Oprah and Past Life Regression

Today’s episode of Oprah opened to renowned psychiatrist and author Dr. Brian Weiss hypnotizing the studio audience and regressing them to past lives. Was this a valid experience or some sort of parlor trick?

Oprah was joined by her cohort cardiologist Dr. Mehmet Oz, who while admittedly skeptical due to his scientific background, offered balanced and open-minded commentary and was himself regressed during the program.
The show’s guest Dr. Weiss is the author of perhaps the best known book on the phenomena of past life regression, “Many Lives-Many Masters.” A psychiatrist and department head at a prestigious hospital, Weiss’ had patient named Catherine that exploded his worldview and led him to his life’s true work.

Catherine had been afflicted with numerous crippling fears and a year of conventional psychiatric treatment yielded no appreciable results. Dr. Weiss decided to use hypnotic regression as an alternative and lo and behold Catherine was soon reliving past lives, although neither she as a Catholic or he being Jewish, had any previous inclination to believe in reincarnation. What was important was that Catherine symptoms began to improve.

At first puzzled, Dr. Weiss was curious as to what was at work here. The clincher for him was when Catherine gave him information about his deceased father and infant son that would have been nearly impossible to gain otherwise.

After the audience’s regression experience, several member shared what they encountered. One African woman stated she had been a white nun, to which Dr. Weiss attributed to the soul’s needs to experience different genders and races in order to develop. Another woman reported recalling a previous incarnation as Native American woman who was murdered and thus separated from her children. In this lifetime this woman is childless and has some fears regarding motherhood, something that according to Dr. Weiss is common amongst people who have been separated from their children in past lives and do not wish to undergo that pain again.

Later in the program a previous guest funeral director Robert Leon was regressed to past lives in an effort to understand both his nightly dreams about flying, his rocky relationship with his sister and his intense dislike of having anything pressing on his chest.

The flying dreams apparently stemmed from his becoming frozen with fear as a fighter pilot and as a result was shot down and killed. In a similar vein, the difficulties with his sister seemed to arise from his also being frozen with fear while she was being sexually assaulted in a past life and that we was killed by someone who did not want him to be a witness. He apparently was crushed to death by his assailant in spite of his not intervening. Like Catherine, Robert reported feeling better after the work.

Dr. Weiss did a good job of separating the essence of hypnotism from the mythology; that it is a state where the mind becomes focused while the body relaxes and in doing so we can get past the conscious clutter that keeps us from knowing our inner selves.

So does it matter whether past life regression is real or not? As Dr. Oz noted, the Western mind is addicted to data and tends to see such practices as the “wishful desires of desperate people.” However, he added that something does not have to be understood to be valuable and there have been many individuals who have been enriched by their hypnotic experiences, those that work with past lives as well as the current one.




James Malone is the proprietor of the TheHolisticMall.Com, the finest collection of affordable transformational ebooks on the planet!