Brian Weiss is the psychiatrist who wrote Many Lives, Many Masters, and many people who contact me say that book is what first made them wonder whether the fears, relationships and unexplained patterns they carry might have a story that reaches beyond this lifetime. His other books include Only Love is Real, Messages from the Masters and Same Soul, Many Bodies. I took a class with him in Austin in 2005 through an Omega Institute program, right after I started learning hypnosis. It was a large group, around 150 people, and watching him guide a group process made the work real for me. It was no longer only something I had read about. If Many Lives, Many Masters is what brought you here, you are in good company. The full story is in the Teachers and Influences section of my blog.

Yes, soul family shows up in sessions all the time. We travel and incarnate with a soul group over many lifetimes so we can work through lessons together. The people closest to you today, a partner, a sibling, a parent, a close friend, were very often with you in earlier lives, though their bodies, genders and cultures may have been entirely different. During the review in a Past Life Regression or a Life Between Lives session, I help you connect the patterns, recognizing who your present day companions were in those past scenes and what shared agreements or karmic lessons you are working out together now. My clients often tell me this is what makes a difficult relationship finally make sense.

An analytical, left brain mind, which I see often in engineers and software developers, is no barrier to hypnosis. To quiet that logical chatter I use a simple visual exercise I call the Ball. You imagine holding a ball, toss it up, and allow it to change into something different. It sounds almost too simple, but what it does is shift you from trying to analyze what is happening into simply allowing impressions to flow from your subconscious. Once that shift happens, the critical mind steps out of the way and my analytical clients access deep memories and knowings just as easily as anyone else. And here is something else about analytical minds. Engineers and programmers are often very creative people, using both sides of the brain, because engineers design things. I worked for 12 years as a programmer, so I can say from personal experience that writing software takes a combination of logic and creativity, and that combination makes an excellent hypnosis subject.

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.

Your Higher Self and your guides are deeply committed to your soul's development, and that means they will not cheat on your soul's test. If giving you a direct answer to a question on your list in a Quantum Healing Hypnosis or Life Between Lives session would interfere with a lesson you are meant to figure out on your own, they hold back. Revealing your exact future or solving a hard lesson for you would rob you of the growth you came here for. When this happens in a session I pivot. I ask what steps you can take to learn the lesson yourself, and the guides typically offer helpful breadcrumbs while preserving your growth. My clients often find that the reframed question brings a richer answer than the original one would have.

Those fast flashes are what some of my clients call fleeting images, so I use that term as well, and I can slow them down. Some of my clients are not especially visual, so a past life memory arrives as a quick scene that appears and vanishes, almost like a slide show. When that happens I use specific hypnotic suggestions that ask your subconscious to let the images settle and hold still long enough to look at. I also shift your attention away from your inner vision and toward what you feel in your body and your emotions, because those channels tend to be steadier. What typically happens is the scene stabilizes, and once it holds we can gather rich, detailed information from it just as we would from a vivid picture.