News
Shropshire Star Features, January 12, 2007
Are you the person you think you are?
BEN BENTLEY engages in some laid-back time travel
Ever thought you were once the King of Tonga? Or got a feeling of deja vu, accompanied by a strange desire to pop on a toga when you visited Wroxeter Roman City?
The answer could be that you've been here before - in an earlier life.
Past life regression therapist, Beth Roberts, who runs the Mansions of the Soul practice in Gobowen, certainly believes we have existed in previous incarnations. Beth herself says she was stabbed to death in 1939. She also drowned off the North Wales coast in Edwardian times.
It's fascinating stuff, particularly when during the process of regression you discover that before you were even born you may have been party to a tragedy involving a sister you never had.
I am reclined on Beth's therapy couch as she takes me on a journey into the past, but first a series of hypnotherapy exercises until I am completely relaxed and in a state that can only be described as dream-like.
Visualising that I am in a beautiful terraced garden in the present, I am led down a series of steps to a path where there are trees on one side and a long wall on the other. Along the wall is a series of doors, one for each year of my life. I am taken past all the doors of my current life: past the '90s, the '80s, the '70s, past my birth date and asked to continue wandering along the path, picturing the doors and their colours, until I see one that looks as if it has some significance. Eventually I arrive at a green door with what I believe is a number 48 above it. Could this be 1948?
Entering, I find myself in an oddly familiar setting, a paved yard at the back of Victorian terraced housing where children are playing with an old pram. I go into one of the houses and I am standing in a kitchen of a two-up, two-down house where a man is reading a newspaper.
He looks familiar, and I feel totally comfortable here. I wander through a door into the living room and see a family photograph on the wall.
Among the people pictured, a skinny-looking man is holding a baby. An old lady in glasses is smiling proudly. I can't quite tell if I'm in the photograph.
I then wander outside, telling the man reading the paper I will be back later.
Back in the yard I see the children are still playing. Beth asks me if I feel any attachment to any of them, and I do. A girl there. I have a strange feeling she is my sister - although I don't have a sister.
Significant
Beth suggests it's time to move forward to the next significant event of this life and soon I find myself in a churchyard, feeling properly heart-broken. Around me, familiar people move silently into the church. I am aware that I am upset and tearful and don't want to go into the church.
I am at a funeral and I have a feeling that I am here for my sister. I also have a feeling that I am to blame, but don't know why.
Retracing the route by which I arrived here in the past, Beth brings me back to the present and tells me that during my recollection of the church episode my voice was cracked and dry and I remember that I'd been crying.
"You might have an issue with your sister emotionally that you have not resolved," she says. "I feel strongly that there was an issue that occurred relating to the funeral, that something in your subconscious mind was blocking."
I tell her that I've previously had feelings, and dreams, that I once had a sister.
One of the problems is that although i got a date for these incidents, from this session I could not quite pinpoint a location where they happened. If I had, then it might even be possible to research the actual incidents back in the present - in my case through newspaper births, marriages and deaths columns.
Dreams
Beth says: "For me it's answered so many questions that I've had in my head for as long as I can remember. I had dreams where I would find myself in a pool of blood after I had been stabbed in the abdomen."
During a regression session she discovered that during a previous life, the father of her unborn child attacked her with a knife. In this life, Beth was born with a birthmark on her abdomen, right at the spot where she says she was stabbed. When her daughter was born 12 years ago, the birthmark vanished.
"I very much believe I was stabbed in that incident because what happens when you go through the regression visualisations is as though you are actually there. You feel the experience and things are so vivid."
The proof, she says, is in the subconscious - the part of the mind that's tapped into during regression - because the subconscious cannot lie or make things up.
People with certain religious beliefs, of course, will take issue with the idea of having led past lives and to others it could all be bunkum. But for as long as we live people will continue to search for greater meaning about their existence, and whether it's through history or regression, only the past holds the key.
As Beth says, people want to know who they are and why they are as they are.
And who's to say that in a previous life I didn't have a sister and that I wasn't involved in her tragic death?
Says Beth: "I would say from these details that, in that life, you had a sister."
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Events
Beth runs regular Positive Mind Power group meetings at her home. During these relaxing and spiritually uplifting sessions group members learn to access the subconscious mind to heal their own bodies and to attract things they want and need into their lives. The collective positive mind power is also used to send distant healing to those we know (and some we don't) as well as to our planet Earth. Please note that these sessions are not religious-based, but attendees are encouraged to connect to the infinite positive energy of the Universe.
These sessions are currently free of charge but spaces are limited. No previous experience is necessary - we are all on a pathway of learning - but you are required to bring along a positive attitude and the intention to put it to good use, for your own benefit as well as for others.
If you live locally and are interested in attending these sessions, or simply seek further information, please email Beth (see contacts page).
