Awakening Body

"As the realized Indian tantric master Tilopa said to his uptight, ever “correct,” scholarly disciple Naropa a long time ago, “Naropa, your problem is not what you experience; it’s that you are taking the wrong approach to what you experience. You don’t know how to leave it alone.” Naropa, the paragon of all of us left-brain junkies, was trying to get rid of his pain by thinking his way out. He was trying to impose now this conceptual map, now that, in an attempt to interpret, limit, and control his experience. He was striving for a fanciful nirvana where he wouldn’t have to deal with the messiness of his own life any more. And so he was running away from the very place where, alone, genuine realization can occur.

Everything that I teach, the entire journey involved in the somatic work, is essentially a meditation practicum; it is a series of Somatic Meditation exercises and practices designed to lead you into the magnificent and stunning spiritual journey that is your own, and yours alone, to discover and to make, waiting for you within your body. Some of these somatic protocols, as I call them, may correspond to what you think of as meditation, and many may not.

As an example of the latter, in many of the practices described below, you will be asked to lie down and direct your mind to all kinds of unexpected and even quite unknown parts of your body; you may not think of this as meditation practice, but it is. Similarly, in this book you will find practices you can do in bed—going to sleep, waking up in the middle of the night, or in the midst of insomnia—and practices you can look to in the midst of heated interpersonal interaction or even intense, traumatic recall. And they are all about the body.

In other aspects of my teaching, once a solid foundation of somatic presence and awareness has been established, we are able to work most fruitfully with more commonly recognizable meditation practices, such as sitting on a cushion in traditional meditation postures. Without somatic training and awareness, though, the outcomes of more conventional practice will be limited; but with such training and awareness, there is no limit to the meditative journey you can make."

-- Reginald Ray, The Awakening Body