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Estafet 7 | Video Interview with Vitor Rodrigues

Wow, Vitor delved into the deep in this interview. A must watch!

Stay tuned for more Estafet videos…

 

VITOR:
Ok.

ANNA:
Great. Hi everyone, and welcome to the next episode of Estafet. And today we stay again in Portugal. We can’t leave this country. It’s just too good. And today, I have with me a great victor, Vitor Rodriguez. Hi, Vitor. How are you?

VITOR:
Hi there, I’m great, actually.

ANNA:
Great. So, we’re gonna ask you some questions today.

VITOR:
Of course.

ANNA:
So good to have you with us. So, please, let’s just go ahead and if you can introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from and where you live now.

VITOR:
Well, yeah, I’m Portuguese. I’m living in Alentejo area in Portugal, near a very old, world heritage town, Évora and I was actually also born in Lisbon. About me.. Usually, I don’t really like saying stuff about myself, namely because I’m working towards transcending myself and it sounds a little bit like going back into ego. Anyway. Well, okay, I’m a psychologist. I’m a psychotherapist for a long time, I thought. Namely, educational and developmental psychology at Portuguese universities for 17 years. I also have a PhD in psychology and aside from that, yeah, I’m an old esoteric guy, so why? Even before I start studying psychology, I was already studying a lot about your cold science, so to say, and trying to practice some stuff like meditation. And then, of course later on I have the training in a regression therapy with Julia Perez from Brazil. She was quite a pioneer. She also worked with Edith Fiore in the past and with the namely Morris Netherton and people like that. Then the training in transpersonal psychology with Vera Salt Daniels from Brazil. And lots of extras later on, like working with with Paul Aurand and I came across a guy named Hans Tandem and the another one named Roger Woolger. That kind of people, not full trainings with them, but a few workshops and and I’ve been around of course- and of course I am also a writer. So I have published 16 books actually.

ANNA:
On psychology or what topics?

VITOR:
Well, you have- there is one on science fiction. There are sort of a couple of novels there is- there are some sort of essays, like two of them on human stupidity. Actually my first books and I have like 7 self help manuals. I have a book I’m still trying to publish in a good way in Portugal. And that is called the the Theory of Shit. So I like to joke around.

ANNA:
I’d like to read that one.

VITOR:
Yeah, well, let’s hope I can find a way to translate it somehow. Yeah, yeah. It’s a fascinating topic actually.

ANNA:
Well, cool. But then how come? So you come from a really academic field? How did you find regression therapy? How did it come into your life?

VITOR:
Well, you know, when I started psychology, I was very interested, but sometimes then I sort of felt like shrinking into like a minor force field because I have to function within the restraints of very limited views of reality and humanity. And that brought where was academically successful, but with some suffering. Because I felt like I’m usually working at 1000 rotations per minute and now I have to go for 30 for a few years and then I was sort of struggling to find a way to connect orthodox psychology and spirituality, and I started finding out about transpersonal authors. That was very nice. And later of course, regression therapy authors and I had the opportunity of meeting Julia Perez. At first I was not really trusting the idea of regression, out of some prejudice. Then I decide to really disobey her because she told us “Don’t go- don’t go along with the session I’m delivering, you the witnesses, you the people watching it.” And I decided to really, really disobey her because I had some training for meditation and some stuff that would allow me to easily do it. And I was astonished because I really found myself in the previous, very powerful life. So I just jumped into it. And I was convinced. OK, OK, now I know there is something here. I really must work on this. I must learn and practice, and it was a fun process in some ways.

ANNA:
Wow, just like that. Here you are.

VITOR:
Yeah, for instance, is at first, of course, she told us at the time that, you know, you should not try to practice regression therapy with friends or family. But what happened is that at the time I was still trying to learn, of course. I have a girlfriend and someday she was stressed. I told her “let’s go for a mind relaxation” and she jumped into a past life and I was forced to help her along, as long as I could. Then I came to the trainer team and told him- told him what happened and he said “Oh, no choice there. Now you must go on and move with her and do whatever you can.” So I started a little bit too soon, being sort of forced to practice, but it- it actually worked. Actually, it became a foundational case because this girlfriend of mine, she suffered from multiple sclerosis and she was- someday she was on the verge of a new- a new starting, a restart of her disease. She had all the signs. So we made like a sixth session, like a desperate session, trying to see if it would be possible to stop the process in where it stands. And she found herself in the previous life, like 2000 years ago, where she had the start- the real start there would be of her disease out of guilt feelings. We dealt with it. And after we dealt with it and you love this one, she was- for one year before she couldn’t use high, high heeled shoes because she couldn’t stand, she had no balance for that and she could coordinate one of her feet from the ankle down and by the end of that session she told me, “you know, I recovered fully my movement and my balance” and I was like, “come on, you are joking. It’s not possible.” But she was for a full year without coordination and she he told me “I’ll show you.” So she brought very high heeled shoes and I could dance of all a waltz with her. I was really astonished.

ANNA:
Wow! That’s the start.

VITOR:
Yeah, you can bet on it. And it was extremely convincing because suddenly I saw like a such a reframing that was not just hitting her at the emotional and cognitive level, it was suddenly restructuring her nervous system even, at the very deep level. So that really convinced me that regression is important.

ANNA:
Wow. Amazing. That’s a story. Cool. And so now in this present moment you practice both. Or how does your daily practice looks like right now?

VITOR:
Well, I do lots of regression therapy, but I also use breath work, meditation, sometimes some bodywork, even some energy work. Of course, imagination and some sort of cognitive restructuring, sometimes also in between sessions. I try to help my clients understand what is going on and what they can make out of it. So I- I resort lots of stuff I learned throughout the years and of course I still have some situations where clients come to me with some important physical disease and it still works. For instance, now I’m working with a woman with -what’s that means in English- this stuff, the famous- Lupus, Lupus erythematosus, I think. It’s a self immune disease, powerful one that can really really bring you down. And she came to me during a very severe crisis and a few sessions later she told me that her top medical expert was surprised and almost angry because she was recovering all too fast.

ANNA:
And didn’t need a medication? Did she cut on medication as well?

VITOR:
Yeah, well she was taking some medication, but the expectation from the doctor were would be that she would recover very slowly all over the months. Not like, “OK, I’m better now.” So that’s- that’s great fun when this happens, of course.

ANNA:
Yeah, it’s amazing. Wow, So much for your clients. And what about you? What have you learned for yourself, personally, for your life from regression?

VITOR:
Well, you know, I- I sort of feel privileged because I am witnessing all the time, lives from people, what’s going on with them, how their lives are unfolding, also how past lives can mingle with it. And I’m trying to, of course, to understand the whole thing. What does this means about human nature, who we are really in our deep self. And I keep finding this idea that OK, there is the level of ongoing lives and past lives and we become sort of attached to that and we come back to our movies. But there is a deeper layer where you have like universal archetypes. And you have a deep self that for sure does not participate in the movies. So we have a deeper self that is not at all part of this. I think that’s why some, some spiritual masters tell us, you know, past lives are an illusion, the same way that our egos in the past lives are an illusion and the same way that our ongoing present time self is an illusion. It’s just a temporary thing in space-time and eventually we we come to the experience that there is something that can almost like jump in and out of space-time. And you know that for instance the yogic tradition and I have quite a relationship with that one. In the yogic tradition, there was this tendency to to think that whatever dies is not real. The reality is beyond space and time. The real things are the ones that are really, really perennial, like the Cosmic Self, that sort of thing.

ANNA: Yes. Wohaa!

VITOR: Yeah. And of course, aside from that, I I work a lot with the Psychic Defense.

ANNA:
Yes, right. Yes, you give workshops on that as well.

VITOR:
Yeah. And I- well, I always tell people that I was forced into that field because I think the choice has been “you go crazy, you die or you learn.” So I tried to learn how to deal with that. And so I developed some, to some extent my own methodology deal with that and to help people, find out about what might be going on with them. And this also mingles a lot with this because in that area also I’m forced to deal with the idea that we have several subtle layers of existence. We have several bodies or vehicles, and again, our deeper self is invulnerable to psychic attacks, but our personal self is not. And our best protection implies again moving from our ongoing identifications and our typical personal self to finding something else. And so with this, also I was sort of forced to try to learn more about human nature again. And for instances if you are hit, that means that there is a portion of you that is going to be hit. And psychologically speaking, this means also generally that you are attached to that portion of yourself. And even for general psychotherapy and emotional issues, I tell people that “Listen, imagine that you want to irritate a normal citizen. You go to the normal citizen and you tell him or her I don’t like you, or you are ugly, or you are fat or you are stupid.” So I use the bullying strategy. I find something the person identifies with and I strike there. But if I want to irritate, let’s say -if I could find the guy Saint Francis of Assisi or even nowadays if I want to irritate the Dalai Lama or perhaps Sadhguru- I don’t know. How can I irritate them? I must find something that is important to them, meaning they are attached to to strike that thing when they are not even there, so not easy to stress them or to irritate them.

ANNA:
Right, that would be some work.

VITOR:
Exactly so they are also free from bullying. And of course, general humans, they are not. The extension of attachments we have, it’s the extension of our fragility.

ANNA:
Right. So I’m going to jump to the question that in the previous Estafet with Mario Resende, he has asked you a question. And then I like to jump to that- and the question from Mario was how do you see this intersection between regression therapy and transpersonal field? How do you see the connection and what is important to do to connect the two?

VITOR:
OK, you know, I also have a theorizing animal inside. So I just love that kind of question. You know, actually I would say that regression therapy is -when possible- transpersonal psychotherapy and they would say that all transpersonal approaches to psychotherapy they have in common working with modified states of consciousness where you find -so to say quantitative changes where the extent of stuff we might be consciously in touch with at a certain moment extends, then you have qualitative changes where we have access to different layers of being or to different layers of energy and substance in the universe. So this is a common thing there.
Then I would say that also all transpersonal approaches deal in different ways and to different amounts with human identity. They deal with consciousness and they then they deal with in a way the the shapes consciousness tends to identify with that conform with. So all of them again will deal to some extent with human identity and what we call ourselves.

But then regression therapy is quite specific in there because it deals with not just our presence, the identity, but with our story of previous ones and how they mingle with the present they went. So they really challenges to go deeper and understand more about what really is human identity, what is really the core of our identity because if I can have 1000 faces like Joseph Campbell would put it, that means that neither of those faces is my real face.

So I am one of those guys, really, really appreciates the famous going from Yates when he says in the certain moment “I’m looking for the face I had before the world was made” so yeah, I think regression therapy also really obliges this to understand it. Probably our real face, again, does not even belong in space and time. It’s really something beyond that. And indeed, to allow for the whole regression thing to happen, for us to have previous lives and to have this ongoing process, we need something beyond the whole thing. We need something that makes a connection between all the lives and he’s not really the same thing as a typical ongoing human personality.

ANNA:
Right.

VITOR:
And so of course, because I also have some amount of mystical experiences I disassemble across this feeling that in some states we can like simultaneously perceive all of our past lives and they are like the the pieces in the a the necklace. A huge necklace with many of them. But we can see that it would be all of them simultaneously present there, right? And we can even perhaps get the glimpse of future ones to some extent. But the real important thing is the necklace. And what is beyond the necklace then?

ANNA:
Yes, the next layer, yeah.

VITOR:
Yeah, so that’s- and I think to me, of course I would agree with Hans TenDam that regression therapy is an extremely powerful approach and it’s really one of the big ones, although I see many transpersonal congresses is that the majority does not even seem to know about it. But it’s extremely powerful, but it just straight away to the essentials of human trouble, human suffering, human happiness and what is beyond that.

ANNA: Right.

VITOR: And also, of course, I like it and you love this one because I think our sessions, I work, I work dances in the way we are dancing with the music from our clients and trying to learn them to unfold new steps. So it’s- it’s great fun there.

ANNA:
Yes, for sure. I myself also enjoyed very much from both sides.

VITOR:
Yeah, great.

ANNA:
Thank you so much Vitor. This is really amazing that you are here today with us and now it’s the time to announce the next person in line and you can choose who that will be.

VITOR:
Yes. And I thought about David Graham as I think it he’s a very interesting guy with right lots of work done. And indeed I do have a question for him okay, because I recently saw some work from the guy and he has been stumbling across clients describing alien encounters, both from the past I think and some of them ongoing. So the question would be to David, “Do you really think there is an ongoing interaction, an interaction of alien humanities with our own and where do you think this is going?”

ANNA:
All right. Ooh, I’m excited to hear about that.

VITOR:
Yes.

ANNA:
Thank you, Vitor. Very good. So next time we are now finally moving out of Portugal and we’re going to England.

VITOR:
Awesome. Yeah.

ANNA:
Thank you very much Vitor, it was really a pleasure to have you and I hope everyone you enjoy it and we’ll see you in the next episode.

VITOR:
Bye, bye. Let’s go for it and thank you too.

Verified publication:

Yasemin Tokatli

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