Dr. Brian Weiss appeared on Thursday's show, discussing his work conducting past life recall therapy.
His first such case, Katherine, was "the one who turned my life upside down," he said. Up till then Weiss had been a traditional psychotherapist who had received his medical degree from Yale. But he was shocked when during his hypnotic regression of Katherine she went back over 4,000 years to describe drowning in a tidal wave. After the session, some of her long standing phobias had suddenly vanished. "I sure did stumble on a valuable healing technique," he said. Since then he's conducted some 4,000 hypnotic regression sessions with patients, a number of whom also reported spontaneous recovery from their long standing ailments.
Weiss said that people can conduct past life recall sessions on their own, through meditations or listening to recordings (such a CD is provided in his book Mirrors of Time). After using progressive relaxation techniques, the person first recalls a happy scene from their childhood. Subsequent to that, they imagine a door, where just beyond is a whole new scene. "Imagination can be the rope that is pulling the memory through," said Weiss, who suggested that those with serious conditions or problems may want to seek out a qualified past life regressionist.