Sample Text
Ads
Advertisement
zhine2
with them.
Through practicing the Six Yogas, we come to realize the infinite
emptiness/openness, ungraspable quality, and luminosity that is the true
nature of reality. Dream interpretation, the use of dreams for predictions and
healing, and the development of psychic powers and healing abilities can arise
naturally from the continuous practice of dream yoga and the related yogas
(especially clear light, inner heat, and illusory body).
The Spiritual Benefits of Tibetan Dream Yoga
His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama has this to say about awakening
our dream body and using it for spiritual progress and development:
"There is said to be a relationship between dreaming, on the one hand,
and the gross and subdue levels of the body on the other. But it is also
said that there is a 'special dream state.' In that state, the special dream
body is created from the mind and from vital energy (prana) within the
body. This special dream body is able to dissociate entirely form the
gross physical body and travel elsewhere."
One way of developing this special dream body is first of all to recognize
a dream as a dream when it occurs. Then you find that the dream is
malleable, and you make efforts to gain control over it. Gradually you
become very skilled in this, increasing your ability to control the
contents of the dream so that it accords to your own desires. Eventually
it is possible to dissociate your dream body from your gross physical
body. In contrast, in the normal dream state, dreaming occurs within the
body. But as a result of specific training, the dream body can go
elsewhere. This first technique is accomplished entirely by the power of
desire or aspiration.
There is another technique that arrives at the same end by means of
prana yoga. These are meditative practices that utilize the subtle, vital
energies in the body. For these techniques it is also necessary to
recognize the sleep state as it occurs.
According to sleep researchers, we typically experience four stages of sleep.
• Hypnagogic sleep - the state of drowsiness we experience as we
begin falling asleep
• Ordinary sleep- here, we enter a true sleeping state, but can still be
easily awakened
. Deeper sleep - vital functions slow down, and we are more likely to
sleep through disturbances
• Deep sleep - muscles are totally relaxed, and it would be difficult to
wake us up (we only spend about fifteen percent of our sleeping hours at
this stage)
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. In order to practice
dream yoga, we must introduce awareness during the periods of REM
sleep (which last from a few minutes to half an hour). If we can identify
that stage while asleep -perhaps with the help of an assistant or a
dream-light device - we can further incubate, develop, and enhance the
awareness practice of becoming conscious and lucid within the dream
state.
Dreaming
Tibetan dream yoga texts teach us that, in general, there are three
types of dreams: Ordinary, karmic dreams, arising mostly from the day's
activities, and from previous life activities, thoughts, experiences, and
contacts.
• "Clear light" dreams: spiritual visions, blessings, and energy openings
• Lucid dreams, which are characterized by awareness that one is dreaming
Under these three broad divisions, dreams can be divided into a further six
categories:
• Dreams of events that occurred while we were still awake
• Dreams about other people, alive or dead
• Forgotten elements emerging from the subconscious
• Archetypal content, evocative symbols, and so on
• Extrasensory perceptions, profound dreams, and omens
• Radiant, luminous, spiritual dreams
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
• Morning wake-up practices that help us recall our dreams, and confirm our
determination to recall more of them
. Night time practice, which prepares the ground for lucid dreaming and
spiritual
Daytime Practice :
During the day, practice these four points:
• Contemplating the body as illusory and unreal
• Contemplating the mind and mental activities as similarly insubstantial
• Regarding the world and all phenomena and experience as dreamlike,
insubstantial, impermanent, and unreal
• Recognizing the relativity and ungraspable quality such as time, space,
knowledge, and awareness
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 Practice
The 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."
Partner Exercise
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.
Nighttime Practice
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.
Deepening Your Practice
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. (if you want, or change the wordings)
A
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
.A
Note: The extracts contained here are for personal use only, and may
not be reproduced for commercial distribution.)
(These are excerpts from three different Dzogchen Dream Yoga books
Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural light by Namkhai Norbu - The Tibetan
Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rimpoche - Sleeping, Dreaming,
and Dying by the Dalai Lama )
Guideline
to
Dream
Interpretation
How do you relate to dreams? A framework for dreams
Painting by Bob Venosa
All dreams work to accomplish one of two things
1 To solve the problems of your conscious, waking life.
2 To present you with access to new potentials and creativity. Because
dreams come from all levels of your being, understanding the imagery
and type of dream is the key to understanding and actualizing the
messages you receive during sleep.
3 Symbols express those things for which we have no words. By working
with them, we use both hemispheres of the brain and tap the
subconscious mind more fully, which in turn opens the doors to our
intuitive self
A dream symbol could literally represent itself as well as its possible
interpretations. The images and symbols may also represent aspects of
your personality. When you begin to reflect on the symbols, always start
by registering your first impressions but don’t stop with the obvious.
Dreams are symbolic representations, not reproductions. The dream
images always represent more than themselves, and so the more you
work with them, the more you will understand them.
Dreams do not come to tell you what you already know. Look at the
dream images and symbols as pieces of a puzzle that you can put
together only by finding out what they mean to you.
How do you relate to the dream?
1 Start by looking at how the dream could be reflecting something going
on in your daily life.
2 Then move on to the more subtle, free association with the dream
images.
3 What’s the first thing you would normally think about in connection to
that symbol or image, activity or person appearing in your dream
scenario?
4 doing more than representing themselves. They may also represent
qualities or characteristics that you have "projected" on them. For
example, you may dream of your grandfather, a man who was very kind
to you. The quality of kindness is therefore associated with your
grandfather, so dreaming of him could symbolize kindness. (You will
know the difference between a symbolic representation of a quality or
characteristic and a real "psychic" contact with a loved one.)
5 Examine the emotions within the dream scenario. What is the
predominant emotion associated with the dream? Remember that it may
be the emotion aroused that is the key and the scenario is simply a
vehicle to deliver the message.
Assinar:
Postar comentários (Atom)
0 comentários: