Though past lives have been incorporated in ancient belief systems for millennia. It hasn’t been until recently that psychiatrist and hypnotherapist have stumbled upon and molded past life regression as we know and use it today.
I would consider the forefathers (and mothers) of modern Past Life Regression to be Dr. Brian Weiss, Dr. Michal Newton and Hypnotherapist Dolores Cannon.
Dr. Brian Weiss graduated from Columbia University in 1996 and then later Yale with a degree in medical Psychiatry. Dr. Weiss first interaction with a past life was with a young woman named “Catherine” who he accidently regressed to a time before her birth while doing a childhood trauma regression. As a man of science and a professed agnostic, he admitted to Opera in an interview that he himself had a hard time believing what had happed. To Catherine the experience seemed “Intense, cathartic and emotional” and she seemed to have an easier time believing in the idea of the past life than Dr. Brian Weiss. Since this first regression, Dr. Brian Weiss has performed countless regressions, and written multiple books on his clients’ experiences.
Dr. Newton had a similar start to past life regression as a traditional behavior modification therapist. He has said in interviews that he had originally been asked by clients if he could do past life regression and always turned them down. Years later a client was referred to him who had seen multiple Dr’s for frequent and sharp hip pain that had no notable cause or explanation. After exploring this client’s childhood via regression and finding no cause or injury, he asked the client to take himself back to the cause of the injury. To both their surprise the client ended up describing a battlefield in France in WW1. Dr. Newton was so skeptical of the client’s description of his past life that he began asking for detail after detail of the WW1 battlefield situation because he still couldn’t believe it. Dr. Newton said this was the start of his more experimental phase in which he also stumbled upon a “life between lives” where countless clients who seem to have the same experience in a sprit state of choosing new lives and learning from past ones. He documents his research and client regressions in his book “Journey of Souls.”
Lastly Dolores Cannon has said in interviews she accidently started her Hypnosis training in the late 60’s and mentions at that time there was no terms used like “New Age”, “Reincarnation” nor “Past Lives”. She was mainly using hypnosis to help people quit smoking, lose wait etc. She stumbled upon past lives accidently and since there were no books or any other information out on the subject, she decided to explore and collect all the information she could as to publish her own book which, of course, at the time was not picked up by any publisher due to the subject being so abstract and unknown. Ten or more years after she continued exploring past lives and collecting information and was eventually able to publish her first book “Five Lives Remembered.” Since then, Dolores has written countless books on the subject and many more.