“How long do you think that was?” she asked me.
“I’m not sure. Maybe an hour?” I offered. “A bit less?”
“Three and a half hours,” she said.
I was stunned. There I was, lying on a bench, having just experienced my first past-life regression, suspecting that my brain had come up with a load of old nonsense - but this fact instantly made me wonder. Where had all that time gone? Where could it have gone?
That morning, I had driven down from the north of the Isle of Wight, where I live, to the south on the first gloriously sunny day of the year to meet with Ellemiek Drucker, a Past Life and Between Lives spiritual regression therapist. Having revisited some of my daughter’s uncanny stories from her early years about ‘how she died before’ for a recent article, I’d become increasingly fascinated by the possibility of being able to revisit my own ‘past lives’. On the drive down, I’d felt a heady mixture of excitement and apprehension. A thousand thoughts were running through my head: What if I can’t be hypnotised and it’s awkward? What if it works and I can’t ‘come back’? What if it works and I’m forced to confront something too hard? I was about to find out.
What is a Past Life Regression?
Most people I know have joked at some point that certain talents or quirks they exhibit come from who they must have been in a past life. There are many others, however, for whom past lives are not simply a fun bit of woo-woo, but a way to better understand their psyche and even heal from trauma. Both sides appeal to me greatly, though I must admit to being sceptical. My family background is in traditional, black and white medicine. Nothing left-field like this was ever entertained growing up.
Here’s how regression works, though: through deep relaxation or light hypnosis, we can apparently go back in time to find memories of key trigger points in our childhood. For example, these might be moments that caused issues such as irrational fears or recurring, negative relationship dynamics. This is actually a fairly standard type of hypnosis therapy, which works because, when someone relives a moment in their mind in that way, they can often directly access the emotion attached to it. Then, with professional guidance, they’ll revisit and alter that memory slightly, which can create a shift in perspective, leading to a sense of release. A childhood regression can be incredibly powerful, but it does mean working with memories we already partly understand, even if we may have spent decades burying them. A past life regression, however, builds on this approach.
Experts say that by stepping even further back into our subconscious, we can consider what some believe are lives that happened before our current incarnation. This gives our psyche more freedom to work in symbols, metaphors, textures or even full technicolour stories. It’s said that this deeper approach means it’s easier to access things that were pre-verbal or feel too charged or too complex or painful to tackle directly - a bit like experiencing feelings through a character in a novel instead of them happening to you. It’s indirect, so it feels safer to go there.
What happens in a regression?
My own past life regression started before I’d even got to Ellemiek’s studio, with a detailed questionnaire asking all sorts of things, from what my favourite colour is to whether I enjoy my work. I understood later that this was to help her decipher how my mind works, such as whether I was a visual person or more of a sound person, so she could help me ‘go back’ more effectively. Once I arrived, we settled into the studio, which faced the sea and had beautiful natural light. I’d been half expecting a ton of spiritual paraphernalia hidden behind a cloud of incense, but the room had a professional feel and was calm and clear. We had a pretty intense chat for an hour about what, if anything, I wanted to get out of the session or would like to shift in terms of limiting beliefs and other mental blocks. Not that these things would necessarily come up, she warned me: “Regression gives you what you need, not always what you think you want.” That wasn’t really what I wanted to hear.
Taking the time to talk beforehand was welcome and Ellemiek soon put me at ease, telling me that I should try to keep an open mind about what comes up and not overthink it. She also explained that the hypnosis would go in waves - sometimes I’d be totally aware of where I am and feel that I might be making things up, and other times it would be more like watching fragments of a silent movie. The key is to just go with it: to say what you see and what you feel with no judgement. This is much easier said than done, I found.
As I lay under a blanket, Ellemiek started by asking me to imagine a safe place and then see a flight of stairs in my mind’s eye. Slowly and calmly, I was asked to notice what was around me and how I was feeling before being mentally guided down each step to the bottom. This part felt quicker than I’d anticipated and my brain screamed, ‘Wait! What? Slow down!’ but then I remembered what I was told about going with it and pushed the voice away. At this point, my imagination – or something like it, at least – kicked in.
Robes and headdresses
The first thing I saw was my bare feet on sand, though everything around them was blurred. They were big feet, with some hair on the toes, and I had a sensation of weight and breadth in my body. There were definitely masculine vibes, which surprised me, as it hadn’t occurred to me that I could be a different sex. Next came a flash of deep blue – loose material moving in the wind, and a heaviness on my head and shoulders. Something told me it was a headdress made of antlers. I saw children running away, clearly scared. I saw trees on fire. All the while, Ellemiek kept asking what I could see, how I felt and what happened next. Answering out loud felt wrong, like I was constantly being pulled back into reality. I worried that I wasn’t really ‘under’ because of it, but I kept going.
Once it felt like that scene was fading because I’d got what I needed from it, which in this case involved noting a feeling of great responsibility coupled with an equally great sense of being woefully unprepared for it, Ellemiek gently asked me to close that story and move to a different timeline. This process repeated three or four times over the session and she’d gently redirect me forward or backwards in time as she felt necessary.
It was a very strange situation to find myself in. On the one hand, I felt constantly aware of what was going on in the present day and doubted everything that came out of my own mouth, yet on the other, I had an internal voice imploring me to just listen and withhold any judgement. It was a classic good cop, bad cop - ann angel and a devil on each shoulder.
I did get judgy though.
By the third ‘life’, I was feeling frustrated and, in all honesty, getting a bit fed up. Always male and always a bit pathetic, I couldn’t seem to move past a similar story of feeling lost, like I wasn’t taught something and had to forgive someone for that. I didn’t like it because that’s how I often feel now, and I reckoned I could just be projecting that. I wanted, instead, to move past this all-too-familiar scenario and get some answers. I wanted some grand, Jesus-like figure to appear and tell me what the hell my life purpose was. You won’t be surprised to hear that it doesn’t quite work like that.
We finished the couch part of the session with the part that will definitely sound completely woo to most people: trying to access my higher self and my soul team – cue eye-rolling, albeit with a splash of excitement. Sadly, those elements didn’t work well together, and I didn’t get the magic answers I was looking for. All I got was some blobby bits of pink that felt like they were coming from the other side of my eyelids as the light changed.
Feeling flat
We finished and I slowly sat up. When asked how I felt, I was cagey as I didn’t want to be rude, but the truth was, I felt flat. Flat and sad. Despite trying to have zero expectations from the session, I realised that I had hoped for some sort of message at least - something that I could take away and work on. And I felt sad because part of me had wanted to throw myself wholeheartedly into this more spiritual world, where I knew for sure that there was more beyond this one singular, directionless human existence. I had wanted proof, and I hadn’t got it. It was then, however, that Ellemiek asked how long I thought the regression had lasted, and the genuine shock of finding out blew my mind. What it also did was plant a seed. That seed was the thought to suspend judgement and let it settle, to let my brain process everything in the background while I got on with my life for a few days. In a week or so, I’d consider how it went.
A gradual revelation
They say the soul whispers quietly and you’ll only really hear it if you take the time to tune in. It took several days to know how I felt about my past life regression experience, but ‘felt’ is the word here, not ‘thought’. I turned my thinking brain off and eventually asked my gut, which responded in such a strong way that I feel emotional writing about it.
All those fragments of male ‘me’s across generations, seeking guidance from elders who couldn’t give it, suddenly came together with the final vision that I had initially dismissed because it happened when I was feeling frustrated. The tweak I had made to the last ‘memory’ of me as a young male leader, even though I didn’t know why at the time, was to invite a woman to come and stand beside me. This woman was so familiar to me, and I clearly loved her. I felt stronger with her there, like anything was possible and I knew exactly what I needed to do from then on.
It seems so obvious now to me, but that woman was the personification of my intuition - something I have dismissed for far too much of my ‘current’ life, choosing instead to follow the crowd and outsource my own instincts, which I know are strong. It’s little wonder that I’ve got to my forties and still feel confused about my direction. I feel quite angry that I didn’t trust my gut in the first place and take more creative risks with my life, because I know exactly where I’d be now if I had.
After this revelation, I decided to Google what seeing pink light blobs might have meant in this regression scenario. It turns out it’s really a ‘thing’. Pink here is generally linked to nurture and healing, but the intense tone of it I saw at the end, when I was essentially looking for Jesus, apparently means “strong emotional release or transformation”. Go figure. I am calling this woman named intuition back into my life, and this time, I’m not letting go. Next stop: more sessions and less judging. I’ll also dip my toes into the more advanced modalities of Life Between Lives and Quantum Healing Hypnosis Therapy (QHHT), now I’m getting better at quietening my thinking brain.
With regard to past life regression, however, what’s clear to me now is this: whether we believe these mental fragments are true memories of our previous incarnations or just our brain piecing together buried emotions in the only way it knows how is almost irrelevant. What matters in practice is that the experience can feel real and meaningful enough to completely change how we see ourselves and move through life. And if that isn’t real magic, what is?
Have you had a similar experience? Please share in the comments!