Sleep Practice

At night, choose a sleeping position that works for you. The texts often recommend the lion posture, lying on your right side. Some people find that they are “opposite wired.” Some say this depends on gender, others say handedness. Some lineages say it is the same for everyone. Explore gently and discover what supports you best. It likely has more to do with energetic patterning than gender.

If you would like a little extra support for this practice, you can create a small shelf above the head of your bed. On that shelf you could place a stupa, a sacred text, and an image meaningful to you — perhaps your yidam, your root teacher, or a statue.

You may light a butter lamp, or place a small electric votive inside a butter-lamp holder so that it gives off a soft glow. If you use a real candle, make sure it is completely safe. The point is not decoration but creating an energetic focal point — a small altar space. This is not required. It is simply an additional support if you find the practice challenging.

Before lying down, spend a few minutes resting in the natural state. Just as in daytime practice, relax the gaze into soft, unfocused openness. Some people prefer lying on their back slightly propped up. Others prefer a posture similar to resting in a lounge chair. Find what allows alert relaxation.

After brushing your teeth, taking evening medications or vitamins, turning things off, tending to the pets or children — once the day is complete — sit for five to ten minutes with channels aligned. Eyes relaxed into non-focus. Neither pursuing thoughts nor rejecting them.

When you lie down, let the breath settle into its natural rhythm. The mouth is slightly open. Breath flows partly through the nose, partly through the mouth. The abdomen expands gently. The in-breath is slightly faster than the out-breath, and there is a small pause at the end of the exhale. This pattern may arise automatically.

What you do not want is for your eyes to slip into REM-like tracking as you fall asleep, following mental imagery. In lucid dream practice you follow imagery. In this practice, you do not follow the images. This is not lucid dreaming practice. Notice that distinction.

The White A

Within your heart chakra — the vital point of mind — at the center of the lotus, is a white syllable A, about the size of your thumbnail.

It emits light.

This light radiates outward across all appearances — samsara and nirvana, existence and nonexistence, movement and stillness.

The light spreads through all phenomena and melts them into itself until they become nothing but clear light. All appearances dissolve into luminosity and reabsorb back into the white A in the heart.

Then again, the light radiates outward, carrying all phenomena within it playing all phenomena back in their places. The universe unfolds. 

Then it radiates outward again, carrying within it all phenomena that had dissolved. Placing all phenomena back in their places. The universe unfolds. The universe appears. Then it dissolves again.

Then it dissolves back into the white A in the heart. You are breathing out the universe and breathing it in. Breathing out the universe and breathing it in. Do this as you fall asleep.

As for the symbolism, he A is the symbol of language, the symbol of sambogakaya of potential of lucidity – the ability to think. We think in language. The ability to conceptualize is also symbolized by A. So the conceptions go out and create the universe and then they come back into what they never left – the A and the A is always here. The mind naturally pulses and cleans itself out of assumptions of existence.

The Inner Mandala

Remember the mandala offering practice. Mount Meru is your spinal column. The four continents are your four limbs — your own local world system. The sun and moon are your two eyes. The jeweled ground is your flesh. When you offer the short mandala, you are offering the inner mandala — your own body as cosmos.

You may wish to recite or remember the mandala prayer before bed:

“All possible dharmas, the entire sentient and insentient contents of samsara, and all the precious offering things of the boundless Deva realms are merely the “play of form” within the unborn Dharmadhatu. In the purity and oneness of subject, object and action is this offering made.”

As you breathe out, you emanate the universe. As you breathe in, you reabsorb it.

Return again to the beginning before the beginning: pure potential, alive, awake, aware, yet without time or space. Without time or space, there can be no occurrence. Therefore there is nothing to be aware of — only simple, open awareness.

Because of the prism-like nature of the vitality pervading all phenomena, that clear light nature of intrinsic awareness arises as five colored lights. In that arising — of sensation, perception, occurrence — Kuntuzangpo and Kuntuzangmo, along with all sentient beings, both recognized the mirror of their own face and knew it for what it was and did not recognize it and so reached out to touch, grab, and grasp causing moving until all movement proliferated through time until we have all of this.

Recognition and nonrecognition arose together. Nonrecognition reached outward, grasped, moved. Movement generated more movement. Proliferation unfolded through time until we arrive at this complexity — ever faster, ever denser, more detailed. There are no longer blank spaces on the map. No dragons at the edge of the world. Everything is mapped, analyzed, satellite-scanned.

And yet — nothing ever happened. It never truly began. There was no mistake, no sin, no error of perception in a moral sense. What we call the “original oops” was not wrongdoing. No one did anything evil.

This sleep practice brings an understanding beyond words of that original display — the spontaneous play of awareness — without blame, without fault.