Podcast

In this episode, Reggie explains how meditating in an embodied way allows our lives to flow freely. We are used to thinking that we are never enough — that we are lacking in so many ways. The practice of meditation gives rise humor and joy, through the insight that our situation is actually always abundant and perfect just as is it is. The tantric approach of somatic meditation dismantles our doubt, frees us from the fetters of thinking, and allows us to receive the inherent blessing within each moment. We see how life is a river that flows through us, unencumbered and without boundary, as a profound expression of beauty and love.

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, Reggie reflects on the meaning of the first line of the Dharma Ocean aspiration chant: “May I develop an attitude of complete acceptance and openness to all situations, emotions, and to all people.” He explores this teaching in the context of Buddhist maitri practice, whereby we cultivate an attitude of loving-kindness toward ourselves. This practice leads to a greater sense of wholeness because it teaches us how to turn toward the full range of our human experience, not just the desirable aspects. “In the Tibetan tradition it is said that positive experiences are much more dangerous than negative ones, because the minute you identify with being a successful person all the other parts of you are immediately marginalized. It happens instantly — a whole universe in you goes into hiding.”

These excerpts are taken from talks given at the 2010 and 2011 Winter Dathüns. Dathün is 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:01 — 18.0MB)

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In today’s podcast, Reggie shows how freedom is found when we refrain from judging our experience. By embracing some aspects of experience and shunning others, we drive the painful, difficult, and unwanted parts of our being into the shadows. These tormented and damaged parts continue to operate, but without our knowledge, as unconscious neurotic behaviors. By making room for and extending love toward all the different aspects of ourselves, we become whole in the fullest sense: everything that happens in our life can become free to uniquely flower in the endlessly abundant field of our experience.

These excerpts are taken from talks given at the 2010 and 2011 Winter Dathüns. Dathün is 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:21 — 13.1MB)

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In today’s teaching, Reggie shows how the fundamental truth of the universe is discovered within the human heart. To trust in the heart means being willing to open to what we are feeling and explore the immediacy of life, no matter what we might think about it. This takes courage because it demands vulnerability and an unreasonable commitment to love the full breadth of our experience without judgment. He says that when we surrender our ideas about who we think we are and what we think our life should be, then we can begin to see that our heart is a jewel in Indra’s net: it reflects the full scope of the universe in its absolute splendor and beauty, and it shows us how we are interconnected with all beings throughout time and space.

This talk was given at the 2010 Winter Dathün — 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:37 — 7.8MB)

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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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:32 — 8.2MB)

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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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:39 — 11.0MB)

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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. Mahamudra for the Modern World is available for download here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:55 — 12.0MB)

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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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:27 — 16.8MB)

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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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:17 — 10.8MB)

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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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:43 — 12.8MB)

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