text: In another past-life regression session, Christopher Benjamin found himself canoeing in wide-open waters, enjoying a day out with a person who he understood intuitively to be his younger brother. As the elder sibling, Benjamin naturally accepted the responsibility of caring for him, of protecting him from danger.
  “It was really, really blue and wavy, choppy water,” Benjamin says, “and I don’t specifically remember how it happened, but he went overboard.”
  “And I’m freaking out, and then I can’t find him,” Benjamin continues. “And the rest of [the memory] is the dread of having to tell everybody what happened. That was hideous.”
  Before this particular past-life regression, Benjamin was talking with his therapist about a strange preoccupation he’d developed with a co-worker, whom he found himself always trying to protect. In the canoe that day, Benjamin sensed that his past-life brother was a previous incarnation of the co-worker. The past-life version of Benjamin blamed himself for the man’s untimely death, but experiencing the memory altered Benjamin’s perspective about why he obsessed over his co-worker in this life. On some core level, Benjamin wanted to look out for him, to protect him. Going back to his past life, he says, helped him move on.
  “After the session, I’m like, Oh, OK. Well that happened way back in the past, and I don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Benjamin remembers.
  Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of regression in the 1890s, utilizing it in psychoanalysis, at first via hypnosis and then in talk therapy. Through regression, his patients could confront childhood events and traumas that continued to create emotional stress in their adult lives.
  When psychoanalysis penetrated the American mainstream in the 1950s, a past-life regression and hypnotherapy craze also erupted. It began when Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist from Colorado, put a 29-year-old housewife named Virginia Tighe under hypnosis. As she recounted memories from her childhood, which were recorded, Bernstein coaxed her to “keep on going back and back and back in your mind.” Soon, Tighe was speaking in an Irish brogue and began detailing a past life in Ireland during the 1800s. She said her name had been “Bridey Murphy”; she’d been married to a barrister in Belfast and had died in 1864 after falling down a flight of stairs.
  The Search for Bridey Murphy, a book written by Bernstein and published by Doubleday, became a best seller in 1956 and was adapted into a movie. The 1995 New York Times obituary for Virginia Tighe — later Virginia Mae Morrow — said, “Bridey Murphy became a 1950s phenomenon rivaling the Hula-Hoop. There were Bridey Murphy parties (‘come as you were’) and Bridey Murphy jokes (parents greeting newborns with ‘Welcome back’).” The Times also reported that The Search for Bridey Murphy “triggered an interest in reincarnation and the use of hypnosis to regress a subject to early childhood, and perhaps beyond.”
  During the following two decades, Ian Stevenson, then chair of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, chronicled about 3,000 cases of people from around the world, mostly children, with past-life memories, and Morris Netherton wrote what he claimed to be the first book in the field of past-life regression therapy.
  Dr. Brian L. Weiss has been perhaps the most prominent American figure in the practice since the 1980s, publishing 10 books on past-life regression and related subjects. Once a traditional psychotherapist, Weiss — who declined to be interviewed for this story due to his busy schedule — has written that he was a past-life regression skeptic at first. But a hypnotized patient of his, whom he called “Catherine” in one of his books, recounted past-life memories that were so precisely outlined and, as it turned out, historically accurate, that he felt it was impossible she could have invented them.
  Weiss has led mass past-life regression sessions, and he conducts five-day training workshops for psychotherapists and others. In a New York Times article that chronicled one of his training workshops, Weiss drew more than 200 people into a meditative state and encouraged them to walk through doors labeled with years such as 1850, 1700 and 1500, where some past-life memories may have resided. Weiss was quoted in the piece as saying, “Any good therapist can use these techniques and you can learn them in a week.” There are also online past-life regression courses, open to anyone, some as short as a few hours long and costing only about $100.
  Matthew Brownstein, founder of The Institute of Interpersonal Hypnotherapy, says these quickie training programs are “holding back a glorious profession.”
  “I’m actually appalled by what’s out there,” he says. “We worked really hard, myself and other leaders in the field, to make hypnotherapy a federally and state-level acknowledged occupation, and it’s technically illegal to train somebody as a hypnotherapist if you’re not licensed to do so.”
  Brownstein adds that if a person could become a medical doctor in four hours, “it wouldn’t make medicine look all that appealing.”
  He says the hands-on training offered at a school like his is extremely important. Aspiring practitioners of hypnosis should know that “some very dark stuff can come up.”
  “Even though you’re looking for, just say, past-life [memories],” he continues, “there are a lot of other … really out-of-this-world phenomena that occur in the altered state that someone needs to be trained to deal with.” Examples of these special instances, Brownstein says, range from remembrances of alien abductions to “channeling,” when a client acts as a conduit for the spirit of a deceased person and communicates their messages.
  Stephanie Riseley rested one hand on her husband’s chest as he died in his hospital bed after a months-long battle with leukemia. Riseley says her husband’s “heart just stopped, and then I had this feeling that he flew through me.”
  One morning, a few months later, while Riseley was journaling, she felt compelled to put her pen into her left hand. She says that her deceased husband, a lefty, then wrote out a message telling her she was not going crazy, that it was indeed him writing, and that she remained his “goddess, now and forever.”
  Perhaps sensing that she was having difficulty forgiving herself for not doing enough to save him, he added: “You must honor what we had together and forget the rest. … Please forgive me. And forgive yourself for not being superwoman.”
  Soon thereafter, her husband “started chatting with me and having wild sex,” Riseley says. “I am not the only widow that this happens to, by the way.”
  Once she opened herself up to the idea that her husband could interact with her from the beyond, she says, he began running his energy through her body, and orgasms were a regular occurrence. The encounters — sexual and conversational — went on for nearly a year, before he had to move on to his next life.
  Riseley, who lives in Los Angeles, wrote a book about these interactions called Love From Both Sides. She is now a hypnotist who trained under Brian Weiss, and began guiding her own clients through past-life regressions in 2004.
  She says that over the past eight years she’s also been “dating the man who had me murdered in my direct past life.”
  Riseley believes she was a male descendant of the Rothschilds, the famed family of bankers, in her most recent past life. She says she was a Jewish doctor who lived in Germany as the Nazis rose to power. Riseley was married, but cheating with a showgirl, who also slept around with Nazi SS officers. When the past-life version of Riseley told the showgirl he was fleeing Germany with his wife and daughter, the showgirl sold him out to the Nazis, and the whole family perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
  Riseley also says that she realized during her past-life regression into Nazi Germany that her wife from that past life had been reincarnated as her high school best friend in this life, while the showgirl returned as her current boyfriend.
  “In that past life I was a complete narcissist: rich, entitled, totally self-involved,” Riseley says. “I wasn’t appreciative. … And in this lifetime? My lesson is to see what it feels like to be surrounded by complete narcissists.”
  From exploring her past life, Riseley says, she is learning compassion and forgiveness. “You’re not supposed to die wanting to kill somebody, that’ll come and bite you in the butt,” she explains. “So I’m forgiving him.”
  “Certainly, I can’t prove to anybody that past-life regression is real or not real,” says Eli Bliliuos, “but doing it as often as I do and having people have similar experiences, after a while it sort of proves itself.”
  Bliliuos first sought out past-life regression himself in his late teens, after losing both of his parents within a year — his father died of cancer; his mother passed after a fall on icy subway stairs. He says that in his regressions into past lives, he has encountered his parents’ souls, which eased his anguish because he knew he’d come across them again in some future life. His subsequent journeys into other past lives — one sent him to 13th-century Italy, where he was a merchant with an unknown but debilitating illness — have continued to help him improve his outlook on this life.
  Bliliuos and other advocates of past-life regression say that you don’t have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from the experience. He recalls one session with a client who told him that they thought their past-life regression was a figment of their imagination.
  “That’s perfectly fine,” Bliliuos responded, but he asked them to at least consider whether the vision might be a message from their unconscious. If it had some relevance to their life now, then the important element of the experience was the lesson they took away from it.
  As effective as past-life regression may be for some, the practice has drawn plenty of criticism throughout the years. In a 1995 Chicago Tribune article, Dr. Mel Sabshin, who was the medical director for the American Psychiatric Association at the time, said that the organization regards past-life regression as “pure quackery.”