Michael Newton wrote Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, the books that introduced Life Between Lives hypnotherapy to the world, and the institute that carries his name still trains and certifies LBL practitioners today. Life Between Lives is the name he gave to deep hypnotic work centered on the period between incarnations, what your soul does after one life and before the next. I found out in 2007 that he was coming out of retirement to teach, and I made sure to be there. I traveled to Chicago that year to train with him, and that training is when I decided to specialize in spiritual hypnotherapy. I later served as a teaching assistant for LBL training, spent time with Michael at the Newton Institute strategy meeting at San Damiano in 2011, and returned there for LBL teacher training in 2014. The full story is in the Teachers and Influences section of my blog.

No, belief is not a requirement. You can come in seeing reincarnation as real, or seeing the whole thing as symbolic metaphor and stories your own mind creates, and the session still delivers insight either way. Your subconscious uses those narratives to bring up deep emotional understanding and loosen long standing blocks. What matters is an open mind and a willingness to let the impressions flow, whatever form they take. Skeptics are welcome. Curiosity is plenty to start with, and in my experience the people who arrive unsure are often surprised by how much comes through once they relax and let it happen.

Yes, you can set a clear intention before we go into hypnosis to visit a specific period, place or culture. I will say that your soul, or Higher Self, ultimately chooses the past life that holds the most important lesson for your growth right now, and that may or may not match what your logical mind is curious about. Even so, a strong intention set during our pre talk acts like a compass. In my experience it often guides your subconscious straight to the lifetime you have been drawn to. So bring the request. We will state it clearly and then let your Higher Self lead.

Repeating the same difficult situation, whether it is a relationship pattern, an emotional block or trouble standing in your own power, is often a sign of a soul lesson that is still open. If your soul ran into that challenge in a past life and never fully understood or resolved it, the lesson comes around again in this one. In the hypnotic state we trace the pattern back to where it started in a previous lifetime. Once your subconscious recognizes the lesson underneath the pattern, something shifts. Clients often tell me that understanding the original source is what finally lets them resolve it and step out of the cycle instead of living it one more time.

Intense, irrational likes and dislikes are very often carryovers from previous lives. An obsession with the Victorian era, a strong aversion to a particular culture, a refusal to watch anything medieval like Game of Thrones, these tend to have a story behind them. Your soul carries cellular memories of where you have lived and how you died. In my experience an obsession usually points to a comforting lifetime where you were happy and fulfilled, while a severe aversion typically marks a past life of real suffering in that region or era, imprisonment, trauma, or a hard death. A regression lets you go back and discover where the feeling comes from.

I cannot answer that specifically for you, because everyone is different, and that lifelong feeling of not fitting in is more common than you might think. It is one of the things people bring to a session as a question. I do not tell you where it comes from ahead of time, and I do not paint a picture during the session either. I ask you what you notice and let your own experience do the explaining. What I will say is that when someone finds the source of that feeling for themselves, the grief tends to lift, and settling into life here gets easier. The discovering is what helps, and it works best when every bit of it is yours.