Chapter 4

THE ADVENTURE YEARS

'Begin with that in hand, but begin if there would be anything accomplished. Talk is well. Action is wise. Deeds are golden'. Edgar Cayce, Reading 254-35

The years between 1964, when I went to the Edgar Cayce Foundation, and 1974, when I met Chuck, were eventful ones. I traveled. I married and divorced and got to know the son of that relationship. I worked at many jobs. I started a successful antiques business.(1) I also continued taking courses on hypnosis, personal development, applied psychology, mind development, mind science, and psychic development, and continued guiding regressions for friends and acquaintances. And I was unhappy inside.

My life, I often thought, resembled a wave that I rode precariously on a slippery surfboard. I wanted more control of my life. I wanted to grow up. My studies helped. So did Patricia, whom I met in 1974 and with whom I had a loving relationship for four years - four years that coincided with a period of enormous personal and professional growth for me.
I call these the "Adventure Years," after a house I bought in 1974 when Patricia and I returned from our transcontinental odyssey. In retrospect, I see that the Adventure Years had two main facets: the experience of living in a group house; and the development of my professional life as a hypnotist; and each contributed in its own way to my personal growth.

The house, which I bought from my parents, is in Ashby, MA, a quaint little town not far from the New Hampshire border. Patricia and I set about renovating it, using century-old board siding from the big barn to panel some of the rooms (it had 11, not counting the two baths, a solarium, and a four story tower). We used the barn and part of the house for the antiques business and rattled around in the rest. But we didn't rattle around for long. Because we were frequently in Europe on antiques buying trips, we found housesitters. Many came; few left. In addition, we held "open invitation" weekends for friends and acquaintances who wanted to explore new regions of consciousness. Some of these people stayed too. Soon the house was filled with a large, shifting, human population, plus 18 cats and dogs and - in the fields - a horse named Fred.

We named the house "Adventure Into Time," and called it "The Adventure." It was an apt name. We who lived there were seekers. All came for reasons of their own, the teachers as well as the novices. But most who came to stay or study were embarked on personal adventures into new knowledge and understanding. Learning and Teaching at The Adventure Although we never planned for it to become a teaching center, it quickly evolved into one. With new people came new ideas and perspectives.
Our community offered classes on self-hypnosis, therapeutic massage, yoga, astrology, and whole health cuisine conducted by people who were, or are now, professionals in their fields. Everyone, visitor or resident, contributed to the whole. Some came with music, others to read palms, cards, or auras. Psychics used their abilities to flash on past lives. (One of them asserted that many in our community had been together at least once before, in another lifetime in medieval Europe, and that the souls of many American Indians had visited our tribe, or lodge.)

Two professional astrologers lived at The Adventure, and other astrologers came who had studied ways of detecting past lives in individual horoscopes. My own chief interest, or course, was exploring the past. I also started experimenting with guiding people into the future, but I soon saw that for me, this was a less productive avenue. The subsconscious mind has access to stored material from the present and the past; the future is not so readily available, as it comprises only probabilities based on past and present.
Besides, the patterns of past lives also reveal the directions future lives are going. The sheer numbers of people passing through gave me an opportunity to conduct countless past life regressions and to fine tune my skills as a hypnotist. Before long, I filled two cartons with tapes of sessions. Working and living in a close community with these varied and wonderful people became quite an adventure in itself, one of the most significant learning experiences of my entire career, for I gained much in my ability to relate to people.

The Providence Hypnosis Center

Meanwhile, the question of my professional life occasionally arose. I was happy and successful in the antiques business. Still, I told Patricia one day that if I were ever to change vocations, I would like to work full time in the field of hypnosis. It was one of those speculative conversations that ordinarily lead no farther. Then, not long afterwards, I received a phone call from Robert Bow, the director of the Providence Hypnosis Center in Providence, RI. Would I like to come to work for him, with a view toward purchasing the center in the near future? I would. Bow had been a guest at one of our open invitation weekends and had seen me do a demonstration of group hypnosis. He evidently liked my style, and followed up with his astonishing phone call.

I went to work at the center in October, 1975, and in 1976 became the director. I worked hard to build the clinic up, and we soon became one of the largest in New England, with four therapists besides myself. We specialized in helping people to lose weight and to stop smoking cigarettes. We later offered a number of other personal development programs and courses on hypnosis and self hypnosis. I also found time to write booklets about self hypnosis that were published through the center. In 1977, with George Parker, a colleague there, I co-authored my first book.* I was invited to speak at the local medical center and at schools, colleges, and civic organizations. I attended professional development workshops and conferences and conventions of other professional hypnotists. Later, I was a speaker at meetings of these same organizations. I enjoyed the local speaking engagements. Most of the time I simply spoke of hypnosis and its therapeutic uses. Sometimes, however, the occasion was more dramatic. One of these evolved from a talk at a high school psychology class. Though the topic was hypnosis the question of past life regression quickly arose. The students and teacher were eager for a demonstration. I was reluctant to agree. Although I had had audiences, this would be the first time I would perform a regression in a classroom setting. Moreover, I didn't (and still don't) like doing this kind of soul work in a class or demonstration setting; it is too much like stage hypnosis. Finally, I was concerned about the atmosphere. The regression experience is characterized by high degrees of emotion and openness. These must be respected; in particular, the audience must not mock the subject.

Could I create the right mood and setting? Something in the climate of the group reassured me, and I agreed to come back the following week and perform the regression. The teacher volunteered to be the subject. In hypnotic regression, he quickly experienced touching episodes with two sons of a past life. The class was enthralled as he revealed secrets of his heart and rekindled the sparks of past love.
After awakening, the teacher held his hands to his face and sobbed in a full, sincere, and spontaneous release of joyous emotion. I feared the students would mock his tears, but they were most considerate, mature, and understanding.

Working as a hypnotist at PHC was totally valuable. Hypnosis became an everyday tool, not an occasional one. The best thing I learned was to work with all kinds of people in all kinds of circumstances. For instance, before going to the center, I might have been intimidated had a high ranking state policeman in full uniform walked in, asking me to hypnotize him so he could quit smoking. Not now. Though I very much wanted him to succeed (for the prestige, if nothing else, for he was on special duty as the governor's chauffeur and bodyguard) I had learned something. The most you can do is the best you can. In this case, it wasn't enough; he was in too much of a hurry and didn't give himself a chance, for all my rooting for him.

Seeking Personal Growth At the beginning of the Adventure Years, I was at a very precarious place in life, especially as regards my relationships. I had recently been divorced, and though my relations with Pat were warm and rewarding, I was aware of some deeper immaturity. Selling antiques is a fine business; so is working in the field of hypnosis. But I dimly realized then - as I strongly realize now - that personal growth, especially through marriage or relationships, is the paramount life issue for me.

In the Adventure Years, I began in a serious way to develop the process of change that I continue to use: I reprogram my present and work to explore and understand my past, including my past lives. Because my knowledge and experience is in the field of hypnosis, it seemed obvious to me to use what I knew. Rather than go to a hypnosis clinic or center, I decided to work with self-hypnosis tapes. I used (and use) two kinds, the commercial ones and those I make for myself. The commercial tapes are prerecorded and are sold in bookstores, pharmacies, and in the mails; they are used to reprogram a certain aspect of personality or behavior or to reach a certain goal.

I quickly realized I could make my own tapes for very specific individual projects and goals. For instance, in the early 1960s, I used commercial tapes on personality development. Soon I made my own tape to cure fingernail biting. (As you see, not everything I work on is "serious" - although my fingernail biting was a serious, advanced case.) Since then, I have made tapes to help me feel more at ease when speaking in public, to help me relax, to help me listen better to others, to find a good love relationship, and many others. Using these, I began to reprogram myself, shedding some of the silliness of youth. I could not change the world, I realized, but I could change myself and my world.

I believed my immaturity was rooted in past lives; I could soothe the scars on my soul by delving into my own past lives. I had seen the healing process as I worked with others.(2) I believed the process could work for me and that insight from my own past contributes to my soul growth in the present. Here is an example of how knowledge of my past lives helps me in the present. As I said, one of the nagging problems of my life has been my difficulty with intimate relationships. In the mid-1960s I was living in a remote part of Spain, where I went to escape the bitter New England winter.
Ironically, the house where I lived was made of stone and was unheated, as are most in that part of Spain; I was not much warmer that winter than I would have been at home. In addition, I was full of sadness over a failed relationship and the loss of a son [from the relationship] who had gone with his mother. I brooded over other unsatisfactory relationships too, for I saw the beginnings of my pattern of difficulties.

For several days, off and on, I prayed and meditated, hoping for insight into the origins of my problems. One day, I sat drearily in my room, sick with the flu and a high fever. In my fevered state, a waking dream, or vision, came, with very strong images and powerful feelings of sadness and tragedy. I was in a past life, in France, and I was abandoning a wife and our three children, two who had been born and one I didn't yet realize had been conceived. By the standards of the day, it was a good life; I had work, we had food. It was a normal peasant's life. And I was leaving that good life to go on one of the Crusades. In that vision, I saw that I left my wife for the magic, the joy, the glamour, and the glory of the Crusade - and for the lure of riches. My comrades and I were going out to fight the infidel for Christ, and we thought it was going to be great fun. We were fools!

They called the Crusade holy; for me it was hell. We marched, and we marched, and we marched. When I got to the very sight of Jerusalem, to the very sight of the Holy City, I died on the side of the road. I died of disease and exhaustion. My body fell into the ditch. The Crusader army kept marching. That was the vision. It provided me with physical and emotional release. I cried; it seemed as though I cried for hours. When I finally dried my eyes, I was filled with peace and self-acceptance. I was grateful that my prayer for insight had been answered.

In my mind, I sent to my French wife my profound regret for abandoning her and our children. I did not really know what to do with the information I now had. But at that time, it was enough that I had information that shed light on my state of mind; that my pain had been relieved; and that I experienced calm and self-acceptance. Nor did I feel a need to do anything. I simply resumed my life. When I recovered from the fever, I traveled throughout Spain buying antiques in the tiny mountain towns (I was apprenticing with a dealer who taught me the trade), living almost as a native.

After six months I returned to New England, working in the apple orchard (as I had in high school), traveling, working at other odd jobs - experiencing life. But my vision stayed with me. In retrospect, it is a key episode in my life. Later, at The Adventure, I was able to confirm its truth when I was the subject of a series of guided past life regressions. The hypnotist/guide in the following exchanges is George Parker.

HENRY
Summer, 1974 Ashby, Massachusetts

Okay, tell me about it... It is me. It is in Jerusalem, the Holy Land. We ravaged a city. We burned a city like a heathen. We raped and we plundered. We killed. We destroyed everything. We burned their bodies. We burned their homes. It was a horrible place - a horrible thing. Jerusalem? Near there. In the land of Jerusalem. Do you remember capturing Jerusalem? I was killed soon after. What was your name? I died, I died disheartened, disgusted, rejected by my friends, condemned by the enemy. I died very bitter. I know what I have done. Having sinned in the name of God. Having destroyed in the name of Christ. Having killed in the name of religion. My name is John.

From what country did you come? ....From Europe.

Do you remember where?... No. I don't care. I know what I have done.

You learned a lesson from this life? ....A very difficult and very bitter lesson.

Do you know what it is?... Not to go off to war.

What did you lose here?... War is not beautiful. I lost a family. I lost friends. I lost a home. I lost a life.

Is that all? Is there anything more of this life?... Is that all! I lost everything and I gained nothing! I went out seeking adventure and I found death. When you left - I went off to glory, found tears and sadness. I went off to the marching of bands and the blaring of bugles. Then I heard the wail of children dying, the stench of cities burning. Had a - [tape unclear] - ugly destruction. Clouds of death overwhelming us. We destroying just to destroy. No reason, just to destroy. Oh, what waste! What loss! When will it ever end? When will it ever cease? It goes on today. It will go on tomorrow. Pillage and destruction. Rape and ravish. It goes on.

In a later session (Aug. 2, 1976, in Ashby), I reviewed the Crusades era again. Louis Acker is the hypnotist/guide.

....I do see a green field, a dusty dirt road, myself in a suit of armor with a long lance, very well dressed, a purple plume - a reddish- purple plume, a little dog beside me, a very nice horse - well groomed going off, going to the crusades in a lot of splendor and a lot of glory. I felt this image before. I haven't seen it this vividly. The horse is white and brown, has even black on it. It's middle ages. There is a castle and a small town way off in the distance. I left a wife and two, three children - two and a third one coming, there's three children - to go off. I didn't have to. I chose to. I wanted to go for the glory and the adventure and all I found was sadness and death and defeat. There was no glory and less adventure. There was privation, there was hunger, there was thirst, there was betrayal of friends, there were empty dreams and emptier promises, empty dreams and sad nights - a very unhappy time, a very sad lesson. The lesson being that sometimes we have something very good, something that we need and want so very much and we always feel like there's more. It's sad, but the grass is always greener, I suppose.
What it's telling me now is to know what I have, to appreciate it, to be very content and very pleased with it. Granted, there can always be more but there can always be much less. In my present life, I have had two marriages, two children of my own (and others through marriage), and yet have been denied the companionship of my own children. Difficulty with relationships, the loss of wives and children - I believe I experience these now because in that former life I left a wife and children. I believe my present condition is the price I pay, or have chosen to pay, for the desertion of my family. I believe from my heart and soul that my present life is the payment due on that previous life, the balance that I owe for deserting a loving wife and family...

Even more perturbing is this question: Do I have an embedded cyclic pattern of leaving loved ones for crusades (in various forms) or is it my karma to endure (or be thankful for) the losses of family and relationships in my present life? Karma is a self-chosen fate. It's like a credit card; the bill comes in and we must pay it, probably with interest. But we incurred the bill; in purchasing the item we have made a contract to pay it. Lives are like that; you pay the bill. You can pay it all off at once at any time you want or you can pay it in small payments over several lifetimes.

This is the great question of lives and the cyclic pattern of lives: How much can we change and write a new script and how much must we act out verbatim on the eternal stage of life?

Investigating the hidden workings of the mind has brought answers that satisfy me. Past life work can ease the mind in the present life and sometimes, give information on which to base the new script. For instance, my vision in Spain eased my mind and spirit. While I didn't feel then it was prophetic, it came to seem so, and the regressions at The Adventure confirmed the Crusade story.

While I could do nothing about the recent past - the two marriages were over and the children gone - I could perhaps rewrite the script. I became more careful about my crusades and transformed the problematic patterns of my past lives. I give more thought to loving relationships, and I do not end them carelessly, but give them all I have. Learning from My Lives At this point, I understood karma as a "what ye sow, that shall ye reap" phenomenon; knew there were prices; knew there was choice in the sense that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Later, with other hypnotic experiments, I was to gain more insight into the larger picture of lives; karma; the ways we change our scripts; and the uses of forgiveness as one of the important healing processes. That understanding all began at The Adventure. So did my understanding of the cyclic character of lives. Two of my own past life experiences illustrate this. In the first of these lives, I was a wealthy, influential female prostitute in ancient Greece. I had an attractive body, a beautiful house, servants, and a clientele of wealthy politicians and generals, the elite of the country. Using my connections with them, I jockeyed myself into a position of wealth. Calculating and bitchy, I got what I wanted for myself and my friends. Every possession a person could have in life at that time and place was mine. I was even buried with great ceremony and state honors.

Most unexpectedly, a contrasting life flashed vividly before me one night in Providence. I saw a vision that night while I was watching TV. I had had a long day at the hypnosis center and was relaxing, tuning out the conscious world. My mind was in a relaxed, alpha state, but I was not looking for any past life memory. Psychic flashes can come on their own, uninvited and sometimes unwanted.
In this life, I was a younger girl. I was destitute and homeless, sleeping in the cold and windy corner of an innkeeper's mule shelter on the steppes of China. The only people who came through were the mule traders. After they finished using my body, they threw down on the dirty straw floor coins of almost no value, more in mockery than in payment. I died of disease and malnutrition at the age of 13. With no ceremony whatsoever, my body was thrown into the pigpen. The body decayed and was eaten by the pigs. How do these two diametrically opposed lifetimes relate to themselves and to my present one? Both of these lives were female, and I know I have had other female lives. With these two lives, I began to understand what Carl Jung meant when he spoke and wrote about the combination of masculine and feminine in all of us.

These lives shed new light on my sexual identity - of course we've all been male and female. The soul is androgynous. The body is far less significant than our society thinks. I believe the story of my two prostitute lives is one of balance. On the one side of the scale was the pretty but calculating and avaricious Grecian. On the other, the poor, starving, beaten victim. Centuries later, as I see them both in my mind's eye, I like the China girl best; she paid the balance without ever complaining. As gruesome as these two lives sound, they were a valid part of my soul's evolution. Granted, they were from a caterpillar stage of my growth; but without going through a caterpillar stage, how could I ever hope to be transformed into a butterfly?

To me, though, the interest of these tales is not in my gruesome experiences, but in using the past life information to gain loving guidance for a more healthy use of my sexual energy in the present. An action in one life does not cause an action in another. In another life we choose (maybe subconsciously) an opposite. The Grecian prostitute abused power more than she misused sex; I paid my bill in my Chinese life.

But I do not need to reexperience a life of prostitution and manipulation. In these years of research and experience, I saw few set rules concerning lives. People always seem to have choices. There seems not to be a moralistic rule of "right" and "wrong," nor did I observe any rule that says people must experience abuse in order to balance abuse. Patterns, I decided, can be changed. Hurts can be healed (or at least kissed). Earth school is usually a merciful institution.

By the time of the Adventure Years I was beginning to view life as an unlimited school, with the different grades as different lifetimes. When we study and learn we pass our tests and we progress; when we neglect our studies and fail our tests, we take those tests over and over again. But in this school of life we are our own teacher, and we grade our own tests. Psychic flashes, in myself and others, can awaken past and present experiences of life. Often simply telling another person of an experience, whether the telling is done consciously or under hypnosis, can give additional perspectives and relief and allows additional information to come forward.

When emotional attachments have been released, the person can generally see and accept a clearer picture of the facts. I believe it is a matter of letting go and continuing on in the human adventure. For instance, the vision in which I experienced myself as a Crusader - and a deserter of my family is still strong in my mind's eye and my soul's memory bank. If I allowed myself to dwell on it I could dredge up the same feelings of terrible pain at my folly. But I must let go of my pain and move on.
The experience of the process stays with us for use again and again as such awarenesses come to us in the exploration of ourselves, as we travel deeper within.

Notes to Chapter 4
(1) To me, antiques have always been closely linked with my past life hypnosis work. Both deal with the past, one through the subconscious mind and the other through artifacts. The antiques are real, solid, living history I can hold and feel and see and smell. They are tangible history. I love each peice, but can also detach myself to sell them to others who love them. It is a win-win-win business. People are happy to sell their "old junk," and I am happy to buy it; other folks are pleased to buy it from me. Now, in 1986, I am so busy that I am preparing to retire from antiques and concentrate on speaking and writing as well as guiding regressions and channeling. (2) The work of professionals like Irene Hickman, an osteopath who also uses hypnosis for therapy, supports my belief in the healing potential of past life experience. Hickman often uses hypnosis to help patients regress to a time of conflict or trauma. She said, "Whenever an emotionally loaded memory was revealed, and the incident relived..., there was a reported definite feeling of release and relief of tension, a lessening of symptoms of the illness, or a movement toward a resolving of personal relationships." Hickman, Irene: Mind Probe - Hypnosis. Kirksville, MO: Hickman Systems [4 Woodland Lane 63501], 1983.

*Bolduc, Henry, and George Parker. How to Unlock the Power of Your Mind With Hypnosis and Explore the Riddle of Reincarnation. Ashby, MA: Adventure Into Time Publishers, 1977. Out of print.