Reginald A. Ray

Dr. Reginald "Reggie" Ray brings us four decades of study and intensive meditation practice within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well as a special gift for applying it to the unique problems, inspirations, and spiritual imperatives of modern people. He currently resides in Crestone, Colorado, where he is Spiritual Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to the practice, study and preservation of the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the practice lineage he embodied.

 

Reggie received his PhD from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 1973. After spending a year in India on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, studying Tibetan and completing his dissertation, he took up a tenure track position at Indiana University. In the spring of 1974, at the invitation of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, he moved to Boulder, Colorado where he became the first full-time faculty member and chair of the Buddhist Studies Department at Naropa University where he has taught ever since.  In subsequent years, he received two of the prestigious year long NEH Senior Research Fellowships in support of his scholarly writing. In 1997, Reggie became the first teacher in residence at the Shambhala Mountain Center and, over his seven year tenure there, became well known for his intensive Winter Dathün retreats. In 2005, seeking a permanent home for a growing community of students, Reggie moved to Crestone and now oversees the Dharma Ocean Foundation and its many programs and projects. Dharma Ocean's Crestone Retreat Center, nestled in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, includes a newly completed meditation hall (seating 150 meditators, with residence building to follow), the development of a center for solitary and small group retreats, and various other facilities for community events and administrative support.

 

During the course of his exploration of Buddhism, Reggie has studied with many accomplished masters of the Nyingma and Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism and Zen. In recent years, he has worked with indigenous teachers from North and South America and Africa. Reggie now incorporates much of the wisdom of these earth-based traditions into his Buddhist teachings, with the view that we have much to learn from indigenous cultures and that the Vajrayana too-at its core-is the survival within Buddhism of a far more ancient form of spirituality.

 

Reggie's intensely experiential and deeply transformative Meditating with the Body® teachings are probably his most powerful and direct way of guiding modern people into their own spiritual essence and unfolding human journey. This body of work steers the modern practitioner away from meditation simply as a mental exercise-which often yields little personal transformation due to its disembodied nature-toward meditation that is directed somatically inward, using practices based mostly on the ancient teachings of Tibetan yoga. Developed and perfected over generations by yogis and yoginis in life-long solitary retreat, this tradition states that the body is the gateway to enlightenment — to discover the body is to discover awareness, and eventually, the awakened state. In an inspiration to share these teachings more broadly to the modern world, Reggie now tours North America regularly. For more information on his teaching retreats, please visit the Retreats section of this website.

 

Reggie has written extensively on the history and practice of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, including six books and many articles, essays, and reviews. His scholarly work Buddhist Saints in India examines the history of the practice lineage in India. Indestructible Truth describes in a comprehensive and accessible manner the exoteric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. Secret of the Vajra World explores the esoteric and tantric aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, focusing on the Vajrayana. Reggie's most recent work, Touching Enlightenment, explores the process of awakening by working directly with the body. He is also the author of In the Presence of Masters and the Tibetan Buddhist Pocket Reader, both collections of sayings and teachings of Tibetan teachers. His nine-disc Sounds True CD series, Buddhist Tantra, provides audio teachings and practices for touching enlightenment with the body. A second audio publication, Your Breathing Body, Basic Series (10 CD's) and the Advanced Series (10 CD's) was released in November 2008 by Sounds True. Reggie continues to teach Buddhist Studies at Naropa University both in the classroom and online, while working regularly with his dedicated dharma students who travel from all over the globe to attend his programs in Crestone, Colorado. A number of Reggie's senior students are now themselves beginning to teach in the United States and Canada in order to bring particularly the "body work teachings" into a more extended public arena.