Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body

Reginald A. Ray

Jan 2008 · Sounds True

About this ebook

What does it mean to "meditate with the body"? Until you answer this question, explains Reggie Ray, meditation may be no more than a mental gymnastic —something you can practice for years without fruitful results.

In Touching Enlightenment, the esteemed author of five books about Buddhist history and practice guides you back to the original practice of the Buddha: a systematic process that results in a profound awareness in your body rather than in your head.

Combining the scholarship that has earned him international renown with original insights from nearly four decades practicing and teaching meditation, Reggie Ray invites you to explore:

• How to enter fully into communion with your embodied nature
• The insights of Tibetan yoga, from guidance on breathing and working with discomfort to its challenge to modern practitioners on the path to realization
• Why "rejected" experience becomes imprinted in the body —and how to receive it anew to reconstitute your human way of being
• Karma of cause and karma of result —taking full responsibility for your life
• Your three bodies—the physical, the interpersonal, and the cosmic

"To be awake, to be enlightened, is to be fully and completely embodied. To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are, in every respect, including our physical being, our emotions, and the totality of our karmic situation," writes Reggie Ray. In Touching Enlightenment, he offers you a map of unprecedented clarity and power for embarking on the journey toward ultimate realization in and through the body.

Ratings and reviews

This book is extraordinarily helpful to the meditation practitioner. It completely transformed my practice and opened an entirely new dimension to my experience of my own awareness. In closely studying this text and regularly practicing in the manner discussed, I was able to discover previously unknown depth of feeling and engagement. Most importantly, the view of meditation presented in this book began a process of unwinding the knots of self-doubt and second guesses. In the view communicated within these teachings, the body is the gateway to a fundamental sense of trust and trust becomes the gateway to a seemingly limitless unfolding of deeper and deeper layers of embodiment.

About the author

Reginald A. Ray

Reginald A. Ray, PhD, is the cofounder 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 Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Reggie is the author of several books including Touching Enlightenment and The Awakening Body. He makes his residence in Crestone and Boulder, Colorado. For more, visit dharmaocean.org.