My Book
Karmic Therapy: Healing the Split Psyche;
Contents; Sample Chapter
This engrossing book, available at www.razorpages.com, sums up three decades of Dr. Proskauer’s work relieving symptoms and disabling behavior patterns through deep exploration of past lifetimes, memories from the prenatal period and birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood as well as through fascinating and illuminating glimpses of conception and consciousness between lifetimes.
Surprisingly, with the help of a skilled guide these experiences are readily available to almost anyone without hypnosis. Verbatim transcripts of sessions show exactly how the tracking and emotional release process works. Besides cutting the deep roots of suffering, Karmic Therapy reveals the karma cycle as it unfolds from lifetime to lifetime and imparts a cosmic perspective on the meaning of our lives as students in Earth School. Dr. Proskauer points out how clinical data conforms with both Buddhist insights into the nature of existence and the principles of modern quantum theory. “Karmic Therapy: Healing the Split Psyche” gives experiential meaning to the marriage of psychological and spiritual healing.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
PART I KARMA AND THE WHEEL OF BIRTH AND DEATH: Introduction
Chapter 1. Karma and the Bodymind
Chapter 2. The Wheel of Birth and Death
PART II TRAUMA AND THE SPLIT PSYCHE: Introduction
Chapter 3. Somatic Splitting: Frozen Karma
Chapter 4. Conceptual Splitting: Karmic Roots of Personality
Chapter 5. Soul Splitting: Dissociation from the Body
PART III KARMA AND RELATIONSHIP: Introduction
Chapter 6. Prenatal Influences on Relationship
Chapter 7. Traumatic Birth
Chapter 8. Karmic Evolution in Relationship
PART IV KARMA AND SPIRIT: Introduction
Chapter 9. Death and Transfiguration
Chapter 10. Spiritual Disempowerment
Chapter 11. Karmic Therapy and Spiritual Psychology
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX
Amanda’s First Session: Impact of a Mother’s Grief on her Unborn Child
Amanda’s Second Session: Conception and an Aztec Priest’s Curse
Amanda’s Third Session: Exhaustion from a Past Life
REFERENCES
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CHAPTER ONE
All phenomena are the result of the law of causation… The law of causation means that cause and effect are inevitably one… Regardless of the time, the place, or the persons involved, the ups and downs of human life are determined by this law… When we actually face our own personal happiness or unhappiness, however, we tend to ignore this law and say such things as “This is an accident,” or “This is my fate,” or “This is the divine will,” and so forth… All situations in our present life are the effect of previous cause. We are reaping the effect of the cause which we ourselves sowed. Hence our situation, whether good or bad, is of our own making and is neither our parents’ nor society’s responsibility… One human being’s life energy will produce the next life just as the energy of one wave produces the next wave. This energy will never disappear, resulting in continuous formation of successive lives. This energy is called “Karma”…
– Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, 1966
KARMA AND THE BODYMIND
Earth School
Here on Earth we live in a school, 24/7. As schools go, Earth feels more like graduate school than kindergarten. It offers an environment of extreme conditions and chaotic changes against a background of natural cycles and rhythms. Sometimes it feels like a playground, sometimes like a hell, but it is always a school. Each of us is here taking a unique personal course, each with its special challenges. The universe throws these challenges at us again and again in many different forms, until we learn what we need to learn and move on to the next lesson.
Nobody knows exactly how the universe mysteriously gives us exactly what we need at each moment; but once we have eyes to see, we can perceive a mysterious web of elegant synchronicities patterning our lives. It is as if we were embedded in a three dimensional computer-simulated hologram of incredible sophistication, capable of simultaneously synthesizing the precise challenges each of us needs.
Who or what programs this elegant computer called the unfolding universe? The answer that comes from all quarters – Buddhism and other Eastern mystical traditions, shamanic traditions worldwide, and quantum physics in the West – is the same basic conclusion: it is pure consciousness that creates and programs the universe out of vast emptiness.
We each participate in the workings of this collective consciousness through our intentions and our choices every moment. Karmic Therapy reveals the deeper roots of these intentions, embedded in the challenges of other existences and the outcome of the choices we made back then, so to speak.
Time is non-existent on the level of pure consciousness. From the perspective of pure consciousness, all so-called “past” lives take place in a timeless present, like the thousands of phone conversations encoded in parallel into a single microwave transmission beam. We only perceive these lives as having a separate locus in linear time as a means of separating one course from the other and giving selective attention to each one.
Past lives work suggests that we each set up our own course and program the challenges we must face as a means of clarifying flawed conclusions and limiting beliefs we have adopted in other lives and advancing to a more inclusive and enlightened perspective. It seems to take us hundreds if not thousands of existences to evolve our consciousness from reptilian survival instinct to the level of perceiving the manifestations of consciousness directly in every experience from morning until night. Along the way, we get to choose how we will relate to our experience. Do we resist the challenge and complain about our fate, feeling like victims of overwhelming forces beyond our control, or do we accept the lessons open-heartedly and opt to face them with curiosity and wonder, penetrating to the heart of what we need to learn from them?
This is the most critical choice we have. Do we relate to our experience from a closed position of fear and constriction or from an open place of curiosity and flexibility? The negative conditioning associated with traumatic experiences is largely responsible for our fearfully shutting down to the vast possibilities always available to us by tapping into the timeless reality of unmanifest potential. As long as we remain trapped in this conditioning, we feel like slaves bound by unbreakable karmic chains of causality.
What Is Karma?
What goes around comes around. We recognize this truth when the diabolical scientist in a James Bond movie is killed by his own weapon of mass destruction. We may smile and say to ourselves, “He got what was coming to him.” Likewise, our acts of generosity and kindness benefit ourselves as well as others.
Everything we think and say and do in life makes a difference, thanks to karma -the inexorable, impersonal law of cause and effect. Our karma is our very life, manifesting through our body and mind the fruits of all we have ever thought and felt, said and done. In every moment there is a pattern of sensations, emotions, ideas and actions that is the expression of our karma.
Each moment of existence flows out of and embraces all moments that have passed, and each moment of existence contains the seeds of all moments yet to come. Eternity lives through us right here and now, whether we are aware of it or not.
We do not usually think of our experience as a play of karma. Rarely do we look at our life from this vast perspective. We are more likely to be caught up in automatic reactions to passing pleasures and pains, attractions and fears. We tend to seek pleasure, valuing ourselves and others according to the satisfaction we feel. Likewise, we fall into blaming ourselves and others for pain and hardship.
If our life feels good, we label ourselves good and the situation right. We try to prolong and increase our pleasure. If things go well for awhile, we tend to get self-satisfied and arrogant. When life turns sour, we find fault with ourselves or others and we call the situation wrong. We get frightened and angry. We try to escape from the situation or change it. Always we are attempting to control life rather than experience it deeply and learn from it. Judging and reacting to our experiences in this way, we suffer needlessly and miss the opportunity to be at one with our karma, to see ourselves in each moment as the full and natural expression of all that has been and all that will be.
As we become more conscious of our life as an expression of karma, we have the opportunity to take responsibility for the pain and fear we carry and make the choice to let it go. Suffering is relieved when we can express and release what is shut up inside us, when we stop resisting our karmic patterns by keeping them frozen in our bodies in the form of pain and tension or locked in our minds in the form of narrow and limiting beliefs. By letting go of emotional scars from the past by expressing what has been withheld, we may be less caught up in futile efforts to control and manipulate ourselves and other people. We can relax and fall more into harmony with the natural flow of our existence.
Karmic Therapy
Karmic Therapy is an experiential technique for becoming conscious of karmic decisions and cutting the roots of disabling karmic scripts. The process could be described as a facilitated meditation on the bodymind process – meaning the constant flow of sensations, perceptions, emotions, images, thoughts, ideas and beliefs arising within body and mind. The purpose of the Karmic Therapy method is to focus awareness on this bodymind process and allow whatever is arising moment to moment to be expressed directly and released.
Usually our attention to the flow of the bodymind process is highly selective. We screen out or ignore most of what is happening because it does not fit our limited view of ourselves or because it is too painful or frightening to face. What is chronically ignored gets frozen within the body as a recurring pattern of tension or pain and in the mind as a set of limiting beliefs. Clusters of these interrelated tensions and beliefs generate recurring sequences of symptoms and behaviors, called karmic scripts, which self-reinforce as they are played out again and again in different contexts.
If we invite the images, words and emotions frozen solid in the bodymind to become fluid by being expressed, what emerges is a vast tapestry of experiences that seem to be associated with various times, places, and physical bodies. Are these experiences evidence of actual reincarnation or are they unconsciously generated metaphors for issues and conflicts in the present lifetime, like dreams? Or could they be archetypal images arising from the collective unconscious?
Most Karmic Therapy patients report that their experiences feel quite immediate and personal, having the subjective quality of memory rather than of dream or fantasy. Anecdotal research data exists demonstrating remarkable correlations between past life recollections and historical records not in any way available to the informant (Ian Stevenson 1974, 1977, 1987). Tibetan lamas leave letters before they die predicting the circumstances of their rebirth with amazing precision (Sogyal Rinpoche, 2002). Correlations have also been found between birth and prenatal memories recalled in therapy sessions and information that could not have been communicated to the patient (Netherton, 1978).
For the purposes of this book, it is enough to say that recalling and releasing what appear to be past life memories and prenatal and birth trauma can have healing value. The question of the origin of these experiences is secondary. For simplicity and clarity, this book is written taking all these experiences at face value as subjectively real. In the therapeutic encounter, we think and talk as if these are memories of actual events from the past, while at the same time recognizing that we can’t really know with certainty how and why they have arisen. The same could be said of all memories that arise in psychotherapy, especially distant ones.
All contents of the bodymind have the same power to influence our reality, regardless of their origins in time and space. A trauma that seems to come from some distant locale and past era may be just as vivid, detailed and subjectively realistic as remembered episodes from the present life, often even more so, since past life episodes connected with even a minor present-day symptom usually involve extreme situations, such as violent death, loss of or betrayal by a loved one, torture and rape.
Reliving minute details of these traumatic scenarios is crucial to releasing the emotional charge. An hour or two of real time in the present might be needed to clear the pain and fear associated with a twenty-minute death scene from a past life – including all the thoughts, physical sensations, emotions and interactions with bystanders as the body passes over into death (see Chapter Nine).
How Does Karmic Therapy Work?
Karmic Therapy delves into the bodymind process, uncovering and dissolving frozen karmic patterns, so that our awareness can flow free and unobstructed. We begin wherever we are, with our suffering just as it is, in the form of physical pain and tension; feelings of fear, sadness and anger; distressing ideas about ourselves, others or our life situation; relationship problems; difficulties with work, creativity and self-expression; or preoccupation with losses and disappointed dreams.
Karmic Therapy is so simple and spontaneous that at first it is almost unbelievable, because it contradicts culturally conditioned beliefs about the dimensions of the mind and the nature of reality. Our ordinary waking consciousness is habituated to a linear concept of space and time. In our physical bodies, we travel from point A to point B. Ordinarily we expect our experience to be continuous during the journey. Likewise, we are accustomed to a mental concept of our lives as moving continuously and smoothly from moment to moment through time toward the future while we retain memories of a continuous past.
In Karmic Therapy, we find ourselves in a mental realm that goes beyond conventional linear concepts of time and space. Events coexist in a multidimensional matrix, each episode intersecting with all thematically related episodes, regardless of apparent place and time of origin. Any linear description of the process can only be an oversimplification of impressions that are complexly interrelated in nonlinear fashion. It can be hard to follow a Karmic Therapy session with the conventional linear mind as it jumps around, for instance, from prenatal memory to early childhood to a past lifetime and then back to birth in the present life, as the episodes needing to be released unfold in exactly the sequence necessary for resolution of the present-day problem.
The flow of bodymind awareness begins immediately once a focus for the session is established. A focus is generally created by three conditions — a physical sensation, an associated emotion, and the thought that accompanies the sensation and emotion. Typically, as the patient focuses on a problem area in the present life, the therapist asks what body sensations are arising and what words and emotions would be expressed if these sensations could talk. Each unique combination of sensation, emotion, and words seems to operate like the address in computer memory accessing a file containing interrelated experiences from many other lives and many stages in the present life.
The therapist creates space for the flow to happen and then keeps encouraging it to continue: “What do you feel in the body right now?” “What words does that sensation have?” “What emotion arises with that sensation and those words?” “What else does that feeling want to say?” “Say those words again until the charge of pain and fear is gone.” “Go on now to the very next words, feelings, or sensations,” etc.
In Karmic Therapy, we faithfully follow the flow of what is happening moment to moment and invite it to be expressed out loud. This seemingly simple procedure of careful attention and full expression is not so easily accomplished on our own without a therapist’s help for at least three reasons. First, most of us have been taught not to express ourselves freely and openly. It has become habitual to ignore most of what is going on within us and to keep the rest of our experience unacknowledged and unarticulated. The unexpressed residues of painful and frightening experiences build up over time, becoming frozen in the body as tension or pain and in the mind as limiting beliefs (what Eckhart Tolle, 2001, calls the “pain body”).
A second reason we need a karmic therapist: what comes into consciousness if we follow the bodymind process, bypassing our culturally conditioned mental filtering system, goes far beyond what most people would imagine possible. Not only childhood scenes come into awareness but experiences seeming to originate in early infancy before we could talk as well as vivid recollections from the womb and from birth. Going back even further, scenes arise of hovering near our parents at conception, psychically linked with both of them as they are creating a body for us. Then we get images and sensations that seem to come from another life in a far off time and place, yet feel vivid and entirely real. After death we find ourselves in an out-of-body state of great serenity, where we become aware of our intentions in choosing our parents and life circumstances for the next body, the next lifetime. How could all this be possible? Raised in the Western cultural tradition, if we have no outside support in validating and integrating such experiences we are bound to censor them and banish them from our awareness.
The third reason why it is difficult to follow the flow of the bodymind process on our own has to do with the very nature of psychological trauma. When we experience emotional pain, it is often a sign of fear accompanying the feelings. We are resisting the experience out of that fear, and the resistance itself causes more pain. Especially when our very existence is threatened or we are experiencing greater intensity of feeling than we can integrate, we fear the loss of self. This fear is most likely to overwhelm us when we are feeling isolated, unsupported by others. Alone and unassisted, we have little chance of becoming fully conscious of the karmic flow, the ceaseless bodymind process. We just go on resisting and being unconscious, holding onto the very contractions and constrictions that contain the trauma we need to release.
The karmic therapist acts as a coach and support for the unfolding bodymind process, reminding us to repeat the loaded words and phrases over and over until they lose their charge, to go on to the next sensation or feeling, and to help us find our bearings in the ocean of experiences emerging into consciousness. The therapist is familiar with the territory into which we are venturing and maintains an open and meditative space for us. It is an exciting and expansive process, guided at every step by that most truthful of witnesses, the sensations and feelings in the body. The mind may play tricks, but the body does not lie. After one to two hours of release work, each session comes to a natural conclusion with the body in deep relaxation, the breathing free and full, and the mind calm and peaceful. John’s story, briefly summarized in the next section, exemplifies this process while Amanda’s complete case history in the Appendix offers transcripts of her three sessions for readers who are interested in the details of the process.
John’s Headaches
John complained of vise-like headaches, passivity, and low self-esteem that had plagued him most of his adult life and that no medical specialist or therapist had been able to treat effectively. When directed to focus on his headache, John experienced a steady band-like tightness encircling his temples that was accompanied by a feeling of desperation. Asked to speak the words that went with this feeling, John said, “I can’t stand it anymore!” This focus connected him first to a childhood memory of being held down on the playground by a bully who called him a stupid wimp and squeezed his head mercilessly. After John finished yelling out the words of rage and fear that he had held back at that time, the scene shifted to a past life in a medieval dungeon where he was being tortured, his head compressed inside a metal band that tightened more and more until he was screaming a false confession just to relieve the anguish. After he confessed, John was publicly humiliated and hanged in the public square. As he died, John had to endure the taunts of the callous crowd, pelting him with rotten vegetables and calling him foul names. He was filled with shame about betraying his cherished beliefs and denouncing his friends only because he could not stand the pain anymore. He vowed to withdraw in future lives and hide his true self, keeping a low profile to avoid further abuse. This was the karmic script that John was still playing out centuries later: hide and hold back to avoid persecution.
Immediately following this episode of past life recall, John remembered being stuck in the birth canal, suffering through a long difficult labor as his head was compressed in the passage through his mother’s narrow pelvis. His mother was also in agony and screamed out the same words that John used about his headache and the torture in the dungeon: “I can’t stand it anymore!” His mother added, “I wish I had never gotten pregnant with this baby!!” Struggling to get out, John felt unloved and unwanted when he overheard his mother’s apparent rejection of his very existence; he began to give up on life. The therapist reminded John that his mother had not been talking about him personally (she had not even met him yet); she was only reacting to severe labor pains. Finally she was drugged and lost consciousness.
Feeling rejected and missing the psychic communion with his now unconscious mother, John lost heart and stopped struggling to get out. The cord was being compressed and John’s life force had begun to wane from lack of oxygen. The delivery room staff became alarmed at the change in his heart rate. There was an anxious voice saying, “This baby can’t take any more. We have to do a forceps extraction right away!” John was pulled out of the birth canal hastily and roughly, with forceps tightly clamped around his already bruised and misshapen head. The doctor greeted him as he emerged into the bright, cold delivery room with more humiliation: “Just look at him! Worse than a drowned rat that’s been run over in the street! We’d better clean him up before his mother sees him or she’ll want to chuck him in the trash.”
After reliving each of these episodes, John’s headache had lessened somewhat, so that by now he was aware of just a slight degree of discomfort and a strange feeling of suppressed resentment. When asked to speak the words that went with this feeling, John said, “You use me however you please; you just don’t care how I feel.” At first these words referred to outrage at the way he was treated at birth, then he was suddenly back at conception, experiencing what his mother was thinking and feeling as his father forced sex on her. She submitted passively, but was seething inside with anger toward her husband and self-hatred for giving in to him against her will. She had a splitting headache and there was certainly no pleasure in this for her. John spoke his mother’s hidden emotions out loud until the headache was completely gone and his body relaxed.
Following this session, John’s headaches were much milder and occurred infrequently, usually in a situation where he felt exposed and insecure, expecting to be ridiculed. After a few more sessions dealing with related karmic episodes and with integrating the Karmic Therapy work into his present life, John was able to find a better job where he was treated with more respect and also began sticking up for himself in his marriage as his self-esteem increased. His sex life improved and so did his overall level of satisfaction. His headaches disappeared and he had the energy to return to hobbies and interests that he had neglected for years. Eventually he fulfilled a lifelong dream of publishing some short stories and poems and took up spiritual interests from his adolescence that he had suppressed throughout his adult life.
Distinguishing Features of Karmic Therapy
Instead of the endless discussions typical of talk therapy, hashing over a familiar story, Karmic Therapy involves direct re-experiencing and the expression and release of intense pain and fear, as we have seen in the example of John’s headaches. As the bodymind process becomes conscious, the patient’s awareness includes both this flow of re-experiencing as well as the knowledge of being safe and comfortable in the office, where connections with the present life that emerge from the flow of experiencing can be shared and discussed with the therapist. Simultaneous awareness of these two dimensions, past experience and the present environment, arises naturally and supports integration of the new information.
In contrast to most deep regression therapies that claim to access past lifetimes, no formal hypnotic induction is required to set the Karmic Therapy process in motion. It is enough for patients like John to focus on a symptom, assume a relaxed posture, and give expression to the unfolding bodymind process. When past life regression relies on deep hypnosis, the patient’s conscious awareness may be unavailable to assist in the work of processing and integration. For this reason, Karmic Therapy does not employ unnecessary and potentially distracting hypnotic trance induction methods.
Karmic Therapy occupies a singular place in the spectrum of body-oriented psychotherapies. In common with many types of somatic release work, Karmic Therapy investigates the roots of correlated body sensations, emotions and thoughts and tracks these clusters from the present moment back to their origins in traumatic events of the past. Yet the vast panorama of experiences referenced in Karmic Therapy is far, far broader than the scope of a single human life. Some of the core primal themes and dualities that emerge in Karmic Therapy work have a mythic significance that reflects the rawness of the human condition (see the section of the next chapter on past lives for a discussion of these themes). The evolution of consciousness through millenia traces the gradual transcendence of all dualities.
The therapist’s role is to follow the patient, helping to keep the session on track, encouraging the full expression of pain and fear, assisting the patient in uncovering and clearing unacknowledged karmic patterns, and helping the patient to rewrite disabling life scripts after their roots have been cut. Insights tend to arise spontaneously in the course of this purging process. Time is taken for discussion whenever needed to help patients integrate these insights into their lives.
The essence of the Karmic Therapy process is healing splits in the psyche, residual effects of unintegrated traumatic experiences from the past. The splitting off of undigested fear and pain from conscious awareness numbs and tenses the body, restricts energy flow, generates limiting beliefs in the mind, and ultimately cuts us off from feelings of wholeness and spiritual well being. Before examining in greater detail the various ways that splitting can lead to physical symptoms, negative beliefs, dysfunctional personality characteristics, and loss of soul energy, we will first turn our attention to the Wheel of Birth and Death, an ancient Far Eastern metaphor for the boundless territory we will be exploring in Karmic Therapy.
