What I Would Tell My 27-Year-Old Self About Courage

How Hypnotherapy, CBT, and Past-Life Regression Give You the Courage to Change

I am not a good fit for everyone. I have known that for a long time, and a phone call this week reminded me of it.

A young woman called me. Her name came up on my phone, so I knew we had spoken once before, four years ago when she was 23. Now she was 27, and she had just come home from a retreat at Omega in upstate New York. I know Omega well. I have worked with Dr. Brian Weiss several times there.

She told me about the teacher she had studied with there. He is very famous, she said, with thousands of followers. She said it more than once. She sat in a room with hundreds of people, but she couldn’t drop into her subconscious mind and find a past life. Her mind was too strong, she explained.

Then she told me she worked in real estate but really wanted to be an energy healer. And she asked me what I could do that the famous man could not.

So I told her how I work. One person at a time. No script, no cookie-cutter program. Every client arrives with a different history and leaves with something different. She listened, and then she argued. That would not work for her, she said.

“I guess you’re right,” I told her. “I guess we’re not a good fit.”

Later she texted to tell me I should have argued with her more.

I will be honest. For a moment I felt bad about that. When I was younger, I might have tried to win her over. But I am more than fifty years older than she is, and I do not sell myself. I know what I can do. I have been doing it for more than 25 years. The people who are meant to find me find me, and I would rather save my energy for the work itself.

The Notebook on the Floor

After that call, I went back into my office, and there was a notebook lying on the floor. I picked it up and opened it, and there I was. Twenty-seven years old.

I had been living in New York for three or four years. I was driving a taxi. I had been reading the Seth books. I was confused and searching and not at all sure what I was supposed to do with my life. And I was about to start a nonfiction writing class at the New School for Social Research, a class that would change everything.

I did not know any of that yet. All I knew was that I was depressed and lost.

Looking back, I can see that I needed every piece of it. The taxi. The books. The confusion. The class. None of it was wasted. All of it was my education, and it made me the person I am today. And I am happy to be her. Happy not to have two million followers. Mostly happy not to be famous. That was a life I could have had. I passed it up. Been there, done that.

The Point of Power Is in the Present

One idea from the Seth material has stayed with me for fifty years: the point of power is in the present. Not in the past you keep replaying. Not in the future you keep worrying about. Right now is the only place you can make a change.

So if you are not happy with what you are doing now, that is information. It is asking something of you. It is asking for courage.

Courage does not mean you know where you are going. It means you are willing to try something new and let yourself fail. Failure is how you find out what does not fit, and every time you find out what does not fit, you get closer to what does. I failed my way into the life I have now.

Here is the question I wish someone had handed me at 27. Stop asking, “What will make me happy?” Ask instead, “How can I serve?” What lights the fire in your heart? Where does your particular gift meet someone else’s need? Follow that, and happiness tends to show up on its own.

Why Change Feels So Dangerous

Here is what nobody tells you about being stuck. Your brain prefers it. The amygdala, the small alarm system deep in your brain, treats the unfamiliar as a threat, even when the familiar is making you miserable. A job you hate feels safer than a leap you cannot predict. That is not weakness. That is wiring.

And wiring can change. Neuroplasticity means the brain that learned fear can learn courage. Martin Seligman spent decades studying why people stop trying, and his work points somewhere hopeful: the brain can learn that its actions matter. Courage is not a trait some lucky people are born with. It is a skill your nervous system can practice.

How Hypnotherapy, CBT, and Past-Life Regression Build Courage

In my practice, I use these three tools together. Each one reaches a different layer of the fear.

Hypnotherapy goes beneath the conscious mind, where the old stories live. I’m not the kind of person who does that. It’s too late for me. Who do I think I am? Those beliefs rarely respond to logic. Under hypnosis, we meet them directly. I have clients rehearse the hard conversation, the interview, the first morning of the new life, until their nervous system has already been there. Once the subconscious has walked that ground, it stops treating it as a cliff.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works in the daylight. It helps you catch the thought that stops you cold, the three a.m. voice that says you will fail and everyone will see. We question that thought. Is it true? Where is the evidence? What would you tell a friend? Then you take one small, concrete step, and then another. Every step you take becomes proof. CBT turns failure into information, which is exactly what it is.

Past-life regression reaches the deepest layer of all. When a client sees herself leaving a village, crossing an ocean, or starting over with nothing, something shifts. Courage stops being an idea and becomes a memory. Not “maybe I could.” Instead, “I have done this before.”

Together, these tools do what willpower alone seldom can. They quiet the alarm, retrain the thinking, and remind the soul of what it already knows.

Courage Is Not Only for the Young

Last night I worked with a woman in her sixties. She is extraordinarily successful. In her regression, she found herself as a very young wife in ancient Babylon. Her husband in that life was the same kind of man she is married to now.

She could not get pregnant, and the women of the village made her life miserable for it. So her husband did something brave. He packed up their life and moved them away to a new village. There she made friends, and there she finally had a daughter. It was the same daughter she has today, and two glorious sons followed. Her husband was proud and happy.

One act of courage changed the whole course of that life.

That is what past-life regression can do. It shows you that courage has been part of your story for a very long time. You have done hard things before. You have left villages before. You can do it again.

If You Are 27 and Searching

You do not need a famous teacher. You do not need thousands of people in a room. You need to be honest with yourself about what is not working and brave enough to try something else.

Trust the thrust of your life. The confusion is part of it. The detours are part of it. Even the wrong fits are part of it.

And if what I do sounds like what you are looking for, call me. If it doesn’t, that is all right too. We may simply not be a good fit, and you will find the one who is.

Please give me a call at (323) 933-4377 to schedule a FREE CONSULTATION.

Sending you all hope and love,

Stephanie