Iberia

When you begin a regression experience, you go into a fairly deep meditative state. If you work with a hypnotherapist, they take you there and can do all of this in a deeper way. If you use a tape, it is preprogrammed and you will not go as deep but are taken through steps to get you into a past life where you will be asked where you are, what you see, the time period, how you are dressed, sometimes how you died. It varies with the tape.

A good tape will give you cues to use if you feel threatened by what you are seeing, but basically you are told to observe, not reenact. You might see pictures as though it was right in front of you or more like remembering something you had forgotten. Sometimes you find a story--

I saw myself as a young woman living in Iberia in a small town. My home was with an unmarried uncle, who appeared to be a surrogate parent. I worked in his cantina by serving as well as dancing in the evenings. He was a popular man in the community. The life was comfortable and I was protected.

A stranger came into the town, someone very different from anyone I had known. He and I fell in love and began a secret love affair. I can see the small room where we made love. It was above the street with a little window and narrow bed. We were happy together which led to our decision that the only way possible to be married was to run away. One night we did just that. My uncle followed. In the darkness, he and my lover fought and my uncle was killed. It was not a deliberate killing but an accident in the fighting.

My lover was unhappy at what had happened, but I felt terrible guilt and decided the only thing I could do was go back to what had been my home. I went alone. The people there blamed me for my uncle's death. I was estranged from everyone.

Despondent, I felt I could not make any of it right. I went to the cliffs outside of town which were high above the ocean with rocks below and I jumped. Interestingly enough, I remember realizing this was another mistake part way down. There is definitely no turning back from that kind of error.

Do I know for sure this story ever happened historically and to me? No. It would explain some of my fear when I get near cliffs but who hasn't experienced the urge to jump if they get too close to an edge? I could have created the whole story as like a dream. Then again...

I learned more about Iberia after the regression. It was ancient Spain; and at the time it probably happened, there would have been many cultural groups who didn't get along well-- Moors, Catholics and Jews which would explain the impossiblity of the couple marrying.

A few months after I had concluded doing regressions, I took a belly dancing class with a friend, who was always coming up with fun ideas like that. When in the class and dancing one evening, I saw what seemed like a flashback, a bit of a moment out of time. There was a man in front of me, sitting on the floor, with a beard and a big smile as he watched me dance. The man was no one I knew then, but I still remember what he looked like as he sat cross-legged and watched me. That evening I had to work to stop the tears running down my cheeks.

Was I influenced by the regression to have the fleeting vision? I don't know, but it did lead to the little painting I put here to illustrate this story.

When you do a regression with the methods I used, you get the events and very few details. Tapes don't let you go too deep and the hypnotherapist I went to later was more oriented to finding an overall karmic patterns through multiple lives.

I have looked back on the one I related above from more distance and perspective and recently saw things I hadn't originally. The woman's life was secure before insecurity walked in, but was she looking for an escape from what was possibly too limiting? The man could have represented not only love but a chance also for a different life, perhaps even an adventure.

Then, was it totally wrong-headed for her to take her uncle's body back to where he had lived? I thought it was a pointless gesture at the time I did the regression. Now I think how could a caring woman have done otherwise given the tragic event and the feeling of how awful it would have been to bury her uncle, who had apparently done his best, in an unmarked grave especially so if her uncle had been a man of religion? What kind of happiness could she have had at that price? The cost of going back however, was high. But if her lover had gone with her, he'd have been killed. Her choices might not have been as silly as I thought immediately after doing the regression. She had lost two men she loved, but her suicide was still totally wrong as with that she eliminated any chance to improve her life, to grow past the mistakes. She ran twice when she should have tried to work things out where she was.

If regressions help us see things about our current lives, my main lesson from that one would be-- don't run from your problems. Don't give up when the going gets tough. I see how important it is to be open to your true self. If the woman had told her uncle what she wanted, would he have blocked her or been understanding. Since she ran, she never found out, and her suicide completed her pattern of trying to escape rather than face things.

Although, no matter what she had done, it could be that love affair was doomed given the cultural times. Star-crossed lovers don't usually get happy endings. What would be interesting to me would have been to find out how the man felt about the whole thing? Did he never love her and was running away with no real caring for what it did to her life? Did he love her and had his life and even faith in himself been damaged by her leaving him? Those are questions I likely will never have answered. Sometimes couples or a group of friends do regressions together, and then they do get various views of the same event. That can be healing to a relationship or very difficult, depending on whether the past wounds are still there.