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.

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.

It can happen, and if it does, it is important not to take it personally, because it is not you. It is a past life version of you. The soul is the same but the physical body is different. When a lifetime like that comes up, it comes up because there is some connection to the energy of that time and place in your life today. These situations come up so they can be better understood in terms of what is going on in your current life, processed in the most appropriate way, and released as part of the thorough review we do before you come back, while you are still relaxed. Part of the release is helping you understand that it is not you, and part of the process may involve the past life self forgiving themselves. And you stay in control the whole time. If you feel uncomfortable inside an experience, you can go from being in the body to being the observer watching it.

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.

In my experience your intuition is still there. Your inner voice is simply being drowned out, usually by a very active analytical mind or by unresolved childhood trauma that planted self doubt. In a quantum healing hypnosis session we trace the specific early events or past life contracts behind that block and clear them. I also teach my clients self hypnosis techniques to quiet the logical mind, because a quieter mind is where intuition gets heard. Many people find that once the noise settles, communication with their Higher Self and spirit guides comes back steadily, and they can hear their intuition again and trust what it tells them. Weak is rarely the right word. Buried is closer.

Reincarnation is a voluntary choice, and your soul is the one making it. I hear from people who want to be sure they never come back, usually because this physical life has been hard. What I have seen in Life Between Lives sessions is that the decision belongs to your soul rather than to your human personality. Your soul is after growth, and it may get guidance or encouragement from your guides to come back and finish lessons that are still open. So the honest answer is that you do not have to reincarnate, but your soul often chooses to, because it sees something worth coming back for.