Past life regression to change ancestral patterns
If we can heal trauma in this lifetime by working with the body’s survival responses, and if memories also exist in our bodies from previous lifetimes, then why can’t we heal trauma and resolve the survival responses from our ancestral lineage or past lives in a similar way?
So why would we want to? Whether we are aware of it or not, we are a composite of energies that resulted in all our experiences – past and present, including our ancestors’. These energies influence our current lives, and in some cases cause us to be less than who we are.
Even patterns resulting from experiences in this lifetime may actually have their roots in previous lives or our ancestral lineage. For example, we may have felt unworthy as a child when we were not invited to a friend’s birthday party. That feeling of unworthiness may linger and continue to influence our behaviour and how we experience our adult lives. We can work with that energy pattern, however the feeling of unworthiness most likely was experienced in previous lives and through our ancestral lineage. Imagine if we could successfully resolve an energy pattern in a distant past life and how that would influence every lifetime thereafter?
How do we resolve an energy pattern?
In Somatic Experiencing, clients are guided to visit adverse experiences that happened in this lifetime, while being anchored in the present moment – to avoid re-traumatising, re-living, and being overwhelmed by the experience. With this orientation, clients can safely re-negotiate their trauma.
Dr. Peter Levine explains that a self protective or self defence response is activated in the body when it perceives an imminent threat. When the self protective response is activated, and allowed to complete its expression, messages are sent from the body to the brain that say ‘it’s over,’ ‘I’m safe,’ and ‘I can take care of myself.’ This FELT experience changes neuropathways. The autonomic nervous system (responsible for fight/flight activation) is reset, and the body feels peaceful.
Since the body does not know the difference between space, time, and dimension, visiting a past experience or a past life event feels like it is happening in the now. When a self defence response is not executed, the body communicates to the brain that it is unsafe and powerless, and this feeling persists indefinitely. This energy pattern remains in the body until it allowed to complete its innate and initial response – despite the timeline in which it occurred.
Past life regression is about visiting an alternate place and time, and almost always involves an overwhelming event or suffering, and might include an untimely death. While one may glean insights from a past life, an ‘incomplete’ regression can be disturbing – when the body is not given an opportunity to resolve the overwhelming event that enables it to feel complete and settled, and may even be re-traumatising.
Working with past life regression therefore, requires somatic-based trauma skills to ensure a complete and successful ‘escape’ from the overwhelming event – which changes limiting patterns in one’s current life.
How do we work with ancestral patterns?
When one is guided to visit an alternative timeline (ancestral or past life) where energy patterns may have their roots, the somatic memory of the body can be encouraged to execute a defence response – thus resolving the behaviours experienced in one’s present life by changing the course of events from an alternate timeline. The shift is immediate, and clients experience themselves differently – for example speaking up without fear (that previously existed).
Some say that when one heals their trauma, seven generations back and seven generations forward are also healed. When one heals a trauma from ancestral lineage / past life, ancestors through all the timelines as well as others involved in the event (and their ancestors) are also healed. The impact of this healing can be far-reaching.
How do we know there is a change? We feel peaceful. There is no discomfort in the body when an old ‘trigger’ is visited (e.g. anything that reminds us or we react to a stimulus associated with the energy pattern). And most noticeably, we don’t experience the same restrictive or limiting behaviours.
How does it work
You are fully present and in control (e.g. not hypnotised) and guided to access a time and place that informs you about a current behaviour or reaction to situations. As an alternate timeline event comes into focus you are guided to notice your somatic (body) reactions as it ‘remembers,’ and encouraged to follow its impulses to compete a successful defence response.
Principles of somatic-based past life – drawn from physics and neuroscience
- Everything is energy – patterns (e.g. behavour responses) are energy
- We hold the energetic patterns of our ancestors/past lives/alternate timelines in our bodies
- Some patterns that show up in our current lives often have their ‘roots’ in past lives/timelines
- All timelines simultaneously co-exist
- Trauma (past, ancestral, current) is anything that overwhelms the autonomic nervous system (ANS)
- The ANS remembers the energetic patterns of trauma and responds/reacts to patterns with a similar signature – IRRESPECTIVE of timeline
- The body doesn’t know space time or dimension – if the energy pattern is activated, the body behaves as if it is happening now
- Energy patterns can be changed/resolved
- The body does not know the difference between imagination and what the mind thinks is reality
- Felt experiences change neuropathways and the brain prefers new neuropathways over older ones
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