How to Do Past Life Regression at Home, Safely

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 20, 2026Oct 20, 2026 · How we write

You can try a past life regression at home as a six-minute guided imagery exercise: eyes closed, a safe room, a door, one scene from another time, and a way back. Treat what comes as imagination, not memory. Skip it if you have psychosis, epilepsy, dissociation or recent trauma.

Press Start and follow the highlighted step; each lasts a minute. You can also read the steps first and do them at your own pace. This is the same structure most past life regression recordings use, minus the long countdown into trance and the scene of dying that some scripts include. The full background, including what experiments found about such “memories”, is on our main page about past life regression.

Before you start: who should not try this alone

Medical sources write about hypnosis, not about home imagery exercises, and we found no guidance written for this exact situation. The logic carries over, though: deep relaxation, suggestion and vivid scenes are the same ingredients. So we follow their lists. Please don’t do this alone, and talk to your doctor or therapist first, if:

• you have schizophrenia, have had psychosis, or hear or see things others don’t (NHS; the Royal College of Psychiatrists says hypnosis could make psychosis worse);
• you have epilepsy or have had seizures (NHS, Cleveland Clinic);
• you have a dissociative disorder, or often feel unreal or cut off from your body (Cleveland Clinic);
• you went through something traumatic recently, or live with PTSD or flashbacks (Cleveland Clinic);
• you are in extreme emotional distress right now (Cleveland Clinic), or have thoughts of death or of harming yourself: then please use our help page instead;
• you want to find out whether you were abused as a child. A 1998 report for the Royal College of Psychiatrists warned that memories recovered by “extraordinary means” are likely to be false; a trauma-informed therapist is the right person for that question.

Also skip it after alcohol or drugs, and when you are very tired. If none of this applies, Cleveland Clinic’s view on self-hypnosis is that it is safe for most people to try on their own.

What you need

• Twenty minutes without interruptions: six for the exercise, the rest for settling and writing. Phone on silent.
• A chair or a bed. Sitting keeps you from falling asleep; lying down is fine if you rarely doze off.
• A notebook and pen within reach, open to a blank page.
• A light room. Not dark: when you open your eyes, you should see the room at once.
• One intention, said in your own words. For example: “I’m going to see what my imagination makes of another time.” In one of the psychologist Nicholas Spanos’s 1991 experiments, how convincing people found the scene depended on whether they were told it was memory or imagination.

The script, step by step

Each step has a reason, so you can change the exercise without losing the point.

1. Arrive. A longer out-breath slows you down, and feeling your weight keeps one foot in the room. Opening your eyes ends the exercise at any point.
2. A safe room. Most guided scripts have some version of this. It gives you a place to return to without leaving the exercise, if a scene becomes too much.
3. A door. The door marks the switch from “here” to “imagined elsewhere”. Saying out loud that what comes is imagination keeps you from treating the scene as evidence later.
4. Your feet. Starting with something small and concrete, like shoes or the ground, is common in published regression scripts. A whole scene is hard to summon, a pair of feet is easy, and the rest builds from there.
5. One ordinary moment. We ask for an everyday scene, not a dramatic one, and leave out the death scene that many scripts include. You lose nothing useful, and the exercise stays gentle enough to do alone.
6. Come back. One question, then back through the door, then the body, then five things you can see. Naming objects in the room is a common grounding step: it moves attention outward.

If you would rather hear the steps than read them, record them on your phone in your own voice, slowly, with pauses of about 40 seconds after each one, and play it back.

If nothing comes

That happens a lot and means nothing bad. In the first of Spanos’s 1991 studies, about two-thirds of 110 students produced no past life at all under the same suggestions as the rest. People who get absorbed easily in films, books and daydreams tend to see more; which says something about imagination.

Some people have little or no mental imagery. Researchers named this aphantasia in 2015. If that is you, do the exercise in words: write down what someone in another time might be wearing, where they might be standing, what they might want. The questions work the same way.

If you feel you are “just making it up”: you are, and that is the exercise. Keep going and see what you make up.

After the exercise: how to write it down

Write within ten minutes. Imagined scenes fade fast, and they also grow: the second time you tell a story, it gains details. A short structure helps:

1. What I saw: the feet, the place, the people, the scene, in plain words.
2. What I felt in the scene and in my body while I was there.
3. The answer to “what does this have to say to me now?”, the first word or image.
4. Where this might come from: any film, book, game, trip, family story or picture it reminds you of. Don’t skip this one.

How to read what you saw

Treat the scene the way you would treat a dream you want to understand. Two things from the research help.

First, details often come from somewhere. The Finnish psychiatrist Reima Kampman, who ran regression experiments with students in the 1960s and 1970s, often found the source of a “past-life” detail by asking again under hypnosis: the person remembered a book read years earlier, and the book contained the detail. The term for this is cryptomnesia, remembering without knowing it is a memory. Your fourth note above is for exactly that.

Second, how real it feels says little about where it came from. Stevenson wrote that a strong emotional experience during regression “provides no assurance” that a real memory was recovered. People who report past-life memories also make more of one kind of memory error in lab tests, according to a 2009 Harvard study by Meyersburg and colleagues.

What remains useful is the question “why this story, why now?” People often find a theme from their present life in their scene: a wish to leave, a fear of being trapped, a longing for a simpler life. That is worth thinking about whatever you believe about past lives.

Self-hypnosis recordings and apps: what to look for

If you choose a recording instead of this exercise, listen to the first few minutes once before using it. A careful recording tells you that you can stop at any time, gives you a safe place, avoids telling you what to expect, and brings you back slowly. Be wary of recordings that promise to “heal” illnesses, to reveal your real past life, or to free you from “attachments”, and of ones that walk you through your own death. Keep the volume low, and never listen while driving.

What this page does not promise. This exercise won’t show you a real past life, and we don’t claim that past lives are real or unreal. It isn’t therapy and doesn’t treat anxiety, phobias, trauma or any illness. It is an imagination exercise with a safe way in and out, and some questions for afterwards.

Related: past life regression: what the research found · meditation for spiritual awakening · dark night of the soul · spiritual journal prompts · help lines