(February 11, 2013) My friend Amy likes to send me CDs in the mail that she downloads from Coast-to-Coast radio. One CD contained an interview with a man named Rich Martini, who was pitching a movie he had recently completed about Michael Newton, PhD, and his Newton Institute for Life Between Lives Hypnotherapy. His movie is called “Flipside.”
Rich Martini mentioned growing up in Northbrook, Illinois, which is also my husband Chris’ hometown. When I visited Rich’s website I found out he was born in 1955, the same year as my husband. I asked Chris if he knew Rich. “Yes! Everybody knew Rich!” he exclaimed.
Suddenly Rich had more credibility in my mind. I browsed the Newton Institute’s listing of certified past life regression hypnotherapists and saw the name Eric J. Christopher, MSMFT, in St. Paul, Minnesota. For years I have made note of Eric’s ads in The Edge magazine, so I immediately went online and scheduled an appointment for Monday, February 11.
That Monday was a snowy one. I’d been the cause of a minor traffic accident on my way into work. I was still shaken when I arrived for my session at 4:30 in the afternoon. Eric greeted me at the door of his huge white Victorian, wearing a professorial tweed jacket and new blue jeans that appeared to have been pressed. He’s a twig of a man with a reedy, friendly voice, heavily flavored with a rural Wisconsin accent. More hardware clerk than Metaphysician, I thought.
Because of the large photo on his website, I felt as though I’d already met him. But he looks different too: his eyes are completely black. Appropriate, I guess, for a hypnotist. In spite of his warm manner, I was spooked.
He ushered me inside the living room, which smelled of a wonderfully spicy curry. I was introduced to the cats Lela and Wolf, after which we climbed an old oak staircase to the third floor of the immense house his wife calls “The Mothership.” At the top of the stairs, down a short hallway, he opened the door to a cozy room with framed degrees and certificates on one wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcases on another. Pictures of Yogananda and sculptures of the Buddha sat serenely on the mantel of a small, lavender-tiled fireplace.
Eric offered me a drink of water from a crystal glass of impressive weight. We settled into two overstuffed chairs to get to know each other a little and to discuss my goals for the session. He explained the process of hypnosis, then the manner in which he would guide me through the regression. After a slow hypnotic deepening, a lifetime gradually presents itself: through image or sound or as a feeling or thought. Several events of that lifetime are explored. Eventually the moment of death comes into view. At that point consciousness leaves the physical plane and travels to a higher level of being. Time is spent at this level examining the life and the nature of the soul expression in that past life.
As he also describes on his website, the most powerful part of the session is usually at the end. There he guides the “sleeping” subject to an even higher level of awareness, where the ability to make connections between the present incarnation and the reviewed past life is possible. The place of the eternal soul.
I was surprisingly nervous. My eyes flitted to the bookcase. I saw books on the life of Christ, Buddha and other great teachers—nothing by Aleister Crowley or any black magicians. A middle shelf held a photo of a slender young couple facing each other, holding hands, in a silver frame engraved with the word “soulmates.” I noticed a few small cylindrical chimes on the table next to Eric’s right elbow.
I told him I was ready and it only took a few minutes to get into a pretty deep place. His light tenor voice distracted me but he used some of the chimes and those were very effective. Gradually a modest life from the Edwardian era in Britain took shape in my mind—less vibrantly than the way images appear in dream work, but still unmistakable. I was an orphan and a governess on a large estate, then later a teacher at a school for girls. It was a quiet, loving life of service. Not dramatic in any way. The death was as gentle as a death in a hospital bed, full of tubes and needles, can be expected to be.
At the point of the soul’s departure from the body, Eric deepened my trance. He used larger bells that reverberated around the room and into my head. The loud, ringing sounds seemed to fill the entire house. At first reflection, I had doubts that such a simple life could inform the strange and difficult question I had brought to the session. But I made a heart connection to the English woman and my respect for her grew.
Then it was time to move further away from the earth plane, higher and higher. I heard the thunderous tone of an enormous Tibetan singing bowl. It buzzed and circled the room like a giant hornet. The tremendous vibration gripped my whole body. The skin on my face blazed from a dry heat, as if I was inches away from a huge bonfire. The flames were within the interior of my body, too, especially inside my head. But it wasn’t like a fever or a hot flash because there was no perspiration anywhere on my skin. I felt a heavy pressure on the bridge of my nose and my face, almost as though I was wearing a mask, and tears streamed from my closed eyelids. Yet I held no emotion.
This ROAR seemed to go on for at least ten or fifteen minutes. What I was experiencing reminded me of Sogyal Richpoche’s descriptions of the Bardo according to Tibetan Buddhism, the place between life and death he so beautifully outlines in his book “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.” I heard echoes of those long Tibetan temple trumpets, the dungchen.
When I finally left trance and re-entered my normal state of consciousness, I could still feel heat radiating from my skin. I spoke hesitantly, saying that my face must be brilliant red but Eric asked, “What do you mean?” He seemed both interested and surprised at my report of physical symptoms. Only then did I notice the glass singing bowl, over a foot in diameter, sitting on the floor behind his chair.
He asked me a few questions about my regression. I was not very talkative. He said that I was an old soul, which didn’t impress me much because I find this a bit of a New Age platitude. He started to add that I am a deep soul, but then changed his mind and said instead that I am a very patient and aware soul. I liked that much better. One of the synonyms for “aware” is “mindful.”
I have been stone calm since the session. A shadowy wisp of the eternal is still with me. Eric lives in a strange place, but I may visit The Mothership again.
I loved reading your experience with past lives regression. I felt like I was reading a novel set in the English moors!