• In :
• Personal Growth

Trauma experienced in past lives can affect your present one. In this connection, Jamuna Rangachari explores reincarnation and the role that past life regression therapy plays in healing deep-seated wounds inflicted by events such as the Holocaust

Healing is not only essential for enjoying a stress-free life but also has many layers to it. Often, extreme trauma or violence experienced in one’s past life can manifest as debilitating illness, phobia, mania, or unexplained mental and behavioural issues in a person’s current life. Incidents like genocide, holocaust, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes inflict deep wounds on the souls of the victims which affect even their subsequent lives.

However, trauma can be healed only when we accept that it had happened and then work on resolving it from the strength of our inner self.  Interestingly, the therapy of past life regression has helped unravel many such limiting factors in a person’s life, which are caused by extreme cruelty and violence experienced in their past lives.

In recent history, there is nothing as horrific as the Holocaust where numerous innocent people were subjected to barbaric treatment, making even demons squirm. In my own reading of history, I have always wondered about the karmic outcomes of such acts in the next lives of both the victims and perpetrators.  

This made me explore the domain of healing, as I knew that the Creator would shed some light on this aspect

The Holocaust and its impact

Ameeta Sanghvi Shah, a PLRT (past life regression therapy) therapist from Mumbai says, “Events like the Holocaust, cruelty, violence, and wars reverberate into future lives as well, preventing a person from joyful living and reaching their full potential. Their healing happens across the quantum of time and space as these are events that affect an entire region, are quite complex, and affect many people involved.”

What many, including herself and other therapists in her circle, have found in common is that there can be all sorts of problems from these kinds of holocaust or war stories. The individual self is lost and interwoven in collective fear and judgment. Fear, terror, and propaganda pushed by dictatorial regimes (done to achieve totalitarian control) fill up the collective psyche. A holocaust cannot happen without mass brainwashing and the use of mind-control tactics. 

The feelings victims combat are of fear and/or depression, and very often, guilt and shame at their victimisation and the inability to protect themselves or their loved ones. This often results in carrying a sense of being a helpless victim for no logical reason in the current lifetime.

Another phenomenon is of our true nature being that of energy, which makes us susceptible to high emotions and internalise the energies of others out of fear and shock, leading to either heightened compassion or helplessness and terror. 

Ameeta explains: “A common effect of such horrific experiences is that people often don’t manage to find peace after death or to get to the other side, and their consciousness remains stuck in the horror of the terrible death they had encountered, especially if there was a group death, like in gas chambers, or dying and being thrown into a mass grave. Those dead spirits get entangled, and it is necessary to do the healing by understanding their terror. In other words, the darkness of all that had happened sticks to the souls that die and keeps them trapped in the horror they had lived. The therapist’s work is to separate and clean up this trauma.” 

How trauma is released

Since people had lost consciousness because of toxic gas, the memory of suffocation clings to the consciousness which needs to be healed. So, in therapy, the therapist asks the client to imagine that they have opened the door of the gas chamber and invited all the people who had died there to go outside and breathe out the gas (energetic residue of it) and breathe in clean, fresh air. Essentially, everyone needs to know that these are not disorders or loss of control. These are past experiences (especially the traumatic ones) which people still carry in their cellular memories. These symptoms are seen as mental health disorders by mainstream psychotherapists today. This is because conventional science is yet to recognise our true nature as souls which go through many lives and carry many memories, impressions, thoughts, and feelings from past life experiences. These may even manifest as obsessive thoughts, intense feelings, body aches, and sensations. They get activated by triggers in the present life similar to the past life events.

Experiences of healing

Whatever approach one uses, it is inner healing alone that can help people overcome trauma, using the current life or past life. Ameeta explains how PLRT helps.  PLRT, contrary to its name, is a therapy meant to bring a person more into the present, to be present to their present possibilities and blessings. She asks her clients to confront various situations and even traumas to learn to rise above the context and regain their power. One can understand one’s mental condition through this amazing drug-free, soul-healing modality of past life regression therapy. Where talk therapy cannot unlock these cellular memories, journeying through time can restore one’s psyche to wholeness, often in a few sessions, and sometimes in even one session.

A past life therapist may use the hypnosis route to a past life. On the other hand, the Tasso method recommends just following the symptoms as they are bridges to the past. By immersing into and intensifying the symptoms such as the somatic body sensations, emotions, and thoughts in the now, this bridge between the present and the past life is created. Deepening is automatic when one is going into the experience. With such traumatic recent lifetimes, it is necessary to sometimes take them a little bit out of the reliving as the fear may get in the way of healing. This is why therapists often form a bond first and spread the healing over many sessions, especially when the events are horrific and barbaric like the Holocaust.

Ameeta shares the experience of Janine Booij, a regression therapist and teacher at the Tasso Institute in the Netherlands, whose client experienced depression and fear. It was first triggered when she was a student and could not get onto a train. Her parents couldn’t understand the reason, and they had to take her back to the place she was studying as she wasn’t able to take the train. The client found that when the Germans had asked for people to report, she had volunteered and got on a train. Her idea was to save her family, but the train trip was so horrible she could not survive it. Unfortunately, her family wasn’t saved either, so there was a lot of self-blame too. With therapy, these emotions were released, and she was convinced that it was not her fault but the deception of the evil government of that time. She learnt that the past was over, and she was no more unsafe and insecure. There are many others too, especially in Europe, who have seen such results.

Dr Marion Boon, a leading holographic regression therapist and teacher trainer in Holland, shares her experiences. A female client, around 35, came to her complaining about her lack of perseverance to grow in her profession. She was an artist, and although her work was known for originality and beauty, she never managed to showcase it enough to make a living out of it. Now she had a new profession and good ideas, but it was difficult for her to step forward and earn a good living. Also, she mentioned some vague issues with her old father, who irritates her. 

In the session, some interesting experiences and information came quite fast. Then she stopped. No words anymore. Her body moved restlessly and then froze. They find out that she is a boy, a young man of 16, standing in a wooden cabinet, hiding between the clothes in the cupboard. His hand holds the hand of his father who is also in that cabinet. The Germans have entered their house and are looking for men to send them to Germany for labour. They are now in the bedroom, where the father and son are hiding. “This cannot be true,” says the client while recalling the event. “This is the story of my father, not mine!”In order to find out the true events that are causing such entanglements, therapists have to be very precise. The next moment, a sound is heard. Men with firm steps, as if wearing heavy boots, enter the building. They speak German. And they speak loudly. The client shivers. She continues: “O my God, they know we are here!” Her hand cramps. The young man in the cabinet holds the hand of his father. Both are thinking, We will die here together. The next moment, shooting takes place. The German soldiers who are looking for them feel that there must be people in the house, but they do not find them. “I know they are here,” says one of them. “Let us move,” says the other one. Before leaving the room, the German soldier just fires a few shots at the cabinet. Just in case. Left and right the bullets fly past the ears of the 16-year-old young man. The father is hit in his leg. They escaped. It is a big relief.

The 16-year-old is the true inner-child-split-off of her father, still holding the hand of his father, the client’s grandfather. These two are totally entangled.

Instructions now follow to deal with the story of the father, integrating his own younger self of age 16 and of the grandfather, making him aware of the fact that in the meantime he is dead, it is really over, and he was able to save his son at that time of the invasion. The spirit and energy of both men were in the energy and the physical, stored memory of the client. The persistent thought was not to be seen, not to show your skills, not to come out and show yourself. Which was exactly the burden the client wanted to get freed from. The session has explained a lot to her. What we learn from this is that fragments and split-off parts from family members can attach and mingle with the children. Undigested experiences and unprocessed trauma need to be healed to avoid the transfer to the next generation.

PLR to the rescue

Edith Eva Eger was a teenager in 1944 in Hungary when she experienced one of the worst evils the human race has ever known. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, she and her family were sent to the heinous death camp, Auschwitz. Her parents were sent to the gas chambers. She and her sister survived but her parents died. After the war, she moved to Czechoslovakia, where she met the person she would marry later. They then moved to the US. She later pursued her doctoral internship at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss, Texas.

The author of The Choice and The Gift (2000), Eger states that it took decades for her to confront her issues of guilt and shame just from this one experience and helps many people handle trauma, shame, and guilt today.

Author Jewelle St. James shares her reincarnated Holocaust memories in Jude: My Reincarnation From Auschwitz, published in 2006. Having Holocaust-related memories since the early age of 10, Jewelle tried to repress them due to fear and shame. As she grew older and explored other past lives, the Holocaust memories kept showing up, and she finally decided that it was time to explore them too. She took the help of psychics, regressionists, and automatic writing, and finally pieced some of the puzzle together. She was a young woman named Katerina, and her family was involved in the underground Resistance movement against the Nazis. Her father used to run an underground printing press that offered help to people in the Resistance. He was eventually caught and taken away by the Nazis. Katerina later met the same fate. She was sent to Auschwitz and died a tragic death. Through her work on herself, in this lifetime, she was able to recognise the key players in her present life as the ones in her past life.

This is often the case with others too. A book that brings this out is From Ashes to Healing: Mystical Encounters With the Holocaust by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom. In one of the stories, a woman talks about her healing from anger, pain, and confusion that she faced during WWII in her past life. With deep introspection, she understood that judging a certain behaviour as ‘evil’ only reinforces that behaviour at an ‘energy level’ and holds this in place on the wheel of karma. On the other hand, acknowledging that every person on the face of the earth is here for healing—even if his or her actions seem unspeakably evil to us—is to triumph in the journey of our lives.

The author states, “We can see that ‘forgive and forget’ is fiction because to learn from our mistakes, we must be able to remember them! When such a memory surfaces, we should examine it to see what relevance, if any, it has to our current life. In other words, we could bring it out into the open, so we can examine it and understand what really happened. All of us need to remember that the only way to heal ourselves is by forgiving and moving forward in the journey of our lives.

Understanding and moving on   

Reincarnation, although very complicated and maybe far-fetched for some, offers comfort and explanation to others. Just like every belief, there are loopholes, faults, and easy ways to pick it apart. However, when truly investigated, the process of past life regression therapy is invaluable. Through regression therapy, people can turn a new leaf, better understand themselves and their identities, and live purposeful lives. The deep understanding provided by regression therapy helps people overcome concerns that impact their daily lives, forgive, and move forward. It is truly a gift to feel that one can understand one’s life and then live accordingly. Who are the sceptics to deny it? In the end, reincarnation comforts many, helps people live life the way they want to, and eases their minds about many concerns—even death. The belief in reincarnation and regression therapy has proven to be superbly beneficial to those who have attempted to explore it. 

The Indian connection

Suzy Singh, a transpersonal therapist  from New Delhi, had shared an experience on Facebook, which made me rethink this subject and write this article. A client of hers had brought his 40-year-old wife to her for healing. During the session, in a flash, a memory emerged. In a Nazi camp, her family was being killed, two soldiers were dragging her resisting body into a dark room, and medical experiments were being conducted on her. There was torture and the fear of mutilation if she lost control. She had a lover in the same camp who had attempted to help her escape but was caught and moved to another faraway camp. There was the hopelessness that he would never return, and the tragic wait for her death.

She laboured to release those imprints using a subconscious-mind scan, and after 90 minutes, her panic dropped from 10 plus on a scale of ten to just five. Suzy observed that the holocaust victim’s pledge ‘we will never forget’ continues to perpetuate their suffering over lifetimes.

Today, she prays that all holocaust victims may remember what happened to them only to heal their terrible wounds. She says, “This is a terrible memory. It’s not just intergenerational trauma and grief but also ‘interlife’ trauma and grief that need attention and addressal.”

Dr Trupti Jayin, a past life regression therapist from Mumbai, shares her experience. “The revisitation of the Nazi concentration camps during past life therapy is cathartic and evokes a reaction from most people. It’s healing as it gives great insights into the working of the shadow-self.”

One of her clients, Navin, a software engineer now based in Dehradun, was suffering from an autoimmune condition which had nearly crippled him after he turned forty. He was a very robust man and did not understand how such a condition had suddenly attacked him. He was now walking with the help of a walking stick and had stopped driving his expensive car. He loved speed, and now he was unable to walk without support. His digestive system was weak and he was losing weight. He was unmarried but held a deep desire to have a family. He was angry and blamed the Almighty for his misfortune. 

A past life regression session revealed him to be living in a Nazi concentration camp. He saw himself as a Jewish man who was separated from his family and spent a year in the camp lamenting the loss of his home and prestige. He was one of the thousands who were living like cattle in the bunkers. He was depressed, and as months rolled by, looked old and bent. He was eventually executed by being shot in his legs. The session was lucid and he experienced acid reflux and severe pain in his legs. He was given a message by his spiritual guides that his woes were over, all the anger and frustration that he had held were released, and it was time to release the past completely. 

Post the session, Navin was able to walk comfortably, and within three months, he could jog. His health improved, and slowly, his autoimmune condition subsided. In six months he was happier and had started dating. 

“The session illustrates that when you relive the past life trauma, the disturbing emotions and painful experiences surface and, eventually, through insight, we can heal the present-life body,” says Dr Trupti. Incidentally, Navin realised that he was forty years old when he was executed in 1942 in Nazi Germany.

To understand this process we need to know that as humans, we have the ability to heal ourselves. Life never gives up on us, so we need to understand the process, work on ourselves, and heal ourselves completely by discarding unwanted add-ons coming from either this life or past lives to move forward, thus making the Creator proud of us.

Box 1 - What we can learn from these experiences

1. Anything can be healed if we let go

2. Never forgetting should not mean never loving

3. Meditate to get healed

4. Always pray to the Almighty for guidance

5. Combat fear by forgiving others and oneself

6. Remember that hatred can be won only with understanding and compassion

Box 2 - Teaching story: Moments in time 

“What is fate?” a scholar asks Mulla Nasruddin.

“An endless succession of intertwined events, each influencing the other,” replied the Mullah. 

“That is hardly a satisfactory answer. I believe in cause and effect,” the scholar argued. 

“I see,” said the Mullah. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a procession passing in the street. “That man is going to be hung to death. He was caught while escaping.” After a pause, he continued, “Is his impending death or that of his victim due to the fact that the victim had once deceived him? Is it because someone gave the murderer a silver piece and enabled him to buy the knife with which he committed the murder? Is it because someone saw him committing the murder? Or because the guards of the victim did not stop him before the murder?”

Interpretation: Though this is about one life, it is equally, if not more applicable to past lives and reincarnations. Life is a complex web of interrelated causes and cannot be explained through a simplistic formula of one cause leading to one specific result. As players in this drama, we can only lead our lives with the right principles, heal ourselves, and not knowingly contribute to something harmful. Understanding this will make us less prone to dejection when something unexpected happens in the patterns of our lives.