Daniel Ryan will be leading a past life regression workshop with Evolver Social Movement on the evening of Thursday, February 11th, at The Alchemist’s Kitchen. He maintains full time private practice at The Center for Integrative Hypnosis in New York City. Learn more here.
Erich Fromm begins his classic little tome The Art of Loving by asking “Is love an art?” When I read the question, an inner ‘yes’ easily rises, followed by a “but…” and then a “well…” I find the word “love” carries a lot of baggage. To me, it suggests family, romance, sexuality, partnership, and its own absence in one brief syllable — and that’s just skimming the surface. It’s worthwhile to examine what the word means from one context to another. At the risk of sounding idealistic or naive, I mostly find that love is seen wherever it’s actively looked for. It can be generated relatively easily when it is needed, and it is mostly the process of how it is given and received that changes. Perhaps most crucially, we give significantly more attention to the external experience of love than the internal. We tend to look for it outside of ourselves.
I’m a hypnotist specializing in past life regression and I like to talk about how we can explore love and relationships through the experience of what may be memories of past lifetimes. To be clear, my approach to past life regression is considerate of all possibilities. They may be memories of past lifetimes we’re exploring, though it is also evident that the experiences are metaphorical in nature, connecting to dominant themes or relationships occurring in the present. The material that arises during a past life regression speaks to us in a way that dreams do, or any kind of symbolic reasoning. Symbolic reasoning is the unique human ability to understand layers of meaning; without it we could not understand languages, use money, or appreciate art. Metaphor is often referred to as the language of the subconscious mind.
Experiencing a past life regression is a lot like a guided meditation or the savasana at the end of a yoga class. The state of awareness is relaxed and open. I use my voice to offer guidance while the content comes from the person having the experience. I don’t tell people what their past lives are, nor do I claim to know what happens in the afterlife. Instead, I focus on the experience in the present moment and the potential therein. Regardless of the number or quality of the relationships seem we explore during regression, there is only one that we’re peering into: the relationship one has with him or herself.
It has been said that in dreams, every landscape is symbolic and every character is the dreamer. We can interpret past life regressions through the same lens. In the first regression I ever experienced I was a woman traveling west on the Great Plains during expansion in the 1800s. The times were wild and I had a banker husband who looked like a real-life rendering of the Monopoly man. We had a number of children and he left me high and dry with no way to fend for them, disappearing as people often did then. I died soon after, penniless and powerless, unable to care for my family and unsure of what happened to them.
This narrative appeared in my psyche as a 14-year-old boy. I was attending a past life regression workshop led by my father, Dr. Jeffrey Ryan. He was a hypnotherapist too, and for a time served as the President of the Association for Past Life Research and Therapies.
The regression was emotional and immersive; I can still feel it to this day. Over the years my interpretations have shifted from seeing it as a true past lifetime to a metaphor for the powerlessness I was experiencing in my home at the time, and various shades in between. It is easy for me to identify with that part of myself that felt a lack of control over his destiny. I can imagine within me the archetype of an older, masculine man that covets money; or children, vulnerable and in need of care; or the woman (who was the main character) searching for a better life in the only way she knows how, only to be abandoned by the person she trusted most. Real or unreal, these characters were in me.
While I cannot say whether we reincarnate, I can say I have seen in myself many spectrums of gender, sexuality, age, race, class, emotion, and attitude. I have seen it in others too. It’s heartening to see how universally, despite all our differences, we are alike in this way. Past life regression, more than any other tool of mind, has shown me this. It allows us to momentarily “touch” another consciousness. That consciousness may be female, male, old, young, human, animal, extra-terrestrial — the possibilities are limitless. Regression is also unmatched as a creative tool, tapping into our unconscious sources of narrative, storytelling, and character-building.
So, back to love. I’m often discouraged by how easily we dismiss the necessity for self-love. On a cultural level, it seems simultaneously too cliche to take seriously and too abstract to achieve. For young people, there seems to be little guidance. For older people, there seems to be little vocabulary. We are hypnotized by the outward expressions of love that we see in marketing, film, and television. The images are produced on an endless loop. We can unconsciously sense the superficiality of the medium, left with a feeling of emptiness which with we must contend.
Let’s not forget that self-love is easily equatable to selfishness. Freud spoke about it as little more than narcissism. Self-love need not be prideful though. Everything can be done in measure, and there is a balance that only one can know for themselves. In The Art of Loving, Fromm speaks of selfishness and self-love as diametrically opposed.
“Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites… selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”
In this expression, we see the same sentiment which countless stories and myths have made self-evident for centuries: one who loves others freely and equally is not selfish, but quite selfless. It’s as though being relieved of the identification clears a path for a great river to flow. (The classic character of Ebenezer Scrooge comes to mind and his transformation into kindness.)
So, how can we examine this most precious and powerful feeling in our emotional lives during past life regression? Easily — by accounting for it in the intention. A teacher once told me that intention and attention operate in us the way light and gravity operate in nature. I wouldn’t know how to test that, though I find it fascinating. The intention for the regression is discussed and established before the exercise begins and then recalled throughout. In my guidance, I direct our attention to the various expressions of love, whether that love is experienced internally, or through a relationship with another. Any relationship that is explored during a past life regression is also happening through your individual self. Through the process of regression, what may at first strike us as separation, as isolation, can be revealed as obscuring a deeper connection — to a lover, to all of creation — though this can be difficult to feel when we are habituated to recognizing only a smaller vision of ourselves.
I’m reminded of a session I had with a man in his late thirties. He was soon becoming a father. His wife was due with twins in a few weeks. We were exploring his career and purpose in his work when a number of unexpected things occurred. During this particular session we touched on three past lifetime memories. In the first, he was a young woman sitting by herself in an opulent, Victorian garden. Wearing something befitting the upper classes and surrounded by beauty, she was alone and terrified. Frozen with fear and struggling to breathe, it was not long before her husband came home, walked out to the garden and, unprovoked, hit her with a closed fist across the cheek. Clearly monstrous and abusive, I gently guided him as he processed the scene and the character of the husband, and we moved on.
In the second scene, the roles were reversed. He was seeing through the eyes of an older woman in a peasant village in Eastern Europe centuries ago. Her role was to care for the children. Her care, however, was perfunctory, and could turn to cruelty swiftly and without warning. She would burn the children’s skin and behave in all manner of barbaric ways when no one was looking. She would then hide behind her role in the community and children’s penchant to invent stories.
In the third and final scene, he was an African-American male jazz singer in 1920s Chicago, singing on stage during the climax of his favorite song. I couldn’t imagine anything with more vitality and verve. The band played behind him while people danced all around. He saw his white girlfriend in the front row looking at him with eyes so filled with attraction and passion, they could have been the only two people there. Obviously, the love between these two was set against the backdrop of racism, segregation, and prejudice that we are still resolving today. I asked “What is different about this singer from the woman in the village or the young wife in the garden?” and he said “He loves himself.”
Psychology suggests that if we reduce all emotions into the categories of positive or negative, every emotion is eventually either love or fear. After the session, my client spoke about the “wheel of violence” we witnessed in the first two scenes, the absence of love and the overwhelming presence of fear. He offered that he had been abused by his father as a child. I saw in the man before me little to no capacity for violence. He was soft-spoken with a casual demeanor and probably had a harder time being assertive as a result. We spoke about how this was surely connected to his imminent fatherhood and desire to not perpetuate what was modeled for him years ago. In that final scene, onstage, singing with all the glory that could be mustered, he felt the purpose we had discussed. “He was driven by what he knew, by music.” He said. “The knowledge of it was in him and his efforts… they were no effort at all. He loved her, she loved him. It was the simplest thing in their complicated lives.”
Is love a passive energy that, if we’re lucky enough, happens to us, or is it an active force inside us? “Is love an art?” Mr. Fromm asks and answers. “Then it requires knowledge and effort.”
Photo: “Electric Love” by Android Jones, http://androidjones.com/
