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Validating PLR Healing segment on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey had Mehmet During the 1970s, Roger Woolger, PhD, a graduate of | Oz, MD, Professor of Surgery at Columbia University, Oxford University and a certified Jungian analyst, sitting in on the show to lend objectivity to the critically reviewed the work of others on reincarnation proceedings. After witnessing the past-life regression, Dr and also experimented with a colleague's technique to Oz opined that there are three ways in which people regress himself to a possible past life. Interestingly, could react after seeing what he just had. "The skeptic,” though Dr Woolger found himself experiencing e said, "might explain it away, saying Jodi [the "unexpected images and feelings" when he self- volunteer] is a person with needs who merely wishes the regressed, he remained sceptical about the theory of _ past-life regression can help her.” reincarnation. Nevertheless, he practised regression on Sceptics of hypnosis point out that patients being his clients and found that some slipped into memories ypnotised are nudged by the practitioner to recollec that seemed to come from before their childhood. certain memories. Practitioners ask the subject a series As Paul Von Ward commented: "Those memories, of questions to induce memories and identities o once awakened, seemed to allow the patients to cope previous lives and also create linkages between presen with their shadow sides of unsociable, problems and past-life experiences. I violent, angry or brutal tendencies. A is said that many subjects, in “cee ime of ‘reliving’ memories of hypnosis, are vulnerable and will ac raumatic events in a postulated In western cultures on the slightest hint given to them, previous life obviously facilitated the cae seeking to supply the answer they release of psychological burdens in that traditionally subconsciously believe the hypnotis his life."° o not navea wishes to hear. Such hypnosis is Convinced of the psychological ow ae largely a matter of releasing relevan ealing power of recovering alleged belief in the details from the brain's incredible past-life memories, Dr Woolger went concept of rebirth capacity for fantasy as well as for on to describe in his book Other Lives, f h h l storing information. The conscious Other Selves’ how some individuals gain or the human sou o) (hypnotised) mind, when fed these psychological relief hrough what they past-life regression answers, wakes up from hypnosis believe to be the remembering and re- has been slammed feeling refreshed and relieved of its experiencing of the events from symptoms. Sceptics believe that as fraudulent and past lives. the memories are at best the supposedly What is noteworthy is that Dr fabricated by the subconscious Woolger saw how patients who mind. relived trauma in their past lives recalled memories Sceptics of the theory of experienced the disappearance of ae reincarnation abound, especially heir physical symptoms. In his as fictitious or in the West where the practice has emerged as a_ highly contentious issue. In western cultures that traditionally do not have a belief in the concept of serious illness affecting her back, rebirth of the human soul, past- and an osteopath with incurable life regression has been slammed sinusitis. In each case, the alleged remembering of as fraudulent and the supposedly recalled memories as specific lives enabled physical as well as emotional fictitious or false, being mere products of human ealing. One learned of a past life involving an accident imagination run wild and sometimes, intentionally or resulting in a broken arm. Another recalled a past life of unintentionally, based on cues given by the hypnotist. a pioneer woman who broke her back in a wagon wreck. The osteopath became well after resurfacing the feelings Nonsensical Recall e had, suffering from a cold at camp while his mother To be fair to sceptics, individuals of sound mind would ay dying at home."* waver before giving a few of the much-publicised cases Ab aant HEA eaaenanian Aating hack ta tha 1NEAS tha book, as Von Ward explains, Dr Woolger "...recounts the stories of a man with a[n] hysterically paralysed arm, a woman with a false... belief in the concept of rebirth of the human soul, past-life regression has been slammed the supposedly recalled memories as false... Nonsensical Recall To be fair to sceptics, individuals of sound mind would waver before giving a few of the much-publicised cases of past-life regression dating back to the 1950s the benefit of the doubt, so unfounded were the claims. In one such example dating back to 1952, Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein put housewife Virginia Tighe of Pueblo, Colorado, into a state of trance that sparked off startling revelations about Tighe's alleged past life as a 19th-century rishwoman. Bernstein hypnotically regressed Tighe to Scepticism about PLR Healing Brian L. Weiss, MD, a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School and Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, Florida, is a well-known voice in support of past-life- regression healing. In 2008, Dr Weiss was called upon to perform a past-life regression on a volunteer during a JUNE - JULY 2011 NEXUS ¢ 43 In western cultures that traditionally do not have a. as fraudulent and as fictitious or www.nexusmagazine.com