A soft winter light breaks through the clouds and enters the hotel room in which Brian Weiss welcomes us in Barcelona. The unexpected caress of the sun seems to accompany his voice and his soft manners, the same ones that induced a state of deep relaxation to nearly a thousand participants of the III Forum of Excellence.

Only a few later reported having returned to «past lives»but most will have had an interesting experience of relaxed concentration, perhaps even with the surprise of recover a childhood memory.

Brian Weiss has spent a lifetime listening to what his patients tell him about these regressions. It all started with Catherine in her office in Miami, when she was working as Chief of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital. He told it in his best-seller Many lives, many teachers (Ediciones B), the first of his nine books on the subject.

Doctor from Yale University (1970) and trained to think as a scientist, he overcame his initial reluctance to become, over the years, a one of the most reputable disseminators of reincarnation.

An extraordinary awareness

–What sparked your interest in past life regressions when you were working as a psychiatrist?
–My first experiences date back to almost thirty years ago although the book Many Lives, Many Masters was published twenty years ago. The fact is important: if it took me so long to tell about my experiences with Catherine, it was because as head of Psychiatry at the hospital and a recognized doctor in my specialty, I was worried about my reputation and my career. At first, too, I was a complete skeptic.

What happened with Catherine, after a year and a half of therapy in which we barely made any progress, is that I resorted to hypnosis to try to make her remember childhood episodes that could be at the origin of her anxieties and phobias. One day I asked him to go back to where the symptoms began, thinking that it would go back to some event that occurred when he was perhaps 5 or 6 years old.

But he went back 4,000 years. In that life she remembered, she was drowning. His daughter was torn from his arms in a kind of flood. Hence her fear of water and suffocation, two of the symptoms that had brought her to my office. His phobia reached such an extreme that he could not swallow pills. And these symptoms disappeared when I remembered those events. At first I didn’t believe in it but I had to accept that, in any case, I was helping him. So I continued to bring her to that state of deep relaxation and she remembered different lives. It was completely cured in a few months. And then I started with another patient and another and another, until I reached four thousand.

–And what led you to finally believe in the veracity of those stories?
–As I say, I was very skeptical and rational. I thought that perhaps what Catherine was saying was a product of her imagination, or metaphors or symbolic images. But in one of his lives, he began to relate his death in the Middle Ages and how he floated above his body and found a beautiful light. He was talking about «the Masters» and then he saw my father and son there. My father had died a year ago and my son had died ten years ago, just a few days after being born. She knew it, she explained to me even the medical details. And she wasn’t an FBI agent or an investigative journalist. This happened even before the computer age.

He knew very private and secret information: he mentioned names, details… And for me, as a doctor, this amazed me. How could he know? There wasn’t even a place where I could have gotten that information. There I understood that there was something more than ordinary consciousness. And then I remember thinking: if everything he knows about my father and my son is true, couldn’t everything he tells about his past lives be true as well? So although she was cured of all her symptoms, I needed this further proof to believe that what she was saying was something more than pure fantasy.

–How do doctors and the general public receive your theories?
–Acceptance now is much greater than years ago. Doctors, especially psychiatrists, are still the most reluctant, I guess because of the way they are used to thinking. They are even more skeptical than the religious, because, in some way, all religions have believed that a part of the human being does not become extinct with death. Even so, today doctors are more receptive, probably due to the influence of movies, magazines, newspapers, books… The other day on a television program in Miami, where I live, the presenter said: «I hope that in my next life…». The concept is much more familiar now than when I started in the eighties.

«Regressive therapy cures fears, phobias and disorders for which there is no apparent cause. That’s what matters.»

A skeptic doubts, not denies

–What would you say to a skeptic about reincarnation?
–I would tell him to try it, to experience it. Then I would see it. It is not very difficult to have a regression. Even if you do not return to past lives, sometimes a spiritual experience, deep interiorization, or communication with a dead loved one is enough. Then you see that something out of the ordinary happens. A skeptic, in the original Greek sense of the word, is someone who doubts, who investigates, and attempts to offer alternative explanations for a phenomenon. He’s not someone who says, «This doesn’t exist because I don’t believe in it.» That is not a true skeptic, but a person with a closed mind.

–How does doubting its validity influence regression?
–Any person, no matter how doubtful they harbor, can experience a regression as long as they allow it, if they let go and relax deeply. If you sit with your eyes open and think, «I’m not going to experience a regression,» then you won’t. But if you consider the possibility of that happening, close your eyes, follow my instructions, breathe deeply, relaxing more and more, you will experience a regression.

–Due to the effect of hypnosis? Wouldn’t suggestion intervene then?
–Hypnosis is completely safe. Nobody controls you or blocks you or anything happens to you, it is just a state of relaxed concentration. When you are engrossed in reading a book and you don’t hear any of the noises around you, that is a form of hypnosis. As simple as that. And as safe as that, because you can open your eyes or return to a conscious thought at any time.

–How can you experience a regression following your specific method?
–I train therapists to know how to carry out regressions. There are many in Spain. And I also have several CDs in Spanish that guide regression (it can be done alone at home, it is a safe method because you can open your eyes at any time). In addition, non-hypnotic techniques such as meditation, contemplation or visualization also work because they lead to a state of relaxed concentration. On the other hand, some people experience regressions when they travel and experience a deja vu: They feel that a place is very familiar to them even though they have not been there before.

–And how can you know that what you experience is not the fruit of your imagination or the unconscious?
–It is difficult to determine at first, it is not always clear. But, for example, if I am guiding someone through a regression and they suddenly start speaking in a language they have not learned, that cannot in any way be fantasy. The phenomenon is known as glossolalia. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because it is therapeutic and that is the main objective: to cure people of fears, phobias and psychological and physical disorders for which there are no apparent causes. The important thing is the healing more than the tests.

How does a regression work?

–How long does it take for this healing to occur?
-Depends. It is rare for it to happen the first time. And if so, it is usually a phobia. For example, if someone is afraid of heights because perhaps they were pushed off a high castle wall in the Middle Ages, the phobia will be cured quickly. Or if a woman cannot wear anything around her neck – not a button or a chain or a scarf – because she was strangled in another life, simply remembering that event will free her from her phobia. If the problem has to do with relationships, it takes more than one session, because perhaps it coincided with a person in different lives: your father may be the reincarnation of your grandmother in another life or your daughter in a previous one… Traumas due to abuse are also more complicated.

In short, what heals faster are phobias and then physical pain: for example, back pain that is relieved by remembering a blow received at that precise point during a medieval battle.

–Why should a trauma from a past life be more important than one from the present life?
–It is not that it is more important, but that it is usually the first cause of the symptom. But anyway, it doesn’t matter what life you have to go back to, it can be a very recent one or even the present one. The essential thing is to bring awareness to where it is needed. I don’t necessarily ask anyone to go back to a past life. I just tell the person, when they are in a state of deep relaxation: «Go to where the symptoms first started.» And she knows it in her unconscious. You may go back to when you were 16 or 6, or to your intrauterine life – some people have memories of when they were in their mother’s womb – or to past lives if that is where the problem originated.

–And can you return to both childhood and past lives at the same time?
-Sometimes. Especially in cases of abuse, because it is repeated, but it is easier to return to the abuse of a past life because it is less scary. Another common case is that of people who use their excess weight as protection, perhaps because they suffered abuse in their past lives. When they remember it, it is not dramatic because they see it from a distance, like watching a movie and, little by little, in successive sessions, they can get closer… They then realize that they no longer need that weight and they begin to lose weight. It’s much better than a diet!

With asthma, the person often remembers dying from asphyxiation in a fire or from gas inhalation. And they improve a lot when that is remembered. The similarity with psychotherapy is that remembering the trauma produces a catharsis, a healing effect. The process is the same, whether the trauma is in childhood or in past lives.

Regression as therapy

–What would be the difference between regressive therapy and psychoanalysis and other psychological therapies?
–The only difference is the setting, that the field of action is larger. Instead of stopping at childhood you can go back much further. It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. Still, it works.

–Does part of the success of the technique consist, then, in looking at life from a much broader perspective?
–Yes, and then the values ​​change. Things that may have seemed very important to you, like money, fame or power, stop being so because you see that you are not going to take them with you. Instead, you realize that you take with you everything that is not material: it matters how you have treated other people and what you have learned about kindness,…