Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 1622033531
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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Through those ten points, your awareness is going to travel down into the earth. So the process of relaxation and of letting go of the tension, as we do in the ten points practice, actually becomes a vehicle for us to descend into the earth. Awareness is not restricted to the body, as many of you know. We can send our awareness beyond our body in many different ways. Not only in Buddhism, but in modern experimental research (such as scientific researcher Russell Targ’s research into “distance.
Old. In modern times, urban people have increasingly succeeded in creating an alternate reality: we spend our time in buildings—homes and workplaces—that shield and separate us from direct contact with the elements; we reside in cities, often at great remove from the natural world, that embody our collective human ideas and projects; we often have little direct relation to our food sources; and, mesmerized by the prospect of complete control over our lives, we regard even our bodies, as.
Mysteries. We also need to let go of our thinking, if only temporarily, in order to be open to what the body itself reveals and to fully profit from what is revealed. Even beyond this, enlightenment or realization involves learning how to live in the body in a non-conceptual way, no longer relying on what we think in order to live our life, but rather on what the body knows and communicates in an immediate and utterly naked way. Given the tremendous importance attached to conceptual thinking in.
The body contemplator, to allow the self, the conscious sense of self, to dissolve and reform, over and over. At that point, your life really begins to happen in a different way. As we experience this shift from ego consciousness to somatic awareness, our life and practice begin to open in two interesting ways. For one thing, working with the body in meditation frees our experience of relative reality, liberating the concrete phenomena of our day-to-day lives. When we operate in a disembodied.
Proceed in a much more open way. Third, we can use the somatic practices if we are sick, suffering from an injury, or are particularly emotionally upset. This “special application” of the practices can be very powerful in bringing awareness and healing to our situation. People with long-term and even terminal illnesses, degenerative conditions, or serious injuries can find much solace, relief, and occasionally even a measure of healing from the work. Sometimes it can bring success even when.