Blog – Page 49 – Toby Ouvry Meditation

The Wild Dogs of the Mind

Post author By Toby
Post date May 9, 2015

Dear Integral Meditators,

When strong, difficult, negative minds and emotions get triggered in our consciousness it can be difficult for the other parts of our mind not to become scattered and disoriented. The article below explores how we can start to changes this, using the image of dogs.

Two free mindfulness resources coming up online: 30 Days of Waking Up from Sounds True, and Beyond Mindfulness from the Shambala Mountain Centre. Click to find out more!

Yours in the spirit of the journey,

Toby

The Wild Dogs of the Mind

A few nights ago I dreamed that a pair of large, fierce dogs were attacking a pack of much smaller but more numerous dogs. At first the small dogs were getting torn apart, but then the leader of the smaller dogs managed to get them all attacking the big dogs together. This resulted in the big dogs getting overwhelmed and having to retreat.
We’ve all got a couple of big, negative dogs in our mind that, when we get upset or hurt start to make a lot of noise and upset our whole mental and emotional equilibrium. They can boss the other different parts of our mind around because they are big, loud and fierce.
What if all of the other parts of our mind were to band together when one of our big, negative minds starts to throw its weight around? What if they were to work together as a ‘pack’ working as a unified, directed energy combining to become stronger than the big, negative dogs within us?
If this were to happen then even when we found ourselves upset or disturbed, we would be able to exert a benevolent control over that disturbance because the rest of our mind knows how to work together and stay strong. On a practical level as long as we know how to get the ‘smaller dogs’ of our mind to stay together as a pack, then our big negative mind will pretty much know that it is not going to be able to boss the situation and so will not try and act out so much. Simply the presence of the smaller dogs demonstrating that they know how to work and fight together is enough to ward off an attack from the big negative dog.
So remember, when you are feeling under attack from the big bad dogs, don’t let the rest of your mind scatter and fall apart; rather keep them consciously working together. The good thing about working with an image like this is that you can kind of experiment with it intuitively and imaginatively, and let the idea start to show you experientially how it works in practice.

A final point; in my dream the dogs were skinned, that is to say they were made of raw flesh. One way of interpreting this is that both groups of dogs represented very ‘raw’ emotions in me. Our emotions and mind can really behave instinctively and like wild dogs when we are feeling raw and vulnerable, so I have been working with this image particularly when my mind feels very raw and instinctive.

Related Coaching: Shadow Coaching with Toby
Related course: Wednesday 20th May 7.30-9.30pm – An Evening of Mindful Relationships: Improving Your Relationships and Social Skills Through Mindfulness – A two hour workshop

© 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:

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

Integral Meditation Asia

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

Tags awareness, consciousness, enlightenment, inner growth, inner strength, integral meditation asia, meditation in singapore, mindful imagination, mindfulness, power of mind, present moment

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Three Dimensions of Mindful Daydreaming

Post author By Toby
Post date May 6, 2015

Dear Integral Meditators,

Often daydreaming is set up against the idea of being mindful; to be daydreaming is not to be ‘present’ like we should be when we are mindful, right? But what if we were to make our daydreams our object of mindfulness? What if we were to really pay attention to them? The article below explores this area.

Related workshop to this subject: Saturday 16th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditations for Activating, Healing and Awakening our Ancestral Karma

This Friday evening is the first of two Integral Meditation classes this month, the subject is ‘Stillness, Energy, Positivity and Relaxation -A grounding in the basics of Integral Meditation’.

Yours in the spirit of conscious daydreams,

Toby

Three Dimensions of Mindful Daydreaming

Daydreaming is often used in a derogatory way, or to indicate that you were not paying attention to something that you should. It has not always been that way. Often daydreaming is set up against the idea of being mindful; to be daydreaming is not to be ‘present’ like what we should be when we are mindful, right? But what if we were to make our daydreams our object of mindfulness? What if we were to really pay attention to them? Here are three areas of daydreaming and three potential benefits of paying attention to them:

Daydreams as a way of processing Your Life
If we pay attention to our daydreams we will see (like night dreams) that dreaming is a method that our consciousness has of trying to resolve the issues, challenges and problems that we are facing in our actual daily life. If I daydream about people verbally threatening me, and I then responding violently this indicates that I may be feeling threatened and insecure or wounded in some way. If I daydream of communicating lovingly or expressively to someone, this may indicate that I am going through a phase where a certain type of positive emotion is awakening in me and my relationships. Our daydreams can give us valuable feedback on how our conscious and unconscious minds are coping with our life. If we pay attention to our daydreams, we may gain valuable insight as to what we can do to help facilitate this daily processing.

Receiving Creative Inputs
Our own unconscious mind is connected to the collective unconscious. Our higher intuitive mind is connected to what you might call a ‘collective super-conscious mind’. There is a huge (infinite?) amount of creative material contained within the collective unconscious and super-conscious minds that we often access unconsciously and without full recognition. Often contact with the collective or group dimensions of mind is communicated to us through the images, intuitions, images and fantasies that we find in our daydreams. By paying attention to our daydreams we can become a lot more consciously receptive to these creative inputs. For example many of the articles that I write upon this blog come into my head largely fully formed as ‘daydreams’ before, during or after my formal meditations.

Being Somewhere Else
When we dream during sleep we often go to inner worlds that appear to be fully formed, have their own stories and rules of interaction. In our daydreams we also find ourselves sometimes transported to these worlds. We can start to mindfully observe the relationship and interaction between the landscapes that we encounter in our outer world, and the inner landscapes of our mind and start to see how they relate to each other. For example I recently read Neil Gaiman’s novel ‘The Ocean at the Bottom of the Lane’ which is full of very vivid dream-like landscapes. In the days subsequent I have been enjoying the observing the very real effect that these ‘fictional’ landscapes and energies have been continuing to have on my perception of my outer reality and perception.

Mindful daydreaming is not difficult to start doing!
All you need to do is sit comfortably and allow your mind to roam freely and without restriction, with just a part of your attention taking a step back and consciously noting what comes up as you daydream. You can even start a daydream journal in the same way you might keep a night dream journal.
Daydreaming shouldn’t be a bad word, and awareness of it can form an important and endlessly creative aspect of your daily mindfulness practice.

© 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

Integral Meditation Asia

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

Tags inner growth, integral meditation, integral meditation asia, meditation and daydreaming, mindful daydreaming, shadow meditation, spiritual intelligence

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

Post author By Toby
Post date May 4, 2015

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:

To secure the best quality of real happiness and wellbeing for ourselves and those in our circle of influence in this lifetime
To work toward the happiness of future generations; to secure a better life for them
To work toward the highest level of physical, psychological, and spiritual development and freedom that we are capable
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

Tags inner growth, insight, integral meditation, integral meditation asia, integrated awareness, liberation, meditation, meditation in singapore, mindful appreciation, mindfulness, minful positivity, self-healing, spiritual intelligence

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Big Enough, Specific Enough (Dealing with spiky minds)

Post author By Toby
Post date April 29, 2015

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.

Tags consciousness, creativity, integral meditation, integral meditation asia, integrated awareness, meditation in singapore, mindful resilience, power of mind, present moment awareness, resilient mind

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Your Tree of Personal Inspiration

Post author By Toby
Post date April 27, 2015

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.

© 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

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

Tags integral meditation, integral meditation asia, meditation, meditation and vizualization, meditation in singapore, mindful inspiration, mindful vizualization, mindfulness, present moment, spiritual intelligence, tree of life

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Defence Against Bliss

Dear Integral Meditators,

Sometimes it is tough to accept pain, sufffering and disappointment, but wierdly it can be equally tough to accept bliss, love and wellbeing. The artlcle below offers a personal reflection on why this can sometimes be so.

Beneath the article there is some information on the Schumman Holophonic Meditationfrom I-Awake. It is the original track that got me into meditation technology of this sort. It is on special offer at the moment, and I recommend it throughly!

Beneath that are the dates for your diary for classes and workshops in May, full details to follow shortly!

In the spirit of accepting bliss,

Toby

Defence Against Bliss

When I was a few months away from being ordained as a Buddhist Monk back in the early 90’s I had a peak ‘love’ experience in my meditation. It started out in a sitting session as a feeling of overwhelming and impartial warmth and affection for all living creatures, and then stayed with me for the next few days as a heightened awareness where my heart felt like it was completely open, my body felt full of blissful energy, and the world around me felt ‘alive’; the grass and the trees seemed to sing, simply sitting on a park bench felt like a heavenly experience, animals seemed to smile at me and so on…It was kind of a classical peak love experience.

Coming out of this peak experience I travelled to Seattle, Washington in the US where was going to a Buddhist festival of sorts. By the time I landed at the airport I was feeling fairly ‘normal’ again, but the feeling of bliss in my body and heart had been replaced by a kind of claustrophobic sense of darkness, I had the song ‘Don’t box me in’, which is a kind of brooding young man’s song of anger and discontent playing in repeat in the background of my mind. It felt as if there was a part of me that resented the blissful experience of love that I had had, that felt threatened by it, and that wanted to destroy it. This experience persisted for the duration of the festival, four or five days.

Over the next couple of years it felt as if there was a ‘dark’ part of me that was fighting against a ‘light’ part of me; a limited small self against an open, bright self. One of the main take-aways of this experience for me was that it is actually as difficult for us to accept expanded states of bliss, happiness and joy as it is for us to accept suffering, disappointment and sadness. BOTH are as much of a threat to our limited ego and everyday self as the other. As a result our established ego seeks to defend itself against not just suffering but also from too much happiness, joy, pleasure, bliss, as these things threaten our inner status quo, challenge our perception of reality quite as much as pain does.

Be aware of the bliss that is available to you and what it offers
So then an awareness practice that you can use to explore your own experience of bliss, love and pleasure if you like; just ask yourself the question ‘What bliss, happiness, pleasure is available to me right now, in the present moment?’ Investigate what bliss you may be able to find in your body, you mind, in your feelings, your relationships. Then ask yourself the question ‘What is preventing me from accepting and enjoying this bliss?’ See what answers come back to you.

It’s is not either the small or the big self
How did I end up resolving my inner battle between my small ego and my bright, expanded self? Essentially by understanding that I could integrate them both together; The small self felt threatened by the big self, so I needed to re-assure and acknowledge it. I spent time letting it know that it was still valued, still had a purpose and function within me. Once it understood that it could still exist within the context of this new and expanded blissful state, then the conflict subsided. Now on the whole I think they get on very well together! The principle here is that when the different parts of self communicate with each other effectively most inner conflicts can be resolved harmoniously.

Shadow 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

I-AWAKE PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Schumann Holophonic

For a Centering, Grounding, and Refreshing Meditation

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Good until April 30, 2015

Dates for your diary in May (Full details shortly)
Friday 8th May, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Class – Focus, appreciation and awareness -A grounding in the basics of Integral Meditation

Saturday 16th May, 9.30am-12.30pm – Exploring the Roots of Mindfulness – The Essential Meditation of the Buddha

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 Medi classes – Travelling deeper into the present moment

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

Integral Meditation Asia

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

Tags enlightenment, integral meditation, integrated awareness, meditation, meditation and bliss, mindful bliss, mindfulness, spiritual intelligence, uniting mind and feelings

Life-fullness Meditation and Psychology Mindful Confidence Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness Uncategorized

Your Long Term Self-Confidence

Post author By Toby
Post date April 18, 2015

You can build your confidence in the short term by surrounding yourself with the familiar and the known; by surrounding yourself with friends who are like you and affirm your world view; by doing something you are already good at; by staying with the job or activity that you know well; by acting in ways that you know will earn the praise of others. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as an approach, but it becomes limiting and debilitating if it is the only approach that we have to building our self-confidence, because it also inherently limits our growth and what we are capable of. Long term self-confidence building involves a different approach. It involves deliberately looking for the areas and activities of your life where you are uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It means consciously engaging in those spaces where you do not feel a sense of easy or established confidence.

In doing this the short term experience is an absence of assured confidence; a sense of being ‘lost’ or out of your comfort zone; a sense of being separate from familiar markers in our surrounding reality. By repeatedly taking yourself into unfamiliar territory and becoming competent in that space you establish a much greater and deeply rooted self-confidence than you could ever develop simply by surrounding yourself with the familiar and the known, and by continuing to engage only in the things that you are good at.

A couple of examples:
In my own experience establishing my own business after having been a monk and an artist for many years was a source of feeling lost, inconvenienced and way out of my comfort zone for many years in many different ways. However, by persisting in my pursuit and understanding of business (as it serves my purposes as a meditation and mindfulness teacher) has over the years become a major source of my own deeper self-confidence as I have moved repeatedly from incompetence to competence in the domain of business.
Similarly, after leaving my life as a monk where I had been surrounded by a lot of ‘spiritual’ people who shared at least in part my worldview, and going back onto the ‘secular’ world where I had to build relationships and ways of communicating with diverse groups of people who often did not share my world view was initially uncomfortable and inconvenient. However in the long term it because a source of confidence as it built within me a sense of being able to go into any situation and adapt to the ‘cultural language’ that was being spoken there.

The relationship between happiness and confidence
Building your short term happiness leads to the experience of being temporarily happy in environments where you are familiar. Mindfully building your long term confidence leads to a sense that you can be happy anywhere, in almost any circumstances because you have built a deep confidence in your own adaptability and a trust in your capacity to engage successfully with whatever comes up.

Its ‘both/and’ not ‘either/or’!
As with other aspects of integral mindfulness and meditation we are aiming for a win-win relationship in the development of our confidence. We can regularly connect to short term sources of self-confidence in order to re-assure and orientate ourselves, combining this with regularly and mindfully pushing ourselves to engage in areas of our life that make us uncomfortable, and seek to build our long term confidence by getting confident in these areas.

It begins today if you want it to
What is it that you can start doing today in order to build your deeper, long term self-confidence?

© 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:

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

Friday 8th & 29th May, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre

Full schedule of May classes to be posted shortly…

Integral Meditation Asia

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

Tags inner growth, integral meditation asia, integrated awareness, meditation and self-confidence, meditation in singapore, mindful self-confidence, mindfulness, mindfulness in Singapore, power of mind

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

How to Mindfully Develop Your Self-Confidence

Post author By Toby
Post date April 15, 2015

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!

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

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Life-Coaching * Meditation Technology

Tags developing self confidence, integral meditation, integral meditation asia, meditation, meditation in singapore, mindful self-confidence, power of mind, self confidence, uniting mind and feelings

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The Dynamic of Personal Evolution

Post author By Toby
Post date April 11, 2015

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

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

Tags awareness, consciousness development, integrated awareness, meditation, meditation in singapore, mindfulness, power of mind

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

Post author By Toby
Post date April 7, 2015

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:

The acknowledgment, exploration and acceptance of my anger
The constructive engagement with that emotion and its causes, followed by the
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.

© 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

Tags integral meditation asia, integrated awareness, mastery of self, meditation and mastery, meditation in singapore, mindful mastery, mindfulness