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A Mind of Ease Shadow meditation

Mind of Ease Q&A: What to do When you are Overwhelmed by Negativity

Press play below to listen to the Mind of Ease 15minute Q&A Session on “What to do when you are overwhelmed by negativity”:

[audio:https://tobyouvry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Mind-of-Ease-QA-Sept-20121.mp3|titles=Mind of Ease Q&A Sept 2012]

Alternatively you can download the recording onto your computer by right clicking here:

Mind of Ease Q&A Sept 2012

Here is a summary of the question:

“In the last meditation class, you shared about developing mental positivity.

However, many times the force of negativity in my mind is so strong that I’m being drowned and the awareness is not even present there to witness the river of mind flowing at all.

For such situations, when there is no awareness to recognize your negativity, how do you even pull back with awareness when awareness itself is absent? (Especially you are in one of those endless loops of negativity which drain your life?)”

And here is the summary of my answer:

Answer:

Meditation is about developing the strength of our conscious awareness and the ability to witness the contents of our mind, it takes practice!

The best time to work on strengthening our self awareness through meditation is when our life and mind are relatively stable and peaceful. If we wait until there is a crisis in our life before we think about trying to meditate, then often it is too late to be of real, practical use.

Most people are leading unconscious lives, being drowned by the force of negativity and habit. Broadly speaking there are four or so stages that we need to go through in order to consciously  re-work deeply engrained and overwhelming negative energies/patterns in our mind:

1)      The first stage is to notice the negativity when we get carried away by it

2)     Second stage is to detach with self compassion and flow with the experience, not fight with it.

3)     Third stage is to dissipate the negativity, and reduce its momentum in our mind and life by practicing non-resistance to it (ie: Not feeding energy by fighting with it or trying to overcome it purely by force of egoic will.

4)     The fourth stage is to replace the negative thought pattern with a new positively structured set of perspectives, thoughts, beliefs and behaviors

This takes time! Our negative personal and inter-personal patterns (ie: in our relationships) have been building up for years and years, of course it takes months and years of consistent practice of conscious awareness to become aware of these patterns, heal them and replace them with appropriate alternatives that wil server the evolution of our consciousness.

Yours in the spirit of a mind of ease,

Toby

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Motivation and scope Shadow meditation Uncategorized

Recognizing Three Types of Fear, Meditating on three Types of Courage

Dear Toby,

Many of the daily challenges we face require dealing with a certain degree of fear, and generating an appropriate degree of courage. The article that I have written below tries to place fear and courage in a particular framework which will help people think about how they can start dealing with fear and consciously use courage to live a more full and fulfilling life, less dominated by fear.

I hope you enjoy it!

Yours in the spirit of daily courage,

Toby


Recognizing Three Types of Fear, Meditating on three Types of Courage

The three types of fear are:

  1. Instinctive or biological fear – This is activated when we, or someone we care for are in actual physical danger of some sort and that impels us to act decisively. The difficulty for many of us in this day and age is that our biological fears get activated in situations where there is not actually any manifest physical danger, and we find ourself in fight or flight mode when we don’t need to be. So a major part of dealing with this fear is to allow it to affect us only when appropriate and necessary!
  2. Psychological fear – This type of fear occurs when our ego or self image feels threatened either by what someone else says about us (for example a deliberate or non-deliberate verbal insult), or when we have thought or emotion that our self image deems inappropriate or bad, and so we then try and “get rid” of that bad thought or emotion, or otherwise repress it out of fear.
  3. Existential fear – This to use the definition of existential psychology is the fear that we all face arising from “Being in the face of non-being”. That is to say it is the fear that we experience as a tiny unity of temporary human life in the face of our inevitable death, or movement into non-being. This is a fear that all of us faces and experiences.

Accordingly there are three types of courage that we might think of as qualities that help us to deal with the three types of fear:

  1. Instinctive or biological courage – This type of courage we are called to act upon in situations of actual danger to our life or wellbeing, or the life/wellbeing of someone else. It is a courage that we have to activate generally only occasionally, but it is important that it is present and ready for these occasional purposes.
  2. Psychological courage – This type of courage enables us to appropriately repel the threats to our self image that may come from the negativity of others outside of us, but perhaps more importantly it enables us to appropriately acknowledge the difficult emotions and thoughts that haunt our own mind and make a firm decision not to run from these inner fears, or to distract ourself from them, but face up to them and learn how to deal with them appropriately. One of the best ways we can set ourself up for happiness and wellbeing in life is to keep ourself as clear as possible of repressed or “shadow” fears in our unconscious mind that block the flow of energy in our being and make us feel unworthy of genuine and deeply felt enjoyment. Another point here is that quite a lot of our psychological fear is actually our biological/instinctive fears projecting themselves onto our everyday situation, so it is actually fear number 1 projecting itself onto fear number 2. If we can learn to recognize this, then this can also really help us deal in a more relaxed and down to earth manner with our psychological fears.
  3. Existential courage – The third type of courage is existential courage, which is essentially the courage to live a full and creative life even in full knowledge of the fact that eventually we will die and (from the perspective of the small-self of this life) lose everything. Existential courage encourages us to really think about what is most important in our lives, and make sure that each day we are expressing our core values, working toward goals that really mean something to us, and appreciating the things in our life that we really hold dear. To have existential courage means to live life in the present moment fully and vibrantly for as long as it lasts, and then hopefully to die without regrets!

A meditative perspective on the three types of courage:

As meditators on courage then we are trying to:

  • Be mindful of our instinctive courage, calling upon it when necessary and control our biological fear when genuine threats are present.
  • Face our psychological fears with courage, acknowledging and dealing appropriately with thoughts and emotions that appear to threaten the wellbeing of our self-image.
  • Consciously leverage on our existential courage to live a full and meaningful human life.

A final point here is that as we meditate we also start to have experiences that temporarily transcend our existential fear as our self-sense expands beyond our ego. When in meditation we start to develop a sense of ourself as being part of a Universal being or consciousness that did not start with our biological birth and will not end with our biological death, we do start to genuinely transcend our natural fear of death. However, in my experience, even after a part of our awareness does transcend our small self, and identify with its deeper Universal nature, there is still a substantial part of us that still has to work with our life as an individual human, and still has to leverage substantially on the three types of courage in order to deal with the three types of fear.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com

Categories
A Mind of Ease Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques

The Key to Dealing with Stress, the Challenge of Dealing with Anxiety

Dear All,

How are you? This weeks article looks at the perennial themes of stress and anxiety, and takes what I think is a relatively new or at least novel approach to the issues that you may find interesting!

Yours in the spirit of an appropriate relationship to stress and anxiety,

Toby


The Key to Dealing with Stress, the Challenge of Dealing with Anxiety

The key to dealing with stress is learning to take life less personally.
The key to deaing with anxiety is learning to take life more personally.
Here is what I mean:

The key to dealing with stress, such as for example you might face with living in a city is not to take the natural friction of such environments personally. This type of friction is simply a natural extension of living in a large community and it is unavoidable. If you take this natural friction personally, then it is going to cause you stress, if you don’t, then it won’t, or at least the stress will be manageable.
For example the old person who tries to jump the que at the bus stop is a natural feature of the city landscape, as are periodically obnoxious customers, co-workers and bosses. The heat and friction of daily life in a crowded 21st century environment is just that, heat and friction, no need to take it personally. Simply learn to detach appropriately and don’t make a problem out of the natural dynamics of the situation.
Similarly in our relationships with friends and family, a certain amount of friction is quite natural, it is not unusual and there is no need to make something unnecessarily personal of it.
In the same way it is quite natural to have a certain amount of friction in our mind as competing concerns crowd into our awareness and make noise to try and attract our attention.
Learning not to take natural friction personally is a major key to managing our stress, and learning to direct the natural stress of our daily situations in an appropriate, mindful and constructive direction.

The key to dealing with anxiety is to keep trying to answer the questions that your deeper sense of self is asking you about the meaning of your life. Anxiety (as I am defining it in this article) is the tension and apprehension that we feel in our mind when we feel our deeper, or evolving self pushing us to develop ourselves, to articulate meaningful action, to move toward our highest potential, to make positive changes, to think independently and courageously, to make a difference. Anxiety is the inner tension that we feel when we hear that inner evolutionary to move out of our comfort zone.
People who have no connection to their deeper self suffer only from stress in life, not anxiety. Anxiety is a call to action that comes from the depths of our being, a call to become who we really are, and to express that without fear or apprehension.
One major coping strategy that many people use to cope with their anxiety isconformity. They hope that by simply working hard at conventional goals that will give them conventional “respect” in society, they can simply be accepted by the status quo and thus they can avoid the challenge of doing something that is truly their own, truly an expression of their deeper self and deeper potential.
However, this superficial strategy of avoidance leaves the inner anxiety un-dealt with, and as a result many people find themselves with a sense of anxiety that is always there, gnawing at them, and they don’t even understand where it is coming from.

Mindful awareness of stress and anxiety

The basic “meditative moves” to deal with stress and anxiety are quite different:

  • Dealing with stress mindfully involves observing when we have started to take the natural friction of our life personally, and consciously stepping back, detaching, releasing, and smiling at ourselves for taking the whole thing rather too seriously.
  • Dealing with anxiety means each day to look into our deeper self and ask; “What is my evolutionary potential asking of me today?” The next thing to do is to start something/make the change/make the decision/begin to create that which is the answer to this question.

The two types of happiness that arise from dealing with stress and anxiety

  • The happiness of dealing with our stress through detachment and not taking it personally is primarily a relaxational type of happiness, learning to go with the flow of life.
  • The happiness that comes from dealing with anxiety is the deep and vibrant happiness of feeling fully alive, awake and engaged with life.

The consequences of not dealing with stress and anxiety:
Interestingly, the consequences of not dealing with stress and anxiety seem to be different and yet similar; the experience of irrational fears and projections in our mind.

  • When we don’t deal with stress well, we find the days’ stressful events “sticking” to our mind, and we re-live them in a state of anger, frustration and fear.
  • When we don’t live to our potential, the anxiety that this creates is a slightly more complex fear, a fear of our own power, and an absence of deeper self confidence, which causes us further anxiety, and makes it more and more difficult to discover what we really need to do in order to make our life a reflection of who we are and what we really want to give.

Conclusion
The main point that I think I am trying to make here is that stress and anxiety (as I am defining them in this article) are different problems that require different solutions.

  • The principle solution to stress that I am putting forward in this article is the practice of appropriate detachment
  • The principle solution to anxiety is the courage to engage more deeply with our idea of who we are, and act every day to make our life a reflection of the deeper meanings that we really wish to make our life an expression of.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com

Categories
A Mind of Ease Enlightened love and loving Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques

Opening the alligators mouth: The Energetic Dynamics of Love

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article looks at the inflow and outflow of love in our life, and how we can start to make conscious, meditative adjustments to improve this flow for the better, I hope you enjoy it.

Yours in the spirit of benign flow,

Toby


The Energetic Dynamics of Love

The fundamental energy dynamics of love are those of giving and receiving. In order to be a love giver, there needs to be enough love being received within your being in order for you to give. When speaking of love in this article, I am simply referring to feelings of warmth and friendship, care and benevolent attention. There are four basic levels of receiving and giving love that we will be looking at:

  • In our relationship to self
  • In our relationship to others
  • In our relationship to the world and the Cosmos at large
  • A synthesis of the above three

Receiving love from self
All of us have blocks in our relationship to ourself; things that we don’t like about ourself, reasons why we withhold love from ourself and so forth. However, learning to receive love from ourself is really an act of great simplicity. It is just a matter of sitting quietly, bringing our attention onto ourself and our body, relaxing our chest and heart area, and allowing ourselves to receive the natural healing and caring energy that starts to flow when we focus our attention gently upon ourself without judgement. The act of directing conscious caring attention toward ourself is in itself an activity that naturally directs love toward ourself. We then simply need to sit within that space and allow ourselves to receive that energy from…ourself. You can try it right now it is really as simple as that!

Giving love to self
Once we have some basic familiarity with receiving love from self, we can then practice giving love toward self, which is really just a slightly more active and dynamic way of receiving love from self. When actively giving love toward myself, I normally just raise the corners of my mouth a couple of millimeters, so that the expression on my face is in a half smile. This half smile carries a natural positive warmth and friendship that I then direct toward myself, breathing it in as I inhale, feeling the energy expand thru-out my body as I exhale.

We are all communal beings, and tend to define ourselves to a greater or lesser degree by our relationships to others, but it is surprising how much healthy, loving energy we can create within ourself just by paying attention to the above two practices. This then gives us a healthy “not overly needy” basis upon which we can then practice giving and receiving love from others.

Receiving and giving love from and to others
If we habitually block love from ourself to ourself, we can also bet that we also habitually block the reception of love from others to us, and deprive ourselves of the positive support we could be receiving from them. To practice receiving love from others, just think about the people who love and like you, friends and family. All of them have a loving intention toward you (even if sometimes on the surface there is annoyance etc…). At any time we choose we can simply be aware of this positive, loving intention from those that are close to us, and open our hearts and minds to receiving that energy fully. It is energy that is available to us all the time (even if we are not always physically close to them) that we can benefit simply by being aware of and opening to.
Consistent awareness of this flow of love toward us practiced over time gives us an inner feeling of having a lot of love inside us, and consequently, in our relationships with others it becomes more and more easy to give love to others, both as an act of awareness in meditation, and as actual acts of kindness and generosity in the world.
Practices together in a balanced way, receiving and giving love should actually build upon each other, creating an ever increasing cycle of love and care in your life.

Receiving and giving love from the Universe
In this world there is a lot of free energy around, in the sense of ambient life force and life-giving subtle energy. I became most prominently aware of this when I started a Qi gong practice over fifteen years ago, and saw how it is possible to receive huge amounts of energy from the universe (that is already there) just through attuning my awareness to it, and learning to direct that energy into and through my body.
Similarly, there is a huge (infinite?) amount of ambient love and warmth on a universal level that we can start tapping into just by becoming aware of it, opening to it, and allowing ourself to receive it.
Essentially it seems to be the loving energy of a creative source (conceptualized by some as God, or alternatively for example that which Was, before the big bang) which flows naturally out into creation, and we can be on the receiving energy of that energy just through an act of conscious awareness.
I remember being in Brazil one time and passing a river where a whole line of small alligators were lined up at the bottom of a small waterfall with their mouths open, waiting for the fast current to wash fish into their mouths. Receiving love from the universe is a bit like this; you just open your heart (like the alligators mouth), and let the love flow in.
Once you have a sense of receiving love from the universe in this way, you can then practice giving love to the Universe, just as an act of joy and communion.

A short integral or synthesis meditation on giving and receiving love
Once you have a sense of the above three ways of giving and receiving love, you can then use a very simple breathing exercise to facilitate that flow in your meditation:

  • As you breathe in, feel yourself receiving love from yourself, from others, from the Universe into your heart and mind. If you like you can see that loving energy as a light in your heart being fed and brightened by streams of energy coming into your body as you inhale.
  • As you breathe out see and feel yourself giving love out from your heart-space; to yourself, to others in your life, and to the Universe at large.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com



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A Mind of Ease Concentration Inner vision Integral Meditation Meditation techniques spiritual intelligence

Building the Inner Power of Your Mind – Gross Subtle and Formless Objects of Meditative Concentration

The nature purpose of training in concentration

The meaning of concentration in a meditative context is similar to the mainstream usage of the word; it simply means to develop the ability to focus our mind upon one object or task single pointedly without distraction. Developing concentration through meditation has many benefits, whether you simply want to become more effective at work, become a better tennis player, become mentally stronger and more resilient, or achieve enlightenment, concentration can help you in your goal.
In general the side effect of concentration is peace of mind. All of us are familiar with the pleasure of being so deeply involved in a task or hobby that all our troubles and worries are forgotten. The flow of concentration creates space and comfort in our mind, and an appropriate detachment between ourself and the challenges we face in our life, enabling us to take better perspectives and make more appropriate choices.
In a specifically meditative context, concentration gives us the power to shift from one state of mind to another at will, making the inner goals of meditation far more eminently achievable.

Should we stay with just one object of training when developing concentration, or can it change?

In the great wisdom traditions of the world generally we find the advice that sticking with one object of meditation is best when training in concentration, if we keep shifting our object of concentration, the act of changing the object in itself becomes a bit if a distraction. However, what I personally recommend is that as your concentration practice evolves, you alter your object of meditation slightly to reflect your developing ability.
Initially when our concentration is quite week, it is best to stick with a relatively gross or manifest object that is easy to find and focus on. Once you become more accomplished you can then switch to a more subtle mental object. Once you can focus clearly for extended periods on a subtle mental object, you can then switch to a very subtle or formless object of meditation. Here are three practical examples of what I mean.

Example 1: The light of a candle flame

Beginners – Gross object: You take an actual candle flame as your object of concentration, fixing your gaze upon it without distraction.
Intermediate – Subtle/Mental object: You take the mental image of a candle flame as your object of meditation, visualizing it clearly and focusing on it without distraction.
Advanced – Very subtle/formless object: You take the inner, empty luminescence, or inner light of your mind as your concentration object.

Example 2: The breathing

Beginners – Gross object: You begin by simply taking the gross breathing as your object of concentration, developing the capacity to follow it without getting distracted.
Intermediate – Subtle/Mental object: If you keep focusing on your breathing consistently, you will find that it will naturally transform into what in the Thai Forest Monk tradition is called “the beautiful breath”. The breathing becomes very smooth, natural and comfortable as the energy winds or prajna, or qi in our body becomes very balanced, blissful and harmonious.
Advanced – Very subtle/formless object: If you keep focusing on the beautiful breath, then breathing will then (over a period of time of practice) slow right down .You can then change your focus to the living inner space and silence that you experience in the pauses between your breaths.

Example: The flow of thoughts in our mind

Beginners – Gross object: Initially you just learn to focus on the flow of thoughts and images in the mind as they arise from moment to moment, watching them as an observer.
Intermediate – Subtle/Mental object: Once you are competent at the beginners stage, you can then switch to focusing on the inner space and silence between your thoughts, taking this as your object of concentration.
Advanced – Very subtle/formless object: Once we are comfortable focusing on the inner space between our thoughts, eventually we can switch to focusing on the open expansive emptiness of our inner awareness, and develop deep concentration on this very subtle object of meditation.

So, I hope these three examples give a clear idea of how we can change our object of meditation as our meditation practice evolves, and our ability to focus on progressively more and more subtle objects increases.

Concentration in daily life

Of course concentration should not be confined to formal meditation practice. In these days of furious multi tasking, it can be a nice practice just to select one activity a day where we choose to consciously focus on that task and nothing else, keeping our mind as present to the task as possible. It does not need to be complicated. It can be hanging out the washing, our daily half hour responding to emails, our daily jog, even mindfully watching TV (Caution, potential capacity for self delusion here “Oh, so all I need to do to develop concentration is watch TV intensely!”).

Developing our concentration requires consistency in our practice, but the benefits really are deep and far reaching in terms of our quality of life, I hope this article contributes to your personal inspiration to develop your own concentration!
© Toby Ouvry 2012, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com