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IN LOVE WITH A NAZI
What had I done?
“Get me out of here!” she all but screamed at me. All that Greta had seen were bodies: bodies upon bodies upon bodies stacked up like so much cordwood against the cold concrete walls. Her eyes closed, her head twisted about furtively like a tiny bird, frantically looking about in her mind’s eye. “I can’t find myself,” she said with a ferocious urgency. “I . . . I don’t know which one I am . . . Get me out of here!”
“Okay, okay, Greta,” I said, trying to sound calm and focused while I felt like my heart was going to pound out of my chest. “As I count upwards from one to ten, you will slowly regain full waking consciousness. Here we go: ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . .” I recited, not realizing that I was counting in the totally opposite direction, Way to go, Gregg!
It was a good thing that Greta had her eyes closed, or she would have seen every red blood cell in my body rush to my face in embarrassment. In truth, that was the least of my worries. I had never seen anyone react so frantically in a past-life regression. Greta’s sheer panic was overtaking her. I had never once had to count anybody out of a past-life regression because they were overwhelmed by the intensity of their feelings.
But then, I had never done a past-life regression before. This was my first.
Fortunately, I already was a licensed professional counselor, not completely unfamiliar with how to deal with an abreaction like the one Greta was having. I counted Greta the rest of the way out, still counting in the wrong direction, but Greta came up and out of hypnosis nonetheless.
She looked around, her eyes wide, the memory fresh. “I couldn’t find myself!” she said with a thick German accent. “I was looking, but I could not find me!”
It took me a minute to get my bearings and figure out exactly what Greta was talking about, but slowly the tumblers were clicking into place. I had successfully hypnotized her and taken her into a past life.
Hey, at least I got that part right. Not bad for a rookie. I told myself, trying to piece together a few shattered bits of my confidence, but cutting myself on the sharp edges. I had directed Greta to go to an important moment in that past life. But there was no way that either I or Greta could have known where she would go.
She had arrived in a lifetime in Nazi Germany, but not “in” her physical body. Moments before, she had been hung by her neck. Her body had then been taken away to some kind of warehouse for temporary storage along with other corpses. Greta was experiencing the aftermath of her life as a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl immediately after her execution. She was completely confused by the experience. She was deeply identified with her young body and panicked, her consciousness floating over the stacks of bodies trying to find the mortal coil that she had so recently inhabited. But then, it was too much, and Greta, rightfully, had asked me to get her out.
I snapped my fingers sharply, breaking the trance.
“Oh, mein Gott,” she said, choking back the tears as I gave the final suggestion to arrive back fully in the present.
“Greta, open your eyes. Greta? Greta! Greta, open your eyes,” I said in a firm voice. She responded, her eyelids fluttering rapidly, then becoming more present. She was breathing in short, sharp breaths, punctuated with chaotic moans. “That’s good. Greta, look at me. Look at me . . . look at me . . . look at me.” Her eyes finally went wide, as though she was seeing the bodies again. Then the rapid blinking returned as tears spilled down her cheeks. I was grounding her in the here-and-now by bringing her attention to my eyes and a safe presence.
“Greta, you are safe. You are safe. Do you understand me?” Her eyes were still filled with a lingering horror, but she nodded, still unable to speak. She whimpered and perused the room, as if to double-check if the evil was still present. She was here, at least in part.
“What you saw was horrible. What you saw was a horrible past-life memory. It was a very frightening image. And you are safe now. An image cannot hurt you. It can scare you, but it cannot hurt you. You are safe. You are back in Greta’s life experience here, now, in the year 1999.”
Greta took a series of slow, deep breaths and looked around the room, nodding, clearly wanting to believe me, beginning to believe me. The terror was still with her, but gradually she was orienting herself with my help in a large room that contained other counselors and therapists, paired off together, all practicing their brand-spanking new regression skills on their second day of training with Brian Weiss, a medical doctor with degrees from Yale and Columbia and perhaps the guy that was voted in his college yearbook as “Least Likely to be an International Authority on Past-Life Regression.”
Brian, a largely agnostic, obsessive-compulsive, magna cum laude grad, who had authored more than forty scientific articles and book chapters, had his life turned upside down some thirty years ago when he put a patient, “Catherine,” under hypnosis and directed her to go back to when the problem began, thinking she would land somewhere in her early childhood.
His worldview hadn’t really prepared him for a patient spinning back hundreds of years to another lifetime and then having the audacity to heal the more she remembered her past lives. To top it all off, Catherine reported the presence of Ascended Masters on the Other Side, who gave Brian especially personal information that Catherine herself could not have known. It was time to take a personal time-out, and take a second look at the Cartesian worldview.
Brian had to, shall we say, regroup.
All of which led to the 1988 publication of Many Lives, Many Masters—Brian’s international best-seller—followed by appearances on major networks and a string of successful follow-up books. Thus, regression came out of the closet and into afternoon TV, on Oprah, just like vibrators and men on the down-low.
I had seen Brian in person at a number of woo-woo conferences, but he wasn’t woo-woo. He was honest, kind, peaceful, and authentic. He was real. He was funny. (A friend of mine aptly described him as Jerry Seinfeld on Valium. But I don’t think that is his secret.) Mostly, he was totally credible, and I knew I would take the very first plane to his next regression training even if I had to hock the dog. You will be pleased to know that wasn’t necessary; I got enough for the cat.
Oh, c’mon, you know me better than that by now.
When I tell people in my workshops about my first past-life regression, they always ask me, “Weren’t you frightened?” And I always answer like the Wizard of Oz: “My Dear, you are looking at a man who has laughed in the face of danger, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe. Why, I was petrified.”
On balance, I must say that if your first past-life regression is filled with extreme Nazi trauma like this one, then pretty much anything else after that is a piece of cake.
So, thanks, Brian, for pairing me with Greta. You know how to show a guy a good time.
Within about ten minutes, I had Greta firmly grounded back in everyday reality. She was still very shook up. I asked her if she thought we should go back in to complete what we started. She shook her head “No,” vehemently.
“All right,” I said, attempting calm, moving towards something that might loosely be called my center. “I want you to know that you never have to revisit that lifetime if you don’t want to. Please be clear, I am okay with that. Having said that, your higher consciousness
