Reframing

Reframing

Of the transformational tools used in past-life therapy, reframing is one of the most powerful. It was first described by Bandler and Grinder in their 1979 book Frogs into Princes, where the focus of reframing is either to separate the intention behind a specific set of symptoms and to reframe that intention in a more beneficial pattern, or to reframe an inappropriate behavior pattern so that it occurs in a useful context. Within the past-life therapy context, reframing is broader than the definition given by Bandler and Grinder. Besides intention and inappropriate behavior patterns, many basic life patterns, such as relationships, talents, handicaps and physical illnesses can be reframed within a past-life scenario in order to provide a different and meaningful perspective to a patient. Such a perspective can not only offer insight into a situation but can allow a patient to have cathartic release and freedom from self-defeating patterns. Thus, reframing is the act of changing a frame by which a person perceives and experiences events in order to change the meaning. When the meaning of an event changes, the patient's behaviors and responses also change.

 Reframing an Intense Mother-Child Bonding

Dawn was a professional woman, concerned because she was in her forties and had never had a loving and supportive relationship. Her experiences with men had turned out to be toxic and frustrating. She had felt a need for a child to complete her experience of being a woman, and five years before she had chosen to have a baby, even though she had to support and care for him alone. Though the experience was satisfying and fulfilling, she longed for someone to love, someone with whom to share the child, and she retained a nagging feeling that somehow she had failed as a woman. She also came under criticism because of her extremely close bonding with her son. She had had other regressions and in each of them she has found herself alone. This aloneness was repeated in the present regression when she moved from the garden setting she had chosen as her special place and which had been used for the induction into another lifetime.

T: Your unconscious mind is now allowing you to go beyond this garden, to know that beyond this garden is a place, a time, that you were once familiar with. Why is it that you have not made any significant relationships with the opposite sex during this lifetime? Where is the energy coming from? Why has that energy been reinforced throughout this lifetime.

Go on back now.

P: The only place I'm getting to is sort of autumn, almost winter, by a forest, not in a forest but alongside one. That's all I see at the moment, not me but the place and the time of year and the wind is blowing.

T: Is this a forest you are familiar with?

P: No, I think it’s  someplace in the past—Europe or farther east.

T: I want you to focus on that. As you begin to focus on the forest, you can allow the nature of the forest to deepen your experience. Allow your mind to open up and develop the context of this forest scene and whether this is the place that you should look at in terms of understanding the lack of positive and loving experiences. Allow yourself to move either forward or backward in time in the scene into significant events connected with this lifetime.

P: I just see it large and in more detail but it’s  still the same.

T: Continue to look, and while you look, are you there somewhere? Is there a relationship between your sense of intensity and this forest?

P: I don’t  see any. I just sense me looking.

T: Is there a path through the forest?

P: I see now one of those little Nordic kind of horses that are smaller than ponies. They're wooly. Nobody's with it but I don't think it's wild.

T: Do you have the feeling this horse belongs somewhere to someone?

P: I have some connection to it.

T: See if you can allow this horse to lead you to its own home or to its connections.

P: I just see its carcass and maggots eating it.

T: What kind of feeling does that bring up?

P: (Crying.) Sadness.

T: Is there a feeling, that this pony is yours?

P: It was mine, yes. He was sold. He wasn’t  mine anymore. Dawn then recovered earlier years in that lifetime when her parents  were killed and she was taken to live with a rather silent and uncommunicative man and woman. The only relationship she had was with her little horse.

T: What's the special relationship you have with the horse?

P: It’s  just that it’s  my friend. My only friend.

T: What do you do with this horse?

P: Go into the woods, walk with it. It’s  more like a dog—no saddle or bridle.

T: How are you experiencing yourself in that family context? I want you to look. Just be very much in touch with your feelings and also the relationship between yourself and this family and yourself and this horse. See yourself as moving into scenes that will help you illuminate the nature of this relationship.

Dawn described her feeling of isolation. She felt no love and no hale. She did her share of chores so she was not a burden. She was very connected with nature, with the woods and hills and seasons, as well as with the horse. The man went out in the woods one day and didn't return.

T: I want you to move forward in time and see what it is between you and this horse that deepens the relationship.

P: Just the joy of being together.

T: There's a deep sense of communication, isn't, there?

P: Yes, I feel like we're soul partners. (Sobs.)

T: Is there connection just with the horse or with the things around you?

P: Yes, with the woods and the wild animals, even though we don’t  get too close. But they're not afraid of me either.

Dawn moved ahead and saw that one day while she was away, the woman, hard up for money, sold the horse. Sometime after that Dawn was swimming in a river and was caught in a bad current. She made no effort to save herself and was drowned.

T: Go to the time that led to your death. What is the feeling in your body? What are you experiencing, now that you have lost your good friend?

P: It was shortly after I found his carcass. I think he had been abused... to death. Nature wasn’t  enough to make me want to hang around I can see what the work of that life was now. I knew there was something, but I wasn’t  focused on it. I couldn’t  see it and I felt I didn’t  want to try anymore.

T: So you just sort of resigned...or gave up.

P: I gave up. I didn’t  do it thoughtfully. I was just swimming in the river. I knew that the middle was very dangerous and I didn’t  really care that it was. It was sort of like Russian roulette. I had to see what happened and it was too strong for me and carried me over some rocks. I guess I hit my head.

T: And when you see yourself in that river and hit on the head, what are your feelings and the last thoughts prior to your becoming unconscious?

P: Maybe next time it will be clearer. My purpose.

T: Maybe next time it will become clearer. Any other feelings here?

P: Just sadness.

T: What does the sadness say?

P: It's as though I lost so much but I did okay as long as I had the horse.

Even though I'd lost my parents. But that was too much. And even loving nature wasn’t  enough to sustain me.  I'm going to share a feeling I have here and I want to see if you resonate with it. The feeling is that you made a decision that there is "really no one there to help and support and take care of me." Or, "I can never really trust in having someone take care of me."

P: That’s  definitely so.

T: And when I can't find anyone to take care of me, the places where I find solace are not really ever enough. You can’t  depend on life to be there for you because other parts of life like that forest can be taken away from you.

P: Even the city lakes nature away.

T: The city takes nature away. If you look back, with these feelings we've just explored see how that relates to where you are now, how it relates to your relationship with people, finding a significant relationship.

P: I see it’s  related to the pattern. It seems like once again I've done what I've done in a lot of regressions—I've gotten to a very lonely life. I don’t  get lives with relationships.

T: Let’s  go back. What you’re  saying is that in this life now and in that life people are never there for you. You can never really depend on people to be there for you, and if one lives life, one must almost live it alone. Is that the sense?

P. Yes.

T: I want you now to allow your Higher Mind to go deeper. Find out where, upon what basis you had to have this kind of lifetime of non-dependence on other people to be really supportive of where you are. I want you to move now to a lifetime responsible for this decision or this experience. I'm going to count back from 10 to one. When I reach one you 'II find yourself in that lifetime.

P: I think I know where it is.

T: Already? I don't have to count? What is coming up for you?

P. It's Egypt.

Dawn told the story of how she had been betrothed to a cousin almost from birth. They grew up together and developed feelings of attachment and love that blossomed into strong sexual feelings in adolescence. They took it for granted they would be married, but suddenly, overnight, when she was 16, she was sent away to become a priestess in the temple. She was given no explanation and in thrusting around for an explanation she decided the young man she loved had betrayed her. Pervasive anger at him covered over the former feelings of love.

T: I want you to go back and look at that situation and see the circumstances of that love and also the change of plans. I want you to go to that scene where you decided that somehow he had betrayed you and I want you to see if that really was the case. There was his energy in loving you and feeling very much in touch with you and having a great deal of joy in expressing and experiencing his and yours both, both your energies. I want you just to see another scene now...

Dawn very easily went into such a scene and realized that her father owed something and had his choice between giving his daughter to the temple or having his entire family killed.

P: To accompany whoever it was who had just died. Either our whole family went with him (died) or I went as a priestess.

T: You became the sacrificial one.

P: Yes. And I never saw or heard from this boy or his family again. I knew nothing about them. But now I'm seeing that he killed himself. (Deep crying.)

T: Because he really loved you, too, didn’t  he? He felt the loss.

P: (Crying.) He took poison.

T: Uh huh. It seems almost as though both of you became victims of filial duty here.

P: (Deep crying.) I don’t  know why I felt his family had done it, because I see now it wasn’t  so.

T: Seeing it now as it is, where is that energy, that anger? Do you feel that you’re  releasing it, now that you 've seen this as it really is, that there was no one who really wanted to reject you.

P: I feel the anger at the religious power that things could be done like that.

Dawn went ahead in that life and saw that she grieved for a few years and then competently took up her duties as a priestess, which were connected with moon worship. She became the wise woman of the temple, one to whom people came for knowledge. When she was quite old she just stopped eating and let herself die.

T: What are your last thoughts and feelings just before your spirit passes from your body?

P: They're sort of double. One is that I've done a good job at what I was supposed to, what it appears I was supposed to do. And another was that something was totally unfinished. With the relationship I feel the pain a little bit again that I had felt on that last night of the year when I was 16.

T: So that on your departure there's really the feeling on one level of satisfaction but on another level there are unresolved feelings.

P: Yes. I both succeeded and didn’t  succeed. I succeeded in that I allowed myself to bend to the purpose that they gave me and flow with the wind.

T: I have a feeling that there's more here. I want you to take this life and see yourself moving out of it and into a space where you can look and view that entire life and compare it to where you are now and see how the

energies and the unresolved relationship had an effect upon the decisions you have made in this lifetime. What do you see? Take a moment and see yourself now renewing that entire scenario and look at what you're unfolding right now. What is it that you see?

P: Somehow it seems—I don’t  know—that I had some reparative work to do in having my son, that I cannot have my son and have a relationship, too. That's the feeling that I have, that I've chosen in this lifetime to do something with my son.

T: With your son. Do you feel any of your son's energy from that lifetime?

P: (Voice breaking.) Well, I'm almost thinking he was the man. (Crying.)

T: You feel that?

P: I think... at least from my sadness... this time it was safer to have him as a son.

T: Because in this way you could protect him, love him, love him in a way that would not have any intrusive factors coming in.

P: It seems that he won’t  hurt me this way.

T: He can’t  hurt you as your son.

P: I have to look at my relationship with my son. I'm making it so there wouldn’t be room for a man.

T: That's right. There wouldn’t be room for a man. It's almost as though you have created a very sacred space and that's part of your decision, and that space between you and him is not to be violated.

P: Yes. Well, I get that feedback from people, too, and I don’t  know what 's right and what 's wrong. I don’t  know.

T: I think it will be more clear to you as he grows up.

Other connections were explored, such as Dawn's deep affinity with the moon, and she was brought back into the peace of the garden, where she saw her son dancing, and then came back into her body. The major piece of work in this second Lifetime lay in the reframing of her interpretation that no one cared for her and that the young man she loved had betrayed her. This reframing made it possible for her to re-experience the deep love she had felt for him and eventually to connect him with her son. She realized that the reason a significant, loving man doesn't come into her life is that her son is her significant loving man, the one with whom she has a deep but unfinished relationship. Other work remains to be done regarding the choice of her as a priestess, that appeared not to be a random one but one based on the potentials she must have manifested as a child in that lifetime.

An interesting sidelight to this regression was the insistence of Dawn's son, when he was three and a half, that he and his mother had lived together in California "before there were buildings." He remembered being

a girl of 15 married to a young brave (his mother). He described fishing together in a wide river and times when the young brave went hunting and he (as the wife) made cakes of corn. He was able to describe the dwelling they lived in and many of the details of their lives as Indians, none of which Dawn had as yet recovered. As he neared five, the memory dimmed and is now almost gone, usual when young children recover past lives spontaneously.

Another factor in my experience of the regression was that as I went into a deeper altered state myself I began to pick up things in scenes and think, "Oh, okay, there's that factor." For instance, when Dawn was describing the loss of the young man, I was in the lead and pacing with her because when she said, "I was in love with this guy," I had already shifted and could feel the love. I sort of said, "Wait a minute." Then I got her back into that space prior to the resentment, and the tears came. I had already experienced that while she was still in the anger. I was continually picking up things in the various scenes. For instance, I thought there were other things that involved her being the sort of child who was selected to be a priestess. I was picking more information up and was becoming more and more connected with her and seeing her life. This capacity, while in an  altered state, to tune into the field of the patient, extends one's ability to know what is the most helpful area or direction in which to move. I believe that past-life work can be done without it, but to me it seems a helpful adjunctive tool. It is necessary, as in this regression, to make a judgment as to when possible directions must be postponed for later sessions in order to focus and integrate a particular insight.

Excerpted from

REGRESSION THERAPY:

A HANDBOOK FOR PROFESSIONALS

Volume I

Article by Ronald Wong Jue, Ph.D.

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