dharmaocean

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Dharma Ocean on The Pilgrimage Within

Originally published on healthtian.com

This article was adapted from Dharma Ocean Podcast 239, a talk given by Dr. Reggie Ray at the November 2016 Meditating With the Body Retreat held at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England. Dr. Reginald “Reggie” Ray is the Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, dedicated to the evolution and flowering of the somatic teachings of the Practicing Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

Good morning, everybody. We have this wonderful opportunity to be together for a few days and to do the most important thing in the world. And that’s a very rare thing in human life. Most of the time, we spend our time doing things that are not the most important thing in the world.

We spend our time doing things that don’t touch the depths, and more and more in modern culture, our lives are set up, so we never touch the depths. Many people don’t even know there are such depths within. Hence we spend our whole lives trying to feed ourselves dust and ashes, eating sand and drinking brackish water while we’re starving and dying of thirst.

But there is a different way, even though the modern world has almost entirely lost sight of it. This is a different way in which humans were born to be connected with what is timeless in ourselves. We were born to go to the full depths of life and live from that place because that’s actually where life is found.

It’s very beautiful here with the changing weather, the sun coming and going, the wind blowing through the trees. And this beauty is also in ourselves—a tremendous beauty and depth of feeling from being alive and feeling the sacredness of our own life.

Sometimes people make a distinction between the secular and the mystical or religious. That’s a very superficial way of thinking because if you fathom the world’s great traditions, you end up at a source of life, the eternal depth of the human person. If you fully fathom the secular world, again, you wind up at a depth of life and the timeless source of our person.

You wind up in the same place. And that’s what traditional meditation is about, whoever you are, whatever your religious or political beliefs or your culture, or your station of life. Until we discover the road back to the source, we have not become fully human, and we can’t live a fully human life.

This isn’t about individual people. It’s about a lineage that goes back hundreds and thousands of years. People come and go, nations come and go, cultures come and go. But the stream of spirituality that we are part of endures beyond all of the changes.

Public traditions and religions fall apart or become corrupt. We see this in the history of religions. The public external traditions often became corrupt, polluted, and even poisoned. But for some, the inner depth was never compromised. Especially the meditators would go to their own depths, their inner lives, their felt sense of life, their body’s unfailing intuitions and discover there the same things people discovered in the external initiations, such as going into the mysterious depths and darkness of underground places.

There’s a very famous person in our tradition from the 5th century in India named Saraha. One day he was meditating in his little hut by the river Ganges. Somebody came along and said, “we’re going to go on a pilgrimage.” A pilgrimage is when you go to sacred places, perhaps because your life isn’t working and you’ve lost track of yourself, and you’re living too much on the surface.

“We’re going to see all these wonderful sacred places; there will be all kinds of colorful experiences, it will be so much fun. Why don’t you come with us?” Saraha declined—he said the greatest place of pilgrimage on the planet is my own body because within my own body is the holy river Ganges and all the sacred sites in India as well.

He was saying that by exploring my body, by exploring my inner world, I can make a much more profound and transformative pilgrimage than you people can by wandering around and looking for it somewhere outside. And that’s very much our tradition. That’s what we’re doing here. Our embodied, or “somatic meditation,” is a Vajrayana tradition from the Eastern regions of Tibet, a region called Kham—a total backwater.

If you saw pictures, you wouldn’t understand how people could live there. These little rundown huts and stone houses and tremendous open territory with not much happening. And this is where this tradition survived for 1,000 years. That’s what we’re doing here. We have taken off the Tibetan cultural trappings, which are very heavy and really get between us as modern people and the teachings that we seek. And they’re not necessary.  But what is left is stunning, and it is what all of us have most deeply longed for, forever.

About Dharma Ocean

Dharma Ocean is a global educational foundation in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, focusing on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, who are genuinely pursuing their spiritual awakening.  Dharma Ocean provides online courses, study resources, guided meditation practice, and residential retreats at Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado.

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DHARMA OCEAN DISCUSSES INVOKING THE PRIMEVAL FIRE

Originally published on sunrisenews.co

This article was adapted from Dharma Ocean Podcast 243, a talk given by Dr. Reggie Ray at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, CO. Dr. Reginald “Reggie” Ray is the Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, dedicated to the evolution and flowering of the somatic teachings of the Practicing Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

There’s a burning quality to awareness. It’s subtle, but it’s there. Space and awareness co-exist. When we first meet space, it seems very empty, but the more we get to know it, the more we begin to detect that the very nature of space is not only empty, it’s warm—and it’s not only warm—it’s actually burning. It’s on fire.

That awareness burns up anything solid. This is why we have such a tough time in life, because we are always trying to pin down our situation and who we are to have some reference point that we can relate to. Every time we try, that burning quality of awareness is at work. That’s the first noble truth—that no matter how we try to solidify things, everything is always being burned, and that’s what pain is. Awareness is burning up our attempts to solidify our life, to pin things down, to find some kind of reference points, some kind of enduring security and comfort.

The very nature of life itself is movement. Life is always flowing. It’s a river that has no banks.  Life begins with the first warmth of space. And then it ends up in everything that we see in the universe. All of it is flowing; all of it is in process. So the burning quality is what life comes out of. This burning quality protects life—it’s the origin of life. It’s what protects life from our attempts to freeze and impede it.

The Hawaiian fire goddess’s name is “Pele.” This is a name given to the life force. We could give it other names—religions have given other names—but Pele is the mistress of the depths. What that means is that the deepest reality of being is fire. The first thing that happens whe space moves into form is fire.

That depth is always there. That fire is always burning. When we seek life, we can touch it. When we feel out of touch with life, we can touch it. It’s extraordinarily loving. It’s actually the nature of love itself, that primeval fire. But if we try to co-opt life, it becomes wrathful, and the wrath is an expression of love.

The world is filled with living energies. The elements are alive, and all the deities of the world are fundamentally all emissaries of the elements. They’re all representing life in different ways, and they are expressions of direct wisdom. They’re not as hesitant and shut down as we are. When we invoke them, it’s not a trivial thing—it’s not inconsequential.

When we start trying to create personal territory out of the flow and unfolding of life, we’ll be called to account in some way. We need the help of the unseen world to make the journey. If we were just left to our own devices, we wouldn’t be able to do it because our capacity for self-deception is so deep. We have to live and act and be creative, respecting that fiery nature of reality—and when we do, then things will go well.

We’re talking about a certain kind of magic in the universe that we are invoking and requesting to be part of our life. And the magic is that when you start drifting and losing track of what you’re doing, you get a message. When we are truly being ourselves, the more we are completely and totally the person that we are and the person we were meant to be, that itself is life. So strangely enough, when we invoke the power of life, we are really calling to our own person at the same time. We are beyond ourselves. And the more that we grow as people and fulfill the purpose of being a human being in this world at this time, the more we’re beyond ourselves and the more we feel that something is happening with us that is beyond anything that we’ve ever been able to imagine. Our life becomes an exploding star, a supernova in space. And this explosion is of cosmic significance; it’s a universal blessing: for it is out of supernovae that all the elements are created that make life possible on earth and elsewhere throughout all the realms of space.

Strangely enough, that is us. That’s who we are. We are an exploding star—our light and our inspiration. That love needs to go out to the whole universe. That’s the very nature of being human. When we begin to become that supernova, we feel more ourselves than we ever have in our whole life. We feel so completely that this is who I am, and this is why I’m here. And every atom in my body is being fulfilled. Life being life. In unleashing life, we come to who we are, and we become who we are by becoming who we are. When we invoke the primordial fire, that process unfolds. We are being nourished and opened and expanded, and we’re being protected at the same time.

We’re being protected from being inauthentic. That’s a very good kind of protection. It’s not about being protected from obstacles. What we perceive as evil forces out there are just egoic projections onto the world. What we’re being protected from is not being ourselves. We’re being protected from all the tendencies in us to want to hide and not become who we are. Ego gets paranoid, of course, but this whole world is a world of blessing. And when we think the world’s a bad place, what we’re doing is we’re projecting our own ego’s paranoia onto the world. This protection of fire protects us from thinking we need to be protected from the world.

Fire is the basic element. There are two ways to work with fire. One is fire as the element and fire in the hearth, fire in the fire pit, the fire in the sun, the fire in the stars and the moon, the fire at the center of the earth, which is the most wrathful. That is what’s interesting about volcanoes. That’s the most wrathful and powerful, primeval experience of fire that any human could ever have. If you’ve ever stood at the edge of a volcano, you feel you’re not even on the earth; you’re not even in the universe. It’s so terrifying. So you can work with fire in that way. And that’s actually, in some sense, the most accessible way to work with it.

That’s working with the outside element, but then at a certain point, you realize the fire is inside too. It’s in us, and it’s burning all the time. And it’s the heat in our body and the nature of our sexual desire and our passion and our love for others. And it’s ultimately the fire of our own awareness. So whether we’re working outside or inside, we’re working with the same primordial, primeval fire. And again, it has two sides. It empowers and protects us, and the protection is empowerment. The protection is protecting the life force in us so that we have no choice but to become who we are. Shall we all become what we are, shall we all become supernovas?

About Dharma Ocean

Dharma Ocean is a global educational foundation in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, focusing on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, who are genuinely pursuing their spiritual awakening.  Dharma Ocean provides online courses, study resources, guided meditation practice, and residential retreats at Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado.

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Dharma Ocean Discusses the Gateway to Direct Experience

Originally published on consciouslifenews.com This article is adapted from the Dharma Ocean Podcast Episode 214 – Direct Experience, by Dr. Reggie Ray, Dharma Ocean Spiritual Director. This excerpt is taken from the online course, The Somatic Practice of Pure Awareness: The Tantric Style of Embodied Meditation.  One keynote of the esoteric and tantric traditions of meditation is that they give rise to a grounded and all-inclusive field of awareness; rather than moving away from our fully embodied, experiential human existence, they are moving toward it. The emphasis is on the human experience as the ultimate and final reference point for everything that we know and think. This goes back to the time of the Buddha. He was engaged by one of his students, who wanted him to give him intellectual and tradition-based answers to questions. The Buddha's response was, “You can live that way if you want to. But at that point, there's no journey, and there's no awakening. In fact, there's no anything.” That approach, and ultimately, trusting anybody or anything outside of your own direct experience, he said, leads to suffering, confusion, pain, and harming others.The Buddha spoke for the primacy of experience — that which we know in the depth of our own being, unfiltered through the thinking mind. His response to this student was, “The only way that you should ever trust anything and know anything is to see for yourself if it's the case.”  That is the role of direct intuition, known only in and through our body.  He said, “Everything else is a hypothesis and not to be believed blindly.” This theme of the sacredness of direct experience as our only resource, our only guide, our only protector, has been central to the early meditation traditions — Ch’an and Zen, and Vajrayana, or Tantric Buddhism in Tibet — the esoteric traditions.Through meditation practice that is fully grounded in our body, what we call “somatic meditation,” we arrive at the knowledge that is not mediated by the thinking mind. It is not abstract; it is not conceptual, it is not hypothetical. At this point, through our body’s direct intuition, what we know is not what the mind thinks or assumes. What we know in our bodies is direct naked experience. And that experience is, as William Blake said, limitless. We're touching eternity when we step out of the thinking mind. When we talk about the human experience as being the touchstone of the whole tradition, this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about what we “think” we experience. We're talking about what we, in fact, truly experience, and it happens without thought. It's self-evident. It's the knowledge of our deeper being, what we're calling our Soma.In the conventional culture, we always look to the experts for everything. Even in the field of meditation, people look to the experts. In these days of profound spiritual consumerism, spiritual shopping, and spiritual materialism, people go to the internet to see which teacher gets the most “hits.” And then that teacher becomes the expert for them. They may even say, “that’s my spiritual teacher,” although never having met that person.When we are operating in modern culture, there are many powerful and seductive forces that lead us in different directions. The internet is amongst the most powerful of addictions and also the most pernicious, and least understood. It has captured and changed all of us in various ways. From my scholarly studies and direct contact with indigenous traditions and traditional religions throughout the world, I know that it hasn't always been like this. And because our disembodiment in this culture is so extreme, we have to find a way back to our basic being; our somatic being; our intuitive way of knowing; our physical body, and the arena where we experience things nakedly.This capacity to know in a different way has been not only part of us since the beginning but is actually a key to our survival. In the book Black Elk Speaks, he shows us how much he relied on what his body knew, how much his bodily intuition showed him while hunting buffalo in winter, blinded by blizzards. He said, “I sensed that over the third hill, there were buffalo.” And there were.We talk about the five senses; sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. And then we talk about the sixth sense as if it were a weird sort of outlying thing that maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't. When we are in our body, the knowledge of the sixth sense becomes our way of knowing. It's immediate direct knowledge. It is our direct intuition.  It doesn't have to be filtered by anything. And the clarity of that knowledge is much higher than any other way of knowing. This veracity, the self-existing truthfulness of that somatic knowledge, is infinitely beyond what we know in any other way.We have to develop that capacity. To be more specific, we are developing the capacity to be identified with our largest and most profound being, and to view and see the world from that standpoint and live from there.We're developing, we could say, a different kind of human being than the one we have been trained to be within this culture. We could also say that we are recovering a way of being human that's much more ancient and closer to our human genetic system. In fact, it is our human genetic inheritance from the very beginning. So we have a challenge in our culture to come back to ourselves. I think that the tendencies that separate us and deny us our own humanity and reinforce our disconnection, are very strong and real, but they don't hold a candle to the noon day sun of the awareness of our own body. About Dharma Ocean Dharma Ocean is a non-profit global educational foundation that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado.Their Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone is a sacred and protected space that hosts a wide range of retreats and meditation groups.  Students can immerse themselves in the richness and depth of their most fundamental being through connection with spiritual tradition, community, and nature.  Dharma Ocean also offers online programs and specialized training for students who wish to become Vajrayana practitioners.

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Dharma Ocean on Culture, Religion, and Modern Spirituality

This article is adapted from the Dharma Ocean podcast of a talk given by Dr. Reggie Ray at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. Originally published on voicesfromtheblogs.com My teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was thoroughly trained in the Tibetan tradition and spent a lot of time in retreat from a very young age. He realized that spirituality and the spiritual journey are an essential, inborn part of human nature. Even though the institutionalized religions try to possess and control it, spirituality is not owned by any organization or religion.Institutionalized religions have largely been unable to acknowledge or accept this because once you acknowledge that spirituality and the spiritual journey are the natural inheritance of all people, you lose control. People who are administrators and officials in organized religions are often people who don’t actually practice a contemplative method. Or, if they do, their priority remains “the organization.”It seems to be true in Buddhism, and it’s probably true in all religions, that the people in positions of power are there because that’s what they want. They want power—generally for altruistic reasons—and they want to be thought of as being important in the social arena and enjoy managing other people. I am not pointing fingers: I feel that this is at least a part of me and others who create spiritual organizations.Often, we as leaders actually spend much of our time doing other things rather than practicing. We are often not deep practitioners. So we have organized religions run by people who are doing something other than making a spiritual journey in a full sense. In the Buddhist tradition, the way that’s played out in an interesting way, that reconnects such people with the essence of their tradition: people go through a phase of life where they are identified with the organized religion, but then there is the wake-up. At a certain point, they realize that to fully possess and take ownership of the Buddhist teachings in the true and genuine sense, they have to leave positions of hierarchical power.And they leave their posts and “enter the forest,” meaning they make practice and realization the center of their lives. Traditionally these people went into the forest and to mountain tops; they went to caves and remote places and practiced meditation. And they were, as far as the institution was concerned, dead and gone.  Most organized religions seem not to have retained this as a viable option for their leaders and power holders. And even within Buddhism,  this kind of wake-up may not have been all that common.The identification of organized religion with “THE TRUTH” of a tradition has been widespread.  And this leads to inherent intolerance and conflict among institutionalized traditions. However, we now live in a new time where the fiction that some religions have the truth and some don’t isn’t working anymore. Because we have rubbed shoulders with each other, Christians and Jews and Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus and Taoists, and the indigenous traditions with all of us, we have friendships with people who belong to different traditions, and we can compare notes on the journey. It becomes clear that the whole idea that there is a single true religion and one way of doing things doesn’t work for most people and, in fact, isn’t true.One senses that the resurgence of fundamentalism is a phobic reaction to the emerging awareness that no tradition has the ultimate word and that each of them represents an expression of human spirituality. Fundamentalism is seen not only in theistic traditions; Buddhists and Hindus have their fundamentalists. Even indigenous traditions have fundamentalists who believe their way is the only authentic way.In a profound and ultimate sense, they’re all equal.  This is because all humans, when you get to the full depth of what our species is, are equal. Their spiritual capacities are equal. For some, this is a very liberating insight. But others go crazy because their identity has been built around having “THE TRUTH,” and their reaction is to retrench and affirm in a much more aggressive way that they have the truth and everybody else is deceived. Ironically, the resurgence of fundamentalism may be pointing to a growing awareness that spirituality is something possessed by everyone.The more we slow down and meditate, the more we actually begin to realize our situation. We are, in a very real sense, on our own. The impact of the 20th century has been that more and more of us feel that we are actually on our own as individuals and that a lot of the spiritual and religious answers that have been accepted without much thought in the past are turning out to be false. They don’t work for people anymore. They brought us a level of truth that is critical—we are truly on our own and the loneliness we feel is real loneliness, and it’s a loneliness that people are trying to fend off. But by resisting that loneliness, we’re resisting our actual situation. The only way to move forward is to face our situation and work with who we are.Although we could say that none of the religions has the ultimate answer, and many are misdirected, the authentic religions all do have the tools to do this; each, in its own way, is actually able to provide a gateway to our own true self, if we know where to look; if we are willing to let go of all the false promises and false answers, whether religious or materialistic.  But then, realizing that we are truly on our own, we actually have to work on ourselves in a very sustained way in order to reach our own human potential.Let’s take Tibetan Buddhism as an example. Tibetan Buddhism, for all of its unthinking conventionality,  does offer incredibly sophisticated and profound techniques for fundamental, radical, and permanent transformation. These methods can work with anybody’s state of mind and problems, anybody’s personal, social, or and cultural situation. That part of Tibetan Buddhism needs to be retained.On the other hand, the cultural trappings, the attitudes that prevailed in Tibetan culture, ways of interacting with other people, and certain belief systems around power and privilege, while these may have been appropriate for traditional Tibetans, they’re not appropriate for Western or modern people, including Tibetans, because they’re too insular and conservative and ego-based—even modern Tibetans have had to break free from their own Tibetan-ness.The issue with traditional Asian religions and many traditional Asian teachers, and with those modern folks of us who try to carry on their lineages, is that they haven’t separated the transformative essence of what they hold from their cultural attitudes and beliefs. That full separation hasn’t been made. But now we modern people have to make it. It’s not their problem. It’s our problem. If we make that journey, it’s imperative that not only do we not get trapped by cultural attitudes and ways that are not ours, we also don’t get trapped by cultural attitudes and ways that are ours.Maybe every period of time is unique in some way, but this time period is really unique.  Ironically, to fully fathom the meaning and possibilities of our current situation, those of us who are Buddhists, in our case those who follow the practicing lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, are using techniques that have been passed down for 2600 years. We’re using these ancient methods to shed ultimate light on our lives right now; we are in the process of trying to discover who we are and who we need to be right at this moment.We need to realize that no outside authority or person can make this discovery for us or even tell us what it is. We have to figure it out for ourselves, starting from ground zero. My sense is that any of us, whatever our culture or religious orientation if we are willing to connect in depth with our own spiritual heritage or tradition, can be doing that too.About Dharma OceanDharma Ocean is a non-profit global educational foundation that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado.

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Dharma Ocean Discusses Using Depression as a Gateway to Insight

Originally published on healthtransformation.net This is adapted from a Dharma Ocean podcast of a talk given by Dr. Reggie Ray at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. Dr. Reginald “Reggie” Ray is the Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, dedicated to the evolution and flowering of the somatic teachings of the Practicing Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.  He teaches in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. The author of many books, audio courses, and online series, Reggie’s work, and teachings draw from his background as a Buddhist scholar and practitioner. With a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago (1973),  he was the first full-time faculty member and chair of the Buddhist Studies (later Religious Studies) Department at Naropa University. Over nearly four decades he grew the department and played various leadership roles at Naropa, developing with Trungpa Rinpoche many of the initiatives and projects that became part of Naropa’s unique identity as a Buddhist-inspired university.  He began explicitly working with dharma students in 1995 and now devotes all his time to transmitting the teachings of the Vajra dharma of his teacher.From a certain point of view, the meditator never takes anything for granted. It doesn’t matter if you run into the same state of mind you think you’ve had a million times; it’s a new thing, always, and we have to find out what it is. If you can do that with a state of mind like depression, it is very, very fruitful. When we run into a low state of mind, a mind with zero inspiration or light or even a will to live, which we call depression, it appears to be a complete absence of energy. Usually what we do at that point is check out— “Oh, I’m depressed,” and “Oh, no…”—and then we start thinking about it as usual and trying to figure a way out.In fact, depression is an extraordinarily powerful energy. It’s an energy that is dark and hidden and low. What we do, because we can’t handle the intensity of this energy, is to think, “Oh, I’m no good, and my life’s never going to be any good. Everybody else is living their life and having these great things happen, and here I am at the bottom of the well, the depths of this deep fathomless pit,” and on and on.However if we take depression as something to be explored, we begin to find that within it there are a lot of subtleties. If we can let go of the fact of the idea that we’re depressed and simply take depression as energy or as a manifestation of our awareness, then there’s a real journey available. Depression is powerful because you actually have to let go of pretty much everything in order to explore it. You have to let go of your hopes, your fears, your dreams, your ambitions;  the things that are working, things that aren’t working, your whole world. That’s why depression is so powerful, because if you step into it, it is actually a process of letting go of your entire known self, your entire known reality. Few are the people that have the courage to actually do that.If you’re willing to relate to it in the way I’m talking about, you may be willing to give up that last reference point of “Poor me.” That’s the last shred to hang on to. Are you willing to let go of “Poor me”? The story of, “I’m the victim. I’m the pitiful, the pitiful remnant of humanity,” or whatever your approach is; are you willing to be with the energy of it as a meditator and do what we’re talking about here, which is take your depression as your object of mindfulness and be with it, surrender to it, and look at it. And then you begin to see in the dark. If you’re always looking up at the world that you think exists then depression is just this black hole. But if you’re willing to actually go into the depression, you begin to be able to see in the dark. There’s something going on there, and there’s a very powerful invitation to enter into the arena of death, the death of self.So depression is maybe the most difficult of all the energies. What’s true with depression is true with all of them; that when we leave the discursive thinking behind, or at least slow it down to the practice of mindfulness, we discover all kinds of things going on in us, and we pay attention to them, be with them, open to them, and just be. And then there’s a journey that starts to unfold. It’s our journey. And it’s a journey that passes through many, many phases as we go.When you feel very depressed, of course, the last thing you want to do is meditate because the experience of depression can be very painful, and one that we certainly would like to get rid of and avoid at all costs—not one that we want to sit down and be friends with. The technique, in this case, is to sit down in a meditation posture. If we’re familiar with Somatic Meditation bodywork, we can lie down. We can do five or 10 minutes of breathing deep into our lower belly, working directly with the body itself and bringing our awareness out of our personal narrative about our depression and into the body.One of the things that we often do not see about depression is the conceptual thinking that generally accompanies it. Sometimes, when we think about our depression, we have the impression that it is just a kind of heavy, sinking, dark feeling that’s pulling us down. But the fact of the matter is that what is actually the most painful thing about depression is the storyline that goes along with it. We feel heavy. We feel sunken. We look around at our life and all we see is kind of gray colors. We feel that all of the things that we used to find meaning in are meaningless, and the friendships seem empty and hollow. The projects that we were excited about seem to be completely pointless. And instead of staying with that feeling, which is actually extraordinarily insightful from a certain point of view, in other words, the basic experience of depression is that we are actually seeing through the usual overlay of kind of candy-coating that we put on our life, and we’re seeing that life is rather empty, or really empty,and a lot of the things that people preoccupy themselves with are meaningless, and they’re not going anywhere, and they’re not going to yield the results that everybody is hoping for.Instead of staying with the wisdom of that experience, which is actually extraordinarily profound, we start thinking and conceptualizing and having all sorts of bad thoughts about ourselves and our life; we start running ourselves down, and we start loathing ourselves, hating ourselves for this experience that we’re having, which is actually extraordinarily insightful. So we turn against ourselves, and we begin to think, “I’m worthless. I’m no good. My life is never going to be any good. Look at everybody else, how happy they all are. They all are having a great time and their life is meaningful, and I just can’t do it, and there must be something terribly, terribly wrong with me.” And all of that thinking that goes on in depression is self-referential. In other words, it’s always feeding back and we’re using that experience of seeing the emptiness of everything as a way, strangely enough, of solidifying our own ego as a kind of a dark and kind of negative situation.So the practice, as I am saying, is that we sit down or lie down, do our breathing, come into our body, and when we’re in our body, we leave the storyline on the surface. It’s as if we’re swimming on the surface of the ocean. It’s covered with  oil and dead fish and seaweed, dead, decaying seaweed, and disgusting eddies of discarded plastic, whatever, which is our ego. Then at a certain point, we just let ourselves give up and sink down, descend beneath the surface and we leave all of that junk behind, and go down into the deep, peaceful, clear, quiet sea beneath; that’s what we do with the Somatic Meditation bodywork. We leave the debris of ego on the surface of our conceptual mind and descend into the body.We do that in working with depression, or any emotion, and having done that, we begin to invite that feeling of depression in—not the storyline and self-flagellation and self-loathing, but simply the raw texture of the depression itself. We’re inviting in the actual feeling component of depression, which is just a quality, strangely enough, of energy and insight arising from the emptiness of our own nature. Trungpa Rinpoche once said that depression is the closest samsaric state to nirvana, to enlightenment. It’s potentially the closest state of mind to real enlightenment and an experience of egolessness. And when we feel very depressed, it’s actually helpful to call that kind of comment to mind, because what it does is it gives us a certain sense of the dignity and nobility of what we’re experiencing and it can be very encouraging to us in terms of sitting down with that emotion and being with it fully.So we sit. We invite the feeling and we sense it in our body. We sense the heaviness. We sense the weight. We might do some the somatic practice of earth descent, breathing into and feeling the quality of the earth beneath us, holding us up, and we begin to roam around in our body, and roam around in the earth, simply feeling deeper and deeper into what we call depression, but really, when you take away the mental aspect of it, it’s not depression anymore. It’s just pure energy of a certain kind, and moreover it’s energy that’s extraordinarily intelligent. And then a journey begins to unfold from there, and if we look into the depression, we try to see what is it about this that’s depressed? What is the exact quality of the feeling? What is really going on in my body at this moment? What am I actually experiencing apart from what I might think about it? And what kind of gifts might this experience be holding for me just now?  We stay with that and a process begins to occur. And this becomes an analogy of how we could work with any challenging emotion that we might experience.About Dharma OceanDharma Ocean Foundation is a non-profit global educational organization that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado.

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Dharma Ocean on Sacred Mysteries

Originally published on personal-development.com This is adapted from a podcast of a talk given by Dr. Reggie Ray, the Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado.

We talk about pain in this lineage. We talk about the pain of our lives. The Buddha talked about pain. He said it was the first thing, the personal truth.

The important point is the way one would talk about pain from the viewpoint of Vajrayana or Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, and the ordinary way ARE completely different. We have to give the relative world room to be what it is. Sometimes, people don’t want to talk about pain, and they feel talking about pain is degrading or depressing, or, “Let’s not talk about death. Let’s not talk about illness. Let’s not talk about the tied-up claustrophobic feeling of neurotic upheavals. Let’s not talk about the heartbreak of being in relationships.”

What we have to realize is that talking about pain is a celebration. It’s a celebration of life. It’s acknowledging that there is nothing wrong with anything, whether it’s life or death. There is nothing wrong with anything. In fact, quite the opposite. Whatever we go through in life, we’re in the presence of sacred mysteries, always.

Pain, pleasure, taking a breath, these are all independent entities. They’re sacred mysteries. Any idea that we have to have an attitude toward the sacred mysteries is ridiculous, and yet we do it. We have all kinds of attitudes. We separate the sacred mysteries. We take them, and we put some of them here and some of them there. Some of them are me, some of them are you, some are pleasure, some are pain, some I like, some I don’t like, and we’re manipulating all the time. It’s ridiculous. It is so lost. It is so mistaken.

The more deeply we discover and rest in the immeasurable expanse of our own being, the more inspired we are to allow our relative life to have its own way, and the more inspired we are to give room to the anthills and the trees and the dung heaps and the stars. Our forebears, the indigenous men and women from all the different social levels and circumstances, held all of life within a sacred compass. They talked about life from this standpoint. They talked about their pain, and they talked about their pleasure. They talked about their hope, and they talked about their fear. But the way they did it was completely different because rather than trying to figure something out or control something or establish some zone where they felt safe, and all the talking was a celebration of what life is.

Suppose that the purpose of speech is to celebrate life and nothing else. So, when we talk about pain from the standpoint of the awakened state, of the unborn awareness, we’re not complaining. We’re not trying to get out of it. We’re not criticizing. When we talk about pleasure, it’s not to celebrate ourselves and how great we are. When we talk about how unspiritual we feel and how screwed up we feel, it’s a celebration. It’s an expression of the sacred mystery of feeling that way or of having that thought or that experience. Your heart can be utterly broken, and it’s a celebration. The journey is the ever-deepening letting go into the natural state, our deepest nature, our eternal awareness.

There isn’t anything more to it because the natural state knows how to live and knows how to receive experience. It knows the moment of compassion and love. It knows the words that need to be spoken. Truly, our life does flow from the unborn emptiness. Our problem is that we somehow along the line got the idea that actually there was something more to it, that there’s a solidified self behind the scenes, that kind of Wizard of Oz. But just the way the Wizard of Oz turned out to be a total fraud, so does that notion that there’s more to it. There isn’t more to it. In fact, there isn’t more that there could be to it. The natural state is the source of our life, and we don’t need to add anything to it.

Maybe last week, your therapist told you that you’ve got a long way to go, and you’re really screwed up. The only way that’s going to hem you in is if you think it hems you in. There are possibilities here, and it isn’t because of us personally; it’s because of the world. Human beings can go along to a certain point, and they can kind of define their reality up to a point. Then at a certain point, at a certain moment, the world reality takes over, and it goes, “No, that’s not how it is. It’s going to be different,” and we are all living in that moment, especially now.

So, the more you can open to yourself, your deeper self, and the more willing you are to not go by what you’ve been thinking about yourselves, the more is going to happen. The world that existed yesterday doesn’t exist anymore. It may be that we’re physically alive, but that our circumstances or the world circumstances will change, and we won’t be able to practice anymore and will be taken over by the river of karma. We have to realize that there may not be very much time at all for us and the opportunities. If the world goes in a certain, slightly different direction, all of us are going to be out of luck. We don’t know what’s coming. It’s the comet phenomenon that at any time, we could be hit by a comment and wiped out as a planet. Nobody really knows.

So, we go from that, the level of sort of cosmic events, all the way down to our own personal life, and it’s very uncertain. Please don’t waste any more time. Please don’t get involved in things that aren’t meaningful in the ultimate sense. We don’t have time to be slightly meaningful and to do things that everybody else thinks are really great, but in our heart, we know it is basically a complete waste of time. We just really don’t have that luxury anymore. We just can’t do it. So, whether you’re 20 or whether you’re 85, please don’t waste any more time.

We have to move on, and we’ve got to take an approach to life that humans have not taken, at least for a long time, which is to focus on what’s the most meaningful and the most real in our lives and let the rest of it go. We have a lot of excuses not to do it in our culture, but we have to do it. We have to turn away from conventional thinking. It doesn’t mean that we don’t live the same life we lived yesterday. But we have to have a completely different approach to it and a different understanding. We do have to pare away the things that are not essential and make room for life. The world’s dying because people haven’t made room for life in a long time. That’s why the world’s dying. It’s very straightforward.

About Dharma Ocean

Dharma Ocean is a non-profit global educational foundation that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado.

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Dharma Ocean Foundation Discusses Tibetan Yoga: The Body in Buddhism

Originally published on theodysseyonline.com Excerpted from Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body by Dr. Reginald Ray, available at Sounds True.Dr. Reginald "Reggie" Ray is the Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, dedicated to the evolution and flowering of the somatic teachings of the Practicing Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He teaches in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. The author of many books, audio courses, and online series, Reggie's work and teachings draw from his background as a Buddhist scholar and practitioner. With a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago (1973), he was the first full-time faculty member and chair of the Buddhist Studies (later Religious Studies) Department at Naropa University. Over nearly four decades, he grew the department and played various leadership roles at Naropa, developing with Trungpa Rinpoche many of the initiatives and projects that became part of Naropa's unique identity as a Buddhist-inspired university. He began explicitly working with dharma students in 1995 and now devotes all of his time to transmitting the teachings of the Vajra dharma of his teacher.This Day in HistoryMay 24, 18831883The Brooklyn Bridge in New YorkCity is opened to traffic after 14years of construction.The term "Tibetan Yoga" refers to advanced, esoteric, somatic Vajrayana meditation practices traditionally carried out by men and women hermits spending much or all of their time in seclusion, in solitary retreat. Although this tradition is preserved within Buddhism, an organized, institutionalized (and thus agricultural) religion, its roots and its essence are far older. In my Ph.D. study at the University of Chicago, my dissertation advisor, the internationally renowned scholar Mircea Eliade, contended that the Vajrayana, though nominally "Buddhist," in fact represents a "survival" of the aboriginal spirituality of humankind, in other words, the pre-agricultural, paleolithic religious orientation of our forebears of perhaps a million years.It is quite interesting that Chögyam Trungpa, in his Shambhala teachings, said more or less the same thing: there is within each person, irrespective of his or her historical period, culture, tradition, or orientation, an inherent human spirituality that lies at the very heart of the human being as such. My own practice of Tibetan yoga (Vajrayana)—carried out in dialogue with the study of earth-based spiritualities, as mentioned—has confirmed this fact on an experiential and practical level.While the actual practice of Tibetan yoga in its more esoteric aspects requires much preparation, it is nevertheless important in the present context for two reasons. First, it presents a thorough challenge to any and all notions that meditation can be practiced in a disembodied state or in any kind of separation from the body. In fact, Tibetan yoga holds the opposite point of view: to attain realization, we have to practice in such a way that we become fully and completely embodied.This is why, in Tibetan yoga, virtually every practice is aimed at recovering the body. This book and the somatic practices it describes are specific responses to Tibetan yoga, and especially to its viewpoint, that realization is the result of greater and greater embodiment. Second, Tibetan yoga is important in this context also because it provides many of the specific insights, gates of entry into the body, and methods for exploring the body that makes up the body work on which this book is based. For these reasons, it may be useful to provide a brief summary of some of the primary perspectives and practices that characterize this ancient, esoteric, "primordial" tradition upon which I am drawing here.The journey that one makes through the practice of Tibetan yoga unfolds according to a series of stages. In the first, one learns how to identify and abandon the myriad body concepts that we all carry around. In other words, each one of us has a package of mental images of our own body that make up what we think our body is. The first step on the Tibetan yoga path is to progressively strip away everything we think about what our body is. Eventually, we arrive at a point where we have no mental picture left, and we actually know nothing of what or how the body may be. Now we are ready to take a look and see what our body actually is, as revealed to the eye of direct experience.In the second phase, when we turn our awareness to the body to see what it is, we notice various things occurring. There are moments of what we might call sensation: intensities of warmth and coolness, hot and cold; flashes of energy, pleasure, and pain; waves of light and chasms of darkness; and so on. Two things are particularly interesting about what we notice when we look within the body. First, every experience is, in some very real sense, unique. There is no naming it; no idea or concept seems adequate. Second, there is nothing permanent in our experience of the body; everything is ever-changing and fleeting.In the third phase, we learn how to abide for longer and longer periods of time within the fundamental emptiness of the body (the fact that we have no idea of what it is) and the continual patterns of energy that arise within the body (phase two). Rather than touch these experiences of the body and then quickly (and anxiously) exit back into our conscious thinking process as a way of escape, we simply learn to abide in the body.In phase four, we learn to "read" the manifestations of the body, to understand in a nonverbal way the energy that is occurring within us. And, in the fifth phase, we discover within what we see as imperatives to action. In other words, we discover that the life that we need to live is actually being born, moment by moment, within the emptiness of the body (phase 1), as the energy that arises (phase two), which we can abide with (phase three) and eventually learn to understand (phase four). In this way, the spontaneous life of the body becomes the source of our actions and engagements in the world. These are, according to Tibetan yoga, nothing less than expressions of the great compassion of a realized person.At each stage, we find ourselves continually running up against what we have been thinking about our body and being challenged to let go of our ideas in order to see more nakedly and directly, in order to go deeper. As we let go, we are gradually dismantling all the presuppositions and conceptual overlays that are getting in between us and our full, complete, and naked experience of our body.These stages all involve attending more and closely to our body, feeling into it, sensing, and discovering what it is really like. As we progress, we are becoming more and more identified with our actual body, the body we meet in our actual experience; we are becoming more embodied. The more we progress along this path of profound embodiment, the more we realize that our actual experience of our body is, in fact, the experience of enlightenment. As we become more and more embodied, we find ourselves approaching the awakened state.About Dharma Ocean FoundationDharma Ocean Foundation is a global educational foundation in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, focusing on somatic meditation as the way to help students - of any secular or religious discipline, who are genuinely pursuing their spiritual awakening. Dharma Ocean provides online courses, study resources, guided meditation practice, and residential retreats at Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado.

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Dharma Ocean Explains The Path of the Heart in Tibetan Buddhism

Originally published on theusbport.com

By Dr. Reggie Ray, Spiritual Director, Dharma Ocean, and author of The Awakening Body, available from Shambhala Publications.

In Sanskrit, the word “Mahayana” translates to “the Great Vehicle” and is a stage of interpersonal sensitivity and commitment that develops very naturally as practitioners in Tibetan Buddhism follow the path of meditation. In Buddhism, the Mahayana stage is a body of compassion practices that are about developing the sensitivity of our feeling, sensing, and intuiting capacities of the heart in relation to our connectedness to other people and the entire universe. We are deepening what our heart already knows, and we need to remove the veils from that sensitivity to open it up. When we do that, we start to see people completely as individuals, and we begin to see that we have a natural love for them. We don’t have to force it or manufacture it—we have a self-existing, relentless love for other people and a desire to connect with them. And we realize that this selfless lovely at the foundation of our own fundamental state of being.

Along these lines, the Mahayana takes our embodiment as human beings and deepens and universalizes our felt sense of being human among others. The experience of practice in the Mahayana typically unfolds in several stages, and each stage represents a further development of the sensitivity and tenderness of the heart. Here is a guided meditation that will show you what I mean: simply put your attention on your heart, more specifically your “heart center,” at heart level right in the center of your chest. Just be there and feel whatever you feel. As you continue, visualize that you are breathing into your heart center with each in-breath trying to feel it coming into your body directly, right at that place. Continue with this practice.

First, we might feel quite numb. I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel my heart. At a certain point, through breathing into the heart, you might begin to feel something. You may feel like your heart is in a vice, it’s constructed, it’s dead. That’s fine. You keep breathing. You want to run, you want to scream, you want to tear your skin off. You want to do something to open up your shut-down, armored heart. Although it is very painful, there is so much good inspiration in that; it is your heart beginning to wake up, to know what it is feeling.

In the next step, many reports feeling actual physical pain in their heart — it’s sore, aching. Someone might practice with this discomfort for a time, but eventually, emotional pain will likely begin to come up. This first level of emotional pain is related to our habitual neurotic upheavals, our basic emotional freak-outs that get between us and relating openly to others and the world around us. We call that level of pain the first veil.

As we work with the material of the first veil, we begin to come into a deeper level of heart awareness. Through this Mahayana practice, we begin to sense the open, empty space that lies right at the center of the heart. At this stage, spend some time exploring this unconditioned space of the heart and opening it further. In the training, we now see that this space is nothing other than the basic space of awareness, emptiness that we may have glimpsed in our previous meditation practice. Now we see that this basic awareness is also the underlying reality of our heart.

By developing the feeling of the unconditioned openness of our heart, we are providing psychological room for ourselves to experience our pain and the pain of others in an unconditioned way, without feeling that we are polluting ourselves or taking any of it into ourselves in a solid way. The heart can never be tainted, injured, or compromised; because it is grounded in the unfathomable expanse of our basic nature, there is never any place for anything to land or stick. We learn here not only that we can afford to love in a completely open way but that that is the only way to truly love.

To learn more about Dharma Ocean and Somatic Meditation, visit www.dharmaocean.org.

About Dharma Ocean

Dharma Ocean is a global educational foundation in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, focusing on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline who are genuinely pursuing their spiritual awakening. Dharma Ocean provides online courses, study resources, guided meditation practice, and residential retreats at Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado.

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Dharma Ocean

Dharma Ocean Dharma Ocean is a non-profit global educational foundation that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students - of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado. Their Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone is a sacred and protected space that hosts a wide range of retreats and meditation groups. Students can immerse themselves in the richness and depth of their most fundamental being through connection with spiritual tradition, community, and nature. Dharma Ocean also offers online programs and specialized training for students who wish to become Vajrayana practitioners. The foundation works to provide students with equal access to a dignified, resourced, and fulfilling human life, and is home to students of all backgrounds from over a hundred countries. Everyone who genuinely wishes to study and practice the teachings of the “practicing lineage” by surrendering to the openness, insight, and resources of the present moment via their soma is welcome at Dharma Ocean.

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