Deconstructing Yourself

Nondual teacher and psychotherapist John Prendergast speaks with host Michael Taft about the heart area as an opening to infinite space, contacting the “dark matrix” of the ground, the body as a vibrant expression of emptiness, moving out of the cycle of reactivity into the creative life, working with energy in meditation, and much more. 

John J. Prendergast, Ph.D., is the author of the books The Deep Heart  and In Touch. He is a spiritual teacher, psychotherapist, and retired adjunct professor of psychology who offers retreats in the U.S. and Europe. 

John Prendergast's website: www.listeningfromsilence.com

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Nondual teacher and psychotherapist Loch Kelly speaks with host Michael Taft about what nondualism is, schools of effort vs. non-effort (and those in between), the five foundations of effortless mindfulness, awake awareness and rigpa, stabilizing nondual awareness, balancing the brain's default mode network, and more.

Loch Kelly is an author, meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and founder of the non-profit, Open-Hearted Awareness Institute. Loch teaches in a non-sectarian lineage based in the earliest non-dual wisdom traditions, modern science, and psychotherapy. 

Learn more at lochkelly.org

Read more about nondual awareness here.

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Host Michael Taft speaks with Michael Owens, a Buddhist teacher and author, about being a monk in Taiwan, Buddhist sutras as portals to alternate realities, understanding dependent origination, the nondual ground and extreme psychedelia of the Mahayana sutras, the Vimalakirti Nirdeśa Sutra, explaining the "inconceivable," Suchness as the opposite of Emptiness, and more.

Michael Charles Owens is a Buddhist teacher, translator, and author. Michael uses a sutra-based curriculum that draws from a variety of traditions to teach the history, philosophy, and practice of Buddhism. His teaching style weaves humor and storytelling with modern scholarly research to create a unique learning experience. He teaches regularly for the San Francisco Dharma Collective and he also runs Lotus Underground, a repository of his teaching activities, audio recordings, and writings.

MC Owens - Lotus Underground on Soundcloud

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In this episode, host Michael Taft remixes his map of deconstructing sensory experience, and talks about how to use it to work in nondual traditions. Essentially the idea is to reverse the stack by starting out with Stage 4 (pure awareness) and then working your way up to stage 3, etc. Michael also spends some time talking about maps of meditation, problems therewith, and why he is already reworking this map after a short time.

Show Notes

0:25 – Introduction

2:11 – Michael’s reasons for opposing maps, and creating the Deconstructing Sensory

Experience map

5:05 – Critiques Michael has heard about the map since first presenting it, and his responses

10:13 – Brief review of stages 1-4 of the map

14:41 – The logic behind putting cessation as stage 5 in the previous map; why it’s now

removed from the map

18:19 – How each stage is useful and no stage is lesser than the others

21:13 – Description of stage 4, pure awareness; how this stage is viewed in other traditions

25:43 – Reversing the stack, using this model bidirectionally

29:56 – The observer trap and how reversing the stack overcomes this problem

34:34 – Outro

Note: this is only a map, only a model. Just like a menu is not food, this model is not claiming to be reality. It’s just a handy way to help you orient your practice.

This model doesn’t count for nondual meditations, high-concentration/jhana practice, etc. It is only to help you with your vipassana practice.

These are not discrete or digital stages. They are analog, and shade into one another. Each stage is desirable and useful for various things. No stage is somehow better than another.

In vipassana practice, however, we are usually attempting to tranverse the stack from stage one to stage four.

When doing nondual practices, we transverse the stack from bottom to top (4 -> 1) and do what we might call “nondual vipassana” or something akin to many Mahamudra practices—which is what this episode describes.

Level 1 - Conceptual - Thinking about sensory experience objects using words.

Level 2 - Phenomenal Object - Contacting the phenomenology of sensory experiences in the form of objects.

Level 3 - Flow / Change - Contacting the phenomenology of sensory experiences as vibration, waves, or change.

Level 4 - Pure Awareness - Noticing awareness itself with no content.

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Host Michael Taft speaks with Dream Yoga expert Andrew Holecek about how the dream state (and dreamless sleep) can effect meditation practice. Topics include: the fantasy-filling model of lucid dreaming vs. spiritual awakening; dream yoga, sleep yoga, and Bardo yoga; the love of napping, meditation in a dream or in dreamless sleep; reification as the "original sin of Buddhism"; lucid dreaming for meditators; and much more.

Andrew Holecek has completed the traditional three-year Buddhist meditation retreat and offers seminars internationally on meditation, dream yoga, and the art of dying. He is the author of many books, including Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep. Andrew is masterful at joining the wisdom traditions of Asia with the knowledge of the West. He holds degrees in classical music, biology, and a doctorate in dental surgery. 

Andrew Holecek's website

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In this episode, host Michael Taft shares a map of deconstructing sensory experience. This is intended to help orient you to your vipassana meditation practice; helping you to understand where you’re at, where you’re going, and what to look for next. A basic map of vipassana.

Note: this is only a map, only a model. Just like a menu is not food, this model is not claiming to be reality. It’s just a handy way to help you orient your practice.

This model doesn’t count for nondual meditations, high-concentration/jhana practice, etc. It is only to help you with your vipassana practice.

Very important: the inclusion of “Cessation” as level 5 doesn’t mean that level 5 is the final goal of practice. It’s just something that can happen, and is included for the sake of completeness.

These are not discrete or digital stages. They are analog, and shade into one another. Each stage is desirable and useful for various things. No stage is somehow better than another.

In vipassana practice, however, we are usually attempting to tranverse the stack from stage one to stage four. Stage five may or may not be something that happens.

When our practice is very skilled, we can also tranverse the stack from bottom to top (4 -> 1) and do what we might call “nondual vipassana” or something akin to many Mahamudra practices. 

Summary of Stages

Stage 1 - Conceptual - Thinking about sensory experience objects using words.

Stage 2 - Phenomenal Object - Contacting the phenomenology of sensory experiences in the form of objects.

Stage 3 - Flow / Change - Contacting the phenomenology of sensory experiences as vibration, waves, or change.

Stage 4 - Pure Awareness - Noticing awareness itself with no content.

Stage 5 - Cessation - Sudden collapse of awareness.

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Host Michael Taft speaks with Vajrayana teacher Rin’dzin Pamo about Vajrayana meditation practice currently, adapting practices for our times, their practice of The Mind Illuminated, the role of the guru in practice, how meditation practice is like engineering (and Jiu Jitsu), and much more.

Rin’dzin Pamo (also known as Charlie El Awbery) is a British born Vajrayana practitioner living in the US. They were an apprentice in the Aro gTér tradition of Tibetan Buddhism for twenty years and are an experienced Dzogchen meditator and mentor. 

Rin’dzin received the London School of Economics Fei Xiaotong prize for their Masters research on the Chinese tech industry. They worked on international development projects in India, Africa and the Middle East and as a program director for Amnesty International. 

Rin’dzin writes at VajrayanaNow.com and has recently been publicly journaling their progress through Culadasa’s system The Mind Illuminated. 

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Why Metadharma? is an unusual episode of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast, in that it’s Part 2 of a joint interview between Vince and Michael Taft. Part 1 appeared on the Buddhist Geeks podcast recently, and they continue the conversation here.

The topic of these discussions is a subject that both speakers are actively developing, called “metadharma.” In brief, metadharma refers to the many different ways that the dharma is being adapted, remixed, and redefined to meet the unique challenges and opportunities of the current moment.

Vincent Horn is part of a new generation of teachers & translators exploring dharma in the age of the network. A computer engineering dropout turned full-time contemplative, he spent his 20s co-founding the ground-breaking Buddhist Geeks Podcast, while simultaneously doing a full year, in total, of silent retreat practice. Vincent began teaching in 2010 having been authorized in both the Pragmatic Dharma lineage of Kenneth Folk, and by Trudy Goodman, guiding teacher of InsightLA, in the Insight Meditation tradition. Vincent has been called a “power player of the mindfulness movement” by Wired magazine and was featured in Wired UK’s “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world.” He currently lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina with his partner Emily Horn and their son Zander.

More about the Buddhist Geeks farm here.

Listen to David Chapman talk about metasystematicity here.

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Host Michael Taft speaks with clinical psychologist and life coach, Douglas Tataryn, Ph.D. about meditation and psychology. Topics include his work with meditation teachers such as Culadasa, the “wake up, clean up, grow up, and look around” model, Wilber’s integral model. working with trauma and the dark night, and his system of emotional processing known as the Bio-Emotive Framework.

Douglas Tataryn received his PH.D. in 1991 and worked as a professor for 10 years in epidemiology and psychosocial oncology. In 2001 he entered private practice where he applied and continued evolving what he now refers to as the bio-emotive framework, a new way of understanding the emotional system and its unappreciated role in many of our most common mental health disorders. Doug began what became a very intensive meditation practice back in 1975 and he and his wife receive and give teachings within the Namgyl Rimpoche stream of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

Resources

Dr. Tataryn’s website has lots of resources, some free and some for pay: https://bioemotiveframework.com

You’ll find thought provoking interviews and video recordings with Douglas Tataryn at this link: https://bioemotiveframework.com/blog/

Upset about a recent event? Use one or both of these forms to turn that upset into a better understanding and expression of how you are feeling about it.

1. This is help you find the inter-personal feelings about the situation: http://tinyurl.com/BEFstress

2. This form will guide you through the core feelings related to the situation. We tend to take core feelings very personally and often feel we are the feelings instead of being someone who is having those feelings: Http://tinyurl.com/BEFCore

Hear Culadasa speaking about his work with Douglas Tataryn here.

Listen to more more about meditation and psychology with Tucker Peck.

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Host Michael Taft speaks with Loch Kelly on nondual practices, contemporary forms of ancient awareness techniques, dzogchen, mahamudra, advaita, the role of psychotherapy in awakening, the need—or not—for a guru, open-hearted awareness, internal family systems therapy, and more.

Loch Kelly is an author, meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and founder of the non-profit, Open-Hearted Awareness Institute. Loch teaches in a non-sectarian lineage based in the earliest non-dual wisdom traditions, modern science, and psychotherapy.

Loch Kelly’s Website

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Show Notes:

00:43 - Intro

03:05 - Loch’s meditation background

06:59 - Shifting from concentration practice to choiceless awareness practice

10:01 - Meeting Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

12:23 - The experience vs explanation of ‘pure awareness’ in different traditions

14:38 - Mahamudra

15:31 - The dualism in stopping halfway at ‘pure/spacious awareness’

17:54 - Recognition vs realization

20:02 - The possibility of ‘awake awareness’ in different traditions

22:53 - Contacting nondual awareness

24:00 - How can awareness be aware of awareness, if you are not aware from awareness?

28:10 - The contemporary teaching of unhooking ‘local awareness’

34:42 - The vipassana model/map vs natural awakenings

37:42 - Upgrading the mahamudra map and instructions (from ‘pure awareness’ to ‘awake awareness’) 

43:07 - The four or five levels of the mind in mahamudra (1. everyday mind, 2. subtle mind, 3. pure awareness, 4. simultaneous mind, 5. open-hearted awareness/bodhicitta)

46:13 - Thoughts and emotions in ‘open-hearted awareness’

50:09 - Teaching moving from ‘spacious awareness’ to ‘awake awareness’

56:02 - Wonder, freedom, and joy in wisdom mind

01:02:14 - Postural yoga and pranayama in mahamudra

01:05:18 - Integrating ‘one-pointed awareness’ into the ‘field of awareness’

01:08:37 - Psychotherapy as a “preliminary” practice

01:10:42 - The “crazy yogi”: waking up without growing up

01:13:32 - The healing power of ‘open-hearted awareness’ in IFS (Internal Family Systems)

01:16:40 - The role of the guru in different traditions; “energetic transmission”

01:21:37 - Don’t stop halfway and come on in the water!

01:27:30 - Teaching vipassana in a nondual way

01:32:47 - Loch’s latest teaching- and personal inquiries

01:35:14 - Outro

What does nondual mean?

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