Born from an extensive process of past-life and between-lives regression, the book recounts Chris Nielsen’s unexpected discovery of a former life as the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—and the profound emotional wounds, unfinished lessons, and spiritual insights that followed her into this lifetime. Moving beyond biography, the book uses Tchaikovsky’s life as a case study to illuminate how trauma, grief, identity, and longing echo across incarnations.
Blending personal experience with therapeutic and spiritual reflection, Chris offers readers a rare glimpse into the mechanics of incarnation, life purpose, and healing from the perspective of the Higher Self. At its core, this book is not about the past—it is about understanding why we are here, how love shapes our evolution, and how deep inner clarity can transform pain into meaning.
This is a book for seekers, creatives, and anyone longing to understand the hidden threads that connect suffering, love, and the soul’s long journey home.
Chris Nielsen is a spiritual author, regression therapist, and podcaster exploring the deeper meaning of incarnation, healing, and soul evolution. She is the author of Being Pyotr Ilyich – Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later, a confessional spiritual memoir born from an extensive process of past-life regression. Through her writing and her podcast, Time Traveling – A Spiritual Journey of Healing, Chris examines themes of love, grief, soul memory, and the transformative power of human experience. With a background in arts communication and cultural marketing, she brings clarity and discernment to complex spiritual subjects. Her work has been featured in ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, Business Insider, and the Miami Herald.
deeper meaning of our earthly existence.
This past incarnation defines my present life far more than any of my other previous lives. My career (in the artistic world), my family relationships, the blockages and fears I experienced before healing, and many other aspects of my life — even seemingly small details, from hobbies to literary preferences — all seem to find their explanation in my past existence as Pyotr Ilyich.
But most importantly, the deepest significance of this rediscovery lies in the continuity I recognised in my own personality, which feels, in many ways, like a natural extension of Tchaikovsky’s way of being.
WOW: How profound! What was your writing process like? Did you do a lot of planning and preparation in advance?
Chris: My book was born from more than twenty regression therapy sessions conducted over the course of a year and a half, amounting to nearly one hundred hours of trance work. The audio recordings made after each session were then transcribed almost word for word. In that sense, I believe my book was, in a very unusual and intimate way, more told than written.
In a world where AI tools increasingly risk making writing feel artificial, I feel that the way this book came into being preserves something deeply authentic: a direct connection between the soul of the author and the soul of the reader.
Because regression therapy naturally takes the form of a dialogue between therapist and patient, the therapist’s questions and some of the more technical passages — what one might call the “pure healing” dimension of the work — were removed from the final text. What remains is the essential material, presented on two levels: first, the story of Tchaikovsky’s life as seen from the most intimate angle possible; and second, the deeper answers I received from higher planes throughout my healing process.
Only light editorial intervention was made, mainly to remove repetition and allow the text to unfold withvgreater clarity and grace, since when you are under trance, you pay no attention to style. The events were also arranged in chronological order, because regression does not always reveal them that way.
So Being Pyotr Ilyich – Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later is a faithful transcription of those trance recordings — the closest possible equivalent to direct testimony — drawn from within Tchaikovsky’s life itself and from within the healing journey undergone by his spirit, and implicitly by my own. In a sense, reading this book is like listening to a live transmission from Tchaikovsky’s inner world and from my own dialogues with the Divine.
WOW: What an incredible experience. What was your research process like?
Chris: Continuing from my previous answer, my research process involved delving into the history of my own spirit. Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, all our memories are stored somewhere in the subconscious mind, whether their source lies in our present life, early childhood, or even past lives. Some people access these memories more easily, through lived experience or intuition, while for others the veil of forgetfulness remains very firmly in place.
In my case, writing this book followed naturally from my healing process. Any regression therapy begins with a problem one wishes to heal in the present life — an emotional blockage, a relational issue, a limiting behavioral pattern, a phobia, recurring nightmares, unexplained pain, and so on.
I began with emotional blockages related to my profession, as well as aspects of my personal and family life. The thread led me to this past life, which I explored in order to understand what I had lived through. But in regression, seeing the story of a past life and its key moments is only half of the process. The second half — and the essential one — is the healing itself. It is not enough to understand what you experienced; even more important is understanding why you experienced it.
That is where the release of blocked emotions begins: saying what could not be said at the time, meeting spiritual guides, the Higher Self, or the Divine, and receiving insight into the meaning of those experiences and their connection to the life one is living now.
So my research process meant following the flow of my own healing. Over the course of more than ten years, I have worked through more than thirty past lives. What I did differently in the case of my life as Tchaikovsky was that, after completing the sessions necessary for my own healing, I continued with a few additional sessions for research purposes. There were certain scenes, not essential to my healing, in which I felt the need to clarify details, relationships, or circumstances in order to offer my readers the most accurate story possible.
WOW: I find that so interesting. I see you host a podcast! Did that experience inspire your book or guide your process in any way?
Chris: I think it would be more accurate to say that things happened in exactly the opposite order: my book
Being Pyotr Ilyich inspired the creation of my podcast
Time Traveling – A Spiritual Journey of Healing, and not the other way around.
I felt that many readers wanted me to go further into the process of past-life regression, so I decided to offer something more to those who were open to understanding what lies behind the architecture of our lives. That is how the podcast was born. I literally took my book in my hands and asked myself, page by page: what might readers want to understand more deeply? Where could I offer more detail, more context, or more concrete examples from my experience, both as a patient and as a therapist?
That is how more than fifty weekly episodes came into being. I have always tried to make everything I share simple and concrete, so that anyone — whether familiar with psychology, alternative healing, or spirituality or not — can easily follow what I am talking about.
The podcast explores the deeper architecture of the soul through past-life regression, karmic memory, and emotional healing across lifetimes. I speak about existential questions such as the purpose of earthly life, how emotional wounds are formed and carried forward, what happens between incarnations, and how relationships, illness, creativity, and destiny reflect a much longer journey of the soul. I also touch on themes such as the inner child, fear of abandonment, karma, soul contracts, family patterns, psychogenealogy, life mission, depression, trauma, self-love, the Higher Self, the relationship between the soul and the Divine, and the link between blocked emotions and physical illness.
Drawing on more than a decade of personal regression experience, therapeutic training, and the spiritual revelations that inspired Being Pyotr Ilyich, the podcast moves beyond abstract spirituality into lived inner experience. Although it includes intimate insights connected to the soul journey portrayed in the book, its message is universal: it offers listeners a bridge between regression therapy, emotional healing, and everyday human transformation.
WOW: That's amazing! How did you come to learn about past life regression, and how did this wisdom shape your writing?
Chris: Today, when I look back on the last fifteen years of my life, I feel with all my heart that my steps were guided, one by one, from Above, building a path of which I was completely unaware while I was living it.
And I believe this is true for all of us: we live with a sense of spontaneity, yet we are constantly assisted and guided along a path shaped by what each of us has chosen to live, feel, and experience in this existence.
So I discovered past lives almost by chance — through a simple footnote, which only shows how much even an apparently insignificant detail can reveal. My husband had borrowed from his aunt a well-known spiritual book called The Intelligence of Matter, written by the Romanian doctor and author Dumitru Constantin Dulcan. In one footnote, he mentioned two American authors known for their books on past lives: Brian Weiss and Sandra Ann Taylor.
I was immediately fascinated and inexplicably drawn to the subject, although I knew nothing about it before. The following weekend, I rushed to a bookshop, bought the books, and read them almost in one breath, feeling instantly convinced of the truth of what I was reading, even though those ideas were completely foreign to my upbringing. I am an Orthodox Christian and was born into a fairly conservative world. But I have always been open-minded, and when something feels true to me, I am willing to follow it.
At the same time, because of several health issues that had been troubling me for years, I began seeing a therapist and master of alternative Asian medicine. He first worked with me as a therapist and later as a teacher, and he explained that my problems originated in past lives, encouraging me to explore further.
Then came a remarkable series of synchronicities. A co-worker of my husband’s turned out to be the only therapist in Central Europe trained at the Newton Institute in the United States, and with her I had my first two trance sessions, which deeply fascinated me and convinced me of the reality of other planes. Later, almost unbelievably by chance, I discovered the courses offered by the Academy of Past Life Regression in the UK, founded by the well-known author and therapist Andy Tomlinson. I became a student there and graduated after about three years of training.
What I find essential is that I do not come from a family or culture in which people believe in past lives — quite the opposite. And I am a very analytical and rational person. So the first sceptic of my own
experiences was myself. But that is precisely what gives depth to everything I have lived: I was
convinced by direct, concrete experience, not by theory alone. Today, I feel deeply the truth of
something the Asian world has taught for thousands of years, and that many of us in the West are only
now beginning to rediscover.
WOW: How profound! What do you hope people gain from reading this book?
Chris: What prompted me to write this book were the truths shared with me in trance by the Divine as part of my healing process. I would come out of trance deeply moved by the revelations I received — about how a life mission is born, how the script of a life is constructed, how one life connects to another, how a spirit evolves, what our relationship with the Divine is, how the subtle planes are organised, and how emotions shape the physical body and even influence illness.
As I write in the introduction, I felt an inner need — almost like a fire — to share all of this, as though it were a sacred duty. At a certain point, it seemed unfair to keep only for myself revelations that had been so generously offered to me.
After all, our lives are not nearly as different as they appear. We all go through similar wounds, losses, fears, and questions. So if my experience can help others understand their lives more deeply and perhaps heal, then I feel the effort was worth it.
I hope readers will come away with the sense that existence has meaning, that nothing is random or without purpose, no matter how painful certain experiences may seem. I hope they will understand that we are always assisted from the subtle planes — by guides, angels, or however each person chooses to understand that reality — and that we are deeply loved by the One who created us, regardless of religion or spiritual language.
Finally, as I say in the book’s introduction, I hope this book brings more love and light into each reader’s life, and that after turning the final page, they may live more consciously, keeping close only what truly matters and what truly defines them. In other words, I believe in living as authentically as possible — or, as my mentor used to say, in “living in truth”.
I would also be happy if this book encouraged people to become more open-minded and flexible in the way they see the world. If we truly understood that across many lives we may have carried different races, religions, and national identities, perhaps many of the divisions we take so seriously today would begin to dissolve.
WOW: That would be wonderful! What are you working on now that you can tell us?
Chris: Right now, in addition to continuing to develop my book Being Pyotr Ilyich and my podcast Time Traveling – A Spiritual Journey of Healing, I am preparing two new podcast projects.
The first is YOU ARE ENERGY – Awaken Your Healing Force, which will be a more practical podcast drawing on my thirteen-plus years of experience working with energy as a Reiki therapist. The second is NEXT LEVEL HUMAN – Elevate Your Consciousness, through which I hope to encourage people to live more purely, at a higher vibration, with more light, more love, and more authenticity, while questioning what is superficial in their lives and reconnecting with what is essential.
I believe the second podcast may be the first one I release, and I warmly invite readers to follow my YouTube channel to stay up to date with everything I am sharing.
WOW: How exciting! What advice would you share with readers who feel they have a story to tell but don't know if it's worth writing?
Chris: As I often tell my nearly ten-year-old child, every meaningful journey in life is difficult, takes time, and asks a great deal of us.
So I would say this: do not begin unless the need to write truly burns within you, because otherwise you may not have enough fuel to continue. But if you feel a clear and powerful inner call to share something, then keep going no matter what — beyond fear, beyond doubt, and beyond the opinions of others. We all have a purpose, and each of us has our own path. So I believe we should make the most of every moment of every life. More than anything, I would love to see people support one another more generously.
I was recently deeply moved by the work of a younger French author, Benjamin Carraud, whose book Goodbye, Fields of Prokhorovka: Past Life Memories of a Waffen-SS Officer I reviewed with great admiration, although we have never met. I felt moved to support him simply because the sincerity and quality of his work touched me. In the same spirit, my own book was generously endorsed by Daniel Meurois, a major French author in the spiritual field.
I am sorry that the world is often so divided. I believe that if we supported one another more, the path would become not only easier, but also far more beautiful. Too often, egos still stand in the way.
Join Tracey for a spotlight on Chris Neilsen's Being Pyotr Ilyich.
Stop by Jodi's blog for her response to our tour-themed prompt about what forgiveness means to her now, compared to earlier in life.
Visit Linda's blog for her response to our tour-themed prompt on her experience with a connection that felt ancient, familiar, or inexplicably deep.
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