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An Interview with Helen Reddy

GB: What is fascinating is that it weaves your professional career with the things you had discovered even as a child.  I think you had your first out of body experience when you were a young girl. What was that like?

HR:   At first, I thought I had died because I was out of my body.  I was looking at my body and my face.  I am lying there and I thought I had died.  That was kind of traumatic.  But at the same time, there was the realization that life does go on; that we are simply inside a body. In other words, I was not the body; I was somebody who had been in that body.  And so that raised a lot of issues with me because I had not been able to get too many of my questions answered by religion, and I actually became an atheist at age nine.  Having that experience at age 11 really brought me back to spirituality and led me on a lifelong search.  I learned about reincarnation in the mid-fifties.  There was a book called “The Search for Bridey Murphy“and that was fascinating.  I did not know anything about reincarnation, but now here was an explanation for so many of the things that religion could not give me an answer for.  Having grown up in show business, I had seen stage hypnotists; but I had never thought that maybe hypnotism could be a tool for research, nor did I have any idea that 50 years later it would be an accepted branch of science and I would practicing it.

GB:   The thought about reincarnation, about past life, about all of us being on a path has to be comforting to somebody who has a loved one at the end of their life.

HR:   Oh, definitely, and to the loved ones themselves, too, you know?  That life does continue. I believe that we are consciousness, consciousness is energy, and energy can never be destroyed.  It can be transformed, but it can never be destroyed.

GB:   What benefit would you think that caregivers might have from the services of a hypnotherapist?

HR:   I have a dear friend in Sydney.  Her husband has Alzheimer’s.  He is in his nineties now and she could not manage him at home anymore; but she faithfully sees him every day, and has every meal with him, but she herself is pretty much at the end of her rope. I have said to her, “Please come and see me because one hour of hypnotherapy equals eight hours sleep and I would really like to give you some relief for what you are going through.”  I think it can be tremendously helpful, just purely from a relaxation point of view, that somebody get to set aside their gear and go to another place.

GB:   You have Addison’s disease.  But, I also know that you had to fight with the medical community for an accurate diagnosis and it is something we go through as caregivers a lot. Do you have any advice for caregivers who do not think they are really getting the help they need?

HR:   The problem with Addison’s is it is such a rare disease. When I first went to Norfolk Island, there were three resident doctors and one of them took me into the room where they all meet.  He said, “I want you to meet someone with Addison’s disease” because none of them had ever met anybody with it so the symptoms can be confusing.  Two patients can have totally different sets of symptoms.  We have all heard stories where doctors have simply misdiagnosed or not known what it was or accused us of malingering.