Free Will and Past Life Regression: Moving Past Regret

He had made a choice at thirty-two that he was still living inside at fifty-eight. Not in the way that all choices persist in their consequences — but in the specific, recurring way of a choice that you have never quite been able to make peace with. He had left a marriage. There were children involved. He had built a different life, which by most measures was good, and the life he had left had also, eventually, been rebuilt. No one was destroyed. But he had not been able to stop reviewing the choice — turning it over, approaching it from different angles, wondering whether a different version of himself would have made a different decision.

The LBL session he describes in Memories of the Afterlife (2009) — documented by a certified Newton Institute therapist — did not tell him the choice had been right. It told him something more complicated, and ultimately more useful, about the nature of choice itself.

What the Between-Lives Space Shows About Free Will

The therapist reported that the client entered the between-lives space carrying the question he had been carrying for twenty-six years: had he done the right thing? He expected the session to answer it. What the session offered instead was a different framework for the question.

According to Newton’s method, the soul’s life plan is not a script. It identifies key learning opportunities, significant relationships, and developmental intentions — but it does not predetermine the specific choices that will be made in navigating them. Free will is real. The choices a soul makes in a physical life are genuinely its own, genuinely consequential, and genuinely not predetermined by the plan.

What this means for regret is significant. The client recalled under LBL hypnosis his guides addressing the question of his choice directly — not by evaluating it as right or wrong, but by showing him how the soul’s development actually works. Every major choice point in a life is a fork. The soul’s plan anticipated that a fork would be here. It did not specify which path would be taken. Both paths carried developmental potential. Both paths had consequences. The soul that took either path would be shaped differently by the experience.

He had taken the path he had taken. The question of whether the other path would have been better was, from the between-lives perspective, not quite the right question. The right question was: what has the path he took developed in him?

The Regret That Becomes Its Own Lesson

The therapist noted that the client’s session took a direction he had not anticipated: instead of resolving the regret about the original choice, it focused on what the regret itself had been doing in his life for twenty-six years.

The between-lives review showed him, with specificity that he found both uncomfortable and clarifying, the cost of sustained regret. Not in the moralistic sense — regret is bad, let it go — but in the developmental sense: the capacity he had spent two and a half decades directing at a choice that could not be unmade had not been available for what the current life was actually asking of him. The review function — the constant returning to the decision, the alternate-history construction, the self-assessment — was using energy that belonged to the present.

According to Newton’s method, the soul’s purpose in a physical life is forward-facing. The between-lives perspective is interested in what a soul is becoming — how it is developing, what it is learning, what it is building. A soul that is oriented primarily toward a fixed point in its past — circling it, measuring it, using it as a primary reference for self-evaluation — is not fully engaged with the developmental purpose of its current incarnation.

The client recalled his guides using an image he found memorable: a driver who has taken a wrong turn and then spends the rest of the journey watching the rearview mirror. The turn is taken. The road ahead is real. The rearview mirror cannot correct the turn. It can only prevent the driver from seeing what is in front of him.

Free Will and the Soul’s Actual Curriculum

One of the most significant aspects of the between-lives review, the therapist reported, was what it revealed about what the choice had actually been for — from the soul’s developmental perspective.

The marriage the client had left had been characterized by a specific kind of suffering that the session clarified: it had been a context in which he had been learning, with considerable difficulty, about the limits of his own capacity for endurance, and about the difference between commitment made from fear and commitment made from genuine love. He had endured for many years. He had eventually left. Both the enduring and the leaving had been developmental experiences.

The life he had built after leaving had required him to develop capacities that the previous context had not: the ability to take responsibility for consequences, to maintain relationship with people he had hurt, to build trust after having broken it. These capacities were real. They had been built. They were part of who he was at fifty-eight in ways that would not have been possible without the specific path he had taken.

According to Newton’s method, the soul that makes choices in a physical life — including choices it later regrets — is not failing its soul plan by making imperfect choices. It is executing the plan’s most fundamental function: having experiences that produce growth. The growth does not require the optimal choice. It requires genuine engagement with the consequences of whatever choice is made.

He had engaged with the consequences for twenty-six years. The engagement itself had been the work, whether or not he had recognized it as such.

Moving On Without Pretending It Was Simple

The therapist noted that the client’s session did not produce the absolution he had been looking for. The between-lives perspective did not tell him his choice had been costless, or that the people it had affected had not been genuinely affected. The truth of the consequences was not revised.

What the session did was place the choice in a context large enough to hold it without it being the defining fact of everything. The choice was one decision, made by a thirty-two-year-old soul in a difficult situation, with the capacities available to that soul at that time. The soul at fifty-eight was different — partly because of the choice, and partly because of the twenty-six years of wrestling with it. The choice had made him. The regret had made him too. None of it was wasted.

Moving on, in this framing, did not mean deciding the choice had been correct. It meant releasing the rearview mirror. Not because the past wasn’t real, but because the road ahead was also real, and the energy that had been going to the mirror was needed elsewhere.

What This Means for You

If you carry a choice — a door taken or not taken, a life built or not built — that you have never quite been able to put down, LBL accounts offer a framework that may be useful.

The soul’s curriculum is not organized around perfect choices. It is organized around what perfect choices and imperfect choices alike produce in the soul that makes them. Your most significant regret may be the thing that has developed you most specifically. The twenty years of wrestling with it may be exactly the work the soul planned to do.

Moving on does not require deciding you were right. It requires recognizing that the road you are currently on is the one in front of you, and that it is asking for your full attention.

The rearview mirror has shown you everything it has to show. The windshield is waiting.

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This story was uncovered through LBL therapy. Ready to explore your own? [Find a certified therapist →](https://www.reincarnatiopedia.com/catalog//)