Reginald A. Ray: Dark Retreat

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November 16, 2010

Reginald A. Ray: Dark Retreat

Reginald A. Ray November 16, 2010

Tami Simon speaks with Reggie Ray, a teacher and scholar in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with four decades of experience with the practice of meditation. He’s the founder and spiritual director of Dharma Ocean and an author whose writings include Touching Enlightenment, Indestructible Truth, and Secret of the Vajra World, as well as several audio programs including Your Breathing Body and Meditating with the Body. Reggie is also a teacher with whom Tami has studied closely for the past eight years. Reggie discusses his recent experiences in dark retreat as well as the true goal of meditation and Reggie’s view of the meaning of spiritual practice. (51 minutes)

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Reginald A. Ray, PhD, is the co-founder and spiritual director of Dharma Ocean Foundation, dedicated to the evolution and flowering of the somatic teachings of Tibetan Tantra. He is a lineage holder in the tradition of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. Reggie is the author of several books including Touching Enlightenment. He makes his residence in Crestone and Boulder, Colorado. For more, visit dharmaocean.org.

Author photo © Dona Laurita | Foto di Vita

Listen to Tami Simon's in-depth audio podcast interviews with Reggie Ray:
The Awakened State »
Hard Questions for a Vajra Master »
Dark Retreat »

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Founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her wife, Julie M. Kramer, and their two spoodles, Rasberry and Bula, in Boulder, Colorado.

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Also By Author

Reginald A. Ray: Hard Questions for a Vajra Master

Reggie Ray is a lineage holder of the great Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a faculty member of Naropa University, and spiritual director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation based in Crestone, Colorado. He is the author of several books, including Touching Enlightenment and Secret of the Vajra World. With Sounds True, Reggie has released audio learning programs such as Meditating with the Body and Meditation in Seven Steps. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon—who is a student of Reggie—poses a series of challenging and difficult questions to her instructor. (52 minutes)

The Tantric Consort: Awakening Through Relationship

Friends, I wanted to let you know about a four-part online video course that we created with Reggie Ray which explores intimacy as one of the most radical vehicles of spiritual transformation. The Vajrayana, or tantric tradition of Buddhism, teaches ways of being in relationship that serve as unique gateways to spiritual awakening. These teachings on the consort represent some of the most advanced teachings in Buddhism, and have been guarded and kept secret for the most part over the last 1000 years. What Reggie has discovered is that contemporary practitioners are uniquely situated to undertake some of their deepest spiritual work in the context of intimate relationship, however lack the perspective and practices needed to do so.

Watch Reggie’s video introduction here:

Learn more and access The Tantric Consort online course here.

Who Is the Tantric Consort?

The tantric tradition asserts that spirituality in its fullest sense cannot be an isolated, solitary, purely self-involved enterprise. Rather, we make the deepest journey of transformation and ultimate fulfillment only in relationship—with our deepest nature, with our unique karmic situations, with the people in our lives, and with the living universe around us. Through being in connection with these others, we are inspired, we love, and we open. We learn at the deepest levels that we are never one alone but always two-by-two, always in connection, always in the love relationship with all that is; and therein lies our life and our realization.

The tantric consort is the ultimate other. In fact, in the tantric tradition, it is said that moment by moment, he or she represents to us the entire phenomenal world. In other words, in the consort, we most deeply and completely meet the sacred universe in its entirety—a perhaps outrageous claim, but one that experience proves. Through the practice of taking the consort as representing the sacred totality, we learn to love more deeply than we ever imagined possible: first the consort, then everything that is. We see where we habitually hold back and hide out; we practice ways to release our masks, blockages, and obstacles; and ultimately we find union, where releasing our narcissistic fixation on ourselves and discovering our profound and eternal oneness with the consort—and through him or her the world—are the same thing. Ultimately, our ability to journey on the path of the tantric consort comes down to our own willingness, bravery, and devotion in cultivating an open heart and in learning to love the beloved openly and without limit.

By sharing ancient Vajrayana teachings on the view of the consort relationship as well as guiding us through specific, powerful meditations, Reggie leads us to both an understanding and an experience of the tantric consort as the gateway to our own awakening. He emphasizes learning practices that can be carried forward into our lives, including several heart-based meditations to be practices on our own or with a partner.

Many believe that the goal of spiritual practice is enlightenment or liberation, but the human being actually longs for much, much more. Instinctually, we yearn for what we know is possible: fulfillment, joy and union with all creation. Opening to our longing to connect with the tantric consort is the gateway and learning to relate with him or her openheartedly is the path.

Here is a summary of the course’s four parts:

Session 1: Relating with the Other as Sacred

The Vajrayana View of Consort Practice

Why is relationality the essence of Vajrayana spirituality? What special role does the consort play within the Vajrayana? Where do these teachings come from and how can the ancient practices of working with a consort be applied to our modern lives? What differentiates the consort relationship from conventional relationships? How does the consort appear in our life?

The guided meditation we will learn in Session One is The Thousand-Petaled Lotus Practice: Beginning to Open the Heart. Just as we establish the view on a conceptual level in order to engage in consort practice, we must also establish the ground of an open heart on a visceral level. The Thousand-Petaled Lotus Practice will become a gateway to all further consort practice for us.

Session 2: Genuine Presence

The Practice of Being a Consort

In Session Two we will discuss the qualities of a consort relationship—as well as each partner’s individual practice—that create a powerful container for spiritual transformation. Themes will include: staying close to your inspiration, becoming vulnerable, the nature of commitment in the consort relationship, courageous honesty, and relaxing the judgmental mind.

The commitment of tantric consorts to work with one another’s fullness—the brilliant array of light and dark, wisdom and neurosis, empowerment and injury that we each possess—becomes an invitation for consorts to explore their own vastness and become who they truly are.

We will also learn a meditation called Dissolving Blockages and Uncovering the Heart’s Unconditional Openness. Through our persistent, gentle practice we begin to wear away the armor that surrounds our hearts, revealing a luminous love that naturally opens to and receives our partner.

Session 3: Obstacles and Antidotes

Practices and Techniques for When the Going Gets Rough

In the consort relationship we are bound to encounter even more emotional and psychological “triggers” than in a conventional relationship, because we have explicitly committed to spiritual awakening, which requires that we go to and through the uncomfortable places; that we surf the endless waves of our own growth edges.

When those unavoidable experiences arise, how can we learn to welcome them with open arms, rather than to cower and escape into habitual behavior patterns? Session Three’s discussion will be on cultivating our bravery as spiritual warriors so we can engage these encounters differently than we have in the past.

In this session Dr. Ray will lead us through a meditation that applies especially well to moments of upheaval in relationship: Learning to Behold Our Intimate Partner with Our Heart.

Session 4: Meditation in Action

Healing Core Traumas with the Consort

It is said in the tradition that the consort “unbinds the fetters of the heart,” meaning that he or she frees us at the deepest levels of our being to love and to open that love to the world. Through consort practices, over time, the most hidden, unconscious blockages are called into consciousness so that we can see them, work with them, and resolve them. Often the emotional twists and distortions that underlie our current conscious ego prison go back to preverbal levels. Yet, as modern psychology shows us, these unconscious patterns control and limit what we can feel and see and experience, and ultimately block our ability to love fully.

This session will discuss the path of consort practice in its ability to heal and resolve our deepest wounds. Facing these traumas with the support of our tantric consort is a slow but liberating process that opens up our own capacity to experience life’s joy and fulfillment.

This session’s final guided meditation is a powerful one that can be practiced on one’s own or with a partner: A Consort Meditation for Dissolving Core Traumas and Obscurations. Dr. Ray will lead us through this meditation technique that can be applied again and again, either when core traumas arise naturally, or when we sit down with the intention of specifically engaging certain aspects of ourselves or our partner that we know need healing.

 

The Purpose of Life is to Love

Within all of the great wisdom traditions we find an emphasis on love, kindness, and opening our heart to others. It is quite natural to open in this way to our family and friends, but what the great traditions teach is that this reservoir of love inside us is unlimited, extends to all living beings, and even to the universe itself. This reality of love is not an abstract experience, notes respected meditation teacher Reggie Ray, but something that is alive the core of who and what we are. One way to envision the spiritual journey is as a pathway which unlocks the love in our hearts, thereby enabling us to become fully human.

Please enjoy this short video from Reggie on the unfolding of love.

 

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A Message of Gratitude

Dear Sounds True friend,

At this time of thanks-giving, I want to thank you, a beloved member of our extended Sounds True community of listeners, readers, authors, and learners worldwide.

Thank you for your interest and willingness to be an explorer of your inner world.

Thank you for your perseverance, your willingness to be here, with all of life’s great joys and terrible griefs and sorrows. Thank you for being ”on the journey,” with all of the ways life breaks open our hearts and asks us to expand and hold a larger space of love.

Thank you for your courage to be you, beloved and singular, the you that carries a unique gift, some special look, a cry and a laugh never heard before, a contribution we need. Thank you for being yourself and extending yourself to others, even in small ways, which often turn out to be huge.

My own prayer this Thanksgiving is to remain steadfast and true. Please know that here at Sounds True we remain so—and we love doing so in connection with you. We are here because you are here. This thanks-giving, I bow to the strength and goodness of our human hearts.

With you on the journey,

Tami

P.S. Here is a thanks-giving offering, a classic poem from Mary Oliver:

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be 
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few 
small stones; just 
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t 
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence, in which 
another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver, Thirst

Tami Simon

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All of the myriad forms of life on our planet, whether plant or animal, predator or prey, contribute to our survival. And when any one of the fragile threads of the web of life begins to fray, all of us are threatened. Craig Foster—the Academy Award–winning creator of My Octopus Teacher—has since the age of three spent his life intimately connected to the natural world, in particular the Earth’s endangered marine ecosystems such as the Great African Seaforest. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Craig about his ongoing mission to reawaken humanity to our interconnectedness—and our interdependence—with each and every living being, seen and unseen. 

Tune in now to a fascinating conversation about: the community of activists behind the Sea Change Project; being part of the Great Mother; the extraordinary biodiversity we depend on; attuning to the “forest mind”; establishing a comfortable connection with the wild of nature “that your whole being is craving”; balancing the tame and the wild aspects of ourselves; getting to know the natural environment through places close to home; therianthropes and other mind-boggling images enshrined in the rock art of Indigenous peoples; the healing power of the cold; underwater tracking and learning “the oldest language on Earth”; staying relaxed in dangerous natural settings; a new understanding of the impacts of species extinction; appreciating the vast intelligence and awareness of the creatures who share our world; what nature can teach us about death and dying; the great potential for rebirth and regeneration at this time; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

Giovanni Dienstmann: Activating Your Aspirational Iden...

What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail? Most of us didn’t grow up in a family that was unfailingly supportive. Instead, as life coach and author Giovanni Dienstmann explains, “We were conditioned to believe certain things about ourselves and about life that are just not helpful.” In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Giovanni about his new book, Wise Confidence, and how we can each create our own “aspirational identity”—the person you want to be, how you want to see yourself and the world, and how you want to operate.

Give a listen to their inspiring conversation about: mindful self-discipline; making sacrifices; self-doubt and arrogance—two traps of the ego; the five elements of wise confidence; the conviction of self-belief; the journey from a conditioned identity to an aspirational identity; goal-oriented spiritual lineages (and those that aren’t); living with purpose; recognizing the stories we tell ourselves as the first step in transcending our conditioning; practicing courage; finding your three “power words”; choosing the personal qualities you most want to develop; imposter syndrome; the ceiling fan metaphor; four core tools—mindset, witnessing, imagination, and embodiment; the “never zero” commitment, and how commitment differs from motivation; self-love and self-compassion; energizing your thoughts; living in a multilayered universe; knowing your “bigger why”; and much more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

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