Can You Meditate to Go Back In Time?

When you think of meditation, you probably don’t think of time-traveling. But meditation can hold so many mysteries to the new practitioner, it does beg the question, can you use meditation as a means to travel back in time?

I’m gonna abstain from giving a binary yes or no answer, since everyone’s experience is different, and while some experiences may seem incredible, meditation is a very personal experience and what happens during the experience will largely be up to you, so long as you are doing a meditation that tailors to a specific need or a general meditation. 

My answer is gonna be leaning more toward a yes, and I’ll get more into why.

More than anything, it’s your mind taking you to places when you meditate. Even outside of meditation, you could say that you are always traveling in time when you’re not meditating, in the sense that the mind’s awareness often lies in the present or future. 

Now, our view of the past is many times biased to recall what’s positive, and it makes it tempting to want to live in the past. 

But it’s only when we have an objective view of things that we see both sides. And it’s often more worth it to be in the present, even if most of the recalled past turns out to be positive memories. 

Traveling Back In Time With Meditation

I can’t speak for physically traveling back in time, since I’m no one to invalidate someone else’s experience, but mentally, you can certainly recall things with meditation that might’ve been buried in the form of trauma or suppressed memories in the past. 

You then bring it to the present and in turn, meditation gives the sensation that you are traveling back in time, allowing you to relive that experience. 

Sometimes, it’s what we need for growth, whereas other times, it’s just clinging onto the past as a means to seek comfort. It can be comfortable to stay in the same place but it usually never leads to something positive, in the sense that it doesn’t allow you to grow. 

On the flip side, accepting the present as it is, while fully setting aside the past and future is what allows you to start living instead of letting life happen to us. 

It can feel intimidating to take such a protagonistic role in our present when we are used to the comfort of staying in the past. But there’s a correlation between wanting to meditate constantly and being in the present moment. 

Out of Body Experiences and Time Travel

Some have an easier time having out-of-body experiences through meditation. Out-of-body experiences mimic many of the sensations you get with lucid dreaming, but it’s usually for those that have reached an advanced level of awareness and are able to remain conscious as their body is asleep. 

Many individuals that have out-of-body experiences report traveling to the past and to the future, so in that sense, you could say that meditation could help you indirectly travel back in time in a way that feels more physical than mental. 

After all, meditation is a facilitator to many things, and entering a deep state of calm and focus is a sweet spot to have many experiences that would be pretty unknown or even incredible for the average individual. Our scope of reality is limited to a physical plane and what we experience on a day-to-day basis. 

Some also use out-of-body experiences to recall past lives, and if you’re more spiritually inclined, you’ll often benefit from the practice if your goal is to have out-of-body experiences. 

Disconnecting From Time

The beauty of meditation is that it allows you to disconnect from time, almost allowing you to forget time exists when you are in a meditative state. 

You’ll be less concerned about how much time is less and in fact, you’ll many times not want the timer to ring because the meditation makes you feel so good. 

When you’re disconnected from time, you might stumble upon memories from the past vividly, where you might’ve not been able to recall them before had you not meditated, since meditation does allow you to tap into the subconscious where you keep memories of your past, be they negative or positive. 

For the negative ones, they’ll often serve as a test to go to the next stage and up your meditation game by testing yourself in the form of discomfort. 

Over the long haul, many start feeling disassociated from time, similarly to what happens when you meditate too much, where you might start conflating some of the events you experience during meditation with your day-to-day life. 

Should You Travel To The Past?

I always recommend taking the meditation experience as it goes, rather than resisting it, but always having the goal of bringing your attention back into the present. 

Because sometimes, your mind will inevitably navigate to the past, as it is its only route to escape the practice and get far away from the discomfort that shows up in the present moment. 

The idea of not experiencing any discomfort during meditation seems attractive, but it also defeats the purpose of the practice, rendering it a waste of time. 

So long as you acknowledge that the mind is attempting to move to the past, accept it and gently bring your attention to the now, you’ll be training yourself to remain in the present. 

But if your mind takes something from the past and brings it to the present, that’s different, that’s just an undealt part of you that you now have the opportunity to overcome, in a completely safe environment. 

However, it’s worth noting that you can’t change the past, no matter how hard you try, which is one of the reasons to not stay stuck in the past and instead focus on what’s within your control because while it may seem obvious, the present is all you have. 

And the more you learn to be comfortable with it, the more enjoyable the present becomes, even to the degree where you might find it better than the past since you’d be taking an active role being the captain of your ship, which in this case, is your mind. 

The past can store pleasant memories and it’s a great way to lure you in to stay, but the present can hold even more pleasant memories that play in real-time. 

This might seem easier to grasp in theory but it becomes harder in practice, since, considering that you’re the captain of your ship, you can steer the ship in the direction you want, so in that sense, you are in control of bringing your ship to a pleasant place in the present that will often rival the one you experienced in the past. 

It sounds easy to do but it’s hard because it can take a lot of trial, error, and failure to grow comfortable with what you have in the now.