Month: June 2016

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Awareness and insight creative imagery Enlightened Flow Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Life-fullness Meditation and Psychology Mindfulness One Minute Mindfulness Presence and being present

Mindful Mobility – Stepping in and out of the river

Dear Toby,

Building inner flexibility and mobility are really core parts of an integrated mindfulness practice, in the article below I explain two core practices for building mindful mobility.

In the spirit of mindful perspective taking,

Toby

Mindful Mobility – Stepping in and out of the river (& from self to other)

One of the fundamental skills that we are trying to develop as mindfulness practitioners is to be able to shift consciously from one perspective to another, and use these perspectives appropriately. In this article we will be exploring how to shift between subjective and objective perspectives, and between self and other.

Moving from subjective to objective; Stepping in and out of the river of your consciousness
Imagine your mind is like a river, with the stream of thoughts, images, memories and sensory impressions being like the water. Spend some time in the river ‘being the water’; as thoughts, emotions and feelings come up experience yourself as them; be the thought, feel the emotion as if you are the emotion, let your attention absorb into the senses. This is experiencing your mind subjectively, from the inside.
After a while imagine yourself ‘stepping out’ of the river of your consciousness onto the river bank. Spend some time watching your mind as an observer, as a witness; watching the river flow by with a clear gap between yourself and the ‘water’ of the thoughts, images, feelings and senses in your mind. Watch your mind like a scientist; this is mindfully watching your mind objectively, from the outside.
The aim of doing this practice is to be able to consciously shift ‘at will’ from observer to subject, from subject to observer. This then enables us to:

  • Enjoy our emotions, thoughts, feelings, memories, senses (etc…) fully by entering into them and ‘owning’ them
  • Detach from our experiences when we need to so that we can see them more clearly and make more objective decisions and rational choices

Moving from self to other and extending care
In this second exercise you imagine yourself with another person, or a group of people. It might be a situation where there is a little tension between yourself and the others for whatever reason.
Stage 1: The eyes of self – See yourself in the situation and view it through your eyes, from your subjective point of view. Experience what your point of view feels and sounds like. If you do this mindfully you may well become aware of aspects of your experience that you had not been aware of before!
Stage 2: Become a fly on the wall – Look at the situation and group from the outside for a while, as if you were a fly on the wall. This is like ‘stepping out of the river’ from the previous exercise; it gives you an objective, witnessing perspective.
Stage 3: Becoming other – Enter into the shoes and see through the eyes of the other person, or group or people. See the situation from their point of view, what do they see? How are they feeling? Why are they acting the way they act? Use your imagination to mindfully understand as far as possible where they are coming from.
Stage 4: Go back, extend care – At the end of this exercise, go back to seeing through the eyes of self (stage 1) and spend a while extending care to the other person/people based on the understanding of then you have gained in stage 3, ‘becoming other’. Back in ‘your shoes’ extend care, compassion and understanding to them.

These two exercises are ‘mindful mobility exercises’ that, if practiced regularly will greatly increase your mental flexibility and ‘range of motion’ as you go about your daily life, as well as having the basic side effect or most mindfulness practices; greater peace of mind and centered-ness.

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

July details out soon!

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology

 

Categories
Concentration Integral Awareness Meditation techniques Mindful Breathing Mindfulness One Minute Mindfulness Presence and being present

Calm abiding, beautiful breathing (Inner air conditioning)

Dear Integral Meditators,

What would happen if you were able to focus your mind in a state of calm abiding at will, or at least more often? This weeks article explores this theme and how you can start developing this skill today!

In the spirit of the strength of calm,

Toby

Calm abiding, beautiful breathing (Inner air conditioning)

Overriding your brains need for over stimulation
One of the main things we are trying to achieve with mindfulness meditation is the ability to focus our mind calmly and continuously on one object for an extended period of time; we train our attention to become happy to be in one place, abiding peacefully. The problem we face is that our brain tends to reward and crave stimulation and new information; impulsively moving from one object to another, happy to remain distracted and busy. So to develop the long term benefits of ‘calm abiding’ we need to repeatedly override our brains craving for stimulation, bringing it back to an object of calming concentration.

The vicious cycle of fatigue and distraction
When we are tired and anxious during our day, often the last thing that we want to do is to bring our mind to a state of calm focus, because it requires effort. But remaining distracted also requires effort and dissipates our energy, making us feel even more tired. With mindfulness meditation we are trying to replace the vicious cycle of fatigue and distraction with the positive cycle of energy and focus.

The beautiful breathing
One of the medium-long term effects of practising calm abiding using awareness of our breathing is the experience of the ‘beautiful breathing’ (so called within the Forest monk tradition of Thai Buddhism) where

  • Our breathing starts to appear more clearly to our mind, with less effort needed to focus
  • Our breathing starts to feel increasingly peaceful, harmonious and ‘beautiful’ as we focus upon it.
  • There is a corresponding feeling of comfort, harmony and bliss within our physical body.

Cultivating the beautiful breathing
One way in which we can cultivate the beautiful breathing right away is to deliberately make our breathing more beautiful and harmonious right now. Here is an exercise for doing this:

  • Set aside a period of time, short or longer. For three-five breaths, deliberately place your attention on the breathing. Make your inhalation and exhalation as smooth, even, harmonious and ‘beautiful’ as you can. You can either make the inhale and exhale even in length, or the exhalation slightly longer according to your preference. Also, make the changeover at the top and bottom of your breath (from inhale to exhale and vice-versa) as smooth and flowing as you can.
  • At the end of your three-five breaths, relax the body as deeply and blissfully as you can; try and feel your body and bring as much ease and comfort as you can to that feeling.
  • Spend the duration of your session cultivating a sense of smooth, beautiful breathing with deep relaxation of the body.

By doing this exercise regularly for a short period of time (daily if you can), you will quite naturally increase your connection to the beautiful breathing, and accelerate the ‘speed’ at which you are able to start to experience it stably and naturally.

Your inner air conditioning
Today I was walking back to my place of work after lunch, focusing gently on my own experience of the beautiful breathing. It was hot, crowded and I was sweating, but because my mind was in a state of calm abiding, just enjoying the smooth flow of my breathing, I felt ‘cool’ inside. The heat and the sweat did not bother me nearly as much. It was almost like I had some ‘inner air conditioning’ with me. It’s a small observation, but it gives an example of what it feels like to have a stable experience of calm abiding, and how it can alter our basic experience of daily life.

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday June 18th, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention – An Introduction to Contemporary Meditation Practice

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology

Categories
A Mind of Ease Enlightened Flow Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Meditation techniques Mindful Breathing Mindful Self-Leadership Motivation and scope Presence and being present Zen Meditation

Three levels of non-striving

Dear Integral Meditators,

Is it possible by letting go of our striving to then learn how to strive better? That is the topic of this weeks article!

Mindful goals coaching offer ends tomorrow, 8th June.

In the spirit of non-striving,

Toby


Three levels of non-striving

In a previous article on non-striving I defined non-striving as “a refusal to be in conflict with yourself and your life. Put another way, rather than seeing yourself in an adversarial relationship to yourself and your circumstances, you practice accepting and working with what is there”.
What I want to explain here is three levels of non-striving that we can work with in our mindfulness practice. These three stages are:

  1. Noticing your inner conflict and striving
  2. Practising non-striving
  3. Striving better

Noticing your inner conflict
This first stage is simply about awareness. You sit down and notice all of the tension, conflict and striving that you have within yourself at this point in time. Without trying to change it, simply notice the tension you may feel about a conversation you had earlier in the day, an unfinished project, an uncertainty that you can’t control, a mistake that you wish you hadn’t made and wish to rectify, something that you are looking forward to and can’t wait for, something that you are sad about and wish hadn’t happened. Simply breath and be present to all of the different types of conflict and striving you notice. Is there one above all of the others that is stronger and stands out? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Relaxing into non-striving
In this stage the object is to progressively drop the different levels of striving and conflict that you feel within yourself.
Take a few breaths to center yourself, then encourage yourself to move into a state of acceptance of yourself, what you find within you, and whatever circumstances you find yourself in. Alternate for a while between the breathing (to center and focus yourself) and entering into a state of easy, relaxed non-striving. With each round of breathing and relaxing, try and enter one step deeper into the feeling of non-striving; learn to move easily and smoothly with whatever it is you find within. You can stay with stage two for as long as you like, it’s good to really immerse yourself in it deeply when you can.

Striving better
In stage one you practiced mindfully noticing the different types of conflict that you have in your life currently. In the second stage, non-striving, you practiced stepping out of that conflict refusing to be in an adversarial relationship to yourself, going with what you find with acceptance. In the final stage, ‘striving better’ you come back to the conflicts that you notice in stage one and ask yourself the question ‘is there any way I can strive better and more harmoniously in this situation?”

  • You might choose to strive more patiently with the project that is stressing you out
  • You might choose to make good for a mistake made without using the fact that you made it in the first place as a hammer that you keep hitting yourself over the head with
  • You might choose to emphasize being playful in a situation that you have been taking overly seriously

There are infinite potential discoveries that you might make and decide to focus on implementing at this stage, the point is that you are using your mindful intelligence to make the quality of your striving wiser, more ergonomic, more realistic.

By using these three stages we learn not just to relax by practising non-striving, but to combine our striving and non-striving into a mutually strengthening and re-enforcing whole. As always with integral mindfulness its ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’!

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday 11th June, 10am-5pm – An Introduction to Meditation from the Perspective of Shamanism

Saturday June 18th, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention – An Introduction to Contemporary Meditation Practice

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology

 

Categories
creative imagery Enlightened Flow Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Mindfulness Presence and being present

Mindfulness of feelings – The principle of flow

Dear Integral Meditators,

In my writings on mindfulness I speak quite a lot about the principle of flow. In the article below I explore it with regard to mindfulness of our feelings, and how to create a healthy, self-cleansing emotional body by using a simple image and exercise.

In the spirit of the flowing river,

Toby

Mindfulness of feelings – The principle of flow

Picture a flowing river. Now imagine that some pollution gets dumped in that river. In the short term this will make the river dirty but, as long as the water keeps on flowing, then eventually the river will self-cleanse. Imagine that same pollution gets placed in a pond. In the case of the pond the pollution has nowhere to go because the water is not flowing, and so the water in the pond simply stays filthy.
It’s the same with your emotions; if you are mindfully feeling and experiencing your emotions every day, then you are allowing them to flow so that, even if some of those feelings are negative, then it doesn’t matter too much because they will be washed along and away by the flow without too much bother. If however you repress or stifle or numb your emotions, then this is like making them into a stagnant pond, they get stuck in your body and mind, unable to flow naturally. In this situation, whenever a difficult or negative emotion gets generated within you it will tend to get ‘stuck’ and just circulate within your emotional being for an unnatural time because it has nowhere to go; it cannot ‘flow’.

The flowing river
Imagine yourself by a deep, flowing river, allow your attention to dwell upon and within the river so that you can start to feel its flow within your emotional being. Allow yourself to feel and flow like the river, letting whatever emotions come up to arise and then flow downstream; don’t try and control or dictate what emotions arise. Allow your emotional self to become a moment to moment flow, gradually becoming a smooth, clear flow of pure feeling-ness; relax mindfully into that and dwell on it for as long as you wish.
You can even take particular emotions that you know you struggle with or tend to repress, and do this exercise specifically with them in mind.

Dealing with surges
When there is a lot of rain, a river swells and the flow increases, but as long as the flow is not blocked, then the surge eventually returns to a normal flow. It’s the same when we have a surge of emotions, as long as you don’t try and block or prevent the flow of the emotion, then after a while it will subside quite naturally. Again the principle here is to work on allowing the energy of the emotion to flow in a conscious, directed way.

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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

Mindful Goals Coaching Special Offer: 15% off from May 25th – June 8th

For two weeks starting May 25th & ending June 8th I am offering a special 15% discount on my mindful goals coaching service. For a three session package that is a saving of Sing$90.
‘To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it is still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble’ – Bill Watterson
Click the link above to find out more about the Mindful Goals Coaching Service!

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday 11th June, 10am-5pm – An Introduction to Meditation from the Perspective of Shamanism

Saturday June 18th, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention – An Introduction to Contemporary Meditation Practice

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology