What makes About Time different-

Jim Kepner’s About Time stands out as a spiritual memoir that weaves a detailed recollection of a past life in 15th-century France (as Etienne, taken in by the alchemist, Édouard) with Kepner’s decades of work in Gestalt therapy and subtle energy healing. It blends personal storytelling with themes of reincarnation, alchemy, and cross-lifetime healing, presented in a novel-like style that readers describe as both captivating and energetically resonant.

Background and perspective

Kepner brings his history as a pioneering Gestalt therapist to the work, treating the past-life narrative not as fantasy but as an exploration of consciousness, memory, and healing beyond a single lifetime. The book is framed as the first in a series, with Past the Past continuing the journey and linking modern experiences to the earlier incarnation.

How Kepner’s therapy background shapes About Time

Kepner’s decades of Gestalt body-process work-centered on embodiment, nervous-system regulation, and the body’s role in healing trauma-inform About Time’s premise that memory and transformation aren’t confined to one lifetime. He translates clinical ideas (bodily awareness, “grounding,” subtle energy, the interface of mind and body) into a spiritual memoir where a past-life narrative becomes a vehicle for exploring how consciousness, emotion, and healing carry across time.

Specific influences

• •   Embodied awareness: Kepner’s Body Process approach treats the body as a source of insight and healing. In About Time that shows up as attention to subtle, felt experiences-energy, sensation, and intuition-as pathways to understanding memory and identity beyond the rational mind.

• •   Healing across lifetimes: His work with trauma and adult survivors (e.g., Healing Tasks) emphasizes that unresolved experiences lodge in the body. The book extends that to the idea that unresolved patterns can echo across incarnations, with alchemy and reincarnation serving as metaphors for deep integration.

• •   Evolving Gestalt practice: Kepner has written about updating Gestalt theory with modern neuroscience and polyvagal insights, and that same openness to evolving, subtle-energy perspectives underpins About Time’s blend of psychotherapy and mysticism. 

In short, the book is less a departure from his clinical work than an expansion of it—using story and past-life imagery to explore the same core question he’s pursued as a therapist: how body, mind, and consciousness hold and heal experience over time.

What themes continue in Past the Past?

Past the Past picks up where About Time leaves off, deepening the spiritual-memoir thread: the soul’s journey across centuries, the interplay of memory and identity, and healing that extends beyond a single lifetime. Kepner frames it as a meditation on continuity of consciousness-how love, transformation, and subtle energy thread through what he calls “versions of yourself” that reach beyond your current incarnation.

What’s emphasized in the sequel

• •   Memory & remembrance: Étienne’s 15th-century France story returns, but the focus shifts to how a mysterious painting in Kepner’s present life reopens that past-suggesting memory, energy, and destiny are intertwined beyond linear time.

• •   Love as alchemy: The narrative explores devotion and awakening as transformative forces, with love functioning almost like an alchemical process that catalyzes change across lifetimes.

• •   The “curious project of the soul”: Kepner treats the question of many lives as a Zen-like koan-not something to be answered definitively, but a lens that pushes awareness past ordinary mental limits toward a sader, more expansive sense of self  lens that pushes awareness past ordinary mental limits toward a broader, more expansive sense of self.

• • Integration of therapy and mysticism: His background in body-oriented Gestalt work continues to inform the tone-healing isn’t just psychological but embodied and energetic, with intuition and subtle awareness playing a central role.

In essence, Past the Past broadens About Time’s exploration: from introducing a past-life recall to examining what those multiple lifetimes reveal about the soul’s ongoing evolution and the beauty that lies beyond ordinary consciousness.