Spiritual Article Directory | The Yoga of Dreams

There is a sad but unfortunately quite common trend in the west these days to think about yoga just in terms of the familiar stretches, postures and breathing exercises that are now so popular.

Everybody is familiar with the many health benefis of practicing yoga: its ability to increase strength, fitness and flexibility, combat stress, prevent illness, increase feeling of wellbeing, and even prolong lifespan. To me this is a relly great thing, but yoa is actually much more than just these familiar exercises, and much of the richness and diversity of the tradition, along with many of the psychological and spiritual benefits, can sometimes get a bit lost with this tendency to boil everything down and reduce it to a flexinility and exercise program.

What I'm tryinto say is that the actual physcial exercises so loved by many millions of practitioners are actualy just one part of a very broad philosophy and practical system. One other aspect of this august tradition that I really think should get more attention and publicty is the yoga of dream and sleep. A popular method amongst traditional Tibetan yogism, the purpose of this system is the ultimate purpose of all types of yoga: enlightenment and self-mastery.

The practices of dream yoga are based on two very simple principles:

1 - The illusion and misperceptions that we all carry around with us in our waking life are basicaly the same as those we all experience at night in our sleep. By learning to recognise and control the latter, we can start to learn how to overcome the former. You might like to think of ordinary everyday consciousness as being on a long line, at the mid-point between sleep and enlightenment.

2 - By learning to control the subconscious part of our mind, our lower 'animal' mind, which we can only experience directly during dreams, we can gain mastery over our own inner nature and over our life and our fate.

It is for these reasons that many people practice 'lucid dreaming', which is actually the first stage on the path to whitelight dreaming. But dream yoga goes further than this modern western aproach. The ultimate goal of this system - what is called white light dreaming - is a state of pure consciousness in which the persons mind is freed from the tumultuous emotional tides and base desires of the subconscious mind, and can experience undisturbed mental clarity. At this stage of accomplishment the person can remain aware throughout the night (although not awake) and the primarily libidinous or confused dreams that most of us fall into each night are then replaced by the soaring freedom and of clear consciousness.

For those of you who beleive in reincarnation, and in trying to attain Nirvanah and freedom from the cycles of Karam after death, I can do no better than to leave you with this quote from the Tibetan teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinoche :

"If we cannot carry our practice into sleep, if we lose ourselves each night, what chance do we have to be aware when death comes?"