It was the late 1960s, in a consulting room in Los Angeles. A hypnotherapist was working with a patient on a persistent shoulder pain — routine, entirely ordinary. Under hypnosis, though, the patient went back further than anyone intended: to the trenches of the First World War, and to a wound he had never received in this life.
The therapist was called Michael Newton and — crucially for this whole story — he did not believe in any of it.
The man who did not want to find this
Newton held a doctorate in counselling psychology, a Master Hypnotherapist certification and membership of the American Counseling Association. He taught psychology in Los Angeles, consulted for companies and ran a therapy practice. He approached metaphysics with marked scepticism — past life regression was a curiosity to him, not a subject of study.
The breakthrough came in 1968 and was again unplanned. Another client, led through a regression, did not stop after passing through death in a past life. She entered a space Newton was not looking for — and described meeting her soul group.
That was the moment Newton’s professional life changed direction. For the next thirty-five years he was occupied mainly with that one question.
Twenty-five years of silence
Here is a detail that says more about Newton than any of his claims.
He made the discovery in the late 1960s. He published his first book in 1994. He waited more than twenty-five years before he judged the material complete enough to show.
In that time he conducted sessions with around 7,000 people. He was not looking for confirmation of a single hypothesis — he gathered accounts and checked whether they formed anything coherent. What struck him was that people who had never met, who came from different cultures and different worldviews, described a surprisingly convergent topography in trance.
Journey of Souls — published in 1994 by Llewellyn Publications, containing twenty-nine case studies — sold 750,000 copies. It was followed by Destiny of Souls (2000, sixty-seven cases) and Life Between Lives Hypnotherapy (2004). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
The map he sketched
What emerged from those accounts, Newton arranged into a sequence. It is not a doctrine and not a revelation — it is a model built from what people said in trance.
Departure. The soul leaves the body. Relief and lightness recur in the accounts; the moment of death itself is often described as gentler than everything that preceded it.
Transition. Movement toward light — an image universal enough that it also appears in accounts from people after cardiac arrest, described in an entirely different literature.
Meeting the guide. A figure who waits. Familiar, though not from this life. Newton described it as a presence accompanying the soul through its whole journey, not just one incarnation.
Return to the soul group. This is one of the most distinctive elements of the whole model. Newton recorded that souls return to small, stable clusters — usually around fifteen people — of similar experience and shared interests, sharing a common mentor. Something between a class, a team, and a family that does not dissolve between lives.
People coming back from LBL sessions describe this meeting surprisingly often as the strongest moment of the whole experience — not because it is spectacular, but because it is recognition.
Life review. Not judgement and not punishment. More a survey: what was understood, what did not work, what was left unfinished.
Planning. Choosing the next life, the next body, the next circumstances — with all the difficulty that carries. In Newton’s accounts, souls do not choose easy scenarios.
Return. And it all begins again, with memory wiped, because otherwise there would be nothing to learn.
What happened to it after his death
Newton died in 2016, but the institute he founded is thriving.
The Michael Newton Institute, established in 2002 as a non-profit, has to date conducted more than 55,000 Life Between Lives sessions across more than 40 countries and 25 languages, through over two hundred certified practitioners.
Those figures are worth setting against the original seven thousand. What began as a mistake in a Los Angeles consulting room is today one of the most extensively documented collections of accounts of what people in deep trance say happens between lives.
Honestly: what this is and what it is not
Newton’s work consists of case studies, not controlled research. There is no control group, no blinding, no independent verification. The encyclopaedia entry on Journey of Souls classifies the book as pseudoscience, and from a methodological standpoint that classification is hard to argue with.
On top of that comes the problem I covered at length in the piece on whether regression hypnosis is safe: hypnosis increases suggestibility and encourages confabulation. The convergence of accounts can be explained by a shared cultural tradition and by the expectations people bring to a session, rather than by a shared source.
This dispute cannot be settled on this page or on any other. I think anyone considering such a session should know that beforehand, not afterwards.
And at the same time: the fact that something cannot be proved does not mean it means nothing. People come back from these sessions changed in ways that can be observed regardless of how we settle the question of literalness. They understand something about their relationships. They stop fearing death. They begin to treat their own life as something they chose.
An LBL session is not proof. It is an experience.
The stages are described in detail in a separate piece: what happens in an LBL session, step by step. The certification of any LBL practitioner — mine included — can be checked in the Institute’s public register.
Michael Newton was looking for the cause of a shoulder pain. He found a map on which a single human life turns out to be one chapter — not the whole book.
You do not have to believe it to want to see. A question that will not leave you alone is enough.
Write to me — I answer every message personally. Or start with accounts from people who have already been there.
Sources
- Dr. Michael Newton — Michael Newton Institute. Biography, the circumstances of the 1968–1969 discovery, the scale of the research (7,000 clients, 35 years), publications, Institute figures (55,000 sessions, 40+ countries, 25 languages, 200+ practitioners).
- Journey of Souls (book) — Wikipedia. Publication details (Llewellyn, 1994), 29 cases, 750,000 copies sold, classification as pseudoscience.
- LBL Frequently Asked Questions — Michael Newton Institute. Session length.
- Find an LBL Facilitator — Michael Newton Institute. Public register of certified practitioners.