Roger J. Woolger - Healing Your Past Lives: Exploring the Many Lives of the Soul

If we really want to know who we are, we must first know who we were. In this integrated book-and-CD learning experience, I want to invite you to explore a specific, highly effective path to self-knowledge and the freedom it brings. This path, which I call Deep Memory Process, is a practice Ive developed over the past twenty years by blending past-life regression therapy with the active imagination techniques of Jungian psychotherapy, but it has its roots in a much more ancient tradition of remembering who we were and understanding what we have become. It offers a set of tools for delving into the deep recesses of your unconscious mindwhat we call the soul to discover where memories of past existence are stored and bring them to light. The exercises and practices you will work through here are surprisingly simple and easy to learn, but they can open you to a profound new self-awareness, help you heal old wounds, and show you your precise place in the scheme of the universe. They can open to you, in short, the transcendent reality of the soul.

If you imagine your psyche as a computer, you can think of past lives as old, corrupted programs that interfere with its running. Like unwanted files you cannot delete, they run over and over in the deepest recesses of your psyche, depleting its resources and making it operate ever more slowly, even to the point of shutdown. The simple meditation practices youll learn in this book and CD work like disk scans to find and repair those malfunctioning past-life programs so you can restore your psychic computer to top performance.

The computer of the psyche is a complex system, with many programs running both close to the surface, at a level were aware of, and deeper, at a level thats invisible to us (much like an operating system such as MS-DOS, which depends on masses of files and code we never see until we hit the wrong key by mistake). We might call the superficial level the personality program and the deeper level the soul program. When problems arise in our day-to-day functioning, they may be the result of mistakes we make in our own running of the program at the personality leveluser error, if you willand such problems are easy to fix. When, for example, we are overanxious about being late or blame ourselves excessively for not being tidy enough, we can usually adjust our behaviors by imposing new habits. But problems at the soul levelsuch as depression, compulsive cleanliness, or irrational phobias about fire, high places, being robbed, and so onin which patterns from past lives lie embedded deep in our psychic history, can cause the equivalent of a computers fatal error: severe physical and emotional problems in our present lives and serious karmic consequences for the evolution of the soul.

I confess that I came late in life to computers and, like many of my generation, lack the facility that my children have with them. I hope youll forgive the traditionalist in me, who is more at home with terms like soul and unconscious than with computereseand, as we go on, I hope you will feel free to translate my terms into your own preferred lingo. Whether we talk of genetic coding or cellular memory, of the psyches operating system or the souls deep history, the essential point is the same: we are all ruled by forces and powers far larger than we know, and greatest of these is what we may simply call the past, a vast psychic pool of prior conditioning that we all share, created by human experience, error, and misdemeanor over millennia. As the philosopher George Santayana succinctly put it, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat itbut when we learn to remember, using tools like those you are about to discover, we begin to free ourselves from the power of the past.

Working with past lives is for me just one step on a greater personal journey. I have been led to study different religions throughout my life: Hinduism and Vedanta drew me in my teens, and later I began to practice a form of Buddhist meditation. My focus in graduate school at London University was religious mysticism. For my professional training, I went to the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich to immerse myself in Carl Jungs psychology of archetypal symbolism and the collective unconscious; later I studied directly with shamans and spiritual healers in South America. From them I learned how many of our blocked feelings and deeper issues can be released by rebalancing the subtle bodies, and that we have many spiritual resources available to us from the higher worlds of the ancestors and other spirit beings. Brazil, in particular, has a very advanced spiritual psychology of past lives derived from the widespread spiritualist practice called Kardecism. In recent years, I have continued to work in Brazil, training therapists in Deep Memory Process, and I remain quite close to that countrys Umbanda and Spiritism traditions. Music and poetry have always nourished meTallis, Bach, Shakespeare, Rilkeas well as the great Sufi mystics Rumi, Hafiz, and Sanai, my constant companions.

All these encounters and practicesalong with my own quite-shattering pastlife experienceshave convinced me that there is a reality of the soul to which all mystical phenomena belong. It cannot be proved by science, because it is not a material reality; it is a spiritual reality, accessible only through spiritual and psychological disciplines, such as past-life remembering, that open the gateways to the soul.

As a therapist and teacher who has worked with past-life regression for more than a quarter century, Ive been asked over and over, Why bother with past lives? Dont we have enough to worry about in this lifetime?

Sometimes I play along. Indeed, I reply, why bother about the past at all? Why waste so much money on therapy focused on childhood? Surely were adults now?

But thats different, the questioner may say. Bad things really happened to me in my childhood and they affect me today.

Then I play devils advocate: Can you prove they really happened?

No, I cant prove it, my questioner says, but I remember them vividly. In fact, Id like to forget them.

I take questions like these very seriously, because when I began to be interested in past-life regression, I asked the same questions myselfso much so that my first book on the subject, Other Lives, Other Selves, was originally subtitled A Skeptic Discovers Past Lives. I will do my best to address them in the chapters that follow. But I must emphasize that for meas for many othersit is not proof that convinces, but personal experience.

The experience that convinced me came nearly thirty-five years ago. I was lying on the sofa when images began to form, at first dimly, then very vividly, and I found myself in thirteenth-century France, in the thick of the holy war that would come to be called the Albigensian Crusade. I saw the unspeakable horrors of a massacre in a walled city where countless innocents, deemed heretics by the Church, were slaughtered and burned. What was worse, I saw that in the character of a crude mercenary soldier, I was doing the slaughtering myself. I painfully relived an attempted suicidea leap off a precipice that left me in agony, with shattered limbs. I saw my own fearsome death by fire.