ABOUT Dave
Dave Ray is a spiritual teacher and human being, devoted to direct realization — the ease that is revealed when we discover that at the center of our being there is formless intelligence, limitless space, and a love not bound to personal identity.
From that discovery, it becomes clear that this same awareness is present at the heart of every experience.
I love teaching and embodying what it means to welcome all that we are. Before realization, we might call this healing or transformation. After realization, the same movement continues — turning toward suffering (unhappiness) with feeling attention, curiosity, appreciation, and a willingness to understand. I call it integration.
When we discover in our own experience what it means to welcome in this way, whatever the unhappiness has to tell us is received — and there is a natural letting go, a release, a surrender.
It is not about improving the person, nor is it something we force. It is our nature as awareness including every part of this human life in what we already are. And often, surprisingly, as we welcome the parts of our experience we might typically judge or suppress, personal expression becomes more coherent — informed by inner wisdom rather than conditioning.
My work bridges nondual clarity with emotional and nervous system intelligence, informed by modern neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. I work at the meeting point of realization and conditioning.
Clarity about our true identity matters to me. So does integration. For me, one without the other is like trying to fly with one wing.
From age nineteen to twenty-eight, I lived as a modern-day sadhu, wandering from place to place, wholly devoted to awakening. Whenever I wasn’t working or in school, I immersed myself in meditation — my deepest love and primary focus.
In my early twenties, I received the name Saleem from mystic, iconoclast, and teacher Osho — a name many people came to know me by, and one I carried for half my life.
For nine years, I had lived as a seeker of truth. That came quietly to an end when I met Gangaji in 1991. I have no adequate words for the significance of that meeting. What followed has been a life of deep happiness and peace — even amidst decades of physical adversity.
For more than three decades, significant health challenges have drawn me into shadows and terrain I might otherwise have ignored. What has remained constant is a commitment to truth — and to meeting whatever arises with steady, non-reactive awareness — a love not dependent on circumstance.
Those years have included recurring relapses, long stretches of recovery, and intermittent periods of working publicly. They have also given me the rare opportunity to live much of my life in retreat — a season that has deepened and refined my work.
From my lived experience has come a deep, unshaken clarity — a stability that does not waver when life does. It is my joy to invite others to discover that same steady peace within their own lives.
Four years ago, I woke up one morning with a quiet certainty: my name was now Dave Ray. I was surprised and delighted.
Dave — the name I was called as a child. Ray — my given middle name, now standing simply as my last name. It felt like a full circle: an inclusion of the origins of this life, and a relaxed arrival into an ordinary, simple name — one I can offer without self-consciousness: "Hi, my name is Dave."
Now, for the first time in many years, I feel inspired to make myself available again — not because I am fully recovered, but because I no longer need to be.
If you feel inspired to meet with me, you'll find presence, genuine inquiry, and a depth that includes laughter and enjoyment — and a sincere welcome for the resistance and unhappiness that so often shape our experience. Together, we explore what is true and what becomes possible when everything in you is welcome.
This is my beloved of 15 years, Laura Loescher, and me. In May of 2023 we left Ashland, Oregon in two camper vans, intending to possibly find a home in Vermont. After two years traveling the country — with extended stays among friends in Vermont, Virginia, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, California, and Oregon — we unexpectedly found ourselves blessed to be back in Ashland, having purchased a home in October 2024.