Top-down or Bottom-up?

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I love the sound that critical puzzle piece makes when it clicks into place. :slightly_smiling_face:

Once again @Andrew gave me that piece in the last Webinar.

For the first six months of my training I worked from the top down trying to train my brain to be lucid. I worked hard and had success but it never felt quite solid or sustainable. Then I started working exclusively with Tenzin Wangyals more chakra oriented protocols, abandoning the classic LD induction techniques as I have written about in previous posts. The results were not as spectacular but it felt as if I was building a foundation.

Then a couple of months ago I discovered the Six Yogas of Naropa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Dharmas_of_Naropa

I am learning now how to stoke the inner fire starting at the very bottom chakra and use that to charge up the central channel and, by extension, fill the subtle illusory body with light. When I get it right I feel as if I am entering the dream as a pillar of light.

Working from the bottom up like this is yielding very strong results.

Once again…just sharing. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I had a similar thought when taking the Tummo course at Menla a couple of weeks ago.

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Cool that you took the course. I keep running across Wim Hof but I get the impression his protocols are aimed more at self realization more than central channel and rigpa development.

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I had never heard of him till similarly searching YouTube. Seems more like self-improvement than anything spiritual but that’s without looking any further.

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Hey Barry…I meant to ask…are you practicing Tummo now? Assuming that you are, how is it helping you?

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Steve,

Started a 2-3 weeks ago with the Menla retreat. I have been interested in learning more about it from my reading of One Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa (Stagg). I’m building up the practice slowly as my breath capacity seems limited through occasional asthma and other ENT issues. Helping? I believe so because I had a pretty significant teaching dream last week after the doing Tummo, but I really need to sustain the practice and make it more habitual. Also, the promised written guidelines have not yet been sent out, perhaps still being translated? So, I’m relying on the videos which are very good, but I like written directions too.

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That teaching dream is a big deal as I see these things. Sometimes we need to take knowledge from wherever we can and then find our own way, right?

That is a whole lot easier here in the 21st century.

I would think that any of the Tsa Lung types of breath practices would be very good for you…if practiced judiciously.

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Do you have a link to that retreat/teacher that offers tummo. thanks.

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Hey @Steve_Gleason, lucid dreaming is one of the 6 Yogas of Naropa. :grin:

That’s why The Boss is SO into this stuff! The west finally figured out this ‘lucid dreaming stuff’ that the wisdom traditions intuited millennias ago simply by working with their minds and their experience. So some of the “secrets” are out now.

The Dalai Lama, Mr. Conservative or so I thought, finally came around and said - “the information is easily accessible now [with the internet and the massive translation/publishing efforts to preserve the death of the Tibetan culture and sacred teachings]. It is our duty to make sure that it is at least accurate.”

It’s all pretty self-secret though. That’s why they always say ‘find a teacher!’ [and I always ask “them” - WHERE?! :wink:]

A friend flipped out when I mentioned ‘self-secret’ - as in there was some cult conspiracy of secrecy and you have to know the right knock. Granted that was his ‘stuff’ running. It’s merely that the subtle meanings of the things we read can only be understood if one has had such an experience, or gotten close. It’s like a hidden bookshelf behind a bookshelf, which has another hidden bookshelf behind THAT, on and on. Concepts and words can’t touch experience.

I’m SO NOT “there”, this is just how I understand it.

And the only I can explain it is - “give me your experience of tasting a strawberry.”

(you could be allergic, have different childhood associations with strawberries, differences in olifactory inputs while chewing, or straight-up just not like strawberries — all different from my own development around ‘strawberry’, or say I’m red-blue color blind, etc… This human situation is a lonely one if scrutinized! All self-secret, you could say)

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@paulmaben That retreat is over but there seems to be some online Tummo instruction but I can’t vouch for any of them. Steve was referring to William Hoff who has several videos and Tummo-type online courses. You can see them here.