Losing Oneself

Sitting on the couch explaining to me why she was attracted to have Past Life Regression sessions at the young age of 25, Angela starts a lot of sentences with the phrase “I guess…” I notice this unconscious habit of hers. It seems to me she always has to guess herself.

Many words said, it is still quite vague to me how she was attracted to Past Life Regression. There seems to be some reasons and patterns rather than simple curiosity, yet she can’t bring to clear description… Some relationship exploration, maybe career as well…

Angela is a local who lived in London for the past two years. In London, she was doing whatever “job” she could find to keep going. It was also in London that she felt strongly that she had been there before. Upon coming back to Vancouver, one of the first things she did, before even getting a cell phone, was to contact a Past Life Regressionist.

Angela is getting clearer and clearer what she wants to do career-wise: to be an actor and eventually to direct films. This “easy” decision has taken Angela many years to seriously consider. “I had to really work on the fear of losing myself.” She tells me.

I feel I am lucky again when I hear this, as I love working with actors. Anyone who can act, can go into hypnosis very easily. It’s true with Angela. It takes less than three minutes for her to enter a past life scene and start to “see” things. Yet very interestingly, even though Angela proves to be an easy hypnotic subject, she is not very relaxed. I lift her arm. It’s rigid. I ask her to relax. She must be “guessing” what that means. So much so that she wants to help, she doesn’t know how to relax her arm.

The fear of losing herself and losing control is big with this talented beautiful young actress.

That male past life starts as a bored, disconnected and detached lawyer named John in England in the 20th century. Sometimes I get a “boring” life in my work, yet I always know life itself is never boring for the soul. It’s always exciting because it’s always the soul’s choice and decision for a particular life. Boredom often comes from self-denial and self-disallowance.

Something is so deeply buried that John can’t tell me much about the reason for boredom. I have to bring him straightforwardly to the moment of death. At the age of 78. Looking back and reflecting on the life that he lived, John sees the turning point of this life and tells me the story of how he lost his wife to the current in a river… Everything starts to make sense of how John felt and behaved; of how Angela feels from time to time; and of how it was really hard for Angela to articulate at the beginning.

At the end of the session, I tell Angela, each personality in each life is like a drop of water. All water comes from Ocean. When we have the separate identity, we start to have fears – When it’s too cold, the drop of water has fear of being frozen. When it’s too hot, the drop of water has fear of evaporation. A drop of water is too small to stay the same forever, though it strives to. The only way to keep itself is to return to ocean. Uninformed, the drop of water can be afraid of losing its identity when merging into the ocean.

Little does the drop of water know, all the pain of survival comes from the identification of a drop of water.

A drop of water is not just a drop of water, it is the entire ocean holistically manifested as a drop of water. A drop of water has never stopped being the ocean. It just thinks it’s only a drop of water.

Therefore, upon returning to the ocean, the drop of water will not disappear, it will become the ocean. So instead of ceasing to exist, it will ecstatically wake up from the dream of being a drop of water and realize it has always been the ocean.

Losing oneself – it all depends on what the “self” refers to. If it’s losing the false identity, as there is actually no “person” in it, there’s only excitement and ecstasy waiting at the moment of “losing”. And we don’t have to take it personally.

In a way, it’s like sexual activity. One has to lose oneself in it to enjoy the union. The ecstasy comes from merging oneself in it.

The joy of acting comes from losing oneself in it. Through this, one realizes more of the self.

Losing oneself is also a great channeling state. It’s one of the most natural states for us to be.

In our hypnotherapy session, I guide Angela to become the drowned wife Annabel. Either because Angela is an excellent actress, or because the loss of John’s body transparentizes the information, as Annabel, she tells me that the moment she was taken by the current, her head hit a rock and she died quite quickly. Then she adds, “I knew it was time.” – Further she tells me this was meant to happen so John can learn his lesson, to appreciate what he has, to be more present. John was always thinking about how others thought about him and busy keeping up the image of a successful lawyer. The purpose of this drowning is for John to get in touch within.

The sadness makes John cut himself away for the rest of his life.

I ask Angela, as a film director, how she can change the ending of this film. Very quickly Angela gives me another version of the ending. Dying at the same place and the same age, by the same cause, this time John is surrounded by flowers and visitors and love…

I think Angela is indeed a very good film director.