Brian Weiss - Only Love Is Real: A Story of Soulmates Reunited

The soul of man is like to water;

From Heaven it cometh

To Heaven it riseth

And then returneth to earth,

Forever altemating.

G OETHE

J ust before my first book, Many Lives, Many Masters, was published, I visited the owner of a local bookstore to see if he had ordered it. We checked his computer.

Four copies, he told me. Do you want to order one?

I wasnt very sure that sales of the book would ever reach the modest amount that the publisher had printed. After all, this was a very strange book for a respected psychiatrist to have written. The book describes the true story of a young patient of mine whose past-life therapy dramatically changed both our lives. However, I knew that my friends, neighbors, and, certainly, my relatives would buy more than four copies, even if the book didnt sell anywhere else in the country.

Please, I said to him. My friends, some of my patients, and other people I know will be coming here looking for my book. Cant you order more?

I had to personally guarantee the one hundred books he reluctantly ordered.

To my utter shock, the book has become an international bestseller with more than two million copies in print, and it has been translated into more than twenty languages. My life had taken another unusual twist.

After being graduated with honors from Columbia University and completing my medical training at the Yale University School of Medicine, I also completed an internship at New York Universitys teaching hospitals and a residency in psychiatry at Yale. Afterward, I was a professor on the medical faculties at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Miami.

For the following eleven years, I was chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. I had written many scientific papers and book chapters. I was at the apex of an academic career.

Catherine, the young patient described in my first book, then walked into my office in Mount Sinai. Her detailed memories of past lifetimes, which I did not initially believe, and her ability to transmit transcendental messages while in a hypnotized trance state, turned my life upside down. I could no longer see the world as I had before.

After Catherine, many more patients came to me for past-life regression therapy. People with symptoms resistant to traditional medical treatments and psychotherapies were being cured.

Through Time into Healing, my second book, describes what I have learned about the healing potential of past-life regression therapy. The book is filled with true case stories of actual patients.

The most intriguing story of all is in Only Love Is Real, my third book. This book is about soulmates, people who are bonded eternally by their love and who come around together and together again, life after life. How we find and recognize our soulmates and the life-transforming decisions we must then make are among the most moving and important moments in our lives.

Destiny dictates the meeting of soulmates. We will meet them. But what we decide to do after that meeting falls in the province of choice or free will. A wrong choice or a missed chance can lead to incredible loneliness and suffering. A right choice, an opportunity realized, can bring us to profound bliss and happiness.

Elizabeth, a beautiful woman from the Midwest, began therapy with me because of her profound grief and anxiety after the death of her mother. She had also been having problems in her relationships with men, choosing losers, abusers, and other toxic partners. She had never found true love in any male relationship.

We began the journey back to distant times, with surprising results.

At the same time that Elizabeth was undergoing past-life therapy with me, I was also treating Pedro, a charming Mexican who was also suffering from grief. His brother had recently died in a tragic accident. In addition, problems with his mother and secrets from his younger days seemed to be conspiring against him.

Pedro was burdened with despair and doubts, and he had no one with whom to share his troubles.

He, too, began a search into ancient times to seek solutions and healing.

Although Elizabeth and Pedro were in therapy with me during the same time period, they had never met each other, as their appointments were scheduled on different days of the week.