Accessing Past Life Memories Through Meditation Practice

Saqib Rizvi, a meditation teacher, opens his talk "Accessing Past Life Memories" with a claim most people would call far-fetched: that remembering past lives is not only possible but achievable through a method you can practice yourself. He says he personally remembers "about 11 or 12" of his own past lives, and that the memories came to him first in dreams before he reached them in deep meditation. His central argument is that these memories are not stored on the surface of the mind but in the deepest layer of consciousness, and that the route down there is a matter of regular practice rather than a therapist's hour. What follows is an explanation of the ideas behind his six-step approach, including the parts of the talk that are easy to skim past and the parts that carry the most weight.

Is it really possible to remember your past lives?

Rizvi's opening move is to ask the reader to consider the question before worrying about technique. "If you are hearing this talk today I'm sure that deep down you know that maybe it is possible," he says at the start of the video, and he frames the rest of the talk around people who already sense that something in them is older than this life. His point is not that you need to be convinced first. It is that the sense of recognition many people report is the starting material.

He also points to a broader pattern. In the talk he notes that "a lot of yogis monks" and shamans recall past lives with ease, some even claiming memories reaching back to birth, and that "there are many many cases of children remembering past lives." He does not walk through specific cases or sources in this talk, so treat those remarks as his observations rather than established findings. What he is building toward is a claim about access: the more you practice going inward, the more of this material becomes available to you.

Why does past-life regression usually take hours?

Rizvi is clear that his method is not a substitute for past-life regression, which he describes as the traditional route. In regression, "you usually have a past life regressionist or a therapist or a hypnotherapist who works with you" and guides you through the process. The sessions are long. He says it can take "an hour or more" to reach the right state, "sometimes two hours three hours."

His alternative is framed as shorter and quicker, with a caveat that matters: it "does require us to meditate regularly." The logic is that the skill is not in a single session but in the cumulative depth of your practice. "The more we meditate it becomes easier for us to access these past lives," he says. Read this way, the six steps are less a recipe than a training sequence, each one preparing the ground for the next.

Where do past-life memories actually live?

The conceptual heart of the talk is a layered model of the mind that Rizvi illustrates with the image of an ocean. The surface, with its waves, is the conscious mind: the layer where you notice your body and the world around you, "this waking world," as he puts it. Go a little deeper and you reach the subconscious, where the automatic processes live. Your heartbeat, your digestion and breathing run without your attention, and so do habits. He gives the examples of nail-biting and driving, which becomes so automatic that you can arrive at the office without remembering the drive.

The unconscious is the next layer down, and it is the one Rizvi finds most personally instructive. He calls it the place of "your Deeper Self," which he also describes as "that part of you" you may not know is there, and he links it to patterns that shape relationships. His example is revealing. If a parent was controlling but also comforting, a child may come to associate control with safety, and in adulthood keep attracting controlling people while feeling oddly at home with them. He says this is how "a lot of people attract narcissists," though he adds that "we don't even realize that we are doing that." He describes living this pattern himself after being controlled in childhood.

Past-life memories, in his model, sit beneath even that. "The past life memories lie even deeper than the unconscious," he says, comparing them to "that Bedrock of the ocean which is very difficult to access." The difficulty, he suggests, is cultural as much as personal: because we are "very much focused on the outer world," we rarely do the inner journey that would let us reach that floor.

What is super consciousness, and why start there?

Step one, in Rizvi's sequence, is what he calls super consciousness. He defines it as "that deepest awareness of yours which is beyond the body which is beyond your" thinking, the layer that is aware of the other layers. The question he poses is almost Socratic: who is observing the thoughts, the feelings, the body? That observer is the point from which the rest of the method operates. If you cannot yet sense the observer, the past-life material remains out of reach, because you are still identified with the surface waves.

What role does the pineal gland play in this method?

Step two is pineal gland activation, and this is where the talk moves into claims that will need a reader's own judgment. Rizvi describes the gland as "very small," about "the size of a rice grain," and he argues that it can be activated and that activation "helps us access past life memories." His explanation uses an analogy to conductors: when pressure is applied to a substance that conducts, it becomes electrified. Applied to the gland, he says, this lets it tune into frequencies in the way a television tunes into channels. He presents this as his own understanding, not as a settled physiological fact, and the video does not cite a source for the mechanism.

What he is more concrete about is the practice. He suggests that you need not apply physical pressure. Instead, you can channel your breath toward the gland. "Your breath it is also known" as a route inward, and holding attention there for longer periods is how he expects the gland to respond. This matters because it keeps the method inside meditation rather than turning it into a bodily procedure.

Why does Rizvi insist on setting an intention first?

Before the practice goes deep, Rizvi emphasizes a clear intention, because the mind goes where it is pointed. His reasoning comes from his own history. He describes past lives he has recalled that were far from comfortable, including one in which he "was like a demon or a monster" in a "Dark Realm which was like a hell Realm." If you go in without direction, he warns, you may meet whatever is closest to the surface, and some of it may be painful.

His remedy is simple. Name the kind of experience you want before you begin, and say it to yourself or write it on paper. He pairs this with a note about vibration. The experience you encounter, he suggests, "can be a vibration of fear," but if you raise your vibration by "bringing love into my body," the material that arrives tends to be different. He recommends heart-centered meditations for this, and extends the sentiment outward: to loved ones, neighbors, animals, insects, the whole earth, "all existence." Intention, in this framing, is both a guide and a form of care.

What is active sensing, and how is it different from visualization?

The step Rizvi calls "the most critical" is active sensing, and it is the one most worth slowing down for. He begins with the familiar technique of looking at the inner side of closed eyelids. In the dark field you may see colors, shapes, or fractals. He links this to active imagination, a method he associates with a founding figure of modern psychology. But he argues that active imagination is not enough. In it, "you are intentionally bringing some visuals into your mind," and the images are yours to construct.

Active sensing goes further. You stop trying to produce pictures and instead attend to what arrives on its own: images, sounds, and especially "feelings and emotions which you can notice which might have a connection with those past lives." He is candid that early results may be thin. You might see a tree and think you are seeing a past life when you are simply seeing a tree from your memory of this one. His correction is that the process is about clearing thought, because "if you are having thoughts in your mind you will see" the thoughts instead. Patience and quiet are the real instruments here.

What does "connecting the dots" ask you to do?

The final step, which Rizvi calls connecting the dots, is about integration. Fragments rarely arrive as a story. He describes an image of "a swing," then a sound of laughter, then a feeling, and says the work is to notice how these pieces relate. A single moment can seem trivial alone and meaningful when linked to the others. He recommends keeping a diary to record each session, because memory of the experience fades quickly and the pattern only becomes visible across several entries.

This is also where the talk's emphasis on the unconscious becomes practical. The fragments you recover may connect to habits and attractions you already have in this life, which is why Rizvi's earlier discussion of relationship patterns is not a digression. The past-life material and the present-life patterns are, in his model, drawn from the same deep layer.

Where to go from here

If Rizvi's talk has done its job, you now have a map and a sequence: start at the surface, locate the observer of super consciousness, prepare the body and breath around the pineal gland, set a clear and caring intention, practice active sensing rather than forced imagery, and then record and connect what emerges. Reading the outline is not the same as doing it, and Rizvi himself frames the method as something that improves with regular meditation. Begin with short sessions, keep a journal from the first day, and be honest with yourself about the difference between what you observe and what you conclude.

For the complete instruction, Rizvi points viewers to his course on accessing past lives, linked in the video description on Insight Timer, along with his other offerings. The talk itself was published in November 2022 and runs about twenty-seven minutes. Watch it through once for the structure, then return to the sections on intention and active sensing when you are ready to practice.