A Deep Dive into the Subconscious: Anxiety, Hypnotherapy, and Past Lives

Craig Meriwether is the founder of Sacred Mystery Hypnotherapy, specializing in past life regression and spiritual hypnotherapy. His work is dedicated to helping individuals experience emotional healing, spiritual awakening, and profound personal transformation.

 The subconscious is built for safety, it may keep old pain like a smoke alarm that never got reset—firing anxiety, anger, or shutdown long after the original event has passed. In this episode, we unpack:

• How triggers form and why your nervous system struggles to distinguish real danger from remembered danger
• Repetitive emotional loops and how they can turn into practiced survival responses
• Hypnotherapy as rewiring—updating childhood "instructions" so your body stops protecting you with strategies that no longer fit your life

We also take on the myths head-on: hypnosis is not mind control, you cannot be forced to do what you don't want, and stage hypnosis is a very different context than therapeutic change work.

Then we widen the lens into spiritual hypnotherapy and past-life regression, exploring the research and stories that led figures like Brian Weiss and Michael Newton to reconsider what the subconscious might access. We touch on big questions about consciousness, memory, and even the idea of the brain as a receiver—including discussion of the pineal gland.

We close with a guided meditation focused on self-love, calm breathing, and letting healing move outward into the world.

If you're looking for practical insight on hypnotherapy for anxiety, trauma, and limiting beliefs—plus a meditation, then subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

Craig's contact details:

https://sacredmysteryhypnotherapy.com/

Social Media:
 https://sacredmystery.substack.com
https://www.youtube.com/@Sacred_Mystery_Hypnotherapy

https://www.instagram.com/sacred_mystery_hypnotherapy

https://www.facebook.com/sacredmysteryhypnotherapy

https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-meriwether-44286718b/ 

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hello, everybody. I'm your host, and we are coming towards the last few episodes of season 20. Can you believe that we are six years old and in season 20? Amazing. I'm super excited because in a moment, shortly joining us, will be clinical hypnotherapist, an expert in subconscious reprogramming, Craig Merriweather. Craig has spent more than 16 years helping people break free from fear, anxiety, trauma, and limiting beliefs. And let Craig explain a bit about his journey and how he came to be in this line of work. Without further ado, please welcome Craig Merriweather to the show. Welcome to the show, Craig.

SPEAKER_04 0:43

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. This is a fun conversation to have, and so I've been looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_03 0:48

Me too. I'm super excited. And now you're in Arizona, if I've got that right, Craig.

SPEAKER_04 0:52

I'm in Arizona. I'm in Flagstaff, Arizona. That's somewhat famous because it's Route 66. Oh, yes. That big roadway in the 1930s that took people from Chicago down to Texas, then west to Santa Monica. It got people to California and the West Coast. But I'm also Flagstaff is famous for being near the Grand Canyon and Sedona.

SPEAKER_03 1:15

So I thought today we'd do a show on using the power of the subconscious mind to heal. And I know that you're an expert in the field of hypnosis. And I just wondered before we get started, would you mind sharing a bit about your story so far and what brought you to this place today?

SPEAKER_04 1:33

Yeah, yeah. I'll I'll try to give you the abbreviated version of that. Because this has been a story that's been going on for about 40 years, maybe even about to turn 59. But there's a couple things that really influenced

From Depression To Hypnotherapy

SPEAKER_04 1:45

my life. And the main two things that influenced my life are depression and anxiety. And that's something I really struggled with as a teenager. And that's the 1980s, if you're doing the math. And if you're doing a timeline, that's no internet. That's no even SSRI drugs like the you know, selective serotonin intake inhibitors, reuptake inhibitors, like Prozac and Zolof and things like this. Those all that stuff didn't come out until the mid-late 90s. And so with this work, it was a kind of a slow drip, if you will, because in the 1980s, all you had was, if you remember back in the day, the the yellow pages, the phone book, the white pages, and just whoever you could find had an ad in the yellow pages or their name in the white pages. You could ask your friends, but really nobody was talking about depression and anxiety back in the 80s. Whatever book, maybe you could find it at the bookstore, the library. But you know, 14, 15-year-old, they're not going to ask their friends at lunch at school, what do you have any good talk therapist recommendations? Who do you see? And so it's just something you bury within. You know, you struggle with it and you don't talk about it. And I just I remember, you know, that's that's the age where it's like, oh, you want to be when you grow up? And you were supposed to say, like an astronaut or like a I don't know, president of the bank, or I don't know, whatever you're supposed to say, but you're supposed to say something about your career. And I remember I always thought in the back of my mind, I just want to be happy. Because I the struggle of the depression and anxiety was so strong, and there's no, I you just I didn't know how to talk about it or who to see uh about it. And as I moved into the 1990s and I moved into my 20s, the 1990s was kind of this resurgence of the personal development movement, the self-help movement, the self-growth movement. Tony Robbins became super popular with uh Awaken the Giant Within. TV show Oprah, Oprah Winfrey's TV show became super positive. She kind of focused more on the more positive aspect and became a superstar. You know, Eckhart Tollies, uh Power of Now, all these books and things started coming at least into my life. And I started focusing on that aspect. Well, maybe this is the way to get better. This is the way to improve my life. And uh, as that's happening, the internet starts dripping out. Back in the day, we had our 14.4 modems that went through the phone lines. It would take 12 hours to download a picture, and then grandma would pick up the phone when you're 99% done and you have to start over again. And uh, you know, as well as uh Prozac and all those SSRI drugs started coming out. And the conversation opened up. And there's these things called blog posts and forums on the internet where you could discuss things kind of anonymously with other people. But the conversation opened up because Oprah was doing a show about it. Or she would have Tony Robbins on, or 60 Minutes here in America would do a show and talk about depression. And you could talk about it with your doctor, you talk about it at parties with your friends. You know, I tried Prozai, yeah, it made me feel better. And so it wasn't uh shameful to let people know you're struggling. And one thing that kept coming up in terms of the forms that people were discussing, or maybe the last chapter in a book about the five things you could do to change your life, or an article in a magazine, or a blog post. They'd say, you know, the five things to change your life, and one of them was always hypnotherapy. All the other four would be different, all that you know, whenever whatever the article was. But there was always hypnotherapy because it was this extraordinary way of tapping into the power of your subconscious mind. And so I started using that. And so that led to me writing a book called Depression 180 about all I'd learned about depression over the years. And that led to me doing my own podcast back in 2012. And that led to me wanting to move deeper into this work of consciousness and healing. And then I went to an extraordinary school, Hypnotherapy Academy of America, to really learn this 500 hours. But one of the reasons I wanted to go to that school is because the last hundred hours, after you learn about helping people with trauma and anxiety and anger and even medical hypnosis about healing and acceleration and uh boosting the immune system and that, well that kind of physical pain, then you learn the spiritual side of this work because that's the other aspect of my life that was important uh for me in that I grew up in the Episcopal Church. And, you know, that's Protestantism, uh, you know, Catholicism light, if you will. But I had the robes and the candles and the Eucharist, and I love that ritual and that ceremony, but I also went to a Baptist school. And it's not that my parents were religious, it's just you went to church. And, you know, 60s and 70s and 80s, you went to church. And so my friends went to church. And the church that was you know a handful of blocks away from my house was the Episcopal Church. If it was Lutheran, we would have been Lutheran. If the Methodists would have been Methodist, it was Episcopal, and then private school was supposed to be. I mean, here in America we call it private school, as opposed to public school, which is run by the government. But private school is supposed to be better education than public school. So it went to private school. It just happened to be run by Baptists. So my entire life of growing up from day one to you know 18, 19, 20, was influenced by church, Bible class every day, chapel at least once a week. And then on you know, evenings of hanging out with my friends from church. We do church stuff, youth group stuff, weekends, church on Sunday. And so I started equating these momentary glimpses of happiness with spirituality and figuring out, but it would always disappear. It's like that ray of sunlight that peers through the gray clouds. Well, then the clouds move over and cover up the sunshine. So, like, how do I get that sunshine? And instead of, you know, alcohol or pills or pot or I don't know, whatever people do, gambling. What it was for me was spirituality, was trying to find God, whatever that meant. And that, you know, as you get into your late teens and your 20s, it's like that changes. And as I learned more about the world, the world opened up. Moved to Santa Cruz, California, which is in the Bay Area here in America. It's right near Silicon Valley, where Apple Computers and Google and Yahoo and all those companies were starting out, and San Francisco is right there. And so it's this cliched melting pot of all these different cultures and people from around the world. And you learn, you know, through their, you know, hearing music and the festivals on the weekends and fairs and food, and and you take a meditation class, and you take a martial arts class, and then you can go to a dance concert or something, and and that intrigues you enough to find out more about maybe where they're coming from and their cultures and their philosophies and theologies and religions and spirituality. And so this been it was this slow drip, the point of focusing on spirituality helped me with the depression and anxiety, as well as a personal growth movement. All this gets mixed together to me talking to you today. And, you know, it wasn't that I was always into past lives or even reincarnation. I didn't believe in Protestants don't believe in that, you know, Episcopalians, Baptists don't believe in that. But as I learn more about other cultures and I get intrigued by, you know, their philosophies of life and their theologies, that comes up again and again and again. And not that in and of itself I believe it, but I understand that they believe it. Again, it's a slow drip, sort of like you go into a spiritual bookstore or a new age bookstore. Well, I only liked one section of the bookstore, this one little shelf unit. But as I go through life, my it expands. So now it's like, okay, well, I I get it now. I understand because you know, I grew into it or I understood it more, or I did the research. I had my own experiences. And that led me to wanting to find out more. And that's where the book ended up coming from, the past lives guidebook, is that I had my own spontaneous, accidental, intense past life memory. And that's probably a whole eight-hour conversation, some maybe some other time. But it's like that led me to wanting to find out more. And that led me to, when wanting to be study hip hypnosis and hypnotherapy, choosing a school and a training program that also had this more spiritual aspect to it. Not only the deeper healing work of trauma and releasing that and anger and the anxiety and even medical hypnosis and physical pain and how that's related to consciousness and mind, but then this deeper spiritual aspect of it. And so it's all kind of informs my life to where I am right now.

SPEAKER_03 10:43

I I love that. It sounds like you've got a really broad, broad, broad lens that you've got the hypnotherapy side and also like the the bridge to like the spiritual side and and stuff like that. I as I was listening to you, I was thinking about how because I've I've done like a lot of work through like meditation over the years, and there's like kind of bit of a trend. There's a word for it now called like toxic positivity, where you know people can be like doing the meditation and things and just pretend everything's okay. I mean, obviously the meditations are really good tools, but I'm thinking with your hypnotherapy side, if the subconscious mind has got a block and someone works with you, it's a way to kind of access that block that people might just be like pushing out of the way, thinking, Oh, I am do my meditation, but then the same problems are coming in again and again and again. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_04 11:36

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the exact work I do. You explained it perfectly well. I

Why The Subconscious Clings To Pain

SPEAKER_04 11:40

think I think everybody listening is like nodding their head. Yep, yep, I understand that. These patterns that show up, maybe even the the physical responses or reactions of anxiety or anger or regret that come up, even though maybe the incident, the event, the trauma that happened happened a long time ago, maybe when you're a little kid. And the thing is, is the subconscious mind is extraordinary. Mind itself is extraordinary. And the subconscious mind's main job is to keep you safe and protected, which doesn't necessarily mean your success and happiness. It means it wants you alive, it wants you protected, it wants you safe. And what it's using is what you've experienced in the past as sort of the filter through which it sees the world. Because there's aspects of the world that are dangerous. You know, if you're out in Alaska in the backwoods of Canada or something, the grizzly bear is not your friend. It may look warm and fuzzy. It's not your friend. You're out in the desert, the rattlesnake is not your friend. The fire coming towards your house is not your friend. You know, that fear and anxiety is there for a reason. And you don't want to get rid of it. That's what keeps you from walking down the dark alley at midnight, even though it's a shortcut home. It's what keeps you from peering over the edge of the Grand Canyon here in America or over the edge of the big tall building too far. Keeps you safe. It's the warning signal. This is too far. Pull back. There is a bear, run. That's what keeps you alive. So the subconscious mind's main job is to keep you safe and protected. And one of the ways it does this is by holding on to that old hurt and pain. Sort of like a filing cabinet, and the top drawer is all these files of the hurt and the pain and the trauma and the embarrassment and humiliation, the things that cause fear and anger and worry and overwhelm, because it doesn't want to experience it again. So as you go through your day, all that you experience through your five senses, what you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell gets filtered through that filing cabinet. And if anything triggers one of those files, you'll get the warning signals. Now, when somebody pulls a fire alarm in a building, the sirens go off, the strobe lights go off, warning everybody that there's danger. Well, we also have a warning system. But in our bodies, it's the feeling state. And so the mind will maybe get triggered accidentally or on purpose through some issue you're going through. It may be benign, maybe because your boss is wearing a red sweater, but that reminds you of something in the past that was very traumatic. And so the warning, well, yeah, where red sweater. And so the warning signal goes off, the brain starts to create a different chemistry. And so you get this feeling stay in your body. You may not even know why, just there's danger somewhere. Be on alert. And so, yes, your subconscious mind is running your immune system and your digestive system. Somebody's up skiing in Alaska and they break their leg. Yeah, you're gonna get cast and go to the doctor, but it's the subconscious mind is gonna start the healing process, get a cut on your finger, scrape on the knee. You ever had that thing of um somebody points to you and say, hey, you got a big scrape on your arm. How'd you get that? And you're like, look, I have no idea. I didn't know that was there. Subconscious mind knew there was a problem, started the healing process before you were even consciously aware there was a problem. You know, heart is beating, breathing your lungs, taking a day-old baby to that of an adult. These are all things you don't have to think about. These are the habits that we have, like walking. You don't have to think about walking or tying your shoes or zipping up your jacket. These are things we don't have to think of, driving a car, riding a bicycle. There are things we don't have to think about. That's the subconscious mind, but its main job is to keep you safe and protected. But one of the issues with being a human being is that the mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. And that's why when somebody has a nightmare in the middle of the night, no matter how crazy the dream may be, may be very realistic, like a veteran having a PTSD dream about being back on the front lines, being back in combat, even though their war was 40 years ago. Or maybe it's more ridiculous, like a cheeseburger is chasing you down the street, throwing coconuts at your head is dumb. It's never going to happen. But your mind, in that instance, even in deep sleep, in both situations, a person is sound asleep in bed, cozy, comfortable in bed, but they think that they're in danger. And so they'll create the warning signals. The mind has a safety protocol of shoot first, ask questions later. And so it'll turn on the stress response. The brain will start creating adrenaline and cortisol. Those hormones will get dumped into bloodstream. Heart starts tracing and get it quickly to the big muscle of your arms to fight your way out of the situation, or the cheeseburger chasing you on the street, or your legs to escape, start turning down the power of your immune system, your digestive system, get that energy to the big muscles, start breathing shallowly to get quick oxygen. Maybe so much cortisol gets dumped into your brain that it wakes you up. Once you awake, physically awake, looking for the danger. You're sweating to cool down your body. Physically, reaction to a cheeseburger chasing on the street. So you can imagine what's happening in your waking world. The other issue with being human, another issue, is that what you practice, you get better at. And that's great if you're learning the piano or the guitar, you're learning to dance, you're learning martial arts, you're learning to walk as a child. What you practice, you get better at. But what if you're practicing anxiety, or if you're practicing anger? Are you not going to get better and better at that and really wire that into your brain? So the subconscious mind's main job is safety and protection and will help protect you by emotionalizing past events to get your attention. So that's the subconscious mind. Conscious mind, that's the logical mind, the analytical mind, the mind where you create your goals and the plans to achieve those goals, the plan for your day, your plan for your week, your five-year plan, the willpower to get up early and go to the gym or go on a walk or whatever, to get going on that project. That's the conscious mind. But what neuroscience says is that conscious mind only makes up 5% of mind. Subconscious mind makes up 95% of mind. So when there's conflict between the logical mind and the emotional mind, the emotional mind wins every time. That's why none of this has to make any sense. And that's where people, I think, get tripped up in talk therapy. Very helpful, very useful, very healing. But in terms of that modality, that healing modality, you're using conscious mind to analyze logically a situation that may not be very logical at all, maybe more emotional. And so that's where people kind of get their wheels spinning. And it's behind that veil of the unconscious. So you may be talking about problems in your life, but you may not be understanding or analyzing or logically moving through and healing the core issue, which may be within that filing cabinet that you don't remember because it happened so long ago. But you remember, you know what the problem is. Because even if somebody is struggling with chronic anxiety, they're anxious all the time, or they're angry all the time, or they've they're dealing with regret or resentment all the time. I'm guessing that's not literally all the time. I'm gonna guess there's parts of their day where they're not anxious. Maybe it's at the end of the day when they just get to sit and read a good book or watch a fun TV show, or maybe it's during the day when they get to have lunch with their friend, you know, or during the morning when they do some yoga or take a walk or do some exercise or something, have a good breakfast. They're not anxious all the time. So the subconscious mind knows when to turn it on and when to turn it off. Subconscious mind knows what the problem is. Subconscious mind is trying to protect you in that way. So it's really the code, the instructions that got set up, maybe by a child going through a traumatic event. And maybe the child came up with the most extraordinarily perfect way to keep themselves safe, maybe to hide, or maybe to keep their voice low, or maybe to keep themselves small and out of the way. That was the best thing the child could have done to keep themselves safe in a very unsafe situation, in a very traumatic situation that maybe lasted years. But that's not gonna work when you're in your 20s or 30s or 40s or 70s or 80s. But the instructions haven't changed. So until you change that computer code of those instructions on how to keep yourself safe and maybe resolve and heal that past hurt and pain, nothing's gonna change. And so that's a quick kind of introduction to how this work happens. It's not that I fix anybody or that hypnotherapy, this kind of umbrella term of hypnotherapy with all these different tools and techniques fixes anybody. You fix yourself. You know, and so it's like the hammer and the screwdriver and the wrench don't build the cathedral. The YouTube video on instructing somebody and facilitating how to build the cathedral, you build the cathedral. You use the tools, you use the instructions and facilitation of somebody who knows how to do it, but you build the cathedral. And same with this, it's not that I'm going to heal you or that these tools heal you. You heal yourself. Because who better to know what the problem is than you? And who better to know what to do about it than you? Sometimes you just have to ask, what do you need to feel better? What do you need to heal this? I just need it to go away. I need it to turn into pure love, I need it to turn into a golden white light of energy. Okay, let's do that. The mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. It'll literally change you physic physically to match what you're thinking and thinking and believing about yourself and the world around you. So change your beliefs and those patterns change.

SPEAKER_03 21:26

Oh, I I absolutely love that. And as you're speaking, Craig, I felt that the tools that you've got to offer as well kind of help if we heal ourselves, but help to shine a light on kind of maybe those blind spots that we have, and then hence we can heal ourselves. I find when I'm when I'm really into a meditation, it can help me step back sometimes from like these kind of unconscious patterns. But I as you were talking about thinking about the subconscious and how it how we can learn anxiety, and I I have woken up. Sometimes in the morning. And I felt anxious. And I'm thinking, actually, why am I actually feeling anxious? I'm just kind of like walking woken up. And it it it probably needs some sort of subconscious stew that my brain's been in the the the night before. But if I'm a listener who's listening to this and thinking, actually, yes, I would like to

Reprogramming Patterns And Self-Healing

SPEAKER_03 22:20

like kind of work with um hypnotherapy. Could could you please let them know about some of the myths that aren't true? Like the I forgot his name. He's a famous British hypnotherapist. We used to have like a big sh like TV show. I forgot his name, but it was always like this TV show where he was hypnotizing people to be like chickens and things like that. And um, and also people get worried that it's gonna control the mind, but it doesn't work like that, does it?

SPEAKER_04 22:47

No, it's it's it's the exact opposite, and that's unfortunate the the TV shows and the movies where they're using this cliche, you know, let's hypnotize them and they'll do what we want. And that's not the way it works. You can't make anybody do anything they don't want to do. And in terms of mind control, what's what's fascinating about it is it's really the other way around. You're already out of control. Because if you're experiencing, like you just you just described in your own experience, you're waking up anxious. You're already out of control. You don't know why you're doing that. You're literally having a physical response to something in your world and you don't know what it is, and it'll change how you're feeling within your body, within your emotions, you're out of control. You know, if if you got to take that test at school or you got the meeting at work and you got to present at the big conference or something, and you get that anxious feeling or nervousness or panic or start to sweat, you're out of control. You're dealing with anger. You don't even know why, resentment about the world. You're just angry at the world, you don't know why. You're out of control. So, what this does is actually give you back that control. It's not, it's not mind, you know, brainwashing or mind control, it's not turning people into zombies. It's the exact opposite. You can't make people do things they don't want to do. Like smoking cessation, that's one of the things hypnotherapy is really famous for, is helping people quit smoking. I can't make people just quit smoking. If somebody's wife or or husband or mother or father makes an appointment, and you're gonna help them quit smoking. The money and the the health implications and just the stink of it all. It's like it ends now. It's like, well, if they don't want to quit smoking, I can't make them just quit smoking. I can't go into prisons and hypnotize everybody, be law-abiding citizens. I can't hypnotize my way into the United Nations and and hypnotize everybody to create world peace. I'd be that guy. I'd be the guy who created world peace. You know, they'd sing songs to me, and my birthday would be an international holiday. I'd be the guy who ended, you know, war. But that's not how it works. You can't make people do things they don't want to do. And in terms of the TV show you're describing, or here in America, we have like the shows you probably have them there too, but like here in like Las Vegas or in comedy clubs and things will be the hip hypnotist show. And people are up on stage, like you describe on the TV show, and they're like quacking like ducks and they're dancing like Michael Jackson and singing like Elvis Presley, and and they're they're all having fun. And understand that everybody on the show and on the on the stage, they volunteered to get up there. The people on that TV show got paid. It may have even been rehearsed. You know, you see these videos on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, and it's like this street hypnosis, and somebody walks up to somebody and just like sleep, and they kill over, and uh, you know, that was rehearsed. They're trying to go viral. You know, that's that was their friend. It's not a stranger, you know. And I don't dare people, I used to say I dare people to do this. I was like, don't do this, don't do this. But think about what would happen if you went up to a complete stranger in the street and

Hypnosis Myths And Mind Control Fears

SPEAKER_04 25:50

just went, sleep, they're gonna punch you in the face and run away because they're frightened.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:56

You know, you can't make people go into that hip unless it's rehearsed and they're your friend, and you spend a week, you know, you know, mapping out how you're gonna do this. In terms of those the TV shows or the stage shows, everybody gets up on the stage volunteers to get up there because they want to get up there. And who's that hypnotist gonna pick when they come out and say, Hey, welcome everybody, we're gonna have a great night tonight and have a lot of fun. Who wants to get up on stage? Are they gonna pick the introvert in the back of the room, sinking down on their chair, hiding in the shadows, or are they gonna pick the extrovert who got there early, sat in the front rows, jumping up and down saying, pick me, pick me?

SPEAKER_03 26:30

Dear listeners, hypnotherapy will not turn you in into a chicken. So that's good to know. So as I speak to Craig, I'm I've done a bit of work on like past lives with my umanic training of like the UK. And I I find it like a fascinating subject. And like you said, some people believe in it or and some people say that it the kind of aspects of ourselves like to kind of work on that depend on different people's beliefs. But I'm interested to see how past lives and hypnotherapy work together.

SPEAKER_04 27:03

What's fascinating about why I find this modality? Look, there's eight billion people in the world, and there's all sorts of different techniques and tools. I'm not saying this is for everyone. Doing it over Zoom, whether it's the more spiritual work or more clinical work of maybe trauma or dealing with hurt and pain, is that again, I'm not fixing anybody. I'm not doing the work. This isn't a massage. Yeah, I don't need to be there with you in terms of physically present. It's fun, it's nice to be in person, but a lot of this work happens over Zoom because it works better over Zoom. People feel relaxed and comfortable in their own homes. They feel safe in their homes. You don't have to drive across town if you live in a big city, you know, London or New York or San Francisco or something. You don't have to drive across town to get to your appointment. And when you're done, you're at home. And so, of course, it works in person.

Zoom Sessions And The Science Of Trance

SPEAKER_04 27:55

But what the research has shown is that Zoom sessions work as well as in person and may even work better than in person, because of people feeling relaxed and safe in their own homes and comfortable in their own homes. And so, history of this, a brief history of this, because of course, this trans state is not new. Certainly, maybe the sleep temples and the healing chambers uh and the mystery schools back in Egypt and and Greece, um, were using these trans states to create healing as well as uh spiritual experiences, mesmerism back in the 1700s. But this more modern version, if you will, of hypnotherapy started in the early 1800s. And Dr. James Esdale, Scottish surgeon who was working in India and early 1800s, there's not fancy hospitals or fancy anesthesia in the world. If you're having your leg amputated, you're biting down on a stick, or you're you know, below the head to knock you unconscious or something. And so Dr. James Esdale in India learned this deep trance state. And he put people so far under a deep trance state, it looked like they're in a coma. So it took him like an hour to get them into this state. But then he could do amputations. They wouldn't move or be bothered, you know, cut people open and take out tumors, deal with injuries and war wounds, all this kind of thing. And so he took this process back to England, started teaching it and working with the Royal Society of whatever medicine or something, and started teaching other doctors and things. There's another doctor, James, Dr. James Bard. He started using this deep trance thing, wanting a word to describe it, this coma-like state, so he could discuss it and write about it. He decided to name it after the Greek god of sleep, hypnose. So he called it hypnosis. And since then it's grown to accompany all sorts of these altered states of subconsciousness, which is really just the alpha, theta, and delta brainwave states. Natural states we go in and out of all day long. You can't be in the beta brainwave state 16, 17, 18 hours a day, and then just drop down into the delta brainwave state and go to sleep. It's not how the brain works. It goes in waves, brainwave states, it goes in waves and patterns. And so you move and you drift off into a daydreamy state. You just drop down the alpha brainwave state. If you're ever driving, and you know, you don't remember the last minute or two. You miss your exit, or you're at home, you're at your parking spot at work, or you're at the store. You don't remember the last minute or two because your mind drifted off. Your subconscious mind took over driving, like it knows how to walk and ride a bike, and your mind drifted off. That's hypnosis. You moved yourself into hypnosis, watching a TV show, reading a good book, being getting creative, and you know, like not realizing it's been two or three hours. It's a state of hypnosis. All we do is do it on purpose. And so this state can also be used to move into the more spiritual realms as well. And in and of itself, I love the books in terms of my work and my education, my training, and how I need to understand the world. I like the books of Michael Newton, Dr. Michael Newton, Journey of Souls, Destiny of Souls, Brian Weiss. And that's because their backgrounds are on a more academic level. Those two, Brian Wass is still alive. He's doing a workshop, I think, pretty soon in a couple weeks here in New York. 83 years old. He's still doing it. Michael Newton passed away, I think, 2011, something like that. But both those gentlemen, and of course, other people who do this work, Dr. Ian Stevenson has said, they're left-brained analytical academics. Dr. Brian Weiss, he wrote one of the most famous books, the one that kind of really set up the modern-day past-life regression movement back in 1988. He wrote Many Lies, Many Masters. Dr. Brian Weiss is an MD. He has a medical degree from Yale. He has a chemistry degree from Columbia. His track was working with Alzheimer's in the late 70s. That was how he's focusing his work. He went into psychiatry after getting a medical degree from Yale.

Past Life Regression And Research Claims

SPEAKER_04 32:15

He was head of psychiatry at Mount Sinai in Miami, Florida. You just don't get that position because you know somebody. You have to know what you're doing. And he was on track to, you know, just in my own imagination, if he continue with the research and that trajectory, maybe the Nobel Prize for chemistry or medicine or something for helping with discovering some sort of cure for dementia and Alzheimer's disease. But he was working with a patient in 1980. Again, there's no internet, you know, there's no SSRI drugs or anything. He was helping this person through her deep anxiety and overwhelm and anger and panic. For a year, he couldn't find a way to help this woman. And he decided to do some regression therapy. He wanted to regress her back to childhood, maybe there's something there. And so they're doing this hypnotherapy, regressing back to cause is a fancy term. And thinking that she's going to go back to childhood, she goes back to a past life. Now, what Sigmund Freud said, what Carl Jung, what Milton Erickson, so many other people said Laura Pearls, one of the founders of Gestalt therapy. They say that the subconscious mind speaks to us in symbolism and metaphor and dreams and imagination. We can also speak back to it in metaphor and symbolism and storytelling and imagination. That's what a lot of hypotherapy is. Well, he thought this was more of a metaphoric healing. Finally, he found a way to tap into the subconscious mind so it creates the healing. Yes, in this symbolic way of going back to Egypt in a past life, quote unquote past life. But he was excited that the healing was happening. Deep healing, she she encountered. So let's do it again. Let's do the symbolic metaphoric healing again. And he did it a few times, and finally he comes to the conclusion she was getting such deep, detailed information of Egypt. This is the 1980. There's no internet. Our understanding of Egypt was in the Encyclopedia Britannica, that little chapter on Egypt. That's all we knew about Egypt. Unless you're an Egyptologist or an archaeologist, and he could confirm this stuff through his contacts at Yale, that what she was saying was accurate. She was also getting detailed information about Brian Weiss's private life, about like a child dying when they were one year old. There's no obituary, only a handful of family members, a couple of doctors, in a state, a different, totally different state. There's no way she could add this information. And so Brian Weiss, as a left-brained academic intellectual, if you will, had to come to the conclusion, just like Sherlock Holmes, when you remove the impossible, whatever's left over, however improbable, has to be the answer. He says, Well, this doesn't seem to be the deep emotional healing she is creating through these memories she's accessing. He had to come to the conclusion as a Yale-educated doctor, that this was real. The deep emotional healing, it wasn't symbolic, it wasn't metaphoric. She was creating deep healing. The information she was getting, not only about Egypt, a subject she knew nothing about, as well as his own private life, was real. The conclusion he had to come to, well, this has to be real for her. And what William James said, one of the kind of pioneers of modern psychotherapy, is that to prove that all crows are not black, you only need one white crow. And there is one white crow. Brian Weiss gave up his career, put his career on the line by releasing that book, Many Lives, Many Masters. It wasn't like, oh, I hope I get famous and get to be on Oprah and start this career that's going to make me a lot of money. He's already making a lot of money. He had a great career. Again, on track to maybe, you know, helping solve the Alzheimer's issue. Instead, he thought, you know, I'm going to put that, put that on the back burner and I'm going to do something different because I think this is important. Michael Newton did the same thing in his book, Journey of Souls. He also accidentally regressed somebody back in 1969. And wanting to regress them back to childhood, he regressed them, or the person went back to soul state or the soul world, being 100% soul before incarnating on earth. And what Michael Newton eventually called life between lines. And he thought this was fascinating. This person did some incredible healing in this state of being a soul or a memory of being a soul. And so he wondered if other people could access this. It was accidental. Could he do it on purpose? So he started working with people, seeing if he could come up with some sort of protocol to get people back into that state of being a soul. And as he worked with people during the 1970s, people kept having similar experiences to each other. Even though they didn't know each other, they weren't in communication. There's no internet, there's no texting, there's no cell phones. These people didn't know each other from different walks of life, different parts of the country. They're having similar experiences to each other. And so he does 20 years of research, all the 1970s, 1980s. He's working with thousands of people, 365 days a year. He's working with thousands of people over 20 years. And that's that first book, Journey of Souls, 1992, that comes out. So he worked with almost like 25 years worth of research working with people, getting the back of the soul state and asking questions about what their experience is. And then there's another decade's worth of research. So now something like 30 years worth of research, that second book, Destiny of Souls, twice as big as the first book, comes out in 2002. It creates the Michael Newton Institute. He passes away in 2011, but Michael Newton Institute is still doing training, still doing research. They just released a book a couple of years ago, Wisdom of the Soul, I think. And that's 60 years of research, basically. 55 years worth of research. And so after a while, it's like, how many white crows do you need? You know, and you know, even the work of Ian Stevenson in the 60s and 70s, he was going to other countries, mostly in the Middle East and India and things like this, because that's where the cultures accepted reincarnation and past lives. Here we're putting it under the rug. Oh, stop being, you know, stop imagining things. You know, when little kids talk about the crazy stuff of past lives, and it's just, oh, it's your imagination. Just stop talking to me about that. Well, you know, the culture is like, yeah, yeah, we accept that. And he started doing this forensic investigation of all these stories, a lot of his books. Ian Stevenson, you can look find find them on eBay and Amazon and things, talks about those stories and those investigations of these children, these remote villages who have experiences of families hundreds of miles away. And he then goes and investigates and says, Yep, there's the house, there's the people, here's what their nicknames are, this is the you know, sickness they had, all that kind of stuff he could verify. Now, you know, let's say he was wrong a majority of the time. Let's say 90% of the let's say 95% of the time he was wrong. 99% of the time he was wrong, and and he was uh there's a lot of fault in his investigation. Say 99% of them are wrong, that still means 1% was right. You only need one white crow to prove that all crows are not black. And so, in terms of people's experiences and their points of view and their beliefs in the world, you can, I guess, believe whatever you'd like. That doesn't change the reality of what it is. And I and again, it's sort of like the Sherlock Holmes thing. And I had to prove to myself, and that's why I wrote the book, The Past Life's Guidebook, for my own skepticism. It's like, well, how does this all work? Consciousness, the remote viewing experience governments were doing back in the 70s, proving consciousness is non-local, it's not locked in and housed, imprisoned within the skull, but consciousness can move around location to underground bunkers to read files that they prove were accurate, and also prove that consciousness can move backwards and forwards in time. This is the government, the US government doing this work, the CIA doing this work with Stanford uh researchers. And so after a while, you through that, along with people way smarter than me, you know, discussing whether this is a computer simulation, this reality of ours, or a hologram, or uh, you know, multiverse or the Pellar universe, or you know, you add all that together, as well as this research going on that the brain is an antenna. It's not a storage house, a warehouse, or a self-storage unit of information. I mean, I have this phone here, you know. I have access to the entirety of the world's information on this phone. Now it's not in my phone. I'm pulling it in from, I don't know, satellites and cell towers and servers at Google and universities and things. It's not in my phone. I have a couple of pictures and a couple of songs on here, a couple of apps. But the entirety of the world's information is at my fingertips. I don't know what it is. I don't even know if I want to, what I want to look up, you know, in the next five minutes. But I have access to all of it through this little wonderful device. Our brains seem to act in a similar fashion. How about that tech technology mimicking what we already do within our own bodies? And so a lot of research coming out that this brain is an antenna focused on the pineal gland. Yeah. And so this is if if you're on video, you can see I'm holding up a kind of drawing of the brain. And this part right here, uh, this kind of green dot, it's about the size of a piece of rice, a part of like a size of a pea. It's the pineal gland. And its main job is melatonin production. But, and that's the hormone that puts you to sleep

Pineal Gland And The Brain As Antenna

SPEAKER_04 41:55

at night. The sun goes down, more melatonin gets produced within the pineal gland, puts the brain into the delta brainwave state. As the sun rises, melatonin production ceases, cortisol levels go up, you wake up. That's its main job. But about 10, uh maybe 12 years ago at this point, to discover there's all these crystals within the pineal gland. There's about 40,000 in this rice-sized piece of your brain, 40,000 of these little crystals. And what the researchers discovered is that this can create an electromagnetic field like crystals can do. And that's why our quartz watches back in the 70s had crystals in them. It was creating energy, creating electrical charge. You had to wind them up, but then what kept the energy going was little crystals in your watch and our electronics. And that's why people deem them kind of powerful because they can create these electromagnetic fields. Well, a measurable electromagnetic field can be created in your brain through these crystals. And it has nothing to do with melatonin production. And since there's these research papers that are coming out that are indicating that consciousness is not held within the brain and consciousness non-local, and that there's this one paper that came out in 2020, and it says common, this is from Frontiers in Psychology, the common basis of memory and consciousness, understanding the brain is a right-read head interacting with an omnipresent background. That's a lot of fancy language for consciousness and memory is not held within the brain. But the brain is a receiver and transmitter, an antenna. And the the transducer is the pineal gland. And transducer, like back in the day when our car, now everything's internet and satellites and streaming and things. But back in the day when we had a radio radio in our car, and we had a little antenna on the hood of our car. There's like, if you're in the big city, there are potentially like 50 radio stations on top of all the TV stations around. All these signals, microwaves, all these things going. Now we have cell tower signals and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all sorts of things. But back in the day, we there may have been video, the sports, the news, all the different kinds of music. You can you can have could be potentially 50 radio stations, and when you turn on your radio in your car at your home, you don't get 50 radio stations and a bunch of noise. You get one radio station because you tuned it to your favorite radio station. You don't like that song, you're tired of the news or whatever. You turn the knob and it switches the signal to pull in a different frequency, a different signal. You get different information, different music. Well, we do that with our television stations, is we're pulling in information through this antenna, it's seeking one particular signal. And there's a transducer in your radio, transducer in your TV back in the day when we had rabbit ears and antennas on our house. And it's pulling in that one signal out of the airways and converting that signal, that frequency through the transducer into image and sound, or just sound if it's the radio. Well, that's what research is indicating that our pioneal gland is doing. It's a transducer pulling in frequencies and turning it back into image and sound, so we have memories, great conscious awareness of various things in our world, maybe accessing memories of a past life. This is where people point to things like whether they call it the Akashic Records or the Divine Matrix or the field or the zero point field or the omnipresent background field, whatever you want to call it, whatever name or a paraphrase, but the name of a blanket we put over the mystery to give it form. So whether you call it records or the divine matrix or omnipresent background field or the field, it's this information, you know, matrix that we can tap into. And that seems to be where memory is held, not within the brain. And by accessing this information, that's what that's what the book's all about. You know, the Past Lives Guide book is more about the science of all this. And I was the reason I wrote the book is not because I believed it, it's because I was skeptical of it. And I wanted to learn more. I mean, it was my own research for my own self. It was that X-files thing, certainly, I want to believe, but I didn't, because that's not the way I was I was born. I grew up. So I really wanted to dive in deep. What's this remote viewing stuff that the government was doing? How does that link into consciousness and time and space and and what's what's what's going on about seeing the future? If we can see the past and there is no time, according to Einstein and Niels Bohr and all those people, you know, could we see the future?

SPEAKER_03 46:28

It's such a big and fascinating subject with so many kinds of, as we call it in humanism, the the web of the weird, where it's all different, we're pulling it in for the ether, all this kind of like the all this information. So it's just such a fascinating subject. If I'm a listener listening in, and I want to get hold of your book, or they want I want to get past some limiting belief and to work with yourself. What is the best way that I can go about it?

SPEAKER_04 46:59

Yeah, so the book itself, of course, is on Amazon. That's probably the best way to get it. You probably ask your bookstore to get it, but probably the easiest way is the wonderfulness of Amazon and their book department. Actually, got it here. Let me uncover it. So this is what it looks like. You can see it in the list. But the Past Lives Guy book, my other book, Depression 180, is going up on Amazon. This book I wrote back in 2012. But in terms of if you're interested in just finding out more, I'm happy to talk with people over Zoom, over the phone, email back and forth about this work. If you have any questions, maybe just specific and personal to you, I'm happy to get in touch with you. And uh the best way is just sacred mystery hypnotherapy.com.

SPEAKER_03 47:43

That's easy to remember. Perfect. Uh excellent. And um so I've reached the stage in the podcast. I'd just like to leave the any final closing remarks that you might like to share before we say goodbye.

SPEAKER_04 47:56

Sure, yeah. Well, and what I find fascinating about this work is again, I I don't fix anybody. And hypnotherapy in of itself doesn't fix anybody. You

Where To Find The Book

SPEAKER_04 48:05

fix yourself. This is a placebo effect. And again, we're not going to trick you into doing it. We're not going to do it accidentally, we're going to do it on purpose. You know what the problem is. Your subconscious mind may be protecting you from something and sending up the warning signals. You're allowed to change that, you're allowed to heal that, you're allowed to resolve those issues and turn down the volume knob on those warning signals. Now, if this the work is more of a spiritual nature, you're allowed to do that too on your own terms with you in control. And that's what I love about this work. You are in control. And so, yeah, if you're interested in more information, let me know. Happy to talk as you can see, I I'll talk on and on and on about this.

SPEAKER_03 48:46

It's brilliant. Yeah, it's good to hear you know that you're so passionate about your your subject, but I will put links in the show notes. Dear listeners, please stay tuned. There's a meditation inspired by today's show. But this has been a very wonderful podcast, and I've had the pleasure of having Craig. Merryweather. So, Craig, thank you very much for being on the show.

SPEAKER_04 49:06

You're welcome, Jane. I really appreciate you inviting me. It's a fun conversation.

SPEAKER_03 49:09

Top tips for the meditation is either sit nice and cross-legged on the floor with a nice straight back. Always nice to sit on a block or a cushion. Or that's not available for you. You sit in a chair with the back nice and straight. The important thing is you're not slouching. And if you're doing something that requires you concentration, all you need to do is just pause this and you can reconvene the meditation at a time that is good for you. If you're doing the meditation, let's begin. In this guided meditation today, imagine you're sitting in the most wonderful room. A room that you either from your imagination or a room that you have been in before, but you imagine that you are in this room, and it's a room that you find great comfort in. And as you sit in this room, you take in the colours of the walls, the textures of the fabric, how the light cascades into the room, and it's

Guided Meditation On Self-Love

SPEAKER_03 50:10

a place that you feel a deep sense of comfort. In many ways, the beauty of this room is a symbol of the self-love, the self-love that we so often forget, or the self-love that we have experienced before but forgotten. Either way, this room symbolizes the self-love that you so lovingly deserve and to help heal the world at the same time. So we heal ourselves and then we help send that healing to the world. Knowing that you're perfect and beautiful just as you are, the refuge of this room offers great comfort and healing. And the more you just allow yourself and your imagination to sit in the room, the more the love builds. So from your energetic heart center, which is known as the heart chakra and yoga, but in all different forms of beliefs, space, and healing, just imagine it is a kind of beautiful energy of love, this self-love. And as you sit softly in this room, you allow this self-love to begin to encircle your being in a gentle way. You feel as if it surrounds you and holds you, as if you're held by the most wonderful fabric that offers great comfort and joy to your being. And this fabric feels like it holds you so beautifully, and you feel as if you are calm and relaxed in it. And as this self-love begins to grow, it reminds you of things about yourself that you like, things that you may or may not remember. For we all have this beautiful love within us, just allow those things to be remembered, even remember at a pace that is right for you, and don't worry if you don't remember. Just allow the feeling of love to grow. So all you're going to do for the for the next few minutes is just take some calm deep breaths in this room and just imagine that love growing and growing. So you feel as if the love that you have generated by being still, you receive, but you send it out into the world, and then the world remembers about love too and sends it back to you. And you can just continue this with slow, calm, deep breathing, and then slowly and calmly come back into the room, come back into the moment, remembering that you are the essence of love.