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I lie down in an enormous recliner, allowing myself to melt in its crevices. I close my eyes and pay close attention to Betty Moore-Hafter's soothing voice, which is enhanced by the faint murmur of otherworldly-sounding music that's playing in the background. "Bring your awareness to your breath," she tells me, "Notice it flowing in and out. As your breath takes on a restful pace, you're drifting deeper and deeper, so calm and peaceful now.
This relaxation exercise continues for what seems like 20 minutes. Although I feel exceptionally calm in this chair, my conscious mind is still working. I worry about whether I'll be able to deliver the goods - to retrieve a long-ago memory from another place, another life. But for now, I'm going with it. "Imagine," says Moore-Hafter, who is practically whispering, "walking down a beautiful staircase, descending deeper with every step."
Moore-Hafter is a certified hypnotherapist in Burlington, Vermont, who uses hypnotic techniques to help people reach a state of inner focus where they can access "past-life" memories, an approach commonly called past-life regression. She does not insist - though many of her clients believe - that the visions and feelings that her work with them evokes are actual events from true past lives, or that reincarnation is necessarily part of human existence. She doesn't need to. The idea that you may be peering into lives you led before is utterly intriguing, but not critical to the outcome. "What's healing about the work," she says, "is that it helps people release patterns, beliefs, and emotions that keep them limited."
I know all about feeling limited. The reason I'm about to take this hypnotic journey is because I've been feeling more and more invisible lately. I feel as if I'm not expressing myself in the way that best feeds me. The intensity of the pain is confounding. I fall into despair; I weep and mope. I feel hopeless, like I'll live forever in obscurity without anyone knowing what I'm really capable of.
I work as a freelance television producer and writer, but I'm an actor by training. Although my interest in living a thespian's life waned long ago, my desire to be seen and heard has not. I've done a lot of psychotherapy over the years, but I can't point to a person or an event in my past that might have spawned this invisibility complex.
Maybe, I think, I haven't gone back far enough.
Obviously, I'm not alone in my wondering. The Internet has at least 200 past-life regression sites that offer personalized sessions, books, software, weekend seminars, and audio- and videotapes to help you get in touch with who you once might have been. One site has confessions and revelations from people who have undergone regression therapy, including one woman who came to believe she'd been Ferdinand Magellan's niece, and another who learned she'd been an outer-space alien. If you think past-life regression isn't for the scientifically minded, one past-life coach is a psychiatrist who was trained at both Columbia and Yale Universities.
"As you bring to mind this issue of invisibility," Moore-Hafter says to me, "find a path that leads to a bridge shrouded in mist. This bridge will take you to a time when you lived in a different body, in a different personality. As I count from seven to one, you'll move across the bridge and be drawn into a scene in that life." At the count of one, Moore-Hafter snaps her fingers. My eyelids are involuntarily fluttering. I'm aware that I'm lying on a recliner in an office in Vermont, but I'm also seeing a cobblestone street.
Before the regression, Moore-Hafter encouraged me to trust my first impressions, whether they emerged through my five senses or appeared as a knowing in my gut. I go with it.
"Notice anything that comes to mind," I hear her say. "Get a sense of your feet. What are you wearing on your feet?"
"Nothing."
"Are you standing or sitting?"
"Standing."
I already have a sense of this person - is it me? - wearing what look like animal skins. My wrists are shackled; I fee like I'm chained to a cart.
"Are you male or female?" Moore-Hafter asks.
"Male," I say with some certainty. I'm a thirty something imprisoned man living in a Dutch village in the 18th or 19th century. My name is something like "Dankin." During the day I perform hard labor. I transport goods to the town. At night I read and write in my cell. I'm always in chains. People in the village look down on me; they don't speak to me, and I'm not free to speak to them.
I regress to the event that landed me in jail. Moore-Hafter counts from three to one and snaps her fingers; I'm a 15-year-old boy living on the outskirts of this village with my mother. We're poor and hungry. One night I enter a neighbor's home to steal some food - just enough to get us by - and I'm caught. Twenty years later I'm still paying the price.
I move ahead to my death, a common facet of past-life regression. Once you leave the body and move into "the light," Moore-Hafter says, there's an opportunity to heal what couldn't be healed during the lifetime. Apparently I tried to escape and was caught and burned to death in the town center. Traumatizing as it sounds, I feel detached describing the scene.
"Breathe a sigh of relief," Moore-Hafter murmers. "No one can hurt you anymore. What are your last thoughts as you leave this body?" "I'm free," I say, "free of being nothing in everyone's eyes. No one in that village knew that I was smart, that I was an articulate speaker. No one knew what I could do."
"What are you feeling?"
"It makes me sad," I say, as tears surface. I may be making this whole story up, I think, but these feelings are real.
Moore-Hafter asks me to express whatever I need to express to the townspeople.
"You wasted my life," I hear myself say. "There were so many things I could have contributed to this community. I was an eloquent man with a great appreciation for poetry. There were people in this village I could have taught to read. You prevented me from expressing myself. You never saw who I really was."
As I speak, I feel the power of my declaration.
It's been three weeks since the regression, and I still don't know what to make of it.
A clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School who specializes in behavioral medicine, Carol Ginandes, Ph.D., appreciates my question but insists that recent studies of the brain during trance states (using brain-imaging techniques) cannot offer any conclusive explanations.
"Scientific findings are not yet conclusive," she says, "but some research suggests it's possible that when people enter a trance state, there's a shift in brain activation and lateralization; this may enhance a shift from the left hemisphere, which is characterized by linear, verbal thinking, to the right, which is characterized by intuitive and imagistic thought processes."
While Ginandes doesn't work with past lives, she concedes that under hypnosis it's possible to access "a bonanza of impressions and emotions from a deeper level of awareness" that are useful for therapeutic purposes.
"What's important is the healing," says Moore-Hafter. "These sessions are often transformative."
I can't argue with that. My response to a question Moore-Hafter asked during the regression - "What would Dankin say to you about this issue of invisibility?" - and my answer, which at the time flowed so easily, still play in my head, giving me comfort, helping me to better understand myself: "Keep cultivating your interests and your skills, and take advantage of every opportunity to let people know who you are and what you love."
(reprinted from, "Body and Soul" magazine, January/February 2004 issue):
Portland Helmich is a free-lance writer based in Boston. She also hosts and produces television programs about health and spirituality.
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