As Dr. John Amoroso explains it, we come into our lives with a specific soul purpose or life mission. Based on our personal karmic or past-life history, this can involve a vocation or avocation, an interest, or simply a way of being in the world. In any case, it is personal and unique for each of us, and it encompasses the positive themes or aspects of ourselves. It is the negative, disruptive themes from past lives (the unfinished business) that can block or disrupt the ability to realize one’s purpose.

Using Integrated Imagery—a practice the author has used with clients for over 20 years—Amoroso will help you to explore the positive and negative themes of your past lives and the behaviors that you carried into this life. Most important, you’ll receive insight as to how these karmic themes function and interact with each other.

Using exercises, the accompanying audio CD, an autobiographical time line, self-reflection, and journaling, you will start to clarify what you already know about yourself. From there, you’ll learn how to de-energize the negative and accentuate the positive.

This step-by-step guide includes practical, experiential exercises that can be benefited from immediately. Here we share the book’s introduction:

Mary’s life had been challenging for the past two years. She had been in a romantic relationship with a man who was emotionally not present. He would consistently pull her into the relationship and then find some reason to push her away. In many respects it had been similar to her fifteen-year marriage. That had ended three years ago when she found out that her husband had been carrying on a series of affairs with other women. She came out of these experiences disillusioned and damaged. Her sense of self-esteem and confidence had once again been compromised. In addition, the dynamics in her marriage and this recent relationship had dramatically interfered with what she was realizing as a passion and a new direction in her life. For years she had thought about pursuing a career in nursing, especially now that her children were living out on their own.

After two years of psychotherapy with a reputable therapist, Mary was beginning to realize a pattern that was clearly reflected in these last two romantic relationships. The issue of betrayal and the experiences of being emotionally abandoned and criticized were familiar to her. Her father had been a critical and overbearing character in her life. Her mother, in the face of her father’s hostility, became submissive. When Mary was eight years old, her family changed dramatically. Her mother died of cancer, and her father became even more emotionally unavailable. The two years of therapy had uncovered these repeating dynamics in the experiences of her relationships, but her life was not changing.

Mary continued to struggle with depression and a sense of hopelessness. Not long after the breakup of this last relationship, Mary heard about my work in past-life regression therapy on a local radio program. During the first three regression sessions, she uncovered past-life experiences that perfectly corresponded to what had been going on in her life recently. She went to a life where she was the chief of a Native American tribe in which she had been betrayed and persecuted by rival factions.

In another life she was the mother of three small children. She had left them alone to find food during a blizzard only to return to find them frozen to death. The guilt of having abandoned her family stayed with her until her death in that life. There were several other past lives during which she was either abandoned or the one who abandoned. Mary’s discovery of this abandonment theme in prior lives was the key to her recovery. Her regression work uncovered the roots of this negative theme in her current life. In the course of awakening each of these traumatic episodes in past lives, she gained deeper insight about these negative karmic themes—the abandoned/abandoner. And by reprocessing these traumatic experiences in those lives in a positive way, she was able to “finish that unfinished business” of the past. She could then reach a state of self-forgiveness and forgiveness of her perpetrators.

Mary started to feel the depression and hopelessness lift. Mary was also surprised to discover several lifetimes where she as a caregiver and healer. In these regression sessions we focused on the positive fulfilling feelings and experiences in those lives that formed into positive talents and ways of being. These positive past-life karmic patterns had been carried into this life and formed into a sense of soul purpose that she was just beginning to recognize. As a result of her past-life regression experiences, she was able to validate and enliven those positive aspects of herself that formed her sense of soul purpose.

By also de-energizing those karmic patterns that had interfered with her relationships and true calling, she had cleared the way for a new life. Mary found herself attracting new relationships that were unburdened by her abandonment theme out of her traumatic karmic past.

It wasn’t long before Mary finished nursing school and got a job in a local hospital. Soon after that, she found a romantic relationship unlike any she had ever experienced. Mary is now remarried and happily pursuing her passion for nursing and care-giving.

Mary’s story is a perfect example of how past-life regression works. It explains how exploring and processing past-life experiences can give one a deeper insight into the dynamics of both positive and negative themes/complexes that are carried into one’s life. It was through this approach that Mary was able to finally release herself from these persistent dysfunctional themes and to successfully refocus on and energize the positive. Although she started out skeptical of the idea of reincarnation, she was still able to use the principles of karma and the experience of exploring past lives to gain insight and to change her life for the better.

The objective of this book is to provide you with the tools to start the process of awakening past lives on the path of healing and growth. Through the use of discussion, self-reflection, journaling, and Integrated Imagery exercises found throughout this book, you will have the opportunity to:

• Explore and de-energize the negative karmic themes from other times.
• Uncover and accentuate the positive karmic themes.
• Discover and enliven your unique sense of soul purpose.

This excursion through past lives and your biographical experiences may simply help you to validate what you already know about yourself. But don’t be surprised if you discover new insights that will contribute to your mission of healing and growth.