Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 535: Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Bön monk, meditation teacher, and expert in Tibetan dream yoga, joins the DTFH! Please check out Ligmincha International, and if you're interested in Tibetan dream yoga check out Tenzin's The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep: Practices for Awakening, Awakening the Sacred Body, and more! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE! This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self.

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We've got a blazer for you today. First, some backstory. When I was in high school, I became obsessed with an author, Robert Monroe. He wrote a bunch of books, the most famous being journeys out of the body, which are his accounts of the experiences he had when he figured out how to do something you've probably heard of astral projection. Now, this is a very old idea, maybe one of the oldest ideas and different cultures have different ways of expressing it. But essentially, the idea is you can like launch yourself out of the sheath of your body and fly around the material universe. Now, do we really have a soul that can launch itself out of a sheath that we call our body? I don't know. There's all kinds of weird stuff wrapped up in astral projection, a kind of silvery cord that connects you to your body that tethers you to your body.

If that cord should be cut, you're out of here, baby. Again, I don't know if we actually have a soul or some kind of astral aspect to us that can fly outside of the body. I don't know. I speculate that astral projection is really just a form of lucid dreaming, but who knows? I speculate it could be a way to induce sleep paralysis, that thing you've probably experienced where you wake up, you can't move. Some people claim that they feel like an old lady sitting on their chest. There's lots of stories about it, documentaries about it. Truly, I don't know, but when I was in high school, I diligently began studying Robert Monroe's techniques of astral projection, his methods of relaxing and all of the ways that you're supposed to come out of your body by like rolling out of it.

Lots of weird little tricks. I could never pull it off. But my mom had a tape, a hypnotic tape on astral projection. And for a while, every night I would listen to it. I still remember it. It would sort of try to relax you by having you imagine that you're on an escalator or something. And then after you fell asleep, it would continue and seed you with methods or the ways to come out of your body. Most importantly, it would sort of implant in you the belief that this is something you could achieve. So one morning, I was skipping school and laying in bed. I'd fallen asleep. And you know, that wonderful, deep, relaxing sleep you used to get in high school when you were skipping school and went to bed.

I don't know if you know what I'm talking about, but four stars level of sleep. I was deep asleep and then I thought I heard somebody knocking on the door of our house. I woke up and suddenly my fan was right in my face. Now, in those days, I was taking LSD all the time. So my first thought was, oh, this is some kind of acid flashback. And then I kind of drifted around and saw myself asleep in bed and realized that my mom's hypnotapes had actually worked. I was doing astral projection. It was not what I had fantasized.

What I'd fantasized was like I'd be able to fly around, spy on people, go through walls, do anything I wanted. This was terrifying. There was a sense of a dark, looming presence in the room and I just wanted to get back in my body. So somehow I managed to float down to my body. I floated through my body and landed on the floor underneath my bed and then opened my eyes and I was wide awake. After that, it happened, I don't know, maybe 10 or 12 more times. Each time was pretty scary and I never really liked it. Maybe that's why I can't do it anymore, though I have tried a few times.

There's lots of methods out there. If you're interested in doing astral projection, journeys out of the body is probably the best place you could go. If you're interested in lucid dreaming, there's lots of techniques out there. One of them is really, really curious. The idea is you sort of set a timer on your watch and every hour your alarm goes off and you think to yourself, am I dreaming? And if you're not dreaming, you just go back to your regular life. But if you do this long enough, then what will happen is in a dream, your alarm will go off and you will be lucid dreaming.

You'll be able to enjoy what it's like to have some kind of conscious control over your dreams. And this is something that for sure people can do. You might have experienced it yourself. In fact, it's one of the best things that can happen, isn't it? When you're having a nightmare and suddenly you remember that you're in a dream, like right away the nightmare transforms. Now, in this incredible book written by today's guest, Tenzin Wango Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, all of this gets kind of turned on its head.

Instead of setting alarms or reminding yourself throughout the day that you're awake, you do the opposite. Throughout the day, you actually tell yourself this is a dream too. What's the difference? It's still like a dream. That is a very psychedelic practice. It's incredible and weird. And I still remember reading about it and just being overwhelmed by that thought experiment,

the thought experiment of wondering to yourself, what if this is a dream, this thing that we call being awake? Maybe it's a more consistent dream. Maybe it's a more stable dream. And whenever I'm dreaming, I'm sort of jumping from one incarnation to the next to the next to the next. But if you think about any given life, you're jumping from one incarnation to the next to the next to the next, even while you're alive. I mean, in the same way dreams have that weird fluid quality to them,

where you don't really question how strange it is that one second you could be sitting on a plane, the next second you might be riding a tiger. Because I guess the way we experience time when we're awake is different than when we dream. We don't notice so much how massively different things are from one year to the next to the next to the next. And there is a quality in that kind of transformation or fluidity of anybody's life that is very dream-like. So that's just one little piece of Tibetan dream yoga. I mean, obviously I'm no expert in Tibetan dream yoga, but today's guest truly is. I don't even, it must be a dream because I actually got to talk to Tenzin Wangyoh Rinpoche about his incredible book.

And I'm really excited to share the conversation that we had. Get ready. It is a very intense psychedelic conversation. We're going to jump right into it, but first this. Today's episode of the DTFH has been sponsored by Babbel. You know, I wish that Babbel had existed when I was in high school. I hated Spanish classes. I wasn't good at it.

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Babbel language for life. And we're back! Friends, it is time for you if you are living in Texas to come and see me do some stand-up with the amazing William Montgomery. You probably know him from Keltoni. He's hilarious. I'm going to be in Fort Worth in Dallas. That's November 11th and November 12th. You can find all of these dates and the links at dunkintrustle.com.

I'm going to be at Hyena's Comedy Club. So I hope you will come see me there. Did you know I have a Patreon? We hang out every week. I hope you will join us. Okay, everybody, let's do it. Today's guest, Tenzin Wango Rinpoche, is the founder and spiritual director of Ligminche International. He is a world-famous meditation teacher.

He teaches the Bon Buddhist tradition of Tibet. And he has written a lot of amazing books. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. It's just one of his incredible books. I hope you will check out all of his writing. And if you're lucky enough to live near him, he still teaches. So you could go to one of his retreats or you could go to one of the Ligminche centers. You can find all of those at Ligminche.org.

And of course, the links are going to be at dunkintrustle.com if you feel drawn to Tenzin's incredible teachings. Tenzin is an amazing way of just cutting right to the essence of things. This is what happens when you are a practicing monk Tibetan teacher. And honestly, just getting a chance to zoom with him was really intense. Being around people like him, it's the most inspiring thing. The clarity, the sharpness, the vividness and also just how cool they are. I feel so lucky that I got a chance to hang out with him. So please welcome to the DTFH Tenzin Wangyue Rinpoche.

It's the dunkintrustle.com. Rinpoche, welcome to the DTFH. I'm thrilled to meet you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. I thought we could, I have a question to start off. And I think this will help us jump right into dream yoga, which I am really interested in. In your book, you say, if we lose ourselves every night, what chance do we have to be aware when death comes?

So I was wondering, why do we need to be aware when death comes? The role of awareness is always the same. I think every single moment in our life, the moment you are aware, more good chance that you are more connected to yourself, more good chance that you will not lose yourself, not lose things. Like even when you lose phone, I often lose my iPhone. So very often I remember when I keep my phone somewhere, I'm looking at myself and saying, I'm putting you here and I'm aware of you and I'm going to pick it up back.

So if I'm not aware, so usually as you put somewhere, you forget and you forget to pick it up. You lose it. So during the moment of the death, it's so important that you are aware of yourself so you don't get lost in the part of the intermediate state. Now, the bardo, the intermediate state, let's imagine someone dies in an unaware state. What can they expect in the bardo? And what is the thing within the bardo that is experiencing anything at all as opposed to a person who dies with awareness?

Yeah, so it's a similar thing that even during the daytime, there are so many moments people get completely get lost. They kill people, they suicide themselves, they bring a lot of harms in the society. In the very moment when they are not aware, they are completely caught up in their deep pain, stories and depressions and anxieties. So if they are aware of those moments, they are able to see, or are not happy, they are very down, they feel very negative, but I should be more aware of the consequences of what I do and what I say.

So even having that awareness, you protect yourself more when to talk and when not to talk, when to act and when not to act. Same way in the bardo, it's more serious because it's not a transition of a day or week or month, it's a transition of life. If you are going to go in the wrong direction, you go for the entire lifetime. So if you go in the right direction, you go for the entire lifetime. It's not like doing a mistake, leaving your phone or doing a wrong turn in the highway. Gotcha. It's sort of like going to a movie theater, except the movie lasts for your entire lifetime.

You want to pick a good movie, you just don't want to run into any theater. You might end up in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I got it. Okay, thank you. In your book, you point out something that I don't think many of us have considered. We spend one third of our lives sleeping and to bring back to what you said initially, and even when we're awake, where were we when we lost our phone? Where were we when we lost our keys? If you add to that one third, the times in the day when we're not there,

it seems like we're barely here at all. Yes, it's scary. It's scary, but I'm curious. In those moments where we have lost our phone, where are we? From your perspective, what has become of us? What was there? What happened? Yeah, and I think as every spiritual tradition talk about the famous being the present moment. Present moment is a gift of our lives.

So what happened is most of the time we get lost. Before we lose our phone, we get lost ourselves. Before we get turned wrong turn, we get lost ourselves. So before we lose it, take our own direction in the intermediate state of Pardo, we get lost ourselves. So I think the main thing is we get lost in our pain stories, some sciatic stories. We have so much stories. And not only we have so much stories of the past, and constantly we are always creating a stories in every given moment.

Instead of letting a resting little bit for a moment, we lack rest. Okay, right. Yes, even sometimes I will fall asleep and thank goodness it hasn't happened as much, but sometimes I'll wake up more tired than when I went to sleep. I don't know if I doubt you have because you are a Rinpoche, but I don't know if you ever had the experience where you fall asleep and in your dream you work. Have you ever had that happen? Yeah, sometimes definitely that happens.

So I think when you are sleeping, it depends on what kind of quality sleep you have, how deep you are sleeping, how long you are sleeping, how much your sleep is interrupted or not. It factors in so many different things. So when you do sleep like a power nap, it could be like a 20 minute. You sleep, you come back with so much more clarity and awareness. Rather than putting that 20 minute, working so hard trying to be more clear, trying to be more aware and exhaust yourself, you don't have any more energy to be clear.

It's better to sleep and wake up and more clarity than trying to be clear and lose little energy to full clarity you have. That mistake we do all the time in our life. Gotcha. Particularly in the West, we think working harder, doing more is better. No, taking break, getting rest, you recover better. Long term, you're going to be way more productive. Even in a short time, even in afternoon, when you're trying to drink double espresso

and trying to do something, it's better to not drink double espresso, take a short nap and wake up. It's right there, you're much better. Well, in the West, if there is a spiritual component to sleeping, generally, I don't know if you've ever seen, I think they're sort of silly. The websites, I dreamed of a bird. They'll say, oh, you dreamed of a bird. It means money is coming or something ridiculous like that, as opposed to what you teach, which is, I just, I mean, I clearly remember the experience I had reading your book.

I remember the feeling as you were inviting me to see waking life as a dream. Oh, what an odd sense came over me. It was, I don't want to say unnerving, but I just don't think I'd spent any amount of time considering the dreamlike quality of waking life, at least in the way you were able to dial it in in your wonderful book. So this thing that you are teaching, it's not like even the Jungian archetypes or anything like that. It's much deeper than that. Can you talk about it, this idea that there is actually some opportunity for a spiritual practice

within the dreaming state? Before I read your book, I'd never even heard of that before. Sure. So I think, you know, in our life, we all need to take a break from our ego, stories of our ego, stories of our pain, stories of our conflict, the push of our ego to always trying to do something, achieve something, compete someone. This whole energy draining machine that we have running 24 hours a week, we need you to learn how to take a break.

And naturally, sometimes we do take a break. So like you're sleeping. When you sleep, you're supposed to sleep deep and good quality. When you're taking a weekend, you're supposed to take a good weekend off. When you're taking a family time, a good family time off. Or even the idea of intermittent fasting, you know, like fasting. In our culture, we do fast in between the food. In Western culture and American culture, you have snack culture.

You have big meals and in between big meals, you have snacks or so many snacks. So you're never giving a break to your organs, particularly your liver. And your liver is getting drained again and again and again. It's like having a bad boss. You've given a task and before you finish that, you've given another task. Before you finish that, you have a bigger task. So we need, you can just really break in our system. So sleep yoga is, and sleep yoga and dream yoga is saying,

you are taking a break anyway, learn to take it better and apply your spiritual awareness in them so that one third of your life not completely lost. There's some development is happening. You make a distinction. I wonder if you could talk about the distinction between the sort of sleep that could result from this yoga versus what most of us think of as sleep. Like when I think of sleep, I think I lay down and I get a little dimmer.

Maybe I'll feel good. The pillow feels mattress feels good. There's some moment where my body will jerk. Then I'll have a series of weird dreams. Maybe wake up in the morning. This is how I sleep. Can you talk about the difference between that kind of non-yogic sleep and the sleep that you're talking about?

Yeah. So basically we think about three different kind of sleep. One we call sleep of clear light. The most important, most profound experience is the sleep of clear light. Sleep of clear light is when you're able to totally rest deep enough so that all your conceptual mind, the story of the day, pain of your emotions, none of them will interfere your higher quality of sleep. You know, we know sometimes some days as a better sleep.

Other days as a worse sleep. The better sleep is when you think, oh, my day was productive. My day was great. I have my family visiting me. I love them. They love me. You have a wonderful day experience. Do you go to sleep?

You're a good night's sleep. So you will sleep well. Next morning you'll feel, you know, more like a rested, more uplifting, more positive energy. But the day when he hits you, your boss fires you. Your family have rejected you. You have deep emotional crisis inside you. Your fear is completely up.

So like night like that, when you go to sleep, you don't, you know, of course, first you don't go to sleep. You maybe go pieces of sleep. You have nightmares. You wake up totally exhausted. So the whole entire life is like that. So it's not so much question about what happens to you. It's more what you do with, or how you process what happens to you.

So sometimes negative experiences can happen. If you know how to handle them better, you still go to sleep. Okay. Sometimes you have a good, good day. But the last morning you have one bad thought that you don't need more. One single bad thought after a whole good day is enough to mess up. Yes. Yes.

My mind is good at producing those thoughts. Incredible. In fact, like a terrible heckler right before I'm falling asleep. Amazing. So, okay. The sleep of clear light. Some mornings after what you just described, rejection from the family, some horrible fight, something rotten is going on.

I wake up in the best mood ever, feeling so good. And then within a few seconds, it's like, my mind reminds me what happened the night before. Is that the clear light that you're talking about? It's this kind of non. The clear light is, it's the moment all your pain stories, it dissolves like water. You know, when you don't shake it like a little spring water, when you shake it, it's a muddy, and when you leave it for a couple of hours,

all the rocks and stones goes down, all the leaves comes up in the middle. It's the crystal clear water. So, your mind, when you go to sleep, when you're able to let go, able to rest, then your mind becomes completely clear like an autumn sky. No clouds. And then that experience in sleep, it's called clear light sleep, where you are able to be aware of that inner sky, inner light, without any stories or pain.

That's like another word, when you're really able to see yourself and experience yourself without all your thoughts and emotions, that's the clear light experience. And, but when we say sleep of samsara, sleep of samsara means sleep where you have dreams, every single dream is your samsaric stories. It has something to do with your activity of the day. It has something to do with your, how you think about that, how you see about it, how you feel about it, all your stories related with it.

When that becomes a dominating factor and take over and you produce a lot of dreams. So, that becomes, it's called samsaric sleep, means you have stories, dreams. Sometimes we call clear light sleep, clear light dream. Clear light dream is dream more predictable dreams, a dream in which you can meet teachers, dream in which you can connect with your inner sources, get a lot of information, inner knowledge from yourself, from other beings, other masters. So, these are different kind of sleep and dreams.

From time to time, I have dreams where people were Tibetan Buddhist monks give me Dharma talks and I love it when it happens. I wake up in the morning and I can't remember much of what they taught, but it's like I'm sitting in a lecture hall or they're just teaching. So, who are those people? Do you, when you are not doing your retreats, do you go into people's dreams and teach them? No, I think it's more like people have, I have dreams like that with my teachers. I regularly visit him, he regularly appears in my dream.

I regularly ask questions, he regularly answers my questions. Then I sometimes very, very long and a very impressive, very sequential and I ask him, you know, I will say, do you come in my dream? He would smile. So, basically I think it's not sometime, not so much that he's coming in me or in my dream more than I'm creating a space in my higher self which is becoming as a form of teacher, the teacher that I know, outer world. So, that outer, my outer teacher, my inner teacher, they come together.

One is essence, one is a form, but it's communicating to me. So, my higher self is communicating me, my outer teacher is communicating me with my higher self. Whatever way you want to look at, I think that's how I see it. That makes a lot of sense. My method, which please don't judge me for this when I say method, but it's very lazy I guess you would say. When I'm falling asleep I will ask for that or I'll put that into my last thoughts and then sometimes I get lucky and it'll happen.

Not all the time, a lot of the times I'm just running from a ghost or something, but sometimes it works and I guess I'm interested in the distinction between this and astral projection, lucid dreaming and the various sort of new-age spiritual methods that allow you to come into waking space but in the astral form. Yeah, I think the astral trip, out-of-body experiences could be very beneficial if it's guided properly, if with knowledge and sometimes I tell in my students, I tell them, you know, you guys are always too much out-of-body anyway.

If you want to learn something, you have to learn how to embody yourself, how to be in your body, not out-of-your-body, because most of the time you are out-of-body. Yes, yes, for sure. That's hilarious. Okay, that's a wonder. Thank you. I get that. Well, this idea of the story, it's very controversial to some people. Some people, they feel quite committed to the story. You know, if you suggest when someone is expressing discontent that this is a story that you're telling yourself, there might be more to you than just this story

or that maybe you're telling a story to make sense of some fundamental suffering, but the story is not quite as real as the suffering. Can you talk a little bit more about this tendency in human beings to sort of instantaneously produce an explanatory reason for all of the pain that seems to go along with being in a human body? Yeah, I think the main thing from this perspective is always human beings always have an identity crisis. You know, I mean, in the West, you know, you say about identity crisis, we think about, yeah, people have identity crisis.

You know, middle-aged people having identity crisis. When their body is weak, they could get a stronger car. That's what I did. I have a big truck. Fancy a car or something like that. Or when people lose their job, sometimes it's not to get into so much pain because of their losing their sense of identity, power, position. And a teenage, you know, when they are going through struggles, they're trying to look for themselves, you know, trying to separate themselves from their parents

and trying to find themselves who they are, identity crisis. A war in Russia, a war in Ukraine in Russia right now is identity crisis. You know, basically it's identity crisis. So instead of becoming an enemy, you can become a friend. You know, one of the best ways to resolve the conflict in two countries is to become closer, not trying to take over each other. You know, like people come, I mean, you see in the U.S. there's all these different states becoming one as one country

rather than, you know, thinking about all times still fighting between Texas and California. So it's between even two people. You know, you can have a conflict, you can argue in a fight all the time or you can, maybe the best solution is how to connect with each other, each other, how to become friends. So friendship is a solution for conflict, not the war, right? So I think that it's always the issue of identity.

This is what it is. So when you don't know who you are, you're always trying to be something, someone. And always there's something someone has to create a story to beat. Right. So even in a dream, you might not be you. What do you think who you are? You might be somebody else. Sometimes you can dream about being animals.

Yes. You can dream about men can dream about being a woman. Woman can dream about being a man or human can dream about being tiger. Yes. You know, or maybe that the monkeys can they dream about being human? I don't know. So it's always the identity is what crisis or identity is what creates all the stories of pain. So there's this possibility.

And I, you know, I think many of my listeners have heard of this possibility, the possibility being that via some spiritual practice, a reacquaintance with something that is not so transient. I think it must be the clear light that you're talking about. Could relieve this identity crisis. It could show you that there's a more stable. Yeah. So for example, if somebody tells you, you know, if somebody tell ask you a story of your pain, you will have a lot of stories to tell. You will say, I broke up with this. I lost this.

This conflict. You can have a lot of story of the past. And then maybe you can have also a lot of stories of the future user. I'm hoping this. I'm hoping that I'm hoping this will happen. And but if you look, if you say, what's your problem right now here? I'm not interested in your past story. I'm not interested in what you're hoping in the future.

What's your problem right now? And you look at right now here. You look at right and left and up and down and here. Here. I don't have any problem. That's it. Yeah. So if you're trying to be in the moment, you don't have so much a problem.

And if you are aware of that, you can have less hassle. You will be less affected by your past and the future if you are more in the present moment, because it doesn't allows the story so much in the present moment. Okay. Well, let's imagine you and I have been sentenced to death. We are both hanging out just before going out to the gallows. And you say to me, what's our problem right now? I'm going to say, they're about to hang us. We're doomed.

This is creating all kinds of anxiety in me. Even if I'm in the present moment, maybe we can even see the gallows right over there, right over there. So how does this work in situations like that imminent doom? Yeah. So in that, those situations, you, first of all, of course, I'm not saying it's easy, but I'm saying we are playing the same game. We have a notion of death and death and you have an idea of death is bad. Yes. Yes.

You have an idea of death is failure and you have an idea of particularly where you are, you're the way you're going to die. You have all these stories. Without those stories, you will not have a problem. Well, the stories is death. Dying like a death, you know, when you take a nap, would you say, you know, it's a problem? No. Because you say, a nap is good. When you say, I will wake up in half an hour.

When you say death, that is a problem. So you're going to wake up in 40, 49 days as a different, another, another life. The story that we have. But I mean, not to keep going back to the story I just told, when I take a nap, I don't hang myself prior to falling asleep. I mean, though I do get the comparison and I, and I do get the comparison, I just, and I love. The main idea here is, is the story that we, it's not about the death and that is the story that you have around the death and that what creates the problem. Death is not creating a problem. Death is not a personal problem.

It happens to everybody. It happened to Christ, happened to Buddha. And it will happen to every single powerful people. It will happen to everybody on this earth right now. In the end of the years, maybe none of these people will be here, all these people right now. I mean, it seems like in a few months, that's possible the way things are going in the world. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's a natural, this is something that, but I do thank you for this because I don't think I ever quite connected the fact that I'm telling that I'm, I always think, I understand the add-ons in Buddhism. I understand. Your example is, I think it's a little bit extreme for people, but every given moment, every single day, you have a stories, there's an event and there's a stories. And the story is you can, the people who are in a very depressed, they will have different stories of the same event. People who are positive, they will have a different version of that story. People who are successful, they look for solutions. They don't talk about problems.

People have failed a lot. They're not interested in the solution. They're attracted to talking about problems. Right, right, right, right. I want to thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Friends, life is incredibly confusing. And sometimes it gets so confusing that you're not going to figure it out yourself. You need help.

I'm somebody who has really benefited from lots of therapy. In fact, once I asked Ram Das what advice he had for me, like what spiritual practice he could recommend for me. And he said, get a therapist. It was really frustrating because I was hoping he would like, you know, I don't know, give me some kind of like spiritual something, a mantra. But it was like, no, you need therapy, man. I ignored him for a long time and then finally I ended up getting therapy and it truly is one of the best things I've ever done for myself in my life. Therapists are trained to help you figure out the cause of challenging emotions and learn productive coping skills, which makes therapy the closest thing to a guided tour of the complex engine called you. BetterHelp has connected over 3 million people with licensed therapists.

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Couldn't be simpler. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist. Learn more and save 10% of your first month at BetterHelp.com slash Duncan. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Duncan. Thanks for sponsoring the show BetterHelp. I want to talk about the, I don't know, the mother of the story. The mother of the story. Like, for me, some kind of pain, some kind of suffering, then that is when I invent, oh, I want to know why I don't feel so good.

Here's why I don't feel so good. Because I didn't get enough sleep or I'm worried about this or that. But can underneath the story, that suffering, what is it? Or are you saying that when we annihilate the story, story goes away? Suffering naturally goes away. Instantly, that would go away too. Now, as I said earlier, underlying the story is the pain identity. The father will have a pain of father's story, not the mother's story.

The mother will have a mother's story, not father's story. The business person will have the story, pain story of business related, not as a parent. So if you look at every pain story, it's associated to a single identity. And this identity sometimes is very flexible. That means, you know, usually we say, I'm no one and I can be anyone. I'm someone, it's hard to be someone else. When you, when you, you know, a whole idea in Buddhism, they say, you are no one. What you're identifying is just identity.

You are identifying with it, but you are not that. You're not, you're not a lawyer. So you're not a doctor. You have a role of law. It's a professional role you're playing as a lawyer. But you are not lawyer. So when you are, you are able to separate what you do. Basically, another word, you are not what you do.

Okay. Now you are, and you have to be free. You have to be free from what you do and do it better and you will do it better. You are a father. How many children do you have? If you don't mind me is just watch how old 16 16. So what's it like being a renowned Rinpoche and a dad to a teenager? Well, that's, I think the beauty is that, you know, I think I feel that all the teaching, the practices, they help me reflect differently.

I don't have to look at one way. I have, I feel I have option to look different ways because I can see, I can see, I feel something. I can see where the feeling is coming from. I can trace back to that one single identity. Then I realize I do not have to be that I am not that I can be more than that beyond that and free from that. Then I have, I'm able to deal with the situation much better. Deal with the situation better does not mean necessarily being passive. Sometimes you have to be strong.

Sometimes you have to be soft. But what do you need to do be when and what kind of kid these decisions, it happens in the second. Yeah. How do you, do you ever find yourself forgetting this? Like, do you ever find yourself wrapped up in? Of course, of course. And do you have tricks for? Well, I mean, I don't have a trick.

I have, I have awareness. You know, I don't have a trick. So I have to, I first whatever is happening you self observation is the most important human beings has. I think one of the greatest gift that we have ability to look ourselves and look analyze ourselves. I'm feeling this. Do I have to feel this? Why I'm feeling this? I'm feeling this because I expect some respect.

I have a main identity who luck, who feel luck of respect and that place of luck of respect and reacting to the situation. But when I realize that, that's all what I need. Not to be too, too, too caught up with the story. Got it. I can see where it's connected. It's not, it's not you or someone. It's me. When I know it's coming out of me and one aspect of me, I feel more free.

This autumn sky, I love that, but I love autumn. It's my favorite time of year. Blue sky. And yet, here we are. Clouds, right? This pain body thing. It's a cloud. It's cloud.

Now the cloud, even though if you even catch a slight. Cloud is okay. Not the storm like in Florida. Yeah, hurricane. That's me. That's when I meditate. I'm flying one of those planes into the hurricane. That's what it's like.

But this pain body, this, I know that from the perspective of the sky, doesn't the pain body kind of not deserve respect, but deserve love or, I mean, gosh, what a mess to find yourself. Even if you are a temporary transient, wispy, clump of knotted stories, you still are something, right? Like you still, this thing, I'm just saying within the possibility of, I'm not the neurotic cloud. There's still the cloud somehow.

It's still there. So, yeah. So, you know, in my book, Tiberi Yogas of Dream and Sleep, which is now a new revised version is coming out with Shambhaka. And so, and that in that book, you know, we talk about different dream, so different kind of dream, different kind of sleep. And in order to make some changes to this pain identity, if you're not able to do it during the waking state, you might able to do it in the night.

So how to do those change, you go to sleep with one personality, you wake up with another personality. It could be that dramatic. It could be that radical. I found it interesting in one of the lectures of yours that I watched. You were talking about how this is, you know, everyone, you didn't say these words, so forgive. This is coming from me, neurotic cloud. That's my spiritual name, neurotic cloud.

We know meditation. We know yoga in the day. This is considered just as much a valid path as meditation, just as much a valid way to wake up as all the others. So, especially in a dream and sleep, what is important is that, you know, just before you go to sleep, one of the very important emphasis, they say it's so important. One of the two moments is a very important moment in life. One before you die, one before you go to sleep, whatever thoughts and emotion you have before

you go to sleep, very important, it will impact the rest of your night. When you die, before your last breath, whatever thoughts and emotion, even what object that you are looking at, will impact, hold the process of journey of the death. So, it's very important. So, in the dream yoga and sleep yoga, it teaches, you know, trying to do something called night breathing or purification, do some kind of breathing, be aware of your thoughts, emotions, breathe them out, find a very restful place and let go, and then find a deep resting place to sleep.

So, you kind of preparing yourself. If you manage to succeed that, let's say in five minutes, you do your little practice, your little tricks, and then when you go to sleep, you manage to, you go to sleep for six hours, four hours. But during those four hours, you are able to maintain that autumn sky, that light, because you just enter in there. During the waking state, it interrupts very often. You know, I have a first second, I have a good thought.

One minute later, I have a bad thought. There's more frequent interruptions in the sleep. No. For example, when you say, I want to wake up five in the morning because I have to take a flight, you put that memory there. And next morning, you wake up around five o'clock, very often. Yes. So, the memory stays the rest of the night.

Right. Whoa. Gotcha. That's amazing. You wake up for five minutes, and then you wake up after four hours, you meditate for, you're meditated for four hours. But if you enter depressed in a five minute and slept five hours in that state of depression, you are depressed for five hours.

Yes, that's why you know why you wake up so bad mood. Wow. I got to stop looking at my phone when I go to sleep. What am I doing? I look at the most terrible things. I watch Ukrainian war footage, and then I fall asleep. I got to stop. Yeah, I do too sometimes.

You do? Yeah, I watch. I mean, I watch the, you know, the war story a little bit more than I should. It's very absorbing. It's a big story. It's a planetary story. It's very absorbing. Could you, and forgive me because I know that this is a, this is the kind of thing you teach

over, you know, months to truly learn it. And, but is there a way for listeners? Could you maybe teach us just a little bit about a simple practice to do before we fall asleep? Sure. So I think for beginners, I think it's important throughout the day. Try to be as much as aware as possible. Try to be aware of, you know, what you're feeling, how you're responding to the world. Like, I'm happy what somebody said.

I'm unhappy what somebody said. Being aware of your thoughts and emotions. And when you're aware of your thoughts and emotions, seeing who is upset. The identity. When you're able to see, oh, I'm upset for no reason. Or maybe I'm upset because this morning I was in, I have, I was in a good mood. Then I am throwing this to my wife, my friend, someone. You just, you recognize something, you know.

So throughout the day, trying to have some control over your own thoughts and emotions, not totally driven by it. So during the daytime, I think that's important to do that. So just calm down, calm down, calm down, self-reflect, calm down, self-reflect, calm down. And then before go to sleep, think about, you know, sleep is, get excited. Think about sleep is a journey to inner temple, sacred temple, sacred journey. Look forward. And then the last moment before you go to sleep, look at what happened during the daytime.

Process them a little bit. Look at what's happening that particular moment before you go to sleep. You are almost ready to close your eye, already close your eye. Look at, you have a thought. One single thought of discomfort thought is sitting there with you. And you are aware of that. Just bring the light of awareness to that one single negative thought, unprocessed thought, and bring awareness in your breath.

And through your breath, breathe out. Breathe out that single thought. Breathe out that single feeling. Breathe out whatever tensions in your body, wherever these tensions are held. You breathe out there. Like they said, deep exhalation, like five to six seconds. Count five to six seconds. Deep and slow breathing out.

And breathe in like about four seconds in. Deep breathing in. You repeat this maybe five, ten times. Then you're clear. You have the past to go to sleep. And once you're going to sleep, you will have amazing experiences. You sleep better, sleep clearer. You might have positive energies are charging.

You might even experience a clear light. But you have to do this little process before you go to sleep. I love that. Thank you. That's very simple. I remember in the book, there's also poses, aren't there? There's ways of sleeping, holding your body. I mean, this gets quite deep.

You know, there's a lot in the book. So I think if, of course, I would, you know, those who are interested in a dream and sleep, I would recommend to get the book, especially the new version. And now revise, revise version so that. And this is the book, not to study for a week or month. This is a book to keep it near your pillow and rest of your life. This is where I, I'm going to get the new edition and I will, I will start doing that. Friends listening, I must tell you this.

I, I have, I don't think I've ever encountered a more psychedelic book. I don't think I've ever encountered a thing that made me how instantaneous. It was almost too, I think I almost stopped wanting to read it, not because it wasn't interesting, because it was too much. And I remember in the book, something of a warning, like you had to tell people just because you were starting to explore the, the, this light waking life as dream. That doesn't mean. So if you read the book, don't think that you will understand everything right away.

Don't think that you have to do everything. What it says you should do. Think about step by step. Take what you're getting and take what you can do. Do what you can do. Don't worry about what you cannot do. Right. That's true in life, right?

Yes. A lot of times we worry about what we are not able to do. We don't enjoy what we have done. Yes. Yes. For sure. This is true. Yes.

I mean, this is, I, I'm sorry to ask the question. I, but is this a kind of yoga that maybe you, did you hesitate to put this out into the world? Did you have a sense that maybe the world? Yeah. Additionally, usually they are more reserved. So, but nowadays, you know, I think how much you're going to keep them reserved. So I think I believe in it. We call it in our tradition, one of the tradition we say self-secret self-secret.

Self-secret means I can keep secret from you, not talking to you, but I can also talk to you and I will ask my angels and guardians to keep it secret. Those who we need to be keep secret from. Wow. So I will not keep it any restricted, but it will keep restricted by itself. So, so when, when, when, when, the probably when, the moment even you want to say, Oh, I don't want to read it anymore. The book saying keep it secret from you. Oh, no, I really want to read it. You're saying, okay, retry it again.

Okay. Maybe I'm ready now. Maybe I've been given a pass to revisit. Yeah. It wasn't, it was just, it was beautiful. It's just, you know, I had, I've, I don't know if you're familiar with Robert Monroe. This is the astral projection stuff. He is, you know, the, and all the other methods for inducing astral projection, which we mentioned, this is probably different from that.

They usually involve reminding yourself, you're awake. So your method is the exact opposite of this in the sense that you're looking around and kind of reminding yourself. This is much like a dream too. That's the part where your angels are like, okay, don't read anymore. Awake. When we say awake, you are waking from what? You know, we awake from our sleep. We awake from our ignorance.

We awake from our pain. You can be awake from anything. You can be awake from your sense of lost. When you found yourself, you are awakened. Awake means can mean many things. Yes. And here's my final question. Thank you for your time and thank you for your concise answers and thank you for this book.

So why are we dreaming? Why is collectively, why is this happening to us? Why has it happened that you and me and everyone on the planet right now have woken from the bardo in a human body or an animal body? Why? What's going on here? Why is the universe expressing it like this, itself like this at all? Why does the emptiness turn into clouds? Yeah, I think there's probably two reasons, one basic reason. One basic reason is that we, you know, I think that just generally able to imagine, able to dream, able to have a vision is very important in our life, right?

I was very stunned by when September 11, the investigation about thousands of pages. In the end, there was one conclusion word. It says Americans were not able to imagine that that could happen. So, you know, imagination, you need to imagine somebody might do it in this way. So we have to be ready for protect from this way. Imagination, right? So imagination, I think dreaming, imagination, visions are very important. But it's bigger than that. I think it's a dream sometimes happening, what we are not able to process in the day, it's happening coming up in the night.

Nightmares, why nightmares come out? We're not able to work with that. That's why they show up. Why our problems? We're not able to process them. That's what they show up in our life. And what we are not able to accommodate, process and be from, they will not leave you. They will come up sooner or later. Thank you so much. Everybody, the links you need to find this book are going to be at dunkitrosil.com.

Are you giving any upcoming, are you doing any tours? Are you giving any classes? Yeah, next week we have the Serenity Reach Dialogue in Virginia. It's in the lignitia.org, L-I-G-M-I-N-C-H-A.org is the website. So we have a spirituality and science conference next week. So that's the upcoming, immediate upcoming events and happening in Virginia in person and online both. I'll have all those links. Thank you so much for your time. And it was very nice meeting you. Yeah, thank you.

That was Tenzin Wango. We're Impaché everybody. Again, you can find him by going to lignitia.org. That's L-I-G-M-I-N-C-H-A.org. A big thank you to our sponsors. And much thanks to you for listening. I will see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. Don't waste valuable child-free minutes on a drink run. Instead, get Drizly, the number one app for alcohol delivery. Drizly has the largest selection of beer, wine and spirits delivered in under 60 minutes.

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