How to Truly Wake Up

 

02.03.2023 HOW TO TRULY WAKE UP “In Buddhism, the end goal of practice is awakening, but what, in the ultimate sense, does it mean to wake up?” asks Lion’s Roar editor Andrea Miller in her opening editorial of our March 2023 issue. Inside the issue, you’ll find teachings and practices that answer this question by exploring the ways that sleeping and dreaming can help us awaken. In today’s world, there’s no end to the obstacles that keep us from both waking and sleeping. We’re often left somewhere between the two, going through the motions of our days and nights with little mindfulness or intention. Luckily, the teachings of Buddhism offer great advice on how to stop living our lives on autopilot, allowing us to sleep better, dream deeper, and truly wake up. Below you’ll find three teachings on practices of rest, wakefulness, and dreaming. May they bring a moment of awakening to your weekend.

Awake In the Now “Buddha” means “the awakened one.” Karen Maezen Miller on what it is the Buddha woke up from—and how you can wake up, too. How do you tell the difference between someone who’s absorbed in their own thoughts and someone absorbed in the now? Someone who’s sleepwalking and someone who’s completely present? By looking and listening, it’s easy to see when someone is distracted, preoccupied, or unaware. In my experience, the gaze is telltale. You can become aware of this during meditation or face-to-face conversation. When the eyes roll up as if into our heads, we’re in abstract thought. If the gaze drifts from side to side, we may be lost in the past or fantasizing about the future. But eyes straight ahead, focused solely on what is right in front of us, we’re awake in the now, free of our conditioned thinking. What happens next? You don’t know, but maybe you’ll be awake enough to see.

How to Practice Lucid Dreaming Andrew Holecek teaches us how to be awake when we’re asleep. Dream yoga, which some scholars trace back to the Buddha, is when lucid dreaming is engaged for spiritual purposes. Some meditation masters proclaim that practicing in a lucid dream can be up to nine times more transformative than practicing in waking life. This is because lucid dreaming is a unique hybrid state of consciousness in which the conscious mind faces the unconscious mind directly. When you transform the unconscious ground of your experience, you can transform everything above.

Rest In the River Resting is a very important practice, says Thich Nhat Hanh. Our physical body needs rest to restore itself, and our consciousness is no different. Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of Buddhist meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest. The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has become a kind of habit. We cannot resist being active, struggling all the time. We struggle even during our sleep.

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