Why I Use Past Life Regression to Break Through Business Blocks
Written by Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach
Donna Wilding is a former corporate advertising executive turned life and business coach who helps female entrepreneurs build strategic, soul-led businesses. She works with the innate intelligence of their ideas, alongside her signature past life regression experience and heart-forward coaching techniques.
What I've discovered about the unconscious patterns that shape how we lead, earn, and grow, and why understanding them isn't always enough to change them. What if you could experience yourself as someone who had never doubted her ability to lead? Someone who felt entirely comfortable being seen, receiving money, making decisions, or occupying a position of authority? What if you could bring that experience back into the life you're living now?
One of the most fascinating things I've discovered through past life regression is that we can encounter ways of being that feel radically different from the identities we've grown accustomed to. Sometimes those experiences reveal fears or patterns that have been difficult to understand. Other times, they introduce us to qualities we haven't yet learned how to access in our present lives.
I've discovered that these experiences can have profound implications for how we build and lead our businesses, although I certainly didn't set out to use past life regression that way.
How past life regression found its way into my business coaching
I spent more than a decade in the advertising industry, working with major brands and immersed in the psychology of marketing, communication, and consumer behaviour. What fascinated me most was the psychology behind it all: why people make the decisions they do, what influences their desires, how beliefs are formed, and what moves someone to take action.
But over time, I found myself wanting to explore a much bigger conversation than the one I was having in advertising, an industry where money was so often the primary measure of success. I was becoming increasingly interested in questions of consciousness, identity, purpose, and what it actually means to thrive.
I loved studying human behaviour, but I wanted to understand people beyond their purchasing decisions. What made us who we were? Why did we keep repeating patterns that made us miserable? What were we capable of becoming if we stopped identifying so completely with the people we'd learned to be? These questions eventually became far more compelling to me than the next advertising campaign. My work expanded into practices that approached these questions through the body, intuition, altered states of consciousness, and the exploration of past lives.
I wasn't trying to create a new business coaching methodology. Business wasn't even the focus of that chapter of my life.
What I eventually discovered, through working with past life regression, was that we could bring an intention into the experience and explore virtually any area of our lives. We could investigate recurring relationship patterns, fears that seemed to have no obvious origin, our relationship with money, or the qualities we struggled to express.
I began wondering what would happen if I brought the questions I'd spent years exploring in business into this very different kind of work. Could we explore someone's fear of visibility through a past life regression? What about the discomfort of asking for more money, the need to control every detail, or the challenge of stepping further into leadership?
I began experimenting with these questions in my own regressions and eventually with clients. What emerged gave me an entirely different way to explore the personal patterns that so often influence our professional lives.
What happens when we experience ourselves differently?
One of the experiences that has stayed with me involved a woman who had a great deal of anxiety around her creative project. During her regression, she experienced herself as a man who moved through the world with an extraordinary sense of confidence. What struck her was the complete absence of self-doubt. He seemed entirely at ease with his own authority, making decisions and occupying space without the constant internal negotiation that had become so familiar to her. There was a sense of personal power that didn't require anyone else's permission or validation. The contrast also raises questions about the social conditioning we absorb about what it means to be a man or a woman, and why some of us are taught to claim our power while others are taught to question it.
What interested me most was what happened when the regression was complete and she opened her eyes. She was back in the same body, with the same circumstances waiting for her, but she'd just experienced a way of moving through the world that challenged what she'd come to believe about herself.
She began drawing on that experience in her daily life, including in her business, and her relationship with anxiety began to shift. Rather than experiencing that intensity solely as something to fear or overcome, she began relating to it as an abundance of energy that could be directed toward action.
How much of what we call our personality is actually a collection of emotional responses, learned behaviours, and identities we've practised for so long that we've mistaken them for who we are? What becomes possible when we have an experience that contradicts them?
Another client, who strongly identified with being fiercely independent, experienced a lifetime in which she was profoundly alone. The experience challenged something she'd always regarded as a strength. She began questioning whether her independence was entirely a choice or whether some part of it had become a deeply ingrained way of protecting herself from needing others.
For an entrepreneur, that question can have enormous implications. Our ability to collaborate, delegate, receive support, and build meaningful partnerships is influenced by how comfortable we are allowing other people into our lives and work.
You don't have to believe in past lives to become curious about what happens during a regression. Whether the images and stories that emerge are understood as memories of another lifetime, symbolic expressions of the unconscious, or something else entirely, what matters to me is the depth of what becomes available through the experience. We can encounter fears and patterns that have been difficult to understand through the lens of our present lives, while also accessing qualities, capacities, and ways of being that feel entirely unfamiliar. Those experiences can profoundly change how we understand ourselves and what's possible for our lives.
Why understanding a pattern isn't always enough to change it
Most of us have had the experience of understanding something about ourselves intellectually while continuing to behave in ways that contradict that understanding. You may know perfectly well that speaking in public isn't inherently dangerous, yet your body may respond as though something terrible is about to happen. You may recognize that charging appropriately for your services is both reasonable and necessary, but still feel a rush of guilt or discomfort when discussing your fees.
Our conscious understanding is only one part of what shapes our behaviour. Emotional learning, past experiences, habits, and expectations all influence how we respond to the world. Some of those responses become so familiar that we barely notice them until we attempt to do something different.
Fortunately, our brains are capable of change. Research into emotional learning and memory reconsolidation suggests that new emotional experiences can help us update deeply ingrained responses, particularly when those experiences are reinforced through action.
Rather than simply gaining another insight into why we are the way we are, past life regression offers an opportunity to experience ourselves beyond the identities and emotional patterns we've become accustomed to. We can create an entirely new felt experience in the same body we’ve had all along.
I think about the woman who experienced herself as a confident man during her regression. She didn't simply come away believing she could be more confident. She had experienced what confidence felt like in her own body, and she could begin drawing on that feeling in situations that had previously made her anxious. The distinction between knowing something and having a felt, embodied experience of it has become central to how I approach transformation.
When the insight is about the business itself
Some of the most interesting experiences I've witnessed have had surprisingly practical implications. One woman experienced a profound sense of connection to a community during her regression. There was a quality of belonging and mutual support that felt deeply natural to her in that experience.
When she returned, she began recognizing how little of that relational richness was present in the way she was operating her business. She had been relying heavily on her own efforts and overlooking the potential of partnerships, collaboration, and community. Her experience gave her a different perspective on how she wanted to grow.
Another woman emerged from a regression with specific insights that led her to question the market she was selling her products in. She had been directing her efforts toward the wrong audience.
Regression can create an environment in which unexpected associations, images, and possibilities come forward. The value, from my perspective, is in becoming curious about what those experiences might be showing us and then bringing our discernment and practical intelligence to the conversation.
My advertising background hasn't disappeared from this work. If a client comes out of a regression questioning her market, I'm going to want to explore that with her. Who's actually buying? What assumptions have we been making? What might happen if we tested a different audience? I love that we can have an extraordinary experience in an altered state of consciousness and then sit down together and make some very practical business decisions.
Where business strategy and inner transformation meet
I've also seen how easily we can invest in another strategy when the real challenge lies in our ability to act on the one we already have. If someone feels deeply uncomfortable being visible, a beautifully developed marketing plan may remain untouched. If receiving money triggers guilt or fear, even the most carefully designed pricing strategy can become difficult to implement. If a person's sense of identity depends on being the one who does everything herself, the business may struggle to grow beyond what she can personally manage.
These aren't necessarily problems that can be resolved through insight alone, either. Recognizing a pattern is valuable, but we also need opportunities to practise responding differently.
That's why I work with both the inner experience of entrepreneurship and its practical expression. I want to understand what someone is creating, who they want to serve, and how to help them make excellent money doing work they genuinely love. I'm interested in businesses that are financially successful, but I'm equally interested in the quality of the life being lived while that success is created.
Past life regression is one of the ways I explore that territory. Then we get to work with what they've discovered.
Read more from Donna Wilding
Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach
Donna Wilding is a life and business coach and former corporate advertising executive who walked away from conventional success to build a more honest way of working and living. She supports women in creating businesses that are both profitable and deeply aligned, combining strategic clarity with past life regression and energetic work. At the core of her approach is the belief that every idea has its own guiding intelligence, and that business becomes easier when you learn to work with it. With over a decade of experience in transformational practices, Donna’s work bridges the worlds of strategy and soul.
