President's Letters

Our Honorary Member Roger Woolger passed away on November 18 in upstate New York. He suffered from melanoma. One of the big names in our field has gone.

About 1989 I saw a video about his work when I was in Brazil. I remember that I immediately saw he would be worthwile as a postgraduate teacher for my graduates in the Netherlands. They had heard of him meanwhile too and they invited him. What convinced me that he was a great therapist? The way his foot was making a circular movement while he was sitting next to the client. I cannot interpret this, but it gave me the feeling that he really was with his client.

I had a similar experience when Trisha Caetano gave her first workshop in the Netherlands. While explaining something, she made beautiful circular movements with her feet while standing in front of the blackbord. Again I had the feeling that she was completely into what she was saying. In general, I don’t mind feet, but these two times I did.

Roger was something that is pretty rare in our field (in most fields actually): he was an educated gentleman and a scholar. He was at home in books and in the arts as well. This broad scholarly interest he shared with people like Mário Resende in Portugal and our own Nassos Komianos from Greece. You could discuss scholarly books with Roger and he would mention titles, even send books he thought were very interesting. I have here a biography of William Blake and an rather unkown book by Yeats, A Vision. His interest in poetry is known to all who got his self-published collection The Story of the Heart.

Around 1990, our colleagues in Brazil came to be split between those that were interested in my work and those who stuck 100% to Morris Netherton. I suggested to defuse the tension by inviting a third one: Woolger. Well, he took to Brazil as the Brazilians took to him. He stormed the country.

In 2003 he was at the First World Congress for Regression Therapy in the Netherlands and offered a well-atttended post-conference institute. With Morris, he received a Lifetimes Award. What is more, he got to know Trisha Caetano, and together with Andy Tomlinson we discussed the need for European training and a European association. From all that came EARTh later. He was there in Frankfurt in 2006 when we founded it. One of the Founding Fathers.

Roger had an other side too. His jokes ranged from Jesus to flatulence. And his impersonation of a French sailor set us back at least three years of hard work trying to make our trade a bit more respectable.

We will miss him.

SEPTEMBER 2011

In a past life, about 30 years ago, I was quite normal - I think. I took things as they came. But I didn’t take people as they came. Oh no! I had all kinds of thoughts about them. I weighed them, classified them, judged them, categorized them and stamped them. In short, I had opinions about them. I was a good judge of people. Even my wife sometimes agreed with me.

In my present life that all changed. I am a therapist AS you know, even worse, a regression therapist. Even worse than a regression therapist, a past-life therapist. Come to think of it, even worse: doing all kind of nonsense: remote sessions, releasing spirits, guiding people through non-physical experiences. I no longer take things as they are: I suspect backgrounds everywhere. But I do take people as they are.

It is a zoo out there. Actually, it is a zoo in here, too. But that’s another story.

Talking about zoos: the Fourth World Congress is nearing! A collection of strange animals, stranger animals and strangest animals. All different: different perspectives, different ways of working, different ideas, different aims. Fons Van den Heuvel listed the differences between workshop leaders and panel members during the First World Congress (see the article on the EARTh-website) and I don’t think the differences are much smaller than they were.

By the way: there are no fences at the congress, no separation between animals and visitors. For the duration of the congress, the visitors are their own zoo. Feeding times you find at the program on the website of the congress (http://www.regressioncongress.org) . Also outside the official times and places you can get nourishment and nourish others.

What nourishment we provide one another at the congress? Of course, knowledge and experience and wisdom and all that. But something more primitive as well: company.

Therapy is a lonely business, regression therapy is a very lonely business. Conventions and congresses are places where we meet each other at a common watering hole.

I remember one of the free discussion groups during the Third World Congress in 2008 near Rio de Janeiro. The strongest common themes were a sense of coming out of isolation and a sense of expansion, a sense of belonging to an expanding field. The World Congresses are the essential antidote to professional isolation.

So sniff and be sniffed at, bump into and be bumped into, meet strangers and be excited about unexpected similarities and unexpected differences. And be passionate about both. And if you are confronted with new ideas: try them out if you can. (Later please. When you are safely home. Not during the proceedings.) We all have to find our own way of working and if we are lucky that will change and develop through time.

I hope to meet you there, at the Aegean seaside. During the Congress we plan to incorporate a new sister association to EARTh, called HEAVen (Holistic Extraterrestrial and Alien Venture). We will encourage all strange animals within EARTh to change to the new association, so we will stay with - yes - the normal people. So if you meet, by any chance, a normal person during the congress, make him or her EARTh member. I know where I have to go.

For all pessimists I want to explicitly denounce that there will be any HELL. Anyway, not in Kusadasi, not during the congress. As Sartre said: Hell is others. During the congress there will be no others. We will be among ourselves. See you soon.

No fence. Promise.

JULY 2011

We are not afraid to die. After all, there is something called reincarnation. And apparently we are not afraid to publish. Many of us did. You will know that people like Morris Netherton, Roger Woolger, Andy Tomlinson and yours truly published. But other members published also, and you may not know that. If I look at our member list, I know at least the following people published books or articles (or movies) about regression or therapy: Milton Menezes, Charlotte Muthesius, Ulf Parczyk, Ingrid Vallières, Marianne Carolus, Athanasios Komianos, Wendy Gillissen, Maria Clara Leitão, Mário Simões, Dorothy Neddermeier, Janet Cunningham and Trisha Caetano. When I list all those names, in alphabetical order, it is even more impressive.

Trisha Caetano

Marianne Carolus

Janet Cunningham

Wendy Gillissen

Athanasios Komianos

Maria Clara Leitão

Milton Menezes,

Charlotte Muthesius,

Dorothy Neddermeier

Morris Netherton

Ulf Parczyk

Mario Resende

Mário Simões

Hans TenDam

Andy Tomlinson

Ingrid Vallières

Roger Woolger

Diba Ayten Yılmaz

And I am sure the list is far from complete. Do you know what these and other people wrote about? We should have all their publication listed on our site, including links to where the books can be ordered or where the articles can be found. The easiest place is on everyone’s personal page. May impress your clients as well.

The secretariat will mail you soon to submit information as complete as possible about your publications. We will include publications in all languages. It would be nice if for both English and non-English books, you will provide one paragraph in English with the contents. And the more links, the better. After all, most writers like people to read their stuff.

An other thing is that we asked people to list and rank order the for them 12 most influential books in this field. You can find the result on our forum. The top 12, also in alphabetical order, are:

1. Carol Bowman - Children’s Past Lives

2. Winafred Lucas - Regression Therapy: A Handbook for Professionals

3. Morris Netherton - Past Lives Therapy

4. Michael Newton - Journey of Souls

5. Michael Newton - Destiny of Souls

6. Hans TenDam - Deep Healing

7. Hans TenDam - Exploring Reincarnation

8. Andy Tomlinson- Healing the Eternal Soul: Insights from Past-Life and Spiritual Regression

9. Helen Wambach - Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence Under Hypnosis

10. Brian Weiss - Many Lives, Many Masters

11. Roger Woolger - Other Lives, Other Selves

12. Roger Woolger - Healing Your Past Lives: Exploring the Many Lives of the Soul

So those books everyone should read. But to me, the interesting thing was that the respondents mentioned altogether more than 150 books they considered influential on their work. Many of them I didn’t read or even didn’t know existed. So we will ask people who collaborated and mentioned a book that no one else listed, to write a short review about it for the EARTh Newsletter to recommend it to colleagues that probably don't know it.

By the way, probably the most outlandish book about our field, was recently published by Nassos Komianos, your Vice President. Outlandish, but very scholarly. Find out what REAR* means. You will either flock in great numbers to his workshop at the World Congress, or stay away as far as you can. Nassos makes us other writers seem quite normal. Thank you Nassos!

* Rapid Entity Attachment Release

MAY 2011

When did you last time refer a client to her doctor? When did you last time got a client being referred to you by the doctor? ‘Never’ is the probable answer to both questions. Only a few colleagues get referrals from doctors, only a few refer to doctors, I guess.

In an ideal world, the two groups would not only mutually refer clients; the two groups would work pretty often together. (Unless your image of an ideal world is a world without problems, without suffering, without patients.) In an ideal world, we even would collaborate with the pharmaceutical industry. Why do I think that?

The body plays an important role in regression, both in ferreting out the problems and anchoring the solutions. Clients wriggle, sigh, cry, get spasms, cold feet, red spots in the neck, goose pimples, pressures and pains. Clients breathe deeper and slower, wrinkles disappear, limbs stretch and relax, skins become rosy, feet become warm, empty body feelings fill up, and heavy body feelings fall away. In an hour, years may fall away like leaves. Successful regression is rejuvenation. And in between, clients sometimes rush to the bathroom like they discovered a new sport.

During massage or acupressure or simple physiotherapy, patients may enter in early childhood experiences or in past lifetimes – even when neither patient nor therapist believe in such imaginings.

And the body helps to induce and to deepen regression. Where do you feel that burden? On my shoulders and somewhat lower on my back. Within a few seconds the client feels the leather strips of a wicker basket, filled with stones, and the iron supports pressing to his back. It’s halfway the morning and I am already dying of thirst.

To put it more precisely, we don’t work with the body, but with the body feelings, with all those internal sensations of warmth and cold, pressure, weight, posture, movement. What we call altogether proprioception (inside perception), as opposed to (outside) perception.

Proprioception, I think, is what gives a recollection a now-feeling. Seeing yourself as a horseman riding out of a wood is one thing; feeling the horse underneath, feeling the exhaustion after a day’s journey, feeling the simmering heat of late afternoon, is another thing.

I know the idea, coming from neurolinguistic programming, of dividing people into visual, auditory and kinesthetic types. It is safer to assume that all people are all three at the same time, so always go for the combination, especially for the combination between visual and kinesthetic.

When Roger Woolger has his clients assume the posture of the original traumatic situation, he is strengthening the kinesthetic sensations, countervailing the often-dominant visual, more mental mind-set. Gestalt is doing such things. And it’s the essence of bio-energetics.

Often, the somatics don’t start with the session; they are there already for years. The body is carrying the shadows, the echoes, and the imprints of body experiences long ago, experiences from bodies long dead.

In fact, we don’t deal with the body as such; we deal with the living body, apparently penetrated - and probably surrounded - by an energy body. Name it chi (Japan), prana (or rather akasha) (India); call it the etheric body (theosophy), the vehicle of vitality (Crookall). Think of aura, of kundalini. We usually call it energy, the energy body. A pretty vague name, but also a pretty neutral name.

It strongly and intimately influences the body, but the body returns the compliment and influences the energy body strongly. The last body feelings before death, for example, can make a deep and lasting imprint. And our most inner conclusions and decisions affect the energy body and so, sooner or later, our physical body. The main channels of interaction seem to me to be the nerve system, the hormone system, and the autoimmune system.

Now we are stuck. The people who deal with the body, deal only half-heartedly with the mind and have no idea of what’s in between and how that works. They cut ulcers, but miss the energetic reality that is often behind that. They prescribe pills for depression, without knowing what it is and whence it comes. They give names to often vague syndromes without knowing what they are: fibromyalgia, whiplash, low back pain, chronic exhaustion, and ME. Even migraine is in this category.

We could do a lot there. Some of us are doing a lot there. But we could do much more if we could collaborate. There is a world to discover. But they won’t have us; we are amateurs at best, crackpots and weirdoes more likely. And we won’t have them. Many of us have a dim view of doctors and see the medical industry as the devil incarnate.

We work in their shadow and they in our shadow. Guess whose shadow is bigger.

In that ideal world I was mentioning, visualization would interlock with medication.

What should we do? I have a revolutionary suggestion: we should start where we are.

Why don’t we establish a Chapter within EARTh of those members who are doctors, paramedics or trained nurses? Or who are in massage or alternative body treatments, like osteopathy, acupressure and the like? I think also of midwives. I am personally interested, because I have a body, but I have nothing to offer.

Anybody out there to take this up?

Meanwhile, let’s shrink some more tumors.

MARCH 2011

As regression therapists we deal with the past. To balance this, I am also a member of the World Future Society. The latest The Futurist (Jan-Feb 2011) has an article about jobs in 2030, listing 70 possible new jobs for the coming decades.  A few of them are interesting for us. Hold on to your hats!

• Amnesia surgeon (specialized doctor to remove bad memories or destructive behavior)
• Brain signal decoder (mind reader)
• Chief Experience officer (responsible for all the experiences offered to employees and customers)
• Digital Identity Planner (managing someone’s trail on the internet)
• Healer (?!)
• Post-normal jobs counselor (either a post-normal counselor for jobs or a counselor for post-normal jobs)
• Rationator police (monitoring thoughts to medicate people to ensure joy, peace and happiness)
• Sensuality stimulator (how can we have done without those?)
• Time hacker: manipulating the time fabric of other people’s lives
• Transhumanist consultant
• Universal ethics proclaimer (making both religions and atheism obsolete)

Compared to the makers of such lists, regression therapists are rocks of common sense. We are already far ahead of amnesia surgeons, by helping people to process bad memories and so adding to mental and emotional health and physical vitality. That mind reading depends on brain signals is an imbecile notion, completely rejected by decades of telepathy research. That both religions and atheism can be supplanted by proclaiming universal ethics seems to me a full stack of misunderstandings. Proclaiming universal values has been done for ages by prophets, mystics and gurus. The idea that these will be  paid jobs in the future, as a career choice, is pretty crazy.

And the idea that healer is a future job is too crazy for words. It is one of the oldest jobs on record.

Would you ever buy a product or a service from a company that will manage your experience?

And do you want to pay someone to manipulate the time fabric of your life - whatever that may possibly mean? Changing before and after? Or shortening bad years to minutes? Or stretching heavenly minutes into years? ®

I couldn’t find an explanation for transhumanist consultant. Maybe regression therapist/coach?

Sometimes I can look at our profession as something lightyears away from the common, down-to-earth conventional world. After reading this futurist article, I see us as very sane, practical, and humane operators. Rocks of common sense, as I said.

As to us being post-normal, I plead guilty. But all people who doubt that we are sane should be checked by the rationator police.

JANUARY 2011

No, this is not about borderline people as clients. Though that might be an interesting topic. I want to share some thoughts about an area that we may come across now and then. Anyway, I did come across it. Actually, many times.

When we regress our clients to the source of their problems, we most often encounter early childhood experiences, including birth trauma and even traumatic experiences in the womb. Also very often, we find past-life experiences, usually traumatic death experiences. How do we know those are true? Well, apart from metaphysical considerations, the fact that these regressions bring healing to otherwise unsolvable problems, is a strong indication.

But sometimes we find as the source of the problem evil intentions by other people, often fired by envy or hate. In countries like India and Brazil, it is not uncommon to unravel something that we - romantically, but pretty realistically - could call black magic. In India we encounter usually Tantric rituals, in Brazil usually Macumba or Candomblê. I have come across African sources and Indonesian sources too.

In Surinam, a former Dutch colony, with many descendants of African slaves, colleagues were enthusiastic by the possibility of countering and undoing Winti spells. In India, I now find such influences in over half of my patients. In Europe, such people have been often in former colonies, or had parents who lived or fought in such countries.

I hope resolving such problems remains a marginal subject in our practice, because the work deals with sticky, dirty and sometimes dangerous influences. I am afraid we are making enemies in some quarters.

If you have affinity with such problems (no, I am not implying a past-life connection with such practices, though … ), thread carefully. If you haven’t, refer such patients to colleagues who are willing and able to deal with them. More generally speaking, if ever something happens that makes you afraid, or brings you into a fighting mode: abstain!

I think there is an important niche in our field for this kind of work, but it should remain a niche. By the way, psychotic people may sense evil external influences and may simply err. But who is to say what is cause and what is effect? Avoid doing intense work with ungrounded people without clear borders.

I imagine that in the future we may move effectively into the field of wilder psychological problems, but together with psychiatrists. Why? Because I suspect that psychopharmaca may be often part of the problem and often part of the solution.

NOVEMBER 2010

What have these two fields to do with each other? Very little and quite a lot. As I have been a management consultant for almost 40 years, I met many leaders of companies and public institutions. I have met few very good leaders, because those people rarely need external consultants. And I have met few very bad leaders, because those avoid external consultants. With only a few of the leaders I met I have done regressions, but many of my regression clients had leadership experiences, either in this life or in a past life. I think I can sense those when I meet them for the first time. Let me share a number of my impressions and conclusions.

1. Most managers have had lifetimes either as commanding officers in the field, or as priests-magistrates. Or both - rarely in the same lifetime. Both experiences have a distinct flavor that I seem to recognize almost immediately.

2. I have the impression that former military leaders tend to be line managers and former priests tend to be staff managers. When we hear about people who remembered a life in the SS, they are almost all managers, directors, producers, and the like. Or again in the military. (By the way, the really evil ones never will visit a regression therapist.)

3. To succeed in higher general management positions you seem to need to have had both experiences.

4. Financial executives have had priest lifetimes. For a time, I wondered why. Then it hit me: money is intangible, priests have learned to deal with intangibles.

5. In women, priest or priestess lifetimes are more easily perceived than military lifetimes, who have been, of course, almost always male. Still, male lifetimes in women seem to be more easily discernible than female lifetimes in men. In general, men have more difficulty in remembering female lifetimes, than women in remembering male lifetimes. Also psychics see more often male past lives of women than female past lives of men.

6. The fundamental difference in spiritual orientation is between priests and priestesses on the one hand and shamans and witches at the other hand. Lifetimes of shamans and witches, if they have been peaceful and successful, seem to lead in the present life more to independent positions than to management positions, as those experiences are less formal, avoiding order and hierarchy. They don’t like to be bosses and they like it even less to have bosses.

7. In the few cases that I had in which personal coaching and consultancy of leaders included regression work (and other interventions at the energetic level like constellations), the effects were immediate, strong and included shifts in the whole area of responsibility.

8. Business leaders are more open to alternative and spiritual approaches than public managers, as they are less sensitive to public constituencies and publicity in general. As long as they produce results, they have more freedom in the way they go about to produce these results.

9. Commercial people are most open to our work, because they are more intuitive, as they deal more with people and their psychological make-up. Technical people are less open, and administrative and legal people least open. Even when they go for our stuff, they have more problems to enter into full experiences.

10. Within the technical people, like in engineering and ICT, there is a sizeable minority that is very interested in anything psychic. I often found extraterrestrial backgrounds in them.

Please remember that these insights - if that is what they are - should be approached with caution:

• Even if they are all true, you can’t reason backwards: that a legal counsel in a firm will have been a priest and not a military officer, or that an independent management consultant (like me) should have been a shaman. The relationships are statistical: in larger numbers of people, we may find such relationships, but they are not valid for individual cases.

• The people I have met are not necessarily a representative sample of all our clients, even less a representative sample of all people.

If you have experiences that seem to confirm - or to contradict - my experiences, react on the forum pages. I am interested!

And what about board members, especially of therapist associations? The only thing I can say, that there is somewhat more chance of a priest background than in the rest of the membership. The tendency to organize things and other people is not too great in witches.

Fortunately, most of us have enough lifetimes to at least sample the strengths (and weaknesses) of commanders, magistrates, priests, priestesses, shamans and witches. I personally knew priestesses who knew all about bewitching others. Before and outside EARTh of course.

SEPTEMBER 2010

It has all the future in the world. But many people don’t think so. We should live in the here and now. In one sense, that is ridiculous. We have no choice.

Also in an other sense it is ridiculous. If you would really live in the here, you should avoid letters, mails, phone conversations. because they all connect you with elsewhere. You should never think about people you love if they happen to be elsewhere. You should not worry when the plane spirals down about to crash. Because that crash is not right here and not right now.

If you would live in the now, you wouldn’t remember the sentences above, you wouldn’t remember why you are reading this, you wouldn’t remember there is something called EARTh. You wouldn’t remember your own name and what that dress is doing around your body. You might even not remember that it’s a dress and that is your body. That this is you.

Still, to live in the here and now also makes sense. We may dream about the future, hope for what is around the corner, worry about what may go wrong, fret about what we did do or didn’t do. We may even forget that we are alive and could be kicking. Many people in love waste their time daydreaming. Many people in bad circumstances waste their time complaining.

Bert Hellinger rightly warns against having people talk too long about their problems, or even talking about them at all. He wants only to know what the problem is, and what are the relevant people and facts of the situation. Why? Because we tend to spend so much time and energy in illustrating and explaining our problems, in complaining and analyzing and worrying and assuming and blaming and hoping, that we spend our energy in that instead of doing something about them. He warns also against what he calls secondary emotions, emotions that are not to spur action, but to avoid action. That is a way to get stuck in the past instead to live in the present.

We may also be absorbed in books, in movies, in video games, forgetting the here and now. Absorbed means entranced. That can be restoring and mind-opening, but also can be escapism and addiction.

Many people object to regression, because the past is the past and we should live in the present. Others say that we don’t need to know the origins of our problems, because origins are not important. They often have a point. Many problems are self-perpetuating. It doesn’t matter to analyze chickens and eggs. We should break the pattern.

But we can’t break a pattern, unless we know it. We can discover it through observation, introspection and analysis. Rational-emotive therapy is great in finding the wrong thoughts that keep us in mental prisons, do some reality-testing and supplant them with better, more rational and more realistic thoughts.

Still, as long as we don’t know the origin, we may create new mental prisons. In regression, we often do not go back to the origin of sate of mind, but to the inner conclusion of decision that created a loop, a mental prison. And we are not going back to the past to wallow over it, but to liberate ourselves.

That is what we are in, the self-liberating business of people. We enable self-liberating.

And we don’t go back to the past at all. We zoom in on the residues of the past that are here and now, that are alive and kicking. In regression we unfreeze them, so the undigested past can be digested and returned to the past. And the present is unfettered, unshackled.

We may even do something else. We may unleash hidden and forgotten talents. We may unlock treasures, dust them off and bring them into broad daylight. Here and now.

We can live in the here and now and have a timespan extending to before birth, even before recorded history, even before living on earth as a human being. That doesn’t take away from the here and now. It enlarges the here and now into an expanding space-time.

Our trade is about the past. And has a great future.

I hope you will remember this all in 15 seconds from now. That is about the timespan of a goldfish. Look in the mirror and say five times loud and clear: “I am not a goldfish!” Make sure it doesn’t take more than 15 seconds.

By the way, 15 seconds is also the time street fights and violent encounters take. What Hollywood shows about that is impressive, but crap.

May your aquarium widen all the time. And avoid street fights.

JULY 2010

In the Year of our Lord two thousand and ten

four years of learning to walk and learning to talk

four years of building the ship

now for the finishing touches

can we sail out?

can we sail around the world?

maybe

one port at a time

almost sailing out of the harbor

will we turn east or west, north or south?

and what will we find there?

and what will we do there?

MAY 2010

It is May 7, 2110. On her low-vibration couch, Maria Torschutz, has her second client that day. The client, a 31-year old woman, has a strange compulsion: she wants to chat. Not just with her friends and acquaintances, but with virtually everybody she meets, on the streets, in the shops, on the chopper-bus. If she can't chat, she seems to go crazy, if she does chat, she seems to go crazy too. She is chatting on the coach, right here, right now. When Maria tries to focus on that, her own mind starts to buzz and whirr, not an unpleasant sensation, but hard to keep in charge of a meaningful session.

MARCH 2010

Lately, I feel guilty. I have felt guilty before, so don't worry. What do I feel guilty about? The number of books I have received from colleagues and hardly have read yet. I am not referring to books they bought in a book shop. No, I am referring to books they have written and published. Most of those books are about case histories from their practice, often with philosophical preludes, asides and conclusions. And sometimes about historical confirmation.

A number of those books are from our members. True, some of those books are in languages like German, Portuguese or Dutch, but we have Chapters in these languages. So, where do these books figure on our website? Nowhere.

JANUARY 2010

India has a first. It is the first country in the world where there is a daily program about regression therapy, past-life therapy to be precise. Each evening, except the weekends, at 9:30 PM there is a one-hour program showing a regression session. Of course, many newspaper journalists are skeptical, suggesting that everything is planned and rehearsed. And discussions about such things have a particular flavor in India, as networks are obliged by law, to invite a skeptic on the panel, to ensure a ‘balanced' treatment. I have been experiencing that myself. The man representing the rationalist was more of an emotionalist and was not too precise in his argumentation. He found out that I had written a book about occultism and almost shouted "This man is an occultist!" So, if I had written a book about pigs, this would have been evidence of me being a pig. He had personally researched 300 cases of children who were purported to remember past lives. All cases were frauds. When I asked him where his research had been published, he answered "on the internet." No web address given.

NOVEMBER 2009

Most of us call ourselves regression therapists. Some prefer past-life therapists. The first expression was past lives therapy, the title of Morris Netherton's book in 1978 and the name of the therapy in the Psychotherapy Handbook in 1980. It unabashedly talks of previous lifetimes. In 1980 APRT was founded, the Association for Past-Life Research and Therapy. Past-life, of course, could also refer to the past of the present lifetime and is somewhat less provocative to the mainstream.

In 1991 William Baldwin titles his book Regression Therapy and in 1993 Winafred Lucas publishes her great two-volume handbook called Regression Therapy. Regression as a concept comes from hypnotic experiments, where it was usually known as age regression. It means simply going back or, a bit more precisely, stepping back.

SEPTEMBER 2009

The Annual Convention is over. What are the results? We hope the participants learned a lot, at least something. Sometimes we get new ideas, sometimes we find out that something is not for us and we continue what we did already with more conviction or more gusto. And we hope that the participants had a good time. After all, we do these things in the holiday season.

For the association itself, for the board and the committees the results are, as usually, more work. The PR-committee is chewing on the discussions about PR, the Research Committee is chewing on the discussions about research.

Our bylaws are nearing completion. The only thing we still have to do is the institutionalization of independent certification for members and schools, as our Articles of Association stipulate. Basically it is about quality assurance, an important, but not so easy subject. You may expect proposals in the course of this year.

JULY 2009

This time I will limit myself to reproducing my opening statement to the Annual Convention in Kleve at July 6, 2009:

What do we do and why are we doing it?

And are we good at what we are doing?

Most of us call ourselves regression therapists.

MAY 2009

What do we have in common? A strange and wonderful and complex and despised profession. And what we have in common, divides us too. We have different views, different opinions, different experiences, different perspectives, different judgments.

We are interested in each other, we exchange views and experiences, we are curious. And we are critical of each other. We appraise, we consider, we judge. We may irritate each other. We trust each other and distrust each other. We like each other and we dislike each other. We are colleagues. And we are competitors. We are happy about each other's success. And we are jealous. We regression therapists are in all this like artists.

Where do we meet? Virtually at the website and especially at the intranet. Physically at the Annual Convention. Or at local Chapters. The website and the convention are our meeting ground, our market place, our agora.

MARCH 2009

This time I want to talk about statistics. The statistics of our website. Below you will find how many visits we get and from where. Just have a look and then I want to comment on them.

JANUARY 2009

We all use intuition. And we take it seriously. If not, we couldn't be regression therapists. Many of our clients have intuitive experiences, many of our colleagues have intuitive experiences. Regression is an intuitive experience.

When people discover intuition, they discover things like automatic writing, giving or receiving readings or doing body scans, consulting oracles.

Anybody with any experience in this field knows that intuitive information is valid, whatever scientists may say. Intuitive information may be surprisingly right and to the point, often wonderfully succinct. Intuitive information is valid, but it is not reliable.

NOVEMBER 2008

This time I don't want to talk about how our profession is developing or how it may develop or should develop.
I want to talk about something altogether different. I want to talk about what our profession is about.

I don't want to talk about what witches do or might do or should do or shouldn't do. I want to talk about the inside. The inside of the witches' cauldron. About what is bubbling and stirring and stewing in there. About what is in the soul of our clients when they do sessions. About what is in our soul when we do sessions.

Our soul is a witches' cauldron. A holographic cauldron in which the present boils, the past simmers (and sometimes erupts) and the future is a bunch of ingredients that are waiting to be added, stirred and absorbed. Often by ourselves, often by others, andpossibly, probably, most of the time by invisible hands. Sometimes our own invisible hands. Sometimes hands that are hardly human. Divine hands?

JULY 2008

According to our Articles of Incorporation, EARTh wants "to improve and enlarge the professional application of regression therapy in Europe." By "the development of professional standards." Whatever these standards may be, many of them we share many with the helping professions in general and psychotherapists in particular. They are in our Code of Conduct.

But what about the quality of our work? What is good regression therapy? I guess we would all agree that good regression therapy gets good results and that it doesn't take ages and loads of money and growing dependence on the therapist to get there. Good results means that we are effective. Getting there without undue delays, costs and complications means that we are efficient or, if you prefer that word, productive.

Good results. How do we know that we have got them? First that the question of the client has been answered, that the problem is resolved, and that the results endure. During the Round Table in November we agreed on the term ‘life-changing results.' We didn't mean that those results are necessarily spectacular (though they sometimes are), but that they are not ephemeral, disappearing after a short euphoria.

MAY 2008

The member survey showed members are interested to contribute to research. What kind of research do we need? What kind do we want? And what is practically doable? Research requires the kind of discipline not all therapists have.

What questions do we wish to answer? We could start with finding out how we are doing. So we need to find out what is the input, the throughput and the output of our work.

1. Input: What people are seeking our services and why are they seeking our services?

2. Throughput: What do we actually do to them? What methods do we use? What interventions?

3. Output: What are the results? How do we measure those?

APRIL 2008

Elsewhere in this Newsletter you will find the results of the Member Survey, as tabulated and analyzed by Anita Groenendijk. The first element we as a Board have concluded from this, is the wish to have meetings between colleagues of the same country or region. Ulrich Kramer is involved in starting a German page in our website, which may become the meeting point for members in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Sueli Simões will contact the Portuguese members, Anita Groenendijk will contact the Dutch members and Tulin Etyemez the Turkish members. We will procure contact persons in other countries to sound the need for more local contacts, by mail, by Skype meetings or in the flesh.

The Code of Conduct has been voted upon and has been accepted almost unanimously. It will become available at the website. New members will be asked to sign and send a copy to the secretariat before admittance. Existing members are asked to print the Code and send also a copy to the Secretariat. You have till May 15 to do that.

MARCH 2008

How should we present ourselves? To whom? And what for?

We would like that people who could benefit from our services, would find their way to us. So they should know what we do and trust what we do. And it would be nice if doctors and other therapists would refer suitable cases to us. May be it would also be nice if reimbursement possibilities that other therapies have, would be extended to us. It would bring in many more clients, though also less motivated clients than the ones we are getting now. Usually, at least.

How do doctors advertise their trade? How do regular psychologists do it? Doctors have a track record, at least the last 150 years. They are authorities. They graduate from universities, they are generally known and respected and they wear white coats. Nobody doubts them. Individual doctors may be criticized or disliked, but the profession inspires trust. Many people think that medicine should be approached in a different fashion, like less pills or less vaccinations or less surgery, but few people indeed would like to see less doctors.

DECEMBER 2007

Where do we come from? Regression started with experiments using deep trance. In 1886,

Colavida described age regression to early childhood. In 1911, Albert de Rochas published Les Vies Successives about regressions to past lifetimes. His results were in line what Ian Stevenson found in children's cases, rather different from what we find in our therapy work. The difference can be explained, but that is not my issue here.

Ralph Grossi writes that in the forties stage hypnotists knew already that 90% of hypnotized people could go back to past lifetimes under hypnosis. Interestingly, hypnotic regressions were already used to explain present-life problems, but not for therapy. Therapy started with non-hypnotic inductions. Ron Hubbard, working with his E-meter and following thoughts and practices op people like Wilhelm Reich, found past lifetimes exploring trauma's, which transformed his dianetics to a world view he called scientology.

SEPTEMBER 2007

What has stayed with me from the Second Summer School of EARTh in Istanbul, was its sheer vitality. There is something about truly international encounters that national conferences and national workshops lack. Everything was vital, even our misunderstandings and our confusion at times. We went home, full of plans, full with ideas, full of energy. I met the other Board members, both the old and the new ones, and we talked and discussed and compared ideas and possibilities and desires and ambitions. I started to call them my board. And even if I left a meeting tired, late at night, I sensed the vitality of my colleagues, of myself, of our field.

We are not just an association and a board, we are a movement. We seem to be on a wave. And now we are home, and the wave is not subsiding.