Brian L. Weiss - Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories

MIRACLES HAPPEN

The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories

Brian L. Weiss and Amy E. Weiss

To Carole

whose idea was the seed that became this book and whose love has nourished us both

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness... the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Contents

O n a beautiful summer afternoon in New York in July 2010, my wife, Carole, and I were driving up the tree-lined Taconic Parkway toward the Omega Institute, a rustic retreat center where we teach an intensive course on past-life regressions. We love teaching this course. Incredible events happen every day, again and again. Participants not only remember past lives but have amazing spiritual or healing experiences, find soul mates, receive messages from departed loved ones, access profound wisdom and knowledge, or encounter some other mystical and marvelous event. Carole and I have witnessed such life-transforming occurrences over the years in these workshops and trainings, and we feel blessed to be able to facilitate and observe them. Often we do not know that a particularly powerful experience has just transpired in the workshop. The person may need time to process it, and we will only hear of it in a later e-mail or letter.

At that moment on the sun-dappled highway, Caroles BlackBerry buzzed with an e-mail describing another one of these wonderful workshop healings, a message relaying such ancient wisdom yet arriving to us through this most modern technology. The timing was perfect, for we were about to reenter the very place where we had observed so many similar happenings. We never knew exactly which amazing events and changes would transpireonly that they would. Carole turned to me and observed in her wise, understated way: Sometimes miracles happen.

Indeed, sometimes they do. The miracles may be large ones that affect the entire group. They may be small and silent. No matter their scope, the transformation is permanent. Relationships are repaired. Souls are nourished. Lives acquire newer and deeper meaning. Miracles happen.

A miracle happened for me on the day that a patient named Catherine walked into my office and introduced me to an entire spiritual universe that I had never believed to exist. My earlier books contain a very detailed account of her experiences, and they describe how her life was permanently altered for the better as a result of them. My own life was affected at least as much. Before uncovering her amazing past-life memories, I had been a left-brained, obsessive-compulsive academic. I had graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in chemistry from Columbia University. I earned my medical degree from the Yale University School of Medicine, where I was the chief resident in psychiatry. Completely skeptical of unscientific fields such as parapsychology and reincarnation, I was the chairman of a prestigious psychiatry department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, and I had authored more than forty scientific articles and book chapters in the fields of psychopharmacology, brain chemistry, and Alzheimers disease. Catherine turned my skepticismand my lifeupside down.

Although it has been over thirty years since that day, I still remember the very first time that she crossed the invisible boundary of her current life and entered the realm of other lifetimes. She was in a deeply relaxed state, her eyelids lightly shut but her concentration intense.

There are big waves knocking down trees, she whispered in a hoarse voice as she described an ancient scene. Theres no place to run. Its cold; the water is cold. I have to save my baby, but I cannot... just have to hold her tight. I drown; the water chokes me. I cant breathe, cant swallow... salty water. My baby is torn out of my arms. Her body had tensed; her breathing accelerated.

Suddenly, her body and her breathing relaxed completely.

I see a cloud... my baby is with me. And others from my village. I see my brother.

My skepticism needed more time to erode, but the process had begun. Catherines severe symptoms began to disappear as she remembered more scenes from this and other prior lifetimes. I knew that imagination could not dissolve such chronic symptoms; only actual memories could. Catherine would go on to remember many historical facts and details from her past lives, which we were sometimes able to confirm. She was also able to relate private truths from my own life, truths that she had no obvious way of knowing or discovering. She would tell me these personal facts while she floated in that beautifully relaxed state in between physical lifetimes.

Those powerful evidential encounters with Catherine began to open my mind and to erase my doubts. I found other reputable clinicians conducting regressions and research, and I became further convinced. Ever since Many Lives, Many Masters, my first book, was published in 1988, I have treated over four thousand individual patients using past-life regression therapy and many, many more in large groups during my experiential workshops. Each case validates and confirms, teaches and expands. Each case reveals more of lifes mystery. In that time, I have met with past-life pioneers and luminaries from all over the world. Where there was once disbelief, there is now carefully collected knowledge and wisdom. The stories in this book will propel you on the very same path and lead you from doubt to discovery. Just open your own mind and let this miraculous journey begin.

In the workshops that I conduct, approximately two-thirds of the audience successfully remembers episodes from previous lives. Their memories and recollections frequently heal emotional and physical maladies. Symptoms resolve even though the memory may not be absolutely accurate, for an error in recall does not negate the truth and importance of the memory. As an example, in a regression you may recall the trauma, chaos, and even the entire emotional reaction of your mother when you were three years old and ran into the street, almost getting hit by a black Buick. When you check with your mother, it turns out that the car was a navy blue Cadillac. Otherwise, everything else in your recall was accurate. This slight degree of distortion is acceptable. Memory is not literal time travel. And if, in describing the memory of the near accident, you used a word that you did not learn until you were twelve, this is also fine. Your observing and describing mind is your present-day consciousness, not your three-year-old brain. You never actually stepped into a time machine. Hypnosis is the tool I use to help people recall such childhood eventsand more. Many of my patients and the people who have attended my workshops are able to remember events not only from their childhood but also from when they were in their mothers wombs, from that mystical state when they were in between lives, and from past lives.

Throughout the years, I have encountered people whose preconceived notions about past-life regression therapy have compelled them to dismiss the concept entirely. They argue that the memories are distorted or inaccurate, as I have addressed above, or that its therapeutic effects can be ascribed to wishful thinking, or that everyone who has a regression erroneously identifies themselves as a famous historical figure in a past life. Such critics are vocal but misinformed. This book contains numerous stories of people who have undergone or performed their own regressions, and together they present a catalog of an incredible diversity of experiences that definitively challenges such assumptions. Its pages contain far more recollections of paupers and peasants than people of prominence. Imagination or fantasy does not cure deeply entrenched physical or mental conditions, yet this book is brimming with examples of how remembering our past lifetimes doesand neither the patient nor the therapist even needs to believe in this concept for the healing to occur, just as neither Catherine nor I did at first. The stories in this book, like a microcosm of the entire field of regression therapy, illustrate a widely varying range of past lives, yet they also point again and again to the fundamental commonalities in our souls journey and evolution. To open your mind to their truthsthat we are immortal and eternal beings who have lived before and will live again, that we are all one, and that we are all here on Earth to learn lessons of love and compassionis, to borrow from that well-known quote, to take one important step for a man and one giant leap for mankind.