Prati Prasav Meditation: Healing Past Lives, Trauma & the Soul
Apr 17, 2026
I have been practising meditation since 1973. In those decades I have worked with Osho's Active Meditations, the 112 methods of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, practices from Buddha's lineage, methods from Mahavira's tradition, and teachings from enlightened masters across many paths.
I have gone deep into Tantra, breathwork, somatic healing, dream work and hypnosis for healing. I have taught thousands of individuals across the world. And of all the practices I have encountered on this journey, Prati Prasav Meditation is one of the most revolutionary, and one of the least understood.
I want to share it with you in depth, as something I lived through for five years, every day, that took me back through this life, through my birth, through the womb, through conception, and into multiple past lives, rewriting my inner script at the soul level in ways I could not have imagined when I started.
If you feel called to this practice, I hope this article gives you everything you need to understand what it is and what becomes possible when you commit to it sincerely.
A Video With Me & Osho Niranjana:
What Prati Prasav Actually Is, & Where It Comes From
Prati Prasav is a Sanskrit term that means, to go back to the source. It is a meditation practice that works by moving backwards through time, starting from the present moment and unwinding through memory, body sensation, breath and sound, going further and further back until the process reaches the root of what it is looking for.
Osho spoke about this method in several of his discourses. He described it as a practice used by the disciples of Buddha and also by the disciples of Mahavira, which places it among the oldest documented meditation practices in human history. When I first heard Osho mention it, I was intrigued immediately. At that point I had no framework for past lives, I had been raised in an atheist family in California, and the concept simply wasn't part of my world. I left home at fifteen, hitchhiked through North America, Europe, the Middle East, and eventually found my way to India, where I met Osho in 1973. But even with everything I had already encountered on that journey, past lives were not something I had any real relationship with.
What drew me to Prati Prasav initially was much more personal and immediate. I wanted to unwind the pain I had accumulated as a child. I wanted to be free of the suffering that was still living inside me. I started the practice not to explore past lives but simply to heal this one.
What happened over the following five years went far beyond anything I had anticipated.
How I Started, & Where It Led
The method begins simply. Each night before sleep, instead of just drifting off, you lie down and start recalling your day, but not from the beginning. You start from the present moment and move backwards through time, like rewinding a film.
As you move back through the day, certain moments will stand out. Maybe it is a conversation that carried strong emotion, or a moment that touched your heart, or even a situation that produced a reaction you didn't fully express. When you reach one of those moments, you don't just note it in your mind. You go into it with your whole body. You breathe into it. You let the movement, the sound, the emotion that belongs to that moment move through you.
On the first night, you might only unwind through the current day. The next day, you may go back three days. Then a week. Then a month. Then three months, six months, a year. You gradually extend the range, building a momentum in the body, mind and soul that eventually carries the practice unwinding further backwards on its own.
When I started, I was focused entirely on this life and on the accumulated pain of my personal history. I was unwinding through memory after memory, reliving and releasing traumas I had been carrying for years. And it worked. I could feel the knots loosening. I could feel the stagnation in my body beginning to move.
Eventually, after about 9 months of practicing this method, I reached my birth. I relived my birth trauma and the shock and intensity of arriving in this world, and I thought, "This is it. I've reached the beginning. The work is done." But the process didn't stop. It kept unwinding. I found myself moving back into the womb, into the nine months before birth, with all the impressions and sensations that were absorbed there. Then back to the moment of conception. And then, from conception, the process jumped into my previous life's death. And from that death, it began unwinding backwards through that entire life.
I went on this unwinding journey, night after night for five years. Through multiple past lives. Through patterns and programs held at the soul level that I had been carrying across lifetimes without knowing it. What emerged from that process was a deep understanding of the architecture of human suffering and the mechanics of rebirth.
Why Most Healing Stays on the Surface
Before I go further into the method, I want to explain why Prati Prasav reaches places that most other healing approaches don't.
When something happens to us that overwhelms our capacity to process it, such as a trauma, a shock, a loss, a moment of profound fear or shame, the natural flow of that experience gets interrupted. We can't fully feel it in the moment. We suppress it, dissociate from it, or simply don't have the resources to meet it completely. The energy of that experience doesn't disappear. It goes inward. It lodges in the body as an incomplete knot of energy and presents itself as tension, numbness, chronic reactivity, a persistent sense of something unresolved.
These knots accumulate over a lifetime. And not just over this lifetime. The teaching of Prati Prasav holds that incomplete experiences from past lives transmigrate with the soul at death. When the soul is dying, the whole body-mind-soul system moves naturally toward forgiveness, toward love, toward release, because it wants to come into wholeness. But if there are incomplete issues that cannot be fully released before death, those form a concentrated bundle of unresolved energy that travels with the soul into the next life.
That bundle seeks a womb that resonates with it. The parents we are born to, the ancestral line we come into, the family dynamics we find ourselves in, none of this is random. It matches the karmic pattern the soul is carrying. Two lines of energy run parallel in every human being. The first is the ancestral line and the second, the karmic line. Both are in resonance with each other. Both need to be unwound for genuine healing to reach the deepest level.
This is what makes dis-ease so persistent. What we experience as physical illness, emotional suffering, or recurring patterns that we cannot seem to shift despite years of work, these often have their roots not just in this life but in the soul memory carried across multiple lives. The body holds all of it. Prati Prasav is one of the few practices that can actually reach it.
One of the most important things I learned through five years of this practice is that memory operates on three distinct levels, and each requires a different mode of access.
The first layer is intellectual memory. This is what most people mean when they talk about remembering something and it is a conscious narrative of events stored in the mind. Intellectual memory has a natural barrier. Most people cannot consciously recall anything before the age of two or three. Some people find their earliest accessible memories begin at four, five, even seven years old.
The second layer is body memory. The body records everything, regardless of whether the intellectual mind was developed enough to retain it. Your birth is a body memory. Your time in the womb is a body memory. The emotional climate of your conception is a body memory. None of this was stored in the intellectual mind because the intellectual mind did not yet exist. But it is all there, held in the tissue, the nervous system, the breath patterns, the chronic tensions of the body.
Body memory is not accessed through thinking. It is accessed through reliving and through breath, movement, sound, and the willingness to let the body lead rather than the mind. When the practice moves into full-body reliving, this is the layer it begins to reach. And once body memory is activated and in motion, it naturally carries you down into the third layer.
The third layer is soul memory. This is the deepest level and the record of experiences carried across lifetimes, written into the soul and from there into the very structure of the body that formed around it. Soul memory cannot be reached through intellectual recall. It cannot even be reached through body memory alone until the momentum of the practice has built sufficiently. But when it becomes accessible, and it does, with time and consistency, what opens up is profound. The soul begins to reveal the patterns it has been carrying, the lives it has lived, the incomplete experiences that have been seeking resolution across multiple incarnations.
Understanding these three layers completely changed how I approach healing work. The reason most therapy stays on the surface is that it works primarily with the intellectual layer with conscious narrative and understanding. Understanding a trauma intellectually can bring genuine relief. But it rarely reaches what is held in the body, and it almost never reaches what is held at the soul level. Prati Prasav goes all the way down.
The Mechanics of Release & Saying What Couldn't Be Said
There is a precise mechanism at the heart of Prati Prasav that I want to describe clearly, because it is often the part that people miss.
Incomplete experiences are completed through expression, specifically through saying or doing, in the reliving, what could not be said or done at the time of the original experience.
Osho described this beautifully. He said that trauma comes in through the front door, through the conscious mind, and then moves into the subconscious where it gets buried. Healing reverses this movement where the buried material comes back up from the subconscious into the conscious mind, and from there it needs to be released through full expression. Without that final step and without the speaking, the sound, the physical expression, the material surfaces but doesn't leave. It remains as an entanglement.
In practice, this might look like you are moving back through a memory of someone who insulted or hurt you. As you relive the moment, you feel the impact of it in your body, like the arrow in the chest, the heat of shame or rage, the catch in the breath. Now, instead of suppressing the response as you did at the time, you give it full expression. You say what you couldn't say then. You stand up if you need to. You stomp, scream, cry, push against something. You let the body complete what it started.
When this happens authentically and when the expression is real, there is an unmistakeable release. Something pops open. The energy that was held there moves through and out. What was a knot becomes space. It is a literal felt experience in the body, and once you have felt it, you understand completely why intellectual understanding alone is never enough.
The same principle applies to body memories from before conscious recall, and to soul memories from past lives. The reliving may look different, more visceral, more unfamiliar, coming through sensation and sound rather than clear imagery, but the mechanism is identical. The body needs to complete what was left incomplete. Breath, movement and sound are the vehicles through which this happens.
Prati Prasav, Karmic Healing & the Ancestral Line
Through my five years of unwinding into past lives, one of the most significant things I came to understand is the relationship between karmic patterns and ancestral lineage, and how precisely these two lines are aligned in the process of rebirth.
When we die, the soul moves naturally toward wholeness. There is an opening toward love, forgiveness & release. But whatever cannot be released carries forward. That unresolved bundle of energy which consists of the incomplete experiences, the unfinished expressions, the patterns that never found resolution transmigrates with the soul and seeks a new womb.
The womb it finds is not random. It resonates with what the soul is carrying. The family we are born into holds a field that matches our karmic imprint. The parents' ancestral patterns and our own karmic patterns are in alignment, which is why the same themes, the same emotional dynamics, the same types of wounding often appear across generations in a family. We are not just inheriting our parents' patterns. We are meeting our own soul patterns through the vehicle of the family we chose.
This means that healing work needs to address both lines. For the karmic line and the soul-level patterns, Prati Prasav is one of the most direct and effective tools I know. For the ancestral line, Family Constellation work is particularly powerful. And Osho's Dynamic Meditation, which I practised intensively for a long time, works on both lines simultaneously, which is part of what makes it such an extraordinary gift for anyone sincere about deep inner work.
When I speak about this to seekers in our community, what I often see is a recognition and a sense that this framework explains something they have always felt but never had language for. The recurring patterns that don't respond to conventional therapy. The inexplicable fears or hang-ups that don't connect to anything in this life. The sense of carrying something that belongs to a larger story than the one that started at birth. Prati Prasav is the practice that allows you to follow those threads all the way back to their source.
How to Build a Prati Prasav Practice That Actually Works
Prati Prasav, like all profound meditation, requires regularity, a consistent time, and a protected container.
You commit to a specific time each day. For most people, the natural time is the transition into sleep, though some practitioners do the work in the morning or at a dedicated time in the afternoon. At that time, every day, you enter the practice, with no exceptions.
What happens when you hold this commitment is that the body-mind-soul system starts to organise itself around it. The inner being begins to prepare for the unwinding at the appointed time. The process starts to move on its own. You don't have to work hard to access the material, it is waiting for you, ready to move, because you have been consistent enough for the system to trust that this is a real container and not an occasional experiment.
The reverse is equally true. If you establish a practice and then skip it and if something else takes priority during the time you committed to the work, the material doesn't simply pause and wait. It begins to surface at other times. You can then experience unbidden memories, unexpected emotional releases, dreams that feel more like relivings as signs that the inner being is still moving, but without the safe structure you created.
I recommend beginning with a clear commitment and with a specific number of days, the same time each day, the same space. Twenty-one days is a meaningful starting point. Treat it the way you would treat any serious sadhana, with consistency, with respect for the process, and with the understanding that what you are doing has real momentum and real consequences.
Who Prati Prasav Is For & What Preparation Helps
I am often asked whether Prati Prasav is for everyone. My answer is if you feel called to it, it is for you. But feeling called to it and being prepared for it are two different things.
Prati Prasav will surface material that needs to move through the body with intensity. It will bring up grief that has been held for years and rage that was never expressed. You can also experience fear that lodged in the nervous system before the mind had words for it. For this work to be effective, you need to have some capacity for emotional fluidity and some experience of letting emotion move through you via breath, movement and sound, rather than suppressing it back into the mind.
If you have no foundation in meditation or emotional release work, I would encourage you to build one before diving deep into Prati Prasav. Osho's Active Meditations are ideal preparation, particularly Dynamic Meditation and Mystic Rose, because they systematically develop emotional fluidity and open the full chakra system. Vipassana in the tradition of Buddha is also valuable. Any powerful breathwork practice that has given you experience of emotional release will serve you here as well.
If you approach Prati Prasav purely from the intellectual mind and are treating it as a memory exercise rather than a full-body reliving, the practice will stay on the surface. You will remember things but not release them. You will understand things but not complete them. The depths that Prati Prasav can reach require you to be willing to feel, to sound, to move and to let the body lead and trust what comes through it.
I also want to say something about people who have experienced severe trauma. Prati Prasav can be extraordinarily healing for deep trauma, I have seen this again and again in my own experience and in the work I do with others. But severe trauma also means there may be material that needs a skilled guide or therapeutic support alongside the meditation practice. Trust your own discernment about this. The goal is to move toward wholeness, not to retraumatise.
The Fruits of Deep Practice
After five years of daily Prati Prasav, moving through this life and into multiple past lives, what I can tell you is that the inner script of your being can change.
The image I return to again and again is fluidity. Before this work, we are all carrying varying degrees of stagnation, and places where the flow of life energy has been halted, where incomplete experiences have formed dams in the river of our being. These stagnant patterns show up as physical tension, emotional reactivity, recurring relationship patterns, inexplicable limitations, the persistent sense of carrying something we cannot name.
As the work deepens and the knots dissolve, what replaces them is flow. Not the absence of challenge or difficulty, but a fundamental ease in the body. A continuity of being that moves freely from the deepest past all the way into the present moment. A quality of presence and aliveness that was not available before. A capacity for love, peace and genuine connection with other human beings, that grows as the stagnation releases.
People who have practised Prati Prasav sincerely report changes that go far beyond what they anticipated. These people see chronic physical conditions shifting. They see relationship patterns that had persisted for decades suddenly releasing their grip. Many form a new relationship to the body.
An Invitation to Begin
For those who want to go deeper, to work with Prati Prasav within a guided series, alongside powerful Tantra and meditation practices, and within a community of sincere seekers on the path, I invite you to join us at Tantra Essence. We offer retreats, and online programs. The journey toward wholeness is one that benefits enormously from being shared and from practising alongside others who are walking the same path, guided by teachers who have genuinely lived what they teach.
Watch our videos, explore our courses, join our community, and share this article with anyone you feel it might reach. The more human beings who have access to these practices, the more healing becomes possible individually, and also collectively. This whole earth can become a paradise when enough people are committed to the process of awakening.
