Yes, it is extremely common. Our souls incarnate across genders, nationalities, cultures and social classes to experience a rich, well rounded spectrum of lessons. In the hypnotic state people regularly discover lifetimes lived as the other gender. Experiencing these varied lives lets your subconscious mind draw on the wisdom of many perspectives. It also explains a lot of the unexplainable attractions people bring to me, that pull toward a specific culture, a style of jewelry, ancient pottery or a particular historical era. My clients often find the life they visit lines up with something they have loved for no reason they could name.

Yes, have your normal morning coffee or tea. If you drink caffeine every day, skipping it can give you a headache that makes it harder to relax, which is the opposite of what we want. Just keep it to a cup or two rather than the whole pot so you do not arrive jittery. A light meal beforehand is fine too. The one thing I ask is to go easy on water and other liquids right before we begin, so you are not needing restroom breaks while you are in trance.

Yes, soul family shows up in sessions all the time. We travel and incarnate with a soul group over many lifetimes so we can work through lessons together. The people closest to you today, a partner, a sibling, a parent, a close friend, were very often with you in earlier lives, though their bodies, genders and cultures may have been entirely different. During the review in a Past Life Regression or a Life Between Lives session, I help you connect the patterns, recognizing who your present day companions were in those past scenes and what shared agreements or karmic lessons you are working out together now. My clients often tell me this is what makes a difficult relationship finally make sense.

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.

You do not need to deliver eloquent descriptions for this to go well. There is no right or wrong way to experience trance, and once the analytical mind steps aside, words come more easily than you expect. I keep my questions gentle and open, things like what do you notice and tell me more, and I let your impressions come out at their own pace. It is a collaboration rather than a performance. Quiet and anxious clients typically find they feel comfortable within a few minutes and share their journey just fine, and some of the richest sessions I have facilitated came from people who barely said a word in everyday life.

Repeating the same difficult situation, whether it is a relationship pattern, an emotional block or trouble standing in your own power, is often a sign of a soul lesson that is still open. If your soul ran into that challenge in a past life and never fully understood or resolved it, the lesson comes around again in this one. In the hypnotic state we trace the pattern back to where it started in a previous lifetime. Once your subconscious recognizes the lesson underneath the pattern, something shifts. Clients often tell me that understanding the original source is what finally lets them resolve it and step out of the cycle instead of living it one more time.