`I haven’t had anything yet,” a woman complains. “I really hope I get an experience in the afternoon.”
It’s lunchtime at an all-day “Past Life Regression” workshop at the Drake hotel, and many of the participants are a little frustrated. Each of them has paid $200 for the chance of having a past-life “experience,” and they want their money’s worth.
“I like learning about the meditation techniques,” she continues, “but it would be nice if I could regress.”
“Regression” refers to making a connection with a past life. Judging by the conversation, some of the attendees have been regressing for quite a while now. Many of them are finding the presented meditation and self-hypnosis techniques helpful; so helpful that there were audible snores during the first session. There are hopes that the rest of the afternoon will be more, well, lively.
Almost 80 people have been here since 9:30 a.m. listening to and meditating with Dr. Brian Weiss, 50, a psychiatrist who claims that at least 75 percent of the people he works with can get in touch with their past lives. Not surprisingly, none of these participants, who include attorneys, graphic designers and social workers, want to be quoted. Many of them are here because of Joe Who, a psychic whose call-in radio show recently profiled Weiss. All of Who’s 5’2″ has been sitting in the back row, eyes half-closed beneath a bowl of impossibly black hair as he nibbles on complimentary mints.
For many Eastern religions, most notably Buddhism and Hinduism, reincarnation is a central tenet. But in the West, reincarnation has traditionally been the territory of Hollywood eccentrics, side-show hustlers and tarot-reading psychics. Reliable research on the topic is nearly impossible to find, unless you count dubious offerings that share shelf space with incense sticks and Alistair Crowley in occult bookstores.
Enter Weiss, a psychiatrist who claims to have discovered, quite by accident, that one of his difficult-to-treat patients, “Catherine,” recalled having a past life while under hypnosis. Her symptoms, which included phobias of water and choking, as well as general panic attacks, subsided.
“I very skeptical,” Weiss said in an interview before the workshop. “But a couple of things didn’t fit. She started to get better, her symptoms began to improve very quickly and imagination or fantasy doesn’t improve lifelong chronic symptoms. Two, she seemed to know things that she didn’t know, details, historical facts . . . which didn’t fit with imagination either. The final thing was that she was able to tell me about my father and my son.”
Weiss’ patient, under hypnosis, told him about the death of both Weiss’ father and his first son–people she had no knowledge of–from heart problems. Weiss details this experience in two books on past-life regression therapy, both published by Simon and Schuster: “Many Lives, Many Masters” (a 1988 best-seller reprinted in 17 languages), and “Through Time Into Healing,” released in ’92. Before that, Weiss’ only literary venture aside from scientific papers was a chapter in a book called “The Biology of Cholinergic Function.” Apparently displeased by his change in subject matter, the University of Miami, where Weiss was teaching at the time, informed him that his contract would not be renewed after the publication of his second book.
After looking for evidence of similar past-life findings from his predecessors or contemporaries, Weiss was surprised to find little to none. One batch of research, published by Dr. Ian Stevenson, former chairman of psychiatry and current Carlson professor of psychiatry with an endowed chair at the University of Virginia, documented cases of hypnotized children exhibiting what Weiss calls xenoglossy, familiarity with a foreign language of which one has no previous knowledge.
“I decided to publish in the popular press because of what happened to Dr. Stevenson,” Weiss said. “His work, very good work, got buried in the psychiatric literature because nobody there would pay it any attention, and it didn’t really get out to the public, which is where people are having experiences: dreams, deja vus, spontaneous regressions.”
His colleagues’ reaction has been mixed, according to Weiss, but is overall positive. “I have a lot of psychiatrists, but also psychologists and other therapists, who call or write to me and tell me that they’ve been doing this work secretly or privately for the past 10 or 15 years, don’t tell anyone, and out come these beautiful case histories.”
A national organization devoted to past life therapy, the Association of Past-life Research and Therapy, was formed in 1980 in Riverside, Calif., “for the protection of the people doing the work, and to have other people to talk to and share experiences with,” says Weiss.
A magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University, Weiss was trained in medicine at Yale, going on to spend four years as assistant professor and 13 years as volunteer clinical associate professor at the University of Miami’s School of Medicine, and 11 years as chairman of psychiatry at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami.
These days, he devotes his time to private practice and to training other therapists in Miami, collecting data for a third book tentatively titled “Only Love Is Real.”
Past-life therapy “gives us a more expanded concept of ourselves,” says Weiss, “for what we really are, not these bodies, which are vehicles to carry us around, but are they really us? So when you can do that, you can begin to get rid of anger and fear and negative emotions and feel very peaceful on the inside.”
Weiss’ second book details his treatment of various ailments, including extreme obesity (“traditional hypnosis . . . does not successfully treat chronic obesity . . . regression to the cause of chronic obesity . . . does cure the condition”), compulsive sexual behavior (“For these patients, regression therapy to past lifetimes was necessary to completely eradicate symptoms”), and migraines (“Chronic headaches are one of several conditions that respond particularly well to past-life therapy”).
Not everyone believes
By his curriculum vitae, one would think he knows what he’s talking about.
Not so, says the American Psychiatric Association. Though Weiss is a member in good standing, the APA’s official statement regarding his controversial therapy is a withering condemnation:
“The American Psychiatric Association believes that past life regression therapy is pure quackery. As in other areas of medicine, psychiatric diagnosis and treatment today is based on objective scientific evidence. There is no accepted scientific evidence to support the existence of past lives let alone the validity of past life regression therapy.”
This quote comes from Dr. Mel Sabshin, the APA’s medical director, and is one with which Weiss is familiar.
“You call the American Psychiatric Association and you get a spokesperson. . . that person has never talked to me, called me up, read my books. . .. he’s also never asked other people in the American Psychiatric Association. I’m a member; no one’s asked me. There’s been no quorum, no survey. So that’s just speaking off the top of the head. . . . There’s a whole literature and rationale behind .”
Indeed, if psychiatric treatment methods are based on objective scientific evidence, it would surely make sense to examine any evidence before debunking it. Has the APA looked at Weiss’ findings?
“No, they have not,” says Gus Cervini, the APA’s media coordinator.
So Weiss has a point when he compares himself to Galileo, who was threatened with death and excommunication by the church in the 17th Century for claiming, among other things, that the Earth was not the center of the solar system.
“The scientists of his day would not even look through his telescope,” Weiss says. “After all, it was a tool of the devil. . . . We’re just saying, `Look, here’s another telescope and this is what I’m seeing; won’t you take a look and tell me what you see?’ That’s science. It’s not having your mind made up before you look.”
Therapy or entertainment?
Out in the lobby, vendors from “Wisdom Productions” are selling Weiss’ relaxation/regression tapes and CDs, in Spanish and English. These same reps handed out printed name tags before the event, presumably so participants would know which life they were in at the end of the day. T-shirts for sale that read “Many Lives World Tour” and “Same Soul, Different Body” raise doubts as to whether this is therapy or a rock concert.
Near a table of coffee and apple turnovers, a self-employed contractor is reticent about discussing his past-life experience. His wife elbows him in the stomach until he ‘fesses up.
“When I went under, I found a past life where I was orphaned and tortured,” he says. “I was found in a dungeon. I think I was left to die, maybe for stealing. . .? It was very emotional.”
By the afternoon, the participants have guzzled enough free coffee that it’s hard to see how they could reach a relaxed state without shots of methadone. Light synthesized sounds play in the background. Weiss is presiding over the room like a new age Mr. Rogers, telling us in an extremely gentle tone, “You can remember. . . everything.”
The day ends with Weiss hand-picking a 47-year-old man for on-stage hypnosis. After going under, the man remembers shooting marbles as a child, after which Weiss leads him into another life, in which he is a laborer. He cries after he describes his hands: “The veins are big and puffy. My hands look very old.”
After coming out of the trance, the man talks about how he has been on blood pressure medication since he was 18. As a child, he “loved winning other people’s marbles,” and as an adult, he has been first in sales at his brokerage company for five years. Weiss relates the man’s obsession with achievement to his past life and tells the man that meditation can lower his blood pressure.
Call it a breakthrough in alternative medicine. Lump it with other unexplained phenomena such as cancer remissions and psychics who have assisted in police investigations. Or file it under holistic hocus-pocus. Weiss doesn’t care.
“The important part of this to me is that when you use this as therapy, people get better. Whether you believe in it or not, the therapist or the patient . . . symptoms start to resolve and people begin to feel better and see relationships in a different way.”
