The patient is an accomplished government employee in India with a well-established career. She has been able to overcome a lot of hurdles in life coming from a lower-middle-class family where she was responsible for taking care of her family and at the same time, was ambitious enough to study and work hard and get prestigious government employment. As for the reason why she sought a psychotherapist, there really wasn’t any explicit problem. There was a certain dissatisfaction with her marriage. She did not really want to get married when she did. However, as is the case with a lot of people getting married prematurely, due to social pressures or a desire to have children, she finally got married at the age of 37.

Now, some might say that 37 is an age where you will call a marriage premature, but that terminology was intentional. Premature marriage is any marriage where you are not really ready to devote a significant amount of your time and being into cultivating and nurturing the family regardless of how old you are. Furthermore, in addition to taking a different path by concentrating on her continued education and career, she also always believed that “koi bhi shaadi ke baad khush nahin reheta, shaadi ke baad zindagi kharaab ho jati hai” (nobody remains happy after marriage, life becomes pathetic after marriage). Even after marriage, the environment is not that of a typical family, the husband actually works abroad and she lives with her parents in India. Even though her marriage situation is atypical, she was happy with the arrangement as it gave her the independence to be with her parents and son and continue working as she liked.

THE SESSION:

The patient first had an introductory psychotherapy session with me where we went into the details of her life and things that troubled her or caused mental unease. I explained to her the various options of therapy she had and things we will be checking for. The session is also used to dispel any myths and concerns the patient might have around the aspects of the treatment. For example, many patients think that hypnotherapy is a state where they lose control over themselves and might start dancing to my instructions akin to a circus monkey or a magic hypnosis demonstration. In reality, while the patient is in trance during hypnotherapy, they are still awake and aware of their surroundings. It is a state of enhanced focus and concentration inwards. The level of detail with which the patients can communicate what they see in such states always surprises me as it is significantly more than what even fully awake individuals can do. After going through her background and addressing any questions about the therapy, I gave her a set of audio scripts to meditate on daily for the next two weeks before her Hypnotherapy session.

During the day of the session, I made her relax and asked her to follow the instructions I provide. These include visualizing various scenarios and going on a mental journey that is guided by me but directed by the patient. The goal is to explore the patient’s subconscious to find any element that might be contributing to the negativity she is experiencing. It can be something in her past, like childhood trauma, or many times it is something from her past lives as well. We can call it a karmic debt or unfinished business from that life. This results in past life regression.

In this case, it seemed that the cause for her present troubles lay in one of her past lives as she went into a deep trance quickly and found herself as a Korean woman in the year 1920. She was able to describe her surroundings and talk about the artistically different architecture of the buildings as compared to what is used to seeing around in India. Another interesting thing about such regressions is that the patient can see the past life memories in the present tense from their perspective but they are also aware of their present consciousness and memories. The key, however, is not to overanalyze things and to surrender to the journey that your soul is taking you on.

The patient saw her 5-6 months old son playing in her house. She was able to feel the love she felt for the child as if it was her own. I enquired about who else lives in the house and she said, ‘nobody’. I asked her to move back in time when she first met the father of the child. She went four years back and saw herself dressing up for a dance show. After the performance, she saw herself sitting with few friends and sipping coffee. She recognized one of the friends as her boyfriend and knew that she married him later in that Korean life in a beautiful church. I let her remember more memories from that married life and she described a memory of her taking a stroll in a garden with her husband and other scattered memories and living happily.

I instructed her to move further to a significant event in that life, she reported that she is going in a car with her husband and they met with an accident where her husband died. She was pregnant at the time and injured in the accident but was able to survive and recover with the help of her sister. Later she successfully gave birth to her son whom she recognized as her son in this current life as well. Being a single mother in Korea in the 1920s proved to be very difficult for her and she started having negative thoughts and going into depression. She recalled having similar thoughts about how her life after marriage was very difficult. Unable to cope with the burden, she committed suicide by jumping off a roof in 1925. She left behind a four-year-old son.

I asked why she committed suicide, and why she abandoned her son, she responded said that her sister will take care of everything. She had a the out of body experience where she was able to see her mangled body after she died. She did not feel any pain and while her soul was outside her body, she felt calm and peaceful.

I asked her to continue in her journey and he found herself peaceful, happy and taking rest somewhere. Usually, patients when they go through death in a previous life and can see what happens after that, almost always they can describe being pulled towards a warm and loving bright light. Many describe meeting an entity that takes them through their life experiences and helps them go on. Our patient here, however, did not see any light and felt that she has to stay in this place and has to take rest. This can be described as a state of limbo where it is not really any torture and the spirit is really at peace and just resting. But it is a state of nothingness that is common in scenarios where the past life death is due to suicide.

OUTCOME:

1) The patient was able to understand why she had an aversion towards marriage given her tragic accident and difficult experience in the past life

2)  She realized that she should not have committed suicide, leaving her son alone. One never escapes their problems, you yourself decide what kind of experience you want to have in life. Each experience teaches you something, if you run away or do not get the experience that you were meant to have, it would mean you are missing out on learning. There, the same problem will come back in a different form in some later life for you to finish experiencing and learning from it. In our patient’s case, she has to complete the unfinished job of bringing her son up on her own. That is why he was born again in the same relationship dynamic with her.

3) She was thankful that this life is much better and she is quite capable of taking care of her son now with the successful career she has.