by Nellie Kampmann

Since I’m obsessed with my Civil War era life and want more answers about it, I decided to give hypnotic regression a try.  The results were worthwhile.

The hypnotist, Chel Hamilton, spent the first half hour of the session talking to me about how hypnosis works and doing some tests to see how well I would react to it.  I found it interesting that there were some parallels to what goes on in a psychic past life reading.  She said that sometimes people want to focus on a specific past life, but their subconscious decides that it’s more important for them to know about a different one and steers them to that instead.  Heaven knows, that can happen with psychic readings.  The old song by the Rolling Stones sums it up nicely.

“You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need".

Next she put me under.  First, I got the giggles when she told me that my eyelids were getting heavy.  Apparently, that’s a common reaction.  Then she made my arm feel like cooked spaghetti, which elicited another round of giggles.  I don’t know why I found that so funny, but it was hysterical at the time.

Then we started visiting scenes from my past life.  It started off when I was about 11.  What I really appreciated about it was that Chel would ask questions throughout to spur me to say who I was dealing, what relationship we had, with and where I was.  She knew that my goal for the session was to get details that could be historically verified, so I’m not sure if this much emphasis would be put on that in a usual past life regression session.  The good news is that she said that she got a lot of details out of me, more so than the average subject.  The bad news is that I am not entirely sure that with some of the more important details, like my name, I wasn’t just spitting out names that had already come up before in psychic readings.  The name I gave did feel right, though.  I did get some new information that may give me some leads, although I haven’t had much chance to research them yet.

In the course of an hour, we went through 7 or 8 scenes from my past life.  Some of them were ones that I had already touched on in my past life meditations, others were new, and some took me completely by surprise.  I have to say, it was very odd remembering giving birth to a breach baby and feeling the midwife’s hands inside me moving the baby around.  I was not expecting that!  

In another event, I remembered waking up in a deserted part of the city near the canal at night, being confused about why I was there, and feeling a lump on my head like I had been conked out.  That memory led to additional memories after the regression was over, giving me a fuller picture as to what had happened and some new leads to research. A couple of weeks later, I came across a period photograph of a strip along the canal that matched what I had seen in the regression. I checked all of the books I had used in my previous research to see if maybe I had just seen that picture before and somehow incorporated that into my memory. While I did find a single photograph of the canal in them, it was not not taken from this particular section of the canal. The photograph in the new book was from a private collection and thus not something that is likely to have been published before regardless.

Another thing that caught me by surprise was how tired I was by the time it was over.  From what I’d read about hypnosis, I was expecting more of a feeling of detachment.  Not that having the emotions was a bad thing.  The experience felt more real that way.  Still, it’s pretty intense going back and feeling how utterly lost and pain filled I was after the love of my life was killed, and even experiencing the fearful premonitions I had about it beforehand.

Overall, I’d say it was worth it.  Even if the details don’t lead to me being able to finally get some validation in the historical records, it did jog some new memories that explain some things about my attitudes in the current life.  Every bit of information I get on that is of value.

copyright Nellie Kampmann, 2009