Shortly after remembering this traumatic lifetime, Gail’s sleep difficulty disappeared, and it has not returned. Her insomnia was resolved because she knew that the sudden and terrifying awakening by the German soldiers was from her past life, not her present one. The initial or root cause of her issue was brought to consciousness; the past-life wound was healed. Gail can now speak her mind—her truth—without having to bite her tongue or hold back for fear of severe consequences. This also is of the past. Now she is free.

  The author of the following story had to learn these lessons about holding back and standing up to those in power. She, too, once enslaved, is now free.

  . OVERCOMING ENSLAVEMENT .

  How could that be me? I asked myself. The woman that I was studying was someone whom I would never recognize as myself. Her body was deathly thin and wrinkled. She wore a burlap-type tunic that was held on her wraithlike frame with a rope at the waist. She looked eighty years old but was probably only in her forties. In contrast to her abject poverty, she wore a valuable gold ring with a deep blue, moon-shaped stone, about the size of a nickel. I had started this life as a young, beautiful, strawberry-blond girl. Only the harshest of lives and isolation could have caused this much change in one lifetime.

  She loved to ride horses through the countryside and gardens. Because her mother was deceased and her father was unavailable to her, she rode freely—too freely. She was ignorant of the bands of men who roamed purposefully to conquer. The town dictator, a young man himself, had her kidnapped. Her horse was brutally killed. Her world changed permanently overnight.

  David was the kidnapper, a man of influence in her town. After impregnating her, he had a wedding ceremony performed by the local clergy. Other men gathered around the couple to witness and guard them from onlookers who might interfere.

  The baby was taken from her at birth. The woman was imprisoned until she became too unhealthy and undesirable to entice companionship, at which point she was threatened and beaten. Her life of enslavement to David was symbolized by her blue stone ring, which everyone who was connected to him was required to wear.

  She became his deliverywoman. She transported valuable items, but she had become such an outcast in the community that no one would interfere with her deliveries. She might as well have been a leper. The townspeople always made a point to ridicule and mock her poverty and enslavement. She was glad to be left alone in her hut on the outskirts of David’s property; it ensured a respite from the societal degradation and, worst of all, the constant threats of physical injury. Although her hut barely protected her fire pit from the extinguishing cold winds and mist, the fire was a greatly appreciated luxury to her starving body.

  The most difficult of her tasks was going to retrieve from David the items she was to deliver. She had to pass by animal pens that housed small creatures who were used for torture. She saw them suffering from beatings and painful amputations. Worst of all was seeing the suffering but no longer having the feelings of empathy that would motivate her to release them. Her own suffering had dehumanized her to a state of dull existence.

  Upon entry into the dictator’s chambers, she showed her blue stone ring. She kneeled, expecting ridicule and abuse. It was common and inescapable. None of the abuse and horror affected her anymore. Her life was truly that of a victim. There were no choices or escapes unless she was to fight back, which would lead to death.

  In the last moments of her life, I saw her squatting in front of a fire in her hut, the first one in many days. I could see and feel that her kidneys and other organs had begun to shut down due to starvation. She fell over next to the fire, and her heart stopped beating. It was a pathetic, unrewarding, invisible way to die.

  As I left that body, I could see the mental enslavement that this body had contained. I had believed that it was better to do the work of evil than to fight back. I learned that fighting back and dying would have been better than living enslaved. Furthermore, complying with the dictator had caused him to become more entrenched in his power. I had nothing to lose by fighting back. I was going to die either way.

  The familiar characters from that life and my present one were my mother, who died when I was nineteen and entering the adult world, and my father, who was emotionally unavailable and detached throughout most of my childhood. The dictator was my second husband, who was emotionally and physically abusive for the six months that my daughter and I lived with him.

  The lessons I learned in that lifetime were that it was okay to be young and beautiful. Young people need support, guidance, and possibly protection as they face the adult world. I learned that it was better to fight back than to live in enslavement. Compliance is a slow death.

  The things I brought to this lifetime are a deep love and empathy for animals and for those marginalized by society. I spent twenty-five years of my life working as an advocate for abused and disabled children. I brought a deep bond and protection for my daughter, my one and only child. I appreciate the choice to leave enslaving situations, and I exercise compassion for all, knowing that we are all shaped by our experiences—both past and present.

  Alice

  The debts accruing from Alice’s past life will be an obligation to David and his cohorts. To abuse, torture, and humiliate or kill animals and humans creates karma that must be resolved. They will have to make it up to Alice and the others. Our lessons are of compassion and kindness, not hatred and violence. We are, in reality, spiritual beings.

  It is never too late to reorient yourself to your spiritual or destined path and to learn these lessons afresh. Wherever you are now is simply a point in time, and the future is multifaceted, changing and growing as you do. No matter how we may have acted in the past, every moment presents another opportunity to treat one another with care and consideration. Even David, at the height of his tyrannical reign, could have decided to become a kinder person, to open his heart, to increase his understanding, to choose love. These are all things that we know so well yet don’t always put into practice. A person who acts out of ego or strictly from intellect can wander very far from his path, but a person who acts from the heart cannot, for the heart will always pull him back. Listen to your intuition, for that is the open heart at work. Choose the loving path; it will never lead you astray.

  The most difficult lifetimes often provide the opportunity for accelerated spiritual growth. Such lifetimes do not automatically imply negative karma from the past. Perhaps you chose the difficult life so that you could progress the most. Alice’s existence as the deliverywoman was very hard and heavy, but she learned invaluable wisdom and, in her present incarnation, she is manifesting great empathy, compassion, and loving service. The most beautiful flowers often arise from seeds hidden and nurtured by the cold, wet mud.

  During a recent five-day workshop, an attendee named Stacy told me that her breathing was becoming more labored, even though she had not yet experienced any past-life or childhood memories. She thought that pollens or other antigens might have been in the air, for grass, flowers, and trees were blooming in the early summer warmth of the New York Hudson Valley, where the intensive workshop was taking place. She also told me that she had a history of asthma. I suspected that other factors might have been at work, and so I chose to regress her in front of the group. I picked a volunteer to hold a microphone close to Stacy’s mouth so that the group could hear any words that she spoke during the regression. Another group member, a surgeon from Alabama, was hunched forward in his seat as I began the hypnotic process. At the time, I did not know that my “randomly” chosen microphone holder, sitting right next to Stacy, was a speech therapist and an expert in respiratory conditions.

  Stacy’s first memory was of choking on a slice of apple when she was a young girl. She had panicked at the time, but her mother’s response was to give her “bread balls” to help ease the apple down to her stomach. This failed to help and perhaps exacerbated the situation. The little girl couldn’t breathe, and she became even more terrified. Finally, her mother held her upside down by the ankles and firmly whacked her on the back, dislodging the apple slice. I asked Stacy how she had felt just before the apple popped out from her throat.

  “Frightened to death,” she responded.

  This phrase became the bridge that I used to uncover her past life. “When were you ‘frightened to death’ before?” I asked. Her answer quickly followed.

  She had been an eleven-year-old boy who had fallen from a rowboat into a lake. The currents carried the boat away from him, and they carried him farther and farther from the shore. He finally became too fatigued to swim any longer. Nobody was around to hear his cries for help. He drowned, gasping and swallowing the lake’s water.

  Stacy’s breathing was raspy and rapid, but when the boy’s consciousness floated above his body and above the lake and the clouds, it completely changed. She could inhale so freely and deeply now, with no difficulty at all. As I awakened her, her breathing remained relaxed, and it continued to be so even as the audience asked her questions about her experiences as the choking girl and the drowning boy. She had a strong feeling that her respiratory problems would not resurface.

  The microphone-holding speech therapist had also noticed the remarkable changes. Clavicular breathing, she had observed, had become diaphragmatic. The surgeon agreed.

  Past-life outcomes shed light on present-day phobias and conditions. Once those are remembered, similar situations will never frighten you “to death” anymore.

  Renata’s story, below, provides more support of this concept.

  . FROM FEAR TO FULFILLMENT .

  I had memories of a previous life from a very early age, and I realized instinctively that it was not wise to discuss such experiences with anyone.

  I was born in Italy in 1952, and I lived in a seaside town. My mother used to take me to a beach that was reached by passing through a strange concrete construction. We had to go up some narrow stairs, walk along an elevated large sort of corridor, and go down the other side onto the beach. The sides of this corridor had a parapet, above which was some barbed wire to prevent people from reaching more industrial constructions at a much lower level. I can’t give a precise description of this place because I was too young. It was a sort of electric plant. Many years later, I asked my mother when it was demolished and she told me that it was in 1954, which means I was only two years old when I saw it.

  Every time we passed there, I felt in a strange state. I was very uneasy, yet at the same time I was somehow eager to go as the feeling was so intense and mesmerizing. The heat was great in summer because the sun fell directly on the concrete. When I passed there, I had a kind of film playing in my mind: images of a woman and a man running in the direction of the beach, she in front, the man behind at a short distance. She was dressed in dark colors and had long, curled hair. I knew they were running toward the seashore, escaping something, and that they were in serious danger. Somehow, and I can’t explain how a girl less than two years old could know this, I was that woman and the place was North Africa.

  I also had recurring dreams or, rather, nightmares. One was of a gray sea and a wave that suddenly rose and submerged me. Sometimes I was on the beach, sometimes I was near the concrete pier, but the feeling was always of total panic, and I would wake up. The nightmares were still recurring when I was a teenager and, little by little, more details appeared: the landscape of a bleak beach, men in dark uniforms chasing us with guns, both me and my companion entering the water. I swam under to find protection from the bullets, but the waves became higher and pressed my head against the bottom of the pier until no space was left for me to breathe, and I drowned.

  I had a curious problem with my clothes. My mother sewed many of my clothes, not only because she had studied dressmaking but also because I needed long zippers that no ready-made dresses had. If I wore a sweater, she had to help me by passing it over my head, keeping the collar far away from my face. Once, we went to a dressmaker, and my mother forgot to tell her of my problem. When the lady passed the dress over my head, I panicked and started crying and moving my arms frantically, unable to breathe.

  I used to go to the seaside in summer, and although I had learned to swim, I was always wary when lying on the sand, because I had the illogical fear that a wave might suddenly come up and submerge me. For this reason, I never lay with my back to the sea. On one occasion, when I was approximately eighteen, I was lying closer to the sea than I normally did, and a much longer wave reached the towel of a friend. She laughed; I was frozen with terror.

  At nineteen, I enrolled at the university. One day, during the lunch break, I was in the large faculty library. It was November and the weather was unusually mild, so the windows were open. The tables were very large, with a dark surface covered by a sheet of glass that reflected the images. Suddenly, while my mind was elsewhere and I was lulled by the gentle noise of the fans in the background, looking at my notes and books on the table, I glimpsed the reflection of my face—but it was not my face anymore, at least not the one I knew. It was me, but I was someone else. There was, again, this young woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with long, curled hair and dark eyes. The room was different, much smaller and with a large fan turning. There was a friendly French police officer speaking to me. He told us that we had to run away because the Gestapo had discovered our names. Then I had a more detailed flashback of the beach, our fear, and our death. This experience was strong and took me totally by surprise.

  One early September after that, I went to visit a friend at the seaside. For some reason I didn’t take my clothes off on that occasion, and we started to walk along the water line of the beach, chatting and laughing. The sea is shallow in that part of Italy, and the long beach is divided, from time to time, by tiny constructions of rocks, like minipiers. I was walking there, joking with my friend. I had just come back from some congresses where I had presented two papers and I was telling her how happy I was that they had been received so well. I felt light and enthusiastic. Suddenly, we reached one of these rocky constructions that, to be passed, required that we walk into the sea with the water reaching our ankles or shins. When I reached the farthest point of this construction, my body stopped working; I had no control over it, and my mind was filled with silent panic. I couldn’t proceed; I was stuck and unable to speak. Later on, my friend told me that I was as white as a ghost. She came to me and took me slowly back to a rock nearby, where I sat down for a while. The first words I could say were, “So it’s all true.” Obviously, she didn’t understand, and I had to explain.

  For a few years, I had tried to cut off the idea of reincarnation and pretend that all that had happened to me in the past didn’t have any specific meaning and was nothing. That experience hit me. I think that what triggered it was the fact that I was fully dressed and not in a swimsuit. The rocks, even if protruding for only a couple of meters into the water, were enough to recall a much bigger and more frightening pier. The experience was so intense and so unexpected, so out of the blue, that I went back to pick up all my old books on reincarnation, bought more, and started reading again.

  These experiences have formed and directed my entire life in one way or another. I have dedicated my personal and academic research to the themes of reincarnation, symbolism, and the journeys to the other world. My Ph.D. itself was based on the study of a medieval journey to the other world, and I started to read books about hypnotic regressions and tried techniques with some like-minded friends. I qualified as a hypnotherapist and studied more advanced techniques that can be applied in past-life regressions, and for a few years now I have run a private practice of hypnotherapy in London. Although I deal with all sorts of problems that hypnotherapy can help to solve, I am happy to say that past-life regressions are among the most common techniques I use with my clients.

  Renata Bartoli

  Renata’s memories, which were so powerful and persistent, pushed her to dedicate her work and her life to helping others using past-life regressions. She knew that her experiences were real. She vividly felt the fear and paralysis that past-life traumas could cause in the present, and she is helping many people to overcome and release similar symptoms.

  Of course, not all regressions are the result of using hypnotic techniques. Renata experienced flashbacks and glimpses when she was near or in the water, through recurring dreams, and even in the faculty library, where she observed her face from her prior lifetime. Her subconscious mind was giving her the information and tools to heal her in the present and, additionally, to steer her toward her soul’s work. Renata had the wisdom and the courage to respond to her mind’s urgings.

  I too had to overcome old belief systems, skepticism, and left-brain conditioning to dedicate my work and my life to help people in the very same way as Renata. I have been so fortunate and so blessed to find this path.

  Judith, in the final story of this chapter, was also a self-described “left-brained and skeptical person.” Even with her doubts she remained accepting and curious, and she was able to have a wonderfully healing and intuitive experience at a workshop. This incident helped her achieve not only the elimination of a physical symptom that had long troubled her but also a greater emotional understanding that has forever changed her life.

  . THERE IS NO NEED TO JUDGE .

  I consider myself to be primarily a left-brained and skeptical person. I’ve been trained as a scientist and veterinarian and had been in practice for over eleven years when I attended my first Brian Weiss seminar. A friend of mine and I had read Many Lives, Many Masters, and we were so excited that he was coming to Fort Lauderdale that we got our tickets nine months in advance and counted down the days. We were both impressed that a well-respected and well-trained doctor had made such an incredible discovery, and we knew that he had faced ridicule and scorn from his fellow scientists and physicians by coming forward with this “mystical” technique to rapidly solve unexplained pains, complicated phobias, and hang-ups.