You can, and I teach you how at the end of your session. Your guides are listening and sending messages all the time. The main thing in the way is the analytical mind asking whether the guidance is real. So before I bring you out of trance I teach you a self hypnosis anchoring technique you keep for life. When you practice it for a few minutes each day, the critical chatter quiets, you settle into a relaxed state, and you become able to receive and trust intuitive signs or direct answers from your guides. Many of my clients find this daily practice becomes the part of the session they use most, because it gives them an open line of communication that does not depend on having me there.

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.

Yes, you stay in the driver's seat the entire time. Hypnosis in my sessions is a state of heightened, focused awareness. Your conscious mind is present as an observer through the whole experience, so you hear everything, you know where you are, and you are choosing to take part. You can open your eyes whenever you like, ask me to pause, or decline to answer any question that feels uncomfortable, and I will follow your lead. Nothing about this resembles stage entertainment, and you will never be asked to do anything silly. What my clients typically notice is the opposite of losing themselves. They feel more aware of their own inner world, not less, and they come out of the session with a clear memory of what they said and experienced.

If you carry memories of dying as a soldier, you are in familiar territory for me. Clients with spontaneous recall of historic battles often carry residual physical and emotional weight from that death into this life. In hypnosis I use release techniques to separate that battlefield energy from your modern body. Reviewing the event from an observer's perspective helps your subconscious take in that the war is over and that you are safe in your current body today. Many people find the fear and tension they carried eases once that message lands. The memory stays, but its grip loosens.

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.

No, your future is not set in stone. The way I understand it, you take part in a planning process before you are born. Your soul chooses your parents, your body and the main lessons you came here to learn, things like compassion or patience. What I have seen in sessions, though, is that this plan is a high level outline of major milestones rather than a minute by minute script. Once you are here, you have full free will. When you reach a crossroads in life, your choices decide which way you go, so what lies ahead is a set of probable outcomes rather than one fixed destiny. The plan gives you the big picture. How you walk it is up to you.