I posted this elsewhere, but this quote from Reggie Ray's article in Tricycle Magazine (summer 2006) titled "Touching Enlightenment' bears repeating:

"My sense is that there is a very real problem among Western Buddhist practitioners. We are attempting to practice meditation and to follow a spiritual path in a disembodied state, and our practice is therefore doomed to failure. The full benefits and fruition of meditation cannot be experienced or enjoyed when we are not grounded in our bodies... the early text, when understood fully, implies not only that we are able to touch enlightenment with our bodies, but that we must do so — that in fact there is no other way to touch enlightenment except in and through our bodies. For most of us, and for most of modern culture, the body is principally seen as the object of our ego agendas, the donkey for the efforts of our ambitions. The donkey is going to be thin, the donkey is going to be strong, the donkey is going to be a great yoga practitioner, the donkey is going to look and feel young, the donkey is going to work eighteen hours a day, the donkey is going to help me fulfill my needs, and so on. All that is necessary is the right technique. There is no sense that the body might actually be more intelligent than 'me,' my precious self, my conscious ego.
" . . . In the classical Buddhist traditions, meditation is deeply somatic – it is fully grounded in sensations, sensory experience, feeling, emotions, and so on. Even thoughts are related to as somatic – as bursts of energy experienced in the body rather than nonphysical phenomena that disconnect us from our bodies. In its most ancient Buddhist form, meditation is a technique for letting go of the objectifying tendency of thought and of entering deeply and fully into communion with our embodied experience. And hence it leads to ‘touching enlightenment with the body.’ And yet, among many of us modern people, meditation is often practiced as a kind of conceptual exercise, a mental gymnastic. We often approach it as a way to fulfill yet another agenda or project – that of attempting to become 'spiritual,' according to whatever we happen to think that is. We may try to use meditation to become peaceful, sharper, more “open,” more effective in our lives, even more conceptually adroit. The problem with this is that we are attempting to be managers, to supersede nature, to control 'the other.' In this case, the 'other' is ourselves, our bodies, and our own experience. Ultimately, it is our own somatic experience of reality that we are trying to override in the attempt to fulfill our ego aim.”

His recent book 'Touching Enlightenment' develops this view further. Well worth reading, IMHO.

rabar

"That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real." Ramana Maharshi
"The resonant, sounding breath is the self-arising (relaxed) manifestation of deep, dreamless sleep. Relax into it while awake and -- guess w