Angella Johnson View From a Broad
I don’t get it. Shirley MacLaine was an Egyptian princess in one of her past lives. Other people became Napoleon, or some other historical great. But me: I got to be some illiterate, forest-dwelling nobody living in the England of 1066.
I was a peasant called Phil (mmm, doesn’t sound much like a name from the Middle Ages) who on his deathbed could only say this about his life: “I wish I had not lived such a solitary one.”
Clearly I am lacking in either imagination or ambition if this is all I could conjure up for myself during my 20-minute regression therapy. Still, I suppose it was better than discovering I had been Adolf Hitler in a previous incarnation.
“Would you be able to handle being responsible for the Holocaust?” asked Kate Rheeders when I insisted on being put through regression on our first meeting.
If I was Hitler, then I was Hitler. Not much I could do about it now, is there, I replied with an impatient shrug. Let’s just do it.
“I’m really not happy about putting you under in July,” continued Rheeders. “It’s not a good month for you. And in any case I never do it without a session beforehand to prepare people for what might happen.”
We were sitting in her studio – a two-room addition to her Benoni home – surrounded by candles, tarot cards, crystals, astrological charts and other paraphernalia associated with the paranormal.
She told me the story about a young female client who found herself back in the Middle Ages (a hint perhaps of where the idea of Phil came from), where she was beaten to death by a sadistic stallholder after stealing food for her baby. “It was horrible. I saw by her defensive body action everything she was going through,” said Rheeders.
Unfortunately, the woman was not prepared for what took place and emerged in a state of shock. “She had not expected it to be so real and I never got a chance to help her because she never came back.”
Past-life regression is not a parlour game. Several people were apprehensive when I told them about my intention to try it out.
“Just be very careful,” warned one friend ominously. “You never know what thoughts they might put into your mind while you’re in a trance.”
Rheeders, who teaches people how to cope with personality defects like fear and shyness, pooh-poohed any idea of her brainwashing me.
“You will be totally aware of what is happening. Only under hypnotherapy do you lose consciousness. What we’ll be doing is using your own imagination to go back into a previous life.”
The imagination (or the soul, if you like) is apparently the part that remains with us throughout our many karmic lives – the illogical side, suppressed by most of us during adulthood. It was my ticket to travelling back in time.
But before we could actually drift down memory lane, Rheeders needed to know what issues I wanted to explore. I told her I had no specific problems (yeah right!), so she did a tarot-card reading to find some.
“I hope you are in communications,” she declared.
I smiled (this was a bit spooky) and nodded.
“Do you work for the SABC?”
It was such a close call that I ‘fessed up my profession and place of work (it is hard to lie to someone you think can see your past and your future). This opened the floodgate for some spot-on character assessment – much of which I shall not share on the grounds that it will incriminate me.
Suffice to reveal that she said I was self- destructive, disruptive, impulsive and perennially childlike.
“You are in your element when in chaos,” Rheeders added. Then she warbled something about the naughty little boy and sulky little girl in me constantly squabbling – hence my moods of extreme highs and lows.
“Your memory is bad because when they fight, they forget to file things in your memory bank. So try to make peace between them.”
At the end of this first one-hour session, Rheeders – a tall, smiling earth-mother type – argued that August would be a better month for my regression. But I insisted and she relented.
Three days later I was lying on what looked like a hospital bed in a room painted with dwarves and elves in colourful, leafy surroundings.
Rheeders put me through a relaxation process (continuously interrupted by the ringing phone) – you know, the kind that starts with the toes and ends with emptying thoughts in bubbles through your head.
Soothing music was playing in the background as she talked me into my regression. “You are drifting into … create for yourself a beautiful, an inner sanctuary (I envisioned a mountainous region between Italy and Switzerland) … it is from here that we are going to start the journey and move to the past life.”
There was more spiel about going into a tunnel, going down some steps, opening a purple door and coming out in a forest. I admit I was very relaxed, but not to the point that I could actually see the things she suggested (I really did try).
So I said the first thing that came to me when she asked: “What do you see as the mist rises?”
I’m still in the forest, I said (well, I told you my imagination was off).
“Look down at your feet. Are they male or female?”
I couldn’t see diddly and said so.
“OK, do you think you are a man or a woman?”
It seemed I would have to say something, so I said male.
“What are you wearing?”
Let’s see, I was in a forest back in time. So I said: green tunic and tights. (Well, I’ve always been fond of Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood.)
“And if you had to say what year you were in, what would it be?” continued Rheeders in her soothing hypnotic voice.
(I’m in a forest wearing green, carrying a hunting bow and arrows, so how about …) 1066, I said.
All the time I was wondering if I should open my eyes and explain that I was not really seeing these things. But, I figured it was the little boy in me messing about. So I made the little girl persuade him to keep quiet.
Yet I was not able to make the story very exciting. All I could come up with was some sorry tale about my father having been killed by the local squire and me avenging his death some time in my 20s.
When Rheeders told me to fast-forward to Phil’s death, I said he was aged 60 (that would be like 150 today), dying of old age and he
had lived a very solitary life which he now regretted.
It was only later I remembered that during her tarot reading Rheeders had emphatically declared earlier that I did not like people much. She had also stated that I had been a traditional healer (was that a black thing?) in a previous life.
After I had returned from my trip into the past, she reminded me I had only experienced a snapshot of the highlights of Phil’s life.
What if I told you that I had made everything up? I asked.
She was unfazed. “But the fact that you choose that particular life, for whatever reason, means subconsciously it has meaning for you. The question is what you can gain from it.”
At the risk of sounding cynical, I was not convinced. It was too easy an explanation. But again Rheeders reminded me I had not chosen an optimum time for regression. So I’m going back for a private session next month.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention another of Rheeders’s predictions: that I shall conceive (yes, that’s right, conceive) a child in May next year. Now such specificity denotes a measure of confidence, don’t you think? So watch this space.