Background on Past Life Regression

Past Life Regression Therapy sounds fascinating and an old science. However, in its modern form it was famously accidentally re-discovered and then reluctantly promoted by hypnotherapist Dr. Brian Weiss. While Dr. Weiss was working with a difficult case he, out of frustration asked his subject to ‘go back to a time related to the cause’ of her current issue. Before trying this idea, he had been fishing around in session after session trying to find the cause in the woman’s childhood. So, he was shocked when her subconscious mind literally obeyed the command and took her back to a past-life situation centuries earlier. At first Dr. Weiss could not fathom what had happened, and he was in deep denial, but as they say ‘proof was in the pudding’, and after some time he realized that his patient no longer suffered from the same issue. This indeed made a deep impression upon him.

Dr. Weiss was not the first to discover the benefits of Past Life Therapy. Back in the late 1920s there was a man named A. R. (Asa Roy) Martin who lived in Sharon, Pennsylvania who accidentally discovered and then developed his own method of past life regression therapy. While trying to develop a better method of memory recall for use by students in taking tests. Little by little, Martin and his family and friends – working on each other – became successful in these experiments. Since Mr. Martin had been studying metaphysics and hypnosis, the death of his mother prompted him to try use what he had learned to tap into the subconscious mind for answers to the questions about death and the afterlife, “since the subconscious theoretically remembers everything it has encountered and learned.” Mr. Martin then tried relaxing some of his subjects (family members and friends) using what he had learned in hypnosis. One such session related by Mrs. Woods, one of Martin’s daughters went like this: “Then… quite suddenly, the reviewer (the subject) would be recalling a past life, speaking in a different voice or language – a high pitched voice or a child’s voice, for example – or many times reviewing what she was doing between lives, how she was planning to return to a physical body and was choosing her parents. For example, a woman who desired to be an opera singer was selecting parents who genetically could give her the vocal cords which would be required to accomplish her goal in her next life.” A.R. Martin came to know Edgar Cayce and visited Cayce in Virginia about five times, the first time probably in 1935. Through those visits, Mrs. Woods says, Martin and Cayce became friends, and some correspondence passed between them. Martin never had a reading from Cayce, however. Cayce died in 1945. It is estimated that A. R. Martin conducted over 500 past-life regressions before he gave it up for other spiritual work, so “it is really not possible to gauge the impact of Martin’s regression work or its continuity through time after Martin’s death. However, considering the large number of people Martin came in contact with after 1928, it would be surprising to find that no one had continued his work with past-life regression.

Martin self-published Researches in Reincarnation and Beyond – a hardcover book of 211 pages – in 1942. However, since it is such a rare book, much of the details for this article came from a small Kindle book titled, A. R. MARTIN: Pioneer In Past-Life Regression by George Schwimmer, PhD. As one book reviewer stated, “A.R. Martin did so much with past life regression… so long ago. As the book he wrote was produced in an edition of 1,000 copies it is obviously not something we would come across very easily. George Schwimmer not only describes Martin’s unusual regression method but also how his wife and daughters assisted him in this work. The booklet [also] contains amazing stories of past lives that the people he worked with had experienced. A.R. Martin was a true pioneer in this work. This booklet contains some really amazing information If you are interested in reincarnation and/or past life regression.

One of the best-known studies into Past Life Experience is by Dr. Ian Stevenson. Over a period of forty years, he investigated and documented some 3,000 cases of children around the world claiming to recollect past-life memories. Stevenson published hundreds of papers and 14 books on reincarnation. He concluded that memories, emotions, and even physical injuries in the form of birthmarks could be transferred from one life to another.