Michèle Lacroix
A difficult childhood and an adolescent crisis pulled me toward psychology and spirituality. Something in me was driven to understand suffering, the human condition, and our real nature. I moved through Christianity, Anthroposophy, Osho, and other teachers, before beginning, in 1998, many years of direct learning from Mikaire and Isa. Their presence and integrity have remained a source of inspiration ever since.
As a counsellor, my work is person-centred and intuitive, rooted in humanistic, body-centred psychotherapy and Eastern philosophy. I'm especially interested in how Western scientific approaches meet the Buddhist understanding of the workings of the mind.
Recently, my curiosity has expanded into two practices that have become a passion and now shape my personal and professional journey: lucid dreaming and dark retreat.
I explore lucid dreaming - the ability to become aware during a dream and deliberately engage with it - as a laboratory for psychological and spiritual development.
Dreams symbolically represent the unconscious mind; therefore - from a psychological perspective - lucid dreaming lets us face our fears, 'shadow' aspects of our personality, hidden desires, and past trauma directly - making the dream space a powerful place for emotional integration, increased self-awareness, and creativity.
From a Buddhist perspective, lucid dreaming points beyond personal growth. It invites us to investigate the nature of awareness itself. In Tibetan Buddhism, lucid dreaming is part of Dream Yoga - a practice for recognizing the dream state as illusory, just as waking life is seen as illusory. By staying aware within the dream, we train the mind to see through appearances, dissolve fear and attachment, and glimpse the nature of mind itself. This recognition is meant to carry over into waking life and, ultimately, into the liminal stages of death.
A second area of exploration is the practice of dark retreat.
Psychologically, silence and darkness remove outer distractions, leaving only the mind's own movements - memories, emotions, fears, and creativity. Our habits of avoidance are challenged. Instead of escaping, we can meet ourselves fully, turning whatever arises - beliefs, fears, pain, boredom - into an opportunity for integration.
Within the Tibetan-Buddhist tradition, however, the purpose of dark retreat extends - as with lucid dreaming - beyond psychological integration. At a sutra level, darkness supports a settled, stable mind (shamatha) and insight (vipassana) into the mind's own nature. At a tantra level, total darkness becomes an environment in which awareness may reveal its own luminous nature.
I believe that my own practice of lucid dreaming and dark retreat not only deepens my understanding of the mind but also sharpens my capacity for presence and non-reactive awareness, which directly shapes how attentively I can sit with anything arising in counselling sessions. Additionally, it enables me to support clients working through related territory like the integration of psychedelic or transpersonal experiences.
For more information about dark retreat and lucid dreaming refer to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdAPj5VWt4w&t=3566s