Andrew Holecek: Dream Yoga, Part 2

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June 27, 2016

Andrew Holecek: Dream Yoga, Part 2

Andrew Holecek June 27, 2016

Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher whose work blends a background in ancient Tibetan Buddhism with the leading edge of contemporary Western thought. With Sounds True, he has released the book Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep. In the fascinating second part of his interview on Insights at the Edge, Andrew speaks with Tami Simon about pressing beyond lucid dreaming and into the actual nighttime practice of dream yoga. They talk about illusory form yoga and invoking specific imagery within dreams to cultivate positive qualities. Finally, Andrew describes the ability to actually meditate within dreams—as well as the doorways to personal inquiry this practice can unlock. (78 minutes)

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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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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Learning the Art of Thriving Online

Amelia Knott is an art psychotherapist who specializes in the mental health impacts of hustle culture and social media. In the video below (3:22 minutes), she shares her inspiration behind her written and illustrated workbook, The Art of Thriving Online: Creative Exercises to Help You Stay Grounded and Feel Joy in the World of Social Media and invites you in on the journey of reimagining a healthier relationship with the digital world.

You can also read the video transcript below:

It’s been half my life—literally half the years of my life—lifting my chin for pictures, anticipating the critical gaze of a digital audience, offering my presence half-heartedly to the world around me to to draft a clever caption, choose a flattering filter, and watch as my phone tells me if this time my work will be rewarded with worthiness.

Too many nights avoiding myself, letting the blue-light-lullaby of my screen become a substitute for true soothing. It’s been half my life; holding up the mirror of comparison to everyone’s best days and hottest takes, highlight reels curated with effortless nonchalance, and now the mirror of comparison to a perfected self made in the algorithm’s image. It’s been half my life of fractured attention, commodified vulnerability, fury, and fear taking turns with despondence.

What if my real life stopped being my body or the land, and became the non-place I devote my hours to?

And it’s been half my life wandering daily into the galleries of artists’ and thinkers’ most beautiful ideas. Half my life keeping far-away loved ones close.

It’s true that the Internet gave me my career, my marriage. It made visible the threads of similarity across a quickly dividing globe. It showed me life-saving examples of people who survived what I needed to survive and it broke my heart open at the things no one should have to.

I like to misquote Carl Jung when he said something almost like “a paradox is our most valuable spiritual tool.” I’m not interested in finding the elusive, singular hack that will make screen time less alluring forever. I’m not interested in a lifetime of cycling through eras of detox and excess. Vacillating between the high of a new regimen and the crash of shame when social media works once again, exactly as it was designed.

I’m a therapist. I know that hacks can be tools, or bandaids. A self-help, step-by-step, sales pitch plan can feel like salvation, but it’s not the medicine of being in an evolving conversation with yourself. I am more interested in making art. I’m more interested in learning to tolerate the tension between social media’s danger and its magic. I’m more interested in learning to like myself, unsolved.

And when I’m learning the same lesson, again, the hard way, I know that my allies in finding safe passage through the digital age are art and writing. Creativity is how we imagine a different future.

So I wrote us this book. It’s a place to start that conversation with yourself about what is really happening between you and your screen; who profits from the ways it harms you, and how to protect the parts of it that are genuinely good, because parts of it are.

So if you are ready to join me—an art psychotherapist who both loves the life her phone enables and desperately needs to put it down—we’ll make some art. We’ll sit in the stunning and maddening paradox, and we’ll find creative ways to author our own definitions of real wellbeing when we choose to be on social media.

And together we’ll find the art of thriving online.

The Art of Thriving Online: A Workbook

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Sounds True

Amelia Knott

Christina Rasmussen: Life Reentry: Exiting the Waiting...

There are certain experiences that are completely and utterly devastating, yet seemingly impossible to articulate and share. Grief educator and author Christina Rasmussen calls these our “invisible losses”—and they are often more perplexing and difficult to navigate than the overt tragedies we all endure in life. In this podcast, join Sounds True’s founder, Tami Simon, in conversation with Christina Rasmussen about her new book, Invisible Loss: Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief

Filled with unique perspective and compassionate insight, this dialogue explores the place of uncertainty and stagnation known as “the waiting room”; the original self, and how we get disconnected from it; the impacts of an “us vs. them” experience; how to identify your primary invisible loss; three inner narrators—the survivor, the watcher, and the thriver; reclaiming our forgotten “thriver memories”; the cost of seeking approval; saying yes to what you’ve always wanted to do; cleansing our patterns of fear; the practice of mental stacking; the Life Reentry model; reframing our experiences and taking action from our wisdom; why the place of death is also the place of creation; and more.

The Greatest Wealth Is Found When We Gather Together

When people ask for my personal secret to living a life that is authentically happy and liberating, the first thing that comes to mind are my friends. I’ve known for a long time that I am a wealthy and blessed person. The wealth that I’m referring to has nothing to do with my bank account balance. The wealth that I’m talking about are the meaningful connections that have sustained me over the years. What I lacked in familial bonds, the divine provided in long-term platonic relationships.

One of the clearest indicators of someone who is flourishing is their ability to build and keep meaningful connections and quality relationships. When designing a life that supports your becoming the most fully expressed version of yourself, the people who are closest to you can either support or hinder your progress. This is why I’m adamant about being intentional about my connections.

My “Presidential Cabinet,” which is basically what I call my trusted circle of friends, is filled with some amazing folks. I’m forever grateful for my community of friends that became family, strangers that became mentors, and colleagues that became accountability partners.

In the chapter “What About Your Friends?” from my book, Evolving While Black, I share with you that people who have strong relationships feel the support of family, friends, and others in their community. When you know you have a village of folks you can count on, it improves your ability to recover from stress, anxiety, and depression.

An agreement I made with myself in my early thirties was to commit to choosing connection and community over isolation. This decision is the gift that keeps on giving. The investment you make in choosing your connections is the greatest pathway to wholeness, prosperity, and longevity.

What you should consider as you’re continuing to build out your own Presidential Cabinet

Your connections should include people who:

  • Energize you and help you to create a life of ease
  • Encourage you to make your mental and emotional well-being a priority 
  • Consider you for opportunities when you’re not in the room
  • Show mutual support and respect 

Now that you know what to consider, use these prompts to create a plan

  • Who’s in your Presidential Cabinet, and how do they support you? 
  • Who do you need to add, and how will they support your journey? 
  • If you change nothing, what will your life look like three months from now? How does this make you feel?

My hope for you is that you attract meaningful connections that bring you joy and make your heart smile, laughs that make your cheeks hurt, and love that covers you like a warm blanket. You deserve to feel loved, supported, and cared for.

Until we meet again.

Currently evolving,

Chianti


Evolving While Black
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Sounds True


Evolving While Black
Sounds True

Chianti Lomax is a sought-after international speaker, certified mindset coach, and leadership trainer who thrives at the intersection of mindfulness, technology, and transformative coaching. As a registered yoga instructor, certified personal and executive coach, certified workplace mindfulness facilitator, and positive psychology practitioner, Chianti teaches doable habit changes to help increase our well-being and elevate the overall human experience. For more, visit chiantilomax.com.

Author photo © Ambreia Williams

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