I present a visualization below (in bold type).  You can use the visualization to explore pastlife material.  It's best to have a hypnotherapist guide your visualizing, because you may get very emotional.  Lacking a therapist, you could do the visualization with an encouraging friend.  Or, if you are comfortable with your own intense feelings, you could do it alone.

     Imagine your spirit circling the world and being attracted or repelled by certain places, and then sense or see your feet in one of the places that drew you or in one of the place that repelled you.

     Notice if your feet are old or young, attached to an male or female body.  Establish your body awareness by noticing the texture, pressure and warmth of things you hold and wear.  Feel your immediate situation, as this person you now embody.  Notice where you are, what's happening or about to happen around you.  Let it happen and fully experience it. View and experience the main turning points, the story line, of this life.  Go backward or forward in time to the key events in this life.  When you get to a key event, experience your thoughts, actions, body feelings, emotions in slow-motion.  Notice what feelings come up and express those feelings in words.  Let the body move as wants.  Notice the moment when, in this key scene, you imprint a decision about yourself, about the way things are.

     Go to when you're dying.  If the body was in pain, let go of all residual of that pain.  Think again your last thought; feel again your last emotions and sensations.  Notice the last things you see and hear.  Notice any self-limiting, fearful, angry, embittering, saddening or vengeful attitudes you go out with.  Notice any pain or bodily pattern you lock into your body image at death.  Experience what happens as you die.  Go to the actual moment of death.  Then go beyond the death, to a higher place--to the interlife, the Bardo.

 THE INTERLIFE

     Imagine you go up to a place where you can reconcile, review and integrate the learning from the life you just lost.  Enter the Bardo, the place between lives.

     If you have unexpressed feelings toward any characters in the past life you just completed, encounter them in spirit here in the Bardo.  Ask their forgiveness and be willing, as well, to forgive them.

     From your spiritual perspective in the Interlife, look back at the life you just left and articulate the main things you learned.  What did you need to feel that life?  What was the overall meaning of the life?  What would you want to have done differently?  Imagine what kind of atonements or balancing action in the world would be needed, in a future life, to balance ill you did in the life you left.

     Then, to integrate this exploration into your life now, consider who, from the pastlife, is like someone in this life.  Ask yourself how the patterns of the pastlife influence you yet.  Contemplate how you're like her or reactively opposite her.  Realize which of your inner voices has been most affected by her experiences.  Commit to acts of atonement, if appropriate.

    There are three levels of past-life work: Realistic-cathartic, Archetypal/Subself and Higher Awareness.

 Realistic-Cathartic Level: at first, you get most therapeutic value if you take the past-life stories you see.  Treat the stories you generate as if they're absolutely  real.  Even if you don't believe the stories are real, you can use them therapeutically.  For now, assume there's a direct cause-effect relation between the past lives you image and your life now.

 At this level, you tell the past-life story without judgment or interpretation.   Allow full emotional expression of the pain, horror, shame.  Live all the major turning points of the past-life person's history, including the exact moment of death.  Assume the loss, hurt, guilt, grief, or bitterness you felt in the life you imaged led you to defensiveness, rationalizations and a lifestyle to avoid ever repeating the same hurtful situation in your present life.

 In successive pastlife regression sessions, you'll probably find you image mirror-opposite lives.  If you're victim one life--raped, murdered, enslaved; you're bully--rapist, killer, master--in another.  In successive lives, you and one of your parents may take turns being each other's parent and spouse; in some of the pastlives, you'll both be of different sexes than now.  Once these feelings between you and your parent are relived in pastlives, you can drop some of your charge toward that parent in this life.

 Archetypal/Subself Level: at this level you detach.  Guides help you see the opposing sides of your being (eg, killer and victim) as interacting parts of you.  You meet the deep needs of the voices you developed around the pastlife scripts.  You realize that the things you dislike in other people just remind you of your inner aspects, your voices, energies, subselves.  You come to peace with self and other folk.

 Higher Awareness Level:  you see all lives and oppositions as part of your overall being and live fully conscious and symptom free.    You enjoy all roles and distinctions as part of the ever-changing play of existence.
 
 
 

* Based on Woolger, R., Other Lives, Other Selves, NY: Doubleday, 1987; Fisher, J., The Case for Reincarnation, NY: Bantam, 1985.

    Maui counselor, Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., is a Certified Holotropic Breathworker and Voice Dialogue Facilitator.  He is certified by Dr. Roger Woolger in Jungian Pastlife Psychotherapy.