Category: Meditation techniques

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Concentration Meditation techniques Motivation and scope Presence and being present

Two things that you need to do before you sit down and start to meditate

Firstly, before you do the two things, you need to actually set aside the time to meditate, and, when the appointed time comes you need to sit yourself down and get on with it!

There seems to be a never ending stream of excuses that our distracted mind uses to avoid the things that will make us most happy, like meditation, so take a NO EXCUSES APPROACH!

Having done this and sat down, here is what you need to do:

1)      Create a safe space – Decide that for the next 5, 10, 15 minutes, or however long you have set aside, you are in a safe space where you can relax. Draw the boundary around your meditation time. After you arise from meditation, the world may indeed come to an end, or your worst fears may be realized. Alternatively, when you get up from meditation you may win the lottery, or get asked for a date by George Cluny, Yelena Isinbeyeva (or insert God/Goddess of choice). The point is that for the time you have allocated for your meditation is down time, relaxation time, YOUR time, time to be present with yourself and not worry about the past or future.

2)      Make a strong decision to focus! – Beyond relaxation, meditation is also about building the strength and focus of your mind. It is like inner weight training or fitness training where your mind is building muscle and stamina. If you start your meditation wishy-washy, then you are probably going to continue that way, so it is really important to get focused and stay focused during the short period of time you have set aside for your meditation practice.

Two life skills that you will develop from this:

If you practice like this at the beginning of your meditations you will learn

1)      That it is possible to create a “safe space” at many times in your day, not just when you are meditating

2)      How to FOCUS. Now, there are many more things that could be said about focus, but for now let’s just reflect on the fact that ALL SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE, IN WHATEVER DISCIPLINE KNOW HOW TO FOCUS!

That last sentence is a good object of meditation in itself…

Yours in the spirit of relaxed focus,

Toby

PS: For those of you in Singapore, this coming Tuesday 21st December there will be a special Winter Solstice meditation at Sanctuary on the Hill with myself. All proceeds will be going to the River Kids Project. See you there!

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Enlightened love and loving Meditation techniques

Devotion to relationship; What happens to romantic love after the peak of attraction and desire has been passed?

In my last article I write about the validity of including the experiences of attraction and desire in our experience of love and in particular our romantic relationships. In these articles I am breaking romantic love goes up into four stages:

  1. The first stage is attraction and desire
  2. The second stage is relationship
  3. The third stage is union
  4. The fourth stage is creativity

Each of these four stages can happen in five types of romantic relationship:

  1. The inner romance between the soul and personality
  2. The romance between ourself and the divine
  3. The romance between two humans (or two evolved life forms, I guess you could include some animals and some nature devas in this bracket too)
  4. The romance we can experience between ourself and landscape, or sense of place
  5. The romance between ourself and our “art” or the work that we love.

So, after the initial intensity of attraction and desire (which is a natural and enjoyable phase of romantic love) has started to fade, what happens then? The answer is we move to the next stage, which I have termed “relationship”. This starts to emerge when:

With a lover:

  • You no longer see the person that you are engaged in a romance with through an idealized projection. It starts to become obvious that the person you are with is not perfect. He or she has faults and eccentricities that you were previously prepared to gloss over and “not see”, but now there they are in plain sight.
  • It is an effort to control your ego in your interaction with your partner. When filled with attraction and desire for him/her, the ego was prepared to take a back seat, but now the novelty of the romance has worn off, your ego come back, and starts to act as crankily and grumpily as ever
  • The first obvious arguments and disagreements occur
  • You start thinking “Is this person as right for me as I thought s/he was?”
  • Issues cannot be resolved simply by having sex or schmoozing

With our soul and the divine: (I will place the two of these together here in the context of, let’s say a daily meditation practice)

  • Our initial awakening or expansion of consciousness becomes the norm, the novelty wears off
  • We start to wonder if the sense of connection and oneness that we previously felt was real. Maybe it was an illusion
  • All that is not oneness, not love, not peace starts to re-emerge in our mind
  • We become intensely aware of all the parts of our mind that our broken, hurt or otherwise suffering or in pain
  • Meditation becomes “work” no longer effortless play
  • The complexity, cruelty, difficulty, negativity of our world comes back into focus with a jolt

With landscape or sense of place:

  • The novelty of the new place becomes ordinary, we start to see the dirt on the sidewalk rather than the beauty of the overall ambiance
  • Our daily routine in the new place becomes effortful
  • We realize the damage that may have been done to the place or environment, and the amount of work that we will have to do to heal or restore the landscape

With our art or work:

  • When the initial enthusiasm for the discipline that we have been attracted to dies
  • We have our first few technical setbacks, it is going to be more complicated that we thought!
  • We have to face our work or art being critiqued (positively or negatively) by others
  • As Michelangelo said: “If people knew how much work it took to make my art, they would not think it so beautiful!”

So, what to do when this starts to happen?

Here are a few suggestions:

  • Recognize what is happening in your romance is a natural part of its unfolding. If it is going to flower into the stages of union and creativity, then it has to go through this testing phase of relationship
  • Know that the tools that will help you at this stage are things like tenderness, honesty, love and compassion (for self and others equally), integrity, a wiling-ness to see the unpleasant without blinking.
  • Don’t mourn the loss of the initial bliss of desire and attraction! If you persevere with the relationship stage desire and attraction will re-emerge in your relationship in the deeper, creative forms of passion and ecstasy (another good word for ecstasy might be rapture)
  • Recognize that the emphasis in your romance has shifted from a temporarily pleasurable phase to a phase of deeper healing, confrontation and self-enquiry (mutual self enquiry if with a person)
  • Understand this is a phase that will require effort, mindfulness, consistency and devotion
  • Don’t be attached to quick results, the challenges in this phase can last years, even decades
  • Don’t be afraid of dark times; true, non-idealized love is a treasure hard won!
  • This phase of the romance will test you to see whether the person, work, place or spiritual practice really is right for you. Whilst recognizing that work will be involved to make the relationship succeed, sometimes the work reveals that the relationship is not in fact right for you. If so, be prepared to let go. The best one liner I ever heard for this is from the Zen Roshi DT Suzuki “In relationships is it not a matter of letting go of what is there, but rather recognizing what has already gone”. You know if a relationship is over because it has already gone.

Contemplation on developing a devotion to your romantic relationships:

Consider any of your romantic relationships with any of the five types of object above. Think about the difficulties that you face, the things about it that you fear, hate, find tiresome etc…Allow yourself to feel the reality of the challenges, and the emotions that you feel.

When you have done this, then focus on developing a mind of devotion to the relationship. Devotion is a mind that has the patience, endurance and love to see the difficulties in your relationship through to their successful resolution.

Simply sit and breathe with your devotion for a while, allow it to strengthen your resolve to build a romantic relationship based around deep love, not just changeable pleasure. Know that if you follow this devotion it will lead you on the long term path to bliss and romantic fulfillment.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyoury.com

Categories
Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Meditation techniques Presence and being present

Can attraction and desire be part of a genuinely spiritual love?

In my previous article on the five types of romantic love I placed the dynamic of romantic love in a larger context, to include our relationship not just with other people, but also ourself, the world/the Universe, landscape and our “art” or work.

What I want to do in this next few articles is have a look at four basic stages that any romantic relationship needs to go through in order to connect us to deep levels of authentic passion and creativity.

When I talk of passion and creativity here I am not referring just to a temporary increase in our creative energy, but a connection to deeper life forces that is continuously sustained over a long period of time.

The four stages of romantic love as I have named them are:

  1. Attraction and desire
  2. Relationship
  3. Union
  4. Creativity

In the article below we will begin by looking at stage 1, attraction and desire. I will focus mainly on the relationship between two people, but bear in mind that it can apply to the other four types of romantic experience as well.

 Stage 1: Attraction and desire

Romantic attraction and desire are often seen as the antithesis of the pure, spiritual experience of love. However, if you look at the state of mind that you enter into when you first “fall in love” with a person, a place or a type of work or art, you will be able to see that it has many magical and spiritual qualities. For example

  • The whole world seems more alive and vivid
  • You seem to be in a kind of telepathic communication with the person you are romantically involved with
  • Daily problems and anxieties fall away
  • You have more energy
  • There is a natural sense of timelessness which is in fact connected to the timeless world of spirit

Attraction and desire are the starting point for ANY romantic relationship, whether the couple are on a high level of consciousness or a low one. Attraction and desire are as natural as breathing and eating for us!

(those last two lines are my answer to the question posed by the title of this article by the way!)

One of the keys to successfully negotiating and enjoying this period of intense attraction and desire is to look closely at the motivations behind your attraction and desire.

  • If you feel attracted to a person because you feel a glaring LACK or POVERTY within yourself, then it is likely that the attachment and desire is going to lead to experiences of pain and suffering in the next stage of the romance.
  •  If you fall into an attraction and desire for someone even though you feel a comfortable sense of FULLNESS and ABUNDANCE within yourself, then it is likely that you will be able to transition to the next stage of the romance where “reality sets back in” without too much problem.

Exercise for appreciating and enjoying desire and attraction

Recall a time when you were in love with someone for the first time (or if you are at that stage in your relationship now, look at what you are experiencing now). Spend a while re-creating the feelings and experiences associated with that time. Creatively imagine your way back into the feeling and texture of your mind, body and emotions at that time. Breathe with it and enjoy it for a while.

Now let go of the specifics of the romance. Forget about the person you were with, the time, the place and so on. Just focus on the essence or essential feeling that is left inside. Breathe with this for a while.

What you will find if you do this is that experiences of desire and attraction lead us quite naturally into a mystical, enraptured, timeless state of consciousness. Most of the time we fail to capitalize on this because we mistake the object of our desire for the STATE OF MIND that he/she evokes. However, if you can let go of the object of your desire and focus on the state of BEING that has been evoked in you, you will find yourself connecting to something timeless, universal and full of life-force…

© Toby Ouvry 2010. You are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Inner vision Meditation techniques Presence and being present Primal Spirituality

Walking meditation with the primal ancestors

This is a simple meditation form that can be done as a walking meditation or a sitting form. I am going to explain it here as a walking meditation. It is a creative meditation where the imagination plays a large role in the experience. However by engaging our imagination we connect ourselves to the spiritual energies of the Planetary Being and of our own common and individual ancestral heritage, and this can be a powerful experience.

One of the things that I think we have forgotten in our contemporary day and age is a feeling of connection and participation in some of the fundamental processes of life. By this I mean simple things like:

  • When you walk you are walking on the surface of a planet that is awe inspiring and in many senses alive and responsive to us
  • Above us is a beautiful and wondrous sky with stars
  • Time moves in cycles, daily, monthly, yearly. We can experience this living process just by lifting our head and looking around
  • We are a part of something much bigger than ourselves

To our ancestors living in earlier ages, these simple and awe inspiring things would have been obvious, as they tended to live in immediate proximity to nature and were more obviously vulnerable to it and reliant upon it. In reality we are no less so I think, but this is in many ways hidden from our view these days.

In this meditation we imagine ourselves to be one of the first ancestors of our human family, and imagine what it is like to walk as they did and experience the Earth as they did. The purpose is to re-awaken a sense of wonder, connection and participation to the earth and the universe as a living thing, something naturally divine.

Walking with and as the primal ancestors

–          Find a pleasant natural environment to walk in. In time you can learnt to do this in the midst of a city, but initially it is helpful to find a peaceful place with plenty of greenery and relative quiet. If you can walk barefoot this is preferable

–          Spend a little while simply breathing and centring yourself in the present moment, attune yourself to your environment.

–          In your mind allow yourself to go back in time as far as you can to the times of your oldest, most primal relatives in distant earlier ages of the Earth. Intuitively see one of these ancestors in front of you or beside you. Get a sense of their clothing (or lack of it) their aspect, their manner, their energy. Feel your minds and hearts establishing an energetic link.

–          Walking with your primal ancestor: Walk through your environment with them walking next to you (perhaps you are holding hands). As you walk try and enter into their experience of walking on the earth, their natural awareness and reverence for nature and the Planetary being. Try and feel into their natural sense of timelessness, their understanding of the seasons, of the elements.

–           Walking as your primal ancestor: Once you have done this a few times you can try walking AS your primal ancestor, that is to say you see yourself in their body, see the world through their eyes, and think with their thoughts as you walk.

–          You may find that each time you do the meditation you meet the same ancestor, or you may find that they change periodically. Trust your intuitive imagination here!

Click here to find out about upcoming classes by Toby on the Six stages of Love.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Concentration Meditation techniques Presence and being present Uncategorized

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew comments on his own daily meditation practice

(This is extracted from an interview that Lee Kuan Yew recently did with the New York Times, I am not going to add or subtract anything from it, just present it as it is – Toby)

Q: “Tell me about meditation?” (Seth Mydans, New York Times/International Herald Tribune)

Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew: “Well, I started it about two, three years ago when Ng Kok Song, the Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, I knew he was doing meditation. His wife had died but he was completely serene. So, I said, how do you achieve this? He said I meditate everyday and so did my wife and when she was dying of cancer, she was totally serene because she meditated everyday and he gave me a video of her in her last few weeks completely composed completely relaxed and she and him had been meditating for years. Well, I said to him, you teach me. He is a devout Christian. He was taught by a man called Laurence Freeman, a Catholic. His guru was John Main a devout Catholic. When I was in London, Ng Kok Song introduced me to Laurence Freeman. In fact, he is coming on Saturday to visit Singapore, and we will do a meditation session. The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. It is most difficult to stay focused on the mantra. The discipline is to have a mantra which you keep repeating in your innermost heart, no need to voice it over and over again throughout the whole period of meditation. The mantra they recommended was a religious one. Ma Ra Na Ta, four syllables. Come To Me Oh Lord Jesus. So I said Okay, I am not a Catholic but I will try. He said you can take any other mantra, Buddhist Om Mi Tuo Fo, and keep repeating it. To me Ma Ran Na Ta is more soothing. So I used Ma Ra Na Ta.

You must be disciplined. I find it helps me go to sleep after that. A certain tranquility settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping. I miss it sometimes when I am tired, or have gone out to a dinner and had wine. Then I cannot concentrate. Otherwise I stick to it… a good meditator will do it for half-an-hour. I do it for 20 minutes.”

Q: “So, would you say like your friend who taught you, would you say you are serene?”

Mr Lee: “Well, not as serene as he is. He has done it for many years and he is a devout Catholic. That makes a difference. He believes in Jesus. He believes in the teachings of the Bible. He has lost his wife, a great calamity. But the wife was serene. He gave me this video to show how meditation helped her in her last few months. I do not think I can achieve his level of serenity. But I do achieve some composure.”

Read full transcript here 

Upcoming October workshop with Toby: “An introduction to meditation as a way of overcoming stress, anxiety and mental busyness.”

Categories
Awareness and insight Concentration Inner vision Meditation techniques Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

The three stages of meditation practice as an art-form

The first stage is using meditation as an art-form to learn to calm the mind, overcome distractions and develop inner peace.

The second stage is using the inner peace and focus you get from the first stage in order to deepen your experience of concentration, awareness and insight.

The third stage is accessing and stabilizing the subtle inner abilities/gifts that you become aware of through stages one and two; understanding what they and learning how to apply them practically/creatively as a way of being of service to the world.

The first stage you could call the art of peace, the second stage you could call the art of concentration and insight, the third stage you could call the art of creative or spiritual service.

Let’s say you start meditating tomorrow, for twenty minutes a day for the next fifteen years. By the end of the first five years you will have probably become competent at stage one. By the end of ten years you will probably have become competent at stage two. By the end of fifteen years you will have a working knowledge of stage three. This will give you a foundation. 

Fifteen years may seem like a long time, but if you are persistent for the first two or three years, it may well be that you will have ceased being all that goal oriented and learned to simply enjoy the journey that the art of meditation offers to the human traveller.

As the practitioner of any genuine art form will tell you, there are no short cuts to genuine mastery! 

PS: Brief plug for the new series of meditation classes on “How to develop our spiritual intelligence and inner wisdom” starting this Tuesday 24th August, I guarantee it will be of interest to any meditator or aspiring meditator. For those not in Singapore it is available as a series of three recordings. 

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first.

Related article: Is your meditation a form of therapy, and art-form or a spiritual practice?

Categories
Awareness and insight Meditation techniques Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

From paranoia to pronoia and transnoia – The journey to perceptual enlightenment in three steps

Three concepts that describe three states of perception:

  • Paranoia – When we see a world that is attacking us and out to get us. This perception arises from a mind that is seeing the world from the perspective of its own fear, anger, jealousy and other negative mindsets
  • Pronoia – When we see a world filled with love and with people, places and things that are worthy of that love. This perception arises within us when our own hearts and minds are filled with love, kindness and care
  • Transnoia – When we see a world where everything is a manifestation of the divine or transcendent, and everything that happens to us is helping us to awaken and grow in the light of this truth. This perception arises from a condition of faith in a higher power than us that is good, but also from wisdom, the ability to see that the challenges we have to face in our life conform to a meaningful pattern that, if we have the presence of mind to face up to will help us grow, evolve and eventually reach our enlightenment.  

One way of viewing the path to enlightenment could be a journey from the nightmare world of paranoia to the “heavenly” states of mind of pronoia and transnoia.

Meditation for introducing pronoia and transnoia into the heart of our paranoia.

Using your breathing as an anchor for your awareness. Recall times or conditions in your life when you have felt deeply surrounded by your own paranoia. Feel into those times and states as realistically as you can without losing your sense of centre.

Having done this, now introduce the perspective of pronoia into the meditation. See the circumstance and yourself though the eyes of love, kindness and compassion. Observe how this perspective starts to alter your view and perception of the situation.

Finally introduce the perspective of transnoia – See what is happening as a part of a larger plan created by a benevolent higher power (call it God, Buddha, the Tao or word of your choice) that is helping you to develop and refine your character, and move toward your own eventual enlightenment and fully awakened state. Observe how this perspective changes your experience of the situation. 

This is a simple exercise that you can do either in a formal sitting meditation or in a more casual, contemplative way when you have a few moments. The main thing is to start seeing how you can work with them in a practical way to alter your experience of your life. 

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

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Awareness and insight Meditation techniques Motivation and scope Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Why worry when you can pray: A five minute active meditation for overcoming worry and anxiety

How often do you spend time feeling worried and anxious about things in your life that you care about but cannot control? It can often be much more beneficial, rather than struggling with the worry to simply acknowledge it and then pass it over to a higher power through a simple, improvised, on the spot prayer. In the exercise below I address all the prayers to “God”, but when you are doing this yourself you can fill in whatever expression of a higher power feels comfortable to you:

 Sit comfortably; spend a short while centring yourself by focusing on the breathing or other appropriate method. Then just let your mind wander onto the things that it feels anxious about. Each time you are able to identify a cause of worry and anxiety, offer up a short prayer and then release the worry to a higher power.

For example:

1)  I notice that I am anxious about an argument with my partner or family member.

So I offer a prayer: “Dear God please help me resolve the conflict between myself and X, I am not sure what to do about it, but I pray for your grace and intervention”.

I then release the prayer and let go of the worry and relax for a few breaths.

 2) Then a worry comes up about a talk that I have to do tomorrow to a large group.

So I pray: “Dear God please help me to find appropriate material for tomorrows talk, and to be able to present it in a way that the audience will connect with.”

I then release the prayer and let go of the worry.

So, the entire five or so minutes is simply spent oscillating between these three activities; noting a worry, praying about it, and releasing it to a higher power. At the end of the meditation I recommend you spend a little while just resting in and enjoying the release/letting-go stage of the exercise.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Awareness and insight Inner vision Meditation techniques Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Tackling a-void-ance: Meditation for healing and transforming loneliness and emptiness

Unless we are careful, a lot of the things that we do in our life are simply activities that we engage in to avoid the underlying sense of loneliness, emptiness, incompleteness, feeling or separation, or quite simply the VOID that we sense inside. The motivation for getting in a relationship for example can primarily be driven by a feeling that we lack something within ourself, and we need someone else to make up for that lack. Thus much of what we do is simply a-void-ance, a way of dancing around the big hole that we sense in the centre of our life, and trying to do everything in our power to avoid acknowledging or confronting it. The following meditation/contemplation is designed to help us look honestly at the void in our life and see that there may be something in it that we did not suspect.

Meditation on a-void-ance

Sit down and spend a short while just relaxing and centring yourself.

Bring to mind times in your day when you feel a sense of loneliness, incompleteness, emptiness, a negative void. Instead of avoiding these feelings, move into them, accept them without comment and allow yourself to feel them deeply. Use the breathing to breathe with them if you like.

Now gently let go of the manifest feelings of loneliness/emptiness that you feel, and just focus instead on the sense of space that accompanies these feelings. Try to experience just the space, just the void in your being. Breathe, relax, allow yourself to sink into that inner space that so often you try and avoid. It is almost like when you have been fighting going to sleep, and then you just decide to give in, and allow yourself to fall asleep.

Now within that empty void sense a light, like the sun gradually dawning over the horizon. What was once a dark empty space now becomes a void filled with light and radiance. The space is still there, the void is still there but it is filled with life, brightness and luminosity, like a sun shining from within the depths of space. Remain with this experience for as long as you like.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Meditation techniques Motivation and scope spiritual intelligence

Is your meditation a type of therapy, an art-form or a spiritual practice?

Your meditation is a therapy if you are doing it to fix something inside you that is broken. Meditating to cope with stress, heal an emotional wound, to pacify/heal our addictions and demons is a form of therapy.

Your meditation is an art-form if you are using it to push the boundaries of your inner skill, power and capability. It is where you take risks, push the limits of what you thought possible, and experience new ways of seeing, feeling creating.

Your meditation is a spiritual practice when you rest in a state of no boundaries, where the barriers between yourself and the universe dissolve into light and there is just pure being-ness, one-ness, opulence and radiance.

The chances are that your meditation oscillates between these three types in an organic way, but it is extremely useful to be able to differentiate them in these three ways because:

–          There are times when you need to stop trying to fix that which is broken in you and start taking some risks

–          There are times when pushing your boundaries is doing more harm than good, and you need to create a healing space for yourself

–          There are times when you need to get off your butt and stop getting absorbed in the timeless wonder of it all

–          There are times when you need to take a holiday from the bounds of time and space and rest in the regenerative-radiance of your original being

–          There are times when you’re universal, original being explodes into action and demands that you start expressing your inner and outer art-forms. If so, you’d better act on this or watch out!

© Toby Ouvry 2010, please do not reproduce without permission. Contact info@tobyouvry.com