Past Life Regression: What It Is, What Research Found, Is It Safe

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 20, 2026Oct 20, 2026 · How we write

Past life regression is a hypnosis or guided-imagery session in which a person is asked to go back “before birth” and describe a previous life. The scenes can feel vivid and emotional. Experiments show they are built by imagination and shaped by the hypnotist’s suggestions.

What is past life regression?

Past life regression (PLR) is a session in which a hypnotist or guide relaxes you, takes you into a light trance and asks you to go back past your birth into a life you supposedly lived before. A typical session follows the same steps. You lie down with your eyes closed, the practitioner relaxes you with slow breathing and counts you down a staircase, and then asks you to walk through a door, a bridge or a tunnel of light. The questions that follow are concrete: look down at your feet, what are you wearing, where are you, what is your name, what year is it. Many sessions end with a scene of death in that life and a question about its “lesson”.

A session often takes an hour or more, with a talk afterwards. Some practitioners work in person, some online, and there are recordings for doing it alone (we cover that on a separate page: how to do past life regression at home). The method came out of hypnotic age regression, where a therapist asks a person to relive an earlier age of this life. PLR pushes the same technique past birth.

Does past life regression help? Anxiety, phobias, meaning

We found no controlled trial showing that past life regression treats any condition. In PubMed, the main database of medical research, there are only a handful of papers on it at all, and none is a randomized trial of the therapy. A 2026 review of age regression in clinical hypnosis excluded past-life studies “due to insufficient empirical support and methodological concerns”. The positive reports come from practitioners’ own journals and client surveys, without a comparison group.

Some people do feel lighter afterwards. That is plausible without past lives: an hour of deep relaxation, a person paying close attention to you, and a story that turns a vague fear into a scene with an ending can all help for a while. If you are dealing with a phobia, panic or depression, therapies with trial evidence exist, such as exposure therapy and CBT; for pain or migraines, start with a doctor. A past life story can delay them. The ethicist Gabriel Andrade argued in 2017 that offering PLR as therapy is unethical for exactly these reasons: it rests on an unproven idea and it risks implanting false memories.

Where it came from: Bridey Murphy, Brian Weiss and Ian Stevenson

Bridey Murphy, 1952–1956. Morey Bernstein, a businessman and amateur hypnotist in Pueblo, Colorado, held six sessions with a local woman, Virginia Tighe, starting in November 1952. Under hypnosis she spoke as Bridey Murphy, born in Cork in 1798, who married a Belfast lawyer and died in 1864. Bernstein’s book The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956) spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Researchers found no birth or death record for Bridey. Newspapers reported that, as a child in Chicago, Tighe had lived across the street from an Irish woman named Bridie Murphy Corkell. Some of those newspaper claims later proved inaccurate too. The case made the method famous, and it also showed that details may come from things a person heard long ago and forgot.

Brian Weiss, 1988. The psychiatrist Brian Weiss, whom his publisher describes as chairman emeritus of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, wrote Many Lives, Many Masters about a patient he calls Catherine. In 1980, under hypnosis for anxiety and phobias, she began describing earlier lives. Weiss writes that her symptoms faded and that she passed on messages from spiritual “Masters”. The book made PLR a mass practice, and publishers say it has sold more than a million copies. Everything about Catherine comes from Weiss himself; we found no independent check of the details she gave.

Ian Stevenson, 1960s–2007. Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, is often quoted as proof that regression works. He didn’t use it. His group collected what they call over 2,500 cases of small children, usually aged two to five, who spontaneously talked about another life; his first book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, appeared in 1966. In a statement still on the university’s site he wrote this about hypnosis:

“nearly all such hypnotically evoked ‘previous personalities’ are entirely imaginary just as are the contents of most dreams.”

He added that a strong emotional experience during regression “provides no assurance” that a real memory came back, and that he did not recommend hypnotists to people who want the experience. His child cases have their own critics, among them the philosopher Paul Edwards, whose 1996 book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination argues they are much weaker than they look.

Is past life regression real? What the experiments found

People do see scenes, hear names and cry. The research tested where that content comes from. The best-known experiments are by the Canadian psychologist Nicholas Spanos and his colleagues, published in 1991 as four studies with university students.

Put together, these studies say the content of a regression follows expectations and suggestions, and that people who report past lives are more prone to one kind of memory error. Two limits are worth knowing. These were small samples of students or volunteers, not therapy clients. And no experiment can disprove reincarnation as a belief. What they show is that a regression session is a poor tool for finding out.

Why the memories feel real

Memory is not a recording. It is rebuilt every time, from bits of what happened, what we were told and what we imagine. In a 1995 study by Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell, about a quarter of 24 adults came to “remember” being lost in a shopping mall as children, an event their relatives had made up for the experiment. A 2023 replication with 123 people got 35%.

Hypnosis doesn’t fix this. In 1985 the American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs reviewed the evidence and concluded that memories recalled under hypnosis can include confabulations and pseudomemories and “actually appear to be less reliable than nonhypnotic recall.” Spanos and colleagues added in 1994 that hypnosis can make people more confident in recall that is wrong.

The name for remembering something without knowing it is a memory is cryptomnesia. The Finnish psychiatrist Reima Kampman ran regression experiments with students in the 1960s and 1970s. When he hypnotized them again and asked where a detail came from, they often named a book they had leafed through years before, and the book had the detail. In one case a young woman sang a medieval English song in her “past life”. Under a second hypnosis she remembered seeing it at 13 in a music history book.

What past life regression can be good for

Treated as imagination rather than memory, the same exercise can be interesting. People often meet in their “past life” a theme that matters now: a loss, a wish to leave, a fear of being trapped. Writing the scene down and asking “why this story, why now?” works the way a dream journal does for some people. Some find a sense of a longer life story comforting, the same way a novel can be.

Spanos’s fourth study points the same way: the same scene feels different depending on whether you call it memory or imagination. Called imagination, it still tells you something about yourself.

Hypnotherapy and past life regression: the same thing?

No. Hypnotherapy is the use of hypnosis in treatment, for example for pain, smoking or anxiety, and it has its own body of research. Past life regression borrows the trance but adds a belief: that problems now come from events in earlier lives. The APA Dictionary of Psychology calls it “a highly controversial hypnotic regression technique” and notes that most hypnotherapists “do not recognize it as a legitimate therapeutic tool”. If you go to a hypnotherapist, you can ask directly whether they do regression and how they avoid leading questions.

Is past life regression a sin? Christianity and Islam

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “There is no ‘reincarnation’ after death” (§1013). That rules out the belief behind PLR, though we found no Vatican document about regression or hypnosis as practices. In Islam, scholars on sites such as IslamQA describe reincarnation as contrary to the Qur’an and the belief in resurrection; there is no single ruling on regression itself. Hindu and Buddhist traditions do teach rebirth, driven by karma, but their texts describe recalling past lives as a fruit of deep meditation (in the Buddhist Bhayabherava Sutta, after the fourth level of absorption), not through hypnosis. If the question matters to you, ask someone in your own tradition.

What this page does not promise. We don’t claim past lives are real or unreal; that is a question of belief, and no session can settle it. The self-check doesn’t diagnose anything and isn’t medical advice. Nothing here treats anxiety, phobias, trauma or any illness. We describe what the research found and what medical sources advise.

How the self-check works

The check has 12 statements. Each has one of four levels, set from the sources above. Good to know is about expectations, from Spanos’s studies and Stevenson’s statement. Ask a doctor first covers hoping to treat a health problem, and epilepsy (NHS). Not now, not alone covers looking for abuse memories (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1998), recent trauma or PTSD, dissociation (Cleveland Clinic) and psychosis (NHS, Royal College of Psychiatrists). Get help now is for crisis or thoughts of death, and shows help lines at once. The headline follows the most cautious item you tick, and each ticked item gets its own note. The example above uses three sample ticks. Nothing is saved or sent.

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