Past Lives, Regression Therapy, and Astrology: An Interview with Michelle Brock

Hi, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today I am going to be joined by my friend and colleague and someone who I have worked with personally through her healing practice. Her name is Michelle Brock. She is a past life regression therapist and the author of a new book called Who Do You Think You Are?, which is coming out from Penguin in the next couple of months and that's available for presale right now.

So I'm going to be telling you about a lot about Michelle's work and, who she is and what she does and her new book. But we're going to be doing that within the context of a conversation also about what ancient astrologers said and what they believed when it came to past lives, past life regression, the transmigration of the soul, and stuff like that.

I think you guys are gonna really like Michelle. I've known her for a long time, and she's a fantastic person and a really great healer. I love the concept behind her new book. So I'm excited to tell you guys about it.

I worked with her last year, and I had a really powerful healing experience, and I believe that I mean, I get questions all year round from people saying like is, you know, evolutionary astrology is one of the big schools of modern astrology it looks to spend a lot of time looking at the progression of the soul through lifetimes and stuff like that.

Ancient astrology doesn't focus as much on, say, reading the nodes of the Moon is a way of understanding the soul's evolutionary journey. But ancient astrologers very much believed in the transmigration of the soul, the evolution of the soul, and things like that. So, I want to lay some of that out there for you today and then bring Michelle on to talk about this subject in depth, as well as her new book.

Before we get into it, though, as always, don't forget to like and subscribe share your comments and reflections. If you've ever had a past life regression or you've done past life regression therapy before, it'd be really interesting to hear some of your stories today or your own reflections about this topic in general; it would be just really interesting to see a little bit of conversation around the topic. So fill up the comments section; we'd love to see that today. If you want, you can find a transcript of today's talk on the website nightlightastrology.com, and don't forget that we are in the midst of enrollment season right now.

My new class, Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic, starts on November 18, so it is not too late to sign up. If you scroll down on this page, you'll be able to learn more about the class and what it includes. It is all held via live webinars over the course of a year. It's a deep immersion into ancient Hellenistic astrology. But we also make sure that everything is cataloged and archived on a class website.

So if you, whether it's time zones, work, or kids, and you can't make it to these classes live, you can always watch them on the website or download them to your device and watch them however you want on your own time.

At the bottom of the page, you will also find some payment options and registration is there at the bottom of the page. Early bird saves you $500 off, there is a 12-month payment plan if you want to spread things out over a year, and then we also still have spots left in our need-based tuition program.

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Okay, well, on that note, before I bring Michelle on to talk about past life regression therapy in her new book, which I know you guys are really gonna like. I want to tell you a little bit about why this topic is relevant for us as students or consumers of astrology. So, first of all, the question I get all of the time is, did ancient astrologers believe that the soul was moving from one body to the next, broadly called the transmigration of the soul? Was that a thing for ancient astrologers? Did they believe it or not? What evidence do we have for that? So? Yes, they did. The short answer is yes.

Now I want to just share with you some of the best evidence that we have, historically, sort of academically, and this is just super condensed, like bullet points, to give you that assurance that yes, this was a thing and in the history of astrology, the belief that the birth chart is depicting the destiny of a soul. Who's here in a body not for the first time, right? That's been a thing for several 1000 years. So how do we know that?

Well, in both the East and the West, at the dawn of Hellenistic astrology, Indian astrology, at the dawn of horoscopic astrology in general, was the belief that the soul was transmigrating from one form to the next and sometimes that in certain traditions that could also be animal, vegetable, human forms. So it's not just one way of looking at how the soul moves from one form to the next, either. It's really interesting that there was a lot of diversity in terms of how people viewed, you know, what forms of soul could take.

But common to both Indian and Greek philosophy were three concepts that were like mirrors of one another. One was the process of reincarnation or transmigration, called samsara, or metempsychosis in Greek, and then moral and sorry, psychological laws that govern the process of how that works, referred to as karma in the East, catharsis in the Greek, and the goal of escape from the process of the entire thing through maybe a final, final spiritual form, or maybe transcending form altogether and merging with God. I mean, there's a lot of different ideas that are floating around in the ancient world. But that was called moksha in the East, Lucis in the West.

So you have these parallel concepts that the soul is transmigrating from one form to another, that there are moral and psychological laws; they're deeply mysterious, they're hard to understand, but that govern the process of how that works, which is partially why we should be interested in living a virtuous life and also that there is the goal of reaching a final spiritual state, imagined in different ways.

Plato suggested, for example, that the process of catharsis or purification through successive reincarnations or successive forms changes the soul that is becoming better into a better incarnation and the soul that is becoming worse and gives it a worse incarnation as a way of sort of course, correcting. That was Plato; I'm not saying you have to believe any of this, just kind of laying the evidence out there. So you know why this topic is so relevant to us?

The Chandogya Upanishad, which was written sometime between the eighth to sixth century BCE, similarly said that those whose conduct here has been good will quickly attain a good birth, and that's a widely held belief in the whole history of Indian astrology of course, in the Phaedo, which is a text written by Plato, Plato says those who have cultivated gluttony or selfishness or drunkenness are likely to assume the form of donkeys. That doesn't sound very nice, or other perverse animals, while those who have preferred a life of lawlessness and violence will become wolves and hawks and kites.

Okay, so maybe that's a little punitive for my own tastes, right? I'm not sure that that's how things work. I'm not suggesting you believe that. It's just, again, more evidence that this was; this isn't just some new-age belief. The belief that the soul is moving from one form to another in a process of purification is very, very old. You see it all around the ancient world. Chandogya Upanishad also says those who have lived wicked, wickedly, may be reborn as dogs or hogs.

So again, you know, some of this might be a little more punitive; maybe there's a lot more compassion involved in how this works than what ancient thinkers imagined. Who knows. But the point is, again, this was widespread.

For the Orphics and another school of mystics who practiced widespread practice of astrology, rebirth was dreaded and escaped from the quote, sorrowful, weary Wheel of Fortune was the ultimate goal of that spiritual school, who again were some of the early carriers of the tradition of astrology.

Cicero, who lived around 106 to sometime around 43 BCE, once said that the doctrine of transmigration was introduced in degrees by Pherecydes of Syros, and I'm probably pronouncing these names wrong. Porphyry also said they had the ability to remember his past lives.

Remarkable. According to Apollodurus, Pherecydes may have lived around 550 BCE. This may date Pherecydes to the same time when Greek and Indian thought were fluidly connected by means of the Persian occupation of Babylon. That's when the Persians occupied Babylon. It became this melting pot of philosophical and mystical traditions from both the East and the West.

So it is very possible that we have people walking around that time who are remembering their past lives. It's interesting to note that that person is dated to around the same time we would have seen a commingling of Eastern and Western teachings regarding a topic like transmigration. The historian Josephus also mentioned that ferocity is learned from the Egyptians and Chaldeans. So it's, you know, who again had similar beliefs.

Similarly, Porphyry said of Pythagoras when he strained with all of his mind, he could easily see everything there is in 10, yes, even 20 human lifetimes, and Pythagoras was one of the most widely celebrated sages of the ancient world who we know spent time in Egypt, he was deeply influenced by Egyptian mysticism. We know that the Egyptians were co-mingling with Indian mystics, and in turn, we know that Pythagoras deeply influenced Plato, and we know that astrology comes out of that same transmission line. So, it is very safe to say that probably a majority of ancient astrologers would have believed in the transmigration of the soul.

Now, that doesn't mean you have to, but again, I'm laying it out there because I think there's a case to be made that people who are into astrology could really benefit from occasionally doing something like past life regression with someone like Michelle, who you're going to meet in the moment.

He also wrote Pythagoras, the following became universally known; first, he maintains that the soul is immortal next, that it changes into other kinds of living things. Also, that events recur in certain cycles, that nothing is ever absolutely new, and finally, that all living things should be regarded as a kin. Protagoras seems to have been the first to bring these beliefs to a degree. But the figurines and or fix were also closely related to the topic of incarnate reincarnation; both seem to be linked to the later dated hermetic texts as well, and all of those traditions discuss reincarnation.

So you have her Hermeticists, Platanus, Pythagoreans Orphics, all of whom were early carriers of the doctrines of astrology, all of whom shared similar beliefs about transmigration. Plato said this about the Orpheus; in fact, he said the Orphics say that the body Soma is the tomb Sama of the soul as if it were dead in its present existence or buried alive. The followers of Orpheus hold that the soul is undergoing punishment for some reason or other and has this husk around it like a prison to keep it from running away like that. That's way too punitive for my taste. But this is a really interesting point because it illustrates that there were literally lots of different. I mean, the belief and trans migration was really not a question. The belief was, how did it work? You know, the question the debate was like, how did it work? You have different schools that say a lot of different things, and some of them, again, for my tastes, are way too harsh.

Heraclitus said immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, each lives the death of the other and dies the others life, and this was also a widely held belief that the gods, the gods sought out the human incarnation as a way of experiencing what a soul is, that in a way, the soul is like a mediating ground for the gods to experience being alive in a form. So that was also widely held, and that this was not just happening over the course of one lifetime, but that the journey the gods wanted to take within the vehicle of the soul would happen through successive lifetimes, really interesting.

Heraclitus has often been compared to the great Taoist Lao Tzu and has also been credited along with Socrates as being the major influences of Zeno, who is the founder of stoicism. Now it's, well, stoicism comes a little bit later, but they were another great tradition, philosophically, mystics that carried astrology forward for a long period of time. Well, stoicism is really was always pretty undefined when it came to the afterlife, or like personal, a personal soul that goes from one form to the next. The human soul was still, by the stoics, said to be a part of the eternal substance of God, and in this sense, the path of logos, or reason, is meant to free us from a life trapped by delusions of matter and reincarnating forms.

So, stoicism is very similar in a sense to Taoism and the two traditions. While they don't focus as much on a personal individual soul that's going from one lifetime to the next. They still believe that energy is recycled constantly in new forms all the time and that once you're in a form, the idea is to practice spiritually to be released from the trappings of that form. So, those schools have very similar beliefs, and in a sense, they embrace the idea of transmigration even though they don't think about the soul, so personally, it's interesting. Yeah, so you have the personal form of reincarnation and the eventual release of a personal soul from successive lifetimes and successive bodies in a final stage of enlightenment as the most common thread through all Vedic or Vedantic Upanishad and Quranic traditions of literature.

So, in other words, the whole, like a huge swath of Indian philosophy, embraces the idea that there's a personal soul that's going from lifetime to lifetime. It's a part of Buddhism; you have the transmigration or reincarnation as a part of Buddhism.

Parmenides, who is said to have been a Pythagorean, may have believed in reincarnation. Simplicus once wrote of Parmenides, goddess of necessity, Ananke, who steers all things in the realm of experience; that quote, she sends souls at one time from the visible to the unseen, and in another time from the unseen to the scene, and that's a reference to Ananke, the who is governing the fate of the soul sending them from a kind of spiritual state into an embodied state in a human form.

So, at any rate, that's enough; I have more pages and pages of notes like this that are really interesting. A while ago, I did this huge presentation on what the beliefs of ancient astrologers were and a significant portion. I mean, you just got the super fast cliffnotes version. But a significant portion of that talk was meant to kind of shed light on what the what were the beliefs, what were the philosophical sort of assumptions that ancient astrologers were working with?

Well, about a year ago, I had the good fortune of working with Michelle Brock, who I'm going to bring on here in just a second. Because I really thought, you know, I want to do I want to try, I've never tried past life regression therapy. I've heard a lot about it; I believe in the transmigration of the soul.

In fact, a lot of my experiences with Ayahuasca deeply validated the feeling or experience of having lived past lives, so I tried it, and I had an absolutely incredible experience with her. I thought to myself when she told me that she had a book coming out; I said, please, I'd love for you to come on my YouTube channel, and we can talk about your book. But even more importantly, we can talk about what past life regression therapy is and why it's important and hopefully, what I've done now is to establish for all of you that astrology very much has a connection with the topic of past lives, and with something as valuable as regression therapy.

So with that, I will bring on my friend and colleague, Michelle Brock. Hey, Michelle. So good to have you here. I'm so excited for you that you have this new book coming out.

Michelle Brock
Yes. Thank you so much. I'm super excited and grateful to be on your channel. Thanks for having me.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, totally. Your new book is called Who Do You Think You Are? and the subtitle is An Interactive Journey Through Your Past Lives and Into Your Best Future. I'm going to put it up on the screen really quick so people can see it, and you can pre-order it right now from Penguin Random House. You can see it right here on the Penguin Random House site. If you look it up, who do you think you are, and then just type in Michelle Brock and Penguin Random House, you'll find the page, and you can pre-order it. What month does it come out?

Michelle Brock
It comes out on January 30.

Adam Elenbaas
So that's January 30, 2024, that it comes out what is the tell us what the book is about.

Michelle Brock
So the book, like you said, is an interactive guide through your past lives and into your best future, and so it gives you a chance through a lot of kind of reflections and journaling exercises to really prime your unconscious mind to bring out kind of your own memories from your past lives. With the idea that your past lives are informing the life you're living right now and that there's insight into your past lives that can help you choose the trajectory that you would like to take in the future, the person that you would like to become, and I love your amazing research.

That introduction really kind of laid it out. That it really is about becoming better; that's kind of the point of reincarnation that I think that most traditions agreed upon. Why do we reincarnate? We reincarnate to learn to grow to become better human beings. So the book kind of gives you a chance to look at your own past lives. See where you've been before, reflect on where you are today, and decide who you want to become in the future.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, I mean, I had no idea like I really knew very little about past life regression therapy when I did my session with you. Other than that, I'm gonna get hypnotized, and I'm going to remember past lives, and I didn't really understand the why behind doing this and tell me if I'm if I've got this if I've kind of articulated this correctly.

My understanding is that in doing this, it's really no different than the unconscious material we're tapping into from our childhood from dreams or from any other area of the unconscious. That the unconscious carries this other dimension, which includes memories and other unconscious mature ethereal that come from previous lives, and that getting in touch with that can be just as illuminating as having a dream that illustrates something you're dealing with in the very real time of like this year, it's just as valuable to have stuff come up from past lives in the same way any other kind of unconscious material coming up would be useful.

Michelle Brock
Yeah, you got that exactly right; the premise behind past life regression and the word regression means to kind of travel back to go back in time. So, a childhood memory would be a childhood regression. A past life regression takes you back beyond your birth in this lifetime to a previous lifetime. But the premise behind it is that we carry within our unconscious all of the memories that we've had of all of our incarnations, and perhaps even possibilities for our untapped potential for our future. Because we could have an argument about the nature of time and if time actually exists. But once you're able to kind of make that unconscious, material conscious, I think there's a really great quote by Carl Jung that describes this that it no longer directs your life, right?

So once you're able to kind of go, oh, that's why I have attitudes about certain people or situations or limiting belief systems, patterns of behavior that you're stuck in, often for many lifetimes, not just in this life. So going back and pulling up those memories from your past life, most people have these aha moments, these moments of insight, they're like, oh, that's, you know, the pattern I need to break or what I need to understand.

So yeah, you got it exactly right, that these memories all exist within us, the answers all lie within, we can go and, you know, ask for advice from other people outside of us. But at the end of the day, you're able to tap into the knowledge of your own previous incarnations and guide your life today.

Adam Elenbaas
I feel like sometimes, this is what was in my head before I did my session with you. I thought I had a little voice in me that was like the past is in the past. You don't have conscious access to that. I'm sure I'd have no doubt that I live past lives. But I had this resistance to thinking that, like, you know, almost like someone being resistant in therapy to going back to their childhood. Like, you know what, that stuff's in the past. I don't want to go back there. Why go back there?

Why dig around in the mud sort of attitude, and I was really blown away because I did not that I was so surprised by the kinds of memories, scenes, impressions, and feelings that I had during my session with you that I was like, Oh, this is not what I was thinking it was. That's the only way I know how to say is this was not about just digging around in, you know, old stuff; it felt to me, like, I don't know, just the exact same feeling I get when I have dreams that are so vivid, and over time, have a lot to say to me, you know, maybe not right away? Do I understand them? Because I've been working with some of the images that came up in our session. For months. I mean, it was really spending time with them, and yeah, it was just so surprised. It was not what I was expecting.

Michelle Brock
Yeah, it's, like, an unconscious mind dump, right, that you have to have processing for weeks afterward, and it's interesting that you say that it's never what you think it was going to be. I've worked with clients now for 17 years. You know, some people are like, Oh, I think I know what's going to come up. It's never what they think. But it's always what they need to know and what's relevant in their life today because the intention behind doing this work is about healing, you know, healing the past in order to overcome the things that are holding you back, again, from the person that you would like to become or the or the possibility that represents your highest potential in this lifetime.

Adam Elenbaas
What prompted doing this for me, Michelle, was, and you know, because I've told you, but everyone else doesn't. I was encountering a pattern that I was like, Whoa, that I've never dealt with this before. This is different. Like this is, this is different. I know myself, and I know my shit, you know, this is like, Oh, this is this is a little different. Like unconscious material that's coming up that I've never really dealt with before, and I was like, ah, and it's something about it just felt like deja vu. That's how I would describe it.

This feels like very otherworldly. This feels like something that's it felt like karma. I don't know how else to put it. It just felt like this is old. This is something, this is like a little faded thing, an unresolved bubble from the past that's coming up, and I just it was a very distinct feeling, and that's what got me interested in it, and I was like, immediately thought of you because I've known you for a long time now and we've been Instagram following each other for a long time and stuff, and I was like, Okay, I'm finally going to do this.

I wasn't close down to it. I just, like I said, like, I think it might be my Capricorn Moon; I was just sort of like, I don't need to go into the past, you know, then I did this and like, how was I so surprised that what? What came up? Yeah. But the other question I have for you is, let's say, I just want to know because I have people that come and study astrology with me that are like, it occasionally doesn't happen often. But I have people who are total atheists. Yeah, I have people who don't believe in past lives. I have people who, you know, they're into astrology because it does something for them. But then they don't connect with it on a belief level.

Now, I came away with this being like, I feel like people could benefit from this, even if they don't even believe in past lives. If they're like, I don't buy it at all. I'm just like, you should still do this. Because there's something about it that I feel like, even if a person believed that it was only their imagination that was pulling up scenes and memories. I would say that there is still something of such powerful archetypes that came up for me that even if I wasn't a believer in past lives, they were insanely valuable to see these scenes coming up. So I'm just wondering, how have you ever had people who come and do this with you who don't even believe in past lives?

Michelle Brock
Absolutely. All the time, and I think that what you're hitting on is actually really important, and something I talk about in my book quite a bit is that, you know, when you have a personal experience that transcends faith and can become your own truth, right, and however you choose to define that is completely up to you, and yes, it's true. A lot of people associate the belief in reincarnation and past lives with certain religious traditions, and one thing that you and I have in common, and we've discussed this before, is that we both grew up with a religious background and the religion I grew up in did not, you know, believe in reincarnation and past lives, but I had an experience that was multisensory, I felt it, I saw it, I knew it, and it felt true.

So, you know, some people leave sessions with me, like, I don't even know if that was real, but there's always a but, they're able to kind of connect it to their lives today. So, to me, I would much rather work with someone who's a little bit more of a healthy skeptic than someone who's maybe read every book there is on reincarnation, and you know, someone who's just willing to be open-minded and see what happens and see if they can find ways to make that relevant, you know, in their life, I am not for or against religion at this point in my life.

You know, I think that it serves a purpose for some people, but to codify beliefs around an institution doesn't ring true for me personally in my life, but um, you know, like I said, it's all about having personal experience and one of the major themes in this book is about divisiveness and looking at people as other like, I believe this, I don't believe that, well, in a past life, maybe you were the group that you think is the other right and that was my intention behind writing this book was really like if people could just see firsthand themselves, not believe it, not have this, you know, Kumbaya, past lives moment, but a real practical, tangible experience and this is maybe my Taurus-Moon, right like to experience it, the embodiment of it. It would really change the way that not only you think about yourself and your journey but think about others as well, and it would allow more compassion and empathy in the way that we see. Others and the concept of other.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, it is one of the things that I feel. To that point, I remember I said to Ashley right afterward, that's my wife, in case people don't know, as she comes on the channel quite a bit. But so afterward, after I had the regression, I said, you know, what I was surprised by is, I was not in any of these memories in the lives I was living, I was not a person of any significance, and for some, you know, I think this is again, just like a new age stereotype cliche and I've seen I mean when you're around the New Age scene for a while. You see some people who are really bonkers.

So it's easy to, like, develop these stereotypes, but it's like, oh, as soon as someone's talking about a past life, it's like, well, I was the high priest of Atlantis, you know, or something like that and it's always like, does it always have to be that you were, you know, I always was so annoyed by that, you know and I went into this thinking, like, I'm sure, you know, like, I'm sure that I'm going to come up with some theatrical thing or person that I was or something and, you know, it's kind of, like, skeptical about that to know.

In both, I was literally just an ordinary person with no great fame or anything, and when I came out, I said to Ashley that it just made me realize that that's how most of us are. We're all just like, very normal, like common folk, and we have many, many, many past lives in which that that's all we've been, that's exactly who we've been in. It's always been enough.

Michelle Brock
Yeah. You know, it's interesting, a lot of people, for some reason, are really focused on Cleopatra as like, like, is everybody Cleopatra? Like, if you're gonna project on a historical figure, I suggest choosing a different one. Right, but it's true. I mean, most people do remember past lives, and I do occasionally come across people who were notable figures in history in past life, right? Nobody wanted to do a press release and announce who they were. But for most of us, it were human beings on planet Earth trying to do life right, and the thing that interests me the most, after all of the many years that I've been doing passive regression, are the commonalities that we have the universal experience of being human that transcends time periods, culture, background, race, gender, gender expression, all of that.

So I've kind of become an amateur spiritual anthropologist, I guess, is how you would say, like, what, what makes us human, and what makes us, you know, be able to find ways to connect with each other and build bridges through this universal human experience and like I said, that was my intention behind writing this book, because I don't need to tell anyone that there's a lot of divisiveness in the world today and as I'm sitting there watching this, and, you know, I came across the idea to write this book during COVID lockdown and Black Lives Matter and you know, all of this, I kept thinking, like, if everybody could just see what I'm seeing, which is that you're not who you think you are, right?

You're so attached to these identities that they end up being false identities, right? So the book kind of leads people through each identity that we cling to as human beings, and then I poke holes in all of that about how it might be a false identity and then what you do with that new information moving forward, if I can lose that identity, that way that I see myself or think about yourself, and that includes looks, and also your story, your background.

Some people have lifetimes that are far more challenging than others, right? And just being a double Libra with a Libra stellium. I was like, How is that fair, right? This is a big thing for me. Why would a kid be like, Why do some people get to live to be 100, and some people like babies die, right? So it wasn't really until I understood how reincarnation worked and had my own experience remembering my past lives. It started to make sense to me, and sharing that truth with other people became my life's work pretty quickly because of how much it changed my own life.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, I mean, I, one of the things that I teach in my first-year program that I will, you'll students will hear me say a lot is that we are not our birth charts. The birth chart for the ancient astrologers was a description of the like in Indian astrology, the shastra, or the field of karma that you are inhabiting, and it's really helpful to get to know that field because there's a deep relationship between the soul and that field.

But there was such a clear distinction for ancient astrologers between the field of karma that describes everything from your character to your health, to your marriage to your parents to, you know, your injuries and accidents and the actual soul itself, and they drew a clear line between that, and they said that the purpose of using astrology you see this in the West in all of these different traditions and astrologers that said this, and in the East, so you use astrology, to help you inhabit your soul and do some healthy differentiating between the soul living the life and the karma that constitutes the life. Not that you want to be dissociative, not that you want to, like, reject the world or your body or your psychology or your culture, your race, your gender, and you don't want to reject any of that because it's part of who you are.

But you also don't want to hold on to it so tightly that you become cloaked in ignorance of who you really are, which is a soul that has had different fields that it has moved through and will continue to have different fields that it moves through.

Michelle Brock
Yeah, I think that that's really well said, and, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about astrology is that I believe that we choose the circumstances of our birth in our lifetime, and this is something I learned from my own experience, as well as the experience of my clients who are doing regression work with me, they describe that there's free will, right and that we choose when and where and how we're born and with that comes this kind of blueprint of the things that we're working on the tendencies, right, like different planets have different strengths and weaknesses and, and it kind of speaks to that we kind of have to be all things like sun sign, moon sign rising, like over many, many lifetimes, in order to fully learn what it means to be embodied in physical form and human form, and it's about learning and growing and becoming better. We don't know where that ends. You know, our cycles are never-ending? Or is their goal, we don't know, right? To be better.

Adam Elenbaas
I would ask about the word better because I'm sure that that word will land with some people listening to this, like, you have to do better. Yeah, you know, but I think being better is really I would equate it with inhabiting a more soulful, loving state of consciousness, right? That being better is really a way of saying becoming more luminescent, becoming more compassionate, forgiving. When you think of better, sometimes people think of a sort of Saturnian; you got to pass 12th grade and go to college and get, you know, like, like jump Hoops and from your work in the way that I've seen you work, you know, with me in a session, and I'm sure this is in your book to the way of thinking about better is really thinking about more light and love. Right?

Michelle Brock
Yeah, and thank you for challenging that term. I mean, because I do think, especially in New Age communities, there's a lot of the idea of, of, we were supposed to transcend the body, or there's some achievement like I did it, I meditated. Right. Yeah. Right, and I think that you're right, it's about becoming more compassionate, more loving, more inclusive, and I think that, you know, one of the things that I believe that we're headed toward, and maybe this is why all of this divisiveness is happening right now is that we each individually can evolve into being more loving, more mindful, more aware of our soul and that will eventually create the collective change that is needed. I mean, we do we still, we do still have some work to do with that. But that we're, we're collectively evolving toward that goal. But it starts with each individual and each individual having, you know, experiences that point them in that direction that life gives you and paths a progression is one of, like you said, many different ways you can find that truth because the truth is a universal truth. There's no one path; there's no one way.

Adam Elenbaas
Yes, right. Oh, so nicely said. Yeah, I want to ask maybe just one or two more questions. I want to tell people how they can find your book again and make sure people know where to go to book a session with you, which I highly recommend. The next question I have for you is just how you got into this in the first place. And you also had a really, you know, you had a special teacher, in my opinion, and maybe some people have heard him too. But could you talk a little bit about how you got into this?

Michelle Brock
Yeah. So, I got into this through my own experience. It's kind of a long story. But my sister, who I'm very close with, gave birth to her youngest son in a hospital and had a near-death experience during that, she was fine, and the baby's fine, but she spoke a language that nobody could recognize during what was essentially a stroke, and her doctor was like, well, there was a guy who used to work at this hospital who wrote a book that might explain why she wrote you why she was speaking in a different language and he gave us many lives many masters by the great Dr. Brian L. Weiss and I read it in one sitting, I couldn't put it down.

It was literally like something lit up, you know, within me, and yeah, I went to a workshop, and I'm sitting in an audience of, obviously, hundreds of people because he's a renowned teacher and, you know, I'm thinking, I really want to have this experience, and we'd had group experiences. Yes, there we go. It's a classic.

Adam Elenbaas
I remember when I read it for the first time.

Michelle Brock
It's one of those books that also, to most people, describe as having a mystical-like life of its own. Like, I don't know how it ended up on my bookshelf, or someone gave it to me, I don't know. But he, you know, was like, I can take one volunteer to come up on stage and, of course, everybody wanted to do it, and for some reason, even though I was sitting in the back, I'm like, ooh, me, he picked me, and I went up on stage, and I hadn't experienced that completely changed the way that I look at everything, like just complete filter change, like you go to the optometrist, right? And it's like, you're like, Oh, can you see better now, or now it was all of a sudden, like, whoa.

I ended up, you know, studying regression techniques with him, but it opened up this whole world into, you know, energy medicine, and intuition and shamanism, and like, you know, obviously, astrology and, yeah, that was quite a few years ago. But I do consider him to be kind of the grandfather of this work. But, you know, once I realized and going back to your question, it changed my life so personally, and the story about the past life I had on stage was about losing my mother to cancer when I was only two, and it was like 15 years of therapy in 20 minutes, you know, not that you can bypass the therapy kind of pardon me to say that, but just understanding, you know, that there was a larger purpose for that loss, understanding how my father acted, you know, in the months afterward and actually, that story is in Brian's book Miracles Happen, which he published in, I think, 2012.

I just thought that this is just so profound and so personally helpful and life-changing that I feel like I get to pay that experience forward on a daily basis with every single person that I work with. So the joke I always make is that it's impossible to have a boring day at the office. Right? And I'm sure you agree with me. People are fascinating. Their stories are fascinating. I'm a history nerd. I was before I got into past life regression.

So, this book is really a culmination of everything that I've learned from over the last; I think it's now 17 years, watching people have these experiences and then doing it long enough that I can actually track how their lives change. You know, I'm kind of either social media friends with people, or they send me updates from people that, like, we're trying to conceive and end up getting pregnant after remembering dying in childbirth in a past life and realizing they had an unconscious fear. Is it psychosomatic, or is it a past life? Who cares, right? They're happy, they're joyful, or getting married or starting new businesses, it's, it's literally the most rewarding work out there.

Adam Elenbaas
So well, I can say personally that the unconscious material that was coming up for me after I did the regression work, within a couple of months after that work was just gone, it had resolved itself. So, I certainly benefited from it to the extent that I really wanted to get you on my program and make sure that people know about your work. I think you're very talented. I can't wait to read your book myself. I couldn't recommend to all of you out there highly enough to check out Michelle's work for yourself. You guys know me; I don't bring people on to my show unless I like them and I like their work.

So you can find Michelle on Instagram at the handle @pastlifemichelle, is that right? That's right. Yep. The book, once again, is called Who Do You Think You Are? by Michelle Brock, and I'm going to share the Penguin Random House page. I do. I can't tell you guys enough if you are someone who is like, oh, past lives, it's New Age fluff. I don't like New Age fluff; got a Capricorn Moon, and I tend to be very skeptical about that kind of stuff.

I think what Michelle does and the way she thinks about and works with this topic is very enlightening and super practically helpful. It really helped me, so you can also go to her website to check out her work, and I'll bring it up right now. So we can go there. This is Michelle-brock.com. Use the dash in between Michelle-Brock, and I'm going to take you over there. Here we go. Just make sure it's loaded here. Okay, so here, you can find her website, and then all of your socials are there as well. Right? Correct. Yep. Yeah. Cool, and so when it comes to pre-ordering the book, you can order it through her website for upcoming events. You do events in New York City, mostly, right?

Michelle Brock
I do. But more and more virtually. I'll be doing book tours, and the book comes out January 30 in the US and Canada, but it will come out February 8 in Europe and Australia, and there'll be a German language version that's out. I'm not sure when, but it will be available worldwide, actually in the late winter or early spring.

Adam Elenbaas
Very cool. Yeah. It's super great to have you on. I think the first time we met was when I was doing something on the nodes of the Moon or Pluto or something like that, and you came to a workshop, right?

Michelle Brock
Yeah, you did a workshop on past life astrology, and I was like, how could I not go to that? But it was wonderful, and you're, and I'm really grateful to be a guest on your channel. Because I'm a fan of your channel, I watch all of your content. So thanks. Thank you so much. You're a really talented teacher, and I really appreciate you giving me the chance to share my passion and my work with your audience.

Adam Elenbaas
No, I was telling Ashley, I was doing this interview, and she's like, Oh my God, I've been meaning to book my own session with Michelle for a while now, and I was like, yep, you've definitely you know, whenever you it's time, it's time. But do it because you'll really like it.

Yeah, thank you so much for being here and for all of you out there. I hope also that the little intro gave you some. I didn't want to labor too long. But I wanted to give people some context because this is something that astrologers believed astrology was a part of the evolutionary journey of the soul from lifetime to lifetime; the birth chart was a way of understanding where that soul is and the temporary identity that we're putting on in this lifetime, and so on and so forth. So I just wanted people to understand that there's a really nice astrological history behind this topic as well, and yeah, we'll look forward to having you on again. Maybe when your book comes out, we could have you come back on and talk with maybe we'll have some questions from the audience or something like that. We could have you back.

Michelle Brock
I would love that. Thank you so much.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, that'd be so much fun. Okay, well, thank you, everybody, for listening. Be sure to check Michelle's work out and leave your comments in the comment section. Have you ever had a past life regression therapy session before? Have you ever had any significant experiences between the symbols in your birth chart and memories of past lives? We'd love to hear your stories as well, and we'll look forward to talking to you guys next time. Bye, everyone.