Past Life Regression

 Sunday 7/19/15

    Today I’m traveling the Erie Canal!  For a couple hours on Amtrak, on my way to be trained in Past Life Regression with Dr. Brian Weiss at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck NY, my train has been accompanying this broad quiet human-made river. I wouldn’t have known it was the Erie Canal except I was surprised to see a flat boat saying Erie Canal Boat Rides.  I guess I thought the Erie Canal was a past tense historical experience.  I remember the song we learned in elementary school “I got a mule, her name is Sal.  Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal”  etc. 

   What a lovely experience here.  I’m no good with measurements but I’d say this waterway is about 4 living rooms across; I could swim it easily.  It’s dark green, not really dirty looking.  I haven’t seen much wild life; it may flow pretty steady so I see no turtles sunning or herons hunting.  There are green or orange buoys here and there to mark underwater objects to be avoided.  Now and then there’s an old 3 part bridge,  or dams with small locks alongside.  No recreational boats, just one empty barge abandoned alongside the water.  Lush forests or marshes along both sides, probably all public lands along this freight way.  No beaches.  Occasionally the canal splits around a sandbar or island.  The famous Erie Canal really exists!

     I’ve taken Amtrak rather than fly to NYC where I’d have to transfer, but this will take me 18 hours from Chicago to Rhinebeck!  I’ve taken a sleeper; tried sleeping sitting up once going to Colorado and was in horrible pain by the time I arrived.  This sleeper is cute!  Very carefully planned so every convenience possible can be squeezed in somehow.  I have my own hidden toilet!  And a sink that folds down with hot, cold, and ice water! My meals are included and can even be brought to my room for me.  The food is pretty good! I slept very soundly once I got used to the sounds and rhythms of the train.      

Omega.  Tuesday.   What a moving and amazing experience!  First off, Dr. Brian Weiss himself is worth being with.  A gentle, warm, centered man with a wonderful sense of humor and genuine love for people, it’s worth the money just to be in the presence of a person like this. He reminds me of the lucky time I was able to sit directly in front of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk.  I don’t remember what he said, but I will NEVER forget what he felt like.

    Dr. Weiss is a psychiatrist , graduated with honors from Columbia University and Yale School of Medicine, trained in Freudian psychotherapy and published and honored for his serious research.  After many years of practice he discovered by accident that patients can be regressed way back to before they were born, other lives that they have lived!  He continued to research this privately for some years and finally felt he had to come out of the closet and reveal what he’d been finding.   He feared he might be disgraced in the eyes of  his fellow professionals but his experience compelled his conscience to share it.  His first book,  Same Soul, Many Bodies, was an unexpected hit.  Professionally he took many punches but in no time other professionals were also coming to him to learn this.  Clients are healed of the strangest ailments, discovering that the origin of various fears, antagonisms towards particular people,  strange physical pains and diseases, even problems with weight can be traced back to experiences in previous lives.  In just the same way that uncovering them in our own forgotten childhood heals these wounds, uncovering them in past lives heals them too.

   I myself know probably twenty other lives that I’ve had.  Some I know through dreams.   I’ve gotten good at interpreting my dreams and can recognize the difference between symbolic dreams and historic dreams as well as interactions going on at deep levels with other living and dead people, out-of-body experiences and such.  Some past lives I’ve guessed by my unusual interests or aversions.  Some I know through hypnosis, the method we use in this class.  In none of my lives (so far) was I famous or exotic, which is usual in past life regression.  These are real ordinary lives; no one comes out claiming they were Napoleon or Jesus or Cleopatra.  A matter of fact, these other lives that are troubling us still are often harsh or non-glorious where we learned something difficult.  In that way, every life is precious. 

   I’m dealing now  in particular with my life as a French Canadian lumberjack in western Michigan.  I seemed to have worked with Swedes, who teased me about being short and French.  I got pretty hot about it and tried to fight, almost got myself killed!  So I retreated to farming, carrying with me a grudge against Swedes. Here in this life my French Canadian father married my Swedish mom and I get to work out this conflict inside me! The story goes on about my bad attitude towards my wife and consequently I get to be a woman now!  Ha ha!  It’s all about learning and growing….