Lucid dreaming and dream yoga.

A well known but uncommon practice of the Buddhist meditative tradition is the practice of dream yoga. Most of what you hear about dream yoga is the spectacular stories and experiences people have during lucid dreaming. Everyone has heard the tale of flying in your dreams, or exploring unknown lands, the heavens, or even the depths of the ocean. These stories are often other-worldly and quite unlike our everyday waking experience, so they are fun to hear and talk about.

I am not going to discourage you from exploring the hidden territories and landscape of the dream world. Maybe you will find something that you are looking for, or come away with some insight that you can carry with you on your journey. At the very least, lucid dreaming is interesting and fun.

Dream yoga is a practice of waking up, gaining some insight into who we are so that we can recognize our true nature and show up in the world more fully. With this understanding, using lucid dreams to go on adventures or have a good time seems a little mundane. We start to realize that lucid dreaming also provides great potential for mining the depths of our own wisdom and manifesting our innate Buddha nature in a very experiential way. There are many ways to do this, but I invite you to consider a quote by the great master Padampa Sangye:

Go to places that scare you.  In haunted places, seek the Buddha within.  

Use the practice of dream yoga to wake up. Go to the places that scare you, that bring up fear. Use that fear to 'wake up' in the dream. A Buddha is 'one who is awake', and that is what lucid dreaming is all about, knowing that you are awake in the dream and that this is a dream. 

Think about your normal experience of a dream. You are normally immersed in the plot as it unfolds and have no power or control over what happens. You just go along for the ride as a bystander and are subject to experiencing the highs and lows of this subjectively real dream world as they come. Does this sound a little bit like waking life? 

Normally, it is only after we awaken from the dream that we discover freedom and a sense of relief, "Ah, thank goodness. That was just a dream." In dream yoga, the key difference is that you wake up in the dream, knowing it is a dream. When you wake up in the dream you discover a natural freedom because you know that what you are experiencing isn't real. It can't hurt you, it can change. 

"This is a dream. This isn't real. I am free." That's a nice sort of mantra for waking up in the dream.

With this insight, going to places that scare you is a powerful way to look at what you are holding onto. What is that monster? It looks terrifying, but what is it really? Who is it that is chasing you and what are you running from? 

Waking up in those dreams allows us to look at our own confusion and grasping. It allows us to invite the hidden recesses of our mind into the light. I see you, I hear you, I understand. Those are just as powerful in the dream world as they are in the real world. 

Waking up in this way, we might ask ourselves, "What would Buddha do?" As a Buddha, what would you do?

How does our wisdom and generosity show up in the world? How do we exercise compassion and patience in difficult situations? How do we maintain an open and responsive presence when we are in the midst of confusion and overwhelm? 

These are questions that we struggle with during the day, and questions that we can continue to work with during the night. 

Go confidently into the darkness. Find the light within.

Upcoming Meditation Workshop: New Location!

Meditation Workshop:
Bringing the Mind to Rest

Event to be held at the following time, date, and location:  Sunday, November 24, 2019 from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM (PST)  Phinney Neighborhood Center Brick Building- Room 32 (Third floor) 6532 Phinney Ave N Seattle, WA 98103 View Map

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Join us for a weekend workshop on the stages of meditation. Learn how to meditate, ask questions, engage in dialogue with other practitioners. Learn the foundational practices for calming your mind, recognizing your own nature, and cultivating your own personal practice.

No prior meditation experience necessary, all students welcome.

• Be introduced to the key points of meditation
• Learn how to bring the mind to rest using various techniques
• Learn how recognize the innate qualities of the nature of mind
• Understand how we stray in the practice and how to eliminate errors in our meditation
  

Location details for Phinney Neighborhood Center

We are located in the lower Brick building at the Phinney Neigborhood Center. Parking is available for free onsite in both the upper lot by the Blue building, and in the lower lot by the Brick building. Meditation cushions and chairs will be available for use.

Hallmark of the Buddha's teachings.

There are many benefits to meditation- increased attention and self-awareness, decreased reactivity to negative thoughts and emotions, the ability to manage and self-regulate strong emotions, and the ability to work with difficult situations in our life. Each of these benefits is significant and important for developing a healthy mind and for being self-reliant in a challenging world.

The Buddha's teachings rely heavily on meditation, but it is insight into the true nature of your mind that is really the hallmark of the wisdom of the Buddha. The Buddha saw that the key to changing our minds and living a life of great purpose was tied to realizing emptiness or selflessness, or the interconnectedness of all things. This insight into selflessness fundamentally changes our perspective of who we are and the nature of the world around us.

The experience of emptiness or selflessness is not one of loss. It is not a blank void. It is not an experience of aloneness or meaninglessness. The realization of emptiness is also the realization of interconnectedness, which is the experience of fullness. There are many signs that we may experience upon realizing this wisdom of emptiness, such as awe, connection, love, openness, oneness, ineffability. There wisdom itself is utterly beyond description because it is beyond the confines of 'this' or 'that', and 'it is' or 'it is not'.

Even a glimpse of selflessness gives rise to more openness and empathy. Openness encompasses appreciation and receptivity, creativity and imagination, as well as tolerance of others opinions and values. That openness gives rise to more empathy and compassion for others. It engenders kindness, generosity and love for others as we move about our day.

The benefit of realizing the wisdom of selflessness is that it awakens our heart and mind and gives our life a sense of direction and purpose. We can navigate the world with a broader perspective and find space for reconciliation and resolution. All of the problems in the world, all of the conflict, opposition, contradictions; they all arise from taking rigid and confined positions based on our own perspective. Selflessness opens the door to a more inclusive and integrated understanding of the world around us and our place in it. 

There are many benefits to meditation, but the benefits of insight and wisdom into our true nature are even more significant and impactful. They bring benefit not only to our own life, but to the communities and neighborhoods in which we live.

Valid cognition.

How do we know what is true?

Valid cognition or pramana is a whole branch of study in traditional Buddhist training. Broadly speaking, there are two types of valid cognition: inferential and direct perception.

Inferential valid cognition is based on reason and logic. We can come to an authentic understanding of phenomena through reason and logic. You can study a system like the human body, understand how it works, all of its parts and pieces, and develop a lot of confidence in that understanding based on examination and analysis.

Direct perception (DP) is presented as four categories, but for our purposes understanding two is sufficient: sensory direct perception and yogic direct perception. Sensory DP is valid cognition based on one's sensory experience. You can learn about the differences between cabernet and pinot noir by reading and studying (inferential valid cognition), but this understanding is quite inferior to actually tasting the wine and discovering the differences based on your own experience. Notice however, that sensory and inferential valid cognition can actually serve to deepen and refine your understanding by mutually supporting each other.

Yogic DP is a non-conceptual valid cognition that directly perceives the true nature of phenomena. This type of valid cognition is reserved for practitioners in a deep meditative state that is free from conceptual elaboration or emotional turbulence. This awareness has a lucid clarity and is completely calm. It is with this lucid awareness that we can explore the inner landscape of the mind or the play of dependent origination. Because such a mind is free from limiting perceptions or biased reference points, it is considered the highest form of valid cognition.

As a practitioner traveling on the path of meditation, it is important to understand the significance of these two forms of valid cognition. Logic and reasoning have their place in your practice, as Ju Mipham describes "giving rise to the approximate ultimate." But this is not to be confused for the actual ultimate reality, which is solely the domain of yogic direct perception.

Learning to navigate life and death.

Our days seem to be ruled by disorder and chaos. Our culture is one in which we are constantly busy in the search of becoming and being something other, continuously moving away from the present and away from ourselves in search of something better.

The world around us seems to be coming apart, and yet there is a marked sense of creation and emergent potential. All around us we see the effects of change, based on an evolution of values, tastes and desires.

Navigating this chaos and disorder can be overwhelming. Every time we think we have made progress or found a firm footing, the ground underneath us changes and moves. At one time the world changed slowly, generation after generation living much the same. Now things seem to change by the days and weeks with no 'catching up' in sight. In an effort to be more present in our lives, we struggle against ourselves and find time slipping away. No matter how much we fight against the tides of change, there is nothing to hold onto and all we are left with is fear and uncertainty about the future, our future, the future of the world and the future of humanity. In the face of change and disorder, what will we, it, and I become?

In Tibetan, we find this word bardo (Tib. བར་དོ་), which is often translated as intermediate state. Usually we talk about the bardo as the transition state between this life and the next, the liminal space of the afterlife. The bardo is an in-between state, a threshold between one state and the next. In a sense, we can understand the bardo as a doorway, in which we cross over from one life into the next. We let go of the old world, the one that we knew, and step into the new and unseen.

As a threshold, the bardo represents a liminal state in which subliminal conditioning creates our experience. This in-between state of the afterlife is simply the mind experiencing itself, or the mind experiencing its appearances. Much like a dream, we have little control over what is appearing to the mind in the bardo. Taking these appearances as our reality, we get caught up in the throes of mind and end up in a powerless and fearful state. Powerless because we have no control.

Having not trained in understanding how the mind works and how the contents of our experience are not in fact the 'self', we have no choice but to suffer the bardo. In this case, we will desparately be looking for a way out, not being particularly intentional about the conditions or motivations for our next life or the next form our life takes.

The bardo is commonly understood this way in Tibetan Buddhism, but there are actually six bardos (or liminal spaces) that we can experience: 1) the liminal space of this life (from birth to death), 2) the liminal space of dreams, 3) the liminal space of meditative absorption, 4) the liminal space of dying (from last breath to dawning of luminosity), 5) the liminal space of the luminous true nature of reality, 6) the liminal space of becoming (taking on new life form).

The essence of the bardo is this liminal, in-between state; between birth and death, waking and sleeping, inhaling and exhaling, destruction and creation, becoming and being. If you take a close look at time, you will find time itself is liminal space, between one moment and then next. As we learn to spend time in this liminal state, the bardo of the ever-present reality, we have an opportunity to break free from the machinations of mind and our experience. We have an opportunity to encounter timelessness, the eternal now of the continuously unfolding present.

In this liminal state of lucid, open presence, you experience the body, but know you are not the body. If your body changes somehow, 'you' don't change with it. There is some aspect of 'you' that is not your body. You experience sensations, but know an aspect of awareness that is not those sensations. Sensations are an object of your awareness. You might notice your perception of things, but know you are not your perception. You encounter thoughts and ideas, but know you are not your thoughts and ideas. You encounter the five senses, but know you are not those experiences of the five senses.

As lucid, open presence, you witness the contents of your experience, but know 'you' are not the contents of your experience. Amidst a sea of change, you are discovering the ground of being. But the real question is, who is this 'you'? If you look for it, where can you find it? Any chance to grab hold of this elusive 'self' results in not finding anything to hold onto. The mind as clear awareness is like water running through your fingers, there is an experience of mind but nothing to hold onto.

When we have certainty that there is nothing to find, nothing to hold onto, nothing to call 'our own', then we simply rest with that ever-present clear awareness. This is the ground from which we can reorient ourselves and choose our way forward. No longer overwhelmed by the subliminal contents appearing in your experience, you are able to respond to the ever unfolding reality rather than react out of habits and conditioning. This ever-present awareness is a vehicle for navigating the bardo of this life, the bardo of death, and the bardo of this moment. It is the basis for participating in the creation of the world, of dancing in the eternal now between the world falling apart around us and the one emerging through our individual and collective actions.

There is no awakening within the bounds of time. We awaken to eternally present clear awareness in the luminous liminal space of the true nature of reality. Furthermore, there is no one who is awakened. There is only lucid, open presence on the threshold of being, in which there is a perpetual letting go and stepping into.

This is how to navigate life and death.

November Meditation Workshop

Meditation Workshop:
Bringing the Mind to Rest

Event to be held at the following time, date, and location:  Sunday, November 24, 2019 from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM (PST)  Phinney Neighborhood Center Brick Building- Room 32 6532 Phinney Ave N Seattle, WA 98103 View Map

Attend Event

Share this event:

Join us for a weekend workshop on the stages of meditation. Learn how to meditate, ask questions, engage in dialogue with other practitioners. Learn the foundational practices for calming your mind, recognizing your own nature, and cultivating your own personal practice. No prior meditation experience necessary, all students welcome. Be introduced to the key points of meditation Learn how to bring the mind to rest using various techniques Learn how recognize the innate qualities of the nature of mind Understand how we stray in the practice and how to eliminate errors in our meditation Location details for Phinney Neighborhood Center We are located in the lower Brick building at the Phinney Neigborhood Center. Parking is available for free onsite in both the upper lot by the Blue building, and in the lower lot by the Brick building. Meditation cushions and chairs will be available for use.