With just about everything in life, we’re on a two-way street. We can get help and be saved, or we can ignore our problems and suffer. We can put on weight or lose it. We can even have out-of-body, near-death experiences yet still come back. We have a choice between this decision or that one. However, the birth experience is the only action that takes place in just one direction: If we want to live, we don’t have the choice to remain in the womb indefinitely. We have no alternative but to move forward, even though we know that we’re going to be born into a world where suffering is inevitable. We choose to do so because we choose to work on our issues and heal them.

No matter how loving our parents were, all of us have abandonment issues that stem from the experience of being born and being separated from the Divine. In fact, according to individuals who have been regressed to their past lives as well as to their birth experiences, by all accounts being born is one of the most difficult and challenging events in creation. Unlike at the time of death, when individuals are preparing to cross over and the soul leaves the body, the birth experience doesn’t provide a feeling of relief. Instead, it causes stress. If the stress is too great, it results in a wounding that deeply affects us throughout our lives.

Our unconscious memories of our experiences in the womb and during the process of birth can reveal themselves during a past-life regression, but sometimes I’ll have a hunch that my clients’ issues have something to do with their birth, and I’ll deliberately bring them back to when they were in the womb and are about to be born.

John’s Story

John, an attorney in his 30s, came to me because of his inexplicable and insistent fear of heights that he felt was holding him back. He also spoke of being afraid to “move up the ladder” or “rise too high” in his work. My intuition told me to regress him to his birth experience with his mother, Joan.

Joan, fully pregnant at nine months, is in her glory. Participating in a singing contest at the county fair, she loves nothing better than to be onstage and to “let it rip,” basking in the thrill of performing. Joan’s voice, both powerful and enchanting, fills the tent, enthralling her audience. In the middle of her song, while adding a few dance movements, she falls off the stage, immediately goes into labor, and is rushed to the hospital. The anxiety, panic, and all-consuming fear stemming from the possibility of losing her baby are agonizing and pervasive. Arriving at the hospital just in time, Joan gives birth to a perfectly healthy baby boy. Both mother and son are well and safe.

Joan’s intense anxiety and fear at the time of her fall and during John’s delivery immediately imprinted onto the fetus’s consciousness. From that moment on, John was never able to explain his phobia of heights. After John was regressed to his birth experience, his fear was clarified and he was able to begin the healing process. To recover from that trauma, he had to re-experience his birth in a completely new way. We rewrote the script of this event. I helped him enter a trancelike state and guided him with my words.

In the story that I talked him through, his mother was able to complete her song at the fair, win the contest, feel a few twinges as labor began, and then calmly and comfortably ask her husband to escort her to the hospital. Joan, eager and excited about having a baby, could transmit a message of safety as well as a sense of adventure to her son rather than transferring fear and panic to him.

Emotionally experiencing this new script while in a trancelike state, John was able to transform his reactions and transcend his phobia of heights. Afterward, he was able to walk out onto a balcony and eventually, onto a terrace of a ten-story building. Within a year, he took pictures of himself standing at the top of a cliff in the Rockies! His newfound confidence caused him to scale new heights in another way, too: He applied for a higher position in his firm, and he got the job.

Overcoming his fear of heights and releasing the conflict at the source—namely, the events around the labor and delivery—offered John tremendous relief. It enabled him to begin to transform himself without suffering the paralyzing fears that once plagued him.