Healing Your Past Lives: Exploring the Many Lives of the Soul

Having read Dr. Woolger's earlier works I bought this with great anticipation and while I feel the concept is valid I was disappointed with his execution of it.I feel he was too structured and directing when you have to be more open in an experience seeking process transcending time.I have successfully navigated time in my mind and am on record as having solved the mystery of the Peri' Reis map and the method by which such maps were drawn in antiquity with accurate longitudes determined thousands of years before the chronometer, radio, etc. And, the method by which Captain Cook so accurately placed islands in the South Pacific. I saw it done 8,000 years ago. These adventures are not easily done.I know how to get there and Dr. Woolger does not. The process has to be much more open and perhaps done in person, but I do believe what he attempted can be done, but it needs a lot of work and testing. This is only a nicely done first attempt.

Cons:This book is only 80 pages long.Much of what is here is repeated in Other Lives Other Selves.Pros:The 20% of the book that is new is very worthwhile information.It's succinct, easy to read and understand.The price is right.The CD is a great bonus. It gives information in a way that written material can't.

Don't buy the Kindle version- the audio CD is a necessary component to this book's teachings, and it's not included (nor are there links to streams/video/audio that could help).

this is a terrific book if one is interested in reading about past life therapy. woolger was a jungian who practiced past life therapy on his patients. very interesting stuff. I recommend the book highly.

Anyone exploring past lives will find this book a treasure of information. Well written, clear and not complicated. You will never think of life and death the same way again.

This book is short, simplistic and boring. Not sure if the author wanted to make a quick buck by simplifying what he already wrote elsewhere. I thought the CD would make it worth the money, but oh my God, his voice is so monotonous it put me to sleep!

Highly recommend

Excellent read!!!

Roger J. Woolger, Healing Your Past Lives: Exploring the many lives of the soul, Sounds True, Boulder CO, 2004, 88 pages.Before approaching this book the reader needs certain qualifications: first, they must believe that there is such a thing as a non-material soul associated with the human body; secondly, they need to belief that that soul can successively inhabit different bodies, who may live very different lives. The aim is to dispel the anxieties and even physical illnesses that have their origins in the events we experienced when we previously occupied another human body. The author is a Jungian psychotherapist who trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. This short book is a successor to Other Lives, Other Selves..Essentially this is a self-help book and it comes with an audio CD for listeners to recognize symptoms in their present lives of past-life traumas. This is a crucial part of the whole experience. The author takes us through a series of exercises conjuring up images of events we experienced and places that we may or may not have visited, Personally, I found this extremely difficult: the author continually poses questions but I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the answers.The past-life recollections achieved under counselling or hypnosis seem to me to be very similar if not identical to the kinds of past lives described by those who have an out-of-body or near-death experience. The human mind from the moment of birth has stored within it the memories of innumerable previous lifetimes. Woolger points up the need to go beyond the boundaries of conventional science if we are to meaningfully explore the imagination and visionary experience. In the writings of the early Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, and for shamans amongst indigenous people there is an awareness that there is a dimension to human life that rational thought alone cannot penetrate. Here, through programmed counselling, the author encourages patients to explore earlier traumatic experiences that are buried in the subconscious and then he interprets them to help patients overcome present-day physical or psychological problems: the aim is emotional cleansing or catharsis, for the ‘karmic wounds from the distant past become the complexes of the present’. There is much discussion about how what we experience in the ‘bardo’, the afterlife realm, will depend on how we live our present lives.My one main reservation about this as a ‘self-help’ book is that I think it is unwise to encourage people to try to drag, out of their subconscious, memories of unpleasant events that are buried for that very reason. People need psychiatrists or other trained counsellors to be with them when they relive such experiences. I also doubt if many people, without deep hypnosis or psychic experience, would be capable of recollecting anything from a past life.

Dr Woolger's visionary imagination is writ large over this fascinating introduction into the capacity in all of us to transcend the material realm and learn to see with the "heavenly eye" of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis) as shamans do when they journey across the bridge of imagination into the subtle world (mundus imaginalis). Developing such a capacity through Deep Memory Process (DMP) is important in healing a strong reaction in the present triggered by a portal into a past-life memory that have become complexes of frozen or buried emotions and assumptions - karmic wounds.A guiding logic stems from a wide reading into Eastern mysticism especially the belief of the continuation of the mind's soul through an intermediary world called a 'bardo' (Tibetan) or 'akasha' (Sanskrit) which after death prepares the soul for 'completeness' to leave the earthly plane. It does this by facing it with entities that mirror the unfinished psychological problems of the person who has died. However, unless the dying consciousness can assimilate these difficult energies it is reborn such that setbacks in one lifetime are passed on, often as violent scripts, that create patterns of suffering called 'samskaras' (deep and bitter scars in the soul). Dr Woolger has, through his personal experiences, discovered that the departing spirit either remains a) earthbound (fixed or wandering) unaware that its earthly life has ended or b) troubled (unfinished/obsessed) but confused in a higher after-death realm to be then recycled by the bardo into a subsequent rebirth, or c) completed, to go peacefully to an enlightened plane.In DMP a person who was emotionally disturbed or obsessively re-running a thought before death would be unable to realise that its life is really over. Lifetimes where there were severe struggles - or an abrupt cutting short as is often the case - are the ones most likely to produce phobic, traumatic patterns or fragmented scripts in the present. This imprint creates an uncontrollable urge to replay our past life stories, often with negative consequences, which are irrational in the world of the biographical self. Ultimately, the relinquishing of attachment across all life times to achieve a true alchemical transformation is what Jungians call our 'opus magnum'.I have to admit that with a slight skeptical air at first I was left with a little uncertainty as to the validity of Dr Woolger's claims since there is the easily levelled accusation of "where is the science?". However, reading the narratives of the "horrors of pre-historical" examples that are presented as evidence one wonders much that our world is like a karmic version of Ghostbusters, and why shouldn't a kindly nudge of therapeutic human warmth and dignity towards lingering spirits from those who care seek to be a part of the mystery of healing that surrounds us all. The only difference here being that I didn't expect to be convinced by an academic in regular clothing with such an authoritative air of knowing!

Kindle version does not download the CD for 6 sessions. These are quite important so this is a huge disappointment. The description does not mention that this would be excluded on this version.

Somebody asked me to buy this for them for a present and they said they were very pleased with it and it was good reading

If you've always been fascinated in exploring your past-lives, this is a great book with CD. The CD that comes with this book has a meditation created to safely explore your past-lives in the comfort of your own home.