A participant in Week 1 of Reggie Ray’s Tricycle Retreat, in response to Reggie’s teaching, states:
I had never heard that the body is the unconscious. Will have to ponder that for a while. Thank you for your generosity.
Reggie responds,
Yes, the body is the unconscious, not only in the smaller but also in the largest sense. The body is ultimately our largest person, the buddha nature, of which we are more or less completely unconscious. Dreams, which Freud called the “royal road to the unconscious,” are the body’s language, the body trying to communicate with us. The unconscious trying to get through to our limited ego mind. We can work with dreams to access the unconscious, but we can also work right with the body itself which is, in some ways, more direct. The body is what Arnie Mindell calls the “dream body”, the true self which is calling to our limited ego consciousness to open, transform, and come closer to the fullness of who we really are. I know this may sound crazy within a conventional Western context where most people think exactly the opposite. But this work we are doing shows us over time that it is true. My book Touching Enlightenment deals with this topic.
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