In this talk, Reggie emphasizes the importance of trusting in the heart on the journey of meditation. He describes how distracted we are by what we think our life is and how meditation brings us back to the true essence of our fundamental life force. The first stage in becoming more present to our life is coming home to our body and recognizing our habitual patterns of thinking. “Then, at a certain point, we realize there is a mandala in the body — there is a kind of organic, gentle flow of energy. And where the energy is flowing is around our heart. We begin to realize that in every situation the body’s wisdom collects itself here, and our heart actually knows the true way — always. It knows the course of our life. It knows what we need to say in situations. It knows the world. It feels the world. It holds all the sadness of the world and all the sweetness of the world. It’s the point of our own inner voice.”

This talk was given at the 2010 Winter Dathun — a month-long retreat held at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of recorded talks and practices to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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This week, we listen to a talk Reggie gave on the relationship between mahamudra meditation and the bodhicitta practice of awakening the heart. Mahamudra practice allows us to explore the vast space of reality as the ground of our basic nature. Practitioners of mahamudra sometimes think that the experience of unconditioned space is the endpoint of the spiritual journey, and that the circumstances of everyday life are irrelevant. Reggie counters that such attitudes are examples of spiritual bypassing: ways of avoiding the painful realities of one’s personal life. Actually, when we rest in the vast space of the heart, we discover an experience of profound warmth. This love, at the core of our being, compels us to connect with the sacredness of our world and care for it in immediate and specific ways. In this way, mahamudra practice allows us to fulfill our bodhisattva vow.

This talk was given at the 2011 Winter Dathun—a month-long retreat held at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of recorded talks and practices to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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In today’s episode, Reggie reflects on the sacredness of our human experience. When we relinquish our preconceptions and ideas about ourselves, he says, we glimpse how truly limitless our experience of life can be. This insight often awakens a longing in us to discover the full beauty and radiance of our world. “In the Vajrayana, there is no profane world — everything we experience is fundamentally an expression of sacredness, of wisdom. Spiritual traditions may tell us the world is degraded, but the soul knows the beauty and ultimate value of the world and our ordinary experience. There is something in us, intuitively, that cannot walk away from that sense of beauty and sacredness.”

These excerpts are taken from a talk given at a weekend program in Portland, OR in 2009 and from Mahamudra for the Modern World, a 37-hour intensive audio training course produced by Sounds True.

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Today’s podcast features the second part of Reggie’s talk on the wisdom of emotions. Emotions in themselves, he says, are not a problem — they are simply explosions of awakened energy. The problem occurs when we attach self-referential storylines to emotions, judging and assigning meaning to them accordingly. If we look closely, we can see that emotions actually “blow wide open” our interpretations, storylines, and judgments about experience. By staying present to the intensity of our emotional life, we learn how the natural energy of emotions can potentially liberate us from our ideas and guide us back to the basic space of our inherent being.

This talk was given at the 2006 Advanced Meditating with the Body retreat held in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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A distinctive feature of Vajrayana Buddhism is the view that emotions are intelligent expressions of energy. Today, we begin listening to a talk Reggie gave on the role of emotions on the meditative journey. He says that to understand the wisdom of emotions, we must first understand how our ego habitually shuts out the vast space and energy that is our awakened state of being. When we surrender our preconceptions about our experience and open beyond the confines of ego, we encounter gaps in ego. Through taking an interest in these gaps, we discover gateways to freedom. Next week, we’ll hear how emotions are one such gateway.

This talk was given at the 2006 Advanced Meditating with the Body retreat held in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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“Confidence means willing to be with your experience with an open heart and not do anything about it — that’s the Vajrayana path.” In this episode, Reggie discusses how the ego reacts to the play of energy that arises when we open to vast space in the practice of meditation. Our mistake, he says, is that we try to solidify energy and turn it into personal territory. This grasping is felt as tension in the body. When we relax our body, release tension, and meet the play of energy on its own terms, we become truly free.

This episode is drawn from talks given at the 2005 and 2010 Winter Dathuns – month-long meditation retreats held in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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In today’s episode, we explore how energy manifests as the rich display of our personal experience: our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sense perceptions. Reggie offers that, rather than being a solid individual self, each of us is a continually unfolding process of energetic movement that is constantly arising from the emptiness of space. He says that when we learn to surrender to the energy of each moment through the practice of meditation, we discover how to enter the flowing river of life.

This talk was given at the 2011 Winter Dathun — a month-long retreat held at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

Today, Reggie invites us to consider a recent discovery in modern physics: that everything in the universe ultimately is born from nothing, from the universe itself down to the tiniest particles at subatomic levels. We are able to have direct experiential knowledge of this basic reality when we allow our limited viewpoints to dissolve into emptiness through meditation practice and witness the energy of our existence arise from that. In this way, the journey of meditation reflects a universal process of death and birth that occurs for all that is: from atoms and trees to stars and galaxies, and all of being itself.

This talk was given last Spring during our Mahamudra for the Modern World retreat at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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“Deep space is completely unconditioned. It’s where everything that’s going to come to birth is held. It’s the origin — the source.” In today’s episode, Reggie explores how our relationship with deep space connects us with the fire of primordial creativity. Boycotting our impulses and waiting for true perception to arise, we discover a depth of genuine creativity that is without limit.

This talk was given at the 2005 Winter Dathun — a month-long retreat held at the White Eagle Conference Center in Crestone, CO. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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When there is a gap in our thoughts, or we suddenly lose track of who we are, that is a moment of protection—reality cuts through our habitual patterns, thus protecting our connection to the fundamental nature of everything. Reggie discusses the way that space—alive, vibrant, vivid space—serves as a protector, and he encourages us to “call into the void” for help.

This talk was given at the 2005 Winter Dathun—a month-long retreat held in Crestone, Colorado. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey, please visit our store.

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“Space and the awareness of space. This is the basic message.” In today’s podcast, Reggie comments on this profoundly simple practice instruction. In meditation, he says, we learn to relate to the basic space of reality. However, when we experience the vastness of space — and lose our habitual reference points — we can experience an ego “freak out.” Reggie encourages us to trust these moments of uncertainty and open further, beyond the confines of ego.

These excerpts are taken from two different talks given at the 2005 Winter Dathun and the 2006 Meditating with the Body retreat held in Crestone, CO. To download more of Reggie’s teachings and to explore a variety of audio listening guides to assist you on your spiritual journey please visit our store.

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our store.An impediment to the practice of Mahamudra for modern people is the notion that we are insufficiently equipped to make the full spiritual journey: that we are too busy, too materialistic, and too distracted. In today’s episode, Reggie offers an alternative, more optimistic perspective on the spiritual capacity of modern people, examining the traditional context of Mahamudra practice and highlighting the opportunities that modern life offers to us as meditation practitioners.

Today’s episode is drawn from Mahamudra for the Modern World, a 37-hour intensive audio training course produced by Sounds True. Mahamudra for the Modern World is available for download on our store.

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Vajrayana Buddhism is sometimes called “the quick path to realization.” In today’s episode, Reggie describes the travails, inspiration, and bravery of practitioners who choose the quick path, an approach to dharma whereby one places meditation at the very center of life. Practitioners who take this approach to the spiritual journey often face “gradations and domains of fear most people can only guess about.” Through a willingness to experience fear, students on the quick path learn to appreciate and explore the full range of possibility in life.

This talk was given at the 2011 Winter Dathun — a month-long retreat held at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. 

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