EARTh movies

Voice Over (VO): Another road, another journey. Have I ever travelled this way before? Will I ever travel this way again? And where does this road take me? To new horizons, new worlds, to hidden parts of myself? Will I ever get to the source of my pain? Will I ever release my pain, dry my tears, let go of my weariness and feel joy in my life? Will I ever beat in tune with my heart and be at peace with who I am? And now I am here, on this blue couch. Laid down next to an expert, a facilitator, a therapist. Closing my eyes and looking into my own private worlds. The darkness behind my eyelids illuminated through looking within me. Nervous. Yeah, trusting the person next to me. Willing to face the unknown inside of me. Hoping that she leads me through the causes of my problems.

My quest led me here, to this therapy room. Eager to learn something about a chance to heal, to evolve. Having heard about this particular therapeutic approach, regression therapy. Feeling drawn to what I have been hearing. It somehow resonates within me. Making me want to understand more about it. Could this be a way for me? Another step on my own personal journey. So, what better way to find out and to ask those who have practiced and taught this approach over many years? Most important, and hearing from people who have already been clients. The journey took me to Kleve in Germany, where a meeting of therapists from all around the world took place. Here I hope to find out more information answers for all of my questions.

And so, I just waltzed right into the middle of their gathering. The convention of an Association of Regression Therapists named EARTh. Here is what I learned. EARTh is an association of practicing regression therapists which stretches beyond the boundaries of Europe, where it all began. Regression therapy is a modern form of psychotherapy where the client, with the assistance of the therapist, looks for experiences in their past where their problems being caused. In discovering, reliving and understanding those causes, they are able to find deep and lasting relief. The term “past” can mean two weeks ago, 20 years ago, the time we were in the womb, and even 200 years ago, within a former life. A substantial number of regression therapists in Europe, and also from all around the world, have joined together to form the EARTh Association. To facilitate both contacts and further training for members, there is the annual EARTh Convention. This is an opportunity to physically meet and talk with a therapist, can attend instructive and experiential workshops and formally exchange experiences, or get to know each other in a relaxed surrounding. Obviously, there is much to share and to learn from each other. In this colourful and lively environment of very different characters, I had the chance to meet some selected members of EARTh. Experienced regression therapists and trainers internationally famous within this field. They will hear and answer my questions connected with the subject regression therapy.

Marion Boon is a regression therapist since 2000 and an international train for EARTh, an active organizer of international events related to the field of regression therapy.

Marion Boon: The trance is already there, so in fact regression therapy is to get them out of trance. They’re in the trance of the problem, so. That’s what we do.

VO: Trisha Caetano is internationally known as a pioneer in inner child integration and regression therapies. She has trained psychotherapist and healthcare professionals in many countries.

Trisha Caetano: So you start with this person who’s like this, and then you, you watch the flower unfold petal by petal. They open up and become who they are. And so for me, that’s the joy.

VO: There is Doctor Morris Netherton. A renowned Los Angeles therapist and founder of the Institute of Past Life Awareness, since 1960 he has been a true pioneer within the field of regression therapy. He has over 30 years of clinical practice in alternative treatment modalities. His book, Past Lives Therapy, was the first in the field of regression therapy.

Morris Netherton: I just, I tell people past life therapy allows you to stop doing things to people and start doing things with people because you want to.

VO: Roger Woolger is a psychotherapist, international trainer and author, specialised in past life regression, spirit release and shamanic healing. With degrees in psychology, religion and philosophy and is trained as an analyst at the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, Roger Woolger developed his own method called deep memory process.

Roger Woolger: What we now call regression therapy or regression to past lives, is tuning into one layer of this many layered thing called- I call it universal memory, the great memory, the AKASHA.

VO: Hans TenDam is an international trainer regression therapist since the early 80s. He’s the author of Exploring Reincarnation and Deep Healing. Hans is the current president of EARTh.

Hans TenDam: The most beautiful sessions are when the deepest pain is healed. And hearing of the deepest pain always leads to an experience that you can only describe as being mystical.

VO: So, we’ll trust my therapist and my intuition. I am in the right place at the right time. And here I go. Not to take it easy but to reach out for solutions and for healing within my deeper self. Closing my eyes and going deep down. Even so, what exactly is regression therapy?

Hans TenDam: To relive cathartically the origin of your problems and cathartically means that you will understand them. You will feel really relieved. You will feel the vitality restored. It’s really resolved.

Trisha Caetano: Regression therapy deals with the cause of the trauma and the problem, and most other therapies and medical methods deal with the results or the effects of trauma. So going back to where the trauma occurred. Going through the trauma again to break up the energy and the emotions that have been impacted or blocked. And by releasing those emotions and feelings, a person can stop their reactive patterns of responding to the old information because that then becomes complete and then they can make conscious choice and now time of what they want to do with their life instead of reacting to the programs of the old trauma.

Roger Woolger: I understand it as the kind of work where you take a person, a client, into an inner process, contacting –what in my language would be– the deeper unconscious mind.

Katerina (Client): The therapist there guided me to the core of my current problem. And that was his intention as we had discussed it before. And from the process it seemed that I went to the root of my current situation. It was as if I was watching a movie that I was participating on, that it was my movie, my story. It was me. Watching in full and mind, body, spirit and the feelings there were they were all mine.

Beatrice (Client): I have been a therapist and a patient for a long time. So as a patient I have seek- seek- to seek therapy to get out of the- yeah, the load of the Japanese camps that my parents and my brothers brought in our family. Even with psychoanalysis I could not find it, although I myself trained as a psychoanalyst. So I went quite deep for what they called was therapy to go to the deepest, and I couldn’t find the catharsis that I needed and the insights that I needed to- to get it off my back and not leave it. As in our family- the victims of the Japanese camps were the perpetrators of the children after the war, and I was the first one.

Hans TenDam: Therapy really begins even before the client comes. So, they start to access what’s in there. And they learn to listen, like we are listening to the client; the client is listening to his inner material, to his inner voices, if you would like to say it like that.

Morris Netherton: I do an interview that over about 2 hours, the first time I see someone that gradually begins to bring those memories from the past into their life here and now. I have never hypnotized anybody. I have never tricked anybody. I simply questioned them as to the trauma and the changes that they need in their life and by the time I have done that they’re that close to being in it. Usually all I have to say is “You know where you are now. You’re exactly where you need to be. All you need to do is go on in and take me with you. What’s the first thing that comes to mind?” And believe me or not, or not, it works.

Beatrice (Client): I asked for a demo session and in that demo session in the workshop I just really- it could help me to get on the terror that my mother must have felt during the Japanese camps. And she had that in her body. So, when she conceived of me it was just given to me. It was passed on to me, and I had carried that all along, and also the- the attitude of not feeling, because all those war victims, they don’t dare to call it feelings. She said “If you feel anxiety, you’re dead, so you don’t feel.” And that was how we were brought up, not feeling and that was so clear in that session that- in the demo session with Netherton that, I thought “No.
No, this is- this is enough. This is enough. I live her life. I’m not living mine. This is enough. This is going to change.”

I thought, ok, I’m very bad. I can hardly walk. And I don’t want to go with crutches and I don’t want to go in a wheelchair. I want to call my own legs. And willpower is something that you need to survive camps and needed that to survive. It was help. I had three weeks, every day the session of two or more hours and he made an intake and he started with birth. He asked me for every surgery or probably a moment of unconsciousness I had had in my life. He asked me for the whole family constellation, of course, and atmosphere. During that intake there were about 3 sentences that I said that in certain periods I look like a lepra- a lepra patient, he wrote it down, he said “that’s a past life, ok” and in another situation, the divorce of my husband, the father of my daughter said it felt like I would drown, he said “that’s the second one past life”, and in another one, there was a real betrayal and I really felt like- we’re- we’re so angry, like, worry; that’s the third one. So besides going through birth, I experienced with the dead child that was born before me- How probably- I would be to came out clearly. I was suspecting that and it came out very clear. The birth, not bonding with my mother, the feelings of always feeling like I should have been a boy– and I don’t know where it comes from. Going through that, it was so obvious that my father wanted a son that, after that it is never occurred to me again that was what I would have to be in there or I should have been born like a boy. It was quiet, it was his thing. So, during the process of Newton’s way of working, all those passed on- ah, the convictions were just so clear and so separated: “that’s from my father, that’s from my mother, that’s from the surgeon, that’s from whoever intruded my- my energy when I was unconscious or physically hurt or whatever. And it’s- it was like one big train every day that was going on through past lives- yeah.

Katerina (Client): I could hear everything that’s happening outside, yes. It felt very well actually. To play on your own movie and observe it at the same time. I wasn’t in any way hypnotized or- I was there in the present. So no, there was no worry of coming out. I was out and in at the same time. So, I found myself living in a very small house, most probably an orphan without the knowledge of it though. Raised by an old man. A strange figure, very severe. That apparently, he was offering himself, as I saw it. And he had to raise this child. With his way. So this child could not face this man because he was sick, he was- all he was always, very angry and the child was afraid. So going into regression that we did, I saw myself in the way I reacted, how scared I was with the tone of his voice even. And what was happening at that time? And my story then- it was how I balanced to escape or resolve that situation. So, with the, with whatever chance I had, there’s a little light. I was sneaking out of the window. That the little house was by a beach, so I was going down to the beach trying to find people and friends and- and play with. But I saw myself really, really scared. And terrified with the behaviour.

Trisha Caetano: And the thing is that what we do is we go wherever the person needs to go to access the trauma and resolve- that will resolve the issue and there are specific methods of how to get to that particular place in time.

Morris Netherton: If you just sit and listen, keep your mouth shut, which is hard for some people to do, but you’ll and they will tell you. I almost started a session by saying “Look. As we’ve been talking, you have put yourself where you need to be. You already talked yourself into the place where we need to start to make you happy and healthy here. Now go on into it and take me with you.” And people are always astounded when they do it. But you ask with with integrity and you ask with honesty too.

Hans TenDam: Basic methods that I label our regression which means most simply: “OK. Go back to the very first time you had this feeling that’s then happiness or fear, whatever.” And then finding out what story develops. And very often that story ends with death, and very often it’s dramatic death or confused death, but not necessarily. The second methods is a cluster of methods that I call personification and includes things that are common with Gestalt thought or voice dialogue, etcetera. So, the basic instruction there is: Just to mention that you’re in your own home or in your study or in your bedroom. The door opens and the main reason of your problem now enters the room. And usually, it’s a kind of person and maybe your dead grandmother, it may be your father, it may be a figure that you can understand. It may be the devil, it may be a dark cloud, whatever it is, and you’re going to explore that and dialogue with that. And the third is what we usually call energy work. It basically means that you have the people imagine that, for example, their problem. Is the kind of presence, the kind of energy receptions that’s inside your body? So, you feel guilty? OK, just try to feel where can you find that built most strongly in your body and they will for example, say on their chest. There is a weight on it. Just imagine that there is a real weight on it. What kind? It may be a rocket, maybe a person. How, how heavy is it that’s happening? And so, we are going to take away the rock. So, in energy work you take the problem and you visualize the problem and you try to have them feel the problem as a substance or an energy that is close to them or inside them, and then you’re going to manipulate it. It’s just that. The trick- an important trick to make to make the problem that is intangible tangible. And what is especially? What is essential is the relationship to bodily experience. Body feelings like anaesthetic experience, warm, cold, but feelings in the body, the body is, especially in energy work, that’s where we do it. That’s territory where we work with. In every good session, elements of all three methods are there. So, it’s not either one method or the other, but I found that these three together are the most simple toolkit you need to resolve anything that is not purely medical.

Marion Boon: I heard you say “Can I use my ability. Can I use my power?” Yeah. I also heard you say “I’m not valued for my work.” Could you repeat a few times? “I am not valued.”
Client: I am not valued. I am not valued.
Marion Boon: Change the words into your words. How you feel it right now?

Marion Boon: I named this method a direct focus method. It is- It is the approach of the verbal information, the feeling that goes with it. And the somatical, the body feeling that the client has. So, somebody may say “Ohh, my life is- is- is a misery.” “So how does it make you feel?” “How does it make me feel? Well, miserable.” “Well, where do you feel it in your body?” “Especially my stomach. My stomach is upset and I have headaches.” So, then you have two somatic places and an information verbal on the life and then you use verbal techniques to- to focus directly to the issue. And then we have an emotion, somatic, a mental thought, and we can start. That’s enough to start a session.

Client: I am not allowed to use my power.
Marion Boon: That’s the strongest, so keep on saying that please. “I am not allowed to use my power.”
Client: I am not allowed to use my power. I am not allowed to use my power.

Marion Boon: And what emotion does it give you?

Client: I start crying.
Marion Boon: Yes, let it come.

Marion Boon: “I am not allowed to use my power.” Yeah. And where do you feel this sadness most strongly? Let it come, your body knows. Where do you feel it most strongly? In your belly. Please put your hand on your belly. So, the belly is keeping the charges.

“I am not allowed to use my power”. Yeah feel it. She is already feeling it very intense, so I’m going to count from 5 to 1 and at 1 you’ll get images of the very first situation that you had when you felt your belly rumbling and you had this thought “I don’t feel, I am not allowed to use my power. Go back in time 5,4,3 to the place and the time where you are not allowed to use your power 3,2, 1. Let the images come. Feel the sadness and your belly rumbling. Where are you, and what is happening?

Marion Boon:

As a rule there is a physical indicator, an emotional indicator and a mental indicator and in fact you only need one, because when you have one and you exaggerate it, the others will show. So that’s why I name it the direct focus. And then of course you could start with energy work and visualization but that’s more for groups. In a one to one session …

Client: It’s like my body is a strange body, but I am on earth. I am sure about that and I am a very important person.

Marion Boon: Are you a man or a woman?

Client: A man.

Marion Boon: What age are you?

Client: I am old for that time, may be 40. I have a feeling I’m kind of traveling around people come to me, they want to be healed or they have questions and I have this place where nobody can find me.

Marion Boon: Yeah, where is this?
Client: It’s in a mountain there’s a lake area and….

Marion Boon: Is that where you live?
Client: Yeah, I go there from time to time to reload my energy, to be alone in order to reach out to…

Hans TenDam: When I was working in India, I used a method that I called “Core Issue”. You go to the deepest pain you have, and you go as deep as you can, and you feel it as completely as you can, and you go as possible deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, and it can be more horrible, and more black, and more lonely and more cold. Whatever it is that the experience is and in some moments there is a complete spontaneous inversion and people come into an absolute state of calm or serenity or happiness etc. So these Indian people were saying “ Ohh! They are going into a satori in half an hour. If you go to a guru it takes years.” So I said yes that’s because what your are taught there is to go up, and I teach you to go down. So in the deepest shit, you can find the solution.

VO: How will I know that I don’t just make it all up, a fantasy, a dream?

Roger Woolger: That’s a very complex question and the theme of controversy about whether therapists can induce memories in clients, whether you can plant a memory in a client and the client will believe it’s real. That’s called the “false memory syndrome” and it will take a whole other interview to go into that, but I believe if you get away, if you get a person in to a fairly

rich state of trance, the memories that come up with will be authentic. They won’t be fantasy.

Fantasy belongs more to the conscious ego but there is a kind of remembering that belongs to the deepest self, or the soul, which you can’t fabricate. You can’t fake that. So it depends on the state of consciousness that the person is in. Another thing is that many people carry memories in their bodies and when you focus on that area, for example, if you focus on a neck pain, you might suddenly get an image of a sword hacking your neck, or you get a chest pain, you get a picture of a rock crashing you. Those images come so quickly and spontaneously it’s highly unlikely that the person made them up. In fact three people with completely very similar neck pains will come up with three totally different images. Because the memories, the pains are specific to specific past lives and I personally believe from my experiences the body never lies. The body doesn’t invent things. We don’t make up pains in our bodies. They feel real. Sometimes in a past life, a person will be remembering a horrible situation. I had a good example, a woman remembered being a soldier in a prison, who was chained to a wall and he was awaiting execution and he was going to be hanged the next day and I said move forward in your memories, see what happens next and she goes into a kind of dreamy state in the regression, she says: “Oh. I’m getting my hands out of these chains. Oh, there is a little window in the cell and seems like it’s opening I can now squeeze through. Oh, now I am running through the mountains and I found this hut and an old man takes me in and heals my wounds.” Well I listened to this story and I said to me: “this doesn’t sound real to me. This sounds like a fantasy”. So I went back again and very carefully I psychodrama the chains

“well show me how you get out of the chains again.” And she goes back and she relives it, and she says “I can’t get out, I can’t get out. I am gonna die.” And then we follow the story. “Follow what happens to your body” The next day they take this man and they take him and they hang him. What had happened in the past life memory, the chained prisoner had become delirious and gone into a delirium. And in the delirium dream state, he’d imagined he had a fantasy of escape. So, we could tell the difference when we brought the body into the story, because the body didn’t lie. This was an out of body fantasy. when they are deeply traumatized (delirium is another state) they will leave the body. They will go on imaginary journeys, which are real psychic events as dream events, but they are not real past lives.

So there is a very subtle distinction within a past life itself. They are different states of consciousness, even in a past life memory and the more we’ve looked carefully in this, the more we can make quite fine distinctions. What is memory, what is fantasy, what is imagination?

Hans TenDam: I don’t think fantasies heal. Of course in a session you cannot be like a kind of a super detective, or judging all the time, “is this real?” etc., because, even if it’s real, it may be polished. I mean in a victim mode, I may embellish my sufferings and if I am very positive or I am a narcissistic, I may add other parts to the story that may be polished and more romantic, but they may be still basically true and of course our profession is to make the story as truthful as possible. But when I hear a story that is more or less symbolic, or is it fake, or it is just is impossible, I don’t accept it. I go to the level of real experience, whenever I can get there and if I can’t get there, I did something wrong or the client wasn’t ready for it, I don’t know. I don’t care at all for fantasies. That’s for kids, not for adults. We try to go to the real thing and of course, many times you do not know, you cannot test it but anyway the story should fit, the story should be reasonable, should give a good explanation. Yeah! Reality first, and reality only.

Beatrice (Client): Yeah, it’s not something miraculous. It’ so beneath the surface that you can reach it very easily if you are trained to that. So, if a therapist like we are trained, and Netherton and Hans TenDam just hear you talk and know there is another load on it and they touch it, you go. If it is not taken seriously and you haven’t taken yourself seriously, then you can walk off of it very easily, but it’s not something of being in another world. It’s not, at the same time I am here in this room, and at the same time I am with you or with Netherton or with Hans and I go in a memory that is maybe not of this life, maybe in other cloth and maybe in other ethics. But the body tells me when it’s true or not and when you feel the same rage or the same sadness or the same human feelings that you can feel in this life too, you know you are right, you are on the spot. And if I feel nothing like the mental thing is going then I feel that I’ m not there it feels different and it’s not something difficult to do.

Katerina (Client): It seems that there is a very affective method for trauma resolution. We were talking about trauma more other results that the therapy has. And what I did because that’s how I work, I researched it before I went to see a therapist, so if we have any doubts the information is there, it’s in the internet. I would recommend to the people to see an acredited therapist that has gone through the proper training and this is very important and to approach the subject with a very open mind and see what happens.

VO: Falling apart. Being at odds with my partner, my body, my life. Life, is just a vast maze   

I don’t understand myself . Others seem to be on a pointless stroll through the emptiness of their lives or struggling with unexplainable body pains or held back by strong ties and hang-ups that just don’t seem to shift. Bound by fears, or anxiety. Or feeling disconnected to others, alone and ungrounded. So many problems waiting to be solved. So who is a suitable client for regression therapy? Am I one, right here on this couch?

Roger Woolger: Phobias, anxiety attacks, panic syndrome, difficulties in relationships, addictive problems, alcohol, drugs, the whole range of human problems that are generally presented to psychotherapy.

Trisha Caetano: People really want to heal and I think that’s really important. Are they there because they want to heal, or are they there because they heard of this weird thing and they want some sort of a magical solution to their problems? “Oh, my past life and then my husband will love me again” I mean this isn’t the way life works.

Marion Boon: The main reason would be on going depression, things that don’t change, that go on too long, chronic diseases, even problems in life that repeat themselves, the patterns in this life. And that’s a good reason to do regression therapy. When I started my studies with Hans TenDam he once said when it’s not logical, it’s suitable for regression therapy, because there is no medical cause. It’s not logical, but you do it and you don’t like it. It’s devastating, you don’t want to do it and yet you do it. So that pattern….

Hans TenDam: Things like “what am I doing here?” or “I feel alienated” or “I don’t feel at home”, “what’s my purpose in life” that kind of stuff.

Trisha Caetano: Are there behaviours that are illogical and out of context and have no apparent origin in this lifetime? Are there medical things that are occurring that the doctor can’t simply find any cause for? Are there… I know a woman that used to have a terrible eczema all up her arms and down her back very painful, very itchy. She’d been to every doctor, trying every medication, herbs, acupuncture, on all nine yards. Nothing had worked. She said: “You are my last hope.” And I said: “Well, we will do what we will do and what happens, happens. So she regressed back into her lifetime as an American Indian and they had been invaded by white people and her baby was dying and she was holding her baby and she got smallpox. And she had broken all over her body with smallpox and her feeling was “my baby is dying and I cannot protect my baby, there is nothing I can do”. And there is an enormous sense of hopelessness and of losing everything she had, her clan, her husband, most of all, her child. So when she came into her present life her husband started an affair with another woman and that triggered this reactive response in her body, of her body on fire and burning and so after doing her past life the hives disappeared and never came back, very effective.

Hans TenDam: People go to this type of therapy, because other types of therapy didn’t work. They’ve been to doctors, they have been to psychologists, they have been to psychiatrists and it did not work. That is a very common reason, they come to us.

VO: And hearing from people who have already been clients.

Katerina (Client): I went through a trauma, the result of which was a post traumatic distress syndrome, which is something very hard to treat. So there was a need and I tried this with this method.

Beatrice (Client): In our family the victims of the Japanese camps were the perpetrators of the children after the war and I was the first one. So I had been physically, sexually, mentally, emotionally abused, and that was… I’ve done that since I was twenty, I wanted to get my health and my mental health. I didn’t know at that moment I had cancer, but I still wanted to get out all of those miserable feelings. The aggression that I felt, the sadness that I felt, the anxiety that I could feel, and my situation had so much worsened that it was cancer and they told me that I had to death, may be six months and that was mid June 2001.And the internal specialist said: you have to go to an oncologist. I said: “No I won’t go there”. He said: “Why not? You need treatment.” I said: “Chemotherapy, and radiation, and surgery, is not treatment. It’s symptomatic and very destructive treatment. That’s not treatment. So I said I don’t know what I will do, but I won’t do it. And the only thing I knew was “I want to live. I have no idea what for, because I was very, very ill. About forty kilos, skin and bones, I could hardly walk anymore, my muscles were gone less and less, they were almost not there anymore.

VO: And are there any people seeking help who should not attend a regression therapist?

Roger Woolger: There is a certain kind of new age client that wants to glamorize their resume by getting rather special past lives, they always want to be… go back as Egyptian priestesses or something glamorous. I don’t work with them. That’s spiritual narcissism as far as I am concerned. There are some people, they are borderline cases for whom to go directly into past lives would be contraindicated because certain types of what we call schizophrenia they’ve already got too much information that is flooding them from possibly past lives, possibly other levels of the psyche, and they need to create boundaries and create a sense of self. And if you start taking them to even more stories they will get further overwhelmed, you will be going the opposite direction. So I would rarely… In special cases I might work with a schizophrenic if I see something that could be specifically connected to a past life but in general I avoid working with them.

Marion Boon: The difficult clients are those who use tranquilizers, medication that is influencing the consciousness, because you go into symbolism. They cannot touch the depth of their body feeling.

Hans TenDam: Let me put it very bluntly. When your mind is a mess, don’t go, it may become more messy. You need something else first. The other type of client that I will not recommend is if your mind is a closed case, is fixed, is dogmatic, is imprisoned, don’t go there. You need some open mindedness, you need some common sense.

Marion Boon: If you are deliberately determine that you will only believe the truth

of objective science and you don’t listen to your own body, then I wouldn’t waste my time on that. I did before. I wish them well, but not with me.

VO: I wonder whether going back to the cause of my problem will help? Why should it? Maybe it will be more than just uncomfortable…. Maybe it will make it all worse.

Beatrice (Client): I know that some things that it does, is that it cleans organically in the body it cleans emotionally, it cleans mentally and if it gets you back to the path and peaceful, then do it. And that’s what I did. And even every day, I can be so much in the here and now, just so open with an open heart, and an open mind, not clogged. It goes for me. I am alive and life is an adventure and… It doesn’t matter. I’m 62 now and I will move to Canada. Ok? I’ll do that. More opportunities…

Trisha Caetano: You go into lifetimes and then you go, you go into lifetimes that you have been much more aware than this lifetime and that opens you up and stretches you. And then the other thing is that you go to between lives and pre-birth experiences and when you go to between lives, if you stay right above the life, you stay in the astral which continues the emotions, feelings and viewpoints of that lifetime. But if you move beyond the astral, you move into between lives there is a fascinating awareness that I have found. I used to believe you had to do a linear regression going back to the very first time it happened and so I was using that method with a client and was telling him “now you go to an earlier experience where you feel this aloneness, ok in an earlier and earlier lifetime we went pre-body and then

I said “move earlier and look down at your feet”. Silence! I said: What’s happening? “I don’t have feet”. …I said: “Your fear cut them off”. What would I know…? “Ok look down at your hands. Silence! “I don’t have hands.” I said: “Are you in a body? “No” Are you between lives? “No” Are you in another dimension? “No” so finally I got smart and shut up and said: “What’s happening?” She said: “I don’t know. I just know I am”…

Morris Netherton: Once a young man had a lump, a grown tumor on his neck, and I learned a big lesson with him. I went in and said what have you got there on your neck? “I don’t know it’s a kind of bump.” I said: “Well, let’s see, what does that feel like? He said: “I don’t know.”

“Well sit back there”, so he sat back and leaned against the wall. So I said: “If something were going to happen to you that would cause your neck to do that, that would cause a bump like that, what’s the first thing that comes to mind and he said: “Well they hung me”. “Ok let’s hung you.” He is not the least been scared or apprehensive of what I am doing. He goes and he is up. “What’s the next thing?” And he went through about ten, half a minute, to a minute, quick little things that would pop on this and I said: “well that was a good work. When are you having your surgery? He said: “Tomorrow”. I said: “Good luck. I’ll see you when I’ll get back.” So I went home and when I got back, two days later he was sitting there. “How was your surgery? He said: “I didn’t have it”. “What do you mean you didn’t have it?” “Well I went up there and that old doctor came and started picking on my throat, he said: “Where did your tumor go?” And the kid said: “I don’t know you tell me”. “I can’t find it” he said. And he called another doctor in. Another doctor came in and they took an x-ray and it wasn’t there.  

Funny the doctor said: “We’ll do the surgery anyway.” The kid said a very distinctive word:

“No you won’t. I’m going back”. So he got up, got his clothes, walked out for four blocks to the street to the door of junior hall and he said: “Let me in! These people are crazy out here.”

And I said: “Well how is your throat?” “My throat is fine.” Ok what I learned was you don’t have to do a long ongoing process with some people. Here boom, boom, boom gone. I thought it was rather astounding.

Trisha Caetano: This works well with phobias. Works well with a lot of things, but phobias is usually one session. Yeah.

Hans TenDam: The only thing we cannot cure is phobia for past-life therapists. That’s a bit more complicated, you need two sessions for that. 😊

Katerina (Client): It was very effective. Whoever experiences in this life a trauma that cannot be resolved, anything that triggers the event creates on the physical body, the sensations as if it is happening now and it could be unrelated to the event. For me even to listen to the news in television (because my problem was war related). So everything that relates to the event had the same effect to me as the first time I experienced it. So although my brain had processed it that it was over, that we are well, we are here, everything is ok, the emotional level was not where my pain was. So after the regression that we did, that part was gone.

Trisha Caetano: So you start with this person who’s like this and then you watch the flower unfold petal by petal. They open up and become who they are.

1:00:42

Roger Woolger: The turnarounds can be so fast and so astonishing. I had a woman who was born with a magnificent voice and she’d grown up in New York City but she was terrified performing in front of groups of people. She would sing for her family and small circles of friends. And so happens that her family was quite musical that one day they invited Leonard Bernstein to come and hear her. Bernstein was at the party and heard her and said. “This woman has an astonishing voice. Why isn’t she singing in the Metropolitan opera? And the family said: Well she is crippled by this terror of performing in public. This is the biggest group, twenty people, that she is comfortable singing in front of, and he said: “This is ridiculous. She’s got to get out there”. The family pushed her and they heard of me and they send her to me. In one session we heard a story where she was a woman, who in a puritan community in early New England had been caught in adultery and had been horribly, publicly punished. She was first of all beaten, and wipped, and then it seemed privately the farmers came in and raped her and she was thrown out of the community. She carried with her from this past life the imprint of public humiliation. That was obvious in one session why of course she couldn’t speak in public. So we talked her through, we did the various things we do in our work to re-empower her and get those nasty Puritans out of her mind. Within six months, she was auditioning at the Vienna opera and within two years she was singing at the Metropolitan. One session turned her around. That’s how fast our work can be.

Morris Netherton: It’s efficient, it’s focused, it’s effective, it goes to the cause and to the process which will change the cause and no matter where that cause is, if it’s in Rome, five thousand years ago or if it’s five minutes ago when you got out of your car. This process will address that and resolve it.

Marion Boon:That’s what makes regression therapy special. I think especially the way that it cures so fast. I have clients who have been walking around with migraines, for 25 years in depression that young man. This man is not even forty. So as a teenager his depression started and he was in homes, he was in psychiatric help, he used medicine and he was getting himself out of that. And he found me himself. He did about eight or ten sessions, which is quite a lot. Mostly people heal before that. But there was a lot he had to deal with and then he phoned me. He stopped therapy because he was going on holiday with his new girlfriend and he felt bright and very good. So he said “Now I want to use the money for holidays”. It’s splendid, his life is starting. So that is my answer to what makes regression therapy special.

Marion Boon: What I like most I must say that’s the results, when you got a person over the point where he couldn’t pass himself. The rest he can do himself. The client walks his own life. But just for this bump in his life we search and get him over the threshold or through the mud or whatever it is and he can continue.

Trisha Caetano: Once I had a Japanese student and we were doing a past life regression

and he was in a big training program. This was in a private session and he went through the body death and I said: ok what happens next? And then all of a sudden his whole body lifts up  

and his face opened up and I didn’t say a word. My translator was sitting there and we looked at each other and that young man at that moment he expanded his energy and the whole room was filled with light and it was like it mirrored me and my translator who we really are and at that moment that young man reached enlightenment.

Hans TenDam: So not many people leave feeling “halleluiah”, but there is a life change.

Marion Boon: Just what it does to you? Body? Mind? Mind. How are you feeling with this?

Client: New. …
Marion Boon: What did you say? New and complete?

Client: It starts to make it softer… I have to say it in German, it starts to bell in me it’s soft. Swinging and clinging

Marion Boon: … and twinkling bells, something like that?
Client: Yeah it’s something very…tiny bells very high sound and it’s also like… how to describe it? Sounds and music and stars at the universe, dark and colourful spots Energy.
Marion Boon: It’s oneness in you

Client: Yes. And water too.

Marion Boon: Great, so enjoy this Masha and while you’re enjoying what you have described in 2 languages, feel it.

Trisha Caetano: But he went in the class of course the next weekend. He is a student doing regression and practice and he is crying and so he came out of the session and I said: what’s like to have reach that moment of enlightenment and now you are in your body, feeling feelings and crying. He didn’t say that “I am still in a body. I still have my feelings.” but he said: “I will never look at life the same again.”

Beatrice (Client): It helped me enormously to make an emotional cleansing. It was done very thoroughly and very neat and I came back another woman. I felt different. I was different.

VO: So, lead me back to the origins of my pain And let me see the source of my fears, my conflicts and body pains. Bringing together all the disconnected parts of me. How will you do that, dear therapist?

Marion Boon: I have a huge confidence in the process. Even if the answer doesn’t come, the client is thinking “what shall I see?” The soul does the job already. The body is resonating. It’s already going and I can see that now.

Marion Boon: So you are there and you are traveling for healing. You feel sad now. So from that moment go on to the next moment. What is happening there?

Client: I was riding in the mountains.

Marion Boon: Riding…?

Client: With a donkey.
Marion Boon: With a donkey.
Client: I got somewhere. Doesn’t matter and there were other people like me and we meet from time to time.

Marion Boon: And then? Feel your hand. Your hand is indicating something. You are moving your hand. What is happening? Continue.

Client: I don’t know. Somebody did something to my stomach. I don’t know if it’s them or someone else. I don’t know.

Marion Boon: What do you mean “somebody did something to my stomach? From the outside, or from the inside?”

Client: Yeah at first I thought it’s something like a wood weapon or something like a sword and my belly was bleeding.

Marion Boon: I have a huge process trust and that is what my client feels. So they lay down and one man said: “I already feel healed”. But it is because of this facilitating trust.

Katerina (Client): There was a trust that was built before we started the session. I had met with the therapist and we had discussed. Not the details of the situation, because he didn’t want to go into that in the present life, but there was trust in place before we started, and it continued through the process.

Morris Netherton: One of my favourite questions is: “Ok, what do we need to do now to resolve this, so that’s free and clear?” And they tell you.

Roger Woolger: The golden rule is you can never take anybody into a space that you haven’t been yourself if you are a therapist.

Trisha Caetano: I assign healing to the client. I am not here as god who is going to wave my magic wand and you are going to feel better. I have tools and methods and also energy to hold your space. And you come and you do whatever it is you need to do in this space.

Hans TenDam: It’s a scientific attitude of… I am always in a session, thinking about hypotheses. It could be this, it could be that, how can I test that out? So I will ask some questions to find out if my hypothesis is right, and I have always more than one hypothesis. So I don’t think: “Oh! They have these migraines so probably it could be that, or that or that. So how are we going to differentiate it? Or it could be something else. This testing of hypothesis is a kind of part your mind set, that is very important with the way I work and I called it in my training programs “The detective part of our work”.

Katerina (Client): I never felt he was imposing any feelings or situations on me. I always felt that I went there by myself and whatever I was experiencing it was me. His influence was in a way he worked as a guide asking me questions to clarify since they were not clear.

Hans TenDam: All the resources needed for fundamental healing are inside the client. And I hardly dislike any therapy also any regression therapist who is taking resources from the outside, like readings, or laying hands, or diagnosis, or long surveys and all that. It is all there. We have to help the client together. Maybe we’ll have to help him take seriously what’s inside him and the simplest way to do that is to listen to what they are telling.

Trisha Caetano: People are not limited in this planet, this solar system, this universe and so that’s where again the soul comes in and it’s far beyond matter and time and so don’t limit the possibilities. Stay with your client and do what you need to do.

Roger Woolger: We did a group regression experience. Everyone was directed to go back to an image of a past life and a man came up and said “I am a rock”. So I tried to talk to this rock. I couldn’t get very much movement out of a rock, as you can imagine. So I said ok move forward a few thousands years. “Nothing is changed”. Well later I realised, this was in the early days of my work, later I realised he was hiding. He didn’t want to go into a real story and again a part of him had left the body and gone and hidden in this rock. There was a real story somewhere else, but in those days I didn’t know how to get to it. So I am more suspicious of people who either go to the angels, or become rocks, or trees. They usually are running away from something. Some people would disagree with this, particularly, people who go into memories of extraterrestrials and spaceships. If they have already done a lot of work on themselves in this life or other past lives which are concrete I will accept it. But if in the first few sessions they want to go to Mars or they want to go to Alpha Centauri or some other planet system, I am very sceptical. I treat it as a possible escape and say: “I want you to come down to your body and see what’s happening”. And usually there is a trauma in the body that they are escaping from. So those kinds of cases can be challenging.

Trisha Caetano: No one method works and if anybody says that, then maybe you need to look for another therapist. Because we are… there are many levels that we exist on. Many things we need to do. So I combine the body, the mind, the soul. I combine the physical movement the gestalt of it. I combine the voice dialogues.

Marion Boon: The therapist is a tool in regression therapy. We don’t use medication; we don’t use some outside tool. We use our own being, in asking questions, in trying to be clever and ask the right question for the client. So you have to be a presence that doesn’t disturb the client and when my presence has a lot of issues of my own, the client will feel that.

We have a saying, I think some of us, which seems very simple and is full of energy. “If you focus on something in the session, something will happen and the next step will be there”.

That may be good feelings, that may be bad feelings, that may be strained thought, it doesn’t matter. The next thing that comes up is carrying the energies over. It’s a very strange flow sometimes, but afterwards you see the logic and the beauty.

Trisha Caetano: When I first started doing this work I did great sessions from the beginning and people would cry and they feel emotions and somatics would turn on and turn off and healings would occur. And after two years it occurred to me that my clients never got angry.

And I thought: when things like that are happening, I have to look here what’s going on. None of my clients ever get angry. Obviously I had fear of anger, my own personal issue and so I needed to go, get myself to see a therapist and say “ok I have to work with this and interestingly, after I did my own work on anger I started to get all these angry clients. And I remember one client came in and he said: “I feel so much rage” and I said: “Ok feel your fears.” And I put a cushion on him and said: “Ok now feel it” and he said: “Trisha, if I ever let go of this rage, I will destroy your office” and I said: “Go ahead”. Of course he never did, because I put in boundaries. But the point is I could hold the space for him to unfold his anger.

Roger Woolger: I think the most difficult thing that comes to mind was a woman who came to a workshop and she observed that work in some video and she said: “I believe you work in pairs in your workshops and someone asks questions and someone does a journey and I said “Yes. That’s correct.” And she said: “I don’t think I can do that work.” And I said: “Why not? And she said “I hate it. I went once to a workshop like that, a Grof holotropic workshop, and people are sitting by you asking questions” She said “I don’t want anyone to ask me questions.” So I thought how we are going to do this process if I can’t ask questions to this woman. So finally I got the solution. I said: “I’d like you to do a little experiment. I’d like you to close your eyes and I am going to do something. She said “alright” so she closed her eyes and I came up close to her and said: “I am going to ask you a lot of questions. What’s your first reaction?” She said: “I won’t tell you. I won’t tell you anything!” And then I realised what it was. She was stuck in a memory of an interrogation and she’d been a stubborn prisoner and refused to speak. So interrogation, being asked questions was the story itself. And it had got involved with the regression technique. So I simply used that as the way in. And where she went by repeating the phrase “I won’t tell you, I won’t tell you anything. You can ask me all the questions you want but I will not tell you a thing”.  

She went to Russia back in the Stalinist era and she was a scientist who had been part of a new movement that it was consider heretical, by, I think it was the Lysenkov period, and this scientist was refusing to speak and he was tortured and finally killed but he never spoke out. So that was the story, but it was a tough one to crack.

Morris Netherton: When we finish working with someone none of us can say that we did it.

That’s one thing we are very clear on. We don’t do it, the people we work with do it.

Trisha Caetano: One day I was looking at a magazine and it was a picture of a glove, a dirty, cement filled, fingers torn out glove. Torn at the edges and in the centre there was an egg yolk

and with no thought I cut it out, framed it and hang it on the wall of my office. It hang there for a couple of months and finally one day a client came in and said: “Trisha you have all these beautiful things, what is this ugly thing doing on your wall.” And again with no thought the words popped out of my mouth “that’s my client’s” I am going “now what am I going to say?” And the reality is they come in and they present you with a glove. It’s torn and it’s broken and cracked in the fingers. But the perfection is always there and you can access that when you are working with a person. And even if you can’t, the person can access it subconsciously, I know it’s there. And so I am always in touch with working with that.

VO: On my search for healing I found that there are many mainstream psychotherapeutic methods but also a variety of alternative methods promising changes for the better. What is the difference between these mainstream methods and regression therapy?”

Roger Woolger: For me it was quite liberating to get out of what I now see as the narrow world of child trauma. If you are raised as psychologist, particularly as I was in the psychoanalytic school. You’re taught from Freud and the post Freudians to look for every problem in childhood. So I was doing regression long before I have heard of past lives by regression to childhood. And in fact past life regression borrows the word “regression” from the Freudians. The Freudians were the first to use it. They talked of a regressed state, a regressing back to infancy and in a typical psychoanalysis you learned in a sort of waking dream state to free associate back to childhood and memories will come spontaneously. Freudians don’t guide you. They just let it happen.

Katerina (Client): It was my personal need in a case that it could not be treated otherwise

with the conventional techniques and psychology for example cognitive recognition therapy

or methods similar of psychotherapy.

Hans TenDam: What’s also rewarding, although it’s rewarding with a kind of almost bitterness in it, is of course when we often come across people that have been very long in the mills of psychiatry, or psychology and it’s so terribly ineffective, it’s so terribly inefficient that’s … to put it all aside and go straight to the problem and really resolve it even when the people have given up the possibility that this could be resolved that really motivates me.

Roger Woolger: Well it’s interesting that Brian Weiss, the psychiatrist who tells his story of how he got into past lives, if you really address the question of free association back to the origin seriously, the unconscious mind doesn’t hear just childhood. Brian Weiss famously said to one: “I want you to go back to the origin of your problem” and he forgot to say “in childhood”. He assumed that everyone knew that all their problems started in childhood. Well, the unconscious heard let’s go back to the origin in another lifetime and that’s where this woman went. When you go to another lifetime it is much more freeing, because issues that you’ve had which really you’ve tried to squeeze into the box of a childhood trauma and they don’t fit. When for example you’ve grown up depressed and disliking crowds and hating certain kinds of weather you trace it back to a childhood event where say grandmother died and you went to the funeral and it was raining. Well, to a degree this will explain your childhood depression. But if you really go deeper, you might find and there is a famous case of this in television that Carol Bowman researched, you might find that this child was remembering a much greater tragedy, the battle of the Somme, where thousands and thousands of soldiers died in rain and mud. And this child that in the research she did always had got depressed when it was raining and he didn’t want to go out and play. And one day he saw a documentary about a war and he said “I was there” and then the memories started to come back. So, if you allow depression to go back to the much greater memory, you’ll find that we were involved in a horrible mass trauma situation. Thousands of people died of a plague, thousands of people died in a war, thousands of people were uprooted from their country. And the pain and the suffering from these events is enormous, and it explains how some people really, some children look as they were born depressed, they came in upset, they came in little wise old souls. And there is nothing to do with potty training or whether they were breast fed. Freudians were looking for explanations in the parents. So we get a much bigger picture of the origins of human sufferings.

Marion Boon: Simple example of a young girl hearing voices. They disturb her when she makes examinations at school and there is a waiting list with the child’s psychiatrist who was going to treat her and her mother is so fearful of this whole event that her child is hearing voices that she tells a friend and that friend, her son heard voices as well one year ago. So this girl came to me only once, because I was the only one who asked: “What do the voices say?” So you take it seriously and you deal with it. And it was one session and it was gone. So that is evidence based, to me.

Trisha Caetano: You know the only thing is that we are in the god job, priests, doctors, and psychotherapists. And the god job is about my ego, and I know-it-all, and I am going to tell you what you need to get better. You’re going to think like this, and act like this, and take this drug. And I would say that what we are doing is the opposite. We are like you said Roger, instead of diagnosing, analyzing and giving dope. We are sitting back and we are saying: “Ok what’s happening?” And that’s not the god job. There is nothing miraculous on the planet.

Morris Netherton: There is no such thing as a miracle. That’s…people use that when they try to sell you something. This therapy does work. I have seen it work and I am perfectly willing to prove that by working with you. I have never said or taught anything to anybody that I haven’t used and found to be absolutely true in my private practice. I don’t hide it. I don’t go screaming through the streets, yelling “Hey! I can save the world”. I simply say: This is what I do. This is what I know it will do. I’d be glad to prove that to you if you like”.

Hans TenDam: But if you don’t listen to the evidence, you can’t discard anything. We know of cases that people had terminal diseases and after some work with regression therapy they were cured and the doctor said “apparently we have misdiagnosed”. I think we just go on with our work and let it be.

Roger Woolger:

I think it’s shocking to traditional psychotherapists the idea that you can get results in two or three sessions, because we’ve been conditioned from years of half a century, or, more of psychoanalysis, to think that therapy takes a long-long time by sort of chiseling away at the problem and slowly we’ll get there. Well this work goes right to the core very-very quickly and of course they are going to resist. And psychoanalysis itself was resisting for a long time. And one of the way of dismiss something is to say it is not scientific. And at the same time those people who dismiss science, refuse to look at the evidence.There is a lot of narrow mindedness inside the scientific establishment. There is a lovely story about Sir Isaac Newton, in the 18th century who of course is considered the great physicist, who brought a whole new way of looking at the physical world, but it’s not generally known, that he was also an astrologer and an alchemist. This was a private part. He didn’t talk so much about that publicly, because it’s always been an underground subject. And apparently at the meeting of the royal society, some young intellectual came up to him, who had heard about his secret studies and what he said, to me, epitomizes presumption. Apparently, he came up saying

“Oh professor Newton I gather that you are studying matters of astrology, alchemy, and these things. How can a man like you of such intellect and intelligence waste their time on such nonsense?” And Newton kept his cool and said to him quite simply: “My dear sir, I have studied the matters and you clearly have not!”

VO: And how about this lively bunch of people undertaking these journeys with so many? How do they all connect? What might we think of this association of international regression therapists called “EARTh”? I learned: A substantial number of regression therapists in Europe, and also from all around the world have joined together to form the EARTh association. Above all else, this association aims to develop professional standards for the practice of regression therapy. Part of these standards is that all members commit to a code of conduct. To foster communication between therapists, EARTh offers an internet platform with information for both therapists and those seeking help for their problems in life. Through the internet, therapists can also exchange experiences and discuss professional issues with each other, thus overcoming any geographical distances. Research is also an important part of the tasks taken on by EARTh and so that is also nurtured.

Marion Boon: So I think we started EARTh, I think in 2003 on the 1st World Congress. First meeting was in 2006, in Frankfurt then already we are now international outside Europe,

because the students that some teachers have in Brazil like Roger Woolger and Hans TenDam in India and Trisha in Japan and many more in many other places. They like to join in, because it is a forum where you can also get more information and where you can also show what you are doing and ask your fellow colleagues tell me what you think about it.

Morris Netherton: EARTh? I tell what I know about. All the rest are folded and gone away

or are in process of folding and going away. And I think these people are very brave to do this. I wouldn’t take this on for a bit.

Trisha Caetano: I love it, because you have so many people from so many different countries

and that’s exciting, because this afternoon at lunch we were talking about Ataturk, the Rumi’s, poems and the origin of all this in Turkey and Middle East and two Turkish people were here.

And so you have different concepts and different ways of being from all other countries on the board …so it provides a much more expanded concept of how this inner world acts with these methods.

Marion Boon: We started it, to combine those people who might feel alone in their countries,

because there aren’t so many yet, like our colleague in Russia, who is in an area where he is the only one. So we started to combine people and to enable exchange and interaction. you need inter subjective community of the field. I can do something and somebody else can judge it and ask me “why did you do this? Why did you do that?” We are comparing our structures, our method and it is … EARTh is an effort to invite everybody practising regression therapy and in the same time we learn from each other and support each other to bring better trainings and to feel more certain about what you are bringing, because your colleagues have already told you what they do or they don’t like about it. I think the value of EARTh is quite big and it can be even more extensive that I can judge now.

Roger Woolger: I think it’s doing incredible work and I hope it’ll grow and grow and reach more people. I certainly support it in that.

Marion Boon: At a certain moment people will look for a therapist and they want to have somebody who dares to be challenged by his colleagues and so when you are a member of EARTh this at least shows that you are up to date and not afraid to share your issues with your colleagues. It must be a quality mark also. Not only a ground for us to find each other, but a quality instrument. Well EARTh is the beginning of a lot more.

VO: I wonder whether this regression approach has any future? What do the experts think?

Trisha Caetano: There are so many people out there that would use this method, if they knew about it.

Hans TenDam: In fact I have three wishes still: it’s research, research and research. And of course good research and publishing results. Yeah, that’s really what we need. As few publicity as possible, so that we can do our work calmly and it will expand anyway, simply because of the results.

Roger Woolger: I wish the academic psychologists would, I mustn’t say something rude, would wake up a bit and see that there is a much bigger world that we have to offer, much bigger picture, a therapy. I think not just the academic psychologists, the media have very narrow minds in the Anglo-Saxon world and we need some really good PR to get into the media, to get into the academies and show that this is one of the most effective therapies, that there are on the planet and that we need to let go of this narrow ideas of what the soul is or what the consciousness is. A much bigger picture we have to share.

Marion Boon: Slow growth in a solid manner. Don’t grow too fast, but grow and spread as we are doing now, solid. Quality and I hope that many people in need will know how to find us. How to find a regression therapist that is my wish, because it’s so needed. This is such a beautiful field. It’s so needed. Yeah, I think that’s my wish.

Hans TenDam: So there might be so much change that one day our therapy as we know it will, also come to its end. And this reminded me of an old joke that somebody is saying about sex: “If they ever invent something better, I’ll keep doing it at the side”. 😊 If they ever invent a better process I will continue doing this on the side.

VO: My doubts have been eased, many of my questions answered so I will start this journey inside. So I take my courage, my responsibility and my will to solve my problems, to soothe my pains, free myself from obstacles and constraints and step forward into the future, healing the past… it will be for the better… let’s move into the future…”