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May 15, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:03:59

Edition 453 - Steve Burgess

Hypnotic regression expert Steve Burgess on past lives and how - he believes - accessing might help people cope with problems in the here and now...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
	Well, thank you very much for all of your kind emails that have really sustained me through this period of lockdown.
	It's been weeks and weeks and weeks, and for me, maybe for you too, the only person I've seen in each of these weeks has been the checkout person once a week at the local supermarket, and I've quickly brushed past, well, not brushed past, being two meters away from, people in the park when I cycle, and that's about it.
	And I never really thought that would be a challenge for me.
	But I don't know about you.
	I definitely have found that it is so.
	And thank you very much for the emails that have really sustained me, the suggestions, and just the little snapshots of your life that you've been kind enough to share, whether you're in Schwarz or Shawa, isn't it, in Canada or wherever you are in the world.
	It's really kind of you to connect with me from, I had an email recently from Dubai and all points in the world and everywhere over the UK and the US.
	It's massively supportive and really nice that you do that.
	But every so often, you get an email that completely blindsides you.
	And usually that email arrives on a day when you really don't need it.
	Today was that day.
	I got an email from a listener who first of all didn't give his name and later named himself as Chris, who said, and everybody's entitled to a view, of course.
	And I do ask for emails, so I got one.
	The email basically said, especially after the recent Michael Tellinger interview, all I ever do is skirt over topics.
	I never get into them.
	I don't have the understanding of them.
	I buy everything that the mainstream media pumps out.
	Really?
	And I waffle on.
	In fact, I'm going to use a slightly bad word here.
	It's not a very bad word.
	So if you want to just skip the next couple of seconds, he said that at the beginning of every show, I do five minutes of waffle and bollocks.
	Okay.
	Well, I thought I was trying to communicate with my listener.
	But I really don't understand.
	If you get to a stage where something annoys you so much and you hate the person who's doing it so much, why listen?
	You know, I mean, if that's the general feeling, then of course I just stop doing the show.
	But it doesn't seem to be as far as I know.
	But I try and do my best with this show, and it's got a bit of me in it.
	And you can only be yourself.
	I had phases in my life and career where I tried to be people I admired and I couldn't do it.
	So I'm only being me.
	So my advice to Chris, very sincerely from my heart, was that I think he's reached the stage now where he's got so much knowledge that I am not imparting and I'm not asking the right questions.
	And this goes for anybody who feels that way.
	Then you have to get out there.
	Life is very short.
	Don't waste it.
	Do your own podcast.
	Reach your own audience and get your views across to make sure that people hear them.
	Now, thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work as ever.
	Thank you to Haley for doing fantastic work booking the guests, which includes Steve Burgess, the guest on this edition, hypnotherapist and past life regression man.
	We're going to talk all about that and the benefits he says that it can have for people by correcting things that happened not in this life on this plane, but maybe somewhere else.
	We'll find out about that.
	Now, I've got to say this, if we were doing this on radio in the UK, I would have to say at the beginning, the regulations would require, but it's common sense anyway, that if you have a pain in your leg, I've had a pain in my ankle, in my foot rather, for weeks now.
	And I really must do something about it.
	If you have a pain in your foot or you have any other medical issue, then of course you have to go and see a GP, a doctor, an MD, as you say in the United States, before you go and see a hypnotherapist or anybody.
	That's just common sense.
	We have to get that out there, and it's very important that we do.
	But having said that, I think the conversation you're going to hear is very, very interesting, or will be.
	So thank you very much for bearing with me, for keeping the faith, and also for sustaining me during these weeks of lockdown.
	We have more weeks to go, according to our Prime Minister.
	So, you know, we have to hang together during these times.
	Okay, at the risk of talking more waffle, let's get to the guest now.
	Steve Burgess, further north than I am in England.
	And Steve, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	Thank you very much, Howard.
	It's a real honor to be here.
	No, it's nice to be talking, Steve, in these difficult times.
	Whereabouts are you?
	I said you were further north than me, but that's all I know.
	Yeah, I'm stranded in Hull at the moment, up in Yorkshire.
	I spend most of the time living in Norway, but I came back just before lockdown for a couple of weeks to put my one-man show on the adventures of a hypnotherapist in Hull.
	And of course, everything got cancelled and I got locked down here.
	The borders of Norway are locked to non-residents.
	So here I am with the rest of the English public.
	And you've no idea, I presume, when you're going to be able to go back.
	None whatsoever.
	Very frustrating.
	So the borders are still closed.
	I understand they are opening things up fairly rapidly over there because they haven't really had much of a problem with the virus at all.
	So schools went back last week and I'm just hoping that in the next couple of weeks that things will be opened up.
	I think the ferries, don't they go from Hull anyway up to Norway?
	Not anymore.
	No, they don't.
	No, so it's all flights nowadays.
	All right.
	Oh, well, I hope you're able to.
	Oh, dear.
	And flying, of course, massive problems with that now.
	Exactly.
	I've got friends who are in and around the aviation industry and there's a lot of suffering.
	Well, I hope you're able to go back soon.
	Now, listen, nice.
	I've got a push bike.
	I've got a push bike.
	Well, no, the government's telling us we've all got a cycle.
	I'll tell you something.
	When I'm working from the radio station, that is a 16-mile, 17-mile cycle at nighttime from here, and a 17-mile cycle through places I wouldn't want to be cycling past in the early hours.
	I am not going to be cycling when we go back.
	Well, we will be, but it's a question of when, but, you know, I'm not going to cycle.
	Now, hypnotherapist, tell me your story.
	Okay, well, I've been a hypnotherapist for over 28 years now and working in the UK and in Norway.
	and also now I do a lot of sessions on Skype around the world.
	And most of my work is regression-based.
	My speciality is regression.
	And in over 15,000 therapy sessions now, I've completed thousands of thousands of past life regression sessions, which is what I'm sort of mainly known for.
	Right.
	Talk to me about hypnotherapy first before we get into the regressions.
	There's a reason why I'm doing this because I think a lot of people don't understand what it is, how it works and how you tap into it.
	I went to see, and in fact, I interviewed when I was probably 22, 23, a hypnotherapist in Liverpool.
	And she was going to do some work on me, you know, sort of confidence stuff for my broadcasting and what have you.
	And she wasn't able to get me under the fluence or whatever it is.
	I just wasn't suggestible in that way.
	So I've always not really understood hypnotherapy.
	So maybe you can explain.
	Okay, I'll do my best.
	Now, the first thing is you've used a word, though, that we therapists don't use, which is to say under.
	So when we go into hypnosis, we just simply go into an inner state, a focused state, maybe even a relaxed state.
	So what I'm usually saying to people is think relaxation.
	And that really is very much what hypnosis is.
	It's very similar to meditation.
	So anybody who meditates regularly will be doing hypnosis regularly without realizing.
	Now, some people are more open to hypnosis than others.
	About 25 to 30% of people have an ability to be hypnotized, which is really quite remarkable.
	In the same way that some people are very good at playing sport or very good at playing musical instruments, some people are very good at going into trance, into hypnosis.
	So you're possibly not one of those.
	It could have been that you were too young as well, Howard, back then.
	You know, 22, you know, sometimes you're not really mature enough to sort of go with these things.
	Or it could be that you're maybe not that good in hypnosis and a few people are not.
	Having said that, everybody can be hypnotized.
	The only people who can't go into trance, and that's our jargon word for hypnosis, trance, are people who are either drunk or stoned or mentally subnormal, which means that everybody else can be hypnotized in some way.
	But the depth of the trance is different to everybody.
	So it could have been that you were in just a light state of trance back then, but you were maybe expecting more out of it.
	You were maybe expecting what a lot of people expect is to be in some sort of coma type state or to not know what's happening, which is really not what hypnosis is.
	Hypnosis itself is a focused state of relaxation.
	We all go into trance every day when we go on automatic pilot in the car or when we get wrapped up in a TV program.
	Those are trance experiences, natural trances.
	So we all go into those sort of trances.
	It's funny you should say that, you know, I used to drive into Berkshire every Saturday, very early in the morning to do a radio show.
	And I'd made that drive so many times over the years that I knew every piece of tarmac and every blade of grass by the roadside.
	You know, I just knew it all.
	And sometimes I would do that.
	And I was perfectly safe.
	It was half past four in the morning, whatever.
	But I would get to the point where I would join the M4, which would be near Heathrow Airport.
	And I wouldn't have remembered the drive from Apex Corner to Heathrow Airport, which is about, I'd say, about five miles.
	And most of the details of it, including, maybe I shouldn't be admitting this, but including road signals and stuff like that, I simply had erased the details of the journey in my head.
	And I never understood how every so often that would happen.
	Yes, yeah.
	And that's trance.
	And as you said, you said it's perfectly safe.
	So trance is natural.
	It's a completely natural experience.
	And people tend to get frightened of hypnosis because they've seen stage hypnotists who are all about, you know, making people do stupid things and humiliating them.
	Or they've seen stuff on the TV, which is Hollywood hypnosis, which isn't real.
	Hypnosis itself is just this relaxed state where we can go inside ourselves and tap into the subconscious part of the mind.
	And Steve, if somebody doesn't want to be hypnotized, it's very important to say, I'm guessing, you know, if somebody really is against the idea of being hypnotized, you're not going to be able to do it.
	It will be very difficult.
	We can do it in sort of a manipulative way, but that still won't work for most people.
	It would work for a very few people, because we're always open to suggestion, of course, in different ways.
	You've just got to find the right way.
	But you're quite right.
	The vast majority of people, if they don't want to be hypnotized, it just doesn't happen.
	And I suppose a lot of this talks about consciousness and perception.
	If you show people the same event, if you show 10 or 12 people the same events that may happen very quickly, chances are that all of them will have a different account of that event, which means that they're all in a completely different headspace.
	So I guess you're in that kind of area.
	Very much so.
	That's trance.
	You know, it's just when people go into some sort of altered state of consciousness, it's different for everybody.
	So that's a good way of looking at it.
	Yeah.
	And what is it then?
	Which part of the brain, what area are you accessing?
	Well, there's two things here.
	First of all, when we're in trance, we are usually still very conscious.
	So we can still think, we can still analyze, we're still aware of what's going on.
	But we tend to use, once we talk about the subconscious mind, once we start to relax a little bit, once we start to go inside ourselves, we move into the deeper mind.
	And the way I tend to talk about this is to say the mind is like an iceberg.
	So the tip of the iceberg above the waves is the thinking mind, the conscious thinking mind.
	And that's sort of 0.0001% of our mind.
	But beneath the surface of the waves is the vast bulk of the iceberg.
	And that's the 99.999% that we don't usually use on a day-to-day basis.
	That's the subconscious mind.
	So that's the powerhouse of the mind.
	And this, of course, is one reason why hypnotherapy is so powerful and effective and very often very fast as a therapy because we're using the engine room of the mind instead of just the tip of the mind, the conscious mind.
	And sometimes this archive, this 99%, is closed off by people for a reason.
	It's something they don't want to remember.
	It's perhaps a traumatic or unpleasant experience.
	It's something they don't want to know about.
	Or something that maybe was so impactful and so big at the time that they just simply, I don't know, they can't get to grip with it.
	I think here of a man that I interviewed a few years ago.
	Sadly, he died a couple of years back.
	Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, who needed to get, from all the accounts, hypnosis and deep relaxation to try and come to terms with and recall aspects of the Apollo journey.
	I'm not sure if he was the only Apollo astronaut to do this.
	I suspect he wasn't.
	Do you know, Jimmy, I've not heard of that, Howard.
	I didn't know that was the case.
	And yeah, that's a strange thing.
	I mean, he was trying to remember what had happened in those experiences.
	Well, I suppose, you know, I mean, look, I'm just talking off the top of my head here, but from people that I've interviewed, I suppose that when you're on the moon and having to do all of those things, you are concentrating on the technical tasks that you have to concentrate on.
	Otherwise, you're not going to get back alive and you're not going to do the experiments while you're there.
	But the enormity of actually being there and having that experience and stepping out, maybe that gets swept a little under the carpet because you're so busy doing other things.
	That makes a lot of sense.
	That really makes a lot of sense when you say it like that.
	Yes, I can imagine that.
	Hypnotherapy, hypnosis would be an ideal way to access that information.
	And I'm surprised that he didn't use hypnosis or if he didn't get more out of the experience because it's ideal for that.
	Well, I'm just reading, I've got in front of me here a piece from the Independent newspaper that I've just found while we were talking.
	It says, he underwent hypnosis and deep relaxation to try and recapture the emotions of the return flight.
	What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness, he wrote in his memoir, The Way of the Explorer.
	I mean, he was the most spiritual of all the astronauts and, in fact, did a lot of work in that field up to his death.
	So he was looking for something very specific, I think.
	Yes, very much so.
	And I would guess that, as I said, hypnotherapy would be an ideal, regression is an ideal process to recapture those sort of experiences because the subconscious mind contains all of our memories.
	And of course, we don't remember all of our memories.
	If we did, we wouldn't be able to live our lives.
	We'd be just full of memories all the time.
	So when what we do, of course, we remember, we have conscious memories.
	And then, as you've said, some memories which are traumatic get pushed into the subconscious because we don't want to remember them.
	And then there are other experiences which we tend to forget quite easily because in Edgar Mitchell's case, he would have been so focused, as you've said, on what he was doing that he would have partly forgotten a lot of what he was experiencing at that sort of more superconscious level.
	On a mundane level, in fact, only recently I had this conversation with my sister, and she mentioned to me a dog that the family had had when I was probably about eight.
	And I had no recollection of the dog, and I think the dog had come to a difficult end, and I blocked it out.
	I really had no recollection of the family having had that dog.
	I knew we'd had one dog when I was very little, but we had another dog, and I don't remember it.
	So that's, and my sister explained to me about it, and it was all very sad, but obviously I was in some way attached to the dog, and I had, this is proof of what you were talking about, I had filed away that memory and had refused for decades to access it.
	Yes, yeah.
	And this is what happens.
	And in some cases, it's not a problem, of course, because we don't need to remember everything that's ever happened.
	But there are some significant emotional experiences in our lives, which if they get buried into the subconscious, then they actually can cause us problems in our day-to-day life.
	And without realizing, we're often being triggered by those memories, you could say.
	Now, it depends on the depth of the trauma, but this is sort of classic phobia territory.
	Let me give you an example.
	I had a client who came to me with a dog phobia.
	She was terrified of dogs, Howard.
	She could hardly leave her home in case she saw a dog.
	She used to drive virtually everywhere.
	If she had to walk anywhere, she had three or four people around her just in case a dog would be near and then they could protect her.
	And when she came for therapy, I asked her if she knew what had caused it, how long she had it before.
	She said, I've had the phobia all my life.
	I don't know what's caused it.
	When I took her into trance, hypnotized her, I asked her subconscious to take her back to the cause of the problem, to the cause of the phobia.
	And she started to remember being two years old.
	And she started to relive a memory in which mommy took her for a walk to the park one day, and she strapped her into a buggy, into a little push chair, so she couldn't get out.
	And then mommy took her to the park.
	And bear in mind, she's laying in tranche.
	She's got her eyes closed.
	She's sharing these memories with me.
	She's as surprised as I was in a way because she hadn't remembered this before.
	Mommy takes her to the park, sticks the buggy in front of the duck pond, and just leaves my client just to look at the ducks while mommy went off to talk to a friend.
	And that was all nice and calm until my client suddenly started to react.
	She was pulling her head over to one side.
	She was looking very anxious and uptight.
	And I said, what's happening now?
	And she said, a dog's here.
	The dog is sniffing me.
	A dog is sniffing me.
	And she put her hand up in tranced and she sort of smacked the imaginary dog.
	And the next thing, she was crying and sobbing and crying and sobbing as she remembered being bitten on the face by the dog.
	And she couldn't get out of the pushchair.
	She was trapped.
	And that was the cause of the phobia.
	So she'd never remembered that memory before.
	After the session, she came out of trance and said, I do remember it now, as clear as a day.
	That definitely happened.
	So why is it you would say then, Steve, that accessing the memory, going back to it, realizing it happened discovering it why would you say that that would cure the problem that you have now that's only part of the process the most important part is releasing the emotions so the regression model is that all of our problems all of our issues as human beings come from locked in feelings and emotions from past traumas that's
	the regression model.
	So what we're aiming to do in regression, and it's usually, it's not a fun process, it's often a very emotional process, is to go back into those memories and release the emotions.
	And that produces the healing in most cases.
	For some clients, getting the memory, reliving the memory, getting an understanding of why they have the problem is the therapy.
	But in most cases, it's about releasing the emotional trauma and letting the client relive the emotion, either through crying or shaking and occasionally screaming and yelling and writhing.
	And that produces the healing.
	And you experience it as an adult, so you can rationalize it better as an adult than you would have done if you were three.
	Yes, very much so.
	But what you're experiencing is the three-year-old's feelings.
	And they are very strong.
	You know, in many cases, the client feels just right now, just as it was all those years ago.
	Boy, I'm not sure I'd want to go back to any of those things.
	And you're certain that by doing that, you don't give people a lasting problem because you're reliving something really bad that had been put into a protection mechanism for a reason.
	As long as the job's done properly, it's very safe.
	It's extremely safe.
	I mean, I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of regression sessions.
	And as long as we do it properly, it's safe.
	If a client doesn't go into the experience deep enough, or if they pull themselves out, or if the therapist gets a bit scared because the client is crying and pulls them out, then that can re-traumatize them.
	So as long as the client goes through the emotions, goes through the events and releases the emotions, it is perfectly safe.
	It's actually liberating, Howard.
	It really is liberating because it frees us up so deeply from our emotional wounds.
	And it helps us to heal from our emotional wounds that very often our lives are completely changed because of it.
	Now, the bulk of our conversation is going to be about past life regression.
	And I'm fascinated to know, and I wonder if you know the story, because I don't, of how past life regression became a thing when people discovered that maybe it's possible to go beyond recollections from this life and actually flip back beyond three and two and one and zero and go to somewhere where you might have been before.
	Gosh, that's a really good question, Howard.
	And I honestly don't know.
	My guess is that past life regression became popular in the 60s and 70s, but I'm not sure if it was ever used very much before then by therapists.
	And certainly from the 1970s onwards, it's become a more and more popular and usual process.
	People tend to not see it through such a look at it through a scans anymore.
	But my guess is it was raised.
	It's only in the last sort of 40, 50 years that it's become more of an accepted process.
	How did you start doing it?
	For me, it was quite remarkable, Howard.
	I'd done my initial hypnotherapy training.
	I was working as a therapist for about six months using what I call basic hypnosis, taking people into trance, using hypnotic suggestions to reprogram the mind.
	And then one day, a young man came to me with a severe anxiety state.
	He was in his 20s and he sat in front of me in my office in the chair and he was shaking and hyperventilating and stuttering and stammering.
	He was in a really bad state.
	And I said, how long have you had this anxiety for?
	He said, I've always been anxious, but the last few years since the children came along, it's got worse and worse.
	And he said, now I've had to give my job up.
	I sit at home all day shaking.
	Medication isn't helping.
	My wife is sick and tired of it because she says, you know, we've got no life anymore.
	And he said, I just don't know why.
	I'm just terribly anxious all the time.
	I can't sleep.
	And all the time, as I say, he was stuttering and stammering.
	I asked him if he knew if anything had caused this in his life and he didn't.
	So, okay, I took him into trance and I thought I was going to do some standard hypnotherapy, relaxation suggestions.
	And then as he went into trance, as he began to calm down and his breathing slowed down and his whole body softened in the chair.
	And I was thinking, okay, this is great.
	I'm just going to do some standard work.
	All of a sudden he started to shake.
	His whole body started to shake and he started to cry out and he was shouting out, hide, hide, no, hide, hide.
	And he was half shouting, half whispering, hide the children in here, hide in here, hide in here, hide them in here.
	They're coming, they're coming, they're coming.
	Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet.
	And then all of a sudden he started to scream and he was screaming, no, no, no, no, no, not the children.
	No, no, no, no.
	And then he just stopped and flopped down in the chair and was completely quiet.
	My God, well, that's dramatic for him and very dramatic for you witnessing this.
	For me, it was such a shock.
	So I said, so how do you feel?
	Are you okay?
	And he said, oh, I feel wonderful.
	I feel wonderful.
	I feel so calm.
	I've never felt like this in my life before.
	And as I'm explaining this, Howard, the reaction from him was maybe 50 times bigger than I'm explaining it.
	He said, I just feel extraordinary.
	Oh, it's all gone.
	It's all gone.
	I'm just so calm.
	So I said, what was happening?
	He said, it was like I was in another body in another time.
	And I was a man and my wife was there.
	We were trying to hide the children.
	There were soldiers coming.
	And then they found us and they shot us all and killed us.
	killed us all and he said what what was it so i said well i think you've been in a past life um how do you feel now and he said no i just feel extra i'm just calm it's all gone and his anxiety state was cured in 10 minutes completely cured in 10 minutes and okay i it gave me an anxiety state, but I thought this is very significant.
	I'd known about past lives because I'd been in past lives and read about past lives and I was a Buddhist for many years, but I'd never trained in them and never used them in therapy.
	And I thought this is significant.
	I had to know more about this.
	So I then started to do more research.
	And this was in 1992, when even then past life regression was coming out, but not as well known as it is now.
	So I did a lot of research and then started to develop working with it.
	And over the years, I've now developed a system which is so effective of healing people from all types of problems.
	Did you, through doing research about this particular man who clearly went through a terribly traumatic experience and relived it with you in your chair, were you able to find out exactly what it was?
	No, and what I'm usually doing when we do therapy, I'm not usually looking for a lot of specific information.
	What I'm aiming to do is to release the emotions.
	And if a client wants specific information, then we can look at that at a later stage.
	In his case, no, he was better.
	He didn't care what it was.
	He didn't even care if it was real or not.
	He just knew that his problem had completely dissolved away.
	And it didn't matter to him whether it was real or the facts in any way.
	And of course, you didn't know.
	And he didn't know.
	You presumably still don't know whether it was real or not.
	No, I mean, I would say, having done so many thousands and thousands of past life regressions now, I can spot a past life which isn't real from about 100 paces away because there's a different quality to what I call a fantasy past life.
	And I can't really describe that.
	You have to be in on a session to see and hear it.
	If you put me into hypnosis and I say, I'm here on the stage, we're in Austria, Germany, and it's me and my family.
	And the Nazis are here and we've got to escape, but we've got to sing some songs first.
	And then during the interval, we escape on bikes around the back.
	Now, either I experienced that in World War II or I've seen the sound of music.
	How are you going to know which one it is?
	I'm sorry, that sounds like a really trivial example, but you know what I'm saying.
	Exactly.
	And it is so difficult because we are so heavily bombarded nowadays with movies and books and information.
	It can be very difficult to decide whether something whether it is real or not.
	What I would say is this, is that very often when a client goes into a past life and the past life story that they tell is really quite unusual and it's not the type of thing you would expect people to talk or to create a story about.
	What I'm saying is if somebody goes into an imaginary past life, usually the life, the experience is done in broad brushstrokes and it's very often a little bit cliched.
	Whereas quite often a client will experience many times a past life which is unusual.
	It has unusual details in it.
	And you would think, how on earth has this person come up with this story in order to get themselves better?
	It doesn't really make sense that they would do that.
	So I take it very much on face value that if the subconscious presents this as a past life, that in most cases it is a past life.
	Because like I've said, the fantasy ones are easy to spot.
	And the bottom line is, having said that, if the client just wants to think it's a metaphor that the subconscious has created to get them better, what does it matter?
	They've got better.
	Well, no, that's true.
	I mean, from a practitioner's point of view, that has to be the aim of the whole thing.
	But of course, what this points to is something that's very controversial.
	And a lot of people believe, and I suspect, but how do I know?
	That, you know, we die and it's not the end.
	We may come back.
	If we've got work to do back here, then we may come back as something or somebody else.
	Have you had indications from any of the people that you've been involved with of the process?
	You know what I'm saying?
	The dying process and then the returning process and what comes between here and whatever comes next?
	Yeah.
	I don't do too much work in that, but I do obviously take most of my clients through the death process because most past life therapy is death trauma release.
	So the vast majority of past life sessions, we are going through the death in order to release the trauma of the death, which is so often causing the problem now in this life.
	Clients experience very much the same thing.
	They go out of the body, they go up, they feel very free and calm.
	It's as if all the troubles and worldly troubles that we have have completely evaporated.
	Sometimes they're looking down on the body and what has happened in the death experience.
	Generally, they then go up and they go up into spirit and into a spirit world.
	Certainly there's a very good book called Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, where he does all of his work between lives.
	And he finds that what tends to happen is we go into halls of learning sometimes.
	We're learning about the life we've just lived.
	We are reconnecting with souls who are in our soul group.
	And we are then guided to sort of think about the life that we're going to come back and live next time.
	Often we are then sort of overlooking that life and getting a sense of the different threads of it and sort of discussing with elders, if you like, or higher beings just how our learning is going to be when we get reborn.
	And then we are reborn back into a human body again at some stage.
	So in the literal sense of the word, the whole process, the whole journey is a very deliberate thing in terms of when you get there, you deliberate about why you're going to be coming back, what you're coming back to do, and who you're going to be.
	Yes, that's the traditional take on the reincarnation process, is that we're able to look ahead, decide what we're going to do, and what we have to learn.
	Sometimes we reincarnate in order to help others to learn.
	Sometimes it's not just about us learning, sometimes we're actually sort of volunteering to help them to learn something.
	And the difficulty is when we get reborn, we get most of these memories are wiped, of course.
	So, when you take people through the process of death, and as you say, sometimes the process is traumatic.
	Maybe somebody's died in a car crash or something horrendous, or they've had a death that hasn't been the sort of death that, you know, a lot of us would wish for quietly in your sleep.
	You know, a lot of people are not that fortunate.
	They go in ways that are deeply traumatic.
	When you take people back through that, is there a period where they stop living the trauma, they stop experiencing the trauma, and then everything goes quiet and something else happens?
	Do you mean in the session or do you mean after the death process, once they've gone through the death?
	Well, in the session when you've gone through the death process.
	Once they've gone through the death, they go very quiet, they go very calm.
	And if all of the emotion has been released, then they feel extremely calm.
	And if we're working on a specific problem, such as a phobia or a depression, they very often just know that the depression or phobia isn't there anymore.
	And then, you know, we finish.
	What I usually do is take the client back through the experience more than once to fully release it.
	It isn't always released just in one go.
	And that obviously takes courage for the client and for the therapist very often because sometimes it isn't pleasant, the process that they're going through.
	And it may be they were raped in the past life, so we have to release the energy of the rape, etc.
	Are you not worried that when you do that sort of thing, you mentioned a rape, and I'm sure you've dealt with murder, that it's very dangerous for the person who's going through that.
	You never know what you might be unleashing.
	What I do is I have a system whereby I ask the subconscious if it's safe for the client to explore the trauma.
	And if it says yes, and it does so in about 98% of cases, then it's okay to explore the trauma.
	And if it says no, then we don't do it.
	But in the vast majority of cases, it is perfectly safe.
	It sounds dramatic.
	It always sounds dramatic.
	And there are some clients, as I've said, where the release is dramatic.
	More often than not, the client is just releasing an energy or they're just crying a little bit or the body is shaking a little bit.
	So it really is very, very safe.
	You ask the unconscious, the subconscious, is it okay for us to go there?
	And you will get a safe answer to that question every time, a yes or a no.
	Yes.
	In 98% of cases, it says yes.
	If it says no, then it knows best.
	See, the subconscious is our higher self.
	It knows everything there is to know about us.
	It has an awesome wisdom.
	It's extraordinarily wise.
	And so when we're working in this way, we're working with the subconscious, not against it or not forcing it in any way.
	We are facilitating the process of the subconscious coming through and letting the healing take place.
	Now, if I came to you and I said, and this is the truth, this is probably, you know, 99.5% of the population.
	But if I said, well, you know, Steve, in my life, I've been prone to being a bit down and depressed at times.
	It's not something that is, I think, is clinical and it's never permanent.
	It's just a passing phase.
	And usually I've sort of put it down to, well, that's my makeup.
	It's my, you know, physiology.
	It's maybe to do with some of my life experiences.
	And it's just one of those things.
	Would you automatically, I keep dropping my notes.
	Sorry, you probably hear me do that.
	Would you automatically say to me, aha, you may think that's just down to your physiology and your past life experiences, but I think that actually it's not just past life experiences, it's past life experiences.
	Yes.
	Yes, definitely.
	In all cases.
	In every case.
	Well, I say in every case.
	Yes, depression can be caused by stuff going on in the body, for example, especially if it's a woman.
	Hormonal issues can cause depression, as can Candida.
	But in the vast majority of cases, the regression model, all of our issues are caused by locked-in feelings and emotions from past traumas.
	And so therefore, when we're able to go into those traumas and release them, then the problem goes.
	We have to be fair to my female listeners, of whom I have many.
	And from what I've read, men can be affected by hormonal issues, testosterone, and that kind of stuff as well.
	But just to say that it's everybody who's affected by those things.
	But you think in every case, if you dig back and you hit the right place, then you'll find the problem.
	Yes, yes.
	As long as we're able to do that, not everybody can regress, but most people can.
	And depression is classic.
	I mean, depression is caused by lot in anger.
	That's the therapy take.
	So what anger, however, is, is a compound emotion.
	So what that means is that underneath anger, there's always sadness.
	So this is why depression is characterized by melancholy.
	It's the sadness underneath the anger.
	But basically, it's when anger gets turned in on ourselves.
	So let me give you an example.
	Again, a lady came to me with depression, and we found I think there were seven or eight past lives that were causing the depression.
	We worked through all of them, but just to share maybe a couple of them.
	In one of them, she was a Victorian flower seller who was extremely sick and poor.
	And eventually, one day she was so sick, she dragged herself to a quack doctor who then killed her.
	And, you know, she was expecting his help and he didn't help.
	He just murdered her.
	So, of course, she was very angry because she'd gone to him for help and he killed her.
	In another past life, she was a lady who had a little boy and the boy died.
	And she never came To terms with his death, she could never come to terms with his death.
	So she was always very sad about that, and of course, very angry that her son had been killed.
	In another past life, she was in a battle.
	A male, of course, we change sex from life to life very often.
	She was a male soldier in a battle who ran away from the battle and on his horse.
	He was just such a coward.
	He thought he was going to die.
	And as he ran away, soldiers were coming after him, and the horse was on the top of a cliff and it slipped and it went down on the cliff with him and he ended up in a big heap under the horse and died.
	And of course, the guilt that she was feeling because she ran away and she was angry with herself for running away in the battle.
	So again, we worked through all of those experiences.
	She released the emotions, completely cured the depression.
	And, you know, it's simple stuff.
	It's cause and effect therapy.
	The effect is the problem, the depression, the anxiety, the lack of confidence.
	But we're talking in a matter-of-fact way about something that's astonishing, because if this is so, it means that people can often live multiple lives.
	Do you have an idea of how many lives your average person might have lived?
	I guess, based on my readings and experience, is that we've lived, most people have lived thousands of lives.
	Thousands?
	Tibetan Buddhism says that we've all lived countless lives over countless aeons of existence, which is a lot.
	But there is a concept maybe some people are newer souls.
	I've always felt that I'm probably an old soul, but I think some people are newer souls.
	And certainly I had one gentleman who came for therapy, and he was in his 20s, early 30s.
	He was a teacher at a children's school, an infant school.
	And he was very innocent.
	He had a very naive innocency about him.
	And we discussed this because, you know, he was quite self-aware.
	And he said to me, you know, I don't think I've been here many times.
	And when he was in trans, I use a technique, Howard, which I call an idiomotore response, which is basically where when the client is in hypnosis, I ask the subconscious to come through into one of the fingers by making a finger feel very, very light and floaty.
	And the finger then just moves all by itself without the conscious mind doing it.
	And I get what I call yes-nos.
	I ask for a yes and the finger raises.
	I ask for a question and we get a no, the finger doesn't raise.
	So I asked his subconscious to indicate how many lifetimes he'd been on earth before this present lifetime.
	And I asked the subconscious, is it more than 100?
	And it said no.
	Is it more than 10?
	It said yes.
	Is it more than 20?
	Is it more than 30?
	We got to 33.
	He'd lived 33 past lives.
	Okay, that sounds like a lot.
	I have to say rationally and sitting here now, and I've said this before to friends, actually, that when they say to me, oh, you come back and if you've got unfinished business here, you're going to come back and you're going to have to do it all over again.
	And I say, please, no way, no how.
	I really do not want to come back.
	I don't want to come back here.
	I don't want to take the chance that something rotten will happen when I come back.
	And I certainly don't want to have to relive any of the things that I've been through this time.
	Do we have any say in all of it, do you think?
	Tough.
	Well, it is, but it's a question, though, isn't it?
	It's a good question.
	Well, in the standard reincarnation terms, no, we don't.
	We have to keep coming back.
	And the concept is that over many lifetimes, we learn enough, we become more wise, and eventually we're able to stop this process of being reborn.
	What maybe Buddhism would talk about being enlightenment or nirvana.
	I'll be very honest, Howard.
	I've started looking just recently, only in the last year or so, at some other possibilities, however, that I've just heard about, in that there are some people who say we don't need to be reborn.
	As souls, we are perfect entities.
	We are completely perfect.
	So why on earth do we have to be reborn in order to learn things when we're already perfect?
	And what they are saying, and I don't know about this, I'm just starting to open this up and look at this.
	So I can't say this is my belief.
	What they are saying is that when we die, our soul leaves the body.
	And then on the other side, there are entities, some people would say these are aliens, who want us to be reborn on earth in order to suffer because they feed on the suffering of humankind.
	That's a horrible thought.
	And so they are pushing us down into being reborn so that we're back here again for more suffering.
	And now I don't know about this.
	This is something I've only started to look at in the last year or so, and I can't find any evidence.
	I've just got sort of a few stories floating around from different people.
	But it's certainly got my attention, and I'm very curious about it.
	What about those people who believe that they were Napoleon or John F. Kennedy or somebody else famous?
	Well, this is one of the myths about past life regression is that everybody thinks they've been Henry VIII or Cleopatra or whatever.
	And for many, many years, for over 10 years as a therapist, I'd done thousands of regression sessions.
	I'd never, if I ever read about anybody saying they'd been famous in a past life, I would say that it's just their ego, just their ego, because every client I'd had would just been a normal person, a soldier, a plumber, or whatever in a past life, a peasant, etc., a farmer.
	And then my attitude was completely changed because a lady came to me and she called me and she said, something very strange has happened.
	I was at the office last week and there's a gentleman in the office who we get on very well.
	We're quite close as friends.
	She said, he passed me a file.
	As his hand touched my hand, I got an immediate flash in my mind of a picture of a lady with long hair and a big long dress.
	And I felt very frustrated.
	And I'm in an old oak paneled room, this old oak panel room, and I'm so frustrated.
	She said, I cannot get the feeling and the image out of my mind.
	What is it?
	So I said, Well, it could be past life.
	Come and see me.
	So she came for a session.
	I asked her to go in, I took her into trance, asked her to go back to that picture that she was seeing.
	And she then opened up a life, a past life, initially as this very beautiful lady.
	And she was frustrated because she was waiting for her lover to come to see her.
	And he wasn't coming.
	She was pacing up and down in this room.
	Eventually, her lover comes, and he's dressed in sort of very fancy old gear from hundreds of years ago.
	And they fall into each other's arms and kiss.
	Now, I thought, okay, that's standard past life.
	What came next was shocking because we found out that she was actually Queen Elizabeth I. And that was for me quite incredible because I'm very skeptical as a therapist.
	I mean, I may not sound it because I've done so much.
	You would think, why would Queen Elizabeth I come to see me?
	Exactly.
	Would you?
	But it happened.
	And I used to take it on face value.
	Maybe because I'm so experienced with past life regression, the universe sent her to me for a reason.
	But we actually did a lot of sessions, and she put a lot of flesh on the bones of the love life of Queen Elizabeth with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.
	It's well known historically that they were very close.
	People don't believe they were lovers, but actually they were.
	And she came up with lots of information.
	So that started me thinking, well, maybe, you know, okay, some people could claim to be famous.
	What actually happened after that is I had another lady who came who appeared to have been, well, who appeared to be, she definitely was, Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, Elizabeth's elder sister.
	And in her sessions, Howard, the specific historical information that this lady came up with, and this lady was just a housewife from Lincolnshire who hadn't researched any of this.
	The specific information she came up with, I had to go to history books to verify and find that it was all true.
	Now, there's no way on this earth that that lady would have known that information if it hadn't been through from a past lifetime.
	So I've written about this in my first book was called Discovering.
	It was called Famous Past Lives.
	And I've actually met several people who appear to have been very famous in past lifetimes, including Titus Oates in the Scott of the Antarctic Expedition.
	Really?
	And that was quite incredible.
	Again, he came up with information that is not generally known.
	I've had one of Jack the Ripper's prostitute victims for therapy, and she, ironically enough, is a policewoman in this lifetime, in this present life.
	And when you talk to Titus Oates or you talk to anybody else, are you able to have a rational conversation with them, like the one that we're having?
	Yeah, very much so.
	I mean, you know, this gentleman was a very mild-mannered, calm man.
	He went into trance.
	He came because of confidence issues, lack of confidence.
	And these memories started to come through of dying in the snow.
	And yes, I mean, he's just recounting what he's seeing.
	He's got his eyes closed.
	He's sharing with me the experience.
	He was shaking a lot because he was shivering to death, of course.
	And the fascinating thing for me is he actually said that before he died, he took poison.
	Now, I thought, well, I don't believe that.
	That's, you know, we know that Titus Hoach went to his colleagues, his comrades, and said, I'm just going outside for a walk, maybe some time.
	And the theory is that he died in the snow.
	But he actually took poison, according to my client.
	And then I did some research into this and found that on the Scott of the Antarctic expedition, they did take poison with them just in case any of them came to a sticky end.
	Now, isn't that fascinating?
	There's no way that any, well, I wouldn't have known that.
	And I know the story, and you wouldn't have known that.
	No, very much so.
	And my client didn't.
	I mean, he's just a businessman in Yorkshire who's not researched this stuff.
	And if you have people who come to you saying that they've been somebody famous, maybe somebody royal or somebody who'd been enormously well regarded and very well treated, do they sometimes, do you think, manifest problems in this life connected with being who they were in that life?
	In other words, if you're the queen or you're somebody very prominent, you expect to be treated in a certain way.
	So if you come back here and you have some of the residual of having been that person and people don't treat you that way, you're going to miss it.
	Maybe.
	I can see what you're getting at.
	I mean, I think that's a possibility can happen, but most of those sort of finer details of the past life tend to get sort of buried.
	It's mainly the sort of the after effects of the past life.
	So, for example, Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, when my client was dying in that life as Mary and looking back on the life, the guilt that she felt for the brutality that she'd perpetrated on Protestants by burning them was immense.
	She was in pieces.
	She was sobbing and sobbing and sobbing because she realized as she was dying that what she'd done was wrong.
	So it's really just like any therapy process, that was the effect of the cause of the lifetime itself.
	Right.
	One of the questions that is always asked, and it's always fascinated me, I've always wondered, sometimes I'll meet an animal and I'll think that animal is particularly knowing.
	And I wonder, could you have been a person before?
	Do you think that that happens?
	I have had some clients who appear to have been animals in past lives.
	It is unusual.
	It doesn't happen very often.
	One lady was a camel and she was in a camel market.
	She hated the smell of all the other camels.
	She was so strong.
	She was nearly sick.
	I had a lady who was a cat in a Greek temple.
	I had a lady who was a rabbit, which was a pretty boring session for me, as you can imagine.
	I just said, You know, I kept saying, What's happening now?
	She was just hopping around everywhere in the life.
	I had a lady who was a rat that got run over by a car.
	One lady was a baby squid, and she came to me with a spider phobia.
	She relived a life as a baby squid who was terrified in the sea because everything was trying to kill her.
	And maybe the strangest one was a gentleman who thought he was a rock in a past life.
	And that was unusual.
	It was a very boring therapy session.
	You can imagine there was nothing happening.
	But I kept saying, what's happening now?
	And he would just say, well, nothing.
	I'm a rock.
	I've never heard of a thing like it.
	Let me just explain because the shamanic concept of life is that everything has soul.
	And I mean, Tibetan Buddhism says that every blade of grass has a Buddha in it.
	So everything has energy in it.
	And from a shamanic concept, I mean, people who do shamanism, they will connect with rocks.
	They will connect with tree people.
	They will connect with the rock people, as they would say, as if they were an entity, as if they had an energy.
	So maybe this gentleman's experience wasn't so daft as first appeared.
	It is an astonishing thing.
	And at the end of the day, though, you can never definitively...
	And we know that people's minds are a delicate thing, and sometimes people can assume things that are part of a condition maybe or a passing phase.
	I once knew of somebody who believed that he was taken over for a period by an alien.
	Quite genuinely, he believed that an alien had walked in, quotes, to him.
	Okay.
	And he wanted for a period to be referred to by another name, the name of this alien.
	And his personality changed for a while and all that sort of stuff.
	And people around him just kind of accepted it.
	And it was indeed, as I suspected, it might be a passing phase.
	I suppose the question is, how can you know that you really are accessing past lives?
	You've got a strong degree of certainty in your soul, but there can never be any real proof.
	Not as such.
	It depends how you're going to look at proof.
	So ultimately, I tend to say, look, if these things weren't real, then why is the subconscious creating these experiences time after time after time?
	Thousands of sessions for me, many past life therapists around the world finding the same thing.
	If it wasn't real, and bear in mind that all of my clients are normal people.
	They are normal, functioning people.
	They are family people, they're working.
	They haven't got a history of psychiatric illness.
	They're just normal, ordinary people who want help.
	So I tend to say, if this wasn't real, first of all, why is it happening?
	But secondly, there are occasions where clients do get specific information which they can later on verify.
	And this is always quite amazing because for me, you know, if you can verify the information and a person has never studied that life or that period of history, there is no way on earth they would know that unless it was coming through from a past life.
	Can you think of a great example?
	Not one of my cases, but certainly a case of another hypnotherapist who had a young boy who came to her.
	And his problem was that whenever anybody asked him a question, his whole body froze.
	His neck muscles went solid and he couldn't reply.
	He just made these guttural sounds.
	And you can imagine, I think he was about 10 or 11 when he went to see a hypnotherapist.
	I mean, his school had been a disaster.
	School life was a disaster.
	He'd seen psychologists, child psychologists, et cetera, et cetera.
	Nobody had helped.
	And he went to see a hypnotherapist.
	She took him into trance and she asked his subconscious to take him to the cause of the problem.
	He goes back into a past life in the Second World War as an American Air Force pilot.
	And he says something like, just as an example, it's April 1942.
	I'm going off on a mission.
	And what happens, he got shot down over Nazi-occupied France.
	He survived the crash, but he was captured by the Nazis who shipped him off to the Gestapo.
	Now, at that stage in the session, the boy re-experienced being tortured to death.
	As that was happening, well, first of all, two things were happening here, Howard.
	First of all, as the therapist was asking him questions, he was speaking completely normally, totally normally.
	He'd never been able to do that before in the whole of his life.
	But secondly, when he was being tortured, all he said over and over and over was his name, his rank, and his serial number.
	Name, rank, serial number.
	He didn't give anything away.
	And then he died.
	So the session was finished.
	He went through the death and he came out of trance.
	His parents came into the room and he was completely cured, which is a pretty good result.
	However, his father was fascinated.
	He contacted the American authorities, gave them the information, and they said, yes, they had listed as missing presumed dead at those dates that the boy had given an American Air Force pilot of that name, that rank, and that serial number.
	And you would ask, how could anybody in the here and now know that?
	Exactly, especially an 11-year-old child.
	She, I just, that's an astonishing one.
	Is there anything I haven't asked you and I should have?
	That's a good question.
	You could mention early in abduction regression because I do that as well.
	Okay.
	Do you get many of those?
	Not a lot, but I've done a fair bit and I've done some Sky TV work some years ago.
	I was featured on a documentary called The Real 4400, which is still on YouTube.
	And I was asked to go to meet a family who believed they'd been abducted by aliens.
	And basically, they were living up in North Yorkshire.
	It was a lady in her late 30s, early 40s with her two sons, about 10 or 11 years old, and her mum.
	And they went to a little chef for lunch one day, left the little chef as they were driving home.
	A spacecraft, a UFO, came down alongside the car and started shining lights in the car.
	Now, they all felt an incredible sense of euphoria.
	And suddenly, after a few seconds, the spacecraft shot off at the speed of light and disappeared.
	And they all felt very disappointed.
	They got home.
	I mean, they were fascinated.
	They were talking about it all the way home.
	But when they arrived home, they found out, they found that the journey, which should have taken 20 minutes, had taken an hour and 20 minutes.
	They had lost an hour of their lives.
	And they all felt that something had happened.
	The boys started to get nightmares.
	They were all very troubled by this because they couldn't tell.
	Something had happened, but they didn't know what.
	Eventually, a Sky TV producer picked this story up, asked me if I'd go to meet them and to regress the mom of the boys, the 38, 40-year-old lady, to see if we could remember anything that had happened.
	I took her into trance.
	This is all on film, took her into trance, asked her to go back to that day.
	And what happened is she started to remember.
	They were driving along in the car.
	The spacecraft comes down and it took the whole car up into the spaceship.
	They then were asked to leave the car.
	It was quite dark in the spacecraft and they couldn't see the beings who were there.
	They were sort of hidden.
	But they knew there were beings there and they were telepathically communicating with them.
	And then some lights came out, like orbs, and started scanning them, moving around them and scanning them.
	And they all felt euphoric.
	She was smiling, my client, while she experienced this.
	It was just an amazing experience.
	They loved being there.
	And then suddenly she got very frightened because the orbs went towards her boys.
	And you can see this on the film.
	She said, no, no, not the boys, not the boys.
	She was crying.
	And suddenly she calmed down.
	They're telling me it's okay.
	They're not going to harm us.
	All they're doing is just checking things out.
	So this went on for a little while with the lights.
	They were then asked to go back in the car.
	The car was then, what's the word, sort of came down, floated down back onto the road.
	They went on the road driving.
	The spacecraft shot off.
	And that was what actually happened.
	So they were very relieved to find out that something other than was normal had happened and they could start to make sense of things.
	And that actually, you think, helped them?
	In a big way.
	In a big, big way.
	I've certainly had other people who have had alien contacts and when it gets wiped, it really troubles them.
	And by opening up the memory, they can start releasing the fears and the feelings.
	This conversation's been quite a journey, Steve.
	And thank you very much for it.
	Listen, I hope you get back to Norway as soon as you can in the midst of this.
	And I hope you enjoy your time in Hull while you've got to be here.
	If people want to read about you and your work, where must they go?
	Okay, so my website is lionheart-training.com.
	I have a new WordPress site, hypnoblogpod.wordpress.com.
	I have a Facebook page, The Power of Past Life Regression, which is named after my new book, The Power of Past Life Regression, which has just come out.
	And I also have a free YouTube channel, which contains free hypnotherapy recordings for people to listen to.
	These are not past lives.
	These are just to help people to get better.
	And that's called Hypno For All.
	Hypno H-Y-P-N-O, the number four, A-L-L, Hypno for All on YouTube.
	All free recordings.
	I ask people just to enjoy them and to subscribe.
	It's just my way of giving stuff back to the world.
	And you know that not everybody believes in this stuff.
	What would you say to them?
	I would say if somebody were to sit in my office or to sit watching me do sessions on Skype day after day after day, they would come to realize this is very real and very significant.
	And I honestly believe, Howard, that I put my head up above the parapet for 28 years to promote that past life regression is an incredibly powerful and effective and real therapy.
	And I honestly believe that it should be accepted as such.
	It should be looked at through scientific lenses and then it would be proven to be extremely real.
	I've enjoyed this conversation, Steve.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.
	Thank you, Howard.
	It's been a real pleasure.
	Thank you.
	Steve Burgess and your thoughts about him and what he said are very welcome.
	Your guest suggestions.
	General thoughts, welcome too.
	Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and I would love to hear from you as ever.
	More great guests in the pipeline, hopefully, here on The Unexplained.
	So until next, we meet.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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