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He doesn’t have to believe your past lives to heal you

THE VIEW FROM ABOVE: Though out of body experiences are not related to past life regression, hypnotist Donald Currie helps to heal emotional scars via past life regression. Clients dig deep into past lives to find the root cause of their woes.
THE VIEW FROM ABOVE: Though out of body experiences are not related to past life regression, hypnotist Donald Currie helps to heal emotional scars via past life regression. Clients dig deep into past lives to find the root cause of their woes.

Brian_Baker_columnX-Files fans can cheer the show is being resurrected for TV this coming year after a 13-year hiatus.

One of the past episodes inspired my search for hypnotist and neurolinguistic programmer, Donald Currie. The episode, “The Field Where I Died,” delved into past life regression.

Amazingly enough, there are folks in midtown who dip into this realm. Eyeroll all you want, but in many Eastern philosophies the belief of reincarnation is common, and the North American expression “old soul” is often used to describe a younger person with peculiar interests for things outside of their generation.

It’s a label that has been pinned to me like the tail on a donkey throughout my life.

So, I chatted about past life regression with Currie at his Yonge and Davisville office and, yes, I brought up The X-Files.

He smiled warmly and admitted whether people believe in reincarnation or not, his role is to help alleviate people of their subconscious hang-ups.

“A lot of those limitations come in from childhood and old programming that their parents put in,” he shares. “Parents saying, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you’re not smart enough.

“Not everybody had happy and healthy childhoods, so a lot of what we experience as children affect us later in life.”

He has some intriguing tales of people supposedly speaking in foreign tongues — in some cases dead languages like Aramaic.

Past life regression is merely a means to help people purge their deep-seeded inhibitions, Currie says. He compared past lives to the three-sided billboards often seen while driving on the Gardiner.

“It’s one advertisement, then it turns and it’s another advertisement and then it turns and it’s another advertisement. It’s still the same sign but different signages,” he says. “It’s almost the same with us.

“We believe the soul is here, having this experience but the soul is elsewhere having other experiences at the same time. It’s all connected to the same thing.”

Being a journalist, I have a healthy dose of skepticism, but I’m also supposed to be neutral and open to all perspectives.

That’s the same approach Currie takes, especially when someone sashays into his office claiming they were Cleopatra in a past life.

“If that’s what they believe, that’s fine, and if that’s the experience they’re going to have, they’re going to have it,” he admits. “It’s not my place to judge or criticize or be critical of that. What I do is I let them have that experience.”

A good way around the Cleos and Napoleons is to take a trip through multiple lives, starting in the teens, and revolving around three major events that took place in their lives, like a wedding, the birth of a child, war or even professional accomplishment.

“We look at that lifetime and start to look at the knowledge and wisdom that was learned: What caused the most sadness or happiness during that time,” he says.

During our discussion, director Christopher Nolan and his film Inception came up, as did physicist Michio Kaku’s string theory of parallel universes.

Pop culture and theoretical science aside, reincarnation has been something I’ve been curious about because I have some unexplainable affinities in my early years. As a teen my favourite actor was Humphrey Bogart, actress Rita Hayworth; I loved Romantic poetry and for some reason I listened to classic rock when I should have been listening to Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots or Pearl Jam.

Now, I often illustrate my thoughts with pop culture references, but the real message Currie is sharing is that he helps people, families overcome mental and emotional barriers that conventional means cannot solve.

If it seems unorthodox, then perhaps you need to dig a little deeper to find out why you have certain hang-ups, fears or affinities that cannot be explained, and then ask yourself, “Where did they come from?”