Month: July 2010

Why worry when you can pray: A five minute active meditation for overcoming worry and anxiety

Post author By Toby
Post date July 29, 2010

How often do you spend time feeling worried and anxious about things in your life that you care about but cannot control? It can often be much more beneficial, rather than struggling with the worry to simply acknowledge it and then pass it over to a higher power through a simple, improvised, on the spot prayer. In the exercise below I address all the prayers to “God”, but when you are doing this yourself you can fill in whatever expression of a higher power feels comfortable to you:

Sit comfortably; spend a short while centring yourself by focusing on the breathing or other appropriate method. Then just let your mind wander onto the things that it feels anxious about. Each time you are able to identify a cause of worry and anxiety, offer up a short prayer and then release the worry to a higher power.

For example:

1) I notice that I am anxious about an argument with my partner or family member.

So I offer a prayer: “Dear God please help me resolve the conflict between myself and X, I am not sure what to do about it, but I pray for your grace and intervention”.

I then release the prayer and let go of the worry and relax for a few breaths.

2) Then a worry comes up about a talk that I have to do tomorrow to a large group.

So I pray: “Dear God please help me to find appropriate material for tomorrows talk, and to be able to present it in a way that the audience will connect with.”

I then release the prayer and let go of the worry.

So, the entire five or so minutes is simply spent oscillating between these three activities; noting a worry, praying about it, and releasing it to a higher power. At the end of the meditation I recommend you spend a little while just resting in and enjoying the release/letting-go stage of the exercise.

Tags letting go, meditation, prayer, stress relief

Awareness and insight Inner vision Meditation techniques Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Tackling a-void-ance: Meditation for healing and transforming loneliness and emptiness

Post author By Toby
Post date July 27, 2010

Unless we are careful, a lot of the things that we do in our life are simply activities that we engage in to avoid the underlying sense of loneliness, emptiness, incompleteness, feeling or separation, or quite simply the VOID that we sense inside. The motivation for getting in a relationship for example can primarily be driven by a feeling that we lack something within ourself, and we need someone else to make up for that lack. Thus much of what we do is simply a-void-ance, a way of dancing around the big hole that we sense in the centre of our life, and trying to do everything in our power to avoid acknowledging or confronting it. The following meditation/contemplation is designed to help us look honestly at the void in our life and see that there may be something in it that we did not suspect.

Meditation on a-void-ance

Sit down and spend a short while just relaxing and centring yourself.

Bring to mind times in your day when you feel a sense of loneliness, incompleteness, emptiness, a negative void. Instead of avoiding these feelings, move into them, accept them without comment and allow yourself to feel them deeply. Use the breathing to breathe with them if you like.

Now gently let go of the manifest feelings of loneliness/emptiness that you feel, and just focus instead on the sense of space that accompanies these feelings. Try to experience just the space, just the void in your being. Breathe, relax, allow yourself to sink into that inner space that so often you try and avoid. It is almost like when you have been fighting going to sleep, and then you just decide to give in, and allow yourself to fall asleep.

Now within that empty void sense a light, like the sun gradually dawning over the horizon. What was once a dark empty space now becomes a void filled with light and radiance. The space is still there, the void is still there but it is filled with life, brightness and luminosity, like a sun shining from within the depths of space. Remain with this experience for as long as you like.

Tags emptiness, meditation, relaxation, therapy, uniting mind and feelings, void

Meditation techniques Motivation and scope spiritual intelligence

Is your meditation a type of therapy, an art-form or a spiritual practice?

Post author By Toby
Post date July 19, 2010

Your meditation is a therapy if you are doing it to fix something inside you that is broken. Meditating to cope with stress, heal an emotional wound, to pacify/heal our addictions and demons is a form of therapy.

Your meditation is an art-form if you are using it to push the boundaries of your inner skill, power and capability. It is where you take risks, push the limits of what you thought possible, and experience new ways of seeing, feeling creating.

Your meditation is a spiritual practice when you rest in a state of no boundaries, where the barriers between yourself and the universe dissolve into light and there is just pure being-ness, one-ness, opulence and radiance.

The chances are that your meditation oscillates between these three types in an organic way, but it is extremely useful to be able to differentiate them in these three ways because:

– There are times when you need to stop trying to fix that which is broken in you and start taking some risks

– There are times when pushing your boundaries is doing more harm than good, and you need to create a healing space for yourself

– There are times when you need to get off your butt and stop getting absorbed in the timeless wonder of it all

– There are times when you need to take a holiday from the bounds of time and space and rest in the regenerative-radiance of your original being

– There are times when you’re universal, original being explodes into action and demands that you start expressing your inner and outer art-forms. If so, you’d better act on this or watch out!

Tags art-form, meditation, meditation tachnique, spiritual practice, therapy

Concentration Meditation techniques spiritual intelligence

Concentrating from the Heart – Both meditation and life are much easier when your head and your heart are in the same place!

Post author By Toby
Post date July 18, 2010

One of the perennial questions that I get asked, and that meditators across the world struggle with on a daily basis is “How can I keep my mind focused in meditation? It seems so difficult!” Here is one technique that I practice and sometimes teach to people that I describe as ‘learning to concentrate from the heart’.

It is based around the observation that, if you are engaged with an object of meditation emotionally and from your heart, then your mind will tend to find it easy to keep its focus. However, if you are trying to focus your mind in meditation but your heart is somewhere else, then you it will be a constant struggle as your mind strives to be in one place, and the heart seeks to be in another. Below is a basic technique that is quite easy to understand, and once you have practised it a few times, you will be able to adjust it according to your point of balance and creatively make it your own.

Learning to concentrate from the heart:

1. Bring to mind something that moves your heart and body to a state of love and engaged emotionality. The potential object is very varied here; someone you love, the most significant kiss of your life, sitting by your favourite river, stamp collecting, a past heightened mystical experience, a project that excites you… The main thing is that it moves YOUR heart, engages YOUR emotions, awakens a certain sense of rapture within YOUR heart and body that you can feel tangibly and deeply.

2. Once the feeling is there, use the breathing to breathe the energy of the experience in and out of your heart space (center of your chest). As time goes by, keep the feeling, but allow its intensity to reduce slightly, and gradually increase your focus on the breathing so that the heartfelt emotion is being combined with a single-pointedness of concentration on the breathing.

Practice being able to combine the arousal and engagement of your heart with the single-pointedness of your concentration in this way.

3. When you are familiar with the basic process described in points 1&2, you can then practice shifting your point of focus away from the original object that engaged your heart to a new meditation object. For example you can shift the rapture of your remembrance of your first love (or your first stamp collection) onto a feeling of love for living beings as a whole, Or the feeling of compassion that you had as a nine year old for a kitten to a love for all the animal kingdom.

The main thing I want to flag up with this article is that meditative concentration without engaging the heart is hard work. Meditation with the heart engaged makes it relatively easy to keep focus, and induces the levels of bliss and rapture that we can experience through meditative concentration much more readily and rapidly!

Tags Concentration, focus, head and heart, meditation, uniting mind and feelings

Awareness and insight Inner vision

Developing your inner vision: The darkness that you encounter in meditation may not be what you think!

Post author By Toby
Post date July 12, 2010

If you meditate consistently over a period of time, at some point you are going to awaken one or other of your faculties of inner vision (see tomorrows class on “How do we awaken our spiritual vision and what will we see?”). This whole area is a big one, but I want to share just one short story now.

When I first started meditating, I had inadvertently, through some basic hatha yoga, activated my kundalini. As a result I started to have visions, and the visions that I saw were quite varied, but as often as not they were very dark, dense and apparently malevolent in nature. It seemed to happen in waves, for days at a time, then going away, only to come back at a later time. I seemed to encounter dark beings within the dark energy, with hooked noses, long hands and so forth, very Harry Potter.

I found this a bit disconcerting, and tried to force these evil visions away with prayers of protection, power mantras and all this type of thing, but the visions persisted causing a certain degree of fear and anxiety. I thought that I must be doing something wrong in my meditation, or I had some form of evil in me that must be magnetizing these funny beings to me.

I was able to clarify the situation as a result of starting to make my own compost. I noticed that when I lay down to bed at night, if I had been doing any work in the garden, and in particular doing composting work, then I would almost always see these same dark beings in my inner vision as I went to sleep. It was at this time also that I started to read a little bit on the idea of nature elementals, the spiritual beings who over-light the fundamental life and death processes of nature. Putting two and two together I realized that what I was seeing in my inner vision was not the forces of darkness in an evil sense, but rather the natural elemental forces of death, decay and breaking down as they exist in the natural world.

These natural forces of death and decay in the natural world are just as important as the life giving forces, and are in no way malevolent. However, for a human such as me encountering them for the first time, they often produce a reaction of confusion and aversion. Once I had clearly understood who and what they were, my fear for them dissolved and I learned to welcome them into my awareness in the same way that I welcomed light, blissful and radiant experiences.

When we start to develop our inner vision we may have some experiences that we do not understand, but it is important not to jump to conclusions too quickly, as what we see may not be what we think it is!

Presence and being present

What is it that is keeping me from relaxing in the present moment?

Post author By Toby
Post date July 8, 2010

If meditation is understood as being able to keep our mind in the present moment (which is one major foundational understanding of it), then a useful question to ask ourselves each day is “What is it within my experience of the present moment right now that I am resisting entering into?” On one level it seems as if the present moment should be the simplest and most natural space to enter into, and yet we resist.

Rather than giving you the answer to this question in an abstract or philosophical manner, I’ll just outline my experience of this over the last weekend, and then offer some conclusions based around this.

Last weekend (it is now Monday) I noticed an uneasy feeling that was preventing me from feeling at comfortable with myself and with my circumstances. It seemed as if my mind was on a hair trigger, as soon as I sat down to try and relax, all sorts of reasons to feel dissatisfied or uneasy would start forming in my mind. So, recognizing that I had something of a challenge on my hands, I asked myself the question “What is it that is causing me to feel uneasy in the present moment and unable to relax?” I just sat and breathed with this question for a while, looking into my body and mind for an answer. Rationally I discovered no real reason for the unease, life is going quite well, no big crisis, nothing REALLY to feel bad about. However, when I looked in my body, on the energy level I found that there was what I would describe as a nervous “tick” in the centre of my chest. This is to say that there was a very uncomfortable energy in the centre of my chest that was creating a natural feeling of discomfort and dis-ease within my mind and body.

It seemed like it was something that I could not shift straight away, and so I made a decision “If I cannot shift this uncomfortable feeling, then I am just going to have to ‘be’ with it, and make sure that I don’t allow it to affect my thinking, feeling and behaviour in any kind of negative way”.

So, having made this decision, my main task over the next 36 or so hours that it took for this heart energy to clear was simply to “be” with this uncomfortable energy and mindfully exercise my willpower in such a way that the energy was not able to manifest in any way beyond just being an uncomfortable feeling.

The act of choosing to be with the uncomfortable feeling, and use my willpower to not allow it to cause a problem is an example of when we need to make an extra effort to be present, even if there is a certain amount of willpower and effort involved.

Key points:

Asking yourself the question “What is it that is keeping me from entering into the present moment” is a very useful way of bringing yourself back to the present moment, even if you can feel resistance to it.
Asking the question regularly enables you to get to know the reasons you personally avoid being in the present moment much more intimately.
Sometimes being in the present moment means exerting your willpower and courage, and being compassionately honest with yourself.
Learning to be aware and take care of your mind and body when they are unhappy and uncomfortable is just as important, maybe more so than being present when things are going well.

©Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Tags avioding, present moment, relaxation, resistance

Awareness and insight Presence and being present

Grow your creativity by embracing uncertainty and ambiguity

Post author By Toby
Post date July 2, 2010

When we face up to our mind in meditation (and indeed in life in general) one of the longings and graspings that we often find there is for certainty and stability, and on the surface of it we may think that this is natural and inevitable. But hold on, what would happen if everything was certain in your life and totally stable? The answer is that your life would become totally dead and lifeless. In a landscape of certainty, with no chance elements there would be no opportunity for you to express your creativity and uniqueness at all.

The more that you reflect upon this the more you realize how misguided and limiting this grasping and craving for certainty is, and the more we find ourself start embracing the constant uncertainty, ambiguity and change that pervades our life on so many different levels.

Every time you are faced with an open, unpredictable situation, therein lies and opportunity for you to explore and express your own creative talents and abilities.

I believe the embracing of uncertainty to be one of the main characteristics not only of people who have good psychological health, but also those who are treading a genuine, developmental path to enlightenment and liberation.

So, the next time you see a gap in your appointment schedule, wonder where the next pay cheque is coming from, worry about what is happening in your romantic relationship and so on, be sure to embrace and appreciate the creative space that the situation is opening up in your life, your mind and your soul. Before you rush to solve the problem, enter for a while the texture, wonder and creative potential of that uncertain space.

The healing power of awareness