Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming by Andrew Holecek

Author:Andrew Holecek
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

At this time when the transitional process of dreaming is appearing to me, I shall abandon negligence and the cemetery of delusion. With unwavering mindfulness, I shall enter the experience of the nature of being. Apprehending the dream-state, I shall train in emanation, transformation, and the clear light. I will not sleep like an animal, but practice integrating sleep and direction perception!

GURU RINPOCHE, Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos, translated by B. Alan Wallace

14

Advancing to Dream Yoga

First Stages and Practices

THE RELEASE OF a brilliant bolt of lightning requires the right

atmosphere: the right temperature, the right altitude, the right humidity, the

right electrical potential, and then suddenly, BANG, there’s a flash of

lightning. Our approach to dream yoga in this book has been a similar

process: we’ve gathered the right view, the right meditations, the right attitude, the right motivation, and the right preliminary practices so that one

day the thunderbolt of lucidity will flash within your dreams. This approach

is called “the gradual path to sudden awakening.”1

As we’ve seen, in Buddhism the preliminaries are more important than

the main practice. For our purposes here, this means that if you do the preliminaries properly, dream yoga is more apt to “just happen.” It’s like when you go to sleep under normal conditions. You can’t will yourself to

sleep. The effort keeps you awake, and the harder you try the more you stay

awake. “Try to relax” is an oxymoron. What you do to go to sleep under

normal conditions is create the proper environment. You turn off the lights, lie down, close your eyes, make yourself snuggly, and then wait. If the proper environment is there, assisted by fatigue of course, sleep “just

happens.” With our dream yoga journey so far we’ve been creating the

proper environment. And like the transition from effortful to effortless

mindfulness, most of the effort comes up front.

Getting to a level where dream yoga “just happens” requires deep inner

work and may be inconvenient. Spiritual practice is often unreasonable and

inconvenient. It doesn’t always make sense from ego’s perspective, and it

doesn’t always play into the hands of conventional reason. This is

especially true for nighttime practice. Ego just doesn’t want to go there. As

we’ve seen, darkness (ignorance) is where ego takes ultimate refuge and

finds its deepest shelter. Piercing light can be irritating for that which lives

in the dark. It requires advanced spiritual techniques to penetrate this darkness, the underground shelter of ego, and reveal that light. Dream and

sleep yoga are therefore advanced bunker busters that the stronghold of ego

may not welcome.

Because these practices are subtle, it’s easy to get discouraged. You’ll

need to maintain an attitude of determination. (Advanced practitioners

never give up. That’s how they advance.) You also have to become your

own meditation instructor. Of course you can talk to other practitioners and

dream yoga instructors, but this journey is a very private one. You have to

be honest with yourself and be willing to go deep into the darkness of this

truth-telling practice.

Some people are afraid of the truth even more than they’re afraid of the

dark. Many of us are afraid to look into the truth-telling mirrors of our life

because we’re afraid of what we might find.

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