Irina Nola is a certified hypnotherapist and past life regression therapist based in New Orleans, offering transformative sessions both in person and online. With over 12 years of professional experience, a background in psychology from St. Petersburg State University, and training with renowned experts like Dolores Cannon and Dr. Brian Weiss, Irina has guided more than a thousand clients in exploring their past lives and uncovering deep insights for personal growth. Learn more in her exclusive MysticMag interview below.
What are your professional beginnings, and how did you get interested in past life regression?
I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia (then Leningrad, USSR), a city rich in classical art and architecture, surrounded by Greco-Roman sculptures, fountains, and museums like the Hermitage. Growing up near the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, which housed artifacts from various religions, I became fascinated by Eastern spirituality, particularly reincarnation. At five, I experienced a powerful déjà vu while watching a film about Ancient Greece, sparking a deep obsession with Greek mythology that lasted years. This interest eventually expanded to include French history, Celtic mythology, and past-life stories, further fueled by books, music, and my psychology studies in college.
After moving to the U.S. in 1990, my foreign psychology degree limited my career options, leading me to work as a waitress and later as a street artist in Central Park. Painting faces came naturally and felt connected to my past lives, blending artistic expression with what I imagined were tribal or cultural memories. I traveled widely for festivals, collecting books on past-life regression and reincarnation along the way.
Though I aspired to practice hypnotherapy, the costs of certification initially made it unattainable. I became inspired by Dolores Cannon’s books and, finally, in 2012, I earned my hypnotherapy certification at the Hypnotherapy Academy of America and completed Cannon’s QHHT (Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique) program, which provided a community for exchanging ideas. During this time, I explored my own past lives, recalling about 20 experiences through exchanges with other practitioners.
After 9/11, my work as a face painter dwindled in New York, prompting a move to New Orleans. The vibrant festival culture offered ample opportunities, and I continued practicing regression techniques while refining my skills. By the time COVID-19 halted in-person sessions, I had already gained a following on Quora, where I wrote extensively on reincarnation and spirituality. Encouraged by readers, I transitioned to offering online sessions, carefully vetting clients for emotional stability to ensure safe experiences.
Today, I conduct both online and in-person regressions, integrating insights from the Akashic Records, soul contracts, and even future-life progression. My unique approach, “Inspirational Regression,” combines past-life exploration, spiritual guidance, and ideal future timelines. Sessions are transformative, offering clients clarity, self-discovery, and tools for growth, whether it’s healing past traumas or unlocking latent skills and talents.
What is Past Life Regression and How Does It Work?
Past Life Regression, or Past Life Therapy, is a specialized form of regression hypnotherapy. This practice involves guiding the client back to a time before their current life, enabling them to explore significant past lives connected to their present challenges, relationships, career, or personal growth. The focus of the session often depends on the client’s intent—whether therapeutic or exploratory. For instance, a session may aim to uncover the origins of emotional or physical issues, but such intense therapeutic work is only conducted in person due to its potentially traumatic nature.
The process begins with a pre-session consultation, which allows me to gather details about the client’s current life biography and clarify their objectives for the session. This stage is critical, as it helps me determine whether an online or in-person session is suitable. Before scheduling, I exchange several emails with the client to assess factors such as their mental health, medication use, or history of psychiatric conditions, which could influence the success of the session. If a client’s circumstances make it inappropriate for me to proceed—for instance, if they have significant unresolved emotional issues—I recommend alternatives. These might include consulting a psychic to gain insights into past lives or working with a local practitioner for in-person regression therapy.
Once the preparatory steps are complete, we proceed with the hypnosis session. Following a short break after the pre-talk, I guide the client into hypnosis using progressive relaxation and gentle guided imagery. This induction typically lasts 20–30 minutes, focusing on creating a calm, receptive state. The process incorporates color-healing techniques with the assistance of the client’s Guides. During this phase, I invoke their Guides and Higher Self, requesting healing energy in the form of colorful rays to balance the client’s energy, support physical healing, and open their chakras and Third Eye to facilitate an enriching session.
For clients who have experienced major traumas or life-threatening events, I include a Clearance Protocol to bypass any negative memories that might block past life recall. This ensures a smoother transition into the regression phase and minimizes emotional distress.
Once in hypnosis, clients are guided into a significant past life. They may find themselves embodying a past-life personality or observing events from a detached perspective. While most clients explore historical human lives, others may visit lives on distant planets, in spaceships, or even in future human colonies. Occasionally, clients connect with parallel lives, as a soul can live multiple lives simultaneously.
During the session, I guide clients through pivotal moments in their past life as if navigating a video. This includes rewinding to childhood to identify family members or uncover early traumas, observing social dynamics at festivals or gatherings, and exploring career paths or skills. For those with psychic or healing abilities, scenes from Atlantis or mystery schools often emerge, shedding light on their spiritual training and purpose.
A unique aspect of regression involves tracing romantic relationships or friendships that carry into the current life. These connections often reveal deep karmic bonds and mutual lessons. The session progresses through key life events and concludes with the death experience. If the death was traumatic, I take care to help the client detach from the physical pain, observing the event as a neutral spectator.
Following death, the client’s spirit transitions into the spiritual realm, where energy healing is performed. This healing addresses both physical imprints and emotional or astral body wounds from the past life. In this state, clients often describe their spiritual appearance as youthful, reflecting their soul’s vitality.
Here, they meet significant Soulmates or Guides, who offer insights and support. I then guide the client to connect with their Higher Self, the pure spiritual energy that oversees all their incarnations. The Higher Self is pivotal for the Life Review, where comparisons between the past life and the current life are made. This phase provides profound clarity about soul contracts, life lessons, and the purpose of the current incarnation.
In their Higher Self state, clients ascend to higher dimensions, such as the Akashic Library or Hall of Records, to access their soul’s history. While the medium—books, computers, or other forms—varies, these Records are energetically stored, akin to a digital cloud. Here, clients gain valuable insights into their soul plans, forgotten memories, and potential future timelines.
If extraterrestrial lives surface, we explore their purpose on Earth, as these lives often involve unique missions. For clients focusing on relationships, we may delve into the Birth of the Soul to identify their original Soul Family or Twin Flame, providing a deeper understanding of their connections.
The session concludes with guidance from the client’s Guides, offering personalized advice on lifestyle, relationships, and career. Some clients choose to schedule additional sessions to delve deeper into questions or spend more time with their Guides.
Finally, I guide the client back to their current body and life, ensuring a smooth transition. While I keep post-session discussions brief to conserve energy, I follow up via email with key insights and next steps.
Past Life Regression is more than a therapeutic tool—it is a journey of self-discovery and healing. Each session is tailored to the individual, providing a unique glimpse into the soul’s vast history and offering practical wisdom to navigate the present life. Whether seeking clarity, closure, or a connection to higher dimensions, this modality can profoundly transform how clients view themselves and their place in the universe.
Why Do People Seek Past Life Regression Sessions?
People seek Past Life Regression (PLR) for various reasons, ranging from curiosity to healing and self-discovery. Here are the primary motivations:
- Curiosity and Exploration
Many clients, especially tourists visiting mystical destinations like New Orleans, are curious about their potential past lives. These sessions often complement their exploration of psychic readings or ghost tours. Couples, including honeymooners, might also pursue PLR to discover the dynamics of their past-life relationships, explore their soulmate connections, and identify any unresolved karma affecting their current life. - Healing Emotional or Physical Issues
PLR can address deep-rooted issues that traditional therapy or medical interventions might not fully resolve. It’s often sought as a complementary approach, with clients referred by psychotherapists or psychics who sense past-life influences. However, PLR isn’t typically the first line of healing; traditional therapies or inner-child work are often recommended before exploring past-life connections. - Relationships
Romantic relationships are a predominant reason for PLR sessions. With the rise of the Twin Flame concept, clients often want to uncover the history and dynamics of their connections. These sessions might delve into shared past lives, contracts, and lessons, sometimes exploring extraterrestrial or multidimensional relationships for Starseeds and Twin Flames. - Career and Professional Guidance
Clients at career crossroads—whether choosing a major, transitioning to civilian roles, or exploring post-retirement options—seek PLR for inspiration. Sessions often reveal talents and skills from successful past lives and even future lives. While these insights can provide motivation, further practice and education are essential for mastery in the present. - Spiritual and Psychic Development
Seekers of spiritual growth often use PLR to expand their consciousness, strengthen psychic abilities, and connect with higher energies. These sessions explore spiritually advanced past lives, including those in ancient civilizations like Atlantis, Lemuria, or otherworldly realms. They may also focus on resolving fears stemming from persecution in past lives due to healing or psychic practices. - Creative Inspiration
Artists, musicians, writers, and other creatives use PLR to spark new ideas. They might revisit lifetimes where they honed their craft or explore astral realms of imagination. These sessions often involve connecting with creative guides, such as historical figures or divine muses, for inspiration. - Extraterrestrial Connections
Some clients, particularly Starseeds or those with experiences involving UFOs or extraterrestrial encounters, seek PLR to understand their cosmic origins and missions on Earth. These sessions often address unusual dreams, feelings of alien contact, or a sense of being on a volunteer mission to aid humanity.
Each PLR session is highly personalized, offering insights and healing tailored to the client’s unique needs and goals, whether they’re exploring past lives, seeking clarity on relationships, or connecting with higher realms of existence.
Can you share a memorable success story?
One unforgettable session I facilitated involved a client, whom I’ll call “Mary.” In her 40s, Mary was an American expat in Europe, divorced with grown children, and in an on-and-off relationship with a European man, who she suspected could be her Twin Flame. She came to the session hoping to understand this connection and to gain insight into her purpose, having read Three Waves of Volunteers by Dolores Cannon and wondered if she might be part of the “second wave”—a group of extraterrestrial souls experiencing their first human life.
It was challenging to guide Mary into a past-life state; she initially encountered only darkness or flying colors, possibly indicating this was her first life on Earth or even in any physical body. After trying a few different techniques, she finally arrived at a memory of a life on another planet. This world had two suns, a pink and green sky, and a night illuminated by bioluminescence. Mary saw herself as a small red humanoid with a large head and antennae, around four feet tall, and androgynous, living a simple life alone in a Hobbit-like hut covered in soil and plants. There were about ten similar beings nearby. They did not eat or speak but absorbed energy and communicated telepathically through their antennae.
Mary described riding a small, furry elephant-like creature with whom her being had a deep bond. These creatures weren’t mere animals; they shared an empathic connection with the red beings. Each day, she and the others would journey into the forest to communicate with and send energy to giant trees, which were part of their reproduction cycle; their kind began as fruits on these trees, maturing in cocoons before emerging as adults.
When I inquired about death, Mary revealed that upon dying, each being’s soul merged with its bonded elephant companion, forming a single, united soul. However, she hadn’t experienced this herself, as her life on this planet ended prematurely when the planet exploded. We took her to a “healing planet,” designated for souls needing recuperation after traumatic events like planetary destruction. She was alone there, her fellow beings and elephants from the original planet absent.
After her time on the healing planet, Mary’s soul journeyed toward Earth. She recalled observing Earth from orbit during a prehistoric time, seeing strange ancient plants but no animals or humans. She was alone and felt lonely in this form, with no intelligent beings to communicate with, prompting her to split her energy into two souls. To her surprise, she recognized this second soul as her current partner. Together, they descended to Earth, taking spirit forms to care for the forests, nurturing the growth of trees, reminiscent of her former life on her home planet.
Next, I guided her to the Akashic Library. Here, we uncovered that Mary had lived six human lives, including an early one in Lemuria, where inhabitants weren’t fully physical. Three of these lives were with her Twin Flame, who indeed seemed to be a “Split Soul Twin Flame”—two souls originating from a single one. Between her human lives, she experienced numerous extraterrestrial lifetimes, with a unique purpose in each. Her current life’s goal involves reuniting with her Twin Flame, achieving soul integration, and developing skills like telepathic communication with animals and plants. This discovery resonated with her love for horses, which she had ridden as a child, possibly reminding her of her past-life connection with the elephant-like creatures.
Without human Guides, she received insights from her Higher Self and Energy Beings, who helped with healing and provided guidance on her relationship. After she emerged from the session, Mary was captivated by what she had seen, especially the deep origins of her relationship. She felt a newfound sense of clarity and lightness. I suggested that she might paint the imagery from the session, explore job opportunities with horses, and consider studying animal communication. This could help her connect with horses in a meaningful way, possibly opening new doors for her future.
To learn more about Irina’s work, you can visit www.neworleanshypnosis.com
