by Dave Graham
Every now and then something might happen or a comment may be made that will make me stop and think about what I am doing. Well it was quite like that when I was copied into an email chain between some regression therapy colleagues. It raised a subject that I had simply not thought about, yet it is a subject that holds a lot of significance for the field of regression therapy. It led me to consider what exactly happens to all of the expertise that has been developed by the pioneering explorers of regression therapy. Much of that expertise has been developed in relative isolation in workshops or with clients, discovering and refining theories and techniques on which our therapy today has been built. Those emails referred to the need to collect and save records of the developing nature of regression therapy; the research, the literature et al. They referred to the need to establish a foundation for regression therapy.
The nature of regression therapy demonstrates that there is much to be gained by going inside and learning from our own history, to understand the encounters that helped to shape our personality and enabled us to develop in our own particular way to become the persons that we are now. The great value in this is in the ability to learn from our mistakes, our successes and the rich diversity of our experiences. As this can be true for an individual it can also be just as true for a group that shares the same aims, even though we may be spread far and wide around the world. It is up to us to seek the opportunity to learn from our history. A foundation could provide us with the place(s) and person(s) to achieve that.
At some point all of this needs to be grounded with the simple task of collecting our knowledge in a practical and organised manner. To collect all this knowledge from therapists across so many countries will take a substantial amount of effort. It will take even more resources to organise all the information in a sensible and accessible manner to create a basis that regression therapists and researchers of the future can turn to. A project such as this will take serious money, way beyond anything that EARTh can afford. For this we need to find donations, subscriptions, bequests to achieve all that needs to be achieved. A physical location (maybe more than one?), translations, electronic storage, physical storage, a curator, accessibility. A significant amount of effort and money to launch the venture and a significant amount of effort and money to maintain it on an on-going basis.
It was about sixty years ago that Chester Carlson developed the Xerox machine. On the basis of his commercial success, finance could be found for a variety of projects including the field trips of Ian Stevenson to record and investigate the past life memories of children. The accumulation of evidence that investigates and supports the case for reincarnation is on-going with a team based at the University of Virginia. This was a significant step in the embryonic stage that contributed to the birth and growth of modern day regression therapy. We cannot know how different we might be today without that step in the research over reincarnation. A foundation for regression therapy can also be a significant step like that, even though it is so much easier to evaluate this when we look back at these events. The call for a foundation is simply giving therapists due respect for the work that has already been done and that we continue to do today. The actual level of respect would be determined by the future generations that may (or may not) take the opportunity to learn from the experiences of their predecessors. Any student of the history of regression therapy would find the archived material to be invaluable and the results of any research may be illuminating for all interested parties.
Over the next period of time new steps can be taken to facilitate the birth and infancy of this project. It will need resources for a healthy birth and it will need resources to grow, so look out for more news on this topic over the next few months.
