Sunday, March 21, 2010

Report From "Experiencing Past Lives"

Yesterday was the "Experiencing Past Lives" seminar in Boston with psychiatrist/author Dr. Brian Weiss and psychic medium John Holland.  As I posted yesterday, my interest in this was due to research regarding a screenplay I wrote a few years ago that introduced me to Dr. Weiss and his book on reincarnation, Many Lives, Many Masters. I'd never heard of John Holland before but discovered he is actually a local boy from Dorchester, Ma.
I'll warn you now, there was no earth shattering moment for me.  So if you're waiting to read about my claims of being Cleopatra or something you can just go back to whatever else you should be doing today. For anyone interested, here are the details.

Dr. Weiss lead the morning session which included some lecture, a regression meditation and a psychometry exercise. Weiss said that the day was meant to show that "life doesn't stop with the death of the physical body" and this would be done from different perspectives. He said there is indeed, "life after death" and "life before death" (that was a cool term I'd never heard before). He's worked with 4,000 patients exploring past lives since he wrote his first book on the subject 30 years ago.

Weiss did a guided regression meditation for the 1,100 people in the hall.  I easily went into a deep meditation, didn't feel my body anymore and was just totally blissful and relaxed.  It felt like a very deep Holosync session.  I went in and out of being aware of Weiss' words.  I recall him saying, "now you are being born" then something about being outside a door and opening the door to a past life.  He told us to look around at all the details, take in as much as we could. At this point I'm not seeing or feeling anything except total peace and comfort. Next I remember him saying that lifetime comes to an end and now we are in spirit realm surrounded by masters and guides. At that point I saw and felt a subtle difference in the darkness and saw faded human shapes around. Then he guided us back to be fully awake and present. I thought it was a 15 minute exercise. It was actually 45 minutes long.

About 2/3rds of the room raised there hand to having some sort of vision or feelings from early childhood, inutero or a past life. He said 60% is the rough average for these group sessions. Lori and I both came up blank but with a pleasant experience and no sense of the time that had passed. In talking with others we both realized how much of the guided words we didn't hear/recall at all.

Next was a psychometry exercise. Psychometry is reading the energy from an object, picking up things about it or its owner. Everyone exchanged a personal object with someone else and held it close to them in silence for a couple minutes. There were some amazing reports between what was learned between strangers from this one. Some people saw where objects came from, who owned them previously and even predictions about where people were heading next.  Lori and I exchanged with each other so tough to say what was picked up versus what we already knew. I held her engagement ring and started to see old white/grey hair. I knew the diamond came from her grandmother so I thought I was going to see her image but it changed and got harder. It wasn't some old woman's hair style it was the rounded steeple top of a church - like this. Neither of us know if it's meaningful.
Lori held my wallet and got a sense of tightness and anxiety then relaxing. That pretty much sums up my wallet.

The afternoon featured medium John Holland giving a funny, high energy talk. This was such a huge change of personality from Brian Weiss who is probably the calmest, most stoic and deadpan person I've ever seen speak. John told his personal story and some of the psychic experiences he's had then he started doing readings for the room. I'd never seen a medium work and didn't know what to expect. It was WILD. So many jaw dropping, bone chilling, and tearful moments happened as he zeroed in on specific people and relayed messages "from the other side." It doesn't even matter if you believe or not, this was fantastic drama and entertainment. The room was so full of emotion as people laughed out loud or broke into tears based on what John told them. Before this event I didn't understand why anyone would care to see a medium unless it was for a personal session, but seeing it all happen live was very cool, surprising and powerful. Messages came from people who had passed decades ago, three months ago, due to illness, suicide, accidents.... the whole gamut. Every message boiled down to conveying love. Some spirits asked the loved one in the room to reach out to other relatives and convey what they heard here. It was quite moving. And for the skeptics - there was no assigned seating, no meeting of people with John or staff before hand, no information given ahead of time.

They day ended with a joint Q&A session where it was reiterated that there is no death; we go on.  The main message from the other side - there is nothing to fear and your loved ones are always with you. Nice.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Past Lives?

Back in 2004 I wrote my first screenplay. It was called "Lost Son" and it was inspired by the true story of a six year old boy who seemed to have the memories and personality of a World War II pilot who died in battle. As I conducted research into stories of other children who had memories of prior lives, I discovered Dr. Brian Weiss.

In 1980, Dr. Weiss was a psychiatrist who was having trouble helping one particular patient overcome anxiety, depression and a range of phobias. After months of therapy he tried hypnotizing her and told her to go to back to when her symptoms first arose.  That resulted in detailed stories of her life 4,000 years ago.  Other sessions brought other vivid recollections of even more lives.  Weiss didn't believe in reincarnation, but the more his patient talked about traumas in these prior lives, the more her current symptoms alleviated.  He was very hesitant to speak of this to anyone but at one point Dr. Weiss' patient told him things she couldn't possibly know about his own deceased son and father.  He started to believe and wrote the best seller, Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives.

Why am I telling this story?  Because Dr. Brian Weiss is doing a full day seminar tomorrow in Boston with John Holland called "Experiencing Your Past Lives." Lori and I are both going and I'll be sure to tell you what happens, unless it just totally freaks me out.

In other big news - the PhilosophersNotes 50 Day Challenge is complete! Today was day 50 and it ended with another fantastic book that I had never heard of but will now be reading; The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. I can't say enough good things about Brian Johnson and his PhilosophersNotes.  I learned so much more in these 50 days than from any single class or seminar I've attended.  Simply a phenomenal experience.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

PhilosophersNotes 50 Day Challenge

I'm in the final week of the PhilosophersNotes 50 Day Challenge and it has blown away all expectations.  PhilosophersNotes are these very cool sort of CliffNotes for personal growth books. The challenge was listening, reading and acting on one a day for fifty days.  Each note is a six page PDF highlighting the biggest ideas of the book and a 20 minute or so MP3 version.  The notes are so packed full of wisdom and reading so many that keep reinforcing each other has been a fantastic experience.  Before I started reading these I thought the notes were meant to replace the books, but they just whet your appetite.  I've uncovered so many cool books, most which I'd never heard of before. Here is a sample of six that I've recently ordered featuring a couple classics by Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer and four books that were completely new to me.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Weekend in Dublin

The Land of GuinnessWe're back home safe and sober after a long weekend in Dublin, Ireland. We landed there early Friday morning, around 5:30am. After a 3 hour nap we headed out to the Guinness Storehouse for the brewery tour. There were no lines to deal with and thanks to the Tasting Room and Perfect Pint training (we are now certified Perfect Pint Pourers - even Larry The Lizard) we had plenty of Guinness in us before we ever had a meal or even water. Feeling very Irish.

The Guinness Brewery is HUGE. It covers 66 acres and with all of its old brick buildings and black gates it looks just like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. We spent hours there and learned a ton about Guinness, like the Guinness Book of World Records comes from the same family - I never put that together before but it all started to settle barroom arguments. I also learned that I love to eat roasted barley. Who knew?

Then we wandered around the Temple Bar area of Dublin for the first of many times. That is the "cultural" area and full of the most pubs. We caught some Irish music and dancing, even got a free CD for being from Boston because there are more Irish in Boston than in Ireland (it seems anyway).Pour Your Own, All Night Long

Over the next few days we drank a lot of Guinness, even had a table with a built-in tap at our hotel, toured the Jameson Distillery, drank whiskey, ate malted barley, saw the Book of Kells, toured Dublin Castle, Christ Church, Kilmainham Gaol (prison), Dublinia, and Trinity College, visited many pubs and met lots of cool people, well except for one drunk douche bag that I had to scare off from bothering a 15 year old girl. And don't get fooled into visiting the Bad Ass Cafe - it should be called the Lame Colon.