Tag: consciousness

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Enlightened love and loving Integral Awareness Meditation techniques spiritual intelligence

Tapping Into Your Invisible Sources of Love and Support, A Contemporary Interpretation of the Process of Prayer

One of the great illusions that we often battle with is the feeling of being isolated and alone. This feeling of loneliness and isolation can exact a heavy toll upon our psyche. There are three approaches that we can take to this challenge:

  1. Get more comfortable with being alone
  2. Reach out to other people and build more of a sense of external community
  3. 3. Tap into sources of invisible love and support that surround us all the time

This article looks at the third option, which in many ways can be understood as tapping into the power of prayer. The meaning of prayer as I am referring to it here is as follows:

“Prayer is a way of invoking and requesting support from the invisible sources of love that surround us at all times” .When I say “invoking” here this can be done in both an active and a passive way. To pray actively means to make a specific request to any invisible source of support. Prayer can also be done in a more passive way simply by becoming aware of the invisible source of support and focusing on consciously receiving supportive energy from that source.

So, what are these invisible sources of loving and supporting energy? Here is a list of examples:

From Yourself – We can prayers and requests to the higher dimensional aspects of ourself that we can term in many ways, for example our Higher Self, our Divine Spark or our Buddha Nature. Since these higher aspects of consciousness are literally a part of who we are, it is safe to assume that they are always wishing us success and happiness, and are sending us that support all the time. Through the practice of prayer we can leverage on this invisible support much more.

From those who love and like you, and from your Ancestors – We are energetically and mentally connected to friends and family all the time, and there is potentially a constant stream of positive energy and support that we can be receiving from them even if they live in a far away land. Moreover there is also an ongoing stream of invisible love, support and wisdom that flows through our life at all times in the form of our ancestral group as a whole.

From the “Power of the Common Good” – This level of support is really about remembering that there is within the group mind of humanity a common intention to benefit, do good and support. Easy to forget amidst the mass of seeming negativity and chaos, but it is nonetheless there for us to tap at will!

From the Wise – Those Saints Saints, Sages and Great Souls, the great and the good, past and present who are filled with love, wisdom and compassion, and are at the cutting edge of human evolutionary consciousness.

From the Earth and from Nature – Sit in a park surrounded by trees for a while and any problem or pain that you have will reduce. I’m reading the Ramayana with my daughter at the moment, where all the characters pray for support from rivers, tress and mountains. It is a bit of a forgotten art in modern society that we could well do with remembering and practicing more!

From Spirit or Source – By this I mean the formless creative energy that creates and sustains all of the above, call it God or what you will…

A One Minute Prayer/Meditation Method for Tapping into Your Invisible Support Network

Pick one of the above invisible sources of love and support and focus on it mentally. You can then either:

  • Offer a specifically worded prayer requesting support for a particular area in your life, or
  • Just recognize this invisible source of love and acknowledge its readiness to support you.

Having made your prayer or recognized this source of invisible love, feel it surrounding you and supporting you, breathe with this feeling of receiving love and support for a few breaths, share your burden and release your worries.

A slightly longer Prayer/Meditation Method for Tapping into Your Invisible Support Network

Take the time to go through the above list of sources of love and support. Having offered your prayer for support, spend a few moments breathing with and feeling the support of each of these sources in turn. Take the time to recognize and feel the support of each of them. Feel the love you are receiving increasing with each source that you focus on. End by focusing on a feeling of having released your worries and burdens, and of being NOT ALONE!

© Toby Ouvry 2011, 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 Enlightened love and loving Meditation techniques Motivation and scope

Meditating on Detached-Compassion and Divine Playfulness

The first of the five enlightened powers that I outline in my meditation technique “The Five enlightened Powers” is the power of embodiment. This involves, quoting from my previous article on the subject:

“Remembering that you are, in essence a spark of Universal spirit experiencing (temporarily) a physically embodied life on Earth as a human. Whatever situation you find yourself in, grounding your awareness in your true identity and not getting caught up in your small or egoic identity is the power of embodiment. Wherever you are, remember WHO you are!”

A question that we may then ask ourselves is “So then what is it actually like to experience ourself as such a spark of Universal Spirit? What qualities and emotions would we experience?” In this article I intend to highlight two specific qualities and perspectives that we can seek to bring into our daily life that will enable us to function more authentically as a divine spark amidst the push and pull of our daily lives. These two qualities are detached-compassion, and divine playfulness.

Detached-compassion

Detachment and compassion are qualities that often we think of as being separate because they appear to exclude each other.  We think that when you are detached you are disconnected from others, and so cannot feel deep compassion for them. Likewise if we are truly being compassionate we cannot be detached because that would mean disconnecting from our feeling nature, which is where our compassion is located.

However, viewed from the perspective of our spiritual being, it is perfectly possible to bring deep compassion together with as sense of detached, witnessing observation. This is because from the perspective of spirit:

  • We can be detached from any situation because we are always viewing things from the “big picture” perspective; nothing is truly personal in the egotistic sense of the word.
  • At the same time we feel totally close and intimate with all living beings because we realize that on the essence level we all share the same common identity. Ultimately we are all one being viewing the world from billions of pairs of different eyes!

So, from the perspective of our spiritual being we experience our life as impersonally-personal, as deeply involved and at the same time not involved, as passionate at the same time as being totally even minded.

The main take away from this is that if you practice bringing detached compassion together simultaneously in life situations, gradually improving your ability to do so, then you will consistently increase your experience of what it is like to be a spiritual being embodied in a physical body.

Divine Playfulness

One of the fundamental qualities of spirit is playfulness and a corresponding sense of humor. From its perspective the whole process of creating and evolving a universe is done as a type of game, a way of creatively expressing itself and its potential.

Consequently, if you want to increase the level of spirit in your daily life then entering into your daily tasks in the spirit of divine playfulness is a great practice to have.

Most of the time we tend to get a little too serious about things and as a result allow our life to become unnecessarily stressful and unhappy. Thinking about the challenges in your day as playful games and puzzles set you by the universe and your own spiritual being in order to help you evolve and grow is a technique that both relieves stress and enhances the deeply felt spiritual nature of your human experience.

One to Five Minute Meditation to integrate Playfulness and Detached Compassion into Your Daily Life

Step 1: Mentally select a particular life situation/challenge  that you wish to work on in the meditation. One of the characteristics of meditating with the Five Enlightened Powers technique is that you are always trying to work directly with a practical “real time” situation in your life. It should never be allowed to become totally abstract.

Step 2: Recollect your understanding of detached compassion. Open your heart to the feelings that you are experiencing and the other people that are involved AT THE SAME TIME AS mentally taking a step back and seeing what is happening from the big picture perspective. Experiment and try to feel both empathic compassion and witnessing observance SIMULTANEOUSLY. Breathe with this combined feeling experience for a while.

Step 3: Introduce playful humor to your perspective of the challenge. Think of the challenge as a game that you as a spiritual being are being set by the Universe to stretch and improve yourself as a human being. Stay with this perspective and the experiences it gives rise to for as long as you wish.

If you do this brief exercise a few times over the next week or so you will find that compassionate detachment and divine playfulness will become a real experience for you in your daily life that can help you to gain an authentic experience of what it is like to be a spiritual being appearing as a physical body!

© Toby Ouvry 2011, you are welcome to use or share this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

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Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Meditation and Psychology Motivation and scope Presence and being present Shadow meditation

The Role of Courage in Meditation

Two Types of Courage

In order to build a successful and authentic meditation practice you need courage, and the two types of courage that I want to highlight today are the courage to initiate, and the courage to persist. You need the courage to initiate to get through all the excuses and distractions that are in the way of you starting or restarting your meditation practice, and just ‘put your bum on the seat’ so to speak. You then need the courage of persistence, which is really a steady type of willpower, to simply keep going on a regular basis week in week out, so that your practice has a chance to bear fruit. Without these two types of courage, the inner clarity, wellbeing and centeredness that is within the grasp of anyone who persists in meditation will remain out of your reach.

Two Types of Meditation: Sitting With the Silence and Sitting With the Noise

When many people approach me for the first time to talk about meditation, the most common reason for them wanting to start meditating is that they want to find some headspace, some inner silence that they can relax with. They then tell me that they simply cannot stop their mind chattering, and so they find it “impossible” to actually start a meditation practice. What we need to realize (and this is really important) is that before we can enjoy “sitting with silence” we first need to enjoy the process of “sitting with the noise”, that noise being the inner noise of our mind incessantly chattering with itself!

The way to learn how to sit in silence is first to get comfortable sitting with the noise of your mind. Over time and out of your daily or regular practice of sitting with the noise of your mind you will gradually start to notice an inner silence emerging, at first only occasionally in brief flashes, but the gradually emerging more and more fully as time goes by.

The Story of Tom

Back in the 90’s, when I was a Buddhist monk teaching meditation in the north of England I had a man in his 70’s come to my meditation class called Tom. Tom was an ex coal miner. He was in constant discomfort due to rheumatism, and his wife was a mental and physical invalid (Parkinson’s disease I think) to whom Tom was the sole care giver. He arrived at my class for the first time in deep despair regarding the loss of his wife, of his own physical fitness and of many of the other good things in his life that had previously made it enjoyable. He made a courageous choice to sit down for 20minutes at the beginning of each day to meditate, a choice to which he stuck to. He used to describe his meditation to me, saying that usually for the first 5-10 minutes all of the anger, despair and sadness would well up within him about his life and about how unfair it all was. Then, at some point in the middle of his meditation, patches of silence would start to appear, and the noise in his mind would quieten. Usually, for the last few minutes of his meditation he said, he would find a state of deep peace, and those few minutes at the end of his meditation were enough to get him through the rest of the day.

Tom’s story is a simple story of courage and persistence in meditation. His description of his own meditation experience shows the truth of how very often before we experience peace in meditation we first have to sit with the “storm” so to speak. The way to meditate in silence is first to get comfortable with sitting with the noise!

Practical Work: Get Comfortable Sitting With The Noise

Pick an amount of time that you can commit to every day, from 3-20minutes. Resolve each day during that time to generate courage and self-compassion, and then simply “sit, breathe and be” with the noise inside your mind. Forget about immediately making your mind silent, just focus on sitting breathing and being with what is there, pleasant or unpleasant, happy or sad.

If you do this consistently each day the inner silence will emerge in its own time. If you make this a lifetime practice the inner silence will grow organically within your life a tree. A tree grows too slowly to spot the changes from day to day, but from month to month, year to year it grows from a fragile seedling to a mighty tree.

Long Term Results

The final thing that I want to mention about meditating on inner noise and inner silence is that eventually, after you have been meditating for quite some time you will discover that you are equally happy to experience inner noise or inner silence, you realize that they are really just two sides of the same coin and not so different in reality.

This can be difficult to grasp conceptually without experience, but an analogy may help: In the same way that a bright, sunny day and a thunderstorm are both “weather”, so a loud noisy mind and a silent one are just “mind”. If you are sitting in a strong house looking out of your window, a storm and a sunny day can both be interesting and enjoyable to experience. Similarly once we have grounded our awareness in the centre of our being through meditation, both noise and silence are equally enjoyable 😉

© Toby Ouvry 2011, 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
Awareness and insight Inner vision Primal Spirituality

Meditating with Animals and Starlight – Shamanic Journeying

Meditating with animals and animal spirits is one of the main practices found in ancient shamanic traditions worldwide. The ancient shamans were really the pioneers of the first meditation techniques and these techniques (which are mainly the technique of “inner world journeying”) are deeply embedded within the psyche of human beings, including you and me. The result of this is that most people who actually try shamanic meditation techniques actually find that they are able to gain some success quite quickly. Michael Harner, one of the pioneers of modern proto-shamanism reports that fully 85% of people participating in his shamanic journeying workshops are able to gain tangible results and experiences from their first attempts at journeying meditation.

As mentioned above, the main meditation “technique” found in shamanism is the “inner world journey” where contact with animal and ancestral spirits is sought for the purposes of gaining guidance, wisdom and healing. When meditating with animals and animal guides the sequence of the meditations would tend to go something like this:

  1. The shaman (or you and I if we are choosing to meditate in this way) goes on a journey, either within his imagination, or actually physically into a landscape to meet his or her animal guide
  2. Once the specific animal has been contacted, the shaman requests to be taught or shown the wisdom or healing method that the animal has to impart to him.  There then follows a communion between human and animal, trust is hopefully gained and the relationship proceeds. It should be noted that the animal chooses the shaman, not vice-versa. If you are met by an ant or a rat when you wanted a lion you cannot do a trade in! Experience will show you that in reality the animal that comes is invariably the best one for you and for the job at hand!
  3. A series of meditations can then be embarked upon where the mediator then goes on journeys and receives teachings, techniques and insights from the animal. Initially the meditator travels WITH the animal, but over time s/he may feel as if he is merging with the animal’s body and actually BECOMING the animal for periods of time.
  4. Over time a stable working relationship is established with the animal spirit which is mutually enriching for both parties, and the wisdom and abilities of the animal are imparted to the meditator.

What “abilities” and wisdom do you get from an animal guide?

The way in which animal guides impart wisdom is non-intellectual, experiential and mainly done through images. To take an example, if your guide is a spider, and in meditation you experience what it is like to have eight sensitive legs picking up information from all directions around you then this will give you a heightened awareness of your inner sense of touch which you can apply to appropriate life situations and challenges.

Starlight meditation with a pigeon

One animal that I have developed a relationship with since the beginning of 2010 is the pink necked green pigeon a number of which hang out in the park near my office. My animal journeying-type meditations are mostly spontaneous these days, done whilst napping or just sitting having a quiet moment. Animal journeying really just becomes an integral part of life once you have been doing it a while. So anyway, here is the last journey that I experienced with the above mentioned green pigeon, maybe a week or two ago:

I am having a ten minute meditation break in my office. My mind becomes quiet and tranquil. Quite suddenly I feel myself to be sitting in the next door park, staring up at a tree, where the green pigeon is sitting looking at me. After an initial contact we fly up into the sky going high above the cloudline.

With the clouds below us and the blue sky above, I become aware of rays of starlight flowing down from the heavens, bathing our bodies in white light. The rest of the meditation is then spent simply enjoying the starlight, absorbing it and being it. We then fly back down to the park, the vision breaks apart and I am sitting in my office meditating. I say thankyou to the green pigeon and get on with my day!

For many people the idea of meditating in this way may seem a bit far-fetched. However there is HUGE value for urbanized humans to do this type of meditation, as it re-connects us to a truly living relationship with nature and animals. The other thing that we discover is that it is actually quite easy, it is just a matter of re-awakening our visualization and imaginative skills, and pointing them in the right direction.

© Toby Ouvry 2011, you are welcome to use or reproduce this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission forst. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Inner vision Integral Awareness Presence and being present

Re-Awakening To Your Bliss

When was the last time you enjoyed bliss? By bliss I mean not just an isolated experience of pleasure in either your physical, mental or spiritual bodies, but an experience of pleasure that touched them all three levels of your being  and brought them naturally back into alignment and harmony with each other?

Perhaps when you read the paragraph above the experience of bliss seems a little bit abstract, something difficult to attain, something that happens to us only occasionally and even then caused by something outside of ourselves, something that “happens” to us, rather than something we ourselves create?.

In my opinion and experience the experience of bliss is a lot simpler and more accessible than that. As  human beings and as living creatures, we are all NATURALLY full of blissful energy. Energy is what we are, and in its natural state, our sensory, mental and spiritual energy is deeply blissful and pleasant.

So, if this is the case, why does experiencing bliss seem like such a difficult experience for us? Well, put very simply, most of us live too much of our life “in our head” or in an abstract mental state divorced from the depth and pleasure of our own natural energy. Get out of your head and step back into your moment to moment direct experience of life and bliss starts to return.

Two ways to begin re-connecting to your bliss:

1) Remembering and experience of bliss.

You can try this one right now. Recall a past experience of genuine bliss. Spend a minute or so remembering it and re-creating it in your mind, until you can feel a bit of that blissful energy in your body and soul. Now let go of the memory, and simply focus of the sensation of bliss in your body-mind. There it is, still there even though you have let go of the memory. This exercise helps show you that bliss is a state of being that is present within you right now, it is not something that you have to go out and purchase, or fight hard to obtain.

2) Taking moments in your day to touch bliss

Try and do five short activities (of one minute maximum) every day that are specifically focused on generating bliss. For example I can look up from my keyboard now and just observe the sky and the cloud formations, as I really drink in the richness of that visual experience, I can feel a natural gentle bliss beginning to flow through my being, it is not just an intellectual appreciation, it is a feeling that I can feel relaxing me and expanding into my physical, mental and spiritual being. So there you go, one minute of bliss!

Later I might give my partner or child a hug, and really focus on the experience of bliss that rises from the physical, mental and spiritual touching of two human beings. Again, another minute of natural, easy bliss.

If you like you can make a list of things that make you feel blissful and then just make sure you touch one or other of these activities a few times each day.

Life should be blissful. The interesting thing about true bliss (not to be confused with craving and attachment) is that it makes us less selfish, more giving, more sane and more happy. As it turns out the most important thing to do if you want to re-awaken your bliss is to REMEMBER it, as it is always there!

 

A final warning: Most people these days do seem to have forgotten their bliss, and are tied up in complicated mental knots. Resolve firmly not to be like them;-)

Thanks for reading, and here is to a blissful week ahead!

Toby

© Toby Ouvry 2011. You are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

PS: If you enjoyed this article and would like to find out how you can use the latest meditation technologies to enhance your bliss and joy, then click here: Digital Euphoria

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Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Presence and being present

Article: Meditating on Your Body as a Landscape, and the Beauty of Ageing

Hi Everyone,

When we see natural objects in a landscape, such as trees, rocks, cliffs, mountains, lakes and so forth, very often we judge them to be beautiful. For example when we see the way in which a trees branches and bark has twisted and morphed over time we think of this as a tree with character, a tree with a deep sense of spirit. Likewise an old but well maintained house is very easy to love and appreciate.
So, if we think of old objects and aspects of landscape as having character and beauty as they age, what about our own bodies and their signs of ageing? To appreciate the beauty of our own ageing process requires the ability to, at least temporarily, step outside of the intense way in which we have been culturally programmed to value youthful looks only, and instead look at the way in which time changes our features as being something natural, something to be embraced, and finally as something that in many ways actually enhances the character and DEEP beauty of our looks.

To start to work experientially with this idea, you might like to try the following simple meditation:
– Sit or stand in front of a mirror. Close your eyes and relax for a few breaths, as you do so think to yourself that, when you open your eyes you are going to see your face (and your body if you can see it) as a landscape.
– When you open your eyes, try for a while simply to stare at your face without thinking or analysing too much, just try and see and accept it as it is. It can be a good idea to smile gently in acceptance of yourself and what you see.
– Then, thinking of your face as a landscape, reflect on the story behind the  lines that you can see on your face (if you are still young, imagine the lines that will be there!), how each crease and bump has arisen from countless times when you have smiled or laughed, countless times when you may have experienced pain or even cried. Think of the lines on your face as beautiful in the sense that they describe the depth and character that you have created within yourself in the years that you have lived in your body. Think of the lines as describing the knowledge and wisdom that you have within your heart. Reflect that, as time goes by and these lines deepen on your face, as long as you are trying to live your best life, the deepening lines will represent the flowering of a deeper human beauty within you.
Continue this mindful exploration for as long as you like, finish when you are ready.

So, of course we don’t want to grow physically “old before our time” so to speak and I really think that daily meditation and Qi gong are one of the very best methods for staying physically and mentally young for as long as possible (Note, also free, all they require is a little gentle discipline!). However, middle and old age come to us all, and we are at a tremendous advantage in terms of personal happiness if we can embrace them openly, value them, and consciously override the fear and resistance that mass consciousness encourages us to develop toward ageing process.

Thanks for reading,

Yours in the spirit of the journey,

Toby

© Toby Ouvry 2011, 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

A Personal Reflection on How Meditation Develops Your Inner Vision and Ability to Work With Energy

Hi Everyone,

Back in 2001 when I left my life as a Buddhist Monk part of the reason was that I wanted to return to a life as an actively working artist expressing his inspiration in paintings and sculpture. As I had meditated during the 1990’s I had touched the inner formless spaces that you find in deep meditation practice, but I had also found that, from these deep formless spaces a lot of inner visions started to emerge quite spontaneously, and that they often really demanded to be expressed.

Since then I have developed a method of combining my meditation and artistic practice where I will meditate on a particular topic or subject for a while in order to receive visual and sensual impressions of its inner nature, and then I will create an art piece based around what I have seen.

In order to give an example of this, at the top of this article you can see a working sketch that I have done for an artwork that embodies the energy of The Tao, Yin-Yang and the five Chinese elements of earth, wood, metal and fire. Here is a brief description of the inner landscape from which this image arose. You can do it yourself if you like, the basic images are simple, and there is plenty of room for creative imagination and to really make the inner landscape your own:

The Asian Tree and the Yin-Yang courtyard.

Before meditating set your intention to travel, within the reality of your creative imagination, to an inner landscape that embodies the spiritual energy of the Tao, Yin-Yang and five elements.

Spend a short while relaxing, focusing on your breathing and stilling your sense of time, space and energy.

After a while you sense yourself within what you intuitively sense is an Asian landscape, in front of you is your “Asian tree”, a tree embodying that embodies the energy of Asian spirituality and that you have a particular inner connection to. Spend a while seeing, feeling and sensing the landscape and the tree; the texture of the bark, the colour of the leaves, the time of day and so forth…

To one side of you in your landscape you see an ancient courtyard. Upon its old wooden doors is inscribed a yin yang symbol.

Passing through the doors to the interior of the courtyard you sense yourself entering into a state of deep peace. The roof of the courtyard is open to the sky. In the centre of the courtyard is a yin-yang symbol made of living light. The light part of the symbol is fed by a stream of bright white star light that comes down from the sky. The dark part of the symbol is fed by a stream of dark light rising from the depths of the earth. Within the courtyard are many beautiful ancient objects, such as bonsai trees, crystals and gemstones. In particular there are sculptures of four creatures:

  • A dragon, embodying the energy of the wood element, of spring, air and morning
  • A phoenix embodying the energy of the fire element, of summer and the noonday sun
  • A tiger embodying the energy of the metal element, of autumn and evening
  • A turtle embodying the energy of the water element, of winter and of night time.

Each of these statues, although static seems to be alive and radiates its elemental energy in the form of colour. These colours gather around the central yin-yang symbol, flowing around it in an ever changing flow of radiant elemental light.

Deep within the earth beneath the yin-yang symbol is a cauldron, which embodies the earth element and is the source from which the other four elements arise.

Simply sit and relax in this beautiful peaceful space, and as you do so feel the yin-yang and elemental balance within your body mind come back into balance. As your body-mind comes into balance, feel your inner being becoming still and spacious like a deep lake.

Thanks for reading,

Yours in the spirit of the rich landscape of the imagination,

Toby

PS: You can see more of my artwork in the most recent post on my Soul Portrait site:

Slideshow of Soul Portraits From the First Three Months of 2011

PPS: If you are not familiar with the 5 elements and want a bit more information, you can find more in my past article on my Qi gong blog:

Meditating on the Five Chinese Elements as a Method Achieving Harmony and Balance Through Dependent Relationship.

Similarly, you can also find a previous Yin-Yang meditation there:

The Meaning of the Term “The Great Mother” and its Relationship to Yin and Yang

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Presence and being present

Meditation for Tapping Into The Natural Creativity of Your Mind

Hi Everyone,

Do you consider yourself to be naturally creative? The following meditation is a simple technique for tapping into awareness of the natural creative quality of the space within our mind, and learning to direct and harness it in a positive way in our life.

Sit down and take a few deep breaths, relax your body-mind as you breathe out, feeling tension leave you on your outward breath.

Now start to become aware of the space within your mind, over a period of time, try and make the inner space within your mind as big as possible, imagine it becoming as big as the sky, or as big as the whole Universe.

Now look at this space in your mind. Initially it seems lifeless, just an empty open space, quite pleasant and peaceful, but not much else. However, if you start to look a little more closely at this space, it is this inner space itself from which all the thoughts, images and feelings within your mind are emerging. If you watch closely in this way you start to see that the “empty” space of your mind is actually a continuously creative source of energy, thinking, images and feeling within you.

Once you have observed this, focus once more upon the inner space within your mind, this time recognizing that this space is a creative, living source of energy, ideas and life force for you. How does it feel to experience directly your own natural inner creative potential? Our creative power can seem like such an elusive beast, yet actually here It is, under our nose all the time within the inner space or formless nature of our consciousness!

Most of the time we don’t use the creative energy of our inner space very well, because as soon as it arises we unconsciously direct it towards old, familiar patterns of thinking and feeling, so the thoughts in our mind don’t feel very creative or inspired at all. Indeed it can feel like our thinking and feeling energy are a burden, a stuck record in our mind that always remains the same whatever we try and do to change it.

Meditating on developing a more lucid and heightened awareness of the creative nature of the space within our mind encourages us to start making use of it in a more flexible, useful fashion, allowing us to respond to the challenges of our life in a more spontaneous and liberated manner. If we do not take responsibility for making good use of the creative energy within our mind, then we can find ourselves oppressed by this creative energy, as again and again it flows into thought patterns that are unhealthy and create feelings of stress, anxiety, fear and unhappiness.

Here’s to enjoying the creative inner space within all of our minds!

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Toby

PS: This weeks meditation class topic:

You are multi-talented! Meditating on multiple-intelligences as a way of finding inner wholeness

PPS: Related articles that might be of interest to you:

Nurturing your natural intelligence and natural dignity

Finding your deep creativity (in three easy steps)

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Motivation and scope

The Story Of A Chance Meeting With A Meditating Taxi Driver – Taking Other Meditation Practitioners As Your Object of Meditation

The physiological and psychological benefits of meditation have been very well documented by science over the last fifty years (the best summary of this scientific research can be found in “The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation” by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan). There is now really no doubt that daily meditation practice makes you look younger, age slower, feel more happy, improves brain function and is THE best method for accelerating personal growth, whatever your station in life or personal philosophy.

Meditation is free, and need take only ten minutes of your time each day, all it requires is a personal commitment based around an understanding of the benefits that you can get from it. I find that one of the best ways of keeping myself motivated to meditate is to look at other mediators and appreciate the very clear benefits of meditation that they are getting.

The other week I was leaving a clients office, and flagged down a cab and got in. The driver was an Indian, I thought perhaps thirty something. As I sat in the back I was really impressed by the positive ambiance in the taxi, and the courteous manner of the driver. We got talking, and very quickly we made the connection that we were both mediators. He talked enthusiastically about his (Hindu) practice, and I shared a little about my own practice and occupation as a meditation coach and artist.

I thought he was thirty something, he turned out to be mid-fifties.

I thought maybe he was some kind of celibate practitioner living in the world and going back home to meditate alone at night, turns out he had five kids, three already at University.

I ask him how he managed financially to raise five kids on a taxi drivers pay? I can’t remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that people plan a bit too complicated in their financial planning these days, and if you live a simple life, you can provide ok for your family even if your income is not huge.

I left the taxi thinking I really want some of what he has got! Then I remembered, actually I have got some of what he has got, and rejoiced in the pleasure of meeting someone who was such a good living example of what happens when you commit yourself to a daily meditation practice amidst the busyness of a contemporary daily life!

If you have been thinking about starting a meditation practice, or have let your practice slip of late, have a think about friends and acquaintances who you know that meditate and as a result seem to carry a lot of good energy with them at all times. You want a bit of that don’t you? Time to get going!

© Toby Ouvry 2011. You are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Presence and being present

Are You A Seeker Or A Practitioner?

You know when you have become a meditation practitioner when in times of crisis you turn to the states of mind that you have been cultivating in meditation to find stability, calm and clarity. The fact that you are able to use the mind-states that you focus on in meditation to solve actual challenges in your life indicates that your meditation has become a part of you, and that you are a practitioner of the art of meditation.

You are a meditation seeker if you meditate sometimes but, when the S&*#! really hits the fan in your life you basically revert to the old habits and coping strategies (or non-coping strategies!) that you used before you started to meditate. In this sense a meditation seeker is kind of like someone who is window shopping or superficially dabbling in the idea of changing their consciousness, but has not yet really committed to the process of transformation. As a result their meditation practice remains skin deep, and not effective when you really need it to be.

So, which one are you? What is the next step that you need to take to transform yourself from a seeker into a practitioner?

Thanks for reading!

Toby

PS: Click HERE to read Toby’s recent article on “Starbathing Meditation” on his Qi Gong blog

© Toby Ouvry 2011, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com