The meditation will be based on the breath, which is foundational to many meditative traditions.
I will offer some light guidance for our time together, so that everyone can participate whether they have experience of meditating or not.
Welcome All!
Dreamtime
The first time I came across Tibetan Buddhism was in the dreamtime. I was homeless in London. This was a condition induced by being a penniless dance artist unwilling to sacrifice my passion by taking any-job to afford rent. Somewhere between squatting, which was a legitimate way to survive on low income then, and sofa-surfing, a friend suggested flat-sitting in Elephant and Castle. The flat belonged to a couple who were on holiday, a Tibetan man and a Yugoslavian woman. There was a Yugoslavia then, although it did not have much time left. The flat was on one of those large council estates that loomed from city skylines in red and grey uniformity. When I moved in, my friend said the couple had asked that neither of us touch the statues wrapped in cloth which sat upon a high shelf in the lounge. They belonged to the Tibetan man and had something to do with his religion. Having been brought up the child of a Church of England vicar, it never occurred to me not to respect the custom or precepts of this man’s religion, whether I understood their rationale or not. So, I moved in and the statues remained untouched, their shapes bulging beneath their coverings from the mysterious top-shelf.
Shortly after I moved in, the dreams started. Every night I awoke with a start after coming face-to-face in the dreamtime with these strange and colourful beings. Their eyes were huge and bulged out of their sockets, the whites gleaming with piercing gaze. They seemed to bore into the core of my being and were so real I would tiptoe around the flat looking for them, checking I was alone before reattempting sleep. It was not until the couple returned that the dreams stopped. They invited me to stay on in the flat and pay them a small amount for doing so. This arrangement wasn’t ever going to work for long. My late-night late-morning theatre life was too much at odds with their cycles, revolving as they did around a pre-school child. However, it was long enough to know each other a little and to be entrusted with sight of the statues on the top shelf. Tenzin would take them down and unwrap them whilst doing certain kinds of Tibetan Buddhist practice I now know to be the Tantric deity yoga practices of Vajrayana Buddhism. Tenzin’s statues were the protector deities of Tantric mandalas, the guardians of spiritual realms inhabited by high level beings thought capable of influencing ours. When I first saw one of the statues and told Tenzin I recognised him as someone I had met in a dream, he said this was because the protectors were watching over his flat in his absence. He had asked them to do so. The very matter-of-fact way in which he talked about these beings incited my curiosity. So, I asked lots of questions and he invited me, along with his wife and child, to attend teachings and Tantric initiation with a highly regarded Tibetan teacher at a Buddhist Centre in someone’s North London living room.
There were about twenty of us crammed in to hear Tokden Rinpoché that afternoon. He led us through a set of guided visualizations and recitations of sacred sound, mantra, which evoked the Tibetan Deity of Compassion, Chenrezig. I felt transported by the Tibetan text, the mantra and the incense, into a dreamlike state. In this state it seemed to me that the deity came to life from its thangka painting, dancing out of the silk like the beings of my dreams. Closing my eyes, I saw the thousand hands of Chenrezig, looking at me with their thousand eyes and then dripping lights of healing nectar to thousands of beings. However, unlike the protectors, Chenrezig inspired no fear, only peace and joy. I came away hooked, and there began for me a journey into study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism so far spanning thirty years that has carried me up to the mountains of the Tibetan plateau pursuing research now stored deep in UK university archives. But it wasn’t any ism that drew me in or has kept me inspired to practice and engaged in research all these years; it was and is the dreamtime.
Sky is the blue.
A few years ago, I was reminded of my original connection to Tibetan Buddhism through dream when a friend invited me to attend a talk by Lama Lena on dream yoga at the Buddhist Society in Pimlico. The speaker was dressed as a Tibetan non-monastic tantric practitioner and she held the space with a dignified yet mischievous grace. I scribbled lots of notes, a habit picked up from years in academia, occasionally peeking out at her from behind the heads of the people in front. During the Q&A at the end, someone asked whether Lama Lena thought it right to attempt these dream yoga practices. Tibetan traditions situate them as high-level yogic practices from within the Dzogchen, ‘Great Perfection’, path to liberation. Therefore, the questioner wondered, should Westerners be presuming to attempt these things. Lama Lena unhesitatingly turned the question on its head. Insofar as, on Indo-Tibetan cosmology, we are psychophysical continuums engaged in an endless cycle of rebirth in mind-made realms, what does being born as a Westerner this time around have to do with anything, she asked? Then she looked directly at me, pointing me out as someone who, for all any of us knew, could have done these practices over the course of many lifetimes. So, she concluded, I must not believe anybody who tells me not to do these practices, but instead follow my heart and the dream. She held my gaze for a moment that seemed long but probably was not.
‘Wow,’ my friend said as we left, ‘she really wants you to do dream-yoga doesn’t she!’
Dream yoga, as with all Tantric Buddhist practices, is founded on the philosophy that neither we nor the world around us exists in any substantially permanent or unchanging way. Everything is in flux and shaped interdependently with the way we perceive it. This is not to say that there is no reality, rather that existent realities are malleable. Working with the mind and perception presents infinite possibilities for transformation. Ultimately, the reality of our ordinary waking lives is no more or less real or substantial than that of our ordinary dreamtimes. The Tibetan Tantric practices that underlie dream yoga include initiation and training in deity yoga as means to purify ordinary appearances. As with all deity yoga, these include transformative techniques such as the visualisation of deities and their realms, recitation of their sacred syllables, mantra, and working with yogic techniques of the breath. In these ways, ordinary illusory appearances of self, other and the world are purified to reveal them to be in the nature of clear light. What this implies for Tibetan dream yoga is that if a practitioner can learn to dream lucidly, so arising as an awakened dreamer, they can continue practicing and transforming in the dreamtime. The dreamscape becomes a basis upon which to develop awareness. The death process of dying and arising in a subtle form which transitions the intermediate state, the bardo, between lives, is likened to falling asleep and arising as dreamer. Therefore, Tibetan dream yoga teachings propose that learning to fall asleep and arise as awakened, lucid dreamer will provide basis upon which to navigate death in similarly awakened, conscious manner. Of course, it follows that the first step in developing an awakened dreamtime is to blur the boundaries between ordinary appearances of waking and dreaming by realising the waking state as dream and the dream as awakened. This, as with many things in life as ordinarily perceived, is a lot easier said than done.
A dream yoga blessing fell into my lap during a UK Government imposed lockdown, March 2020. My daughter and I spent over three weeks seeing nobody in the flesh but each other and the occasional groceries delivery person. However, we did see quite a few illusory appearances of people via technologies such as WhatsApp and Zoom. I started doing things I would normally be precluded from by lack of childcare. One of these was yoga online with my old teacher Gingi Lee at his centre The Shala in South London. The fact that The Shala had offered an affordable online unlimited yoga pass and I had no childcare restrictions meant that I started signing up for classes other than with Gingi, exploring yoga with teachers I didn’t know at times which ordinarily would not have been possible. That is how I met Ben Wolff, or at least his illusory appearance as Zoom-Ben. One Sunday evening, I got into my yoga clothes, tied back my hair, rolled the cat off my yoga mat and logged in to find there was no need for me to do any of those things. All I needed to do was to get comfortable, close my eyes and be receptive. Ben guides the participants in his classes, or unfoldings, with breathing exercises through a series of dreamlike guided visualizations. He does not require devotion to himself, or any deity, as guru, but rather lets participants know which neuroscience is most relevant and supportive of the principles upon which his classes are based. His knowledge of neuroscience is clearly well-developed, and he reads the latest papers prolifically. Over the course of the following lockdowned months, my meetings with Zoom-Ben became one of the highlights of my week. At his unfoldings, I began to understand that Ben was touching upon many of the Tibetan dream yoga practices I had come across before. However, he has found creatively explorative ways to release these from their culturally Tibetan lineages, reframing them for any ‘wild-hearted outsider’ interested. This is in fact dream yoga for the 21st Century. Ben proposes the breath and the imagination as the two prime vehicles for unlocking blocks within the person and enabling them to transform aspects of their life and perception that are limiting for them. Ben’s unfoldings appear to me to work in similar ways to Tibetan deity and dream yoga. Through the power of the breath and imagination, he guides participants in semi waking or dream state, through imaginative journeys which cut through appearances and perceptions that no longer serve them well. Psychophysical places of wounding are healed through realising them as eminently transformable with ‘effortless elegant efficiency and ease’. Ben suggests ‘starting with best guess at enlightenment’, just as Tibetan Dzogchen works on a principle of beginning with the result, allowing for the possibility of spontaneous realisation. Ben’s focus on things like ‘freedom from mind-made fears’, ‘asking for specific wonders’ and ‘tuning in to one’s own illusion’ in order to transform it, evokes for me the tried and tested dream-yoga principle that our best-lived dreamlife can bless us with the waking life we dream to be in.
Related Links
The Shala Yoga Centre: https://www.theshalalondon.com/
https://www.yoganidranetwork.org/users/ben-wolff
Breathing Circle: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/benwolff/
Further Reading
14th Dalai Lama, Varela, F. (ed.), B. Alan Wallace and Thupten Jinpa (trans.), Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997.
James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, UK: Penguin Random House, 2020.
Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Katz, M. (ed.), Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1993.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. New York: Snow Lion, 1998.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Healing with Form, Energy and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra and Dzogchen. Boulder: Snow Lion, 2002.
The meditation will be based on the breath, which is foundational to many meditative traditions.
I will offer some light guidance for our time together, so that everyone can participate whether they have experience of meditating or not.
Welcome All!
dawnaturalmo(ve)ment 