A reflection on the therapist’s inner preparation, the client’s readiness, and the thin line between experience and fact in PLRT.
In PLRT, we stand at an extraordinary threshold.
A person sits before us. In pain. In restlessness. Carrying a question that refuses to settle.
They ask — “Why is this happening to me?”
And we try to guide them into that depth from where answers may surface.
But there is a question we should be asking ourselves too —
before we lead a client to that gate, has the therapist done their own inner preparation?
Is technique enough?
If we see regression as a possible contact with some deeper memory field, the subconscious, or an Akashic dimension, then technique alone doesn’t seem enough. Induction, deepening and skilful questioning can take us there. But the capacity to receive what comes from there does not come from them.
In one of his lectures (Analytical Psychology and Education), Carl Jung said —
“Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.”
The therapist needs a different inner state —
to see, without assumptions.
To listen, without conclusions.
To accept, without rushing to declare it true.
Is the therapist truly neutral?
To me, this is the subtlest question of all.
If a therapist believes in past lives, won’t every image start to look like a past-life memory?
If they believe in karma, won’t every suffering look like a karmic consequence?
If they believe in the Akashic records, won’t every symbolic experience look like Akashic information?
And if the therapist is quietly waiting for a particular answer, are they receiving… or unknowingly constructing?
This question isn’t only philosophical. It has been tested.
In 1991, Canadian psychologist Nicholas Spanos and his team used hypnosis to take participants into a “previous life.” Some groups were given different information beforehand. Whatever expectation a group was given, their experiences bent in that direction.
In other words, what is in the therapist’s mind can find its way into the client’s experience. Even unspoken.
The same research recorded something else. The more intense the experience, the more deeply the person believed that life had been their own.
This is where the client’s readiness comes in. A client who cannot watch their experience from a little distance turns it into an identity. And the story, instead of healing, becomes a new burden.
Ian Stevenson, the University of Virginia psychiatrist regarded as the biggest name in reincarnation research, wrote a plain warning about this —
“A marked emotional experience during the hypnotic regression provides no assurance that memories of a real previous life were recovered.”
The client may weep, tremble, go through a deep catharsis — all of it is real. But it does not settle whether what appeared is history.
And if the therapist treats that intensity as “proof,” that too is the therapist’s own conditioning.
So keeping a clear distance between “what appeared” and “what historically happened” is the therapist’s responsibility.
In 1962, psychologist Martin Orne gave this pull a name — demand characteristics. A person in an experiment unknowingly begins to do what is expected of them. Orne was also a leading scholar of hypnosis, and in trance this effect runs deeper. The tone of the therapist’s question, their eagerness, a simple “okay… and then?” — can become a signpost for the client.
The psychoanalytic tradition looked for an answer to this long ago. In 1912, Freud asked the therapist for evenly suspended attention — attention that doesn’t lock onto one thing and go deaf to the rest. In 1967, Wilfred Bion took it further, suggesting that each session be entered “without memory or desire”. No grip on what came before, no wish for a particular outcome.
In our own tradition, this is called Sakshi Bhav — the witness state. The Mundaka Upanishad offers a famous image — “Dvā suparṇā sayujā sakhāyā…” Two birds on the same tree. One tastes the fruit, caught in pleasure and pain. The other simply watches.
In PLRT, perhaps the client is the first bird.
And the therapist has to be the second.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in regression is not the client’s trance. It is the therapist’s own conditioning.
We tell the client — “Let whatever comes, come.”
Can we do the same ourselves?
What makes a client ready?
Is an intense desire for healing enough? Is saying “I want to be free of this pain” enough to step into that depth?
Perhaps not.
In Trauma and Recovery (1992), a foundational book in trauma therapy, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman described three stages of healing — first safety, then remembrance and mourning, and finally reconnection. The order matters. Going into memory is the second step, not the first.
Daniel Siegel called it the window of tolerance — the range of emotion within which a person can both feel an experience and hold it. An experience pushed beyond that window doesn’t become healing. It can become the same wound all over again.
So readiness is not some mysterious spiritual qualification. It is made of concrete things: psychological stability, informed consent, emotional containment, and the ability to watch one’s own experience from a little distance.
One line from Herman feels exactly right here —
“Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.”
Healing happens within a relationship. And in regression, that relationship is between therapist and client.
So the therapist opens the door, but the role doesn’t end there. The therapist must also be the gatekeeper. The witness. The container.
Where my understanding shifted
In 1988, our Param Guru, Dr. Brian Weiss, published Many Lives, Many Masters. Dr. Weiss, under whom our mentor trained, was then Chairman of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami — a conventional, research-minded psychiatrist. His client Catherine began telling stories of past lives under regression, and her symptoms began to ease. This book gave past life therapy a new recognition around the world.
Around the same time, Jungian therapist Roger Woolger offered a different view in Other Lives, Other Selves (1987). In his work, the past-life story was read as the mind’s own language — a story in which the client’s unresolved pain takes shape, whether or not it can be proven historically.
Both streams were before me.
My question used to be — “Can we access Akashic memories?”
Now it is — “Whatever arrives from there as experience, can we hold it without distorting it?”
Not every experience has to be true. But every experience can be meaningful.
Therapeutic wisdom lies in holding that difference.
Before saying “this happened,” an experienced therapist asks — “What does this mean to you?”
When we turn experience into fact, we hand the client a new story. When we hold it as exploration, the client gets to see their own story.
Perhaps this is where PLRT’s next professional maturity lies —
From Technique to Presence.
From Interpretation to Inquiry.
From Certainty to Discernment.
And, before becoming a therapist, becoming an aware Witness.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra (1.3) says — “Tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe’vasthānam.” When the movements of the mind settle, the seer rests in its own nature.
Perhaps that is the therapist’s real preparation.
In the end, the real question is not whether the Akashic gate opens.
The question is: when it does, is there enough stillness within the therapist that they don’t fill what emerges with their own beliefs?
And is the client ready enough not to cling to that experience, but to learn from it — to see, to understand, and to be free?
Perhaps real regression is not a journey into the past.
Perhaps it is both therapist and client taking one step back from their own beliefs.
And perhaps that is where the deepest door of healing opens.
A question for fellow practitioners:
In your sessions, how do you tell whether you are receiving or constructing? And what signs tell you a client is not yet ready for regression?