Past Life Regression #2

About Past Life Regression

This preface on past life regression is reposted from my first blog on past life regression. Ironically, it was also posted around this time last year. Is it the spooky season vibes?

If you read my blogs, you know I’m a Scorpio rising. The occult, the woo, other reality is stuff I love exploring. Cue the astrology here, I’ve been studying astrology for years. I’ve also been a student of manifestation for years. I’ve read a lot and experimented. I have yet to come up with a surefire method, or maybe I have, but I’ve yet to perfect it myself. Suffice to say, it has a lot to do with believing it’s truly possible and having the feeling it has already happened. It’s putting your mind ahead of the reality. So it is about seeing reality differently. But you can read that blog here. It’s one of my most popular.

Many Lives, Many Masters

Past life regression came onto my radar the I read Brian Weiss’ book Many Lives Many Masters. In his book Dr. Weiss, a psychiatrist, treats a patient who is plagued by phobias. She is a nurse at the hospital where he practices. He uses hypnosis, a new technique in his field at the time, and is shocked when his patient begins recounting what seems to be past lives. She describes where she is, how she is dressed, how her life unfolds as well as traumas that can be linked to her present day fears.

She has no prior knowledge of these periods, has never visited these places or read about them. Yet her information is accurate. In one of their first session, she tells Dr. Weiss that he lost his firstborn in infancy and describes the heart condition that lead to his son’s death. A condition that even he, as a doctor, had trouble understanding when the cardiologist explained it to him. Despite being a skeptic, he can’t explain how his patient knows these things. It’s an event far in the past, and is not known in his workplace. He is now middle age and has a family. Few people know of this first child. He also, in keeping with his practice, has an office devoid of personal items. No family photos, nothing personal, so as to not influence the patient.

Is it Scary?

I hesitated for a while. I mean, what if this got very weird? What if I was traumatized by what I’d see or learn? But as I read more, I understood it’s not like a bad dream, or even a dream. You can just stop anytime you want. You not stuck ‘in there’.

I watched a few videos of past life regressions with a hypnotherapist. Then I learned you could do your own past life regression. I also discovered there is a YouTube video with Brian Weiss doing a guided past life regression. So I decided to try it. I’ll link that right here. This still seems to be an ad free version as of August 2023. It may be a good idea to watch it through once to familiarize yourself and to see if there are ads during the regression. You definitely don’t want that.

Looking back, and maybe this is just me, I didn’t have any emotional attachment to past life me. I didn’t get upset or mourn that person. That may be dependent on our individual make up, or the past life itself. Or maybe we are only subject to the trials and tribulations of our present lifetime. Thank goodness!

Is it your Imagination?

Now let me preface this by saying I’ll never be 100% sure that’s what it was. I am a writer so I guess I do have an overactive imagination and I would completely agree with anyone who says ‘Well Rosemary, that could be your imagination.’ I’ve read several of Shirley MacLaine’s books, and in her past life regressions this was also been a question that arose for her. So no, I can’t be sure it was a regression, and not my imagination.

But if it was my imagination, I can’t explain how or why it chose that ‘story’ or where it got all the details and how I knew so much. It’s more detailed than a dream, and more normal, and fits together. Often, dreams can be confusing or have unexplained or shadow events. Here, I knew the whole backstory, I wasn’t trying to decipher random scenes. I just knew. That’s the best way I can explain it: I knew who I was and where I was and why.

The Past Life Regression

I’m at a university. It is a prestigious university in England, I think. I’m looking up at one of the buildings, with rows and rows of identical windows. Guillotine windows that you have to lift up and push down. It’s about four stories high, all in stone. I’m feeling apprehensive.

Then I’m inside in my professor’s office. He is at his desk with pen over paper, not looking up at me. I feel he is being dismissive. I’m standing in front of the desk, turned so my right leg is against it. I’m feeling confrontational and I’m leaning forward. There’s a ‘this ends here’ feeling.

I’m a woman. I am tall and blonde. I feel this is the UK and I am British. I’m wearing a heavy tweed wool skirt and matching jacket. It’s a straight skirt below the knee with thick brown stockings. It is not that it’s particularly cold out, it is just the style of dress. I have lace-up black shoes with a slight heel. It’s very 1920’s with the long straight line of the jacket and skirt and style of the shoes.

I study Egyptology: ancient Egypt, the pharaohs, the pyramids and their way of life. My class is graduating, but there’s an argument between he and I because he is refusing to let me travel to Egypt to go on the digs and to do research, like the rest of my classmates who are all men.

I’ve been allowed this prestigious, university education, still very rare for a woman, but I am realizing that is only been to make me a better future wife: cultivated, interesting and educated. Are my parents behind this refusal? Are they making him do this? Maybe that’s why he won’t look me in the eye. That irritated me and makes me more insistent.

I won’t get to go like the men, to experience in person what we have been studying for years. It was to be the culmination, a reward of sorts, for succeeding. But it’s all been for show and no one really cares what I learn. I am rebelling against these limitations and I know somehow I’ll be a rebel my whole life.

As I am arguing that I should be allowed to go to Egypt, to the archeology sites, I understand, with quite a shock, that his reason for refusing is that he is in love with me and wants to marry me. He wants to protect me, he’s afraid I could get hurt or worse, and he would lose me.

I stand there speechless, trying to fit all the pieces together. I don’t know how much my parents are aware of, I have the feeling perhaps he’s spoken with them and they agreed that I should stay in the UK.

Eventually he will relent, and we’ll go together as husband and wife. He’ll come to see me as an equal and we’ll make our research and studies of Egypt our life‘s work. His name is Dennis or Daniel. I am Sophie or Sara but I hear the name Sidra.

I am so obsessed with Egypt that I wonder if I have not lived there in a past life. When I am there I dress in traditional dress. My British clothes have always felt heavy and constricting, I can’t wait to arrive and wear loose flowing garments.

I will rebel and fight on different fronts most of my life: against limits put upon me as a woman, but also against the desecration of the tombs in Egypt. I work to preserve Egyptian culture my whole life, to learn and educate others. In the end, I will sometimes wonder if it has been worth it. There are no children in my life, and Daniel predeceases me by several years.

I see myself at the end of my life. I am at home in our beautiful house. We became wealthy. I am alone in my late husband’s study sitting in one of two wing chairs. There is a small round table between them, behind is a window. I know my heart is giving out. I’ve felt it on and off for a while. Suddenly, I slide from my chair to the floor, leaning against it for support, with my right arm on the seat cushion to keep myself up. I’m going to lose this time, my heart is going to stop.

I’ve had a life where all I wanted came true, but it was relentless work, and somethings, like children, were not to be. Daniel comes for me and carries me up, through the window and out of the house. Up, up and away. He tells me it is time to rest, the work is done.

Thoughts and Reality Checks

Once again, the regression was surprisingly detailed. But I’ll never know if this was imagination. But the details, and especially the certainty were unnerving. I know what I looked like, how tight and warm my european clothes were. I could feel the shock at finding out my professor was in love with me. At the same time there is a sense of overview. I know when I protest to him, it is the start of many fights I’ll take up. I have a rebellious nature.

If it is a sort of dream state there is none of the confusion or nonsensical elements you get in dreams. There can be a fantastical side to a dream. This has not been the case in my regressions. It’s very real.

Sidra

I did look up Sidra, not even sure if it was a name or even a word. I’m sure I’ve never heard it before. If I have, I can’t remember. It really does not ring a bell.

Sidra is in fact a woman’s name. It is a Latin name meaning like the stars, but also an Islamic name and refers to a tree in heaven.

Egypt in the 1920’s

I put the style of dress I had to that of the 1920’s, especially the long straight line of the flapper style, so opposite the pleats and ruffles and excessiveness of the preceding Victorian Era.

At that time, Britain ruled Egypt, until their independence in 1922, but the British Empire still had a strong presence. In the early 1920s, there were excavations at Thebes, leading to the discovery of tombs. This was not the first or only place where the British had explored tombs of pharaohs, beginning in the previous century. In fact, The British Museum holds several mummified remains of kings as well as the Rosetta Stone, among many other artifacts. On their site they make no bones about it (pun intended) saying “The museum holds that largest collection of Egyptian objects outside Egypt…”

Women Egyptologists and Norah Griffith

You can find a list of women egyptologists on Wikipedia. One in particular, Norah Griffith (1870-1937), is the closest I could find to my past life persona. She was Scottish, fair haired and married to prominent egyptologist Sir Francis Llewellyn Griffith. She met him when she studied egyptology at Oxford, where he was a professor.

Norah was a conservator at King’s College in Aberdeen. Already she was fascinated with Egyptology. She travelled there before meeting Griffith, but it seems it was as a visitor. Tourism to Egypt was not uncommon at the time as Egypt was a British colony.

After the visit she furthered her learning and studied under Griffith at Oxford. She assisted him on many excavations and published her own works. She also organized her husband’s final works for publication posthumously and continued to organize and finance further excavations. An intellectual, she was a talented illustrator and photographer. She used their joint fortunes, after his death, to create and fund the Griffith Institute at Oxford. Their huge library on Egypt, that she continued to build, was donated to Oxford after her death.

Do you think past life regressions are that? Or is it just our imagination? Or a sort of dream state? Let me know your thoughts or if you’ve tried something similar.