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Essential Spirituality Inner vision Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditation techniques spiritual intelligence

What’s the Difference Between Your Higher Self and ‘Big Mind’? (The Doorway)

Dear Integral Meditators,

After last week’s article on Connecting to Your Big Mind I was asked ‘What is the difference between your Higher Self and your Big Mind’. Since it is a good question, I thought I may as well address it in an article, which you will find below!

In the spirit of the doorway,

Toby


What’s the Difference Between Your Higher Self and ‘Big Mind’? (The Doorway)

The term ‘Higher Self’ is used in various western and Indian (generally Theistic) spiritualities to denote our soul, or the deeper part of our individual nature. This Higher Self  or ‘Soul Self’ is conceived to be engaged in a process of learning and evolution that spans not just one life but multiple lifetimes, each lifetime hopefully building upon the experience of the last in order to lead to a gradual maturation of the individual. Unless the individual person is quite evolved, generally he or she will not be experientially aware that he or she has a soul or Higher Self that is ‘looking after’ her. However as s/he matures spiritually will generally become aware of this deeper or higher aspect of her own being that is guiding and directing them. Over a period of time a sense of connection and communication will be established between this person and their Higher Self that eventually leads to the person effectively merging with and functioning as the Higher Self on Earth. The Higher Self is still an individual self, with a history and particular individual characteristics, generally located on the higher mental planes; it is not an abstract, formless timeless spirit.
‘Big Mind’ on the other hand is a term used in some Zen traditions to describe the experience of primal, formless timeless awareness. This formless timeless lies at the heart of our experience of each moment, but it is completely open and limitless, beyond any kind of individual self, beyond time, beyond space; it is pure limitless awareness or spirit. So Big Mind really refers to a unified experience of ‘spiritual’ consciousness that lies beyond our individual ego, but also beyond the limitations of our Higher Self or Soul. The Big Mind is all pervasive, ever present, something that you can learn to recognize and relax into at any time through meditation and mindfulness training.

The Doorway
The doorway is an image I find very helpful as an image that helps to connect the above idea to an actual experience. Imagine your Soul or Higher Self as a doorway. If you look in one direction you see yourself in time and space, going about your daily life in the world. If you look in the other direction you find yourself staring into the experience of a formless, timeless infinity, and expanse of open awareness without limitation; the Big Mind. You are the Soul, the Higher Self that links the world of your individuality and daily life with the formless, timeless experience of Big Mind. In meditation you simply turn and face in the direction of Big mind, allowing yourself to be absorbed into it, when you come out of meditation you simply turn around, face your daily life and walk back into it. Your doorway is the gateway you can come back to at any point in your day to reconnect to your Higher Self and to Big Mind.

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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


Integral Meditation Asia

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Categories
Essential Spirituality Inner vision Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation techniques

Connecting to Your Big Mind

Dear Integral Meditators,

Where is your mind? In your body, in your brain, somewhere else? The article below offers a meditators perspective!

In the spirit of the Big Mind,

Toby


Connecting to Your Big Mind (Is the Mind in the Body or the Body in the Mind?)

A contemporary, conventional view of the mind is that it is inside our body, most often the assumption is that it is in the brain. Our mind sits in our brain, and if we can just figure out our brain, then we will be able to figure out our mind. Right?

The Big Mind
If you have been meditating or practicing mindfulness for a while you will notice that there are times when your mind and energy seem to become open, spacious, almost limitless, transcending the mere experience of your physical body and brain. Even if we are not meditators we will have experienced times where our present moment experience seems to transcend our physical body and brain; perhaps when in love, when in the presence of a beautiful sunset, when we have experienced a profoundly moving work of art, or during a dreaming experience.
In Zen the awakened mind or mind of enlightenment is sometimes called the ‘Big mind’; an experience of a formless, timeless beingness that is without limitation, beyond time, beyond the body and brain,  and beyond the conceptual mind.

The body in the mind
From this point of view our body, and indeed the physical world and universe all exist within the limitless space of our Big Mind. So rather than our mind being in our body, our body is actually contained within our mind! Our brain is seen as a filter that filters out all of the infinite information contained within the Big Mind, enabling us to function operationally as an individual human being in the physical world. If you think about your brain as a computer, and the Big Mind as like the internet, this gives you an idea; the computer helps you to find the information you need from the internet, filtering it out from all the other information on the net.

An Exercise: Experiencing your body and brain in your Big Mind
Sitting quietly, imagine your mind becoming as big as possible; expanding our beyond your body and brain, out into the landscape around you, up into the sky and stars above you, and down into the earth beneath you. Let it become as big as you can, enter into the Big Mind experience. Then think about your body and environment as being contained within your Big Mind; everything you sense, think of and experience is all contained within your Big Mind; it is the context in which everything else is experienced.

Why does this matter?
Spending a period of time each day relaxing into your Big Mind can really change the way in which you experience yourself, your life, your challenges and your joys. Instead of being stuck in your body, you gain access to a bigger, stabler identity that enables you to experience the ups and downs of your life with stability, lightness, creativity and humour.

A final point; your small mind and small life still matters, and looking after it is still important, it’s just that it is contained within a bigger, more spacious identity and context!

Categories
creative imagery Energy Meditation Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Life-fullness meditation and creativity Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Mindfulness

Working With Your Body’s Cellular Memory Through Meditation

Dear Integral Meditators,

What is the relationship between your body’s cellular structure and how you expereince your life? And how can meditation help influence this relationship in a positive and practical way? The article below explores this topic…

In the spirit of the living body,

Toby


Working With Your Body’s Cellular Memory Through Meditation

Let’s say I meet someone at a party, that person looks somewhat  like someone who hurt me and made me angry in the past. Based on meeting this person that looks like a past acquaintance, my body’s cellular memory is stimulated and I feel myself experiencing not just a mental aversion and hurt, but a tangible energy of hurt that I feel in my body.
Let’s say alternatively I meet an old friend whom I share many good and fond memories of. My body’s cellular memory remembers this old friend, and I feel impelled to embrace them warmly to express my appreciation.
Our body remembers things on a cellular level, and this cellular memory is a powerful force in our life.

Working with positive cellular memories
Take any quality that you wish to develop in your life. Let’s say courage. To activate your body’s cellular memory of courage you can contemplate times in the past when you have felt and acted upon the quality of courage. Focusing on memories of times in the past when you have experienced courage will activate your cellular memory, and your body will re-create the experience of what it feels like to be courageous in the present moment, now.
Once you have re-created that feeling of courage you can then simply sit with it, breathe with it and ‘soak’ yourself in it through meditation, making that quality stronger and stronger within yourself so that over time it starts to become more and more a part of your instinctive way of going and being in the world.

Working with negative or difficult cellular memories
Think of an emotion that you experience periodically that you want to let go of, let’s say resentment or inferiority. Contemplate times in the past when you have felt inferior or resentful, allow your bodies cellular memory to be stimulated so that you have a tangible experience of that resentment present in your body. Now relax and breathe with that feeling; by acknowledging and accepting it you can then learn to actually release and let go of those instinctive feelings in your body, and open up your cellular structure to the influence of new positive emotional programmings.

Closing comments
When working with positive cellular memories, the purpose of meditating on them is to strengthen and consolidate them. When working with difficult cellular memories, the purpose is to release the energetic charge of those memories through awareness, acknowledgement and acceptance. The essential technique is actually quite similar for both, the difference being in our intention and what we do once we have stimulated the cellular memory in meditation.

Which cellular memories would you like to work with this week in your own meditation and mindfulness practice?

Related article: Combining Your Meditation and Mindfulness Practice Together

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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


Upcoming events at Integral Meditation Asia in October

Saturday 17th October, 2.30-5.30pm  Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention 3 Hour workshop

Saturday October  31st, 9.30am-12.30pm – Engaged Mindfulness: Take Control of Your Life Direction and Wellbeing Through Awareness, Curiosity, Courage and Care – A Three Hour Workshop


Integral Meditation Asia

Categories
A Mind of Ease Integral Meditation Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Mindfulness

Combining Your Meditation and Mindfulness Practice Together (Meditating on relaxation)

Dear Integral Meditators,
What is the difference between meditation and mindfulness? Are they the same or different? This weeks article looks at working definitions of both and how they can be combined into an effective daily practice, enjoy!

In the spirit of the mindful journey,

Toby


Combining Your Meditation and Mindfulness Practice Together

To be mindful of something means to bring a certain focused,  non-judgmental awareness and attention to something in order to understand it and get to know it better.
To meditate means to focus your attention very specifically upon a particular state of mind in order to really ground it experientially for you and to integrate it into the foundational, habitual structure of your consciousness. Combining meditation and mindfulness together into a single practice optimizes the effects of both. Let’s take a simple example of how to do this using the basic but profound quality of relaxation.

Mindfully investigating relaxation.
What does relaxation meant to me? When in my life have I felt truly relaxed on all levels? By asking yourself questions like these you can begin a process of mindful enquiry where you bring to mind different experiences of relaxation that you have had in the past. As I’m sitting here writing, I am thinking of a beach in Langkawi that I have been to where I had a particularly relaxing time. As I remember and picture the beach and my experiences there I notice my body, mind and heart starting to respond to those memories; the cellular structure of my body relaxes and rests at ease.

Meditating on relaxation
Now that my process of mindful enquiry has helped me find a mental, physical and emotional state of relaxation, I can now meditate on it. To meditate on relaxation, I simply practice focusing upon and holding that state of relaxation with meditative concentration; breathing it in and breathing it out. By meditating on relaxation in this way I really allow my body mind and heart to ‘soak’ in the feeling of relaxation, so that I really become very familiar with the feeling. By meditating on relaxation I can integrate it much more deeply into my daily, habitual consciousness, and thus I can start to use it more and more effectively; when I find myself under pressure at work, when I feel emotional stress in my relationships and so on…

If you understand how to combine meditation and mindfulness in this way, then you can basically accelerate the development of any inner quality or experience that you want. For example if I want to develop my creative energy I can first mindfully investigate what creativity means to me, and recall times in the past when I have felt in ‘the creative flow’. Having investigated mindfully in this way I can then use meditation to ‘soak’ my body-mind in that state of creative flow so that it becomes a stronger and stronger part of my basic habitual psychological makeup.

Perhaps this week you might like to start working with combining your own meditation and mindfulness practice together taking the example of relaxation above. Alternatively pick any quality that you want to develop right now and use that!

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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


Upcoming events at Integral Meditation Asia in October

Every Wednesday, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday 3rd October, 2.30-5.30pm – Going From Over-whelmed to Over-well: Meditation for Quietening the Mind – a three hour workshop

Sunday 11th October, 8.00-10.30am – An Introduction to Walking Meditation Workshop

Wednesday  14th October 2015, 7.30-9pm – Evening Event: Integral Mindfulness –Co-creating Your Professional Success and Personal Wellbeing

Saturday 17th October, 2.30-5.30pm  Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention 3 Hour workshop

Saturday October  31st, 9.30am-12.30pm – Engaged Mindfulness: Take Control of Your Life Direction and Wellbeing Through Awareness, Curiosity, Courage and Care – A Three Hour Workshop


Integral Meditation Asia

Categories
Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Presence and being present Uncategorized

Dualistic Appearance – The Dance of Reality & Illusion

Dear Integral Meditators,

When you look at something, what is it that you really see? This weeks article looks at the way in which our mind projects itself onto our reality, moulding it in its own image. I then offer practical method for starting to gain awareness and benevolent control of this process.

In the spirit of the journey,

Toby


Dualistic Appearance – The Dance of Reality & Illusion

Dualistic Appearance is a meditation term originally coined by the Buddha. It means the appearance of an object together with our minds projected or imagined image of what we think is appearing. For example let’s say my partner and I had an argument last night. She comes into the kitchen in the morning and two things will appear to me:

  • The literal body and person appearing to me right there, in the present moment
  • Almost instantly after I see her my mind with project an imagined image of what it thinks it sees upon her, based upon our history, last night’s argument and so on.

So, in fact there are two thing s appearing when I see my partner, one ‘real’; and one a mental projection.
One of the main functions of meditation and mindfulness is to help us to separate our actual experience of each moment from our mental projections, and by doing so improve our ability to feel deeply at home and in touch with each moment of our reality.

The problem of dualistic appearance is that if we have no sense that our mind is projecting this second ‘imagined’ image upon our reality, then it is very difficult to avoid literally living in an illusion. It is like being in a hall of mirrors; we cannot tell what part of our experience is real and which parts merely mental projections. We live out of touch with our reality in a ‘world of our own’ which is often filled with a lot of mental and emotional pain.

The potential beauty of dualistic appearance is that it enables us to project and imagine ideas onto our reality that can change it in radical and positive ways. We can imagine a picture on a blank canvas and then do it. We can find ourself in a difficult work environment and imagine ways in which we can change it for the better. We can bring new realities into existence through the power that our mind has to project images and ideas.

So then, as you start to reflect upon this, you might like to consider how your own experience of dualistic appearance has been working today. Has your minds ability to project itself onto what it experiences been working for you or against you?

Meditation on dualistic appearance – Three basic movements

1. Observing the play of reality and projection – the first stage in meditating on non duality is to observe the process of dualistic appearance and how it happens in your own experience. Let’s say I take the view from my window as I write this. I can see the view itself as it is, and then I can start to see how my mind projects itself upon that view. If I am having a bad day my mind might project ‘bleak meaningless urban landscape’ upon it, and feel depressed. On another day where I am feeling great I can look out the window and project ‘city filled with wonder and beauty!’ Same view, different projection.
2. Dropping the projection & connecting to reality as it is – Once we have observed this play of dualistic appearance, we can then work to ‘drop’ the mental projection and just see what we observe ‘as it is’ without projecting. To go back to the example of me looking out of the window at the view, I simply try and see the cityscape without projecting good or bad, pleasure or pain, beautiful or ugly, or any other form of mental image. I simply sit and see what I see without projecting, resting in that space of alert awareness.
3. Consciously working with dualistic appearance – Once we have developed a basic capacity to sit and observe our experience of each moment without projecting, we can then start to make conscious choices about our projections, and by doing so learn to further take benevolent control of our experience of reality. For example if I notice I am looking out of my window and unconsciously projecting ‘bleak urban landscape’ because I am feeling down, I can recognize that and refrain from re-enforcing or strengthening that projection. Instead I can consciously choose to project a more useful and positive idea of what I am seeing.

This week if you like, take these three stages of working with dualistic appearance and start to work with them in chosen areas of your life, observing how your perception of what is really going on changes when you do so

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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


Upcoming events at Integral Meditation Asia in October

Every Wednesday, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday 3rd October, 2.30-5.30pm – Going From Over-whelmed to Over-well: Meditation for Quietening the Mind – a three hour workshop

Wednesday  14th October 2015, 7.30-9pm – Evening Event: Integral Mindfulness –Co-creating Your Professional Success and Personal Wellbeing

Saturday 17th October, 2.30-5.30pm  Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention 3 Hour workshop

Sunday October  30th, 9.30am-12.30pm – Engaged Mindfulness: Take Control of Your Life Direction and Wellbeing Through Awareness, Curiosity, Courage and Care – A Three Hour Workshop


Integral Meditation Asia