Getting to Know Your LBL Facilitator
Mark Johnson, Certified Life Between Lives® Hypnotherapist
Texas, USA
and Offering Online Sessions
Interview by Savarna Wiley, Certified Life Between Lives® Facilitator
Mark Johnson is a Second-Generation Hypnotherapist and Past Life Regression Therapist. Mark is a Certified Hypnotherapist, an Award-Winning Certified Master Trainer, a Certified LBL Therapist and a Lead LBL Trainer for the Michael Newton Institute. After offering sessions and teaching in the Dallas area for many years, he decided to move to Grand Saline, Texas, 90 minutes east of Dallas, where he offers sessions and training online.
After taking the LBL Training with Michael Newton and members of the MNI Training team in 2007, Mark decided to specialize in Spiritual Hypnotherapy. Once his last day job ended in 2010, he had time to travel to 7 different locations to offer Past Life Regression, Life Between Lives and Quantum Healing Hypnosis sessions. When he began to teach in 2012, it was only natural for him to take his training on the road as well.
Working and teaching online provides Mark with the ability to work with people from across the country and around the world and helps him to follow the advice from Michael Newton when he was getting started traveling, “Don’t burn yourself out!”.
Savarna: I’ve heard fascinating stories about how LBL practitioners have come to doing this work. What prompted you to begin offering LBL?
Mark: My father was a hypnotherapist and even offered Past Life Regression sessions back in the 1960’s, so I have been around this most if not all of my life. When my mother passed in 2003, I saw an old girlfriend who said she had been to a hypnotist for weight loss, and her spirit guide showed up and started talking with her.
I got a message when she told me that, though I thought it was an idea, ‘I want to learn hypnosis so I can talk to mom.’ I started learning hypnosis on my own, and this created a new connection with my father during the later years of his life. I eventually took a class in hypnosis and then took a class with Brian Weiss, Michael Newton, and Dolores Cannon.
I attended a Stage Hypnosis class in Las Vegas in 2007, and I feel the only thing I learned in that class was that Michael Newton was teaching LBL in Chicago later that year. I applied and was accepted into the training. I have many friends from that class, and the ones I keep in touch with are still members of the Newton Institute.
What in your background prepared you to do this work?
I feel that my background as a programmer helped me prepare to be a hypnotist and to be able to promote my business online. The knowledge around web development and working with the search engines helped me to go full time as a hypnotherapist, past life regression therapist, life between lives therapist and to become a trainer in all those areas.
I also had a background in teaching group piano, keyboard, and organ classes, which prepared me to become an instructor. I have said before these 2 careers helped me learn how to teach people to reprogram their minds.
What are some of the favorite things you enjoy about facilitating LBL journeys?
I enjoy the connections with spirit, spending time helping my client connect with guides, higher self, the soul, and the Council. The insights, wisdom, knowledge an understanding gained during these exchanges is invaluable to the client.
All sessions are different, though each client gets what they need. Helping them connect with the spirit world experience is rewarding, though there are opportunities along the way to assist the client in learning how to connect on their own, perhaps thru meditation or self-hypnosis.
It’s always a relief when the client makes it to the spirit world, because at that point I know it’s probably going to be smooth sailing. Empowering the client to connect with the different experiences on their own, making their own decisions about where they want to go and what they want to explore feels like the best way to facilitate these sessions.
In LBL, we can learn so much about such things as our soul nature, the activities of the spirit world, our personal lessons, and contracts with others as well as a wider perspective about humanity’s evolution, etc. In working with clients, what teachings have come through that have been especially impactful?
In a session on October 12, 2010, I met a group of 13 healers in spirit called the Masters of Light. They worked with my client, much like a guide. It was an amazing experience for my client as well as myself. I still connect with them myself during meditation and in sessions.
They provided insight to my client that related to her situation with her family. There was also an opportunity for healing, and they let her know that she needed to call on them so they could continue the healing they started in the session. They told me to call on them as well, which I did the next day. That began my journey of working with them after that initial session.
Back in 2015, I started offering what I call a Masters of Light Meditation for my Meetup Group. Since then, I have also presented it at conferences and to my Past Life Regression students. Many of those who attend have amazing experiences.
I have found that during certain sessions, having them available can provide benefits for the client in terms of connecting to spirit as well as healing. In one session I called them in to help my client with back pain. As I was talking, I began to feel an energy in the room, a very powerful energy I had not felt before. My wife can see them; for me it’s more of a feeling, though in this case, I knew it was not them. However, they wanted to be sure I knew, and I heard them say, that’s not us. At the end as I asked them to wrap my client in light I heard, you don’t need us. I had a sense that they were there watching but felt that her guides and healers were taking care of her back issues. They were what I felt, and I never felt an energy like that before or after that session.
Beautiful way to work with your team and hers as well. The theme for this issue of the journal is Guides and guidance. What else have you learned via LBL journeys about this topic?
I have noticed something that involves what Michael Newton called Hybrid Souls and others call starseeds. These are souls who incarnate on Earth but have incarnated in other realms before coming to Earth.
It is not uncommon for hybrid souls to feel out of place here on Earth, like the planet is very heavy and that they feel alone, like they don’t have friends. When a client shares this with me, even before the start of the session, I feel it’s an initial indication that they may be a hybrid soul or a starseed.
In some cases, I have met groups of beings that work with the client in much the way a guide does, yet it’s a group, not an individual guide. I have also realized that the group typically comes with the client from other realms, though most of them do not incarnate. In addition, often my clients realize that they are part of the group.
We often think of a guide as being more wise or knowledgeable. That’s not the case here, because the client is on the same level as the group. Some say it’s like a soul family, yet they assist the client in their life on earth much like a guide.
When I help one of these clients connect with what initially may seem to be a guide, I usually assume this is a guide, until I start to notice otherwise. I may notice during the pretalk, before we start the session, especially when the client has questions about life on other planets or in other worlds.
As we continue to connect with their ‘guide’ I pay attention to what is being shared and at some point, it becomes obvious to me that the one that seems to be a guide is actually part of a group. I may begin asking questions about the soul of the client, perhaps ask if you have always incarnated on earth or have you also incarnated in other worlds. Depending on the answer, I may continue to ask more questions. Often this ‘guide’ will refer to ‘we’, indicating they are part of a group.
When it becomes more obvious, I may ask if the ‘guide’ is part of a group and if the group is also from this other realm. Then I begin to inquire about the connection between my client and the group and quite often I am told that the client is part of the group. Rather than a guide with more knowledge and experience than the client, the client is actually part of the group who volunteered to come down to Earth and take one for the team. The others are there in spirit to support the client, in much the same way as a spirit guide might do.
This team is not unlike a soul group, and in some cases more than 1 of them are incarnated on Earth, though more often than not, in my experience, only 1 of them incarnates at a time. This knowledge empowers the client, as they realize they are not alone and they better understand why they feel the way they feel here on Earth.
I have discussed this with 3 or 4 other MNI LBL facilitators, and they have said that they too have had similar experiences with their clients.
Yes, I too have worked with clients who report something similar. In one case, it seemed that all that was learned and experienced by the one who incarnated here was immediately uploaded to the group consciousness on an on-going basis so that the whole group was growing because of the volunteer here on earth. I found that there was much gratitude expressed by the group to the one who came into density and separation.
The experience of guides does seem quite varied. I have found that some clients feel the presence of their guides very deeply. They might appear in a recognizable form and give clear and specific guidance while others may find their guides are present but experience them in a more subtle way. Do you also find there is a continuum of ways that people experience their helpers in life and in sessions?
It varies from client to client, just like how some are more visual than others and some get information more through feeling and knowing during the Past Life and the Spirit world part of the sessions, some experience their guides in different ways. They can take on more of a physical form, appear as a shaft of light or even appear to be more of a color or mist.
One client got stuck after the death scene as he was moving into the spirit world, he just stopped maybe half way to the spirit world. At one point he noticed what he described as a red backpack. He explained that it was not a backpack, but that was the only way to describe what it looked like. Eventually, the red backpack started talking to him. It was his guide who told him he needed to deal with fear before he could move on to the spirit world.
Often when I assist my clients in connecting with spirit, I am not sure if they are getting information from higher self, a guide or a group in spirit. I do not always ask right away, but at some point, I feel it’s important to get more information about the connection. Often it is a guide, but sometimes it’s higher self or a group, often referred to as a collective.
A client who had 3 sessions with me had very different experiences in each session. In the first session we spent a long time communicating with his higher self, a great deal of information came through about him, his career, and his personal life.
In the 2nd session, the plan was to experience LBL, yet when we got ready to go to the spirit world there was some push back. We were told that he does not go where you think he goes— it’s not the Earth LBL experience for him, he goes back to his original home. When I asked if we could go there we were told no, you would not understand that experience. We continued the session by talking with his group, a collective that works with him. I feel this was the first time I realized that my client was part of this group, though it might not have been until I had a few more clients who were part of a group from another realm that works with them like a guide as I mentioned above.
His 3rd session was also interesting. Again, he met with his group and they were upset with him. He had some sort of issue with his stomach, and they had let him know that he needs to watch what he eats and drinks. They offered to do another healing on him, but this was the last time if he did not follow their advice and change his eating habits. They also said that they had helped him find his new home, and it was special because he could sit up in bed and see the first rays of the sun in the morning. They made a point that this was important for him to experience.
Before they started the healing, he said that they said he needed to be in a deeper state of hypnosis. I had worked with him multiple times and wanted to do something different, so I just created a new way to take him deeper. After the session he said that he had never been that deep before, so I guess it worked. This deepener is now part of the new Newton Institute LBL Training Manual that we started using in 2022.
He explained their healing process to me. They took cubes out of his body and stacked them up beside the surface where he was laying. Then they shined a light on them and put them back in his body. At this point they said the healing is complete. I communicated with him recently via email and he reported all is well with this part of his body and he is following their advice on what to avoid eating.
Sometimes clients express a worry that talking with guides or consciously knowing more about their soul plan is “cheating” and they are afraid to open that door. I tell them if there is something they are really not to consciously know, the guides will give vague answers or simply say- you are not to know this yet.
I have found that if an answer is connected to the lesson they are working on, that often the question will not be answered, or it might be a vague answer that does not give them too much detail. This often happens with soul agreements. They are not discussed if they have not been completed yet.
There are situations that arise where a question is not answered for some reason. The guide might say they are not going to answer or there may be a long period of silence. Often we can get information about why it cannot be answered. In my experience, I have discovered that if the answer is not provided or is vague, that they need to find that answer on their own. Spirit is not going to allow the client to ‘cheat’ and learn something they are not supposed to receive during the session.
This can work the other way as well. I did have an online client who told me that he needed to have the lights off during the session to be able to focus. Eventually we met the guide, who actually spoke with me through the client. She said, he was not honest about the lighting situation. He thought his home was messy and did not want you to see the mess, that is why he wanted the lights off.
I know some of the readers of SOTA are interested in becoming an LBL hypnotherapist and wonder what it is like to do this work. What do you think are the qualities that are important for someone to enjoy offering LBL?
I teach my own Hypnotherapy and Past Life Regression classes and I am also a Lead Trainer with the Newton Institute. I am also the registrar for MNI’s trainings, which means I review applications to take the training. I have found there are many reasons people decide to offer LBL sessions.
Curiosity about spirit guides and the spirit world are important as well as a desire to help others. Intuition is very helpful, but like with many things, the more you do this work, the more your intuition tends to expand. Personally, I find that when I am working with a very intuitive client, my intuition tends to be stronger, this often lets me know how intuitive my client actually is.
Often people who have had an LBL experience themselves find a strong desire to become an LBL Therapist. It is not uncommon for those who have lost a loved one to make this decision either before or after they have their own LBL experience.
Dr. Newton expressed that when a person is in deep grief, or is experiencing high levels of anxiety that it is not advisable to do LBL until the present day issues are resolved to some extent. What is your experience with this?
I prefer to visit with my clients on Zoom before we schedule a session, especially an LBL session. This usually gives me an idea who the person is and if there is anxiety or grief, I can usually realize it then, if not on the phone. I let them know that this is powerful, healing work, but that it is important for them to be ready for the experience. By starting with Past Life Regression session first, it lets us both know if they are ready for the LBL experience.
I usually check in with my guides if I am not sure to get a better idea of where the client is and if I feel they are not ready I can usually get an insight into how long they need to wait after the loss to be ready for the session.
In some cases, my clients have found it beneficial to start with a hypnosis session first, before the initial Past Life Regression session. This way we can work through some of what is getting in their way and again get a better idea if they are ready for the Past Life and the LBL experiences.
When working with others, do you see a trend in what is being offered to people in their sessions these days? Anything particularly surprising?
As you know, the LBL sessions are changing, not all of them, but quite often the experiences are quite different than the ones Michael wrote about in his books. I have had clients get to the spirit world and connect with guides or elders and spend several hours or more communicating with them. When that is done, they are told that’s all they need.
This can be a powerful experience, though some readers may think that the client might be disappointed that they did not have the experience like the stories in the books. That’s not the case at all. These clients receive a great deal of knowledge and wisdom from these experiences and are grateful for the opportunity to have a focused visit with spirit. This often makes it easier for them to reconnect with spirit on their own after the session.
Yes, a gift that continues to give.
Thank you Mark for sharing of your experience! ♥
Savarna Wiley MA CCHT is an LBL facilitator in the Santa Cruz area of California