It is possible. The problem is once you get in there, you tend to bring yourself out. I tried going to the spirit world on my own using a process called Ultra Height, which I learned from Gerald Kein, and when I got there it felt like my head was sticking up out of a rabbit hole, looking around at all this white. Then I thought, what do I do now, and the moment I started to think, I brought myself out. That is the challenge of navigating on your own. Figuring out what to do next pulls you out of the state. So rather than sitting down, closing your eyes and trying to go to a past life by yourself, I would suggest a recorded session or a group past life session. A recording is the least expensive, a group costs less than a one on one, and a group has a live energy that a recording does not have. I feed off of the people in the group just like they feed off of me. What makes the one on one session the most effective is the interaction, and that is what helps you bring more information out. Some people try a group or a recording first and use that to decide about a one on one, and in my experience the people who get the most out of a group are the ones who have already experienced a one on one session.

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, a private, quiet room where you will not be disturbed is essential. I tell my clients to plan for both two legged and four legged distractions. A family member walking in, a phone ringing or a dog whining at the door pulls you right out of the deep theta state, so arrange childcare, ask your partner to handle whatever comes up in the house, and turn your phone off. If home is simply too busy, some of my clients stay at a quiet friend's house, sit out in their vehicle, or book a hotel room for the day. Whatever it takes to give yourself a few uninterrupted hours is worth it, because that privacy is what lets you go all the way in.

The hypnotherapy certification. There is no way around it and no shortcut through it. The 220 hour program certified through IACT is the foundation the rest of the path stands on. From there you take past life regression, which is a six day class across two consecutive three day weekends, covering childhood memories, womb regression and past lifetimes, because the Newton Institute expects a regressionist to be fluent in those timelines before LBL training. Spiritual Connection and Communication comes after that. Each step is built to make the next one possible.

The easiest tell is how the message arrives. Your own logical thoughts involve active thinking, weighing and planning, and you can feel yourself doing the work. A message from your spirit guides or Higher Self lands all at once as a sudden clear hunch or a knowing, and my clients describe it the same way again and again, saying something like this just popped into my head. It arrives without effort and feels distinct from thinking. Learning to trust that line of communication without arguing with it is a real milestone in spiritual development. At the end of your session I teach you a self hypnosis anchor so you can settle into the relaxed state where those messages are easiest to recognize and trust on your own.

Yes. Positive talents and abilities from past lives, things like writing, teaching, music or healing, are carried forward in your soul's cellular memory. One client of mine had always been drawn to flying, and on his very first lesson he could handle the plane by instinct, because he had been a pilot in a previous life. When we access those lifetimes in trance, I ask your subconscious mind to bring those positive talents forward with you. What tends to happen is that abilities you have barely touched become easier to learn and to amplify, and clients often find themselves using them in their careers or creative work in ways they had not expected.