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.

A past life contract, vow or promise is an absolute decision your soul makes during a difficult lifetime, often using powerful words like always or never. If you do not specify for the rest of this life when you make the vow, the promise bridges across lifetimes on a soul level. For example, a soul devastated by losing a partner might vow, I will never get close to anyone ever again. That contract carries over, and you may find yourself unconsciously sabotaging relationships in your current life without knowing why. During the past life review at the end of a session we identify the contract, look at it with fresh eyes and cancel it. My clients often recognize the vow the moment they hear themselves say it.

Many of my clients tell me they sleep better after a session, and it comes from something I teach at the very end. Right before I bring you out of trance, I teach you self hypnosis and set a post hypnotic trigger. I guide you to anchor a deeply relaxed, quiet state of mind that you can call up at bedtime, with the suggestion that when you close your eyes and use the technique you drift off and rest through the night. I also send you a written handout afterward that walks through how to practice the self hypnosis daily, so it becomes a habit rather than a one time experience. Better sleep is one of the most common things people report back to me.

Repetitive conflicts or intense struggles with your partner are often structured on a soul level to trigger necessary growth. Before birth your souls agreed to incarnate together to help each other resolve old karmic patterns or learn lessons such as compassion or boundaries. In the hypnotic state you can trace the conflict pattern back to its original past life cause. Realizing that the ancient struggle belongs to a previous incarnation helps your subconscious release the current relational trigger, and what tends to happen is that the same old argument loses its charge. My clients often report more harmony and peace at home afterward, not because their partner changed but because the pattern underneath the fight has been seen and set down.

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.