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Life between Life – Dr Joel Whitton and Joe Fisher

The following is a condensation from Heather's diary of the most telling trance episodes:

In the winter of 1933 Isobel is living with a nurse and two servants in a seaside cottage near the town of Rye in Sussex, England. She moves very slowly and with a great deal of pain. Her vocal expression is limited to painful whispers. I force myself to take a close look at her - what a mess! Her face is scarred and distorted; the right eye and mouth are pulled askew. She is wearing a long silk scarf of a pale peach colour wound around her head and neck. Her right hand is covered with blisters and puckered skin and looks useless. There is a piano in the cottage, but Isobel's playing days are over. With her left hand she paints watercolours of flowers in a semi-realistic style.
Several times Isobel has thought about ending her wretchedness and these thoughts are inflamed by a visit from Eleanor, a fashionably overdressed 'friend' from London. Eleanor sits on the couch sipping tea as she rubs her chatty conversation into Isobel's gaping wounds . . . Everybody keeps talking about your looks and hands having been ruined, Isobel dear. Of course, whenever they say anything nasty about you, I tell them how wrong they are. I don't think I could live if I were in your place. How can you stand it, my dear? I mean, how can you bear to look at yourself?' And so on. Not long afterwards, Isobel walks out of the cottage into a howling winter's night. With sleet beating against her face, she crosses the field that separates her home from the shoreline and plods along beside a wrathful sea. Then she descends some slippery wooden steps to a beach of pebbles. Slowly and deliberately, she walks into the frigid and turbulent water and keeps on walking...

Heather's black moods were linked directly to this grim night when she last walked the earth as Isobel. After re-experiencing, in trance, the watery tomb of the English Channel, the rolling waves of depression never returned.

To her amazement, Heather remembered writing a composition in which she had described Isobel's death scene in precise detail. As a schoolgirl, she had given full expression to her wildest thoughts and feelings, not caring how bizarre they might appear. 'You must be very unhappy,' her teacher had said.

Taken as a criticism, this remark served to muzzle her desire to write creatively and repressed for years her apparently spontaneous memory of Isobel's suicide.

 Now that the nature of Isobel's death had been revealed, Heather's remaining psychological problems became more and more apparent to Dr Whitton as he persevered in his search for further healing resonance. Under his guidance, Heather spent several weeks compiling an inventory of nineteen past lives which included a cave painter in the Dordogne, France, circa 13 000 BC; a craftsman in predynastic Egypt, circa 3,100 BC; a poverty-stricken artisan who lived in Changan, China, two centuries before the birth of Christ; a Roman woman who died in childbirth in the imperial province of Lusitania around AD 25; a twelfth-century Druid priestess from Brittany, France; and a French noblewoman who was cruelly put to death in late fifteenth-century Spain.

Many of the lives showed Heather engaged in arts and crafts of some kind - appropriate precursors to the current incarnation. But none gave any intimation as to why she should be paralysed, in this life, by the very idea of artistic creation. And no reasons were revealed for her hypersensitivity and profound feelings of unworthiness. Apart from Isobel's existence, the only life which appeared to have direct bearing on Heather's problems was the particularly ugly incarnation during the reign of Ferdinand II.