evolution – Toby Ouvry Meditation

Gratitude is mentioned a lot as a spiritual practice, and with good reason as it is an important one. What you may not have heard before is that gratitude goes through stages of growth, it is not just one practice that stays the same thru-out our journey, it evolves as we evolve. With this in mind here are three basic stages of gratitude that we need to pass through:

Ingratitude or an absence of gratefulness – At this stage our ego is very contracted and small in its thinking, the things that we have to be grateful for we very quickly take for granted, we have no idea or feel for the interconnectedness of the web of life and the kindness that we are shown directly and indirectly by so many beings on so many levels. We live our lives in a state of perpetual discontent and “lack”. Our mind is like a closed window to the light and grace of gratitude.
Conscious gratefulness for the manifest good in our life – The second stage of gratefulness is where we have developed some form of evolutionary aspiration in our mind, and we recognize the benefits, both for ourself and others, of appreciating the good, the beautiful and the true in our life. Each day is spent consciously taking into account what we have to be grateful for and reminding ourselves not to slip back into a state of taking-things-for-granted-ness. This stage of gratefulness sees a battle between the consciously grateful mind that is growing and evolving in our life, and the old ungrateful ego-contraction that it is trying to replace (and that tends to be stubborn as a mule!)
Spontaneous gratefulness – This third stage of gratefulness arises from a direct perception and experience of our living relationship as an individual to the evolving Life-force of the Universe. More traditionally you could call this a gratitude for being in a living, participating relationship to God and the wonder of creation.

Whether you choose the words Life, the Universe, God or otherwise, the subjective experience here is basically a spontaneous sense of gratitude that arises effortlessly due to our constant connection and ‘simpatico’ with the dancing energies of life and the universe as they continue on the journey and adventure of evolution. At this stage gratitude has become a state of being rather than something that we have to battle constantly to maintain.

Initially we have to work quite hard to journey from stages one to stage two. After a period of years, depending upon our effort we will find ourself starting to ‘peak experience’ into level three for short periods of time, then regressing back. Eventually we are able to stabilize our mind at level three as our “default gratitude attitude”, at which point we can truly have said to have a realization of gratitude.

Upcoming events with Toby:

Tuesday 7^th September evening meditation class – Spiritual intelligence as a path to personal to personal, integrated enlightenment

New series of Three Body Qi Gong™ classes in September and October

Article on “What is Three Body Qi Gong™ (and why you should be interested in practicing it)”

For many people interest in meditation comes from the stress of the prevalence of doing and achieving in contemporary society. Because there is so much busy-ness and activity, we feel a need to retreat into a state of pure being-ness where we can rest and recuperate our energies before returning to the fray of our daily life. Meditation provides us with regular contact with such a being-state.

For such a person the balance of doing and being is found by oscillating between the activity of their daily life and tasks, and their daily meditation practice when they emphasize relaxation, beingness, non-doing and non-thinking.

However, if such a person persists in their meditation, there will come a point where they will start to observe that the state of being-ness that they experience in meditation starts to bleed into their active states; they are able to maintain a sense of centre and balance even when under stress or in conditions of relatively frenetic activity.

At this point the meditator has evolved their sense of doing and being. What they have started to see is that doing is really a sub-set or sub-category of being. Now in their life they have two types of being-ness; in meditation they practice pure-being, and in their daily life they practice doing-being. Doing-being is a far less stressful way of doing things than a state of doing that is disconnected to our sense of being.

If the person persists in their practice then increasingly they will find that their actions become a vehicle for their being-ness, that is to say that the actions of the person are always accompanied by a certain quality and depth which makes the actions themselves causes of happiness and balance.

In summary, three stages of the evolution of the balance between doing and being:

Meditation as a way of cultivating our being-ness so as to balance all the busy-ness, stress and action in our life
Doing becomes a sub-set or sub-category of being; In meditation we practice pure being-ness, in daily life we practice doing-being
Doing becomes an expression of our being