Awake to be woken.

I sleep like a baby. To the envy of pretty much every woman I have ever been with. I fall asleep in a matter of seconds and I sleep through the night. I always have. Even if I get woken during the night I still fall back to sleep almost instantly.

So, in those rare occasions when I can’t sleep – you know, those times when you wake up at 2am feeling like you’ve had 17 shots of espresso – I have come to realise that there will be a reason. Perhaps there’s something I need to see, or hear, or learn. Perhaps an idea will come to me that has been eluding me. Perhaps somebody will need my help or support. Whatever the reason, there is always one, if I have the humility to allow it.  Not all, however, are quite as remarkable as what I am about to share.

I was lying in bed about a week ago, next to my beautiful wife who, at the time, was fast asleep. I was staring at the ceiling, wondering why I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was quite enjoying just staring into space when I noticed that Rebecca had woken up.

“Hey, babe!” I said.

“Hey.” She replied.

I could feel in her reply that something was wrong.  I asked her what was the matter and she told me that she was feeling really anxious. About our relationship; about work; about money; about everything, really.  Now, Rebecca is a Master Practitioner in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and she has some wonderful techniques, using something called Mental Emotional Release (MER), to release anxiety quickly and effortlessly.  I asked her if she would like me to help her release this anxiety (I have a practitioner level NLP qualification so she could coach me through the process). She agreed.

So, I pulled out her NLP manual, that contains all the techniques for various release work. The anxiety release is really quite fascinating! You ask your “client” to move up above his or her timeline (I’m really simplifying it here) and move past the event or events that are triggering the anxiety and see them as successfully completed or resolved.  Then, when the person returns to present time and place, the anxiety is gone! So that’s what we did! And, true to form, her anxiety released and she was happy and smiling again. (It’s not magic, it’s just knowing how to push the right buttons in your brain, that’s all!)

With her anxiety released, Rebecca started leafing through her NLP manual and, as chance would have it, one of the next pages was all about “Forensic Regression.” I suspect it wasn’t chance at all.  She excitedly asked me if I wanted to play a little with forensic regression which, as the name suggests, involves going back to previous memories and using them to learn, grow or release “baggage.” I expected our little 2am game to be a little fun and then we’d fall back to sleep and that would be it. Oh boy, was I wrong!

Rebecca decided to regress me first.  Using her NLP skills, she took me (or rather, I took myself, cos that’s really how it works) to a memory of another life, another time.  It was some time during the medieval era, I think in England, and I was standing facing a burning barn. At least, with my modern perspective, it seemed to be a barn. On further entering the memory I realised this was my house. And it was on fire. And my wife and daughter were inside.  Strangely, I knew that my wife was Rebecca.  Or at least her in a different incarnation.  I was feeling a sense of panic and loss, as I knew that my wife and daughter must surely have perished in this fire.  My memory kept flipping between the burning building and the aftermath. One scene filled with people running around, frantically trying to extinguish this inferno. The other, a smouldering wreck where once my house had stood.

Finally, after some time in the latter scene, the past Rebecca emerged from the forest, where she had been hiding with our baby daughter in her arms. They were safe! Rebecca (in the present) asked me to preserve the learnings that I needed to take from this experience. She asked me what the lesson was in this, to which I replied, “That sometimes things look really, really bad but they can still work out fine. Sometimes all is well!”

Coming out of this memory was as easy as entering it, and we had a fun little chat about my experience. I explained to her how this lesson was particularly important to me because I do have a habit of seeing doom and gloom in things if I’m not careful. Perhaps this lesson could help me to release this habit and find a way to see life always working out ok, always working FOR me.

Then it was her turn to be regressed. So off she went. Into her unconscious mind and back to a memory of her mind’s choosing.  She was entering a memory when she suddenly appeared to be getting distressed and she asked me to bring her out. I did as she asked and she reported that she didn’t want to go in to that memory. I asked her what she had seen and she said, “Nothing. Just black. All black.” It seemed odd to me that blackness would have created such an apparently strong reaction but I didn’t think more of it at the time.

She asked me if I wanted to be regressed again. I thought, “Sure! Why the hell not!”  So in I went, to the depths of my unconscious mind, to see what other treasures I could unearth.  I was not prepared for the lesson that awaited me!

I found myself sitting on a stone spiral staircase, surrounded by grey stone walls, like the kind of stone of which many of our British Castles are made.  Sitting on this staircase, I was filled with a kind of despair, panic, sadness and grief that was, quite simply, too much to handle.  I started to hyperventilate and seemed (from Rebecca’s perspective as she later explained) to be having some kind of panic attack.  It is hard to describe just how powerful this feeling was. I literally wanted to die, in that moment.  With her depth of training, Rebecca calmly brought me safely out of this memory and helped me to release the emotions that were causing so much distress.  She then suggested that we could leave that one alone, but I knew that there was something for me here. Now that I was prepared, I felt so deeply that I needed to explore this more.

So I returned to the stone staircase.  To the scene of where, some hundreds of years ago, in some fit of rage I had thrown my wife off the roof of this castle! I could see her broken body on the ground, I could feel the guilt, the grief, the shame, the loss, the anger. Every possible painful emotion, stacked on top of one another.

This is where it really got interesting! I then had a vision of myself taking a blade, like a long dagger, and cutting my chest and abdomen, again and again, and then hanging myself.  All a bit gruesome, really.  One thing that I had never told anyone until Rebecca and I discussed this experience afterwards, is that for as long as I can remember, I sometimes have this strange impulse to take a blade and cut open my chest. I have also had suicidal thoughts nearly every day since I was a child. I always knew I would never do these things, but I did often feel like perhaps this wasn’t exactly normal.  When I asked myself, during the regression, what the lesson was in all this, the answer was clear. “You’ve punished yourself enough. It’s time to forgive yourself and let go. It’s enough now.”

If this wasn’t freaky enough already, Rebecca had seen a grey stone staircase in her first memory, and hadn’t told me. Then, she decided to enter this memory again and she experienced the same event but from her perspective! (In fact, she didn’t see her own death and I guess that would have been unnecessary for her learning experience.). It struck us both as unbelievable that we should have the same memory, independently of each other.  The lesson for her was that she cannot be destroyed; that she is safe and enduring, whatever happens.

It still seems a little crazy that I’m putting this all down on paper. After all, it’s kind of off the wall! And yet, those feelings of wanting to hurt myself, the suicidal thoughts, have all gone. Like magic. Gone. And Rebecca and I achieved a closeness that I never thought possible! It seems that our little trip down memory lane was exactly what we needed to release some wounds that have followed us through the ages.

At this point I don’t really care if it seems crazy. I’ll take these results any day!!