There are three levels of past-life work: Realistic-cathartic, Archetypal/Subself and Higher Awareness.

      Realistic-Cathartic Level: at first, you get most therapeutic value if you take the past-life stories you see.  Treat the stories you generate as if they're absolutely  real.  Even if you don't believe the stories are real, you can use them therapeutically.  For now, assume there's a direct cause-effect relation between the past lives you image and your life now.

      At this level, you tell the past-life story without judgment or interpretation.   Allow full emotional expression of the pain, horror, shame.  Live all the major turning points of the past-life person's history, including the exact moment of death.  Assume the loss, hurt, guilt, grief, or bitterness you felt in the life you imaged led you to defensiveness, rationalizations and a lifestyle to avoid ever repeating the same hurtful situation in your present life.

      In successive pastlife regression sessions, you'll probably find you image mirror-opposite lives.  If you're victim one life--raped, murdered, enslaved; you're bully--rapist, killer, master--in another.  In successive lives, you and one of your parents may take turns being each other's parent and spouse; in some of the pastlives, you'll both be of different sexes than now.  Once these feelings between you and your parent are relived in pastlives, you can drop some of your charge toward that parent in this life.

      Archetypal/Subself Level: at this level you detach.  Guides help you see the opposing sides of your being (eg, killer and victim) as interacting parts of you.  You meet the deep needs of the voices you developed around the pastlife scripts.  You realize that the things you dislike in other people just remind you of your inner aspects, your voices, energies, subselves.  You come to peace with self and other folk.

     Higher Awareness Level:  you see all lives and oppositions as part of your overall being and live fully conscious and symptom free.    You enjoy all roles and distinctions as part of the ever-changing play of existence.
 
  

* Based on Woolger, R., Other Lives, Other Selves, NY: Doubleday, 1987; Fisher, J., The Case for Reincarnation, NY: Bantam, 1985.

    Maui counselor, Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., is a Certified Holotropic Breathworker and Voice Dialogue Facilitator.  He is certified by Dr. Roger Woolger in Jungian Pastlife Psychotherapy.