Month: October 2022

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A Mind of Ease Awareness and insight creative imagery Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Life-fullness Meditation techniques mind body connection Presence and being present

Three Simple Creative Awareness Forms

“One of the things that we learn when we take up meditation is to appreciate how pleasurable the simple act of awareness can be”

Dear Integral Meditators,

This article explores three ways of stimulating your capacity for meditative awareness. They are practices in themselves, or they can be practiced together in combination.
If you enjoy them, the practices will be a part of this Tuesday and Wednesdays’ meditation class, you’d be welcome to join us, live or online.

Final call for this weekend’s Shamanic meditation workshop!

In the spirit of the pleasure of awareness,

Toby

 

 

Three Simple Creative Awareness Forms

Here are three simple meditation forms that you can do anytime, either as a short 1-5 minute practice in a spare moment, or as a longer meditations when you have more time.

1. Developing appreciation of simple awareness.
One of the things that we learn to appreciate when we take up meditation is to appreciate how pleasurable the simple act of awareness can be.
Take a minute now and just allow your mind to rest on an object. It could be the sounds as they come and go in the moment, or the play of the light across the landscape or cityscape as you look out of the window. Just allow your awareness to rest on that single area for as long as you want. As you do so, feel your mind and body moving into a state of rest and regeneration. Feel how pleasant the simple experience of relaxed, open awareness is.

2. Observing yourself in the third person
We habitually view our daily life and the events that happen in it in a first person, subjective manner. This awareness exercise offers another perspective on our life that we can work on integrating.
Sitting down, imagine that, rather than seeing life through the eyes of your physical body, imagine that you are outside your body, maybe two or three meters away observing yourself. Recall the events of the last 24 hours, and mentally see yourself engaging in your activities. As you observe yourself, you may find that feelings and emotions come up. If so, that is fine, just allow them to. The thing that you want to try and avoid as you are watching yourself is to start analyzing it or making judgements about what you are seeing. Simply be an objective observer and try and experience as fully as possible what it is like to be free from an obsessive first person experience of your life.

3. Finding your inner light by relaxing into the darkness of your mind.
Relax your mind as much as possible, as if you are falling asleep. Allow your awareness to be enveloped by the deep, silky darkness that is normally experienced as you start to drift into unconscious slumber. The key here is to ALMOST fall asleep, but NOT to actually fall asleep! Keep a part of your mind alert and awake as the main part of your mind and body relaxes deeply.
Think of the darkness that you experience as you are relaxing in this way as being like the darkness that a baby experiences in the mother’s womb, or like the darkness of deep night when we are all asleep. Rest in this darkness as fully as you can without losing that small element of aawakeness!
After a while imagine that you sense within the darkness a point of light. A little bit like the first rays of sun as it is still beneath the horizon at dawn. Focus on this point of light and allow it to become gradually stronger and more pervasive, like the rays of the sun spilling across the horizon as it rises. Gradually, without trying too hard, let the inner light within your mind begin to fill the darkness until your mind feels bright and radiant like a morning sun.
The key with this exercise is to relax as fully into the darkness before you attempt to find the light, and not to try too hard to find the light. If you relax deeply into the darkness, the light will actually start to emerge in its own time. However, you can stimulate it a little bit by imagining the point of light emerging from the darkness as described above.

​© Toby Ouvry 2022, 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

Sat & Sun 22nd/23rd October – Shamanic meditation workshop retreatLearn how to practice the fundamentals of the most ancient meditation tradition on the planet in a clear, practical and concise manner, and understand its relevance and value to you and the challenges that you face in your life.

The workshop will give an overview and introduce some simple but profound shamanic practices on day one, with a deeper dive into Shamanic meditation practices on day two…read full details

 

Tues & Weds 25th/26th October, 7.30pm – Deepavali Meditation – Connecting to your inner light

About the class: Deepavali is traditionally (amongst other things) the annual celebration in the Hindu Calendar of the triumph of the light ever the darkness, of good over evil. In this session we will be taking some time to connect to our own ‘inner light’ in meditation, as a way of conquering the ‘darkness’ of our own inner confusion and fear….read full details

 

Saturday September 24th, 9.30-11.30am – Monthly Qi Gong & Taoist Breathwork Clinic & Mini-retreat

In a sentence: Experience unique Qi gong and Taoist breathing techniques to improve your immune system, energy level, psychological wellness and enhance your meditation…read full details

 


Life-fullness – The Integral Life-Coaching Program with Toby
 

Are you looking a coach who can help you to:

  • Meet the challenges, stress and changes that you face in a more effective and mindful way
  • Become happier within yourself, in your relationships and at work
  • Be actively accountable for finding a sense of balance/well-being in your life and fulfilling your personal potential?
  • Guide you to find and operate from a deeper sense of meaning, motivation and connectivity in your life?
Read full details…

All upcoming classes and workshops at IMA:

Ongoing – Weekly Tuesday, Wednesday Online class schedule

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby (Bukit Timah)

Ongoing on Tuesday evenings, 7.30-8.30pm – Tuesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby  (East Coast)

Ongoing – An Adventure in Consciousness – The What, Why & How of integral & engaged meditation practice

Sat & Sun 22nd/23rd October – Shamanic meditation workshop retreat

Tues & Weds 25th/26th October, 7.30pm – Deepavali Meditation – Connecting to your inner light

Saturday October 29th, 9.30-11.30am – Monthly Qi Gong & Taoist Breathwork Clinic & Mini-retreat

Tues 1st & Weds 2nd November, 7.30pm – Samhain Meditation (Live & Online) – Acknowledging the gifts and wounds of our ancestors

 

Integral Meditation Asia

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

Categories
creative imagery Energy Meditation Life-fullness Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Presence and being present Qi gong

Lighting up your pathways – Helping your brain to help you

Dear Integral Meditors,

This article explores ways of being mindful to help develop an appreciation toward your brain. I hope you enjoy it. If you do them it will be a part of this Tuesday and Wednesdays’ meditation class, you’d be welcome to join us, live or online.

In the spirit of a bright brain,

Toby

 

 

 

Lighting up your pathways – Helping your brain to help you

This article explores ways of being mindful to help develop an appreciation toward your brain. My experience over the years is that you can significantly change the health of the different internal organs and zones of the body using meditation. Since your brain is such an important aspect of our body-complex, time spend in mindful appreciation of your brain is well spent.
Like other areas of out body, often we only notice our brain when it starts to go wrong or malfunction. It doesn’t take too much wisdom to see the benefit of not waiting to that point before we start to look after it!

Caring attention to your brain
You can start mindfulness of the brain simply by noticing it sitting there in your skull, and paying attention the feelings and sensations that you have in and around it. Any areas of tension or ‘brain-fog’ that you notice there you can gently encourage the brain to release. Awareness itself is a healer, and just this opening stage can be quite powerful if done with reasonable quality attention

Smiling to your body and brain
In the Qi gong tradition of meditation there is a practice called ‘smiling to the internal organs’ which is a form of health meditation. This can be easily applied to the brain as follows:
Step 1: Relax your facial muscles. Then raise the corners of your mouth a few millimetres, so the expression on your face is that of a gentle half smile. Notice the natural warmth of the energy that is generated from this.
Step2: Imagine the warm energy of the smile as a miniature sun that gathers in the space between your eyebrows, maybe about the size of a golf ball. Then imagine that mini-sun moving to different parts of the brain. Focus your smiling energy in each area for a short while seeing it radiate its healing and energizing there. For example, you could move it:

  • First to the prefrontal cortex at the front, just behind the forehead and temples
  • Secondly to the mid-brain or limbic-zone, responsible for much of our emotional and social processing
  • Finally to the back, the primal/reptilian zone of the brain and the brain stem where our fight or flight responses are located

Move the smiling energy back and forth into each area for a while, and then finish by relaxing your attention and letting your brain absorb the effect of this process.
As well as being good for your brain, you’ll also notice that this meditation has a soothing effect on your thoughts, making it quite easy to feel mentally calm.

Mindfulness and brain density
Evidence has shown that regular meditation increases the gray matter in the:

  • Insula – which is linked to interoception; self-awareness; empathy for emotions. (Holzel et al.,2008; Lazar et al., 2005)
  • Hippocampus – associated to visual-spatial memory; establishing context; inhibiting amygdala and cortisol. (Holzel et al.,2008; Luders et al., 2009*)
  • Prefrontal cortext (PFC) – related to executive functions and attention control. (Larzar et al., 2005; Luders et al., 2009*)
  • Regular meditation reduces: Cortisol thinning linked to aging in insula and PFC. (Lazar et al.,2005)

The experiments above were just measuring the effects of a very general mindfulness practice, nothing brain specific. The proposition would be that the meditation that I describe above would have a rather more explicit and positive effect on the brain than the one done in the research.
Actually, I find that doing the brain meditation itself and the good feelings that come from it is rather more motivating than research. But if it motivates you to get practising, then by all means use it to get up and running!

Related reading: Meditation Technique For Brain Relaxation, Non-Conceptuality and Falling Asleep at Night.
Access your brain’s ‘zero space’

​© Toby Ouvry 2022, 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

Sat & Sun 22nd/23rd October – Shamanic meditation workshop retreatLearn how to practice the fundamentals of the most ancient meditation tradition on the planet in a clear, practical and concise manner, and understand its relevance and value to you and the challenges that you face in your life.

The workshop will give an overview and introduce some simple but profound shamanic practices on day one, with a deeper dive into Shamanic meditation practices on day two…read full details

 

Tues & Weds 25th/26th October, 7.30pm – Deepavali Meditation – Connecting to your inner light

About the class: Deepavali is traditionally (amongst other things) the annual celebration in the Hindu Calendar of the triumph of the light ever the darkness, of good over evil. In this session we will be taking some time to connect to our own ‘inner light’ in meditation, as a way of conquering the ‘darkness’ of our own inner confusion and fear….read full details

 

Saturday September 24th, 9.30-11.30am – Monthly Qi Gong & Taoist Breathwork Clinic & Mini-retreat

In a sentence: Experience unique Qi gong and Taoist breathing techniques to improve your immune system, energy level, psychological wellness and enhance your meditation…read full details

 


Life-fullness – The Integral Life-Coaching Program with Toby
 

Are you looking a coach who can help you to:

  • Meet the challenges, stress and changes that you face in a more effective and mindful way
  • Become happier within yourself, in your relationships and at work
  • Be actively accountable for finding a sense of balance/well-being in your life and fulfilling your personal potential?
  • Guide you to find and operate from a deeper sense of meaning, motivation and connectivity in your life?
Read full details…

All upcoming classes and workshops at IMA:

Ongoing – Weekly Tuesday, Wednesday Online class schedule

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby (Bukit Timah)

Ongoing on Tuesday evenings, 7.30-8.30pm – Tuesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby  (East Coast)

Starts Tues 16th /Weds 17th August – An Adventure in Consciousness – The What, Why & How of integral & engaged meditation practice

Sat & Sun 22nd/23rd October – Shamanic meditation workshop retreat

Tues & Weds 25th/26th October, 7.30pm – Deepavali Meditation – Connecting to your inner light

Saturday October 29th, 9.30-11.30am – Monthly Qi Gong & Taoist Breathwork Clinic & Mini-retreat

Tues 1st & Weds 2nd November, 7.30pm – Samhain Meditation (Live & Online) – Acknowledging the gifts and wounds of our ancestors

 

Integral Meditation Asia

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

Categories
A Mind of Ease Inner vision Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Life-fullness Meditation techniques Mindful Resilience Presence and being present

Inner listening – Three levels of meditating on silence

“The nice thing about the above meditation is also that it can be done without having to exert much effort; it’s all listening, accepting, opening to. It can be done when you are tired and want to relax, as well as when you want to sit down and really do some focused inner work”

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article explores how you can access and enjoy silence progressively and without too much effort. It’s partly the subject of  this weeks Tuesday & Wednesday meditation class,  it’ll be a fun one, and your welcome to join is either live or online.

Beneath the article you an find full details of all classes and workshops for October, do have a browse, it’s a full line up!

In the spirit of  silence amongst the noise,

Toby

Inner listening – Three levels of meditating on silence

Cultivating silent presence is not by any means the only way to meditate, but nevertheless it is a super important dimension of meditation. It is also one that, once you can do it, helps all your other forms of meditation as well as being an end in itself. Here are three ways to meditate on silence, the first is a doorway to the second, and the second is a doorway to the third. For the first two there are two ways to do it; listening inwardly and listening outwardly. They can be combined or focused on separately in any given session, as you wish.

Listening and observing the non-silence
The first practice is to listen to the non-silence or the noise.
On the inner level – As you turn your attention inward, this means to notice your inner conversation, and all the other ‘noise’ that is going on inside your mind, just holding the position of the observer in that space. You don’t try and stop the thoughts, rather you simply listen and notice.
On the outer level – You simply listen to the sounds going on around you, noticing them, and letting them come and go. Like the inner level the key is simply listening and noticing, and letting that be your point of stability as the sounds come and go.

Listening and observing the silence
If you listen to your inner noise in the way described above, then after a while you will notice that it starts to die down a little. Listening inwardly, you will start to notice pockets of silence between the noise. When these start to happen, pay attention to them and start to drop into them, extending the duration of them a little. Over time you will start to have more silence than inner noise. Eventually you’ll start to experience extended periods where it is almost all silence, and you drop into deeper and deeper states of meditation.
On the outer level, you can choose to focus on the silences in between the noises. After a while you will start to notice that silence is all pervasive; even when there is noise, you realize that the noise is contained by silence; that silence is present even when there are sounds around.

Listening to the sound of silence     
Once you have some experience of stages one and two, you will have probably started to notice that, when you listen to silence, both inwardly and outwardly, there is a sound. It’s kind of like a high-pitched ringing in your inner ear. If you relax with it, you may find that it makes it easier to let go of discursive thoughts and move into a thoughtless condition. Listening to the sound of silence almost puts you in a trance-like state that is very conducive to meditation and moving into deeper, non-conceptual states of awareness. On this third level the inner and outer dimension of the listening pretty much merge into the same thing, as the sound seems both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ at the same time.

The nice thing about the above meditation is also that it can be done without having to exert much effort; it’s all listening, accepting, opening to. It can be done when you are tired and want to relax, as well as when you want to sit down and really do some focused inner work!

Related articles:

Inner sensitivity – Listening to yourself

The way to silence

Meditating on the Sound of Silence

Four ways of working with your inner voice

© Toby Ouvry 2022, 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

Sat & Sun 22nd/23rd October – Shamanic meditation workshop retreatLearn how to practice the fundamentals of the most ancient meditation tradition on the planet in a clear, practical and concise manner, and understand its relevance and value to you and the challenges that you face in your life.

The workshop will give an overview and introduce some simple but profound shamanic practices on day one, with a deeper dive into Shamanic meditation practices on day two…read full details

 

Saturday October  8th, 9.30-12noon –  Zen deep-dive mini-retreat

Session overview: These 2.5hour Zen ‘mini-retreats’ are a chance to go into much deeper meditation states than you would be able to in your own personal daily practice, or even if you came to a one-hour class. Using sitting meditation methods in combination with breathing techniques and gentle stretching/mobility exercises Toby will guide you into deep meditative flow states that create the experience of a calm, unified, harmonized, resilient body, mind & heart.. read full details


Life-fullness – The Integral Life-Coaching Program with Toby
 

Are you looking a coach who can help you to:

  • Meet the challenges, stress and changes that you face in a more effective and mindful way
  • Become happier within yourself, in your relationships and at work
  • Be actively accountable for finding a sense of balance/well-being in your life and fulfilling your personal potential?
  • Guide you to find and operate from a deeper sense of meaning, motivation and connectivity in your life?
Read full details…

All upcoming classes and workshops at IMA:

Ongoing – Weekly Tuesday, Wednesday Online class schedule

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby (Bukit Timah)

Ongoing on Tuesday evenings, 7.30-8.30pm – Tuesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby  (East Coast)

Starts Tues 16th /Weds 17th August – An Adventure in Consciousness – The What, Why & How of integral & engaged meditation practice

Saturday October  8th, 9.30-12noon –  Zen deep-dive mini-retreat

Sat & Sun 22nd/23rd October – Shamanic meditation workshop retreat

Tues & Weds 25th/26th October, 7.30pm – Deepavali Meditation – Connecting to your inner light

Saturday October 29th, 9.30-11.30am – Monthly Qi Gong & Taoist Breathwork Clinic & Mini-retreat

Tues 1st & Weds 2nd November, 7.30pm – Samhain Meditation (Live & Online) – Acknowledging the gifts and wounds of our ancestors

 

Integral Meditation Asia

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