Dying Happily - birth, death, bardos, and dream yoga

Class with Mé-tsal Wangmo and Ja'gyür Dorje

7pm to 9pm on Monday evenings for 5 weeks from Monday 14th January to Monday 11th February
Zen Dojo
91 - 93 Gloucester Road BS7 8AT
above Miss Millies Fried Chicken Shop
Bristol, UK

Why do we sometimes find it so difficult to live cheerfully, creatively, and courageously? Why are we afraid of dying but equally afraid of living fully? If we are to die happy we need to live happy too – uninhibited by the fears and tensions that restrict the glorious sparkle of our innate nature.

This 5 week course will explore how we put these crimps in our experience of being and introduce the Buddhist practices of bardo and dream yoga which enable us to fully appreciate all that life and death have to offer. The teachings on the bardos explore discontinuous experiences such as birth and death, waking and sleep, meditation and action, remembering and experiencing, and introduce the thamal-gyi-shépa bardo which can explode us into the dimension of who we are, discovering that this is precisely where we have always been. The dream yoga practices of clear light, lucid dreaming, and illusory wakefulness are techniques for finding self-luminous awareness in every moment of the day and night – whatever our state of consciousness. Both awake and asleep, we lack authentic awareness. During the day, we are distracted by expectations, obligations, and avoidance. In dreams, we lose conceptual consciousness, and are at the mercy of bizarre imaginal events. In deep sleep, we seem to have no awareness at all. The practice of clear light allows us to retain awareness through the process of falling asleep and into the deep sleep without dreams. This practice liberates us from addiction to familiar form and enables us to experience pure awareness without sensory or conceptual content. The practice of illusory wakefulness connects powerfully with dream yoga through sitting meditation in waking consciousness, thus revealing the ‘one taste’ or essential sameness of experience in both waking and sleeping. Together, these practices free us from conceptual limitations of time and space, and allow us to experience the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity of experience.
No previous meditation experience needed as silent sitting instruction will also be given.
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£8 per session or pay what you can afford

For more information please contact Mé-tsal on This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it 07505569680