Acknowledgements 1
Foreword 2
Introduction 3

Part I: The Human Face of Karma 10
Chapter 1. Suffering 11
Chapter 2. Patterns, Symptoms and Signposts 25
Chapter 3. Stories within the Stories 37
Chapter 4. New Conceptions of Prenatal Life 46
Chapter 5. A Brief History of Karma 73
Chapter 6. The Anatomy of Experience and How Events become Karma 80
Chapter 7. Desires at the Heart of the Self: Recovering our Innocence 105
Chapter 8. No One Here Gets Out Alive 111
Chapter 9. Regression, Therapy and the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are 114

Part II: The Karmic Network 141
Chapter 10. Karmic Network - Our Co-Created Reality 142
Chapter 11. Shamanic Realities and The Otherworld 162

Part III: The End of Karma 178
Chapter 12: Why On Earth Are We Here? 179
Chapter 13. The End of Karma - The One Thing It Asks of Us 184
Karma Workbook: Exploration & Self-Reflection 192
Bibliography 238



Chapter 9: Regression, Therapy and the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are


How much of our psychology offers hospitality to us as living human beings, inviting us to be fully present before the aggressive analysis and intrusive interventions begin? Indeed, how hospitable are we to the realities of our own experience and the contents of our own minds before we feel the necessity to shape, develop, replace or suppress them? What is this fear of allowing experience to speak for itself, to invite what is inside of us to speak in its own voice?
Karl Schlotterbeck


Let’s return to Howard’s session. Howard found his childhood memory where he feared falling from a tree, absorbed his mother’s fear of falling, relived his own prenatal fear of falling to his death, but found that his past-life fall – and his story line – was interrupted when terror drove him out of his body and out of time. Yet the tension in his body was a message that still more needed to be done. I returned him to the edge of the cliff one last time, this time with direct instructions to remain with the consciousness in his body and not to leave it. We found the previously ceaseless falling in panic to be just a few seconds of real time: this time, his panicked fall lasted as long as it took to reach the rocks below. His panic dissipated as life quickly drained from his broken body. And his body in my office finally relaxed, telling us we were finished.
It’s ironic that, on the one hand, his fear of falling resulted from having not completely fallen to his death but, rather, from having abandoned his body mid-fall; and, on the other hand, that his release from the phobia came only through the full experience of falling. As is so often the case, the way out is through.


Facing the Life Inside
In our compulsively extraverted world, obsessed with measurable and "scientific" things, attention to the inner life is too often neglected or relegated to artists and poets. This makes messages from the inner self and the unconscious mind all the more significant. There are so many ways our lives attempt to communicate with us and, instead of responding to them directly, we go off in search of things that support our denial: techniques, practices, self-help programs, exercise regimens, teachers, gurus, religious movements, happy hour. There's nothing inherently wrong with these, except when they drown out the messages coming to us from the one life for which we are responsible. Not only that, our schools of psychology and techniques of self-help have become increasingly behavioral, not just because the techniques do have something to offer and are more easily taught than deeper explorations, but because 1) we are insecure in the face of the vast worlds within us and 2) people who are well-connected with what is inside them are less susceptible to the pressures and manipulations of those who would have them conform to an external expectation. There is a very real tension between forces of conformity, on the one hand, and consciousness and self-determination on the other.
Our inner life comes toward us, but it is our choice to receive it or to turn away through any of the avenues our culture so easily offers us. We have been taught to be afraid of what's inside of us, which is, in reality, the largest part of ourselves. Pop psychology deriving from Freudian times and misinterpretations of Jung's concept of the "Shadow" has identified the unconscious as the place only of uncontrolled impulses, antisocial desires, and all the ugliness we want to hide. This is one of the sources of self-hatred, self-sabotage and destructive behavior we see in the world: we have alienated ourselves from the sources of our life. Add admonitions to stay in the "Now," ambitions for enlightenment and oppressive kinds of meditations, and we impoverish ourselves. Then, as if the darkness and troubles of this life weren't enough, add the idea of karma and its catastrophes, and who would want anything but external, material and powerful achievements – where you can see progress and quantify wealth?
We generally fear what might overturn our world, even for the better, because it robs us of our familiar devils and desperately held preconceptions. As much as we desire wholeness, we are attached to the fragmentary nature of our lives, fearing who we may become and what we might lose if we allow ourselves to fully develop.
It does take courage to turn and face the messenger coming toward us. The messenger is not just coming with painful stories, but with revelation of the source of our wound, how it got there, and what it is asking of us for its healing. With Netherton's observation that these patterns are trance states, he found it unnecessary to induce yet another trance in order to access the memories carried in them, but to be hospitable to the messenger; to invite that already-present trance into the therapy office, enter. . .