|
TIBETAN
DREAM YOGA
How dreams can help -
His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama said:
How Dreams Can Help Us Some contemporary psychologists consider lucid dreaming a valuable practice for personal growth. This model is, however, different from Tibetan dream yoga. The spiritual practice goes deeper, helping us work with the great passages of life and death. Tibetan dream yoga teaches us how to navigate the groundlessness of moment-to-moment existence, which typically makes no intellectual sense. It is at this level that we cut through the illusory nature of mind and truly experience our marvelous human existence.
Cultivating our innate ability to wake up within the dream can: • Increase clarity and lucidity, both waking and
sleeping Awakening within the dreamThe seminal Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly. Upon awakening, he wondered whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Chuang Tzu's musings underscore a fundamental truth: life is like a dream.
Spiritual life is about awakening from the dream of unreality. The word Buddha
itself is from the word bodhi, "awakeful." Buddhist
wisdom and practice help us to awaken to who and what we truly are, and
to recognize the difference between the real and the unreal in our daily
life. All of our spiritual practices are designed to awaken us from the
daydream of illusion and confusion, where we are like sleepwalkers,
semiconsciously muddling our way through life.
Self-knowledge through spiritual awakening helps us become masters of circumstances and conditions, rather than victims. This is why the Armenian spiritual master George Gurdjieff said: "Contemporary man is born asleep, lives asleep, and dies asleep. And what knowledge could a sleeping man have? If you think about it and at the same time remember that sleep is the chief feature of our being, you will soon understand that if man wishes to obtain knowledge, he should first of all think about how to awaken himself, that is about how to change his being."
South American shamans call this awakening from the dream of life "shapeshifting": entering into a spiritual journey with the explicit purpose of transformation. Shapeshifting and other forms of conscious dream-work can, through regular practice, help us experience other realms of existence, visit our dear departed, and achieve spiritual mastery.
Australian aborigines say we all live in the dreamtime: we are like
dream characters, living out our lives beyond the illusion of being born
and dying. Tibetan masters call this dreamtime the bardo, or
intermediate stage. Bardos exist between the ending of one state and the
beginning of another, such as birth and death - or death and rebirth.
Dreaming, too, is a bardo, marking the seemingly unstructured zone
between waking and sleeping.
Tibetan Buddhism is unique among Buddhist schools in teaching us how to awaken within the dream and how to practice spiritually while sleeping. This is the essence of Tibetan dream yoga, and the focus of all the practices associated with it. The Yoga of the Dream State, an ancient Tibetan manual on the practice of dream yoga and lucid dreaming teaches that we can learn five spiritually significant wisdom lessons through assiduously practicing this path of awakening:
•
Dreams can be altered through will and attention • Dreams are unstable, impermanent, and unreal — much like fantasies, magical illusions, mirages, and hallucinations
•
Daily perceptions in the everyday waking state are also unreal
The Six Yogas of Tibet
The Spiritual Benefits of Tibetan Dream Yoga
It takes about an hour to cycle through all four stages; then we go back
in reverse order to stage 1. Before beginning the cycle again, however, we
experience rapid eye movements (REM) under our closed lids. Research shows
that this is when we dream. We spend twenty to twenty-five percent of our
sleep time in this state.
• "Clear light"
dreams: spiritual visions, blessings, and energy openings Under these three broad
divisions, dreams can be divided into a further six categories: • Dreams of events that
occurred while we were still awake
Recurrent dreams, nightmares, dreams of death, and other kinds of commonly
reported dreams all fall within the first four dream categories. In the
interests of developing deeper awareness of your dreams, you may find it
helpful to identify the category that applies whenever you recall a
particular dream.
The Practices of Tibetan Dream Yoga It is important to create a spiritual context for the practice of Tibetan
dream yoga. Lucid dreaming can easily be misused to perpetuate the
problems we experience in our waking lives. For example, one might direct
one's dream toward a gratifying encounter or a vengeful fantasy. You will
find that the techniques on Tibetan Dream Yoga somehow don't work
as well when used for such purposes.
Tibetan dream yoga practice comprises three parts: • Daytime practice, designed
to help us recognize the dreamlike nature of all existence and thereby
prepare us to experience our dreams as vividly as we do our waking
activities During the day, practice these
four points:
Reminding ourselves of these four truths throughout our waking hours helps
to dissolve the barrier between the dream of life and the sleeping dream.
As we become more adept at these practices, we begin to regard our
nighttime dreams as continuations of our waking dream and we learn how
to bring habitual awareness to both. Mirror PracticeThe following mirror practice is an effective way of perceiving the
dreamlike nature of “reality”,
and especially of “self”. From time to time during the day, take a few
minutes to do it.
1 Stand in front of a mirror and look into your own eyes.
2. Hold up a hand mirror behind your right or left ear and look at its
reflection in the larger mirror. Keep angling the hand mirror so as to
fragment and multiply your image as much as possible. Let your mind
fragment along with the image. 3. After a few minutes,
angle the hand mirror back until you return to the original, single image
in the mirror in front of you.
The analogy of a mirror image is, like dreams, traditionally used to
describe the insubstantial nature of our everyday experience. The mirror
practice helps bring that teaching to life. The fragmented image is the
kind we might see in a dream; yet we are seeing it while we're fully awake
— or are we?
Allowing your mind to "fall apart" also helps ventilate the
solidity we typically attribute to our world, and especially to our
"self." Here is a traditional dream yoga practice you can do with a partner. This is an immensely useful technique, not only for challenging the distinction between sleeping dreams and the dream of being awake, but also for applying your training to practical, everyday situations. 1 - Insult, blame, and criticize your partner. Your partner should listen to all of this as echoes; empty sounds. 2 – Trade places. Now have your partner disparage you, while you practice just hearing the sounds and not taking the words to heart 3 – Try doing this same exercise using praise and flattery instead of blame. In either case, the listening partner should practice not reacting in any way, recognizing what is being said as a dream. At first, you may find it difficult to maintain equanimity while you do this practice. Stay with it – you will find that doing so yields rich rewards over time.
Wake-up Practice
The moments immediately after waking are the most fertile for recalling
dreams. The following practices are designed to support and
strengthen your recall. They will also facilitate a mindful transition
between the sleeping and waking dream states. Upon waking in the morning,
practice: • The lion's out-breath -
breathing out with the sound "ah" • The lion-like posture for
awakening and purifying - sitting up in bed with raised head and gazing
and emphasizing the exhalation, repeating the "ah" out breath
three times • Raising the energy -
standing up, reaching the fingertips to the sky, and repeating the lion's
out-breath • Entering into mindful
reflection on the transition between the states of sleeping, dreaming, and
waking reality - coming into the present moment, recording dreams. Thus,
you will enter the day recognizing that all things are like a dream,
illusion, fantasy, mirage, and so forth.
After going to bed, practice these four points in order
to create the
conditions for mindful, lucid dreaming.
•
Chant the following prayer three times to remind you of and strengthen
your resolve to awaken within the dream, for the benefit of the ultimate
awakening of all beings: “May I awaken within this dream and grasp the
fact that I am dreaming, so that all dreamlike beings may likewise awaken
from the nightmare of illusory suffering and confusion”. • Lie on one side with your legs together and knees slightly bent. Let your bent
arm take the weight of your torso by resting your head on your open hand.
This is the posture of the sleeping Buddha, as he has been traditionally
depicted at the moment of passing into nirvana (death). • Bringing your attention to
your throat chakra, visualize your energy rising up out of your body. Feel
it rise up from your heart chakra with your breath and pass into your
"third eye" or brow chakra: the point between your eyebrows.
Visualize it as a full, luminous moon behind your eyes. Go into the light. • Visualize the letter
"A" (symbolizing infinite space) on the surface of the moon. • Notice whatever images begin
to appear on the sphere of light behind your eyes. To progress still further in
Tibetan dream yoga, • Pay careful attention to
your dreams • Record your dreams in a
dream journal upon waking each morning
• Recognize recurrent images, themes, associations,
and patterns • Contemplate the archetypal,
symbolic content and meanings of your dreams • Reflect on the similarities
and differences between night dreams, daydreams, fantasies, visions,
ideas, projections, and so on • Wake yourself up during the
night to reaffirm your resolve to awaken within the dream and grasp the
fact that you are dreaming • Sit up in meditation posture
while sleeping to maintain continuous awareness while inducing and
incubating lucid dreaming • Have a dream assistant at
hand to guide you while asleep, helping you learn to retain conscious
presence during dreams • Meditate alone in darkness
to develop the inner clarity of the Clear Light Mind - the mind
unaffected by illusion • During the day, maintain
awareness that everything you experience is like a dream
•
Chant the dream yoga prayer by day and by night to help reinforce your
intention to awaken within the dream.
THE
LIFELONG PRACTICE OF TIBETAN DREAM YOGA
Like any spiritual practice, Tibetan dream yoga will reveal more
substantial benefits the longer and more consistently you practice it. In
the Buddhist tradition, however, discipline alone is not enough to bring
your practice fully alive. Motivation — the reason you practice in the
first place - is considered as crucial as technique and commitment.
You will have noticed that the Tibetan dream yoga chant includes an
aspiration to help free all beings of their suffering. This intention lies
at the root of all Buddhist practice. The underlying teaching is that all
living beings are interconnected: none of us can be completely free so
long as any of us is still asleep. As you practice Tibetan dream yoga, recognize that the suffering you seek to alleviate through spiritual practice is, in fact, universal. Recognize, too, that the more awake you are, the more helpful you can be to those you care about in fact, to, to everyone you come into contact with. Practice with the intention of working with your own individual part of the whole, in order to bring all of human awareness to a new level. In this way, you will derive the greatest possible benefits from your dream yoga practice.
Some
sayings about dreams:
“Dreams
are a reservoir of knowledge and experience, yet they are often overlooked
as a vehicle for exploring reality”- Tarthang Tulku Yoga Practice “All that we see is but a dream within a dream”- Edgar Allen Poe "A dream not interpreted is like a letter not read"- The Talmud
“Dreams
are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?” – Henry
Havelock Ellis
“You
beings on earth who are deep in slumber… Stop sleeping! Wake up! What
are you waiting for?”- The Zohar
“There
are some who are awake even while asleep, and then there are those who,
apparently awake, are deeply asleep” – Lalla
“Do
not sleep like an animal that mixes sleep and reality” - Tibetan
instruction for dream yoga practice
“Let
sleep itself be an exercise in piety, for such as our life and conduct
have been so also of necessity will be our dreams” – Saint Basil
|
