Entry #688471, added on 02-23-10 @ 10:55 pm EST
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Since I have so much time at school, after skimming through my course book and rummaging through job postings on the job board (perpetually coming up empty), I tend to chat in the student lounge with my friend C. who is usually happy to have a distraction from her work. We bring our granola bars and water with us and stake a claim at the table that can't be seen from the doorway, where no one can see us reading our horoscopes or laughing at the local paper's attempts at reporting crime. I make every effort to ensure my voice is low, but again, this room has the acoustics of a glass-topped lake, so invariably, someone will come into the room and join our conversation without us knowing they'd even heard us. This is probably a bad thing, actually, because I'm really open when chatting with C., so I can only assume all sorts of people are up-to-date on my business. Today, the topic was past-life regression, something I am seriously considering doing because I have read four books on the subject in the last couple weeks and am currently milling through my fifth, which is my favourite so far. I excitedly related studies that have been conducted as well as cases in which the people regressed were cured from whichever phobia or illness they'd been battling throughout their lives that common medicine couldn't fix. C. was just as excited as I was and told me that she wants to do it, too, but the trouble is that I can't see something like this being cheap, and also, I'm just a little bit scared of what might happen.
J., the maybe-bipolar, came in and asked me what I was reading, and when I told her, admittedly a little red-faced as I did, she got really animated and told me about her experience over twenty years ago with a regressionist. Apparently, while in journalism school, she had to write an article about hypnosis and the like, and came upon a psychologist who also practiced past-life regression therapy. She was game, she said, and was eager to see if she could be hypnotized, and after a couple hours, was astounded to note that not only had she 'gone under', but she had visited a different incarnation. She got so excited while talking that I actually got lost in what she was saying, but from I do remember her 'previous incarnation' had a lot to do with a controlling father figure and financial hardship. In this life she also has the controlling father and it has been a source of great stress for her, something she is currently working on resolving. She said that she believes in the therapy without question and only wishes she'd continued on with it because she is certain her life would have been better if she had.
The lady I refer to as 'Chipmunk Face' happened to be listening to our conversation. I could see that she was following it because she was nodding in between looks of gleeful shock as she chomped on her corn nuts. When J. stopped rambling, C.F. leaned forward in her seat and started talking.
'I had it done,' she said with her whiskey-smoke voice. 'Years ago, around '93 or so. I had it done because it was a last resort.'
'Oh?' I said. 'Was it a positive experience?'
'It changed my life,' she said flatly. 'It helped me uncover all kinds of repressed feelings and let me remember things I'd had no previous recollection of.'
'So,' I said, gently pushing, 'you remember what you saw?'
'Oh, yeah,' she said, reaching for more nuts. 'I had gone through some pretty rough stuff, you know, abusive father and all that, and I was in such a deep state of depression that I could barely function. Trouble was, I had four kids to deal with, so I knew I had to do something because the medication I was prescribed wasn't doing anything.' Crunch, crunch. 'You probably wouldn't believe some of the crap I'd gone through, even I can't believe it sometimes, but it happened, and it nearly killed me.'
'How'd the therapy work?' J. asked, spellbound.
'I volunteered to work with a child psychologist who was using hypnotherapy to help her patients, and I willingly stayed in the hospital ward where she worked to do a bunch of sessions with her. It was free because I volunteered, you see.'
'Right,' we nodded.
'So, she did this 'eye thing' where she had me focus on her eyes, and before I knew it, I was talking but not really aware of what I was saying. She taped the whole damn thing and I still have the tapes.' Crunch, crunch. 'So, turns out I was talking about all kinds of abuse from my very early childhood that I didn't remember until then, and I even started talking about stuff that didn't happen to me in this life, but it's impossible to know if those were real memories or not. I kind of think they were, but you know, I wasn't raised to believe in any of that stuff so it's hard for me to admit that. Anyway, after I did those sessions, I got off the medication and haven't been depressed since. I even volunteer for every charity going that has to do with abused kids because I want to help them, and I know if I hadn't done that hypnotherapy, I'd either be dead or stuck in a nuthouse somewhere.'
Once I digested the last bit of elegance of that story, I looked at C.F and felt terrible for thinking of her the way I have been. I have regarded her as uncouth and rough and said she looks like a rodent, but after her story, I realized I was looking at a survivor. A survivor with an unfortunate hair colour and a habit of chain-smoking, but a survivor nonetheless, and I was ashamed of myself for being so judgmental. She seemed particularly happy to have me listening to her, and even joked with me about how after all this time of being strangers in the same school, we finally had a conversation about something interesting, even. This is a woman whom I have never seen in a bad mood, who actually comes off as one of those 'go-getter' types, and though she has a lot of habits that annoy/disgust me, I can't take away from her all the work she has done to better her life. I'd have to say that I found her inspirational.
I then talked about how I've been reading that a lot of people who are depressed or have inexplicable phobias seem to have great success with past-life regression therapy because it allows them to deal with the unresolved emotions from their supposed previous incarnations (one study I read said that as much as 80% of a control group were healed or almost completely healed from the experience), and C.F. nodded excitedly.
'I'm not one for reading,' she admitted shyly, 'but all I know is that it worked for me, and I'd do it again in a slick minute if I ever found myself depressed again, you can bank on it.'
And so, I have been enlisted to research past-life regressionists in my immediate vicinity at the request of J. and C. who are both anxious to know their respective 'pasts'. J. wants to get rid of her depression and understand her man issues, and C. wants to deal with a childhood trauma in which her aunt and two cousins were drowned in a freak accident, plus she'd like to sort out her anxiety problems. Me, well, we know all about me, plus, I want to know what being hynotized is like. I spend so much time trying to be in control that it kind of excites me to think of letting that control go. In a safe, controlled environment, that is.
Intuitively, I don't have much in terms of who I think I used to be. I feel a sense of familiarity mixed with eerieness whenever I think of the late 1960's and have wondered if my anti-drug stance has anything to do with a life in which I may not have had any rules in that area. I am quite honestly haunted by those years, despite never having officially existed in them, and I often get images of what I can only assume is California in my mind. Then again, this could be a result of television or discussion of these things in my early youth which was not far beyond the sixties, so maybe I am confusing real memories with fantasy. Whatever the case, I feel a connection to the hippie movement and anti-war philosophy. I also feel a sense of peace and happiness when I think of the fifties, and have wondered if both decades were part of one lifetime for me. Maybe I was born in the 1940's, had an idyllic post-war childhood and then got all drugged-out during the summer of love and overdosed? I have no idea.
I went to a psychic once who told me that in a previous incarnation, I died in an accident while traveling through France.
'Where was it that your boyfriend wants you to travel to and you're too frightened to go?' he asked innocently.
'Uh, France,' I said, baffled.
'Oh,' he laughed from his belly, 'so I guess you now understand your hesitance to go a little better! Don't worry, though, it won't happen again.'
Easy for him to say.
As for reincarnation and whether it's just a nice idea or a fact of life is still a mystery to me, but millions of people all over the world accept it as a foregone conclusion. My theory is that if it helps you feel better and allows you live this life with a new kind of zest then it has to be a good thing, learning about who you might have been. Maybe it's just fantasy, but I won't say that all those people who have been cured of their emotional problems are wrong to believe it. I have read too many accounts, particularly by Dr. Ian Stevenson, a former professor at the University of Virginia who devoted his life to documenting past-life experiences as an empiricist rather than someone who accepted it at face value, to say it isn't possible.
I think that blind cynicism is just as bizarre as believing in something that cannot be seen or proven. It's arrogant, really, to think you have the answer to life's greatest mystery when brilliant individuals the world over have not been able to arrive at a solid conclusion. No one can prove that reincarnation doesn't exist, pure and simple, and there is too much scientific evidence supporting it that it would be impossible for me to deny it outright. In my view, anyone I know who vehemently denies the possibility of it are people who don't actually know a thing about it, have not read any of the research and who are largely disinterested in being open-minded about things, not unlike those who used to think the world was flat. No, you can't see the dimensions of time and most of us have had no personal experience speaking with the dead or remembering if we have lived before, and I can count myself in this group. That said, the side of it which posits that we are simple organisms that live and die and end up as nothing more than dirt depresses me. Furthermore, it doesn't feel accurate to me. I feel like we are vessels for some kind of energy, and that this energy does not begin or end but merely changes. I don't know if this is what we think of as a soul or if it is just a collective unconscious, but whatever it is, I'm not going to dress it up with religious doctrine because to me, religion is man's invention to manipulate and control (yup, I'm a sorry excuse for a Catholic, I know it). Spirit, though, just is.
It would be undeniably cool if I regressed and found out I was Marilyn Monroe. It's been bugging forever as to whether or not it was a suicide or a case of a high-ranking former lover ordering a hit. Much more likely, though, I was a peasant who ate bugs for protein, or a winemaker who stomped around a vat in bare feet, eventually falling and hitting my head, floating above my body which would then be stained red, contaminating the batch which would have to be thrown out so as not to taint the masses with my sour grapes.
This is more likely than me being a 1950's sex goddess, trust.
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