
“Each door has its own character, personality, and construction,” Barham said. My wandering awareness at this point led me away from the sunshine drenched Caribbean parish to walking down a well-lit hallway with different doors on both sides. This door leads to a happy and successful prior lifetime that will help you build confidence.īarham told me to act “as if my awareness is just going to go on its own adventure,” even as my body lay relaxed and still on my bed in Brooklyn. “It takes the pressure off of anticipating something difficult or challenging that may come up,” Barham reassured me. I didn’t want to go through the pain of reliving the trauma and missed opportunities during my childhood, so for my second past life attempt with Barham, we decided to explore a happy vision from the past instead, one that could resolve the anxious feelings I had about moving to a new city and starting a new job.

It was a tearful two-hour session that resulted in an aha moment: that I could finally have a relationship with my dad in the spiritual sense, even though his body was no longer here physically. In a previous appointment just one month earlier, burdened by feelings of guilt over my father’s death, I decided to pursue past life regression therapy to come to grips with the relationship (or lack thereof) I had with my father when he was alive. Here's what happened when I was hypnotized.ĭisclaimer: This wasn't the first encounter I had with Barham.

Instead, I found myself conjuring up images, smells, people, and experiences that were parallel to my present life. I went on this journey with Barham expecting to prove that past life regression was really the result of making up false memories. And while I hate to be cliché, it was an absolutely transformative experience. So my goal with this past life therapy session was to solve the age-old dilemma of whether my life has meaning. Since turning 34 in February, I’ve been experiencing what psychologists call an existential crisis. Other times, they discover a happy memory, like the one I found on that frigid night in my New York City apartment. Sometimes her clients uncover painful experiences. Using various hypnosis techniques (like slow breathing and counting down), Barham acts as a meditative guide, helping her clients return to prior life spans in search of nuggets of information that can improve their present life. The stranger in question was Ann Barham, LMFT, a certified past life regression therapist and author of the 2016 book, The Past Life Perspective: Discovering Your True Nature Across Multiple Lifetimes. With my eyes covered in a furry, leopard print sleep mask, a complete stranger listened to my story while recording my deepest, innermost thoughts in order to offer insight and spiritual understanding about how my past life factors into my current one.

#Find my past life series#
Weird or Wellness is an series where staffers answer the question: Do we really need the "woo-woo" fads we keep seeing on social media in our self-care routines? We put buzzy treatments from halotherapy to chakra healing to the test so you don't have to-all in the name of living your best life.ĭanish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.”Ĭhasing the meaning of that quote is what inspired me to try past life regression therapy while reclining on the queen-sized bed in my dimly-lit studio apartment one evening in March.
