MARCH 2013
by Hans TenDam
What is the acme, the crown of the work of a past-life therapist? I am believing more and more that it is the way we can do present-life regressions.
We can give a marvelous twist to inner child work. From rebirthing to adolescent mayhem. One of my principles in regression is what I call Children before God.
To unfreeze hurt and withdrawn inner children. To clean and restore children who had dirty experiences with darkened adults. To let volcanoes of impotent rage erupt, till peace once more reigns and the soul is like an immensely fertile hilly field where new trees can sprout new bloom. To dig up what is buried before its time. To drag lost soul parts that sunk in deep waters.
One of the most beautiful specialisms in our field is with children. Like we find inner children in adults, we find inner adults in children.
What are t
he products of our work? I think there are three: catharsis, integration and transformation. In the end: liberated people, integrated people, transformed people. There are few thing more stimulating than to meet adults in which the child-like and the truly adult qualities live together joyful and strong. In which masculine and feminine sides are married. In which the animal and the spiritual live side by side. We are a new and glorious crop of obstetricians, of new midwives.
We tend to think that somewhere in the past, there have been civilizations in which spirituality and statecraft went together, where wise healers tended to the suffering. I am pretty sure these times and places have existed. But what we are doing today seems to me a new wave, in the midst of a turbulent world. We are in the forefront of a New Age, firmly rooted in the present age. We teach people to live better, to die better, to be reborn better. We don’t teach in schools. We simply deal with people that have problems. We help them to help themselves. In the most profound way imaginable. In the most simple and practical way imaginable.
There seems to be a tremendous development in practical psychology, though much of academic psychology stays outside this development. The main problems are three.
First, that methods and approaches grow under many different names, making the field ill-organized and poorly surveyable. That is already true for professionals, let alone for people seeking help. The Psychotherapy Handbook of 1980 lists already more than 250 therapies in use.
Second, there is a lot of money-making going on. In itself that is not bad, but it complicates further. Strong personalities sell patented solutions, often rigid, rarely new, denouncing other approaches.
Third, there is a lot of overly positive thinking, selling the idea that anybody can solve anything, can attain anything. Obsession with personal success creates a large shadow of all those disappointed, often blaming themselves that they didn’t succeed. Obsession with success creates a wide-spread sense of personal failure. Obsession with winning creates a nation of losers.
We are just a part of all this. But I am sure we are a central part. I call regression therapy the queen of therapies, knowing that regression is only a part of our work, though an essential part. We are the fruit of something that may have started with William James, one of the fathers of psychology. We are the true psychologist, as the soul for us is not an abstraction, but a living reality.
To end, some quotes of William James:
… Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
… A radical empiricism must neither admit any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude any element that is directly experienced.
… Truth is what works.
Let’s work some more. Welcome to Estonia!
Hans tenDam
President of EARTh (still)
