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Enlightened love and loving Inner vision Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Life-fullness Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness Presence and being present

Life-fullness

Dear Integral Meditators,

This mid-week article explores the idea of Life-fullness, if you enjoy it, I’ve recently re-named and re-calibrated my life coaching practice “Life-fullness – The Integral Coaching Program“. If you are interested in finding out more, just click on the link!

In the spirit of life-fullness,

Toby


Life-fullness

One of the words that I have been thinking about over the last six months or so is life-fullness.  It has become so significant to me that I’ve even decided to name my life coaching program after it. What does it mean? Here are a few things that it means to me:

  1. To feel full of life – To feel life full means to allow myself to feel life fully, both the good and ‘bad’, to feel my strength and vulnerability, my virtues and your flaws. It means to care enough about the value of my experiences that I don’t reject or turn away from any of them.
  2. To mediate life flow  It means to allow life-force to flow through me, obstructing it as little as possible, and directing it as skilfully as possible toward the best possible inner and outer goals
  3. To be committed and interested in my life and the lives of others – This means to never as far as possible to ‘switch off’ or to become indifferent. If point one (to feel full of life) above is a commitment to caring, this third point is a commitment to being curious
  4. To participate – To practice life-fullness means to get stuck into life, not to be a mere spectator. It means to contribute, to commit, to take wise chances with (sometimes) unknown outcomes. It means to think about the life-values I hold on a deeper level and practice embodying them as best I can

To feel life, to mediate life, to be curious about life, to commit to participating meaningfully in my life; That is what life-fullness means to me. And these are the four aspects that I try and be mindful of in my own life-fullness practice.

When you think about the word life-fullness what sort of meanings and feelings emerge for you? If you could do one thing over the next few days to make your life more genuinely life-full what would it be?

Related Article: Curiosity, Courage and Care – Cornerstones of the Mindful Encounter

© Toby Ouvry 2014, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 

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creative imagery Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Mindfulness

Detached Mindfulness, Engaged Mindfulness; Your Inner Scientist and Inner Friend

Dear Integral Meditators,

Engagement and detachment are two different skills. we need to develop both in order to become truly effective mindfulness practitioners. This weeks article explores how, enjoy!

Yours in the spirit of engaged detachment,

Toby

 


Detached Mindfulness, Engaged Mindfulness; Your Inner Scientist and Inner Friend

Detached mindfulness is like developing an inner scientist; it gives you the capacity to look at what is going on within you and in your life with objectivity and calm.
Engaged mindfulness is like developing an inner friend and companion; it gives you the capacity to experience what you are going through with empathy, care and understanding of yourself.

Recently I have been having a lot of strong emotions based around certain life changes that I am having. How can I use mindfulness in an integrated way to deal with these emotions and even make use of them? Let’s take anxiety around the future as an example to work with in this article.

Detached mindfulness (developing my inner scientist) involves me stepping back from the anxiety and observing it in an objective, dis-engaged manner; ‘the anxiety is in my mind but it is not me’, ‘my anxiety is like the clouds, my mind is like the sky, I am the sky, not the clouds’. This type of mindfulness enables me to temporarily reduce my anxiety and calm my body-mind, and the space that it creates in my mind may also enable me to come up with creative solutions and approaches to the challenges that are causing the anxiety.
However, what detached mindfulness does not do is process the actual emotion and anxiety itself, and if I use detached mindfulness only in my approach to my anxiety this may prolong and even make my anxiety worse by causing me to avoid and dis-associate from it in an unhealthy way. To work with my anxiety directly I need to practice engaged mindfulness.

Engaged mindfulness (developing my inner friend) involves me consciously recognizing, owning and experiencing my anxiety; feeling it fully, accepting the reality of it and allowing my body-mind to discharge the emotional force of my anxiety by experiencing it. ‘I now recognize I am anxious around the future’, ‘I can feel my body trembling with anxiety, and I allow this to happen’, ‘I accept I am anxious and take responsibility for it’, ‘I am anxious, but this is not a problem’.
If I practice only engaged mindfulness with my anxiety, I may find myself getting a little over-involved in the emotion, so combining it with detached mindfulness provides me with a ‘safety net’, a place of detachment and observation I can go to when I wish to take a break.

An integrated mindfulness approach involves me using both detached and engaged mindfulness together in order to deal with my anxiety optimally and effectively; I can accept, honour and engage my emotion whilst also having a place of inner calm and detachment I can go to anytime I wish to find temporary relief and perspective from the challenge.

Over the next few days, if you like, keep in mind the image of the inner scientist and the inner friend and practice using both engaged and detached mindfulness alternately as an integrated approach to the challenges you face.

Related article: Engaged Equanimity
© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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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creative imagery Enlightened love and loving Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Mindful Resilience Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness

The Resilience of Gentleness

One of my meditation words I have taken for 2015 is self-care. Normally I take 2-3 words and focus upon them over the course of a year and let the themes and mysteries within them gradually reveal themselves. Meditation means to dwell deeply, so staying with just one, two or three words for a year and spending time each day investigating them deeply can be a beautiful and rewarding  meditation practice!

One of the things that I have observed about focusing upon and trying to practice self-care each day is that each time I take the time to do a little self-care, I start to feel a little more inwardly resilient; it becomes a little easier to feel happy, a little easier to be benevolent to others, a little easier to acknowledge and face the challenges in my life I might want to wish away.
This is one of the interesting things about developing a quality; when we develop it we find that we start to simultaneously develop its opposite quality in a way in which we may not have expected. Gentleness gives rise to strength; stillness gives rise to dynamism; focus gives rise to relaxation.This week or over the next few days, if you like, try doing something each day that is a deliberate and appropriate expression of self-care. See how you can grow your inner resilience by using the method of gentleness.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 :

January 9.30am-12.30pm – Regenerating Your Inner Self – Integral Meditation Half – Day Retreat

Sunday 18th January,9.30am-12.30pm – Meditations for Connecting to the Green World – An Introduction to the Path of Nature Mysticism

Sunday 1st February – Mindful Self-Leadership: Take Control of Your Life Direction and Wellbeing Through Awareness, Curiosity, Courage and Care


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Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Mindfulness

The Top Meditation and Mindfulness Articles of 2014

Dear Integral Meditators,

I wrote over one hundred articles over the course of 2014. Of these  the top 10 most read meditation and mindfulness articles are listed below. Were they the best? Maybe, maybe not, but they were the most clicked on. I’ve certainly enjoyed revisiting them and taking a little time to digest the practical messages in them!

Nice recent article from Oliver Burkeman on New Years Resolutions with Making, the first he lists is meditation: “First, just start meditating already. You probably saw some of the eleventy-thousand studies in 2014 on how much difference a few minutes’ daily breath-following can make. Meditation could make you happier, more creativeless anxious, even less racist; it may conceivably ease your arthritisslow Alzheimer’sboost your learning ability and reduce cold symptoms. (Spiritual types might dispute that all this is the “point” of meditation, but they’re nice side-effects.)

Please note the Integral Meditation Day Retreat on the 11th January is now a half-day retreat from 9.30am-12.30pm, but still, no better way to start the new year as you mean to continue!

Yours in the spirit of appreciative reflection,

Toby


Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia :

January 9.30am-12.30pm – Regenerating Your Inner Self – Integral Meditation Half – Day Retreat

Sunday 18th January,9.30am-12.30pm – Meditations for Connecting to the Green World – An Introduction to the Path of Nature Mysticism

Sunday 1st February – Mindful Self-Leadership: Take Control of Your Life Direction and Wellbeing Through Awareness, Curiosity, Courage and Care


The Top Meditation and Mindfulness Articles of 2014

1. Four Mindful Images for Stress Transformation

2. Non-Striving

3. Motivating Yourself to Meditate (and continue meditating)

4. Complementricizing Your Archetypes

5. If you feel properly you will think clearly

6. Finding Your Spiritual, Physical Home

7. Trusting Your Mind

8. When Your Energy Level Follows Your Mind and Imagination

9. The Three Purposes of Meditation

10.  Seriously Light/Lightly Serious

© Toby Ouvry 2014, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 

 

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creative imagery Essential Spirituality Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Meditation techniques Mindfulness Presence and being present

The Stability of Uncertainty

Dear Integral Meditators,

I wrote the article below at the beginning of December, as the new year comes in I would like to wish you all the gift of the stability of uncertainty. If you have it, then whatever sort of year you have in store ahead of you, you will be fine.

Thanks for reading in 2014, I look forward to connecting with you all in 2015!

Toby



The Stability of Uncertainty

I seem to be going through a whole lot of difficult changes right now in both my personal and professional life. One thing that I’m observing as I do so is my ability to adapt to change and get over setbacks seems to be pretty good, I can feel nervous and lost one morning, but be through it by the afternoon. I can feel panicked by all the things that are not done and not fixed, and process that without falling apart. More than this, whilst I am not enjoying myself in the sense of laughing and cracking jokes, I do seem to be genuinely enjoying myself in the sense of welcoming the challenges and quietly and cautiously enjoying the process of putting solutions together, or at least accepting that there are no solutions when there are none.

I was reflecting last night on what it is that has made this recent process of change easier for me, despite it being in relative terms really quite difficult. The answer that came back to me was that my philosophy of life really seems to have become embedded in the perspective of uncertainty, in a good way. To know uncertainty is a part of your reality means that:

  • You are never expecting things to stay the same
  • You know you can never afford to ‘switch off’ (though you may choose of course to consciously relax and/or rest for periods!)
  • You accept striving to adapt and change with each day as normal and healthy
  • Failing, feeling bewildered, experiencing nervousness and fear are not shocking to you, they are just part of the process, not problems in themselves
  • You are aware that the solutions that you created today will be obsolete tomorrow, and you are expecting to have to be creative in life
  • When you really relax into uncertainty you also become aware that as many good things come from it as bad things, if you can open to then and see them!

When you have an attitude that resists change that wants things to always be the same, this attitude rubs against the natural processes of reality, creates a lot of friction and upset simply because we want and desire things to be one way (certain and fixed) when in reality they are fluid and changeable.
So, ironically I am led to the conclusion that my relative resilience, and speed in bouncing back from the obstacles and challenges in my life is due to my ability to rest in the solidity of uncertainty; the capacity to rest in a view of the world that is compatible with the reality of the world itself, and therefore creates an inner experience of confidence in my ability to cope and thrive in the face of what is going on.
To rest confidently in the solidity of uncertainty I also realize that my most valuable asset is my mind, my ability to think my way clearly things through to the best of my ability. What is the best way to optimize my mind? To be mindful, that is to bring a high degree of conscious awareness to each moment of the uncertainty of my life.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 


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Awareness and insight creative imagery Essential Spirituality Inner vision Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Mindfulness Presence and being present spiritual intelligence Uncategorized

The Man or woman of No Rank

A lot of the suffering, pain and confusion that we experience in our lives comes from the attachment that we have to the roles that we habitually play in our life. The man or woman of no rank is a meditation technique that allows us to:

  • Become more aware of this attachment and over-identification we have with roles
  • Enables us to let go of them and see that we are not these labels
  • Helps us use these labels and identities effectively and appropriately in our life

You can do this contemplation in a formal meditation, or you can do it just sitting casually on your sofa or any quiet space…

Think about the roles and identities you play in your work, observe your identification with them for a while, then set them aside, temporarily let them go, realize you are not this role or label.

Extend the same process to:

  • Yourself as a partner, husband, wife
  • Yourself as a son or daughter
  • As a father or mother
  • As a person from this country, or area
  • From this social class
  • From this level of education
  • From yourself as a man, or as a woman
  • Explore any other areas where you have a strong identity to a role; ‘big strong guy’, ‘the shy type’, ‘the peacemaker’, the ‘fortunate one’ or ‘unfortunate’ one, and so on; any place where you see that you are attached or very identified with a role or label.

Step by step strip away your roles and labels. Rest in the space where you are simply a man or woman of no rank, just a person, not better or worse than anyone else, equal with the highest and the lowest of them all. Sit in a space where you are just a human being, maybe even just a ‘being’. Live this space deeply for a while.
When you return to the world, of course playing roles is inevitable, but if you practice being the man or woman of no rank you can liberate yourself from these labels, and the discover that you can use them consciously to explore and fulfill your own potential, be of service to the people around you and the world.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 

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Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Mindful Resilience Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness

What Real Power Does Mindfulness Give You?

Dear Integral Meditators,

When you think of mindfulness, do you think of power? If not the article below explains why you should!

 


What Real Power Does Mindfulness Give You?

We talk about mindfulness in terms of relief from stress, bringing more presence to our life and so on, but what about power?
One way mindfulness (when well practiced) gives us greater power is by giving us awareness of choice. The more consciousness we bring to any given situation, the larger the number of choices we will be aware of regarding how to act, how to feel and how to approach the situation.  Conversely, the less conscious awareness that we bring to a situation, the fewer the choices that we will have, and therefore the less power.
Without mindfulness we are essentially limited to our instinctive and habitual patterns of reacting and responding to our life’s challenges (and joys), with mindfulness we can even innovate choices, options and possibilities that we have never considered before as we actively bring our intelligence to bear upon the situation fully.

Our mind is basically our primary tool for surviving, adapting and thriving in the outer world of our career and relationships, and the inner world of our relationship to ourself. Mindfulness is the practice of learning how to use and apply the potential of our mind in daily life. Looked at in this way there is nothing more powerful and valuable than mindfulness. Do you have time for a little now?

Related articles:
You Always Have a Choice
Six Mindful Questions for Effective Decision Making

Check out the Upcoming workshops and events at Integral Meditation Asia

© Toby Ouvry 2014, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 

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Awareness and insight Inner vision Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Mindfulness One Minute Mindfulness

The Easiest Way to Avoid Death

 

Dear Integral Meditators,

What does it mean to live like you are alive? That could have been another title for the article below.

Yours in the spirit of being alive,

Toby


Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in December:

Sunday December 14th, 9.30am-12.30pm – An Introduction to Meditation From the Perspective of  Zen


The Easiest Way to Avoid Death

…is to avoid living. If you just fit in, do what others are doing, stay out of (too much) trouble, forget about what your real, deepest and most visceral desires are, and generally anesthetize yourself from the reality that you are alive, then the pain and anxiety of the inevitability of death won’t worry you too much. If you anesthetize yourself from life, your feelings and your reality, then you can arrive at death and act with genuine surprise, “Hey, how can this be happening to me, this isn’t fair!”

If on the other hand you commit to life, to being alive, to bringing as much consciousness, value and feeling and vibrancy to each moment of your life, then inevitably you are going to become more and more aware that your life is fleeting, impermanent, and that it will inevitably end, sooner or later (we don’t know). To be vitally aware that we are alive is to invite awareness of death and impermanence, and to feel the anxiety and challenge of that awareness.

The thing is that, by committing to be alive now, and feeling the anxiety of our transience, we are truly and urgently in a position to make use of the opportunity to be alive, to make a difference, to communicate values and meaning whilst we can.

Or we can sleepwalk through life and then act angry when we are about to die.

It is our choice, today, each day.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 Energy Meditation Integral Meditation Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditation techniques Mindful Resilience Mindfulness Stress Transformation

Caring For Your Life-force Through Meditation: Four Levels

Dear Integral Meditators,

I’ve been focusing in my own practice over the last week on taking care of my life-force or libido through meditation. The article below is really some thoughts I have put together as a result. I hope you enjoy it!

Yours  in the spirit of the journey,

Toby


Caring For Your Life-force Through Meditation: Four Levels

Your life-force (as we will be defining it in this article) is your ‘psychic energy’ or ‘libido’. It manifests on the physical, psychological, soul and spiritual levels of your being.

Simply put if your libido or life-force is healthy then it will manifest as a healthy ‘appetite’ for life. If your libido is low then your appetite for life diminishes correspondingly.
Here is a brief resume of the way in which our life-force manifests on the four levels (the soul and spiritual level being counted as one):

Your life-force on the physical/biological level – On this vital level of your being a healthy libido manifests as appetite for food, drink and sex/sensuality, and healthy emotions. It can be sustained by the appropriate engagement with these basic activities (eating & drinking healthily, enjoying sex and sensuality appropriately, feeling emotions fully). Correspondingly it can be damaged by eating and drinking unhealthily, over indulging in sex (or unhealthy expressions of sex) and negative emotions.

Your libido & life-force on the psychological level – On the level of your ego the libido manifests as striving, desiring and willing (to use the Jungian terms). From this we can see that to maintain a healthy psychological libido we need goals to strive towards, and a healthy pleasure in striving for and achieving those goals. Correspondingly our psychological ‘appetite’ can be damaged if we lack motivation, goals and objectives to strive for in life, or if our self-esteem & confidence are low.

Your life-force & libido on the soul& spiritual level – This level of libido is really the psychological level expressed at a deeper level of our being. It involves the pursuit of “the true, the beautiful and the good” as we feel compelled to explore and express them in our life. One way of understanding our own ‘spiritual path’ is how our psychological process of striving, desiring and willing evolves and transforms toward a creative expression of truth, beauty and goodness.

From this we can see that looking after your life-force is a multi-disciplinary activity, ranging from physical diet to psychological motivation to a deeper contemplation of the meaning of your life. Each one of these levels has something to offer you in terms of the overall experience of your life-force and the power of its energy.
Moreover, our life-force can shift from one level to another and back again. For example we can find a new lease of psychological motivation as a result of a changed diet, or we can find a renewed enthusiasm for emotional or sexual expression as a result of finding a deeper level of meaning on the soul level of our being.

Healing, balancing and renewing your life-force thorough meditation.

One very simple way in which you can use meditation as a way of enhancing your life force and libido is to just take the discipline of sitting still and relaxing in a focused, aware way for a certain period of time each day. This will:

  • Enable your physical body to relax and begin regenerating its biological life-force
  • Enable your psychological being to relax and begin regenerating its motivation and energy
  • Enable your soul to become receptive to spiritual and intuitive inspirations that inspire it toward greater meaning and creativity.

You can further enhance this function of meditation as you are sitting and relaxing by:

  • Deliberately imagining and encouraging your body to move into a state of deep, regenerative relaxation
  • Deliberately not pursuing thoughts and discursive thoughts in the mind so that your psychological being can regain its clarity and focus
  • Consciously inviting, being receptive to and noting intuitive inspirations & idea  that arise whilst you are enjoying the process of relaxing your body and mind

This very simple process of meditation, sitting in a state of receptive awareness in the way I have described is not the whole story when it comes to looking after and increasing our life-force on the physical, psychological and soul/spiritual levels, but it will help all of the other efforts that we make to do so!

Two more thoughts: Enhancing your life-force meditation a little further:

1. There are certain simple ways of directing the energy in your body-mind that can enhance and increase the flow of life-force. You can see a couple of simple examples from my qi gong blog here:
Building and strengthening your Qi/Light Body by connecting to Planetary Qi
Qi gong standing exercises 1: Light body standing form/Earth light standing form

2. You can use bio-field and neuro-flow technology to achieve a more rapid and deeper entry into a regenerative state of mind. The one I’m using a lot at the moment is called Harmonic Resonance Meditation, if you’re interested you can scroll down to see the coupon code to get 25% off any of the products at I-Awake technologies.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 


November 26 – December 2,
2014

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Categories
Insight Meditation Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditation and Psychology Mindfulness Shadow meditation Stress Transformation

When the Mask Cracks the Light Shines Out

Over the last few months I have had the good fortune to be able to catch up with a few old friends from school days. The conversation immediately becomes 200% more engaging and compelling between us when we discover that we have been through a similar psychological challenge or difficulty, or where we have come face to face with a part of ourselves that we did not like to admit was there. When this happens the tone of the conversation always goes from ‘pleasant’ to genuinely soulful.

Last weekend I facilitated a stress transformation workshop. It was great to see people becoming excited about the ways in which they could make use of the parts of themselves and their personality that they considered obstacles to happiness, that they considered ‘dysfunctional’ or weak.

We spend a lot of time investing in our ‘persona’, the face that we present to society; to cultivating and preserving a mask behind which we can hide our insecurity and vulnerability. We protect this mask, strengthen it, try to keep both it and ourselves ‘looking right’ in the eyes of those around us. Any cracks that appear in the mask often invoke a crisis in us, something we should avoid at all costs.

The funny thing is that when circumstances come together to crack open the mask of our persona, it is often the very opportunity that our soul has been waiting for to shine its light into the world, to start making a difference.

It’d be a shame to miss such opportunities because we were too busy trying desperately to repair our mask.

Related article: Enlightened Imperfection

Upcoming workshops and events at Integral Meditation Asia

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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