Your Dream World Is Just About to End

Ahhhhh…finally, I’m snuggled in my cozy twin bed at the Menla Center for Health & Happiness.   as my Kundalini intensive training with Guru Dharam begins to learn to navigate the dream world for productivity, problem solving, creativity, and healing has begun.  I met Guru Dharam when I did my Kundalini Teacher Training in India in 2013.  He is quite likely the smartest yogi I’ve had the pleasure of studying with making this immersion intensively satisfying to my thinking mind.

I’m pretty sure my dream actually started before I left and certainly continued at the airport with a small airplane fire, a changed plane, a cancelled plane, an unexpected trip to JFK, a drive around the big apple, lost luggage, lost reservations, and I’ll stop boring you with those details.  I actually did the whole day with a big smile on my face because I assumed the Great Yogis were testing my resolve as they often due, it seems, on the way to transformational change.  All day simply questioning, “what is the resistance?”

Arriving late I was able to  participate in our bedtime meditation and what appears to be our new ritual.  At the end of the meditation we visited the dream state and learned how to safely navigate in and out of it using the familiarity of our hands as anchors.  When you want to leave the dream world, you simply contemplate your hands.  Having practiced Tibetan Dream Yoga, I am seeing the overlap between that practice and this.

This dream place we went to this evening was sweetly familiar to me from work I did long ago with the Inner Guide Meditation (link below) and my experience at the Chopra Center for Wellbeing where Deepak guided us into an altered state using Heleotropic breathing.  That’s basically where you hyperventilate yourself and has to be done with a doctor present, so don’t google and try it on your own.  I was honestly surprised to find myself back in familiar territory. My dream place is a very specific nook of a very specific forrest.  Once there, however, I felt really powerful and the maya or veils thinned changing my perception quickly and completely.  I didn’t want to leave and avoided my hands until a sharp pain in my right hand forced my dream me to look down.

And that is precisely why I stopped practicing Tibetan Dream Yoga.  What if you could live in your dream world as actively as you do this manifest reality?  

If any of this sounds INSANE, that’s probably because it is.  Why do this?  The Tibetans believe you create karma in dreams and our work as a yoga is to transcend all karma.  For example, if you were to harm another in a dream, the karma is real and the suffering from creating that harm comes back to you.  It’s the idea we talk about a lot in class where the thoughts we are thinking are creating our experience or weaving this web or tapestry of our life.  Guru Dharam talked about ancient traditions where dreaming was an art and the tribe spent much time interpreting dreams and making decisions based upon them.  More practical, Tibetan dream yoga helped me to stop processing my stress by grinding my teeth in my sleep.  More esoteric, I want to understand the karmic bondage of my family 7 generations back so I can be free.

I think we all have had the experience of having a problem with no solution and “sleeping on it” only to wake up with the answer.  If the Universe is a sentient being and our consciousness or chitta is an energy in which we swim, if the Universal mind is continuously downloading to our human apparatus ( he mind), then there is a constant flow of information to the mind.  Our work as meditators is to discern what are our thoughts and what is the ambient flow.   (I got all of that from my Guru Dharam notes….he’s so smart!!!)

So I’m off to the dream world to meet my dream body and find out what condition it is in.  Guru Dharam promised we’d have a repair shop tomorrow.   OM, Pamela