As reviewed in the Aug./Sept.
Association for Humanistic Psychology Perspectives

SOUL VISIONING: Clear the Past, Create Your Future
Book Review by Dr. Barbara Terao

Wishing to live in the now, as so many sages advise, and wanting to manifest our best dreams, as so many books and movies promote, seem to be treasured goals that appear across cultures.  To achieve these goals requires skill and wisdom, both ancient and modern.  This is where Susan Wisehart's book comes in.  Her book is a well-lit path in a field littered with misleading signage.  From spiritual forms of therapy accessing past lives to cutting-edge neurobiological techniques, her book brings personal growth and self-insight to a whole new level.  Her goal is nothing less than for each person to live by the ideals of his or her Soul.  Wisehart, whose last name is Scottish, is a holistic psychotherapist, licensed marriage and family therapist, and certified hypnotherapist.  In Soul Visioning: Clearing the Past, Creating the Future she has distilled thirty years of experience into this veritable guidebook to emotional healing and self-discovery.

The magnetic notion of the Law of Attraction notwithstanding, we can't all get what we want, whenever we want.  As such teachings become more popular, it's easy to get the impression that anyone can find and follow their bliss, as Joseph Campbell liked to say, or at least understand the role of perception in helping or hindering us in that quest.  Yet so many of us remain stuck.  Wisehart jumps right into these stuck areas in Chapter One of her book, calling them obstacles to Soul expression.  As she states, "Many of the popular manifestation models take us only so far, largely because our decisions typically come from the ego or personality self, instead of our higher Soul guidance."  Four types of obstacles are identified and addressed throughout Part One of the book.

Part Two is called Healing Through Spiritual Regression Therapy and highlights experiences of those who have had Past Life Regression (PLR), the therapy developed by psychiatrist Brian Weiss, and Life-Between-Lives Regression (LBL), developed by psychologist Michael Newton.  Talk about uncovering old issues!  Some people found that their current stumbling blocks were related to past lives from long ago.  Wisehart includes parts of the transcripts from PLR and LBL sessions so readers can see for themselves how spiritual regression therapy helps people make sense of their lives, resolve old wounds, and move forward.  She also shares the results of her follow-up interviews with those clients.

The case histories delving into past lives—and deaths— would be more gruesome except for the fact that trauma is not experienced with its original intensity.  Wisehart carefully guides the two-hour process, noting "You can view the scenes from an observer mode (like watching a movie) if needed."  People bring forth memories of past lives that are most relevant to their current situation.  A client she calls Gayle went back to her death in a Civil War battle.  Wisehart "gave her the suggestion under hypnosis to go to the root cause of her blocks to use her healing gifts in this incarnation."  Gayle, a nurse, knew that she stifled some of her healing abilities.  She found that this was linked to the remorse felt in her previous life as Sergeant Samuel Smith, who felt terrible when so many of his men were killed in battle.  She was avoiding, in this lifetime, being responsible for the lives and well-being of others.

A Life-Between-Lives session involves "going back to one's most immediate past life, going through the death, and then transitioning into the between state" in order to enter the spirit realm and find out, perhaps, a bit more about one's purpose and Soul progress.  One doctor reported that her LBL session helped her to be more in touch with her guides "in a conscious way." Another woman found herself in a meeting with her Soul Council: "There were beings giving their opinions on what my next lifetime (this current life) would be about—what my Soul most needed to evolve."

The spiritual regression therapies are fascinating.  I can understand how they can help people become unblocked.  But to even approach that kind of deep work, many clients need to do some basic therapy, perhaps using some of the techniques described by Wisehart in the first half of the book.  These are the methods and exercises I was able to utilize to great benefit as I read the book.

Susan Wisehart differentiates between creating from the ego mind and creating from our Soul, sharing her seven-step process to do the latter.  She calls it Soul Visioning, which "guides you to the experience of your own Divine Self, which will help to illuminate and transform your life."  The author has crafted a series of visualization exercises to help people clarify their Soul ideals and move toward them in both attitude and behavior. These guided journeys are available for download in MP3 format.  Some of the chapters include writing exercises as well.

I found the guided meditations to be powerful experiences in terms of what they (my Soul, in Susan's terms) revealed to me.  The Peak Experiences guided meditation involves a life review that helped me see patterns that in turn revealed my most precious values, the Soul ideals by which to live my life.  The Soul Visioning guided journey introduced me to a helpful character, my ideal future self who is in, as Wisehart puts it, "the synchronous flow of your divine destiny."

In case you experience something less than synchronous flow, Chapter Five offers several breakthrough technologies that can help.  I especially liked the method of Whole Healing—Easily and Effectively (WHEE).  Bilateral stimulation in the form of tapping on alternate sides of the body is a surprisingly simple and effective way to lower anxiety and get beyond traumas and issues.  Wisehart includes such energy psychology methods in order to help readers challenge their limiting core beliefs and clear the path to a more intuitive, harmonious way of living.  These practical tools are a good compliment to the spiritual work of the other chapters.  Integrating these various methods, readers and practitioners will quickly find their feet on paths of healing.

 Barbara Wolf Terao, Ed.D. (bwterao@gmail.com) has a "soul ideal" of continuing to notice the connections and oneness of all things.  Her connection with Susan Wisehart began through the International Association for Near Death Studies and continues with the pleasure and privilege of reviewing her manuscript for this book.