The Practice of Pure Awareness by Reginald A. Ray

Author:Reginald A. Ray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2018-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

15

Getting into the Nitty-Gritty of the Practice

Practicing with Guidance and Without

In the beginning, we will have to make a lot of effort to bring our attention to the posture and to maintain it there. The audio guided meditations along with your study of this book should provide the training wheels you need to learn and assimilate the instructions. Once you have done that, then you are ready to practice on your own, without support. But there is no need to rush or push yourself to practice on your own. Please let yourself be guided and carried by my oral presentation for as long as you feel it is helpful. In fact, I know practitioners who have listened to a particular guided meditation daily for a month or two or much longer, and by the end of that time, it is so much part of them they hardly need to think about it. It is as if not only their mind but their body has integrated the full range of the practice. The guideline here, as always, is to follow your own somatic sense. At a certain point in listening to the guided practice, your body is going to notify you, “That’s enough.” Then it is time to move on and try the practice on your own.

At first, you may want to go through all four guided meditations and cover all seventeen points, maybe over a period of a few days, so you can experience the full terrain. After that, though, you might want to take one of the guided meditations—as you saw, each one leads you through only four or five of the seventeen steps—and stick with that for a while, until you feel it is yours. You could work with the first guided meditation for quite some time, then the second, and so on. But you could also move between them, as you feel called, and go in any order you want. As you do so, though, try to keep the overall geography of the entire practice in mind so that you don’t lose track of where you are in the process. As the unfolding practice will make clear, every piece is part of every other, each feeding into the feeling of the whole, and we need to stay present to that fact.

When you listen to the audio guided meditations, you will notice that I am gradually building a sense of the entire posture. I will lead you through the five points of Guided Practice I. Then, when I guide you through the second, I will begin by going briefly through the first five points and then teach the next four points of Guided Practice II in detail. Similarly, when I lead you in Guided Practice III with its four steps, I will begin by going briefly through the nine steps you have already practiced in the first two guided sessions. And when I instruct you in the fourth and final guided practice with its four steps, I will begin by leading you briefly through the previous thirteen steps.

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