“Everybody is an old soul.”
There’s a pause after the words come out of Georgina Cannon’s mouth during a February phone conversation.
The award-winning author, practising hypnotherapist and founder of the Ontario Hypnosis Centre discusses how hypnotherapy helps people heal, particularly through past life regression.
For medical practitioners, past life regression is often considered confabulation. To Christians, it’s not even present, as one lives, dies, is judged and goes to heaven or hell.
But to others, chiefly Buddhists, it’s a pathway to spiritual enlightenment.
And there’s no hesitation when Cannon talks about her belief in the unknown. The former journalist and PR executive grew up in England, where belief in elementals and folktales is commonplace.
“We knew there were fairies at the end of the garden and we understood spirits and energies,” she says, her British accent still present. “It’s part of our life. We take it for granted.
“When I came to Canada, I was a bit surprised that nobody believed in that.”
After years as a journalist and a public relations consultant — her fledgling company was eventually bought by Burson-Marsteller — she began to explore Gestalt therapy, psychodrama therapy and Reiki.
“I got tired of the corporate world. So in 1996, I had enough, took a year off and started to find out how I could help humanity instead of big business.”
She studied past life regression under Canadian psychologist Dr. Henry Leo Bolduc and interlife regression with American psychologist Dr. Michael Newton.
Past life regression is another way of helping clients address trauma or uncover the roots of certain behavioural patterns.
Perhaps the most famous case of past life regression is that of Pueblo, Colorado housewife Virginia Tighe. While under hypnosis by Morey Bernstein, she recounted her life in 19th-century Ireland as Bridget “Bridey” Murphy.
Originally hiding under the pseudonym Ruth Simmons to avoid backlash — as Tighe was a respectable Christian — she revealed specific details about life in the city of Cork.
Regardless of earlier stories, those who visit Cannon are curious about past life regression. There may be some skepticism, but as Cannon gets them to relax, “the soul will take them where they need to go.”
The client could be a survivor of Auschwitz, a wealthy 18th-century woman confined to her home or, time permitting, a slave in a third session.
“When they come out of hypnosis, my first question is, ‘Can you see the similarities?’” Cannon says. “People are usually quite shaken by their journeys and they say, ‘Well, I was a woman in one and a man in another.’
“What did those lives mean? Then they get it. They come to that recognition themselves. That’s very important.”
Helping those in need
One of Cannon’s most memorable experiences with interlife work involved a young woman in Toronto who didn’t know who she was.
CANNON
Georgina Cannon is the founder of the
Ontario Hypnosis Centre in Toronto
The 17-year-old was found bruised, scratched and crying in a Toronto park by another woman, who took her in. The teen had no memory of her identity or origin. The only evidence was that she had undergone a hysterectomy.
Eventually, she got a job at the Arthur Murray Dance School and got married.
“She came to see me because she was going to have minor heart surgery. She wanted to know if she could find out who she was,” Cannon recalls, describing the process of entering the interlife realm. “We took her back into the womb and we went just beyond the womb. She brought herself out of hypnosis. She said she knew who she was. She had three sisters and she got her father’s name.”
A week later, Cannon received an email: the woman had found her birth family and was originally from North Carolina.
“She had been very badly treated. She wouldn’t go into detail,” Cannon says. “The father was an addict and the mother had disappeared. They were filed out to foster families, where she was abused.”
The suspicion is the young woman had been a victim of human trafficking. Cannon would see her again when she returned to the clinic with her sister. The resemblance was uncanny.
Cannon sees clients with past lives six to eight times a month. She’s been doing this work for more than 20 years.
Another common theme: the same souls tend to travel together.
“Our aim is for the soul to evolve and become closer to the light,” Cannon says. “We bring in karma or patterns from past lives because we need to learn the lesson. When we learn the lesson, we can move on to the next one.”
Experiencers and interlife
Toronto hypnotherapist Lesley Mitchell-Clarke, who studied under Cannon 20 years ago, says Canada is a leading country in the advancement of past-life and interlife regression.
Even though OHIP doesn’t cover sessions, people still seek help to resolve emotional or physical issues.
Originally from New York City, she emigrated to Canada with her husband, who introduced her to the world of past life regression.
“My husband bought me a past-life regression session with a hypnotist who shall not be named. As soon as she began, I had the feeling that I had done this before,” she recalls. “It wasn’t very long after that I made arrangements to study at the Toronto Hypnosis Centre.”
After studying under Cannon and completing an internship, Mitchell-Clarke began practising at the clinic. Eventually, she began working with experiencers — people who believe they’ve experienced missing time or alien abductions. She works with MUFON Canada and The Experiencer Support Association.
While she has done past-life regression work, it’s her use of interlife regression that helps clients heal.
One of her first clients was experiencer Wes Roberts. She placed him under hypnosis and regressed him to his teenage years, one of his first encounters with high strangeness. In later sessions, Mitchell-Clarke learned that the alien abductions he was experiencing now were approved by him during his previous interlife.
Interlife is the intermediary point between death and rebirth. In Buddhism, it’s referred to as Bardo. Modern Christian doctrines often avoid the concept of reincarnation or Plato’s theory of metempsychosis.
“It’s simply a higher vibratory level. When we’re here, it’s a very dense physical form, dense realities … What we believe is that when we leave the physical body, we ascend to a higher vibrational reality,” Mitchell-Clarke says.
The most accurate depiction of this world, she adds, is Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come.
“I think it has very deep connections with how it actually is, in a sense that we can manifest our reality and that we do incarnate in groups,” she says. “What we seem to do, we really live in that higher vibration.”
When we pass on, there is reportedly a meeting with a council — something Mitchell-Clarke has heard about from multiple experiencers.
“When I brought people into the interlife, they would describe beings that were humanoid, but not necessarily Terran,” she says. “There would be a number of council members, and I would have the person describe them to me.”
Which raises another question: are all our past lives earthbound?
Throughout the process, Mitchell-Clarke ensures she doesn’t influence her clients.
“All of this has to be done without leading language,” she says. “It has to be done in such a benign way that there’s no risk of suggesting anything to them.”
West Coast regression
After being laid off, Kemila Zsange enrolled in a hypnotherapy program.
Kemila Zsange practices hypnotherapy
and past life regression in Vancouver,
B.C.
There was brief mention of past life regression, but the instructor didn’t go into detail.
That’s when the 51-year-old Vancouver native decided to explore the subject and help those struggling in their current lives resolve issues rooted in the past.
“I got super excited. And the best way to do it is to practise it,” Zsange says during a February phone call. “I started doing it with my neighbour, then my partner and then my friends.”
She became self-taught using the basics of hypnotherapy and eventually wrote a book in 2015.
And there’s no need to convert anyone.
“I feel I have to work within someone’s belief systems rather than sell them something,” she says. “I really don’t have much of an agenda. Everybody is on their own journey.”
Facing skepticism
Zsange has faced criticism for her career choice. Skeptics have denounced the practice of past life regression as an imaginative fantasy.
She remains in contact with the employer who laid her off. Over lunch, he expressed concern.
“I remember when I started this and I met up with my former boss. I told him, ‘Well, I’m doing this.’ He’s a hardcore Christian and he said, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ And I said, ‘I do. Thank you so much for laying me off.’”
But those who want to explore their past incarnations will still visit her downtown Vancouver office.
“I’m busy enough to see people who want this work,” Zsange says. “My job is to work with people who want it, not to convince people who don’t believe it.”
One client was a casino worker who, under hypnosis, was taken to 19th-century Mississippi.
She was a married woman and a published author.
“She was very confused. But I was not. I was able to help her,” Zsange recalls. “She still didn’t use the term past life. I softly said, ‘Maybe this is what other people call a past life. If you feel you’re imagining, let’s keep imagining. This is what your subconscious wants to tell you.’
“We went through a past time regression without her even knowing it.”
Another case involved a woman who regressed into a male high school teacher in Vancouver. His wife had died in a traffic accident. They tracked down the school where he taught. It still stood.
“Then a few days later, she sent me an email with two pictures,” Zsange says. “She couldn’t believe it. The school she saw in her regression, she saw it.”
In another case, a doctor regressed back to 1920s New York City. He was working on Wall Street during the bombing.
“He was working there as another male but he didn’t believe any of it,” Zsange says. “If you don’t believe, that’s fine. But he was curious enough to see me.”
That curiosity even caught the CBC’s attention 15 years ago. Former CBC producer Sarah Kapoor worked on an investigative documentary, Past Life Investigation.
Cannon was the acting hypnotherapist during the filmed sessions.
Skeptics often scoff, pointing to convenient examples of people claiming to have been prominent historical figures.
But most of the cases Cannon, Mitchell-Clarke and Zsange deal with involve everyday people.
“I’m very pragmatic. It’s the journalist in me,” Mitchell-Clarke says. “People always ask me, ‘How do you know I wasn’t imagining it or making it all up?’ I say to them, ‘If you had made it up, your stories would be much more glamorous than a farmer. And secondly, the emotion wouldn’t be so strong.’”
For further reading:
- The Journey Within: Past-Life Regression and Channelling by Henry Leo Bolduc (2010)
- Return Again: How to Find Meaning in Your Past Lives and Your Interlives by Georgina Cannon (2012)
- Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton (1994)
- Intersections: A True Story of Extraterrestrial Contact by Wes Roberts and Lesley Mitchell-Clarke (2019)
- Past Life Regression: A Manual for Hypnotherapists to Conduct Effective Past Life Regression Sessions by Kemila Zsange (2015)
(Lesley Mitchell-Clarke by Brian Baker / The Superstitious Times)