Andrew Holecek

Andrew Holecek (00:00) The reverse meditations are really brilliant because they vastly expand our notion of what meditation and contemplative practice is by bringing unwanted experiences onto the path. And so in this age of the meta-crisis, have you noticed — there's no shortage of unwanted experiences. And so do we run from them or do we work with them? The reverse meditations are called reverse because you reverse your normal feel-good strategies. Authentic psychospiritual growth is not about feeling good — it's about getting real. And getting real means dealing with challenging situations, like old age, sickness and death, or everything else that's happening in the world. Armed with this skill set, one can take even the most challenging experience — like death, arguably the most unwanted of all — and if you relate to it properly using reverse meditation strategies, obstacle transforms into opportunity. By putting your meditation in reverse, you'll find yourself going forward. Because with the reverse meditations, nothing can interrupt your meditation. Interruption becomes your meditation. Nothing can distract you because distraction becomes your meditation.

Dmitrij Achelrod (01:27) Welcome to Inner Pioneers, a podcast for those who feel the call to break new ground within themselves. Join us as we dive into real stories of transformation and learn from leading voices in psychology, science and human development on how to move through inner shifts and seasons of change. I'm your host, Dmitrij Achelrod — and now let's begin pioneering.

Dmitrij Achelrod (01:54) Andrew Holecek is an internationally acclaimed author, scholar-practitioner and long-time teacher in Tibetan Buddhism and non-dual wisdom traditions. Andrew has spent more than 30 years helping people turn life's deepest challenges and most mysterious states — such as pain, death, sleep, dreams and even darkness — into gateways for awakening. He completed the traditional three-year Tibetan Buddhist meditation retreat, is one of the West's leading voices on dream yoga and lucid dreaming, and has guided nearly a thousand people through his Preparing to Die program. Andrew holds degrees in classical music, biology, and a doctorate in dental surgery.

Dmitrij Achelrod (02:39) Andrew, good evening — or good morning. Thank you for being on tonight.

Andrew Holecek (02:46) Thank you for having me, Dmitrij. Nice to spend time with you. I appreciate it.

Dmitrij Achelrod (02:50) Wonderful. So Andrew, you are a renowned teacher in Tibetan Buddhist practice. You have written extensively about very interesting ways of doing introspection — dream yoga — and now a new book will be coming out about darkness retreats and darkness exposure. But before we dive into these areas of specialty, I would love to hear how you actually found your way to Tibetan practice. When I read about your life in the beginning, you were experimenting with many methods, and it didn't seem to be easy for you. This quest was coming out of a certain longing to end suffering, if you will.

Andrew Holecek (03:45) Yeah, how did I get into this business? I think one pretty seminal and transformative event was when I was 20 years old, studying at a big university doing a challenging double-degree pursuit. I was diagnosed with symptoms consistent with hypertension. They prescribed exercise, diet regulation, and some medication. I said — I'm 20 years old, I'm not going to take any medication. So I changed my diet, increased my exercise. And at that time there was some initial data coming out about the benefits of transcendental meditation for reducing things like hypertension. I went to an introductory session on campus, signed up for my first session, and long story short, over the course of maybe an hour, my mind dropped into a complete state of cessation, absorption — which I attribute to beginner's luck. It introduced a dimension of awareness and consciousness that I didn't even know was possible. No thought, no mental contact whatsoever — just ecstatic cessation. That really launched the whole thing. It was like taking a sober psychedelic. Then a couple of years later, I started having very interesting precognitive dreams. I spontaneously entered an altered state where for about two weeks, all my dreams were lucid — and correlatively, my waking reality became more dreamlike. That pointed me powerfully toward the Tibetan teachings, and I've been on that path ever since.

Dmitrij Achelrod (07:42) It seems like you had the luck to experience such a deep state — fascinating but also destabilizing, even worrying. And still you decided to pursue it and seek the guidance of more experienced people. You ended up deciding to join a three-year retreat. What made you believe it was a good idea to do that?

Andrew Holecek (08:24) Yeah. At that point I'd been studying very rigorously the vast corpus of Tibetan Buddhist teachings — a 12-year rigorous cycle of teachings with my main teacher, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. I'd studied so much material, but I hadn't fully incorporated it. It was more just at the level of intellect. I realized that in order to really bring this into my life, I had to slow down and practice what has been preached. So I went into retreat for three years and radically changed my life. It was like meditation university — I probably did 60 different practices over the course of those years. It was a magnificent exploration of the depth of the human condition. The first book I wrote when I came out was called The Power and the Pain — about the extraordinary power of really deep inner work and also the challenges, the pain of waking up. It's not easy. It's like a detox. Ever since then, I've just been propelled deeper into the extraordinary depths of the mind and the heart. We're always working with our mind — and if that's true, why not work with it directly?

Dmitrij Achelrod (10:57) When you reflect about it from today's point of view — who did you think you were when you went into that retreat, and who came out?

Andrew Holecek (11:20) That's a nice question. Answering "who am I" is actually the core inquiry — the Greeks had it at the temple of Apollo, Ramana Maharshi made it his central practice. When I came in, my identity was still fairly consolidated at the most exterior, superficial, somatic, body-based level of appearance. Ego is first and foremost identification with form — Freud, Eckhart Tolle. Then, going through this kind of detox over three years, it was a profound dissolution and dying process. This is why I'm so deeply interested in the Bardo literature of Tibetan Buddhism, which explores death. My identity began to transition from exclusive identification with form into the interior, subtle-body dimensions — all the way down to what many traditions call the nondual essence of being. I'm still very much a work in progress, but there's something about the profound reiteration of these pointings that brings about a certain stabilization and levels of insight. My path continues — to make it more stable, more familiar.

Dmitrij Achelrod (13:31) If I imagine young Andrew walking in, identifying himself as this mind, personality, body, familiar history — and then these edifices are being dissolved. It has immense revelatory potential. But it can also be pretty frightening to not know who you are or where you belong. Trungpa Rinpoche said: "The bad news is you're falling through the air, there's nothing to hold on to, no parachute. But the upside is there's also no ground to hit." Have you ever questioned your choice — and felt: is this the right way, is it helpful, or is it rather destabilizing?

Andrew Holecek (14:32) Well, it's both, because we exist along a sophisticated, complex spectrum of identity along at least two axes. What happens in an extended retreat is you realize that space, time, causality, the very sense of self — these are all constructs. They're literally made up, actively reconstructed all the time. When you do deep intensive inner work, you see this magnificent construction process. Ego is the world's most efficient, fastest construction company. In the blink of an eye, you co-create: there is no color, no shape, no dimensionality out there independent of perception — these are all enacted the moment you open your eyes, co-emerging with the very sense of self. Self and other lean on each other; they co-emerge. By understanding this, you understand where anxiety and fear come from. You exist along two axes: the more evolved, ultraviolet aspect that really does want to wake up — and on the infrared end, this devolutionary tail that wants nothing to do with it. That's where the fear and resistance come from. Understanding the nuanced dimensions of our identity helps us understand these dissolution processes. This is where spiritual traditions dovetail beautifully with Western developmental psychology and structural developmental disciplines. We're working along both these vectors whether we know it or not.

Dmitrij Achelrod (17:36) One of the things I love about your approach is that you don't restrict yourself solely to the traditional contemplative path, but also incorporate modern or Western approaches — psychology, adult developmental perspective. These are, as Ken Wilber says, different lines of development. When you came back from the retreat, how was it for you to step back into your former world? How was the integration?

Andrew Holecek (18:45) Definitely not easy. But where does growth take place? You're not going to grow when you're working on your suntan or hanging out in a hot tub. You grow when you're stretched. So yeah, it was extraordinarily challenging. I lost my job, my house, my wife. It was like a death — everything was released. It was profoundly revelatory and revealing, and for me, it was choiceless. This underlying drive, this longing to wake up — it's the only authentic path for me that there is. And the integration piece — just like with psychedelics or any other really powerful transformative journey — that's the most important part. You can have amazing experiences. So what? You can become a state junkie, addicted to certain states of consciousness. The point is to transform states into traits, stable qualities. "Incorporation" literally means to turn into a body — to take the experience and make it the very structure of your being. It's an ongoing journey. Where does growth take place? One has to be willing to step out of comfort zones, step into the challenge zones, and look at the world in new ways. Otherwise we're just stuck in our habit patterns until the day we die, when all these boxes dissolve on nature's non-negotiable terms.

Dmitrij Achelrod (21:53) When we think about it from a Buddhist perspective, one of the most fundamental truths the Buddha spoke was that there is suffering in life — and there are causes and conditions for it, but also a way to end them. From your point of view, what is the root source of most of our suffering?

Andrew Holecek (22:38) That's obviously a major question. The first noble truth in the Buddhist tradition is the truth of suffering — really, the truth of dissatisfaction. But this is only in the realm of conventional reality. We only suffer in conventional reality. We suffer because we don't know what's real, because we don't know who we are. That's archetypal non-lucidity — ignorance. If we continue to see the world in a dualistic way, solid, lasting, and independent, we're going to suffer in direct proportion to that wrong view. More specifically, we suffer because we subscribe to materialism and duality. No one has ever experienced matter — matter is an inference, a label we append to the regularity of experience. On a more developmental, psychological level, we suffer because of an arrested form of development called ego structure. There's nothing inherently wrong with ego — it's a very necessary, important stage in human evolution. If we didn't have egoic structure, we wouldn't be here talking about it. The issue is not this stage itself, but our exclusive identification with it, and the lack of recognition that it's an arrested form of development. So those are the two principal psycho-spiritual reasons why we suffer: we don't know what's real, and we don't know who we are.

Dmitrij Achelrod (25:22) Two arguments: we are confused about what's real, and we cling to our identification with form. But if you said to a regular person — "your suffering is an illusion" — I'm not sure that's helpful. They will say: my depression feels very real. No matter how I think about it, it's not so easily changeable.

Andrew Holecek (26:11) I agree with you 100%. It all depends on how you define illusion. Illusion doesn't mean it's not real — illusion means appearance is not in harmony with reality. Just like in a dream: if you're in a non-lucid dream and you don't know you're dreaming, you mistake the contents of your dream to be real. You can have nightmares, you can literally scare yourself to death. The minute you become lucid — the minute you realize, wait, this is just a dream, this is just my mind — the tables are immediately turned. The appearance is still there, the monster is still there, but with lucidity you can see through it. So what we cultivate is what William Blake talked about as double vision — keeping one eye on absolute truth and one eye on relative truth. The relative truth is the truth of appearance; you can't deny it. That's classic spiritual bypassing, which leads to serious psychospiritual pathologies. But you also develop a kind of X-ray vision that lets you see the underlying reality behind appearance. Keeping one eye on both truths — that's one way to talk about what awakening might actually be. You can still operate in the world, communicate, write, help — in fact you do so better than before — but you're no longer falling into the trap of a reified, dualistic, materialistic world.

Dmitrij Achelrod (31:08) This resonates very much — holding both levels simultaneously. There's a story about a Zen master who was crying and sobbing deeply. A student showed up and said: "Master, why are you crying?" He said: "I just lost my child." The student asked: "But aren't you teaching us that this is all an illusion?" He said: "Yes — and losing a child is the biggest one." The pain here is real. This human vulnerability, this shattering heart, is part of the human condition — and it's also what makes us human, what allows us to become compassionate. And yet if we only remain on that level, it is crushing. When we remember there is something more absolute, that's where spaciousness and liberation come in. Ram Dass often said: if you're only up there with the celestial beings, you become completely detached from reality — you see somebody fall and you say "well, it's karma." But if you're only stuck in human suffering, it will crush you. Balancing these two levels — I think this is the art of the path.

Andrew Holecek (33:16) 100%. That level of fluidity is really characteristic of awakening. And you're touching on something compelling: the capacity to deal with irony, contradiction, and paradox. I think it was Suzuki Roshi who said, "If it's not paradoxical, it's not true." When we look at non-duality through a dualistic lens, you get irony, paradox, and contradiction — because non-duality doesn't fit into shrink-wrapped dualistic concepts. The capacity to hold different perspectives — what's called complementarity in physics — multi-perspectivalism — is absolutely important for having a mind and heart ready to deal with paradox. Reality itself is not paradoxical; reality is ineffable. The minute you try to "eff" the ineffable, you're going to "eff" it up — as Alan Watts put it. This is why philosophy alone only goes so far. You change when you feel things. And the beautiful result: as one progresses on the path, you actually feel things more, but they hurt you less. You feel things more because you're more open, more in contact with reality. When the whole duality thing breaks down, there's no longer a place for the pain to land — no ego structure to grasp it. Like a neutrino, it just passes through you. And because of this, you don't burn out, you don't have all the problems that many people do when they only operate in the relative realm.

Dmitrij Achelrod (37:29) Viktor Frankl said: between the stimulus and the response, there is a space — and the more we can enlarge that space, the bigger our inner freedom. I love this concept. But let me play devil's advocate. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that Buddhism is the ideological supplement to capitalism — instead of bringing people to the streets against unjust or oppressive systems, it says "sit on the cushion and deal with it internally." What is your take on that?

Andrew Holecek (38:24) With all due respect, that's incredibly misinformed and naive — it's borderline silly, highly revelatory of his lack of understanding of this tradition. At entry-level, provisional teachings — called the Theravāda, the narrow vehicle — yes, you work on yourself. Because if I don't understand my own mind, my heart, how can I even hope to understand a reality that's completely plastered with my projections? A very powerful psychological maxim: when a situation affects you more than it informs you, you're dealing with a projection. When you react more than you respond, you're dealing with a projection. We're affected and reactive all the time because we're always projecting. So if we can take responsibility — cleaning up our projections, we clean up the world — then we're no longer reactive. Now we can respond in a sensitive, intelligent way. Yes, on one level at first, you could say that's selfish. But then the Hinayana matures into the Mahayana, the greater vehicle. The practitioner then spontaneously gets up to help the world — because when they see people suffering, they are suffering. There is no other. Suzuki Roshi said it beautifully: "Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened beings, there's only enlightened activity." So activism is a natural consequence. At the Mahayana level, the practitioner spontaneously marches, serves, acts — in every breath, in the service of others.

Dmitrij Achelrod (42:12) To be fair, in Žižek's defense — he mostly refers to the Western version of Buddhism uprooted from its traditional ground.

Andrew Holecek (42:15) That's really important context. The secularization of Buddhism — taking it out of its traditional setting, transforming meditation, which was never meant for all the things it's used for today, and poorly translating it into Western culture — that's a real issue. Part of my job as a cultural translator is taking these wisdom streams and bringing them into Western cultural contexts through the vocabulary of science, philosophy, and psychology. If Žižek is addressing that decontextualized version, there's probably more wisdom in what he's saying. But the deeper tradition absolutely does not support passivity. And why can't you do both? If you don't understand your mind, how can you effectively help others? How can you centrifuge out what's really happening from your projections onto what's happening?

Dmitrij Achelrod (43:44) Exactly. I believe that from a deeper understanding of the self and of the nature of reality, a more enlightened activism can arise — not driven by rage and anger, but something that by its own presence transforms. Ram Dass calls it the difference between the activist who says "I will fight until there is peace" versus the enlightened activist who says "I am peace, so may there be peace in the world." This is a completely different way of relating to the world. And so — I want to talk with you about different ways of practicing. You have coined the term "reverse meditation." What do you mean by this? What is regular meditation, and what is reverse meditation?

Andrew Holecek (44:50) The reverse meditations are called that because they reverse our relationship to unwanted experience. Here's the key distinction — the difference that Victor Frankl was pointing at — the space between stimulus and response. Everything really is brought about by how we relate to phenomenal arising, not by what arises itself. The issue isn't what arises in our minds. The issue is how we relate to it. The reverse meditations vastly expand our notion of what meditation is by bringing unwanted experiences onto the path. In this age of the meta-crisis, there's no shortage of unwanted experiences. The question is: do we run from them, or do we work with them? They're called reverse because you reverse your normal feel-good strategies. Authentic psychospiritual growth is not about feeling good — it's about getting real. Getting real means dealing with challenging situations: old age, sickness, death, everything happening in the world. And I bring a broad-spectrum approach here: as a retired dental surgeon, I worked in the pain business. I've been involved in studies around physical pain. So this is not armchair philosophizing. It's about how we take this inevitable lifetime partner — pain — and transform it into an ally. Something we can befriend, accept, and grow with.

Dmitrij Achelrod (49:44) Can you give us an example of how one would work with emotional or physical pain using this approach?

Andrew Holecek (49:56) Sure. There are four steps. The overarching view first: establishing a new relationship to unwanted experience. If you ask someone "have you ever taken time to become familiar with your pain?" they'd say, "I'll drink a beer, I'll take some drugs, I'll distract myself." Just understanding that the principal transformation is an alteration of one's relationship — that's already a shift. Step one: observe. Just notice. When you have pain, do you notice contraction? Most people feel some type of contraction — they defend against it. Just holding a witness awareness quality to what's arising already starts to transform it, because you're holding it in a different crucible. Step two: be with it. Instead of running to TV, to alcohol, to distraction — just allow yourself to be with this discomfort. Trungpa Rinpoche said: "There is no way out. The magic is to discover that there's a way in." Be with the pain. Befriend it. Become familiar with it — the Tibetan word for meditation, GOM, literally means "to become familiar with." Step three: examine it. Become curious. What is this thing called pain, really? What's it made of? The idea is to feel it, not feed it. And then the key question — not examining the pain, but examining the experiencer. Who is feeling this pain? That's a game changer. Step four: dissolve into it — become one with it. T.S. Eliot said of music: "Music heard so deeply, it is not heard at all. You become the music while the music lasts." If you feel whatever you're feeling 100 percent, that dualistic experience becomes a non-dual experience. If you become one with your pain, there's no one to hurt. There's just this sensation we append the label "pain" to. This is why you can look at Thích Quảng Đức — the self-immolating monk in the Vietnamese war. How is it humanly possible for a human being to sit in complete stationary meditation posture without flinching while his body is being burned alive? Because fire can't burn space. He had a radically different relationship to his pain.

Dmitrij Achelrod (57:21) What comes into play is the equation you mentioned: suffering equals pain times resistance. Maybe you can explain what you mean by that.

Andrew Holecek (57:54) More important than E equals MC squared: S equals P times R. Suffering equals pain times resistance. What you resist persists. If you do just a little bit of basic math — if you drop the resistance, you drop the suffering. Suffering is a construct. Suffering is just an inappropriate relationship to pain. And because it's an inappropriate relationship, you can change it. You can deconstruct suffering. You can reduce suffering back to its substrate, which is pain. And then even further, you can deconstruct pain itself. What's left when you go through this non-dualistic demolition derby is just raw, intense sensory awareness. Awareness — mind — that's what's left. So: try it for yourself. You'll touch into the pain and contract away. Touch into it, contract. In that moment of contraction, that's precisely when you transform simple pain into complex suffering. So counteract it — open, open, open. My favorite definition of meditation: habituation to openness. When you open, accept, and go into it, everything starts to change, because your relationship changes.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:02:07) Going to the places that are scary, that hurt — this is tremendously powerful and transformative. And yet, when we bring in trauma-informed awareness: people who have been hurt so badly psychologically or physically — even the thought of approaching the pain might be overwhelming. What's a wise approach to that?

Andrew Holecek (1:02:44) That's a really important question. Use this practice in conjunction with — not as a replacement for — all the standard approaches to trauma. If you do that, then you can work with sensitization approaches, exposure therapy, all the amazing things done in trauma work — including internal family systems, Bessel van der Kolk's work, and the like. Because what are you doing in EMDR and all these other approaches? Take a look under the process, the phenomenology of these techniques, and you'll find alterations in relationship. Fundamentally, that's what's going on. Trauma is chronic contraction. If you understand the phenomenology of contraction and openness, you can eventually work to open and release these chronic contractions. Because if you descend through higher-order contractions — irritation, pain, fear, panic — you work your way down to what I call the primordial contraction. And I ask people: what might that primordial contraction actually feel like, the root trauma? It feels like the very sense of self. The primordial contraction is the very sense of self. Why do we contract not merely in self-defense but in self-generation? Because the self is embodied contraction. That is a game-changing level of exploration.

Andrew Holecek (1:07:16) What I really live by from Socrates is: "The only difference between you and me is I know that I don't know." That level of openness and humility is everything for me. The Dalai Lama said — and how many world religious leaders would say this — if science comes up with material discoveries that contradict the teachings of the Buddhist tradition, the Buddhist tradition needs to capitulate. So: endless beginner's mind, endless humility. I don't have the final word on any of this. People can find me at andrewholecek.com. We have a big platform called Nightclub that supports the nocturnal meditations, and a new website just launching to support dark retreat practices — my next series of books will be on that topic. And I have my own podcast, Edge of Mind, which is free and ongoing. It's a delight to spend time with you, Dmitrij — great questions, great sensitivity. Maybe after my book comes out we can talk about dark matters. As I playfully say, my charter now is I'm trying to bring darkness into the world.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:09:27) I love it. We need more of your darkness. Thank you so much, Andrew.

Andrew Holecek (1:09:29) Too much light in the world right now — way too much light pollution. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You're a delight to spend time with. Let's do it again sometime. Take care, my friend.