Lessons Across Lifetimes with Bettye Binder

In this Episode

• [02:32]Stephan welcomes Bettye Binder. Bettye recounts spontaneous past life memories guided by unseen forces. They both discuss the concepts of spiritual amnesia.
• [11:14]Bettye shares her awe-inspiring journey of finding confirmation of past life memories through research and library visits.
• [15:00]Bettye enlightens us on why Earth is not just a planet, but a profound school for fixing unresolved issues from past lives, a concept that is sure to intrigue you.
• [21:12]Stephan asks about Bettye’s process of resolution with family members and other loved ones.
• [29:55]Bettye defines karmic debt and discusses meditation as a process of soul growth.
• [34:38]Bettye emphasizes that the soul is the essence of who we are, and we are chosen to take on experiences to grow and elevate in dimension.
• [35:41]Bettye offers phone-based past life regression sessions for $100 for a 2-hour session.

Jump to Links and Resources

Bettye, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

First of all, I would love to understand how you got into this interesting business of being a past life regression hypnotherapist. What’s the origin story here?

My guides must have prepared it because it happens spontaneously. I was in the process of changing careers in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. I got a message from one of my guides about past life regression, and my first reaction was, “What’s that?” I was given a few examples and promptly felt comfortable like I’d done this before. I’ll remember. That’s actually how it started. It was an awakening of memories that had gone on in past lives.

You said that your guides brought these memories forward, and they communicated with you and directed you to take this path. In terms of a career, how did you end up understanding that the unseen world is as real or even more real than the seen world and that these messages that are coming in, just popping into your head in different ways, are actually from divine and sacred sources?

It felt natural. It felt very familiar. When I started hearing messages like this, I had done meditation, but not seriously about other lifetimes. The same practices that can be used for past life regression can be used in the present, future, or altered states. I found that out very quickly because I began remembering as I started experiencing this stuff. It’s like having done something years ago, having put it in the closet and not thought about it in a couple of generations, and suddenly, it pops out again.

When you open the door, it feels familiar. You know the answers and feelings, and it simply comes back. I like to liken it to riding a bicycle. If you rode a bike as a kid, put it in the garage and haven’t been on it in a long time, and you get on it, it doesn’t take very long to feel familiar and to be able to go down the block on your bicycle.

We don't have a soul. We are souls who have chosen to take on experiences to grow, learn, and elevate through these dimensions. Share on X

Yeah, but we still get this spiritual amnesia. We don’t remember any of this stuff when we enter a new incarnation. So we’re born, and we’ve forgotten our true nature. Why is that?

Not everybody goes through that. Some people have spontaneous memories, and I was one of them.

Well, some people actually remember a whole set of past lives, like Matias De Stefano. He’s pretty famous—I think he’s got his own show on Gaia TV. He’s phenomenal. He’s very popular on YouTube and so forth. And he remembers a lot of his past lives.

It also applies to abilities, things you’ve never thought of doing before. Somebody eggs you on and says, “Oh, try it once, and you will do it better than the pros.” Well, where does that come from? It’s a past life memory. It’s been squirreled away, but when it comes out into the light of day, you will remember it in full detail.

Was there a particular moment in your childhood where you realized, “Hey, I’m seeing stuff or hearing stuff that other people may not be hearing or seeing?”

Not exactly. I wouldn’t put it in those terms. All I’m saying is that anytime something from another lifetime that I had known before, experienced before, was reviving in some fashion, came to mind, if it felt familiar, if I knew the answers immediately, perhaps without even reading the textbook or getting into a lecture, it had to come from somewhere.

The process of moving into the field of meditation concerns not only past lives but also this lifetime.

So I started wondering, “Where did it come from? Why did I know that?” The answer was very logical. If you knew something, for example, as a child and for 50 years, you didn’t use that talent, and all of a sudden, one day, somebody pulled something out of a closet says, “What’s this for?” You go into a long explanation of what it is and how to use it. Well, I had to go from somewhere.

Right. So, in one of the books I read, you wrote about a story of a memory. You were in a past life, and you were native American, and there were horses and other Native Americans on the scene. Can you recall that for our listener and explain its significance to you? How important was it for you to see that it was solid?

That was a solid example that got everything started up to that point. It was gentle memories in the background or a feeling of familiarity. I could walk into a museum and recognize a tribe or that kind of thing. But when I began to meditate, I began to get messages, some verbal and clear, some just at a feeling level, from my guides. In the process of experiencing that, what popped up one day was a very clear past-life memory of my sitting around a fireplace. The people who were around me were clearly native Americans. 

I began to feel very comfortable and familiar with the setting and the people sitting around it. That was how it was triggered, and that’s what my guides encouraged me to experience because the more I experienced it, the more real it became, and I wanted to know more. That’s how I started to learn about past lives, and these things get timed in real time.

Earth is a large school. A lot of individuals have incarnated on this planet in order to resolve unresolved issues and learn. Share on X

A course opened up a couple of weeks after I had these experiences, and the person teaching it turned out to be someone I had known in a past life. That’s not unusual. She was a teacher again in this lifetime. She picked up on the fact that I had been getting memories of this in any lifetime, and she asked me about it, and I hadn’t told anybody about it. This was brand new, so I thought this was an opportunity for me to take her course. 

Within a few days, she announced that she was teaching an advanced course on regressions and meditations with other people to help them awaken their memories, and I immediately signed up. Now, remember, I had just started her course about three or four days earlier, but the two of them blended together perfectly well, and she wasn’t surprised I was interested.

Earth is a school; it’s an opportunity to resolve things we haven’t resolved before and to learn things we haven’t learned before.

I had a nice, long talk with her privately after class one day, and she told me some things that I already knew and that she had guessed I would stumble into eventually. It was only a matter of days before I made that connection. So, I signed up with her to learn more about meditation. I quickly moved from that point of view to wanting to remember certain past lives in depth, and I realized that Indian past life was one of them.

But you got confirmation. That helped. Maybe the skeptics or the doubters see that you weren’t just making this up, or you weren’t just imagining it. There was a particular tribe that you somehow got connected with or knew was your tribe, and you did some research. It’s vague. I remember something about this in the book. When I read it, it’s like, “Wow, that’s really cool to get that confirmation and actual evidence in the library that you weren’t imagining this stuff. This was real.”

I certainly had been a researcher in this lifetime, and the idea of reading about this and actually going to the library and finding books on the subject was very exciting. That’s how I ran into the information about that tribe. As I read it, one of the amusing things that happened was I turned the page. Suddenly, there was a full-page, full-color picture of a horse, and I said, “That’s my horse.” Remember, I was in a library when that happened? I said it aloud and turned to one side or the other because I didn’t want to disturb other people in the library.

One person heard it, smiled, and went back to reading his book. But that’s how the confirmation of the researcher backed up the experiential, and the two of them fit perfectly together. I find that happens often with people willing to extend beyond the first memories.

An example is if you run into somebody in this lifetime who feels like they’ve been a family member, even though you just met them, chances are that’s a past life family member that you just ran into. There’s a reason why you just met them again. There’s something to resolve, or there’s something to learn, or maybe there was a close love relationship, but there are reasons for this. As the left brain becomes satisfied that you get that kind of information backing up the experiential, the right brain, things become very real, and there’s an acceleration in the process of moving into the field. Meditation is about not only past lives but in this lifetime as well.

Yeah. One thing you wrote in one of your books that I really liked is about these warring generals who fight each other to death, end up reincarnating as siblings, and then work their differences out over cornflakes in the morning. I love that analogy.

We’re incarnating to improve who we are, how we function, how we get along with other people, and therefore improve life in the present and the future.

A lot of people get a real kick out of that. I remember saying that in front of a group when I was teaching a class, the group laughed their heads off. They really related to the idea. So I put it into the book that I was writing, and it’s literally true, where there’s a past life connection you’re not aware of consciously, but it’s right under the surface, and you know it. That’s why the person feels familiar.

Whatever your feelings have been, whatever your attitudes, whatever your differences from another lifetime, they’re going to surface. And it’s an opportunity, one, to resolve and, two, to get to know them again. It’s like running into somebody you knew in childhood. Now they’re adults, and you have a different kind of relationship, but it’s still a close relationship. That happens a lot.

This is a way to help resolve the unresolved issues that spill over into this lifetime from previous lifetimes. You get this additional insight information from a past life regression hypnosis session that gives you some peace or clarity about dealing with a particularly difficult person in your life. It’s like, “Oh, now, this makes so much more sense. I can approach this with fresh eyes and a more open heart rather than be so reactive to them like I was before.”

Right. I’ve often said that Earth is a large school. A lot of individuals have incarnated on this planet in order to do what you just outlined. As we run into one another again, we may start where we had something unresolved in another lifetime, and it’s an opportunity to resolve it. Then, we can go on to the next step, which is to get to know them better at a deeper, more philosophical level. As we do that, they become friends; if there is a difference, we can resolve it. I’ve seen that again and again and again. 

It’s not unusual for two souls to recognize one another from another time.

The most common issue I’ve ever worked on in all the thousands of regressions I have done is that Earth is a school; it’s an opportunity to resolve things we haven’t resolved before and to learn things we haven’t learned before. That’s why we signed up to incarnate on this planet in the first place.

And yet some people will say, “I’m not interested in dredging up my past, especially if it’s other lifetimes. That’s not relevant. I’m in the here and the now. I don’t care about that stuff. That’s not helpful. That’s a distraction.” What do you tell a person? How do you respond to somebody who has that belief?

Try saying that to a person who is a counselor or a therapist. They’ll laugh because the issues you’ve raised are very current, or they won’t be hitting you in the eyes. Now, something is unresolved, regardless of where it came from. It could be from childhood in this lifetime, and it could be from another lifetime. It doesn’t matter where it came from. 

The point is, if you have something to learn or resolve, it’s like going to class, opening the textbook, and reading the book. That’s what we’re incarnating to do: improve who we are, how we function, how we get along with other people, and therefore improve life in the present and future.

I love a couple of quotes that relate to this. One is, “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.” My favorite Mark Twain quote is, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.”

Yes, he had a lovely sense of humor. The point is that we’re in a learning process, and learning comes in many forms. You don’t have to sit in a classroom to do it. If you do, that’s helpful. Most of our learning occurs in interrelationships, which allow us to see something that we need to resolve or learn in ourselves or another person. It’s an opportunity. Why not take that opportunity, run with it, and have a better life as a result?

For sure. Some of the closest family members, perhaps our spouse or soulmate, are their soul contracts. We’re here to work things out, make each other better, and help each other grow. So if you believe that, let’s say, a mother and a child chose each other prior to incarnation, which is incarnating, which I do believe, then I’m curious: do you believe that, too?

When you identify areas of friction or disagreement that need to be resolved, probably on both sides.

Yeah, I do. It’s interesting to see the examples that have popped up in the process when doing regressions with people. The fact of the matter is, when we trade places with somebody, let’s say a mother, this lifetime is the child’s prior lifetime. The fact is, the behaviors, the beliefs, the shadow issues will hit us between the eyes, and it will feel very familiar. “Oh, yeah, that’s something I really need to clean up.” 

The fact is that the process is not confined to a very narrow piece of time in any given lifetime. It’s an issue that’s come up in many forms, in many opportunities to resolve it. Maybe we have done a little bit before, but not completely. It’s an opportunity to completely resolve it this time.

I’m curious about your relationship with your mom. I know that from your books, you wrote about your mom being in a coma towards the end, and there is some sort of meaningful experience that you had that you included in the book about this. Do you want to share anything about that?

My mother and I were very close during the years that I was growing up and during my early adult years when she encouraged me to go in any direction I felt I wanted to go. She was very supportive when I started doing regression work, even though it was not part of her experience. She was excited that I’d found a niche. 

Allow yourself to grow, expand, and embrace experiences. They're all part of your journey to becoming a more complete person, and when you reach that state, it’s truly enjoyable. Share on X

The result of that was it encouraged me to ask people whether they came into group or individual sessions if there were any individuals from their families that they were close to as well as individuals they may have had differences with because it’s not unusual that two souls will recognize one another from another time and not necessarily know when and where and who they were, but it’ll be comfortable for them because there’s an acceptance that all of this is part of our personal growth process, and that’s what my mother was doing with me for many years.

If someone is trying to resolve something with a family member or another loved one, from a practical standpoint, what do you recommend they do to work past life regression into their resolution and healing process?

If you’re a person who wants to see a therapist first, that’s fine. If you want to go directly for meditation, that’s fine. Whatever works for you.

First of all, notice the things where you agree with one another, where you’re comfortable, and where you’re not, things that are unresolved. Those are two little checklists. It helps if you’ve done any kind of psychotherapy. You’ll know what those issues are pretty quickly. But even if you haven’t, you’ll be able to think about where you’re comfortable with a family member, what you’re comfortable talking about, where you’re not comfortable with a family member and don’t want to tell them anything about whatever you’re learning. 

Those kinds of issues start us off in both contexts, both in psychotherapy and meditation. When we identify them, and we can take them apart, like having a piece of bread and chopping it into little pieces, you’ll notice where there’s a comfort zone.

It’s something we’ve resolved or felt comfortable with that individual in another setting, in another time and place, where there is friction, disagreement, arguments, etc. That’s something that probably needs to be resolved on both sides.

It may not be the same issue for both of them, but it comes together in a way that both of them need to work on. One may decide to do so, and the other may not want to be bothered. That’s their choice. In the process of doing that, you’ll notice you feel more comfortable with yourself. You feel prouder of yourself and what you’ve accomplished. You’ll also feel sadness about loss. Don’t bury that.

Allow yourself to go through it because that’s an unresolved tear, and it’s likely that it will open other doors you may not have expected. When Loy Young introduced me to the concept of past life regression a long time ago, and she recognized me, I felt she was familiar with it, but she knew what past life we had shared. When that begins to surface, it’s not unusual. It affects career change. It certainly did in my case. 

When I started doing this stuff, I never thought I was going to spend 30 years doing meditative regressions with hundreds and hundreds of people, both in group settings and individually in counseling. And yet, that’s exactly what I did. So, don’t say no. Allow the process to work where you feel stuck, and get help.

If you’re a person who wants to see a therapist first, that’s fine. If you want to go directly for meditation, that’s fine—whatever works for you. If you want to do both, that’s great. Allow yourself to grow and expand and have those experiences. They’re all part of your growth, all part of your becoming a more complete person. It’s actually fun when you get to that state.

This is all to make yourself better and refine your soul. I’m looking at the Past Life Regression Guidebook right now, and on page 101, there’s this acid test. You walk people through on two columns. One column is characteristics I want to let go of or change, and the other is opposites or characteristics I would rather have. 

Then there’s another test—a 50% test where you look at people like your mom and your dad, and you see if they’re more like the attributes on the left column or the right column, 50% or more on one column versus the other, then they’re more like that. Then you see where the key people in your life end up having a lot of negative attributes, especially those you don’t like in yourself, which come from your parents and siblings and other key figures in your life.

Of course, it rubs off when you have people or role models in your early childhood, and then they end up wiping that baggage all over you, and then you carry that through your life. This helps to unpack that, and then you can go even deeper by using past life regression.

It’s an extremely helpful tool. The people who work that in with everything else they do, whatever their improvement process is, the fact is, the more you have access to different ways of growing, the better you’re going to feel about yourself. The more you function in society, the more people will be able to look up to you and see you’ve done it. I can do it, too.

Allow the meditative regression process to work where you feel stuck.

Now, you mentioned the phrase meditative regression. Is that different from hypnotic regression or regression hypnosis? Some people will say, “I’m not good at getting hypnotized. Nobody can hypnotize me,” so they kind of shut the door to the process of accessing past life memories through hypnosis.

There are different methodologies. The one we are probably most familiar with has to deal with hypnosis. The work I’ve done is on a different track. It has similar results, but it’s a little less clinical. The people who do hypnosis can help reprogram. My intention was to help people find who they are and what they are comfortable with. If a person says, “I can’t be regressed, or I can’t go to a hypnotist because it doesn’t work,” that’s fine if that’s your experience or feeling. 

The reality is you don’t have to go into a deep altered state. I have many times, but not everybody does. One of the things I’ve noticed at a surface level is that if people don’t put tags or names on methods, they will come up with answers without having to sweat them. There’s a natural, intuitive process that goes on in their minds that brings them answers without having to work hard at it.

The reality is that you don’t have to enter a deep, altered state to access past life memories.

You don’t have to use a structured methodology if it doesn’t feel right for you. If you’re the kind of person who could sit down on the shore of a dream and not fall asleep necessarily but go into a very dreamy, relaxed state, believe it or not, you’re meditating. You automatically drop into a meditative state without having to sweat it. People who do that don’t have to be programmed or have somebody say, “Okay, now this is what we’re going to do next.” It just comes to them. 

Everybody is different in how they get answers and how they experience things. When I’m working with somebody, I may ask some questions, such as, “What have you experienced before? How do you feel about that kind of thing?” If it’s something they want to shut the door on, fine with me. I won’t force them to open a door they don’t want to open. But if they’re comfortable with the process, if they feel it’s truly coming from within them, within their psyche, go with it. It’s working.

I am curious to hear your definitions of a few different terms that are labels for different things. We talked about the label of hypnosis, and if you have certain beliefs about that label, then you create your own reality around it, even if it’s not helpful to you to do so. There are some other labels I want to get your take on, like karmic debt, chakras, astral projection, and thought forms. So, let’s just start with karmic debt. Just unpack that for our listeners.

I refer to the concept of karma as a learning lesson. It’s like signing up for courses at colleges. Everybody who goes through that process has made some sort of internal decision, consciously or unconsciously. There’s something they have to learn, something they have to resolve, something that’s been nagging at them, and they really need to break that open and understand why it bothers them. 

Each person has his or her own needs and brings his or her own memories and unresolved issues into another lifetime. And when you get to a point where something is resolved, you don’t have to go back to it. It’s like being in school—I took that course and passed it. I want to go to something else in the process of doing meditation, which is my definition of regression.

The methodologies may be different in different schools or different approaches, but the point is you’re going into a relaxed state in which the subconscious mind begins to offer you information at a conscious level that you either have suppressed or been unaware of.  But when it comes up, it intrigues you, makes you angry or upset, and you want to find out about it. “What is this? Why did I react that way?” It’s like any other learning process.

The more you experience, the more you open the door—instead of shutting it, the more you learn. That’s what learning is all about. You open the book, and you read it. “Okay, let me come back to that paragraph later.” Put the book aside. Come back that evening. “Oh, now I understand that. I got it.” It’s a process like that to me. That’s what meditation’s about. There are different forms by which you can get that experience, different structures, and different results. 

But the bottom line is the soul needs to grow, expand, learn, and be able to function at the highest possible spiritual level, which brings up the issue of our going through a rapid change that is already taking place and going from one level like the third dimension to the fourth dimension to the fifth dimension. That’s the process that this planet is going through right now. Some people are already very well aware of it and working at it. Some people are highly resistant to it. “Don’t bother me about it.” 

But the fact is that, as a planet, we’re going through that process. There are people who are hanging on to the third dimension at the lower level or even the fourth at the lower level for dear life. They won’t give up on it, “That’s where they are. Maybe they’ll come back and learn it at a later time. They’re not going to take the course this time around.” Other people can’t wait to jump from one to the other, who can’t wait to be maybe back in the fifth dimension they’ve been in before, and they came down to the third to do certain things to improve life on Earth. 

Everybody has different agendas. My point is that the process and structure we do may take different forms for different people from different backgrounds, but they are very similar. If you look at it from a broad standpoint, we’re all in it to grow, elevate, and go to a higher level. People do it faster than others. Some people resist it, but that’s the process the soul intends to go through.

There’s a natural, intuitive process that operates in other people’s minds, effortlessly bringing answers without the need for strenuous effort.

That’s a very positive way to look at it. It is much better than the commonly negative connotation of karmic debt, as you were the creditor in one lifetime. You ruined somebody because they couldn’t pay you back, and now you’re the debtor in this lifetime, so you can feel what it feels like and get the brunt of the punishment you were doling out in a previous lifetime. This isn’t about punishment. This is about learning and growing. This is about spiritual refinement.

From the standpoint of the soul, which is what I was presenting, that’s correct. If they’re individuals with a lot of resistance and do not want to learn, do not want to change the way they do things, want to be in control, and want to make sure that everybody agrees with them. If that’s where they are, they’ve got a long way to go, but God bless them; they’ll get there eventually. 

The soul is a beautiful thing. It’s really the essence of who we are. We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. I’ve said that many, many times throughout my career. We are souls who have chosen to take on these experiences to grow, learn, and elevate through the dimensions. That’s the most positive way of looking at it. But those people who are resistant, or those who had a terrible experience that is still wrapped up in it, well, that’s where they are. They may take longer to get out of it.

I know we’re out of time here, but I wanted to make sure that our listeners know that they can work with you. They can hire you for past life regression, which is phone-based, so you could be anywhere in the world. You have a really amazing special offer for our listeners: a $100 rate for a two-hour session, which is amazing. That’s like 1980s pricing.

Well, it is, truly. I want people to start experiencing what it feels like to grow, resolve issues and feel good about themselves and their relationships with other people, so I want to encourage that.

Yeah. If somebody is open to therapy, this is just another form of therapy, and you don’t have to regress somebody in a session. If they feel comfortable to do that, then by all means. But even getting therapy from you for a session for $100 is a great deal. I want to ensure our listener understands the amazing value you’re offering here and the thousands of sessions you have done. You are so incredibly experienced at this and an author and renowned expert in this field. I just think that’s an incredible offer.

Thank you. Let me add that California law is very specific. I cannot call myself a therapist unless I’ve gone through their process.

The soul, a truly beautiful entity, is the essence of who we are.

So, whether I’m working with one person, one-on-one, or a group of people on the phone, in person, or in an auditorium, wherever I am, I’m a teacher and helping you grow.

If our listener wants to work with you, the best way for them to get a hold of you is through email, right?

Now let me give you both my phone number and my email. The email address is bettyebinder@email.com. They can also call me if they wish to do that. I’m going to give them the phone number: 951-658-5794.

Thank you, Betty. This is really awesome and inspiring. You clearly have an incredible depth and wealth of information and experience in this field of past life regression. Thank you for all the work that you do and have done over the decades to help people in this episode and to help our listeners. So thank you so much.

You’re most welcome. I look forward to hearing from you and would love to help you.

Awesome, and thank you, listener. Go out there and make it a great day. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

Important Links

 

Connect with Bettye Binder

 

 

Books

 

 

Film

 

 

People

 

 

YouTube  Videos

 

 

About Bettye Binder

Bettye Binder is the author of five books, including Past Life Regression Guidebook, Discovering Your Past Lives and Other Dimensions, and Past Lives Present Karma Workbook. She earned a B.A. at Barnard College and an M.A. at Columbia University Graduate School in New York. A reincarnation teacher since 1980, she has taught nearly 14,000 people in classes and workshops and conducted over 3,000 past-life regressions with her students.

Disclaimer: The medical, fitness, psychological, mindset, lifestyle, and nutritional information provided on this website and through any materials, downloads, videos, webinars, podcasts, or emails is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/fitness/nutritional advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Always seek the help of your physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, certified trainer, or dietitian with any questions regarding starting any new programs or treatments, or stopping any current programs or treatments. This website is for information purposes only, and the creators and editors, including Stephan Spencer, accept no liability for any injury or illness arising out of the use of the material contained herein, and make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the contents of this website and affiliated materials.