For Whom Is This Programme?

You may carry a symptom, a fear, or a pattern that has resisted resolution through ordinary biographical and even somatic work — something that has been named, understood, worked on, and yet it is still present.

You may have had a spontaneous experience — in meditation, in dreaming, in a psychedelic journey, in a moment of unexplained recognition — that presented itself with the texture of a memory from a life that is not the one you are currently living. You may feel that you need a guide who can help you work with it rather than dismiss it.

You may simply be drawn to the question of the soul's continuity across more than one lifetime, and want this approached with rigour — neither the easy credulity of popular spirituality, nor the reflexive scepticism that refuses to look at the evidence at all.

You may already be engaged in earlier work — becoming fully yourself, the clearing of transgenerational legacies, the preparation for dying — and have noticed that some of what surfaces in that work seems to point further back than this single biography can account for.

This programme is for people ready to work, with real clinical rigour and genuine respect for the evidence, with the possibility that the self extends further than a single lifetime.

What This Programme Is About

This work rests on two independent lines of support, drawn from entirely different methods and traditions, which converge on the same essential claim: that the boundary of a single lifetime is not the true boundary of the self — and that this larger boundary has both an ancient philosophical and religious history, and a modern clinical and evidentiary basis.

This is not a programme that asks for belief. It offers two separate, serious bodies of evidence — one historical and evidentiary, one clinical and experiential — and lets each speak in its own register. What is then done with that evidence, in the actual work of regression, is approached with the same care, the same scepticism toward easy conclusions, and the same respect for the person's own experience that characterises every other programme in this practice.

It would be a mistake, though, to think of this work as beginning only once hypnotic depth is reached. In practice, it often begins much earlier. The act of speaking about a pattern that has been carried for years; the act of writing it down, in one's own words; the conversation that follows, in which what has been written is taken seriously and reflected back with care — these alone frequently loosen something. Clients regularly report that insight begins to surface, and that the healing process is already in motion, before the regression session itself has even taken place. The regression session is the deepest point of this work, not its only point — the whole sequence, from the first conversation onward, is the work.

My Path to This Work

My own grounding in this work has two roots, separated by thirty years, which turned out to converge.

Between 1987 and 1990 I undertook a three-year training in hypnotherapy offered by the Dutch Association of Psychiatrists — a rigorous clinical formation, conducted within psychiatry itself, that gave me the foundational skill of inducing and working within hypnotic depth safely and precisely. I have used hypnotherapy continuously in my clinical work in the decades since.

It was only much later, in 2018 and 2019, that I trained specifically in Regression to Previous Lives with Paul Aurand, MHt, in New York. Paul Aurand is the Director of Education and lead trainer of the Michael Newton Institute — the organisation founded to carry forward the Life Between Lives regression method pioneered by Dr. Michael Newton. My own training with Aurand was specifically in past-life regression technique, not in the separate Life Between Lives protocol that is the Institute's signature method; the two are related but distinct disciplines within the same lineage, and it is the former that forms the technical foundation of this module.

What I bring to this work, then, is not a single technique but an integration: nearly four decades of clinical hypnotherapy, specific training in regression to previous lives, and the wider body of psychotherapeutic frameworks described in the toolbox below — brought to bear on whatever material a person's own depth of consciousness actually presents.

I. Reincarnation: Roots in the Civilisations That Formed Us

A brief overview — not exhaustive, oriented toward the two streams that most shaped Western inheritance, with India as the deeper current beneath both.

Greece — the Philosophical Root

Metempsychosis enters Western philosophical thought through Pythagoras, in the sixth century BCE. Pythagoras claimed direct memory of his own past lives.

The doctrine deepens through Empedocles and reaches its most enduring philosophical form in Plato — in the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and above all in the myth of Er that closes the Republic: the soul's journey after death, its judgment, and its return to a body suited to what it had attained.

Judaism and Early Christianity — the Religious Root, and Its Foreclosure

Reincarnation becomes a major teaching within Kabbalah. The doctrine of gilgul first appears in the Sefer ha-Bahir, around 1150–1200, and is then elaborated at far greater length in the Zohar, before reaching its most systematic form in the sixteenth century through Isaac Luria in Safed. Gilgul ties reincarnation to tikkun — cosmic rectification — with souls returning to complete unfinished moral and spiritual business. The aim of gilgul is not endless repetition but release from the cycle of life and death altogether — a flame returning, finally, to the boundless light of God.

Before 553 CE, the soul's pre-existence was a live and serious subject of Christian theological inquiry, associated above all with Origen of Alexandria. How the Christian Church came to outlaw this belief, sealed at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 CE, was a very complex process, strongly politically motivated. Justinian sought the imperial unity of his fractured Byzantine Empire, and chose to appease the faction which appeared politically stronger, the faction which opposed Origen of Alexandria and his school. It is very interesting to observe how political interests changed a theological dogma, hence the life philosophy for millions of people over many generations, by now for more than one billion people for around 1500 years.

Yet the belief in the transmigration of souls never fully vanished from the Christian mystical undercurrent. The teachings of the Cathars, the Bogomils, the Christian Kabbalists who took it over from the Jewish Kabbalah, not from Origen, continued to surface for centuries afterward.

The practical effect, regardless of the more tangled technical history, was the closing of this particular theological door within institutional Christianity.

India — the Deeper Current Beneath Both

India gave reincarnation its most complete philosophical architecture. The first textual traces about it appear in the Rigveda and the Yajurveda, and the doctrine receives its full philosophical weight in the Upanishads, roughly 1100 to 500 BCE, through the concepts of atman, the individual eternal self, and Brahman, the unchanging reality underlying all existence. The soul remains bound to the wheel of rebirth only through ignorance of its true nature, and through the law of moral causality by which actions generate consequences across lives as well as within them. The shared goal across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain tradition alike is liberation from the wheel of rebirth, attained by following a life of moral duty and progressively resolving one's accumulated moral debts.

It is India's doctrine, more than the Greek or the Judeo-Christian, that supplies the precise psychological logic this module needs: ignorance, not metaphysical decree, is what binds the soul to the cycle — and it is exactly this logic, translated into clinical terms, that the second half of this module takes up.

II. COEX: The Clinical Evidence

Stanislav Grof — a Czech-American psychiatrist who began this research in the 1950s and 1960s in Prague before continuing it in the United States — observed, across hundreds of LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions and later through Holotropic Breathwork, that the psyche does not store emotionally significant material as a disconnected scatter of isolated incidents. It organises that material into what he called systems of condensed experience, or COEX systems: clusters of memories unified by a shared emotional or physical quality — the way iron filings arrange themselves around an invisible magnetic field.

A COEX (condensed experience) is a specific constellation or cluster of memories bound together by a similar basic theme, and carrying a strong emotional charge of the same quality.

For example, memories of guilt and remorse, or anxiety about being excluded, or envy, extending into many life periods, including childhood, easily triggered by events that may seem to be innocent, and which do not find resolution through the usual therapeutic work.

Grof himself, after decades of clinical observation, stated:

“The existence of past-life experiences with all their remarkable characteristics is an unquestionable fact that can be verified by any serious researcher who is sufficiently open-minded and interested to check the evidence.” — Stanislav Grof

Where This Material Actually Appears

What gives Grof's observation its weight is that the same phenomenon recurred across a wide range of doorways into non-ordinary consciousness: psychedelic therapy with patients facing terminal illness; Holotropic Breathwork; meditation; sensory isolation; bodywork; spontaneous spiritual emergencies arising with no drug or technique involved at all; children in ordinary waking consciousness. The breadth of contexts supports Grof's own view that he was observing a genuine and stable feature of how the psyche organises itself.

I treated a colleague, a medical doctor, who throughout his whole life chose to work in the emergency service. He suffered throughout his life from insomnia. When he retired, he became depressed and agitated. Therapeutic work revealed a pattern he was not aware of: he was always hyper alert, extremely vigilant; he had a chronic feeling of guilt, so much part of his default system, that he could not even identify it, give it a name. Therapy also revealed that his mother was physically and emotionally abusive towards his little sister, whom he tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to protect. As a child, he was always on guard.  His father was weak, rather scared of his wife. We unravelled this story, and he better understood his pattern of feeling guilty, hyper alertness, his choice for working in the emergency service of the hospital, his present depression, his incapacity to relax, and his tendency to feel guilty rather than enjoy the leisure time offered by his retirement. Yet we both felt that this was not the whole story. Regression to a previous life uncovered a life in which he was a fifteen years old boy, living in a village embroiled in a feud with neighboring villagers. He had to stay awake night after night, as a watch. The night the village was attacked, and many members of his village were killed, including his grandparents and his mother, he had fallen asleep, and did not alert the village. He felt that the guilt and vigilance in this life carried forward the episode in his life as a village boy. This is the gist of COEX – a system of condensed experiences permeating one's life, sometimes with roots that precede it.

The experience of my colleague when he re-lived the village and the brutal attack carried what researchers in this field call a noetic quality — the subject's own settled conviction that they had encountered something real rather than invented.

Many clients who embark on this type of therapy report the sense that a present relationship or recurring life situation is the continuation of something begun, left incomplete, or owed in a different lifetime — without the experience necessarily resolving into the vivid, specific narrative of a single, concrete, remembered circumstance.

This is where clinical material and the historical traditions surveyed above meet most directly. The Kabbalistic doctrine of gilgul describes precisely this mechanism in religious language centuries before Grof's research — souls returning specifically to complete unfinished moral and spiritual business. This tallies with the Vedic concept of “karma” - very complex, but pointing to the same phenomenon.

The Practical Toolbox

A clarification belongs at the start of this section, because it corrects a common misunderstanding — held by many prospective clients and, frankly, by many practitioners who use the word loosely.

Hypnotherapy is not, itself, a treatment. No one is treated ‘with hypnotherapy’ in the way one might be treated with a medication or a single defined technique. Hypnotherapy is the skill of helping a person move into a deeper or expanded state of consciousness — a hypnotic trance — in which layers of the mind not accessible to ordinary, default waking awareness become available for direct work. What happens once that depth has been reached is a separate clinical decision: the therapist draws on one or several conceptual frameworks and methodologies, chosen according to what the specific person and the specific material actually require. A competent hypnotherapist is therefore not a specialist in one technique but someone trained across a range of approaches, fluent enough in each to choose well.

My own training reflects this breadth, built up over nearly four decades. The foundational three-year training with the Dutch Association of Psychiatrists (1987–1990) gave me the core skill of inducing and working within hypnotic depth safely. Building on that foundation, I have drawn since on several distinct schools of thought, each contributing something specific to this work:

Ego-state therapy — developed by John G. Watkins and Helen H. Watkins — understands the personality not as a single, monolithic entity but as composed of distinct ego states, separate parts of the self, each with its own history, feelings, and perspective, that develop naturally through life's challenges and can also form around trauma. Working with these states directly, once hypnotic depth has been reached, is often the most direct route to material that ordinary conversation cannot access. Gerald Edelstein's contributions to trance-based ego-state work extend this foundation further.

Parts work more broadly — the practice of identifying, dialoguing with, and healing distinct aspects of the self — has deep roots across several therapeutic traditions beyond ego-state therapy specifically. This lineage was given its most complete and widely practised contemporary form by Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D., in Internal Family Systems (IFS) — a framework I draw on directly, and which Schwartz built by integrating insights from Family Therapy into the parts-work tradition, giving the internal parts of a person the same kind of systemic attention a family therapist gives to members of an actual family.

Trauma therapy — including training in which Bessel van der Kolk was among my teachers — grounds this work in the body's own storage and expression of trauma, a perspective essential for working with material, including past-life material, that so often presents first as a physical symptom rather than a narrative memory.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) contributes specific elements where a client's present-day thought patterns need direct, structured attention alongside the deeper work.

Imagery work forms a substantial part of my own training and practice, and several distinct lineages feed into it. Hanscarl Leuner, whom I trained with independently of my hypnotherapy formation with the Dutch Association of Psychiatrists, developed Guided Affective Imagery (Katathymes Bilderleben) as a structured method for using spontaneous imagery therapeutically. Milton H. Erickson's indirect and metaphor-rich approach to hypnotic suggestion shaped how imagery is offered rather than imposed. Jeanne Achterberg's work on imagery and healing, and Gerald Epstein's and Colette Aboulker-Muscat's methods of waking-imagery practice, contribute further technique and depth to this part of the work.

In the specific context of regression to previous lives, these frameworks are not used as separate, sequential modules but as an integrated set of lenses brought to bear on whatever material actually presents itself once hypnotic depth has been reached. A past-life memory that surfaces with the emotional charge of an unresolved ego state will be worked with as an ego state; one that surfaces as a held pattern affecting several family-like relationships across the material will be worked with through the IFS lens of parts in relationship; one that surfaces primarily in the body, before it has any narrative content at all, will be worked with through trauma-informed somatic attention first, before any story is invited to form.

The Arc of the Programme

Unlike a single intensive day, this programme unfolds across a sequence of separate appointments, each with its own purpose, separated by enough time for reflection and preparation between them. The work moves through four stages.

Stage 1 — The Orientation Encounter

The programme begins with a conversation, not a commitment. Before any regression work is considered, there needs to be a genuine meeting: who this person is, what has brought them to this particular threshold, and what specific question, symptom, fear, or pattern they believe this work might address.

This encounter serves a second, equally important function: discernment. Not everyone who is curious about regression to previous lives is well served by it, and not every reason for seeking it is, on its own, a sufficient reason to proceed. This conversation is where that judgment is made — together, without either false encouragement or unnecessary gatekeeping. A reason grounded in genuine, specific need — a recurring pattern that has resisted other approaches, a symptom whose roots remain unclear despite real effort to understand it, a spontaneous experience that needs serious engagement rather than dismissal — is a good reason. Curiosity alone, or an expectation that this work will provide easy answers or dramatic revelations, is usually not.

Acceptance into the programme is not automatic. It follows from this encounter, and from a shared sense that the work is likely to be genuinely useful to this person, at this time, for this reason.

Stage 2 — Writing the Bio

Once accepted, the client is asked to write their own biography — not a comprehensive autobiography, but a focused account of their life, written with particular attention to the specific pattern, symptom, or question that brought them to this work: its history within this lifetime, the form it has taken, what has already been tried, and anything already sensed, dreamed, or intuited about its possible deeper roots.

This document does real work before the next appointment even takes place. The act of writing it, slowly and honestly, on one's own, frequently brings clarity that conversation alone does not produce — connections the person had not consciously noticed, the shape of a pattern becoming visible once it is set down in their own words. The Bio also becomes an essential written reference, returned to throughout the rest of the programme whenever emerging material needs to be checked against what is already known and stated about the person's present life.

Stage 3 — The Preparation Talk and the Regression Itself

This stage is held across two separate appointments.

The preparation talk comes first. Here the Bio is discussed directly — what surfaced, what it clarified, what it perhaps made newly visible. The specific focus for the regression work is confirmed, refined if necessary, and agreed. Practical matters are also addressed here: what to expect from hypnotic depth, how safety and communication will work throughout the regression session, and what kind of preparation will support the work to come. By the end of this hour, an appointment is made for the regression session itself, giving the client time between the two — to let the preparation settle, rather than moving directly from talk into trance.

The regression session (two to three hours), held at the appointment made during the preparation talk, is the heart of the programme. Once sufficient hypnotic depth has been reached — itself requiring real, unhurried time, since rushing this part of the work is the most common cause of material that proves too thin or too suggestible to be trustworthy — the focus agreed upon in the preparation talk becomes the doorway. The client is guided to bring their attention to the felt sense of the symptom or pattern in the body, to its emotional quality, and from there, gently, to follow wherever that felt sense leads.

The duration is not fixed in advance, because the work follows what actually arises rather than a predetermined schedule. Sometimes this unfolds as a single, continuous narrative — a specific place, a specific identity, a specific death, encountered with the vividness and felt reality that distinguishes this material from ordinary fantasy. Sometimes it unfolds in fragments whose coherence only becomes clear later, in integration.

Throughout, the guiding principle is the one established in the COEX material discussed earlier: when something has not yet released its full charge, the work continues rather than stops, following the thread downward to wherever it actually leads.

Stage 4 — Integration

The return from hypnotic depth to ordinary waking consciousness is itself handled carefully within the regression session — but the larger work of making sense of what has been encountered is given its own appointment, held after enough time has passed for the immediate intensity to settle and for the material to begin, on its own, finding its place in the person's ongoing awareness.

This is where the Bio, written before any of the rest of the work began, becomes essential again. The material that surfaced during the regression is brought into direct relationship with the specific symptom, fear, or pattern named at the very start of the programme. What correspondence is there? What has shifted — even in the time since the regression session itself — in how the original concern feels? What understanding has emerged that the person did not have access to before this work began?

Integration also addresses the practical question every regression eventually raises: what does one do with this, afterward? Specific guidance is given for what to notice over the coming weeks, how to recognise whether the original symptom or pattern begins to shift, and whether — and if so, when — a return for further work would be warranted.

The programme closes only once both client and guide agree that the material has been genuinely grounded: that the person is leaving not with raw, unprocessed material but with something they can carry forward, continue to reflect on, and keep working with on their own.

What You Can Expect to Gain

Every regression is individual, and no two sessions surface the same material in the same way. What follows is not a promise of a particular outcome but a description of what those who undertake this work, with genuine focus and honest preparation, consistently find.

Clarity. The symptom, fear, or pattern that brought you to this work rarely arrives with a story attached — it arrives as something felt, recurring, resistant to explanation. What regression work offers, more reliably than almost any other gain, is a story: a specific place, a specific identity, a specific event that the pattern can finally be traced to. Whether or not that story is verifiable, its arrival changes the relationship to the pattern. A fear that has always felt nameless and disproportionate to anything in this life acquires a name, a context, a reason. Clarity of this kind does not require external proof to be genuinely useful — the felt sense of finally understanding why is itself a significant shift.

Insight. Beyond the specific narrative that surfaces, regression work frequently reveals the deeper logic of a pattern — not just what happened, but what it meant, what was at stake, what was learned or left unlearned. This is close to what the Indian tradition calls the movement from ignorance toward understanding: the pattern that bound you was bound by not-knowing, and what regression offers is precisely the kind of knowing that loosens the grip of what was previously only felt. Insight gained this way often extends beyond the specific symptom worked on — people frequently find that understanding one deep pattern illuminates the logic of several others.

Healing — and a path opened toward more complete healing. The relief that follows a successful regression session is real, but it is rarely the final word. As with the COEX material discussed earlier, a symptom's deepest root, once reached and worked through, often resolves significantly — sometimes completely — but the work of integration in the weeks that follow is where this resolution is consolidated or, in some cases, where it becomes clear that further layers remain. This programme is honest about that: a single regression session opens a path toward healing rather than guaranteeing its completion in a single sitting. For some, one session is sufficient. For others, what surfaces in one regression points toward further work — another life, another layer, another aspect of the same pattern — and the integration session is where that judgment, together, is made.

A broadened understanding of who you are. Independent of whether any specific session resolves the symptom that brought you here, the experience of encountering material that presents itself with the full sensory and emotional weight of memory — material that the ordinary, single-lifetime account of yourself cannot explain — tends to permanently widen a person's sense of their own boundaries. The self that arrives for the orientation encounter and the self that leaves the integration session are not identical, even when the specific symptom has only partially shifted. Something about the felt scale of one's own existence has changed. This broadening is, in itself, one of the most consistently reported and most valued outcomes of this work — quite apart from whatever happens to the particular pattern that prompted the request.

Structure, Format, and Investment

• The Orientation Encounter — a conversation, not yet a commitment, in which the reason for seeking this work is discussed honestly and a shared judgment is made about whether regression work is the right approach at this time.
• Writing the Bio — undertaken independently, once accepted into the programme, as preparatory work that grounds everything that follows. Once submitted, the Bio is read and reflected on carefully before the next appointment.
• The Preparation Talk — one hour, in which the Bio is discussed, the specific focus for the regression is confirmed, and the appointment for the regression session itself is made.
• The Regression Session — two to three hours, at a separate appointment, the heart of the programme.
• The Integration Session — two hours, at a further separate appointment, held once there has been time for the immediate intensity of the regression to settle.

Investment: €1,800 for the complete programme — the orientation encounter, the careful reading and reflection on the Bio, the preparation talk, the regression session, and the integration session.

This figure is confirmed at the orientation encounter, once the specific scope of work has been discussed.

Closing

Every tradition surveyed in this module — the Greek, the Jewish, the early Christian before its sixth-century foreclosure, the Indian — arrived independently at the same essential intuition: that a single lifetime is too short a frame to hold the whole story of a soul. What modern clinical work has added is not a new belief but a new kind of attention — Grof's careful clinical observation of symptoms that will not release until they are followed past the boundary of this one biography.

The programme does not ask you to believe anything before you begin. It simply asks you to look closely at what is actually there — in the historical record, in the clinical literature, and, if you choose to undertake this work, in your own felt experience, in the room, in trance, following a thread you did not consciously choose.

What you carry into the orientation encounter is a question, or a symptom, or a fear that has resisted every attempt to resolve it within the frame of this single life. What this programme offers is not a guarantee that the frame will prove too small — but a serious, disciplined way of finding out, and a structure equal to whatever is found.

Some debts are not paid in a single lifetime. Some understanding is not reached in a single conversation with oneself. This programme asks for nothing more than the willingness to look further back than is usually assumed — and to bring back, whatever is found there, into the life you are actually living now.