For over two decades, Liz Vincent has dedicated her life to uncovering the hidden pathways of the mind, spirit, and body. From her first awakening to hypnosis, she has journeyed through meditation circles, spiritual healing, Reiki, and a wide array of modalities—including past life regression, ThetaHealing™, EFT, and hypnobirthing—to help people release trauma, rediscover themselves, and embrace a life of balance and fulfillment. Liz’s journey began with a simple yet profound question: “How could I help others if I couldn’t help myself?” Through relentless study with world-renowned masters, immersive training in transformational healing techniques, and hands-on experience, she has become a beacon for those seeking deeper understanding and profound change. In this interview with Mystic Mag, Liz shares her path from personal exploration to professional mastery, revealing how accessing past lives, freeing emotional blockages, and reconnecting with inner guidance can transform the present—and open the door to a more empowered future.
Your healing journey began with a deep commitment to working on yourself first. How did that early self-healing shape the way you now guide clients through hypnosis and past life regression?
I started reading about past-life regression many years before I even contemplated trying it. I read some of Brian Weiss’s books and Hands Tens Dam (a book called Exploring Reincarnation). I’d also heard about children in India who remembered past lives. Even though I wasn’t on a healing journey at the time, I was interested in the subject.
I lived in Italy for many years and did a lot of that reading while I was there. At a certain point, however, I decided I needed to leave—Italy wasn’t bringing me forward in the way I needed. So I returned to Bristol in England and moved in with my mother. Because I didn’t really know anyone or what I was doing, I joined the Spiritualist Church. It wasn’t necessarily what I believed, but it helped me at the time and allowed me to make contacts. I started attending workshops the church ran on Saturdays and I began sitting in a circle, which introduced me to meditation in a group setting.
A friend I met through that circle invited me to join a clairvoyant course at a college in Bristol—she didn’t want to go alone and I had nothing better to do—so I went along. At the time I was working sales jobs and doing interpreting, including court interpreting, which is very different from working with clients. Bit by bit, on that course I learned meditation and a lot of different practices that were all connected to this path.
I had always been interested in hypnosis, although I didn’t know why. As a child I said things that made my mother think I was odd—I would refer to hypnosis and, when watching TV, I used to say I could diagnose people. I remember saying things like, “That man’s had a heart attack,” or “That man’s got a brain tumor.” My mum would look at me as if I were mad, and then later she’d find out I was right. I had that knowledge without realizing it.
While I was on the course, I started learning Reiki and hands-on healing. I was especially interested in hypnosis, and my cousin’s wife was a hypnotherapist. I told her I wanted to train, specifically in past-life regression—back then it was mainly called just that. She told me that a very famous hypnotherapist would be coming to Bath soon. Bath and Bristol are neighboring cities, so the timing worked.
The man was Ormond McGill, then a very famous American hypnotherapist who could seemingly put people into trance by looking at them. He was in his 90s and came with Tom Silver, who was a more conventional hypnotherapist. During the course, I asked Ormond to demonstrate past-life regression, and he did. That was the first time I saw it—of course now I know they chose a susceptible subject from the group—but it showed me what I needed to see. They picked a woman who went straight into a life in France and began speaking French, which doesn’t happen often, but it did that day and it was compelling.
After that, I went on an English hypnotherapy course to earn a diploma. I began doing past-life regressions while continuing my meditation practice. What really resonated with me was past-life regression. I didn’t much want to do basic hypnotherapy—where someone is put into trance and given positive suggestions—because, to me, that doesn’t get to the root cause of a problem. It can help, but it’s not what I was after. So I focused on past-life work.
The more regressions I did, the more I realized that many people suffering from anxiety and trauma are dealing with issues from this life. I worked extensively with anxiety and depression. Trauma can be a mixture of past-life and this-life issues because unresolved problems tend to carry forward. As a result, I also did a lot of “this-life” work: inner-child work, soul-fragment recovery, and other techniques to address present-life wounds. I still do a lot of past-life regression, but much of my practice now involves this-life regression and the inner-child work needed to bring back soul fragments.
Past life regression can sometimes lead people to surprising revelations. Can you share one of the most profound or unexpected client experiences that highlighted the power of this technique?
Well, a couple of cases come to mind. One was many years ago: a woman came to me after seeing an article in a magazine—she wasn’t a regular client. When she sat in the treatment chair she sighed, so I asked what was going on. She said, “I’ve had a really bad back ever since I had my child.” I took her into past lives, and she became a trapeze artist who fell off a trapeze. The ringmaster at the time was not very sympathetic and was quite harsh toward her. Because we often work with people across many lifetimes, I asked her to look into his eyes and see if she recognized him. She looked and said, “Oh my God—he’s my son.”
What had happened was that in that lifetime the ringmaster later became her son in this life. We had to work on forgiving the ringmaster in order to resolve that past-life pattern. After we did, she got off the chair and no longer had the bad back. She had been holding the pain because of that connection—even though she didn’t consciously know the ringmaster was her son, that was what had been carried forward.
I also remember a man from many years ago—certain things stick in my mind. He was from somewhere like Uzbekistan. He said, “I have bad asthma.” I asked him to find where the asthma started. Asthma is often linked to past-life experiences—being burned, suffocated, trapped in an earthquake, and so on—although it can also be connected to this life.
He regressed into a life as a warrior who rode around burning villages and abusing people, including women. In that life he showed little remorse. We explored a couple more lives, but I had a feeling we hadn’t cleared it completely. He returned a week later and said his asthma was worse. I suspected he hadn’t dealt with everything—the root cause. On the next session we found another life where he had been abusive, burning tents and causing suffering.
I asked him, “Are you ready to let the asthma go?” He said yes, but something told me he wasn’t ready. I had the sense he’d made an oath or vow against himself. When I asked him about it, he admitted he had vowed to punish himself for eternity for what he’d done—he believed he had to suffer forever with asthma. So we did a large forgiveness process: he asked forgiveness from the people he had harmed, we worked to release any curses or bindings placed on him, and most importantly he released the vow he’d made against himself. Once he released that oath, his asthma let go. Very interesting.
I’m not saying past-life cases are always dramatic. Sometimes people go into quite ordinary or “boring” lives. In my book there’s a case of a woman who regressed into the life of Judy Garland, the singer—she was a famous Hollywood star who, interestingly, died in England. When people regress into famous lives you might question the accuracy, but in this case the client began by saying, “I don’t like these cameras, I don’t want to be here.” Bit by bit it emerged that she had been that person, and the memories made sense.
Sometimes souls punish themselves. If a person commits suicide, for example, a soul fragment may need to be collected and forgiven—so a lot of the work is about forgiveness. Once people can truly forgive, they can let things go.
I had a training-case client who was almost blind and also couldn’t bear to watch anything related to World War II. In regression we discovered she had been a young German soldier who had been ordered to shoot people. She felt overwhelming guilt in that lifetime. Because she couldn’t bear to see it, she’d been born in this life nearly blind as a kind of self-punishment. I’m not saying her sight markedly improved, but she did understand why she had been born that way and was able to watch war-related material without the same terror.
Other past lives can be simple but meaningful. Once a client regressed into a life as a shepherd who spent his days caring for sheep and meditating—absolute peace. He said he’d lost that peace in this life and needed to find it again. So even when a past life seems mundane, the client usually knows the purpose of having lived it.
What type of services do you offer?
Over the years, I’ve specialized in this-life regression, inner-child work, and working with people who are traumatized—those who suffer from anxiety and depression. At the same time, I’ve also worked with past-life regression to help sort out unresolved issues. Along the way, I practiced hands-on healing and EFT (tapping).
One thing I’ve noticed is that if you’re working with someone who simply will not let go, you can often guide them into hypnosis without them realizing it. For example, if you do EFT while holding their hand, it will usually take them into a hypnotic state, even though they’re not aware it’s happening.
What most people don’t realize is that hypnosis is not a deep state. Many think it means going into some kind of very deep sleep or floating out of the window. If that were the case, they wouldn’t be able to hear me or answer my questions. I always explain to clients that hypnosis feels like being between asleep and awake.
It’s similar to when you’re dozing off at home and the doorbell rings. You wake up enough to answer it, but you’re still almost dreaming. That’s the brainwave we use in hypnosis—you’re not fully asleep, but you’re not fully awake either. Everyone naturally passes through that brainwave state every day, both when falling asleep and when waking up.
The exception is when someone takes sleeping tablets. These take people straight into a trance, bypassing that brainwave stage, which is why they often wake up feeling groggy and tired. It’s a stage we actually need to go through.
As a hypnotherapist, it’s very important to explain this to people. Otherwise, they expect something different and feel disappointed if they don’t enter a very deep sleep. People need to understand how hypnosis really works so they can allow it to happen. No one can force anyone into hypnosis—it’s always about allowing.
Fear and unresolved trauma often manifest physically in the body. How do you help clients release fear in a way that creates lasting healing rather than temporary relief?
I work a lot with people who’ve been sexually abused. But the person doesn’t have to stay in the memory or feel it fully. You can take them above the event so they’re looking down at themselves, or you can put the scene on a TV screen. There’s an NLP technique where you become the projectionist, watching yourself watch the film. That’s called double dissociation: rather than the client having to watch themselves on the screen, the projectionist watches them watching the film. This steps the client right back from the experience, and by stepping back they can begin to deal with the trauma.
There are lots of ways to work with trauma. I make the person big and the aggressor small. This allows the person to take their power back and become in charge of the situation. The goal is to help them reach forgiveness — and once they can forgive, they can let the whole thing go.
I work a lot with trauma, including survivors of rape. Ultimately, however, they often need to forgive themselves for having allowed the situation to happen. Most people find that idea strange, but in many cases the person has placed themselves in a situation where it occurred and is, in effect, paying themselves back.
You can take the work deeper — and you can only do this with clients who are spiritually ready — by asking them to find a past life where they did something to the person who harmed them now. Often, they’ll discover, “Oh my God, I was part of an army and we raped and pillaged a village; I raped that person.” In such cases, the current-life perpetrator may be returning in a different role to balance what happened. Most clients, though, won’t accept that right away — they’re understandably angry with the person who raped them — but you can still regress and trace where the pattern began. Unfortunately, it often starts with actions we ourselves carried out in another life.
With more than 20 years on this path, how has your own understanding of healing evolved? If you could give advice to your younger self—when you were just starting meditation circles—what would you say?
A lot of the time when I work, I’m sort of channeling to a certain extent. I’m not consciously planning what I’m going to do with the client — it just happens.
So, I can’t honestly say what I would have told my younger self, because I had to allow the work to evolve as it did. If anything, I’d say that in the beginning I thought the answer to everything was past-life regression, but I later realized that the deeper answer is often working with the young inner child. It’s important to look for the trauma in this life before trying to resolve it in the past one.
Of course, some people are naturally very spiritual and slip into past lives easily, which often connects with the reasons they’ve attracted certain experiences in this life. But for most people, you have to deal with present-life trauma first. I often take clients back to the womb, because many say, “I would never have chosen my mother” or “I would never have chosen my father.” If I tell them directly, “Yes, you did,” they dismiss it. But if I guide them into the womb and say, “In a couple of months you’re going to be born as Brett or Mary. Tell me why you’re going to be born to these parents,” they begin to uncover the reasons. They might say, “I had a past life with the woman who’s now my mother. It’s going to be a difficult relationship, but I need to work through it.” In that way, they come to the realization themselves — that they chose their parents for a reason, to help them learn.
So, really, all of my work has evolved in that way. I can’t pinpoint exactly how it developed; it just did. That’s why I don’t think I could go back to my younger self and say, “Do this, do that.” It was more about trusting the process and allowing things to progress as they were meant to.
Liz Vincent https://awakening2hypnosis.com/
+44 7769682383
