I had the pleasure of talking to Amy Shapiro last week, and I'd like to share my experience with you. Amy is a priceless resource for this work, not only because of her 18 published books and the fact that she uses the Awareness Techniques in her counseling practice, but she actually met William Swygard. (The only other person that I know who met him was Miguel Paredes, and I did not get the chance to speak to him before he passed in 2016.) I will include the audio of Amy's description because meeting Swygard was such a big part of her personal journey. But I also got to talk to Amy about her work and her use of the advanced techniques from Books 2 & 3. 

Amy is one the few people I know who use the Awareness Techniques in addition to hypnosis in the practice:

“This made me very curious: if this (the Awareness Technique) isn’t hypnosis, then what is hypnosis and how is it different. And so back in 1993 I signed up for a seminar series at the New England Society of Hypnotherapy, and that was a week long training. And from that I learned a lot of hypnotherapy principles and techniques, and saw that there was a lot of similarity in terms of the work I was already doing in guided meditation and guided visualization. And what was similar is that both hypnotherapy and the Awareness Techniques were ways to access unconscious information, unconscious material, deep soul level material. That’s where they were the same. But they differ in that the Awareness Techniques are such that the person undergoing the experience has full control over it; at no point are they un-conscious. And that’s why its important to me to continue to use the term 'Awareness Techniques' as opposed to other names... that’s been given to the techniques. Because I do want people to know that they’re not going to lose any awareness in the process of this, they’re only going to expand their awareness. Where with the hypnotherapy, you can help the person access their unconscious material and also instruct them that they will not remember when they come back to their conscious (state). And that is where there is a very big separation between hypnotherapy and the Awareness Techniques, is you’re always in control. You can stop the session at any moment and then come back to it later at your will. Where in hypnotherapy, typically, people are guided by someone else. I always say to my clients, once you’ve come for a session, and you’ve gotten the basics of the technique, its perfectly safe to do this for yourself. You don’t have to worry about getting caught somewhere, trapped in a time warp. You’re never going to lose yourself. Nor are there any 'parlor game' tricks with the Awareness Techniques, as you find sometimes with people who do hypnotherapy for entertainment purposes, where they have you take on a persona of a duck, or whatever manipulated thing they have you do. There’s never that kind of shenanigan with the Awareness Techniques."

I compared notes with Amy on my experiences in running people between lives and those of the Michael Newton LBL process, specifically my issue of a "checklist" of experiences: the life review, meeting the guide, the soul group reunion, the life planning session and putting it to the council; all of which have occurred but not in that order and not every time:

"Think of it this way. When you’re learning to cook, it helps to have a recipe, and a recipe is a checklist. But when you’ve mastered enough recipes, and you understand the concept of ingredients and what works well with what, you get to make up your own recipe… So look at it like that’s just one recipe, it doesn’t mean its the only one."

Amy has worked extensively with the Multi-Plane Awareness in Book 2:

"The concept of a ‘council’ might actually be all of your plane consciousnesses. ..I do believe the Akashic records, or soul records, are stored on the 7th plane, so probably that’s where we do go when we’re reviewing our records."

(That syncs with the information from Helen Hoag's book that I mentioned in a previous post. Hoag postulated that we begin our between lives journey on the 4th plane, and work our way up to the 7th before returning to the 3rd plane to incarnate.)

When I remarked that it is called “The Awareness Techniques”, plural: 

“To me its like house cleaning. I like to use analogies… so if I’m having company coming over, of course I’m going to get my house cleaned. So its like, clear out your soul record, get your house cleaned, and then meet all your higher consciousnesses (in the  Multi-Plane technique)… People have so much junk that they have to get rid of. “

On utilizing the connection to our higher planes:

"I think we are seeing evidence of integration with higher planes all around us in this information age. Because all of these warp speed rapid pace breakthroughs going on with cyberspace, technology and applications, they’ve all filtered down from the higher planes. So there are people who are receptive even if they haven’t gone through the recipe; they are still connecting to their higher planes where these ideas are coming through and coming from. I think even unwittingly, people are starting to have awakenings to higher plane experiences even if they haven’t become aware that they have these specific higher plane consciousnesses with a name and a function. I think the filters are really thinned out right now."

BB: The implication is, that by consciously pursuing these higher planes we can access that knowledge and bring it back down to the 3rd plane with us.

AS: Exactly, we can participate more actively and mindfully and fruitfully here. ..You know the old cliche, “an idea whose time has come”, well anybody can be the vehicle for these ideas whose time has come. But you have to be open, and you have to clean your house first, to have the mental and psychic space to be open."

Amy's website is http://newagesages.com. I will be doing some sessions with Amy and will update you when they occur. 

PS: Audio takes a few seconds to load.