Case Studies

PAST-LIFE REGRESSION AND SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT

by Gayla Reiter

If someone had told me nine years ago when my husband I retired to an active adult community in Florida, that I would be a hypnotherapist specializing in past-life regression today, I would have suggested that they had an overactive imagination. I had given up my nutrition business and all thoughts of using my Master of Science Degree in Education for any other purpose than a wall decoration. I was ready to tap dance, play tennis and live the life of the idle retired.

My higher self, my mystical mentors and my dead father's spirit had other plans for me. I followed my intuition and started to take courses in topics that I had been reading about since my father died in 1975, metaphysics and parapsychology. I also started to do the things that my classes and books were encouraging me to do. I started a psychic journal, meditated, did service for others, started to practice unconditional love and forgiveness and expressed my thankfulness on a daily basis. To my surprise, all of this led to an astounding spiritual enlightenment. I would awaken at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning with information about my immortal soul pouring into my conscious mind. I found out the symbols that my soul was known by and was given the knowledge these symbols could function as spiritual e-mail, bringing me guidance from the invisible realm. I also began to have spontaneous past-life regressions. I would find myself having very strong deja vu in places that I had never been in before. My psychic journal was beginning to fill up. My intuition started to prod me again. It kept telling me that I had to write a book about my spiritual and metaphysical experiences. It also told me to delve even deeper into my past lives in order to discover my soul's mission through time. I listened to the call of my intuition and made an appointment with my metaphysics and parapsychology teacher, who was also a certified hypnotherapist, for a past-life regression session. I was astonished to find myself back in the lifetime that I had just experienced spontaneously in Vienna and Budapest. Two and one-half hours later, I realized that my book had to be written. This realization caused me to feel doubt and trepidations. I was never trained as a profession writer. Could I accomplish this daunting task?

My fascination with past-life regression led me to experience five other lifetimes with my friend, the hypnotherapist. To my utter amazement, I was a writer in each of the six lifetimes that I experienced in formal hypnosis. My higher self was telling me that not only was I a writer in my present lifetime, but that I had been a writer before. I saw myself as a cavewoman, scratching figures on the cave wall with a sharp rock. I also saw myself as a Native American woman, painting symbols on the teepees and on deerskin clothing and musical instruments. I was also a poetess and a writer of non-fiction books. Experiencing these past lives encouraged me to write my spiritual autobiography and how-to book for the achievement of spiritual enlightenment, Discovering Soul Connections. I added the lessons contained within the book to the end of every chapter so that readers could follow my lead and reach their own spiritual enlightenment.

After reading the manuscript, my editor suggested that I write a lecture series called the "Eight Paths to Spiritual Enlightenment", which I could use as a tool to teach the lessons of "Discovering Soul Connections." I began to teach this lecture series to my readers. But, something was missing. One of the eight paths to enlightenment was past-life regression. My students would never be able to understand their souls' missions through time without the tool of past-life regression. This realization was the true reason that I was trained as a hypnotherapist specializing in past-life regression. I knew that I owed this to my students.

Training as a hypnotherapist specializing in past-life regression proved to be another major part of my spiritual enlightenment. One of the past lives that I accessed was that of a black African man who was captured by European slavers to be transported to the New World. I never reached this destination. I tried to kill one of my captors and was subsequently killed by him. I recognized this captor as one of my close relatives in my present lifetime. I realized that the theme of forgiving the unforgivable was one that I had chosen for my soul to accomplish in my present incarnation. My higher self encouraged me to continue to work on forgiving the unforgivable as I had done in the past. I did just that and forgave this relative unconditionally. This experience was healing for both of us.

At this point, I have accessed more that 70 past lifetimes. Accessing each of these incarnations has brought me some kind of healing. The major healing was a complete dissolution of any previous prejudice or stereotype that I may have had in the past. After finding myself in lifetimes when I was black, red, yellow, white, man, woman, rich, poor, commoner and royalty; I reached the conclusion that if everyone in the world could experience past lifetimes, discrimination and prejudice would decline sharply. There is nothing like walking a mile in someone else's shoes. Finding oneself living in totally alien skin would give one food for thought. Hating a member of a group that one had previously been a member of would be like hating one's self. Perhaps this thinking is idealistic on my part. But, isn't idealism something that we desperately need in this terrorist and hatred-ridden world that we are living in today?