“We need to appreciate our mistakes and the ways in which we seem to mess ourselves up. In the life of a practitioner, those seemingly false steps represent the ripening of karma and the exhaustion of evil deeds…

Shantideva* says, you become like a stick of wood, a dry stick of wood, lying in a field, when the charge is up and you simply experience the charge. And that’s how you resolve karma, that’s how you do it. You stay with the feeling and you stay with the situation; you stay with the unacceptable level of stress, emotional stress that the situation is causing you. And you realize it’s really your own shit and you hang out with it and you go through it. And at the end, because you have been willing to live through the feeling, which is something that humans don’t ever do. They never do it, humans don’t do that. That’s how samsara goes, because you never actually live through a feeling without dumping it on someone else or repressing it.

But when you do do that, when you simply hang out with the feeling you resolve the karma and at the end of the process you see a lot of things you never saw before. Now you could say this is a sort of reward for doing a good job, which I’m ok with that way of looking at it. But from a psychological standpoint, because you’ve been willing to take the feeling as a feeling and not as the truth about the situation and simply live with it, therefore you’re personal investment in seeing things in that old way has been diminished, and because of that now you can see things in a different way. And you get all kinds of interesting insights about it.” ~Reggie Ray of the Dharma Ocean Foundation

*Shantideva is an 8th century Buddhist madyamaka poet-practitioner.

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Dr. Reggie Ray 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.

The Dharma Ocean Foundation has an online media store where you can download “theme-based affordable bundles of talks, as well as complete program recordings.” Right now they are offering a free MP3 or PDF download, a talk from Reggie Ray entitled, “Emotional Awakening.” Click here for this free download.

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