Shanghai, 1930s
The Japanese Spy
A woman came to heal a feeling that her employees were stealing from her. She went back to gray — nothing visible. I asked if the light came from in front or behind her. She made out her shadow, stepped back, and saw a great gray wall. She was in Shanghai. A Japanese spy in the 1930s, watching industrialists in apartments furnished like Paris. Neither of us had ever heard of this. We looked it up afterward. The gray wall around Shanghai existed. The wealthy residents furnished their homes with European pieces. Japanese spies were real. The connection to her current-life fear became immediately clear.
American Civil War Era
The Woman Soldier
A woman discovered she was Black, formerly enslaved, disguised as a man and serving in the Union Army — chased into a swamp where she drowned. We searched afterward: are there cases of African American women serving as soldiers? Up came the story of Cathay Williams — the first documented African American woman to serve in the US military, disguised as a man. The client was not African American in this life. But the feeling of being a slave to obligation, and the connection to her military service in this lifetime, made the healing profound.
Petra, Jordan — 1600 BC
The Nabataean Princess
A woman found herself in the Middle East, daughter of a nobleman, sitting with men and negotiating trade deals on behalf of her father — knowing that plural marriages didn't exist in this culture and that women wielded real power. Afterward we typed her description into AI: where and when might this have been? It came back as Nabataean Petra in modern-day Jordan, 1600 BC. The name she thought sounded like Athena turned out to be an Arabic name given to daughters of noblemen. Neither of us had ever heard of the Nabataeans.
Egypt — Ancient
Rick's Own Past Life
When I first trained in hypnotherapy I kept feeling a strange fear come over me every time I placed my hands on someone for Reiki. I went back. I was in a temple in Egypt — an energy healer called to heal the Pharaoh. I healed him right into his transition to the afterlife. They thought I had killed him. They cut off my arms. I bled to death. That session, horrific as it was to experience, released the fear completely. I have never felt it since. That's what a past life regression is for.