Dr Brian Weiss

Dr. Brian Weiss is the psychiatrist who brought past-life regression from the fringes into millions of living rooms — a Columbia- and Yale-trained physician whose impeccable credentials made his story impossible to dismiss. Born in New York City in 1944, Weiss built a distinguished conventional career, rising to become founding Chairman of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, where he remains Chairman Emeritus. Nothing in his training prepared him for what happened in 1980, when a young patient he calls Catherine — plagued by nightmares, phobias, and anxiety that resisted every conventional treatment — slipped under hypnosis into what appeared to be vivid memories of previous lifetimes. The skeptical scientist was astonished; his skepticism finally gave way when Catherine began relaying messages from what she called the space between lives — including private details about Weiss's family and his firstborn son, who had died in infancy, that she could not possibly have known. Weiss waited four years before risking his reputation to tell the story. Many Lives, Many Masters (1988) went on to become one of the bestselling spiritual books of all time, translated into dozens of languages, and made him the world's leading authority on past-life regression therapy. Across more than four thousand regressions and a shelf of further bestsellers — Through Time Into Healing, Only Love Is Real, Messages from the Masters, Same Soul, Many Bodies, and Miracles Happen, co-written with his daughter Amy — he has developed a consistent, deeply comforting teaching: that we are souls, not bodies; that we have loved and lost each other across many lifetimes and will meet again; that our deepest fears and symptoms often carry stories waiting to be healed; and that, as the Masters repeatedly told him, only love is real. Featured by Oprah Winfrey on the Emmy-winning Super Soul Sunday, Weiss no longer takes individual patients, devoting himself instead to books, recorded meditations, and experiential workshops that have taught his gentle regression techniques to audiences worldwide. His claims sit outside mainstream psychiatry, and he presents them not as dogma but as the testimony of a scientist transformed by what his patients showed him. For anyone carrying grief, the fear of death, or the ache of a love lost, Dr. Weiss offers perhaps the most reassuring message on Spiritpedia: that nothing truly ends, and no one is ever really gone.