Andrew Holecek: Dream Yoga, Part 1

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June 20, 2016

Andrew Holecek: Dream Yoga, Part 1

Andrew Holecek June 20, 2016

Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher whose longtime study of Buddhism blends ancient wisdom with contemporary knowledge and insights. With Sounds True, he has published the book Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Andrew and Tami Simon speak on the practice of dream yoga and the foundational practice needed to plumb its depths: lucid dreaming. They discuss how to train to induce lucid dreaming, including daytime practices one can use to awaken in a dream. Finally, Andrew talks about the innate need for healthy sleep and how beginning a new spiritual practice during the nighttime hours is not something to be undertaken lightly.
(67 minutes)

Listen to Dream Yoga, Part 2 »

Andrew Holecek is a renowned author and humanitarian who teaches internationally on spirituality, meditation, lucid dreaming, and the art of dying. He has studied sleep yoga, bardo yoga, and other traditional practices with living masters in India and Nepal. Andrew’s books include Dreams of LightDream Yoga, and Reverse Meditation. His work has appeared in Psychology Today, Parabola, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Utne Reader, Buddhadharma, Light of Consciousness, and many other periodicals. He hosts the popular Edge of Mind podcast and is the founder of the Night Club community, a support platform for nocturnal meditations. Learn more at andrewholecek.com.

Author photo © Abby Stern

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Also By Author

Andrew Holecek: Reverse Meditation

Your mindfulness practice worked! You calmed your mind and felt the deep, inner bliss that meditation brings. But, asks Andrew Holecek, what do you do with these beatific states when your world is falling apart? Where’s your meditation practice then? 

In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Holecek about his new book, Reverse Meditation, and how we can move toward a more complete spirituality that welcomes all of our experience. Illuminating the four steps of reverse meditation and much more, their conversation explores: how pain and hardship can accelerate the spiritual journey; why mindfulness “sedates but doesn’t liberate”; the cultivation of “industrial-strength” meditation; repairing an adverse relationship to unwanted experiences; the practice of open awareness; bringing the unconscious into the light of consciousness; investigating our personal “super-contractors” such as anger, fear, or anxiety; shifting from reactivity to responsiveness; the OBEY acronym of reverse meditation: observe, be, examine, yoke; three attitudes for practice: kindness, patience, and curiosity; establishing the right view; the anti-complaint meditation; and productive thinking.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

Turn your understanding of meditation inside out and u...

Meditation has found a home in the West. Countless scientific studies tout its benefits, and a multitude of students proclaim its life-changing value. I am one of those students. For over forty-five years I have practiced this ancient art, and I continue to reap its remarkable rewards. While I remain a follower of many wisdom traditions, and believe that no one has a patent on truth, thirty years ago I took refuge in Buddhism. The adage “Chase two rabbits; catch none” points out the necessity of commitment, and the dangers of spreading yourself too thin.

My passion for meditation led me into the traditional Tibetan three-year retreat, where I became a monk with robes and a shaved head, meditating fourteen hours a day in a remote monastery. I even slept sitting up in meditation posture, practicing the nocturnal meditations of dream and sleep yoga. Three-year retreat is like a meditation university, providing the opportunity to practice dozens of meditations in the most nurturing environment. It remains the most transformative experience of my life.

Of the many practices I was introduced to in retreat, one meditation stands out: the quirky, intense, multifaceted, and revolutionary practice of reverse meditation. I learned these practices within the context of Mahāmudrā (Sanskrit for “great seal”), a lofty tradition in Tibetan Buddhism that explores the nature of the mind. This was over twenty years ago, and since then these radical meditations have become a cornerstone of my spiritual path.

They’re called “reverse” meditation for a number of reasons. First, these practices are the opposite, or reverse, of what many of us associate with meditation. Most people think that meditation is about feeling good, getting “Zen,” or otherwise chilling out. But this is just one small aspect of meditation. Complete meditation is not about feeling good—it’s about getting real. And getting real requires dealing with the reality of difficult situations.

Second, these unique meditations are designed to reverse our relationship to unwanted experiences, which means going directly into them instead of avoiding them. In so doing we can discover the basic goodness of whatever arises, which is deeper than interpretative goodness. Basic goodness refers to the ineffable “suchness, isness, thatness” of whatever occurs—good or bad.

If we capitulate to our usual avoidance strategies, we push the acute, conscious psychological discomfort of avoidance into becoming a chronic, unconscious mental cramp. The discomfort is still there, but now it’s buried deep in our body-mind matrix, where it works backstage to dictate much of our onstage life. The rejected experience then manifests symptomatically—it becomes an undiagnosed reflection of an underlying discord that expresses itself in virtually everything we do. Our actions then become evasion tactics—reactivity, psychological duress, physical illness, and all manner of unskillful responses to the challenges of life—as we try to skirt these buried, uncomfortable feelings.

The reverse meditations give us the opportunity to relate to our mind instead of from it—and also to establish a relationship to our evasion tactics, which otherwise become obstacles that act like scar tissue to sequester the unwanted experience from consciousness. Relating from our mind, from our reactivity, is no relationship at all. In place of conscious relationship, we respond with knee-jerk reflexes to difficult experience, a reactivity that kicks us out of our feeling body and into our thinking head, and into unnecessary suffering. Instead of dealing authentically with the challenging somatic sensation, we leap into inauthentic conceptual proliferation (confabulating and catastrophizing) to buffer ourselves from the discomfort of our feelings. We run from the honest pain and real news that come with being human, and into dishonest commentary and fake news. The truth is that many of the worst things in our life are things that never really “happened”!

Third, the reverse meditations upend our sense of meditation altogether. They represent a revolution in spiritual practice that turns our understanding of meditation inside out and upside down, and therefore radically expand our practice. Situations that were once antithetical to meditation now become our meditation. Obstacles that previously obstructed our spiritual path now become our path. This means that everything becomes our meditation. Nothing is forbidden. We can enter lifetime retreat in the midst of ordinary life.

Excerpted from Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom by Andrew Holecek.

Andrew Holecek is an author, speaker, and humanitarian who offers seminars internationally on meditation, lucid dreaming, and the art of dying. His work has appeared in Psychology Today, Parabola, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Utne Reader, Buddhadharma, Light of Consciousness, and many other periodicals. Learn more at andrewholecek.com.

Andrew Holecek: Perception Is Creation: Discovering Em...

Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher whose longtime study of Buddhism blends ancient wisdom with contemporary knowledge and insights. He is renowned for his expertise in lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream. With Sounds True, he has published the books Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep and Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Andrew and Tami Simon discuss his latest book, including: the traditional three-step approach to the practice of illusory form, seeing the world in a more authentic way and connecting to what’s real, uncovering the roots of human suffering, the intersection of neuroscience and the world’s wisdom traditions, and much more.

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Tami and Tirzah discuss: the concept of “image deposits” and “task deposits”; dreams containing real-life experiences of our ancestors, and how they are far more common than we might think; the shift from impotence to agency; harnessing our pain as a fuel for growth; how the human nervous system holds on to unresolved trauma despite the debilitating consequences; hypervigilance and the dangers of overactive stress hormones; overcoming self-blame, shame, unworthiness, and isolation; unlearning inherited beliefs that impair our well-being; choosing compassion instead of “othering”; the roots of anti-Semitism; kabbalah, the mystical branch of Judaism; disidentifying from victimhood; the power of being witnessed; why healing intergenerational trauma is a gift to both our ancestors and our descendants; self-regulation and coming back home to ourselves in nurturing ways; a guided practice for finding inner safety amid stressors; alchemizing pain into wisdom (instead of passing it on); and more.

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How to Cope with Shame, the Master Emotion

Shame has been called the master emotion because it takes over our bodies and our minds.  It can freeze our nervous system.  It can place us in a fog, unable to seek help, reassess a situation or reassess what is really going on. Shame defeats our ability to reflect on ourselves, get some support, and move on. Shame can be overwhelming, but if we can look at it clearly and catch it before it takes over, we can cope with it and create conditions that can transform it from an enemy into a friend.

This is not academic to us.  We are both well-acquainted with the experience of shame. Co-author of Embracing Shame, Sheila Rubin has been researching shame since she was a shy five-year-old. “In my twenties, I remember having a new job and being so worried about being late for a first meeting that I showed up early and accidentally interrupted a lunch that was happening in the room,” notes Sheila. “I froze in embarrassment. I remember the shame voice saying to me: ‘What’s wrong with me?  Maybe they shouldn’t hire me because something is wrong with me.’  Fortunately, while I was holding the door knob, frozen in shame, someone opened the door and invited me in with kindness.”

Embracing Shame co-author, Bret Lyon, remembers that, as a kid, when the gym teacher blew the whistle and said to pick teams. Everyone else was picked first. He still remembers trying to pretend it didn’t matter while he felt like dying inside.

One client accepted extra work even though he does not want to work weekends because he wants to be liked and couldn’t say “no” because it would be embarrassing.

Another client spoke of shame seeping into her mind about the changes in her body since giving birth. She is happy to be a mother, but the changes in her body and the inner dialogue in her mind keep her in shame circles. The differences between how she experienced her body and how she feels now is shame.

Our inner conversations may say a variety of unhelpful things. For many of us, it is the voice of not being good enough. Or we might feel like an imposter. If our partner or boss says that we made a mistake, that may be a trigger for a shame attack.

Here are some clues to know when shame may be operating in your mind and body:

Thoughts: There’s something wrong with me and I don’t want anyone to know. Maybe I am an imposter and I need to hide.

Sensations: Feeling shy, face flushed, brain can freeze, difficulty having a conversation.

Reactions: Embarrassed, going blank, blaming others, using activity to numb, withdrawing. Not able to write or think clearly and not know why.

Coping with shame

If, instead of letting shame take over, we can be with and observe our shame, we can actually begin to learn something from it.  We can begin to transform shame from a toxic disruptor to a useful informant, from a devastating foe to a useful ally.

Here are a few experiments to try when you notice shame coming up. Instead of putting yourself down, try one, then reflect on the results and write them down in a journal or in your notes app:

Be kind to yourself. Say something kind to yourself to ease the shame.

Pause and take a breath. Pausing for even a few seconds or one minute can offer a new perspective. How might this allow you to set a new boundary or reframe your story in a healthier way?

Set boundaries. Is there an extra shift you cannot take this week? Can you say stop or politely decline?

Name your feelings. Notice what didn’t feel good in your reaction. Can you talk about what you’re feeling in a different way?

Ground yourself. Tap your feet or feel the earth under your feet.

Get support. Talk to a friend who is kind and who can hear your feelings.

Spend time in nature. Take a few minutes to bathe in nature to refresh and replenish.

Understand that change happens slowly. Talk back to the shame inside yourself for a bit and find if the shame can be a little less toxic. Even a small shift or change can help you move forward rather than staying stuck.

Being friends with your shame can begin to change yourself and your life. When toxic shame lifts there can be access to creativity and new doors can open. The weight of heaviness can be put down and we can have new hope for the future. The reason we do this work is so others can find hope when there is shame and they can transform it and heal it.

 

Sheila Rubin, MA, LMFT, RDT/BCT, has been researching shame since she was five years old. Along with her husband and colleague, Bret Lyon, she is a founder and codirector of the Center for Healing Shame, and cocreator of the Healing Shame–Lyon/Rubin Method. Through their popular workshops, they have taught thousands of psychotherapists, coaches, and other helping professionals across the world to more effectively identify and work with shame. Sheila is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, a Registered Drama Therapist, and has taught at JFK University and CIIS, as well as being the eating disorder specialist at a hospital and directing Embodied Life Stories performances. For more, visit healingshame.com.

Bret Lyon, PhD, SEP has devoted almost two decades of his life to healing shame. Along with his wife and colleague, Sheila Rubin, he is a founder and codirector of the Center for Healing Shame, and cocreator of the Healing Shame–Lyon/Rubin Method. Through their popular workshops, they have taught thousands of psychotherapists, coaches, and other helping professionals across the world how to more effectively identify and work with shame. Bret holds doctorates in both psychology and drama and has taught at Tufts University, Pomona College, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, as well as writing and directing plays in regional theater and off-off Broadway. For more, visit healingshame.com.

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In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with the host of This Jungian Life and author of the new book Dream Wise. Enjoy this inspiring conversation about falling in love with dreaming; simple ways to boost dream recall; meeting the dream maker, the creator of your dreams; why even your worst nightmare may not really be a “bad dream”; the practice of dream incubation; curiosity and humility: two essentials for interpreting dreams; paying attention to the emotions in your dreams; fear in dreams, and what it might represent; receiving constructive criticism from the dream maker; Jung and the concept of the Self; working on your dreams in the context of community; a case study: the dream of the gold watch; the dream ego; the practice of active imagination; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

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