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.

Of course you can. Quite often my clients mention my therapist this, my therapist that. Any kind of hypnotherapy, I consider it to be complementary, and I choose that word deliberately. Alternative would mean you do not need your talk therapy, and that is not what I am saying. This can add another dimension to what you are already doing. You can bring the idea up with your therapist, and some therapists are really open to this work. I teach therapists how to do hypnosis, and a lot of the ones I teach go on to learn past life as well. Some are not open to hypnosis at all, much less past life, and that is true in any profession, some are open, some are not. I worked with a pastor in Houston who did a Life Between Lives session because his brother passed away, so there are plenty of people you might suspect would not be open to this who actually are. Here is the thing though. With past life there is really no gray area, people either believe it or they do not. So if you feel drawn to this work, do not let other people's views or judgment of it influence your decision.

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.