reborn to do it

Past-life regression is having a moment. Our quest for happiness is now no longer limited to the body we inhabit. Alice Wignall discovers that for true fulfilment, we need to go back – way back

A past-life regression has some surprising results.

You can see a bridge… You’re crossing the bridge… It’s misty… The mist is clearing… What can you see?” I can see a street of shops housed in low buildings, with overhanging first floors. It’s dark but still busy with people running errands – an early evening in late autumn. The street is lit by old-fashioned gas lamps, there are no cars. I’m holding a neatly tied package under one arm. It contains embroidery that I’ve been working on, and I’m going to drop it off at the tailor who has paid me to do it. The year is 1900. Welcome to my former life.

In my current life I’m in London, lying in a dimly lit basement room under a store specialising in style and spirituality (so you can browse JW Anderson before aligning your chakras). I’m being guided through a past-life regression (PLR) by Morgan Yakus, an integrative hypnosis and PLR practitioner who also works in New York and LA.

To be honest, I’m not an ideal candidate for PLR due to a couple of minor details, such as the fact I don’t believe in past lives and that talk of accessing memories of previous existences makes me do the kind of face you normally see in a particularly “WTF?” GIF. Still, I figured that if nothing else, it would at least be a chance for a nice lie-down, and so quite happily took myself off for a journey into my own previous existences.

Yakus is a lovely, engaging woman who used to work in the fashion industry as a stylist and designer, later drawn into hypnosis and healing by a lifelong instinct to want to help others with a desire to change negative patterns. She has led me through an apparently simple relaxation (beach, palm trees swaying, tension leaving your body, yada yada, you know the drill). I do feel like the tension has left my body. Lying on the therapist’s table, I feel calm, warm and safe, and

though my mind is free of the usual buzz and whirr of things to do and things left undone, I’m certainly conscious, and definitely not asleep.

So it comes as something of a shock when Yakus asks me how many times I’ve lived before and I say, instinctively and automatically, “Five.”

Yakus guides me across the misty bridge into the first life that I access during our session. As she asks me to “fast forward” through significant scenes in this past life, the answers to her questions continue to come thick and fast. One moment in particular – “I” am now in my forties, standing in the shadowy kitchen of a small cottage where I live alone, looking out through the open door into a sunny garden – is as vivid as a photo. It’s something I know I’ve seen, though back in my real life I can’t recall anywhere I’ve been that looks like that room.

In a super-relaxed state it turns out it is actually quite easy to summon up a snapshot of a room or place from the dredges of your subconscious. But does that mean it’s a past life? When I first stepped onto that Victorian street, did it look familiar because I knew it from a previous existence or was it actually just the Diagon Alley set from the Harry Potter films? What’s slightly weirder is that I don’t just see my past lives, but feel them, too. I have an absolute sense of how “I” am feeling in each of the scenes of the life I see: emotionally, even physically.

Which is all very interesting, but let’s be honest here: no self-respecting, egocentric journalist signs up for a PLR without the hope that they’re going to turn out to have been someone really cool in centuries past. Looking at sunlit gardens in another time and place is all very nice, but let’s focus for a moment on the “small cottage” element of the scene. Where are my gilded palaces? Where are my aristocratic lovers and daring adventures? Forgive me, but isn’t the point of PLR to find yourself zapped into the most exciting and/or scenic moments of history, like in Forrest Gump?

Not for me, apparently. My previous existences seem to have been determinedly, depressingly domestic. (In one of my other past lives, I seem to be a pretty grumpy male farmer, going mad at the drudgery associated with his home life. And because his existence is pre-industrial, he doesn’t even have a Dyson.)

And anyway, no, that’s not the point. According to Yakus, there are many reasons people might seek out a PLR therapist, and scenic time-travel is not one of them. “Perhaps they have a strong connection to an event, a place or have a phobia or issue in this lifetime they think may have been carried over. They may have had a dream about an experience, place or event they believed to be a past life. Clients tell me they went to a psychic and have been told by them that they have carried an issue over in which they need to clear with a PLR.”

She also says that, in her experience, PLR is becoming more popular – the number of requests she receives is increasing. I guess it fits in with our introspective age and our incessant search for meaning. That, and an increasing willingness to try things that are outside the mainstream and tap into our quest for spiritual fulfilment.

The most peculiar moment of my PLR is when I die. Yakus leads me to the end of my previous existences and into the spirit world. I find this the hardest bit to describe: when Yakus asks me what I’m seeing or experiencing, I’m just not sure. Unlike the 3D clarity of my earthly past lives, I only have the vaguest feeling about what might be going on in my deaths.

I’ve noticed that when I hesitate in answering questions, Yakus clicks her fingers to prompt an answer.

“At the end of my session, I feel a bit spaced out, as you might expect from someone who has just travelled through time, not to mention seen her own death (twice) and been to heaven (possibly)”

I understand why she’s doing this: to stop me overintellectualising, to make me give my first, instinctive response. But it’s a lot of pressure, and I’m already having a difficult time, what with being dead and everything. I end up giving garbled descriptions of, er, the afterlife? But it’s such a clichéd version of crowds of people wandering around in milky-white light – it’s possible I even think I’m walking on an actual cloud – that in retrospect I’m not sure I didn’t just cull it from the bit in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey where they go to heaven.

At the end of my PLR session, I feel a bit spaced out, as you might expect from someone who has just travelled through time and space, not to mention seen her own death (twice) and been to heaven (possibly). But am I convinced? Do I believe I’ve witnessed my own previous existences?

Well, I’m not going to answer definitively. Realistically, full comprehension of every facet of the mysteries of life and death, the body and the soul is probably a bit beyond me. I don’t even understand how my dishwasher works. I’m sceptical, but for reasons that would probably cause other people to be convinced. The past lives just felt too familiar to me. You could argue that they’re familiar because they’re my own previous existences, but I can’t shake the feeling that they were just scraps of experiences and images that were floating around in my head anyway, mashed together by my brain when I was in a relaxed and creative frame of mind.

A friend asks what would happen if I had it again, with a different practitioner. Would I access the same lives? And if they were different, would that mean it was all a load of nonsense? For fans of empirical proof, the disappointing answer is no. It doesn’t work like that. As Yakus explains to me, the client is in control during a session: you may be relaxed but you’re not unconscious. “The client can be as specific or general about what they would like to experience,” she says. “If someone wanted more information about a particular lifetime and moment they would be able to go back. You can choose to return to the same previous life, or a different one.” And having experienced it, I can attest that that’s true. I’m sure if I did PLR again I’d be able to summon up the same images, or different ones if I felt like it.

But does that mean I think PLR is a waste of time? Actually, no. Essentially, it’s about getting yourself comfortable, focused and calm, and then imagining a different life. Sure, that life might involve some hilarious old-timey clothing choices and less rigorous personal hygiene and that’s always fun, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that whatever you picture, regardless of whether it “really happened” or not, could have some obvious current-life applications.

Yakus tells me that struggling creative types often access past lives in which they are successful artists, which enables them to experience what it is like to feel confident in their abilities and to be rewarded for them. As for me, in this life I have a full-time job, two very small children and a house that is continually on the verge of collapsing into a pile of brick dust and dodgy Victorian plaster. I don’t think it’s exactly a coincidence that the two lives I saw were one in which I was weighed down and angry at my domestic responsibilities (Grumpy Farmer) and one where I didn’t have any at all (Loner Seamstress). Yakus mentioned that the past lives we see have lessons for us, and I think that is true. I just don’t think the lives I saw were previous incarnations, so much as refractions of my current one.

“Accessing specific states and/or resources you believe you’ve had in a past life can be very empowering,” says Yakus. “A lot of clients have received a universal message that there’s more to life, and perhaps everything is more expansive than they originally thought. That is not a negative experience but a positive one, and that it’s possible our souls are really infinite, therefore, creating a wider view of their life and the world.” And isn’t that, after all, the point of any kind of journey?

You can have a PLR session with Morgan Yakus via Skype – it costs $230 for 75 minutes. For more information, go to morganyakus.com