Reginald Ray

Reginald “Reggie” Ray (1942-present) is an American Buddhist teacher and scholar, a longtime student of Chogyam Trungpa, who developed a distinctively somatic approach to Tibetan Vajrayana and Dzogchen through his organization Dharma Ocean.

In works such as Touching Enlightenment and The Awakening Body, Ray argues that genuine realization is not an escape upward into disembodied awareness but a descent into the body—that the felt, sensing body is itself the ground and gateway of awakened awareness.

His practices emphasize deep somatic attention, breathing into the body, and discovering that the natural mind (rigpa) is found by inhabiting physical experience fully rather than transcending it. For the mind-power lineage, Ray adds an important corrective and complement: against tendencies (in both Tibetan practice and modern manifestation culture) to treat consciousness as something to be cultivated “in the head” or used to override physical reality, he insists that awareness and the body are inseparable, and that true transformation is embodied.

This positions him alongside Trungpa as a check on the more disembodied or bypassing forms of consciousness-first spirituality, while still affirming the Dzogchen view that awareness is the ground of experience. His somatic Dzogchen feeds the modern body-based meditation and embodiment movements, supplying the lineage with a grounded, felt-sense counterweight to purely mental approaches.