What Is a Past Life?
Updated: Jul 21
Understanding Why the Soul Lives Many Lifetimes
When people discover that I work with Past Life Regression, one of the first questions they ask is whether I really believe in past lives. It is a question I understand well because, before I began this work, I asked it myself. Like many people, I had read books about reincarnation, listened to lectures and heard countless personal stories. Some people spoke with absolute certainty, while others dismissed the entire subject as imagination. I found both perspectives interesting, but neither answered the question that mattered most to me. I wasn't interested in debating whether past lives existed. I wanted to know whether exploring them could genuinely help people.
The answer did not come from another book or another theory. It came from sitting quietly with one client after another and watching something extraordinary unfold.
Over the years, I have guided many people through Past Life Regression. They have come from different countries, different cultures and very different belief systems. Some arrived convinced they had lived before, while others admitted they were deeply sceptical and expected very little to happen. Most simply came because there was something in their present life they could not fully understand. A recurring relationship pattern, an unexplained fear, a feeling of being stuck or a quiet sense that there was more to their story than they could consciously remember had brought them to my door.
Although every session has been unique, one thing has remained remarkably consistent. Every client I have guided has experienced one or more past lives. The stories have never been alike. One person may find themselves living in a small coastal village several hundred years ago, while another experiences life in a bustling city or on an isolated farm. Some revisit lives filled with love and contentment, while others encounter experiences marked by grief, conflict or profound loss. Occasionally someone recognises a soul they feel is still walking beside them in this lifetime. Just as often they meet people they have never consciously thought about before. The details change every time, yet the experience itself has become so consistent that it fundamentally changed the way I understand the soul.
That does not mean I expect everyone reading this article to reach the same conclusion. Some people interpret these experiences as genuine memories carried by the soul, while others understand them as symbolic journeys created by the subconscious mind. I have worked with thoughtful people who hold both views, and I have never felt the need to persuade them otherwise. What matters to me is not how someone labels the experience afterwards. What matters is what changes because of it.
Time after time I have watched people leave a session with a completely different understanding of themselves. A fear that had felt irrational for decades suddenly made sense. A relationship that had been confusing became easier to understand. A pattern that had repeated throughout adult life was no longer something to fight against, but something to look at with curiosity and compassion. Whether those changes came through remembering another lifetime or through a profound symbolic experience became almost secondary. The healing was real, and that is ultimately why I continue doing this work.
My own understanding of reincarnation has therefore grown out of experience rather than belief. Today, I no longer see this lifetime as the beginning of the soul's story. I see it as one chapter in a journey that stretches far beyond the years we consciously remember. That perspective has changed not only the way I work with clients, but also the way I understand life itself. It has taught me that people are often carrying far more than the experiences of their current lifetime, and that approaching one another with greater curiosity is almost always more helpful than rushing to judgement.
Why Would the Soul Live More Than One Lifetime?
Once people become comfortable with the idea that the soul may continue beyond a single lifetime, another question almost always follows. Why would it need to return at all? If life is here to help us grow, wouldn't one incarnation be enough?
I have thought about that question many times, particularly after listening to the experiences my clients describe. The longer I have worked with regression, the more difficult it has become for me to imagine that everything the soul hopes to experience could be contained within one human life.
When we look back on our own lives, we can already see how profoundly experience changes us. The person we were at twenty often bears little resemblance to the person we become decades later. Our understanding of love deepens after heartbreak. Compassion grows when we have known suffering ourselves. Patience often arrives only after years of frustration, and wisdom has a habit of appearing long after we wish we had possessed it. Even within a single lifetime, growth unfolds slowly, shaped by countless ordinary moments that rarely seem important at the time.
Now imagine trying to experience every possible aspect of being human within just one lifetime. Imagine understanding life from every perspective: as a parent and as a child, as someone who leads and someone who follows, as a person born into comfort and another born into hardship. Imagine learning what it means to forgive, to be forgiven, to lose everything, to begin again, to care for another human being and, at another point in the journey, to depend entirely on someone else's care. The richness of human experience is extraordinary, and the more I reflect on it, the more natural it seems that the soul would explore it gradually rather than all at once.
One of the things that surprised me most when I began guiding regressions was how ordinary so many past lives appeared to be. Popular culture often encourages us to expect dramatic stories about royalty, famous historical figures or remarkable achievements. Every now and then a client does experience a life that would certainly attract attention in a history book. Much more often, however, the stories are beautifully ordinary.
I remember guiding a woman whose regression took her to the life of someone who never travelled beyond the neighbouring villages where she had been born. She married young, raised children, cared for ageing parents and eventually spent many years looking after a husband whose health slowly declined. There were no great adventures, no historical events and nothing that would have seemed extraordinary to anyone living at the time. Yet when we explored that lifetime together, it became clear that her entire life revolved around one quiet lesson. She had spent decades learning how to care deeply for others without completely losing herself in the process.
When the session ended, she sat silently for several minutes before smiling. She told me that she had been living exactly the same pattern in her present life.
For years she had believed that her worth depended on how much she could do for everyone around her. She had read books about boundaries, attended workshops and promised herself countless times that she would change, yet nothing had truly shifted. Seeing the same pattern reflected in another lifetime did not magically solve everything overnight, but it helped her understand something she had never been able to see before. She stopped viewing her behaviour as a personal failure and began seeing it as part of a much longer journey of learning.
Experiences like that have changed the way I think about reincarnation. They have also changed the way I think about success. We often measure a meaningful life by achievements, recognition or the impact we have on the world around us. The soul appears to measure life very differently. It seems far more interested in what we experience than in what we accomplish. A lifetime spent quietly learning patience, forgiveness or unconditional love may contribute just as much to the soul's journey as one remembered by history, and perhaps far more than we would ever realise while we are living it.
What Actually Carries From One Lifetime to the Next?
One of the questions that naturally follows is what actually continues from one lifetime into the next. If the soul has lived before, what is it that it brings with it? Is it memory, knowledge or something else entirely?
When people first hear about reincarnation, they often imagine that the soul carries detailed memories from one life to another, almost as though every lifetime were carefully stored in an enormous library waiting to be opened again. It is an understandable image, but it doesn't reflect what I have witnessed through regression work.
Clients rarely leave a session talking about names, dates or historical facts. Those details can certainly be fascinating, particularly when they later discover information that appears to support what they experienced, but they are almost never what moves people most deeply. What stays with them is the understanding they gained about themselves.
I remember working with a client who had spent most of her adult life feeling like she never truly belonged anywhere. She had lived in several countries, built a successful career and formed close friendships, yet the feeling followed her wherever she went. She described it as carrying an invisible homesickness without knowing what she was homesick for.
During her regression she experienced the life of a woman who had been forced to leave her home after war swept through the region where she lived. She lost not only the place she loved, but also the sense of identity that came from belonging somewhere. Throughout the session there was a quiet sadness that was difficult to put into words. It wasn't simply grief for a house or a village. It was the grief of losing the feeling of being rooted.
Afterwards she wasn't interested in researching whether that village had really existed or whether the events matched historical records. She kept returning to one simple realisation.
"For the first time," she said, "I understand why I've spent my whole life searching for a place that feels like home."
That moment has stayed with me because it captures something I have seen repeatedly over the years. The historical details are rarely the true gift of the session. They simply provide the setting in which a much deeper understanding becomes possible.
Experiences like these have gradually changed the way I think about what the soul carries from one lifetime to another. I no longer believe it carries every memory in the way our minds naturally imagine memory. Instead, I think it carries the understanding those experiences created.
If you think about your own life, the same principle already exists. You probably cannot remember most ordinary days from your childhood. You have forgotten countless conversations, birthdays, journeys and school lessons. Yet all of those experiences helped shape the person you eventually became. The individual memories faded, but the wisdom remained.
Perhaps the soul learns in exactly the same way.
A lifetime may come to an end, but the compassion developed through caring for another person, the resilience discovered during hardship or the courage found in the middle of fear does not simply disappear. Those qualities become part of the soul itself, quietly influencing how it approaches future experiences. That may also explain why people often arrive in this life with natural gifts, strong intuitions or emotional tendencies that seem older than anything they can trace within their present circumstances.
Whether we choose to see that as spiritual truth or as the language of the subconscious, the invitation remains the same. Instead of asking only what happened in another lifetime, we begin asking what that experience contributed to the person we are becoming.
That is a much more interesting question.
Why Don't We Remember Our Past Lives?
Sooner or later almost everyone asks the same question.
If the soul has lived many lives, why don't we remember them?
It seems like an obvious objection. If previous lifetimes contain valuable wisdom, surely remembering them would make life much easier. We could avoid old mistakes, recognise the people we have known before and perhaps understand ourselves from the very beginning.
For a long time I thought exactly the same.
The more regression work I have done, however, the more I have come to appreciate the possibility that forgetting serves an important purpose.
Think about everything you have already experienced during this lifetime. There are probably moments you treasure and would never want to lose, but there are also experiences you would never willingly relive. Most people carry memories of grief, disappointment, heartbreak or fear. Time softens many of those memories, allowing us to move forward without constantly reliving the emotional intensity that once accompanied them.
Now imagine carrying not only the memories from this lifetime, but the emotional weight of every lifetime your soul has ever experienced. Imagine remembering every child you had lost, every partner whose hand you had held as they took their final breath, every betrayal, every mistake and every moment of regret accumulated across centuries of human experience. It becomes difficult to imagine how anyone could begin a new life with openness if they were still carrying the full emotional burden of everything that had gone before.
From that perspective, forgetting begins to look less like something that has been taken away from us and more like something that has been lovingly given.
That doesn't mean the soul begins each lifetime empty.
Far from it.
My experience has been that while detailed memories usually remain beyond conscious awareness, the deeper understanding continues. The soul seems to arrive carrying qualities rather than stories. It remembers through wisdom instead of through narrative. We may not consciously recall where our compassion first developed, but we still possess it. We may not remember the lifetime in which we learned resilience, yet resilience quietly shapes the way we meet life's challenges today.
This is also something I notice again and again during regression sessions. Clients rarely experience random moments from another lifetime. The memories that emerge almost always relate to the question they brought with them. Someone exploring an unexplained fear is often shown the experience that helps them understand that fear. Someone struggling with forgiveness may revisit a relationship that sheds light on the emotional pattern they are living today.
It is almost as though the soul opens exactly the chapter that is needed, while allowing the rest of the library to remain quietly closed until the time is right.
The more I have reflected on this, the more natural it has begun to feel. Life isn't asking us to remember everything. It is asking us to continue growing from everything the soul has already experienced, even when we no longer remember where those lessons first began.
How Past Lives Can Influence the Life We Are Living Today
One of the biggest misconceptions about Past Life Regression is that it is primarily about discovering who we once were. Popular books and television programmes have often presented regression as a journey into history, where the greatest excitement comes from uncovering another identity or another time period.
That has never been what fascinated me.
After guiding many regression sessions, I have come to see that the past itself is rarely the destination. It is simply the path that helps people understand the present more clearly.
Most clients do not come to me because they want to know whether they once lived in Ancient Egypt or Medieval England.
They come because something in their current life no longer makes sense.
A relationship keeps repeating the same painful pattern.
An unexplained fear refuses to disappear despite years of personal development.
Someone feels an overwhelming responsibility for other people, while another struggles to believe they are worthy of love, even though nothing in their present life seems to explain why.
These are the questions that bring people into my practice.
The past becomes relevant only because it sometimes helps us understand the present.
I remember working with a man who had lived with a profound fear of failure for as long as he could remember. Outwardly his life appeared successful. He had built a respected career, raised a family and was well liked by the people around him, yet every important decision filled him with anxiety. No matter how well things were going, he carried a quiet conviction that everything could disappear overnight.
During his regression he experienced the life of a craftsman whose mistake had led to the collapse of a large building project. Several people died, and although the events unfolded in another lifetime, the overwhelming feeling of responsibility was almost tangible. As the session progressed, it became clear that the emotional wound had never really been about failure itself. It was about the belief that making a mistake meant becoming unworthy of trust.
When we spoke afterwards, he said something that has stayed with me ever since.
"I've spent forty years trying to become perfect because some part of me believed it was the only way to feel safe."
Whether the lifetime he experienced represented an actual memory or a symbolic story created by his subconscious was not the most important part of the session. The important part was that he finally understood the emotional pattern that had shaped his life for decades. Once he could see it clearly, he stopped fighting himself and began approaching that fear with curiosity instead of criticism.
Experiences like these have taught me that healing often begins long before anything in our external circumstances changes. The moment we understand ourselves more deeply, we also begin relating to ourselves differently. Old habits lose some of their power, long-held fears become easier to question and patterns that once seemed permanent begin to soften.
This is why I believe Past Life Regression should never be approached as entertainment or as a search for extraordinary stories. Its greatest value lies in the insight it offers. Every lifetime that emerges during a session seems to ask the same quiet question.
"What is this experience helping you understand about yourself today?"
When people leave my practice, they rarely talk about the century they visited or the clothes they wore in another lifetime. They talk about finally understanding themselves. They talk about feeling lighter, more compassionate towards themselves and more hopeful about the future. Those conversations have convinced me that the real purpose of regression has never been to change the past.
It is to change the way we live in the present.
Why Exploring Past Lives Is Really About Understanding Yourself
One of the most unexpected lessons this work has taught me is that Past Life Regression is far less about looking backwards than most people imagine.
When someone books a session, they often believe they are coming to explore another lifetime. By the end of the day, they usually realise they have actually been exploring themselves.
That distinction matters.
If regression were only about satisfying curiosity, I doubt I would still be doing this work. Curiosity is a wonderful place to begin, but it is rarely enough to create lasting change. What continues to inspire me is watching people discover something about themselves that allows them to move forward with greater freedom than they had before.
I think of the woman who spent years believing she was somehow "too sensitive" because she felt other people's emotions so deeply. I think of the man who carried guilt he could never explain until he experienced a lifetime that helped him understand where that feeling seemed to originate. I think of the client who had always been terrified of water, despite growing up without a single traumatic experience connected to it. Each story was different, yet they all shared something in common.
The regression offered a new perspective on a life that had previously felt confusing.
Sometimes that perspective led to profound emotional healing. Sometimes it simply gave people permission to stop judging themselves quite so harshly. Very often that alone became the beginning of real change.
This is one of the reasons I encourage people not to become too attached to proving whether every detail of a regression is historically accurate. Of course it can be fascinating when information later appears to match historical records, but in my experience that has never been the heart of the work.
If someone leaves a session understanding why they have struggled with trust for most of their life, does it matter whether every historical detail can be verified?
If another person finally releases an emotional burden they have carried for decades, is the value of that healing dependent on proving where the story came from?
For me, the answer has always been no.
The purpose of regression is not to win an argument about reincarnation.
The purpose is to help people understand themselves more fully.
Whether those insights are understood as memories of the soul, expressions of the subconscious mind or something that exists somewhere between the two is ultimately a personal decision. What cannot be denied is the impact those insights often have on the people who experience them. I have watched clients become kinder towards themselves, more accepting of their own journey and more willing to let go of beliefs that had quietly limited them for years.
Perhaps that is the greatest gift Past Life Regression offers.
Not certainty.
Understanding.
And understanding has a remarkable way of changing the way we live, regardless of what we choose to believe about where that understanding came from.
What I Have Learned From Guiding Past Life Regressions
When I first trained as a Past Life Regression therapist, I imagined that the most memorable part of this work would be the past lives themselves. I thought I would remember the centuries people visited, the countries they described or the remarkable stories that emerged during hypnosis.
That isn't what stayed with me.
What I remember are the conversations after the regression has ended.
They are often quiet conversations. People are no longer trying to understand another lifetime. They are trying to make sense of their own. They begin connecting experiences they had never thought belonged together. A difficult relationship suddenly looks different. A lifelong fear no longer feels quite so overwhelming. Someone who has spent years believing there was something fundamentally wrong with them starts looking at themselves with a little more kindness.
Those are the moments that have shaped me far more than any individual regression.
Over time I have realised that this work has changed me as much as it has changed many of my clients.
It has made me slower to judge people because I have learned that we rarely know the full story of another human being. Every person carries experiences we cannot see. Even if someone has never explored Past Life Regression, they still carry the invisible history of everything they have lived through in this lifetime alone. That thought has made me approach people with greater patience and compassion than I once did.
Regression work has also changed the questions I ask.
When I was younger, I often wondered why difficult things happened to good people. Today I find myself asking different questions. Instead of asking why an experience happened, I wonder what it might be inviting someone to understand. Instead of assuming that every challenge is something to overcome as quickly as possible, I have become curious about what it may be trying to teach.
That does not mean I believe suffering is necessary or that every painful experience happens for a higher reason. Life can be deeply unfair, and some events are simply heartbreaking. I would never tell someone who is grieving that everything happened for a reason.
What I do believe is that human beings have an extraordinary capacity to find meaning in their experiences.
Again and again I have watched people transform because they began seeing their own story differently. The circumstances themselves did not change. The past remained exactly as it was. What changed was the understanding they carried forward, and sometimes that was enough to change the direction of the rest of their lives.
Perhaps that is the greatest lesson this work has given me.
The soul does not seem to ask us to become someone else.
It asks us to understand ourselves more completely.
The more we understand ourselves, the more compassion we naturally develop for others. We begin recognising that everyone we meet is carrying struggles, questions and experiences that are often invisible on the surface. Whether those experiences belong only to this lifetime or extend across many incarnations becomes less important than the simple fact that every human being deserves to be met with kindness.
That, more than anything else, is what I have taken with me from this work.
A Journey That Continues Beyond One Lifetime
Whether you are reading this because you have always believed in reincarnation or because you are simply curious about the possibility, I hope one idea stays with you.
Past lives are not about escaping the present. They are about understanding it.
The more I have worked with regression, the less interested I have become in proving where a memory comes from. My attention has shifted instead towards the changes that occur when people understand themselves more deeply. I have seen relationships heal because someone finally recognised an old emotional pattern. I have watched lifelong fears lose their grip after being understood from a completely different perspective. I have seen people leave a session feeling lighter, not because all of life's questions had been answered, but because they no longer felt they had to fight themselves.
That is why I believe the greatest value of Past Life Regression has never been the stories themselves.
The stories matter because they hold a mirror up to the life we are living today.
When we look into that mirror with honesty and curiosity, we often discover that we are carrying far more wisdom than we realised. We also discover that many of the questions we have been asking about ourselves begin to soften. Instead of wondering what is wrong with us, we begin wondering what our soul may have been trying to learn all along.
For me, that is where the real journey begins.
Not in another century or another country, but in the quiet moment when understanding replaces judgement and curiosity replaces fear. Whether someone interprets that journey as the unfolding story of the soul or as a profound exploration of the subconscious mind is entirely their own choice.
My role has never been to tell people what they should believe.
My role is simply to create a safe space in which they can explore their own experience.
After guiding so many people through Past Life Regression, I have become convinced of one thing above all else. Every person carries a story that is far richer than it first appears. Sometimes that story begins long before this lifetime. Sometimes it reveals itself through symbols, emotions or memories that seem to come from somewhere beyond ordinary awareness.
Whatever form it takes, it has the potential to deepen our understanding of ourselves.
And when we understand ourselves more deeply, we inevitably begin living differently.
Why I Continue Doing This Work
When I first trained as a Past Life Regression therapist, I thought the most remarkable part of this work would be the past lives themselves. I imagined I would remember the different centuries people visited, the places they described and the extraordinary stories that unfolded during hypnosis.
That isn't what has stayed with me.
What I remember are the conversations afterwards.
I remember the woman who finally understood why she had spent most of her life putting everyone else's needs before her own. I remember the man who realised that the fear he had carried since childhood no longer felt quite so overwhelming once he understood where it seemed to come from. I remember the quiet moments when someone stopped asking, "What's wrong with me?" and began asking a very different question: "What have I been trying to understand all along?"
Those moments have shaped me far more than any individual past life ever could.
Over the years, they have also changed the way I look at people. I have become less interested in judging behaviour and much more interested in understanding it. Every person who walks through my door has a story, and that story is always richer and more complex than it first appears. Sometimes the answers are found within this lifetime. Sometimes they seem to reach beyond it. Either way, I have learned that approaching people with curiosity almost always reveals more than approaching them with certainty.
That is one of the reasons I continue doing this work.
Past Life Regression has never been about convincing people to believe in reincarnation. Every client is free to interpret their experience in the way that feels most meaningful to them. What matters to me is not the explanation they choose afterwards, but the understanding they gain along the way. If someone leaves a session feeling more at peace with themselves, more compassionate towards their own journey or able to look at an old pattern with fresh eyes, then the session has already been worthwhile.
Looking back over the years, I realise that regression has taught me as much as it has taught many of my clients. It has reminded me that people are rarely as broken as they believe they are. More often than not, they are carrying experiences they have never fully understood. Sometimes all that is needed is the opportunity to look at those experiences from a different perspective.
Perhaps that is why I still find this work as meaningful today as I did when I first began. Every session reminds me that understanding has the power to change us in ways that force never can. When we understand ourselves more deeply, we naturally become more compassionate, not only towards ourselves, but also towards the people around us.
For me, that has become the real value of Past Life Regression. It is not about discovering who we were hundreds of years ago. It is about understanding ourselves a little more honestly today, so that we can move through this life with greater awareness, greater compassion and a deeper appreciation for the journey our soul continues to take.
You May Also Enjoy Reading
If this topic has sparked your curiosity, you may enjoy exploring these articles next:
Exploring why the soul may not consciously remember previous incarnations, and why forgetting may play an important role in the human experience.
Looking at common experiences such as unexplained fears, instant recognition, recurring patterns and natural abilities that many people associate with past lives.
Understanding how emotional patterns, relationships and recurring life themes may continue across different incarnations.
Exploring what many people experience between incarnations and how the soul prepares for a new lifetime.
Looking at soul planning, free will and the possibility that certain life themes are chosen before incarnation.
Exploring rest, healing, reflection and spiritual growth between incarnations.
Understanding the Life Review and why many spiritual traditions describe it as an opportunity for awareness rather than judgement.
Exploring soul groups, soul families and why some relationships feel instantly familiar.
Exploring common experiences often connected to past life influence and soul memory.
Understanding why past life memories may appear more through feeling, intuition, and recognition than clear conscious memory.
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Photo: Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (69-3C BCE) became Queen of Egypt 51 BCE.
Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt,
renowned for ther political acumen, multilingual abilities, and alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.
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