From Past Life Regressions to Expanded Healing Hypnosis: An Introduction

What is this Expanded Healing Hypnosis thing that I do? Well, it all started with a fascination in reincarnation, and after studying hypnotherapy and past life regression while I was enrolled online at the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, I started practicing with clients. It didn’t take long before the past life regressions these clients signed up for took a turn into much more powerful healing experiences, and I realized I needed to give these sessions a broader name, because they are so much more than just visiting past lives out of curiosity.

But first, let me give you a little background.

I’ve always had a fascination with the concept of reincarnation and the afterlife. I was raised Catholic, and I no longer subscribe to any religious belief because, to me, there are so many unanswerable questions, and no way of proving anything right or wrong. I agree with the idea that religions can offer a sense of peace for some people when it comes to wondering what our purpose is here, or what happens to us after we die (those can be very intimidating, even scary, concepts!); but, as I grew up in the Catholic faith, I never felt satisfied that anything I was being taught was true, nor could it be proven.

The idea of reincarnation started out very personal for me, not as something that was taught to me. I remember being very young – so young, in fact, that I was sitting in the child’s seat in a shopping cart, facing my mom as she pushed me down the aisle of an old grocery store that used to be in our town. As I rode along in the cart, I reflected on being a young boy, playing outside. The memory was very real, so real that I didn’t question anything about it, and I asked my mom, “Do you remember when I was a boy?”

I’ll never forget the confused look she gave me, and I think that look is what rooted that memory for me. It’s my earliest memory of having to apply “logic,” which was a bit of a challenge for me, because when she said, “Jami, you’re a girl, you were never a boy,” I processed what she said to be true – yes, I was born a girl, how could I have ever been a boy? But… I had a very distinct and real memory of being a boy, so where did that come from? My little brain was very confused.

I also remember at a very young age getting the news that my great-grandma passed away, and not long after that my grandpa died. I didn’t question death much, but I was certainly curious. Where did they go, exactly?

As I grew older, the idea that we only get one life made less and less sense to me. When I was in high school, a friend of mine got killed in a car accident, and it shook me how young she was. Not long after, another student lost his battle with cancer, and again I was left with the feeling of unfairness that they were so young, their life was cut so short.

Or was it?

I’m grateful I had open-minded parents, and my Granny especially had a great fascination with psychic phenomena and metaphysics, because I had a lot of opportunities to explore these questions and curiosities. Granny had many books by Sylvia Browne, a well-known psychic medium in the 90s, and Edgar Cayce, who was known as the “sleeping prophet.” I especially took to Sylvia Browne’s works, and couldn’t get enough of her information about reincarnation and the afterlife. The idea that our souls are eternal, and continue coming back into new bodies in order to have new experiences and opportunities to learn and grow, really resonated with me. It made sense. It added a sense of comfort in terrible things happening like babies or children dying, knowing that it’s not over – they get to come back and try again. It also solved that question that stayed with me for years – what exactly was that memory I had as a small child in the shopping cart with my mom? That memory of being a little boy?

In massage school I became close friends with a classmate who had experience with past life regression, and I got to participate in a session with her where I had my first experience with past life memories. I was a teenage boy in what felt like eastern Europe. I couldn’t get a sense of the time frame, but it seemed to predate the industrial era. I was a blacksmith apprentice, and I could see a donkey turning the large crank to pump the bellows. I felt like a slave to this work, like I had no choice, and I hated that feeling. I was an artist, and I distinctly saw this large dead tree outside of town, alongside the rock road, and felt the strong need to sit out by that tree and sketch it. It had been struck by lightning, and was twisted and gnarled, with black veins running through it, and I found it so fascinating and beautiful. There was an explosion at the blacksmith shop, though, and I died as a teenager. I never got to sketch that tree.

I related that feeling to a sense of urgency to accomplish things in life. I had dreams and I felt that if I didn’t act fast, I wouldn’t accomplish them. I’m not sure I fully released that feeling, because I published my first novel, The Transcendent, prematurely – I hadn’t done near enough polishing and editing for it to be ready for the shelves, but my desire to make sure the story got out into the world and my fear that if I didn’t act now, it would never happen, outweighed my desire to make sure it was clean and professional and truly ready for serious publication. I ended up pulling it, and I’m now working on cleaning it up to do it the justice it deserves and re-release it. I’m, in essence, getting my “second chance” to sketch that tree.

In my early 30s I discovered the works of Dolores Cannon, a renowned hypnotherapist who was known for her work with extraterrestrial phenomena. I couldn’t (and still can’t!) get enough of her books, especially Custodians and The Convoluted Universe series. I had to know more, and I began dreaming of having my own experiences of facilitating hypnosis sessions that provided such incredible insight to the mysteries of our existence here.

As synchronicity would have it, I discovered that a fellow massage therapist friend of mine happened to have been trained in Dolores’s method, Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, or QHHT, and we were both blown away that we were familiar with the same hypnotherapist and never discussed that with each other. I immediately signed up for a session with her.

The visualization technique she used after achieving deep relaxation was to visualize floating on a cloud, and the cloud transcends all time and space, and is basically the vehicle to transport me to whatever lifetime I was meant to visit. I ended up adopting this technique into my own hypnotherapy work.

As soon as I floated down from my cloud, I got a sense of disappointment, and immediately wanted to turn around and go back. I was almost angry that I was coming down, but wasn’t sure why yet. I slowly saw myself as a heavy-set woman wearing a plain linen dress and an apron, and the whole world seemed very gray. I found myself once again in eastern Europe, in the vicinity of western Russia, and the streets were cobblestone and the buildings were all wood and stone. There was no electricity yet. I soon realized I had been in an arranged marriage, and had children, but my life amounted to nothing more than cooking and cleaning. I felt empty and meaningless, and sensed a deep depression. The sooner I could get out of that life, the better, and in fact, I jumped out of it without any prompts from my friend, the facilitator. I reflect on this experience anytime I tell my own clients that if there’s somewhere they really don’t want to be, or an experience they really don’t want to revisit, they have the power to leave at any time, and don’t have to wait for me to prompt them.

However, I did immediately relate that feeling of obligation to marry this man to the feeling of obligation I had in my current lifetime to get married, despite the fact that I actually didn’t want to get married at all, ever. I’m divorced now, and I think visiting that lifetime helped to see that I’m never trapped, never stuck. I have the freedom now that I didn’t have then, to choose my own path, to be with whom I want, rather than sticking with someone out of obligation. I realized the potential of past life regression for healing purposes, and how making peace with former lifetimes can set you free in your current lifetime.

The next life I visited in that session I was a young man, in my mid 20s, and I sensed this to be in the timeframe of the 60s, in the vicinity of Wisconsin. I was a tall, lanky beanpole, and a bit of a recluse. I liked people well enough, but felt they lacked the depth I was looking for. I loved the woods, and spent more time living in my tent than I did in my own house. I knew the woods – I knew the ways of the wildlife, I knew every plant and whether it was edible, medicinal, or poisonous. I was a wilderness guide, and made a living off of teaching survival techniques to small groups, who would spend a week at a time camping with me in the wilderness as I taught them the properties of the vegetation as well as basic survival skills. However, I could sense an energy in the woods – I could sense there was a spirit in the trees, the plants, the creeks, and I could feel the interconnectedness of that energy through all living things, even myself. I figured people would think I was crazy if I tried to teach this, so I stuck with the basics when guiding my groups.

I fast-forwarded to a significant event in that lifetime, and found myself at my mother’s bedside, and realized she was dying. Now, mind you, I was still conscious enough to be aware that I was still Jami, lying on my friend’s table, listening to her voice as she asked me questions and guided me along, but I was also very much at that bedside, and very much that young man. The realization of my mother dying hit me hard, and I suddenly began sobbing, overcome with grief. It was the strangest feeling, because Jami, lying on the table, technically didn’t know this woman, and yet me as that young man did, she was very much my mother! I cried to my friend between sobs, “This – feels – so – weird!”

And I was officially sold. Past life regression is real. Those emotions I felt were very real. And I had the sense, too, that this young man was the same boy I had the memory of when I was riding in that shopping cart as a child.

After my mother died in that lifetime, I decided life was too short, and I began to open myself up to being more authentic in my work. My business grew exponentially, as I was teaching not only survival skills and identifying plant properties, but also how to connect with the spirit and energy of the woods as well as your own body and spirit, offering meditations and energy healing while on the camping excursions. People loved it, and I became well known in my town and surrounding areas. I developed friendships, and more importantly, confidence in myself. After I died, my soul stuck around for a bit to see how things went after my passing. I saw they built a gazebo in the park and dedicated it to me, and I felt funny about it – I’m not that special to deserve that, am I? I related it to the same feeling I have in this lifetime. I feel I’ve helped people in many ways, but I don’t feel that I’m anything special because of it. However, I felt proud of myself for stepping into my authenticity, and grateful that I built so many meaningful relationships because of it. I’ve done the same in my current lifetime. I hid my true colors for a while, knowing I march to my own drum and that there are probably many people who think I’m weird. But, I chose to ignore those people, and in being more myself I’ve attracted some amazing relationships with people who accept me for who I am.

This also allowed me to open myself up to practicing past life regression myself. In 2020 I enrolled in online classes at the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts based in Tempe, Arizona, specializing in life coaching and hypnotherapy. In the past life regression class, I courageously posted on Facebook that I was looking for practice clients for those sessions so I could get some experience as well as my hours for training, and I wasn’t sure how it would be received in my small, primarily Christian community. I was pleasantly surprised when my email inbox blew up with interested participants, and I had no trouble getting in my hours, and then some! Word of mouth spread, and once I graduated and had my certification, I began acquiring paying clients.

Each experience became more and more profound, and I was quickly finding that these sessions went far beyond the exploration of past lives. My clients were dipping into spaces between lives, traveling into other dimensions, and receiving healing in unexpected ways. Each session went deeper than the last, and offered something new and different to ponder on. I felt that calling these sessions “Past Life Regressions” was no longer appropriate, and I changed the name to “Expanded Healing Hypnosis.”

I also realized that explaining what exactly happens in these sessions is very challenging. How do I put into words the level of healing and expansion that happens when you journey out of the body and beyond time and space?

Well, what better way than to share the actual session transcripts? So, I got to work listening to the session recordings and transcribing them, and in this series of blog posts, I’m happy to offer this insight to my readers. I have changed the names of the clients for anonymity, and have also gained permission from each client to share their sessions on my blog, even though nobody will know who they really are.

I hope you enjoy this series, and that it opens your mind to the endless possibilities of this vast and mysterious Universe in which we’re all part of. Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you receive updates on when my latest blog posts are out, so you don’t miss out on these exciting adventures!