July 2018.
Most of us, most of
the time, are caught up in clouds of anxiety, thoughts, memories, feelings of
shame… general inner noise. These clouds whirr around us in a vortex of “what
ifs”, “should I”, “and then”… making us increasingly confused. A lot of my work
is about sorting through these clouds and making real what needs to be real,
and releasing what is inessential, and thus freeing my clients from much
unnecessary anxiety.
The making real is
grounding the something into a tangible form; something that can be worked
with, and something rich with actual possibilities.
In my own life in
recent times I spent months of wanting, of craving, to travel again to Europe,
mulling, thinking, planning, changing those plans, mulling, dwelling on,
dispelling: essentially caught up in swirling clouds of possibilities. And
then, a mid-September conference in Heidelberg, Germany beckoned (a time of
Autumnal cooling and dancing red-bronze leaves and ripened berries), and I
thought maybe I will/maybe I wont go, and so the churning continued. Then in
the middle of one night, clarity came: go to the conference, and then work the
rest of the journey out from that point. I registered with the conference
people and booked my accommodation, and then a few days later, booked my plane
flights.
In this time of
observing my own inner processes and noticing with clearer insight the
processes of my clients, I began again thinking of the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology,
or three planes of existence (trailokya):
the desire realm (Kāmaloka), the form
realm (Rūpaloka), and the formless realm (Arūpaloka). Of particular interest in so far as this
article is concerned is the desire realm. Here, is populated with lurid hell
beings, of demons, ravenously hungry ghosts who can never be satisfied,
demi-gods, animals and humans, all in a state of suffering.
I can see elements of
Kāmaloka in the horribly confusing and tormenting psychological
states some clients bring to our sessions together; states dominated by
anxiety, fear, self doubt, shame, and longing. I certainly can identify aspects of it in myself. Until they are identified, spoken about,
even written about, they just undermine our capacity to move on in our
relationships, our jobs, our life.
This work has parallels in the Buddhist
practice of dream yoga, or Milam. Dream yoga is, in essence, the art of bringing
consciousness into the dream state and learning to observe and control the
dream, and then be free of it. Working with the unconscious (from where dreams
arise) is a fundamental tool of psychodynamic psychotherapy and that work is
about bring consciousness to ordinary and unordinary life. I’ve certainly noticed
this in my own personal work, begun decades ago. I used to write my dreams down
in journals and over the years collected dozens of them (big handwriting). I
notice the quality of my dreams changed as I brought the light of conscious
awareness to them. I also noticed that I was becoming aware that I was dreaming
while asleep, and that I could change the course of dreams. And then came an awareness that I
didn’t need to dream quite as much as previously and also that I understood the
meaning of the dreams I had with greater clarity.
What I’ve found is the
bringing concrete reality, through clearer insight, and tangible actions like
keeping notes, or requesting actual documents, or preparing an action, dispels
the dream clouds.
Developing consciousness
in dreaming begins with the learning to know that we are dreaming, and then,
gradually working towards shaping what we dream, and then the art of lucid
dreaming and travelling via the dream horse to anywhere we wish, or nowhere at
all.
The dream state in
Buddhism refers not only to rapid eye movement dreaming in sleep, but to the
arising of phenomena itself in every day life. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the account of the stages we pass
through from life to death, from this moment to that moment, is the exploration
of the bardo state (the “in-between”).
The bardo describes the transitional,
liminal state. This is a rich place
of engagement, whether conscious or not, not an empty space. It is in here,
however, that the silence of awareness is possible.
The progression of sleep and dream yoga is
something like this: first you learn how to remember your dreams; then you
learn how to wake up in them; then you train your mind in the dream; then you
learn how to stay awake in dreamless sleep. All the while you are taking
the insights from the night and transposing them into the day. Not only
are you transforming the night into meditation, but you begin to transform your
life. You start to wake up, in the spiritual sense.
