One might say that I had been on a bit of a lucky streak.
I had carried out months of successful past life regressions under hypnosis, with clients who would leave my clinic room beaming with their newfound connection to their soul lineage, and a sense that there is definitely something more to existence than just this one lifetime. What a gift to be able to give them, and what a contribution to humanity also, to help alleviate even one soul’s fear of dying…
It is also a pleasure for me to accompany my clients on their journeys deep into their subconscious minds, and help them collect the pieces that make the picture more whole. I am operating fully and absolutely in alignment with my life purpose as soon as a new potential client sends me questions like: “I am trying to find out why I am alive. Can you help?” Part of my purpose is to help them find theirs. We journey deep into their subconscious minds and collect the pieces that complete the picture of their existence.
So imagine the sinking feeling I got when I set out to do yet another regression that I was sure would be successful, but where I simply could not get the client past the gateway into his subconscious mind. Surely it couldn’t be happening? I deployed every trick in the book, and made up a few more, over hours of hard labour in negotiations with the client’s conscious mind.
He was simply NOT about to let go and surrender to the trance. He had fears about what he might find, despite the longing to connect with his deeper self. He was, in hypnotherapist lingo, in complete conscious interference and block.
I closed the session as best I could, and decided not to charge the client. After all, I SHOULD surely have been able to get him there? And not getting him there was a failure, right? I felt awful, and it took some time to remember that it was indeed my soul’s purpose to be working with this deep level with humanity, and not at a supermarket check-out where I might be less prone to these sorts of failures… It was all about me, and my feelings of failure and shame. My client was just a detail in my thought stream.
The next session went as they usually do, with deep insight into the client’s alternate lifetime experiences after an easy and smooth induction into deep trance. We visited two separate lifetimes that had very different outcomes, to help him make the best decisions for his current life. The one where he was a successful artist in a city with many friends around him seemed more attractive than the one where he ended up alone in a forest with a meaningless life. He gained an understanding of the importance of allowing others to connect with him and to live within society to allow his artistic talents to flourish.
This client left with a big grin on his face, ready to live out the rest of this lifetime with renewed energy and purpose.
I presumed that my experience with the other client who I could not regress was a fluke. A one-off unlucky shot. My professional pride was on the mend already.
However, with the next client who came, I had an even worse experience. Not only did she not go into an alternate lifetime experience, she would not go into trance at all. At one point, when the client is supposed to raise their finger to indicate they are ready to start descending an imaginary stairway into the past, she just sat straight up on the couch and said “It’s not working!” and decided to abort the session.
I spent some time with this client examining her beliefs about what “trance” is supposed to be, and realised that she was expecting to feel something along the lines of general anaesthesia in her body and mind, before then seeing a cinema-like projection of her past lives unfold in front of her eyes, with the augmented reality of her senses also giving her feedback about it. She also said that she did not really believe in “this past life stuff“, and did not actually think she could be hypnotised, or travel anywhere in her subconscious mind under hypnosis, although she was very curious about it all.
I offered to charge half-price for the session, but she insisted on paying the full amount as she recognised that I had worked hard for four hours to try to help her achieve what she had come for. After the session, I felt disheartened once again, but there was something else present this time. I felt a dawning trust in the bigger picture. Surely, if the client were ready to discover her soul lineage, then she would also be able to go to the depth of trance required…
Perhaps there was nothing “wrong” with me, but instead, this was a safety mechanism at play in this client that was going to ensure that she only experienced what her conscious mind was ready to make sense of and integrate in her life. I can only imagine how shocking it would be for her system to have a full-blown past life experience, which some clients indeed do have in full cinematic colour with augmented sensations and emotions, while still not believing she is more than her conscious mind in her mortal body. This soothed my bruised ego, and allowed me to be more philosophical about my “failure” as a hypnotherapist.
The next day brought the next client, and this time the stakes were even higher. He was filming a documentary about The Search for Personal Truth, and I had agreed to have cameras in my clinic room while I undertook the regression session with him.
Despite the glare of the cameras and lights, his induction was smooth, and I could see his body reacting deeply to the hypnotic suggestions of relaxation I was giving him. We crossed the gateway to his subconscious mind with ease, and honed in on an alternate experience that would be useful for him to discover and shed light on his current questions and struggles.
To my delight and relief, he suddenly saw and experienced himself in a green grassy field, with no shoes on – as he specified, when I asked what was on his feet. It is always a good sign when clients contradict my assumptions when they are in trance, as I then know they are being true to their authentic experience. He felt like he was around 9 years old, and it was a bright summer’s day.
But then something changed. He reported feeling strange, and wanted to come out of trance. I asked some calm questions about the strangeness, but he opened his eyes, fully back in the room surrounded by cameras. We had gone as far as his conscious mind could allow for that moment. He knew he had really gone “somewhere”, but like my other client, he had trouble believing that it could really be true. Had he just imagined it all? Could there really be more to existence than this mind, body and lifetime? The safety mechanisms of his conscious mind had kicked in and taken him back to “safety” inside the realms of the known and his comfort zone.
I sat with him as the experience rolled through his system, and he tried to make sense of what had happened. This time I did not feel a tinge of guilt or failure. I allowed him to have his experience, and I encouraged him not to write it off as a “failure” but to include it in his documentary. I could feel how valuable that it would be for him and his audience – and for me – to show what it is like when we try to grasp our own immortality as souls. How this bumps up against the edges of our conscious minds. How rewarding it can be to stay with those edges and explore them, little by little, as our tolerance for the unknown spaces grows. How we can learn, through the repeated experience of going there, that we do not suddenly turn insane, or something worse, when we enter those unknown places.
I received a lovely message from the documentary-maker a little while later, thanking me for my patience and support. What we achieved in the session together was by no means a failure. It was the first opening for him into the timelessness of his soul, and that was plenty for now. He wishes to return later for another session, and see how far we can go then.
None of this is about “me” at all, I come to realise. It is about a beautiful and wondrous interplay between all the journeys that our souls are on together. It is about the right place, moment, connection in time-space, and a constellation of higher intentions and energies that fall into place exactly when it is right. And if we miss it then, well, there is bound to be another opportunity on the timescale of eternity.
Failure, thank you for your teaching. Thank you for knocking on my door repeatedly until I was ready to open up and hear your deeper message. Please come and remind me of your importance, lest I should start to fear you again. You help me to pause and ponder, and to know that there is a right time for everything.
