Category: Inner vision

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Awareness and insight Essential Spirituality Inner vision Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Life-fullness Mindful Resilience Mindfulness The Essential Meditation of the Buddha

You’ve Already Won! – Mindful Appreciation and Ambition

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article looks at one of the foundations of traditional mindfulness practice,  the healthy ambitions that we can generate from it and the particular type of resilience that it helps us to develop.

In the spirit of appreciation and ambition,

Toby

You’ve Already Won! – Mindful Appreciation and Ambition

Biologically speaking you have already won the lottery. The human body is the Rolls Royce of mother nature’s evolutionary technology, with the most advanced tools for intelligence, development, pleasure and growth on the planet all built in. If you think about this regularly you start to get a feeling of appreciation simply for the opportunity to experience life in a human body.

Other conditions that make your life fortunate
The Buddha in his teachings on mindful appreciation of our human life also pointed out other aspects that make out life fortunate, quite a few or which you may have noted at least intellectually yourself:

  • Being born in a time &/or place relatively free from war or famine
  • Having complete intellectual & physical faculties
  • Being free from intense or chronic hunger &  thirst
  • To have access to education, both  secular & spiritual, & to have the freedom to study that which we choose
  • To have the leisure to practice mindfulness & other methods of personal growth that give rise to the experience of inner wellbeing

If we have them all, we shouldn’t take any of them for granted!

Mindful appreciation and ambition
If you sit with a mindful recognition of any of the above points, almost inevitably you are going to start to feel good about your circumstances; whatever your relative situation you are a very lucky person. Staying with this feeling of being fortunate, of having a great opportunity by being alive and being human is a foundational object of mindfulness and meditation practice, a basic building block of your sense of personal happiness and wellbeing.
As well as giving rise to a sense of appreciation, this type of reflection can also give rise to a type of mindful ambition; a strong desire to make the most of the opportunity we have whilst it lasts.

Four types of mindful ambition
Traditionally speaking, there are four types of meaningful ambition we can cultivate by recognizing the good fortune of our human life:

  1. To secure the best quality of real happiness and wellbeing for ourselves and those in our circle of influence in this lifetime
  2. To work toward the happiness of future generations; to secure a better life for them
  3. To work toward the highest level of physical, psychological, and spiritual development and freedom that we are capable
  4. To cultivate the enlightenment experience (See my past article ‘Enlightened Imperfection’)

If you got out of bed each morning with this type of mindful appreciation and ambition in the front and centre of your mind; what would change in your life and the way in which you went about it?

Mindful appreciation and ambition as givers of resilience
One of the great things about this form of mindful appreciation and ambition is that it gives you a context for experiencing the rest of your challenges; many of the problems in your life cease to be so bothersome, because at the end of the day you know how fortunate you are. Not finding the man or woman of your dreams, not having an ideal career, not having the biggest house on the street or the exact life you want are all problems that can be dealt with; they are all relative and all manageable.

Live it up and be mindfully ambitious while it lasts!

Related article: How to Meditate on Gratitude

© 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in May:

Friday 8th May, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre – Stillness, Energy, Positivity and Relaxation -A grounding in the basics of Integral Meditation

Saturday 16th May, 9.30am-12.30pm – Growing Your Mindful Freedom – The Essential Meditation of the Buddha: A Three Hour Meditation Workshop

Saturday 16th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditations for Activating, Healing and Awakening our Ancestral Karma

Wednesday 20th, 7.30-9.30pm –  An Evening of Mindful Relationships: Improving Your Relationships and Social Skills Through Mindfulness – A two hour workshop

Friday 29th May 7.30-9.30pm –  Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre – Travelling deeper into the present moment through integral meditation

Saturday 30th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Enlightened Flow: Finding the Ultimate Relaxation and Release from Stress

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creative imagery Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Mindful Resilience Mindfulness One Minute Mindfulness Stress Transformation

Big Enough, Specific Enough (Dealing with spiky minds)

Dear Integral Meditators,

What can you do when your mind feels spiky, insecure and uncomfortable? The article below explores a contemplative approach that involves working consciously with the scale of your mind.

In case anyone missed it, you can see the schedule of live classes in May at Integral Meditation Asia HERE.

In the spirit of being comfortable with spikiness,

Toby


Big Enough, Specific Enough (Dealing with spiky minds)

One of the simplest ways to change the way you experience a difficult or challenging state of mind and emotion is to make your mind bigger.
To use an image; if think about your difficult of challenging minds as being like number of spiny sea urchins (sea picture). If your mind is small, let’s say like the size of your average black bin liner, and you put the sea urchins in there then it is going to feel extremely uncomfortable. Because of the smallness of the space, it feels like you can’t move around in your mind without getting a painful spine sticking into you somewhere. However, if you make your mind as big as you can, say big like the ocean, then you can accommodate the ‘spiny sea urchins of your mind’ very comfortably. This is not because you have changed them in any way; it’s just that your mind is so much bigger that it can happily accommodate the sea urchins without experiencing any discomfort. This is in the same way that there are literally millions of actual sea urchins in the ocean, but they don’t cause the ocean discomfort in any way.

A practical perspective
So, lets’ say over the last week I’ve been feeling uncomfortable about traditional human concerns; financial worries, ageing, career uncertainty, romantic insecurity. Using the approach I have described above I would not try and overcome the inner issues I am facing by changing them per se. Rather I would focus on making my mind as big, relaxed and expansive as I can, so that I experience the scale of the spiky thoughts as being really very small in relation to the total size of my mind. I don’t really need to change them per-se because they don’t really bother me; they just come and go in the big space of my mind.

So the basic principle; get out of the bin-liner of your head and get into the ocean of your mind!

Balancing this approach with specificity
The danger with the above approach is that it can become a bit abstract; whenever we get an uncomfortable mind we just up the scale of our mind, problem solved. But sometimes we need to do something about the issues that our spiky minds are worrying about. To ensure that we are keeping our feet on the ground, we can identify one of the issues that our spiky mind is fixed on, let’s say romantic insecurity. With this issue in mind we can work on a practical solution by completing the following sentence in 5-10 different ways in writing as fast as we can:
One of the practical things that I could do in order to improve my experience of romantic relationships might include –
If you complete this sentence several times in the way described, you may be surprised at how many creative ways you can come up with to work on your experience of romance for the better in an entirely practical, specific and down to earth way.

Make your mind big, make your approach to your problems specific, tailored and practical.

© 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

Categories
Biographical creative imagery Essential Spirituality Gods and Goddesses Inner vision Meditation and Art Meditation techniques Mindful Confidence

Your Tree of Personal Inspiration

Dear Integral Meditators,
As an artist and a meditator, I have a healthy appreciation of the power of the imagination to affect the way we expereince our reality in very real and tangible ways. The article below explores a fun and imaginative method to receive inspiration through meditation and visalization. Enjoy!

The program of events in May is nearly finnished, see beneath the article for diary dates.

In the spirit of inspiration,

Toby

Your Tree of Personal Inspiration

Back when I was a monk one of our visualizations we used to work with was a wish-fulfilling tree which grew up from the centre of a lake (which in turn was in the centre of the world!) Upon the leaves and branches of this tree sat all of the enlightened beings you could imagine. We would visualize them in this way in order to create a connection to them, build a relationship to them and receive their blessings.
One variation on this that I have developed since then is as follows:
I visualize my own ‘Tree of Life’ (you can visualize this tree in any way you choose). On the leaves and branches of this tree are all the people and living creatures from which I derive inspiration and strength. This includes people I know personally, those from the public sphere as well as those who may be from stories, myths and so on.
After visualizing this tree in general, I then set my intention to connect with those on my tree who it would be particularly appropriate at this time in my life, in view of the present circumstances and challenges that I am facing. I then let my ‘imaginative eye’ wonder over the tree and pick out one (or two or three) people or living beings that fit this description.
I then spend time just connecting with them, feeling inspired by their energy, perhaps having a bit of a dialogue with them about an issue I have or choices that I need to make. When I have finished the communion, I bring the meditation to a close.
This is a simple technique that I use that can be very useful for finding inspiration when you need it, as well as developing your visualization, imaginative and intuitive skills. The figures that I connect to change often; sometimes they are ‘enlightened’ figures, other times they are just those who have particular qualities that I may have a need of. It is also an organic and relatively free form way of connecting to the powers of inspiration that do exist in the inner world, and that we can access through meditative awareness.

Related Articles: Meditating on the Power of Your Creative Imagination
When Your Energy Level Follows Your Mind and Imagination

© 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in May:

Friday 8th May, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre – Stillness, Energy, Positivity and Relaxation -A grounding in the basics of Integral Meditation

Saturday 16th May, 9.30am-12.30pm – Growing Your Mindful Freedom – The Essential Meditation of the Buddha: A Three Hour Meditation Workshop

Saturday 16th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditations for Activating, Healing and Awakening our Ancestral Karma

Wednesday 20th, 7.30-9.30pm – Going Beyond Happiness (and resilience?) – Using the Wisdom of Paradox to Find a Deeper Level of Fulfilment and Wellbeing in Your Life

Friday 29th May 7.30-9.30pm –  Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre – Travelling deeper into the present moment through integral meditation

Saturday 30th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Enlightened Flow: Finding the Ultimate Relaxation and Release from Stress

Integral Meditation Asia

 

Categories
Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Mindful Confidence Mindful Resilience Mindfulness

How to Mindfully Develop Your Self-Confidence

Dear Integral Meditators,

The article below focuses on how you can develop the art of mindful self-confidence in a systematic, multi-faceted manner, I hope you enjoy it!

Toby

How to Mindfully Develop Your Self-Confidence

Why focus on self-confidence?
How many things in your life would you be doing differently if you were thinking and acting from a place of deep self confidence? The capacity for authentic self-confidence offers many benefits, for example we become more creative and expressive, we find access to greater capacity for focus, mental stamina and energy, we experience greater peace of mind, we experience life as fundamentally enjoyable and playful.

What is self-confidence?
We will all have our own ideas of what self-confidence is, but the definition I normally work with (following Nathaniel Branden’s definition of self-esteem) is that self –confidence consists of two distinct parts:

  • Self-worth – The belief that I am worthy of happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, wellbeing, success & so on and
  • Self-efficacy – The sense that I have the capacity be successful in the face of life’s challenges. Even if I currently lack the skills to be successful in a particular task, self-efficacy is a confidence in my ability to learn those skills as and when necessary

If you lack a fundamental sense of your self-worth or your capacity for self-efficacy, then your self-confidence is going to be built upon shaky ground!

Mindful methods for developing your self-confidence
With the above definitions in mind, we can then start t adopt a multi-faceted approach to developing self-confidence, here are a few suggestions:
1. Connect and nourish your present self confidence – No one completely lacks self confidence, look for times and places in your life where you have felt and experienced self confidence. Revisit them mentally, take an inventory of them, recall how it felt. Then look at how you can translate those experiences into feelings and attitudes of self-confidence in the face of your present life challenges.
2. Know what self-confidence feels like in the body – Practice holding your body and feeling it in a way that communicates confidence and self assurance to your mind. Our posture is often communicating all sorts of messages to us psychologically, so we need to take advantage of this rather than being victimized by it!
3. Make friends with the parts of you that are not self-confident – As the famous gestalt therapist Fritz Pearls said ‘As long as you fight a symptom it will get worse’ (I recommend meditating on that sentence for a looong time!) Open to and get intimate with your fears, your vulnerabilities, the parts of you feel fragmented. Care for them, experience them, open to them, allow them to become the basis of your self-confidence, rather than the things you are trying to escape from by developing your self-confidence. This needs careful thought, reflection and experience to understand, but it is super-important to get right!
4. Find role models for your self confidence – Find real life examples of people who are appropriate and inspiring role models for the type of self-confidence you want to have. Study them carefully and draw conscious inspiration from them.
5. Do something each day to engage your self-confidence – Do something manageable each day to test and develop your self confidence experientially and in real time.
6. Practice mindful framing – ‘Last month I was depressed, and this month I’m still depressed’ sounds like a bit of a failure. ‘Last month I was very depressed and although this month I am still depressed I feel less depressed, and there have been days when I have actually felt good’ Sounds like progress and a cause of boosting our self-confidence. How we frame what happens to us mentally is crucial in terms of whether we experience something as supporting our self-confidence or not!

Conclusion
If you wanted to make this article a practical exploration, you could take one of the above six suggestions per day as a point of mindful focus for the next three weeks or so (taking one day off to give you three rounds over three weeks). See where it takes your own experience of mindful self-confidence!

Related articles: Choosing to be on your own side
Trusting your mind
Free audio meditation on self-trust

Stress Transformation Coaching with Toby

Tuesday 21st April, 7.30-9.30pm – An Evening of Mindful Self-Confidence – Developing your self-confidence, self-belief & self-trust through mindfulness & meditation

© 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

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

 

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creative imagery Inner vision Integral Awareness Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Shadow meditation

The Dynamic of Personal Evolution   

A seed is destroyed in order for it to become a plant. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly its old body must be destroyed.
Our own personal growth is often like this too; in order for us to move from our current level of consciousness to the next higher or deeper level of consciousness, the patterns of the old level must be destroyed or broken apart.
When this happens you can find yourself feeling lost, uncertain and vulnerable. Your relationships with other people may start to change, even dramatically. You can even feel as if there is something going deeply wrong with you. Old emotions that you thought you had left behind a long time ago seem to come back with vigour.
The reason for these experiences is that you truly are emerging into a way of going and being that you have never experienced before:

  • You are feeling lost because you are in new territory
  • You are feeling vulnerable because you have been ‘born anew’ and have to find your feet in this new environment
  • You feel uncertain because you literally don’t know what is going to happen, it is an experiment!
  • Old difficult emotions can come back to you either because they are threatened by your new, emerging self, OR because they have a new and vital role to play in your life now that you have the capacity to look at or experience them in a new way (eg: anger may be ready to be re-understood and re-directed as personal power)

One of the things that a regular meditation and mindfulness practice does is to stimulate the evolutionary impulse of your mind; to stimulate its growth from the level of consciousness that you at to the level beyond it.
Consequently, while your mindfulness practice will occasionally take you to places of deep peace and wellbeing, it will also and equally take you to places of acute discomfort and confusion when you are going through a developmental shift such as the one I describe above.
When this happens it is important not to panic – try as far as you can to relax into the process of change; let the old self be destroyed with thanks as the new self within you emerges and starts to find its feet.

© 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in April:

Tuesday 21st April, 7.30-9.30pm –  An Evening of Mindful Self-Confidence – Developing your self-confidence, self-belief & self-trust through mindfulness & meditation

Integral Meditation Asia

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Biographical Inner vision Integral Awareness Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Shadow meditation

Mastery Follows Acknowledgement (Plus Integral Meditation & Self-Healing Videos)

Dear Integral Meditators,

Sometimes the most difficult thing to do is to acknowledge the things that we become aware of within ourselves, yet without this first step it is almost impossible to achieve any genuine self-mastery. The article below explores this theme.

Final reminder for the Workshops on Integral Meditation Practice and Meditation For Self-Healing and Self-Energizing this Saturday of you are in Singapore.
I have also created two new short videos, one on Integral Meditation Practice and one on Self-Healing meditation. To view them just click on the workshop pages above, or you can view them on youtube directly HERE (Integral Meditation Practice) and HERE (Self-Healing Meditation)

In the spirit of acknowledgment and mastery,

Toby

Mastery Follows Acknowledgment

You can’t master a challenge or a part of yourself that you don’t admit you have.

When I was a young man beginning my meditation practice I had a lot of repressed anger that I was not really aware of. Meditation was an exciting new skill for me at the time, and I immersed myself in the ‘spiritual’ aspect of the mastery of meditation for the next ten years. I worked very hard in a very disciplined way at my meditation and as a result had a lot of peak experiences, genuine ‘enlightenment’ experiences, states of expanded awareness and so on. However, in those ten years I never really came to terms with my anger. In a certain sense you could say that I used my meditation as a way of escaping from my anger, avoiding it, not really looking it in the eye, so to speak.
As a result after ten years of meditation I found myself i many ways still as lost and unfamiliar with how to deal with my human anger as I was before I began my spiritual path.
The beginning of me mastering my anger started with being able to look at myself, my emotions and my inner self and say ‘I have a lot of repressed anger that I need to understand how to work with’. This initial acknowledgment was then able to act as the basis of my mastery of anger, which had and still has (it is an ongoing process) three main stages:

  1. The acknowledgment, exploration and acceptance of my anger
  2. The constructive engagement with that emotion and its  causes, followed by the
  3. Redirection and transformation of that angry energy into something constructive and worthwhile

So, my basic point here is that there is no way you can master an aspect of self that you don’t admit that you have. This is why a genuine and sound mindfulness practice begins with an investigation into and acknowledgment of what is really there, and proceeds to work on mastering what it finds based around the reality of what you find.

If you can make this first step of acknowledgment well, which generally involves some discomfort, insecurity, a sense of ‘failure’, and humility (not to mention a bit of a knock to your ego), then truly your potential for inner growth knows no limits!

A final point here, when you begin practicing meditation or mindfulness (or any path of inner growth) there are literally many aspects of yourself that you can’t see, and that only start to come out as you progress. So the process of acknowledgment and mastery continues to unfold as time passes by and your knowledge of yourself continues to grow.

Related Articles: The Four Essential Stages to Transforming Negative Stress into Positive Energy
The Self-Healing and Self Evolving Power of the Mind and Six Tips For Releasing the Shadow Self

Related Online Course: Meditations for Transforming Negativity and Stress into Energy, Positivity and Enlightenment

© 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

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *
Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology
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Awareness and insight Biographical creative imagery Enlightened love and loving Inner vision Insight Meditation Meditation and Art Meditation and Psychology

Making it Beautiful

Dear Integral Meditators,

What if instead of seeing yourself as a consumer of beauty, you focused upon becoming a source and creator of beauty in the world? The article below examines how we might go about doing this…

There is a special 2 day Easter sale on at Integral Meditation Asia, with two of the online courses being offered at a 30% discount! Scroll down to the ‘Upcoming Courses’ section below to find out more!

In the spirit of the mindful journey,

Toby

Making it Beautiful

There is a rubbish bin at the bottom of my block of apartments next to the lift. Some of the local school kids have painted with the message ‘Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful’.
To me this is a great mindfulness saying, and communicates a lot about the power that each of us has as human beings to use our creative energy to create beauty in the places, circumstances and situations we find ourself in.
Often times and without really thinking about it too much we are passive in our experience of our life; we are looking for someone else or something else to provide us with experiences of beauty, or positivity, or empowerment, or solace, or wellbeing. What would your day look like if you started it by saying something like:

  • ‘I am here to appreciate beauty but also to create it where there is none’
  • Or ‘I am here to enjoy the good energy of others, but also to create good energy and give it away to myself and others’
  • Or ‘If I’m finding it difficult to find fulfillment in what I am doing right now, what can I do to create fulfillment within the same circumstances?’

If everyone made a mindful choice each day to make things beautiful we’d be living in quite a different world. We can start making the world a little bit more beautiful today by making the choice ourselves.

© 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in March:

Sunday/Monday April 5th&6th – Easter Sale save 30% on the following Online Meditation Courses – 
Integrating the Energy of Dynamic Calm into Your Life – A Four Module Online Course

Taking Control of Your Life Through the Practice of Mindful Self-Leadership – A Five Module Online Course

Live Workshops:

Saturday 11th April, 9.30am-12.30pm – Integral Meditation and Mindfulness: Optimize Your Inner Calm, Strength and Energy – A three hour workshop

Saturday 11th April, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditation and Mindfulness for Self-Healing and Creating High Levels of Energy

Tuesday 21st April, 7.30-9.30pm –  An Evening of Mindful Self-Confidence – Developing your self-confidence, self-belief & self-trust through mindfulness & meditation

Integral Meditation Asia

 

 

Categories
Concentration creative imagery Enlightened Flow Inner vision

The River of Concentration

Dear Integral Meditators,

Ever sit down to meditate but just get completely overwhelmed by your distractions? The article below explores an image that I use myself to gradually move from busyness to stillness in meditation, not trying to get there too fast.

If you are in Singapore, do check out the Integral Meditation Class on Developing Focus and Concentration that I will be leading this Friday at 7.30pm, and the Integral Meditation Workshop on Saturday the 11th.

In the spirit of the river of concentration,

Toby

The River of Concentration

One of the challenges that we face in meditation is that when we sit down to try and calm our mind we become discouraged when we cannot move it from a busy state to a state of stillness. One of the reasons for this is that we try and do it all at once, like going from running to standing with no ‘slowing down’ period in between. In this article we use the stages of a river as an image that we can use to gradually and incrementallyslow our mind down in meditation, moving from activity to stillness in four stages. In this analogy we take as our object of meditation the body and breathing in combination with the stages of a river.

The highland stream
When we first sit down to meditate at the beginning of our session, our mind is often busy and fast moving like a highland stream coming down from a mountain. The gradient creates a natural momentum that means the water moves fast. At this stage in our meditation we expect the mind to move quickly away from our point of focus, and for us to have to bring our attention back to our body and breathing again and again. This is natural, normal.

The lowland stream
As we get a few minutes into our meditation, we can consciously start to relax and slow down our mind so that it becomes like a lowland stream or river; we can still feel the flow, momentum and activity, but it is not as fast as previously. Our efforts to keep our attention on the breathing and the body are easier and we achieve more consistency.

The valley river
In this third stage we consciously slow our mind down another small increment so that it becomes like a valley river; the movement is slower, more consistent, more predictable. Even though the movement is there, we can hold our attention on the body and the breathing relatively easily and consistently, and when we get distracted we can bring our attention and focus back comparatively easily.

The estuary river
Deeper into out session we now slow down our mind another increment, it becomes like an estuary river; a river flowing at its slowest and deepest. Here we sense our concentration deepening and moving toward stillness. The distracting currents are less and less, and the efforts to keep our mind focused on our body and breathing are easier. The main distractions we face here are relatively subtle ‘daydream’ type movements of the mind that come from the sense of mental comfort and subtlety that we are experiencing. We can feel our mind moving towards a ‘merged’ state; in the same way that the estuary river merges with the great openness of the ocean, we can feel our mind and concentration moving us toward a unitive state of inner openness and spacious awareness.

Outside of meditation
Outside of meditation you can bear the above analogy in mind; when your mind feels like a highland stream, gently slow it down so that it becomes like a lowland stream in order to reduce your stress. Whatever the ‘speed’ of the river of your mind, at regular intervals during the day just mindfully slow it down to the next stage when you need to be a little more reflective and mindful.

Related Articles: The Inner Weather of the Mind
Shifting Down the Gears – On Meditation and Power Napping
How Much Energy Should You Focus on Focus on Being Focused?

© 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

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *
Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology
Categories
Biographical creative imagery Enlightened Flow Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Meditation and Art Mindful Confidence Presence and being present Primal Spirituality

The Laughter of the Young and the Ancient

Dear Integral Meditators,

What if when something in your life went seriously wrong, the first thing that you did was laugh open-heartedly? Perhaps there is a part of us that already does, and the article below explores how to connect to him/her/it!

This Saturday if you are in Singapore we have two meditation workshops, do scroll down to the ‘upcoming courses section’ below to find out more.

In the spirit of ancient lightness,

Toby

The Laughter of the Young and the Ancient

What if when something in your life went seriously wrong, the first thing that you did was laugh open-heartedly?
What would happen if the next time you lost some money, or a big business deal feel through you winked knowingly at the first stranger you met?
What would happen if you could respond to the most ‘serious’ parts of your life with playful and spontaneous creativity?

I really enjoyed the movie version of the Lord of the Rings books, but the one thing I was slightly disappointed about was that they left out a character called Tom Bombadil. Tom Bomabadil interests me because, of all the characters in the story, he is the only one who is immune to the evil, corruptive influence of the ‘ring of power’. All of the other characters are afraid of the power of the ring, which upon contact causes them to immediately start fantasizing about delusions of power and dominion. However, when Tom puts on the ring it has no effect; to him the all corrupting ring is an object of amusement, a trinket, with no real practical use.
We hear in the story of the lord of the Rings that Tom Bombadil was the Oldest of the Old (‘the oldest and fatherless’) who walked the earth before both elves and men. Essentially he seems to be a nature spirit of sorts, coming from a time and existing within a mental framework both before and outside of our human paradigm of good and evil, a time when harmony, laughter and song were a natural state of being, were perhaps the law of being.

As my own practice of meditation and mindfulness develops, I find myself coming across and connecting to an inner place within myself that lies beyond the daily struggle of good and evil, of striving or laziness, achievement versus failure. It seems to be an innocent state of being that is naturally laughing and humorous, naturally light and strong, naturally comfortable and balanced despite the comings and goings of fate and fortune in my life. This state of mind seems to me to be a little bit like my ‘Inner Tom Bombadil’, the part of me that walks on the earth as one with nature, that lives truly in the primally presentmoment, that sings and laughs with child-like and yet very old spontaneity, comfortable in the world but not of the world.

Connecting within yourself to a time before good and evil
Spend a few moments now connecting to that part of you that is fatherless and motherless, the oldest of the old as well as the youngest of the young.  S/he is beyond any struggle for human power, beyond shame or pride. s/he is primally humorous and celebratory; the wise fool, the innocent sage. Bring your inner Tom Bombadil out into the world to play and celebrate. See what starts to change in your life when you do!

Related articles: The Four Types of Present Moment Awareness
Locating Your Deep Centre
Connecting to Your Spiritual Fool in the Mirror World

© 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 Courses at Integral Meditation Asia :

Tuesday March 10th – The Mindful Salesperson – An Evening Exploring the Relationship Between Mindfulness, Sales and Marketing

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Egotistic or Strong Ego?

Dear Integral Meditators,

When we tell ourselves to ‘get over our own ego’ what exactly do we mean by that? Its an area that it is very easy to get mixed up and confused around! The article below explores the difference between egotism and a strong ego. We really need one, we really need to drop the other.

In the spirit of inner strength,

Toby

Egotistic or Strong Ego?

‘There’s a tremendous difference between a strong ego and an egocentric ego; the latter is always weak. Individuation, that is the attainment of ones potential, can’t take place without the strong ego’ – John A Sandford

The Ego is
…the unifying centre of our awareness, it is the sense of self that ties together the disparate collection of physical, emotional and mental habits and characteristics that together makes us a unique human being. A strong ego is vital for success and happiness in our life; it has characteristics such as confidence, self-esteem, ethical awareness, competency and capacity for enjoyment.

To be egotistical is
…to believe and act as if we were more important than others, as if we were the central fulcrum of the functioning universe, and/or without adequate concern or empathy for the happiness or wellbeing of others

Ironically a lot of egotistical behaviour is stimulated by having a weak ego. If I feel inadequate, incompetent or inferior it can be very tempting to try and compensate for that feeling by asserting myself unskilfully, selfishly and or inconsiderately. Conversely if I have a strong ego I can have people behaving selfishly, unskilfully and/or inconsiderately around me, but because I have a strong sense of ego, of who I AM it can be relatively easy to remain in my own integrity and not be influenced by my company.

Experientially knowing the difference between a strong ego and being egotistical is a great mindful journey in itself, and it is an area that many people are deeply confused about.

Take a moment
To imagine yourself with a truly strong ego; confident, trusting in yourself, liking whom you are, able to forgive yourself for your flaws whilst at the same time holding yourself accountable for them, centred and balanced in your sense of whom you are. Strong enough to be vulnerable and take chances, socially aware, aware you are no more important than anyone else, but also and crucially that you are no less important than anyone else. That’s a strong ego.
If you stay with this sense of having a strong ego you’ll find it is quite a lot easier and more natural to behave with benevolence & consideration for others as well as to be playful and creative in your life, even when under pressure. Sound like fun? It is!
Does that last paragraph sound like the opposite of an egotistical selfish person? Yup, pretty much.

To transcend your egotism, first begin by mindfully building your strong, functional and creative ego.

Related articles: Balancing the development of your ego and spirit

Fulfillment of the Ego, Fulfillment of the Soul, Fulfillment of SpiritHandle Stress and Have Peace of Mind – Personal Coaching with Toby

© 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