Tag: insight

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A Mind of Ease Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Motivation and scope Presence and being present

How to Meditate on Gratitude

Why Should we Meditate on Gratitude? What are we Trying to Achieve?

The function  and purpose of meditating on gratitude is to train our attention in such a way that even when we are under pressure and feeling unhappy in some way we never lose sight of the things in our life that are there for us to appreciate, value and feel grateful for. Moreover, when we are not feeling unduly under pressure or unhappy, the practice of gratitude helps us to substantially enhance and stabilize our happiness and sense of wellbeing.
Meditating on gratitude is a way of leveraging more fully upon the existing good in your life. By consciously noting and appreciating that which is there to be thankful for, the amount of happiness that you get from that person, object of event increases exponentially. Whenever we take someone or something/someone for granted we minimize the amount of wellbeing that we can derive from our relationship to it or them.

Success in Meditating on Gratitude.
One of the main signs of success in our meditation on gratitude comes when we start to realize that there is something that we can be appreciating and feeling happy about in each and every moment of our life. There is in fact an abundance of things to feel positive about in everyone’s life, it is just a matter of training our attention through meditation to be aware of it!
Our biological brain is hardwired toward picking our faults, threats and dangers in our life. This was good for our survival when we were fighting of bears and tigers and other tribes, but in today’s modern world this tendency to pick out the negative serves most often to inhibit our quality of life and constrict the amount of potential happiness that we experience at any given moment. The meditation on gratitude is designed t remedy this issue.

How to Meditate on Gratitude.
The perception can be that meditation is an activity that you do sitting down in silence, and then once you get up you then start doing something else. In reality however good meditation involves training our attention through-out the day to focus on objects that make us calm, peaceful and happy.
Correspondingly this meditation in gratitude is something that you can in the midst of your daily activities in spare moments.

The Basic Practice:Finding short periods of time to come back to a mind of gratitude and appreciation.
Think about the way in which your day is structured and try and come up with 5-6 one minute slots where you can consciously come back to a mind of gratitude, and focus on it for just that very short period of time. By doing this over the period of the week you will start to create some strong practical habits in your mind that naturally incline toward valuing, appreciating and feeling grateful for the good in your life.

What Should I feel Grateful For?
There are almost innumerable things that we can choose to be grateful for, three main areas are:
– Gratitude appreciation for ourself and our own actions. Give yourself a regular pat on the back for the positive efforts you are making!
– Gratitude and appreciation for others in our life who help or assist us in some way.
– Gratitude and appreciation for the Earth, for nature and the opportunity to participate in life

Some Samples From my own journal
Of course there are many other different things that we can focus on as objects of gratitude and rejoicing. One thing that I find really powerful is actually writing down the thing that I am feeling grateful for, either actually at the time or later in the day. Writing down our object of gratitude makes it really stand out in the field of our awareness, and therefore has a powerful and accelerated effect upon our development of gratitude (and yes, writing can be very much a part of our meditation practice!).
Here are some examples from my own journal over a twenty four hour period:

9th September

3.15pm – I am waiting for my daughters’ bus to arrive, there is a pleasant breeze blowing through the bushes and flowers, the sky is cool and overcast. Next to me on the wall a little family of sparrows observes me closely whilst preening themselves. I take a moment to appreciate and soak in all of these gifts from the natural world, freely available to me as long as I care to notice.

6.15pm – Whilst waiting at the bus stop on the way to the shopping centre I took a minute to appreciate the trees around me, and the calming energy that they gave me at a time when I was feeling a little bit irritable. I also took the time to notice the sun setting behind the clouds and value how pleasant it can be to view the light of the sun when it is hidden behind light cloud.

9.30pm – Took time after my evening meditation to appreciate myself for making the time and effort to meditate. I also spent a short period of time enjoying and appreciating the evening moon and its cooling and calming light!

12.30am – Reflected on the enjoyment that both I and my daughter are getting from reading “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” together each evening.

10th September

8.30am – Took a few moments whilst watering the plants on our roof to appreciate and feel gratitude for the good energy that they give to us and the way in which they visually enhance our living space.

11.15am – Spent a few moments appreciating myself for having done the vacuuming and other cleaning tasks around the house, as well as feel grateful to the makers of the vacuum cleaner for saving me time by making such an effective machine! Finally felt grateful for our pleasant apartment.

2pm – Felt gratitude for the excellent Japanese vegetarian meal that I had just participated in, and for the efforts of the people who had created such an excellent alternative Japanese vegetarian restaurant!

4.15pm – After spending an hour taking research photos for my new project, I took a moment to feel grateful for the fact that I have such a relatively large amount of time to devote to my artistic practice in my life.

As you can see none of the above are hugely unusual or remarkable events. Enjoying the daily happiness that gratitude can give is simply a matter of training your attention to look in the right directions every day!

© 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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A Mind of Ease Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Integral Meditation Meditation and Psychology Motivation and scope

On the Three Types of Relational Love and How to Integrate Them Into Your Life

What does it mean to be expressing love fully in your relationships? There are many ways to answer this question, but one answer deriving from classical sources is that you should aim to have three types of love functioning fully in your day to day interactions with others and yourself. These types of love are eros, filia and agape.

Here is a brief explanation of what each of them are in the context of relationships

Eros – This put simply is the creative spark that arises between two people or between ourselves and  something that we love. This is most commonly thought of as the romantic love between lovers which over time may lead to the biologically creative result of a baby, but it can just as validly be understood as  other forms of creativity. For example an intellectual spark between two people in a platonic relationship that inspires both of them to become more creative, dynamic and inspired in their life and work.
Most commonly this type of love is felt between a man and a woman (in a sexual or non-sexual context), because the interaction of masculine and feminine energies is an important aspect of the arising of eros. However, between two people of the same sex who both have well developed masculine and feminine energies it is perfectly possible to have a very inspiring “erotic” relationship, although this has a quite different meaning and connotation from the common usage of erotic!
Essentially to have eros in your relationships means that they are regularly supplying you with a source of creative inspiration in your life. Conversely to give filialin your relationships means to provide others with creative inspiration.

Filia – Filial love is classically the love between siblings, but it is also a common way of bonding between friends. Here the two people find strong ways of non-sexual bonding with each other that provides a source of mutual support, enjoyment and potential growth for each other. The ideal with filial love is to have the both parties on an equal footing in the relationship and a sense of mutual respect.
So, with images love the ideas is to be seeking and finding respect, support, self esteem and enjoyment from your friendships, and likewise seek to give these things to the people whom you share your life with.

Agape – One of the archetypal images of agape is the mother and child (eg: Mary with the baby Jesus), but more broadly speaking agape is empathetic or compassionate love. Agape seeks to understand and sympathize with its object like a parent caring for a child, seeking as Saint Francis would say “To understand rather than to be understood”. To give agape in your relationships with others is a wonderful thing, and likewise learning to receive it is an important source of sustenance.

So, using these three type of love as our model, our relationships should contain healthy elements of giving and receiving the following:

Eros – Creative inspiration.
Filia – Support, enjoyment, bonding, esteem building.
Agape – Empathy, compassion and healthy sympathy.

Working with these three types of love

Here are some possible ways to start working practically with these three types of love in your relationships:

  • Firstly we can simply look at our current relationships and appreciate the people who are currently providing us with these types of love in our life right now.
  • Secondly we can look for ways that we can actively increase the amount of eros, agape and filia to those we love.
  • Thirdly if it feels as if there is something lacking in your relationship with someone close to you, reflect upon which of the three types of love is most lacking. Having had an insight on this, then try and increase that particular type of love in the relationship through your actions.
  • Finally, practice agape, filia and eros toward yourself each day. Support yourself, inspire yourself, understand and have compassion for yourself!

© 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 Inner vision Meditation and Psychology Motivation and scope

The Three Purposes of Meditation

Different people come to meditation for different reasons. In recent times meditation has come into public awareness as a method for dealing with many stresses and strains that contemporary life places us under.

Traditionally meditation has been used as a method for communing with the divine and seeking enlightenment.

A third use of meditation has been as a method for building the power of our mind and thereby helping us to fulfill our potential in whatever our chosen field of excellence is. For example athletes use meditation as a way to enhance their performance, and people studying for exams can use meditation as a method of enhancing their mental clarity and thereby their ability to retain the information they need to remember.

This article will look at the purposes and benefits of meditation under three headings:

1)      Meditation as therapy
2)      Meditation as an art
3)      Meditation as a spiritual path.

What is meditation?
Before we get into the three purposes of meditation, here are two definitions of meditation that people may find helpful:

Meditation is any method or technique that trains our awareness and attention to focus upon a positive object. This definition can be applied to meditation both as a formal, focused exercise, but also as a general practice whilst going about our daily life. A “positive object” here means any object that when we focus upon it with our awareness causes our mind to become cal and peaceful.
– Meditation is a mental practice that causes our mind and body to tend toward union or singularity. Normally in our daily life our mind tends toward distraction, movement and diversity. Meditation is  any exercise that helps us to consciously reduce the amount of distractions and mental busyness in our head, and helps us to become lucid, focused, clear minded and unified.

I could obviously talk quite a lot more about these definitions, but I wanted to include them in this article so that we can now talk about the three purposes of meditation in a less abstract manner below.

1) Meditation as Therapy – When we talk about meditation as a therapy, we are talking about the capacity of meditation to fix and/or help to heal the parts of our mind that are “broken” or otherwise dysfunctional. Meditation helps to ease chronic anxiety, unrelenting mental busyness, obsessive focusing on the negative and other afflictions that directly and indirectly sabotage the fundamental happy and easy daily functioning of our body and mind. In this sense meditation can be seen as a therapeutic activity.

2) Meditation as an Art – Once we have achieved a basic level of healing and functionality in our mind through meditation we can then start to use it as a creative method for developing our inner freedom and autonomy. Living a life of inner freedom means developing the following inner qualities through our meditation practice; awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.

Awareness, to quote the psychologist Eric Berne is the “The capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one’s own way, and not the way one was taught”. This means developing the art of seeing our present moment experience directly without past memories getting in the way and interfering.

Spontaneity means to be able to respond to life’s experiences in a way that is creative and intelligently improvisatory, rather than mechanical and without feeling.

Intimacy means to feel life deeply and authentically without looking to continually place barriers and defense mechanisms between yourself and what is going on in front of you. To practice intimacy means to not be afraid of one’s own vulnerability and sensitivity, and learning when to expose it in appropriate, healthy places.

The meditative practices of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy are all art-forms that greatly increase the amount of freedom, joy, love and creativity that we have in our life.

3) Meditation as a Spiritual Path – Meditation as a spiritual path is the traditional use of meditation but it does not have to be experienced in an overtly religious context. What we mean here by a “spiritual path” is that the process of meditation helps us to answer two very important questions in our life, namely:

  • Who am I? 
  • What is of ultimate concern or importance in my life? 

With meditation as a spiritual path we are daily using our meditation practice to come back to what is most important to us, and getting in touch with out deepest sense of self, the person that we feel we truly are.

In conclusion
These three purposes of meditation are useful meditation objects in themselves. Careful contemplation of them will reveal directly useful and practical purposes of our own meditation practice in our daily life. The good news is that if we practice meditation in a skillful and balanced way, then we can practice all three purposes at once. We can reduce our stress and heal our inner wounds, we can develop our inner freedom and creativity, and we can remain in touch with that which is most important and fundamental to us in our life.

PS: You can see a previous article that I wrote on these three purposes of meditation HERE.

© 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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A Mind of Ease Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology

Seven Ways of Creating a Mind of Ease and Inner Wellbeing

One of my favorite personal growth “formulas” was coined by a guy called Timothy W Gallway (of “The Inner Game of Tennis” fame) who said that performance = potential minus interference. What this formula points out is that as often as not is we ourselves that get in our own way at least as much if not more than anything else in our outer environment.

So, the first stage of getting rid of our “inner interference” is learning to create a mind of ease and relaxation. Here are seven short meditative methods for creating a mind of ease and relaxation. They can be done on their own, either as super-short practices done for as little time as 15 seconds, or they can be done in combination with each other, taking a few moments to focus on each one, and then moving onto the next. Here they are:

  1. Create a time for safe space – For a specific period of time consciously recognize that you are at this moment not in any manifest physical danger. Make a decision also to abstain from inner criticism of yourself, and try to feel the Earth and your immediate environment as friendly rather than hostile. Allow your mind to rest in the safe physical and psychological space of these three recognitions for the time you have set aside.
  2. Extend a feeling of warmth and friendliness to yourself – Chose to be a friend to yourself. Focusing on your self-sense, gently extend a feeling of warmth and welcome to it. Relax as deeply as you can into this warm feeling of liking who you are, just for now!
  3. Find something positive to focus on – Mentally search through the last 24 hours. Find some positive achievement, experience of good fortune, recognition of a kindness that you have given someone or other such positive event. Having found such a positive thought focus on it, developing a sense of appreciation and enjoyment for what has transpired.
  4. Concentrate on a single object for a short while – Take a single object such as the breathing and focus on it exclusively for a short period of time. You can temporarily forget about the causes of your stress simply by learning to focus. your mind in this way.
  5. Utilize the exhalation – Following on from point 4, we can combine our focused concentration with a deeper release of stress by imagining inner tension leaving our body and mind on the exhalation. There is a natural releasing or letting go mechanism that happens in our body when we breathe out that we can leverage on consciously.
  6. Abstain from inner criticism – Expanding a little upon point 1, we can set aside a short period of time where we decide that no critical thoughts about ourself are allowed in our mind. Discover that it is possible to shut the door on self criticism for a while, and enjoy the inner space and ease that is created! Excluding critical thoughts of others can also be included in this section.
  7. Be aware of the space between your thoughts – Normally we focus on the content of our consciousness, the thoughts and feelings in our mind. In doing so we become completely oblivious ever present “inner space” that is constantly there in our mind. Setting aside time to focus exclusively upon the space between our thoughts helps us to find a source of wellbeing that is there all the time but that we often overlook!

Meditation is a mind that focuses on a positive object, an object that when we focus on it makes us peaceful and happy. All of the seven points above are simple objects of meditation that, through focusing on we can begin to build our own mind of ease.

A final point, you may find that when you try to use any of the above techniques and you find your mind resisting. For example you may  find that it is very difficult to develop a feeling of liking yourself when you try technique 2. If this happens then rather than struggling and trying to force yourself to get to that feeling simply be aware of your resistance to liking who you are, and take that resistance as your object of meditation. Accepting inner resistance that you encounter in meditation is one way of beginning to let go if the inner tension and blockages that are causing the resistance in the first place.

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Awareness and insight Inner vision Meditation and Art Meditation and Psychology

Reflecting on the Relationship Between Art and Meditation

Here are three areas and life lessons that meditating and making art both teach:

Close Observation

Most of us think we know what the world looks like, but if we examine this assumption we learn it is not as true as we thought. For example if you try and draw a tree you discover that your idea of what a tree looks like and the way in which it actually exists physically in space are very different, and that in order to get to the “real” tree and draw it accurately you have to let go of your idea of the tree and look closely and clearly with your eyes.
In a similar way we may think that we know ourselves well, we think we know who we are. However, when we start meditating, which is partly the discipline of witnessing and observing our mind and self, we discover that the person we think we are and the person that we actually behave like are actually very different. Meditation teaches us the bitter-sweet art of seeing who we REALLY are and trying to bring our self-image and behavior into an authentic and genuine communion.
Both making art and meditation have made me find simple objects and activities very interesting and fulfilling as there is always endless detail and nuance to observe and enjoy. Last Friday I took a bit of time off and went to sit down in East Coast Park and just look at the sea, listen to the wind in the trees and observe the play of the afternoon sunlight across the landscape. I can’t imagine a much more fulfilling time.

How to See Through Difficult Times

If you have ever tried to create a piece of art work you will know that often (though not always) there is a time when everything about the picture seems horrible, ugly and awful, and where the critical voice in your mind is telling you that you may as well give up and trash the whole thing, and that you also may as well give up art too. After a while as an artist you come to expect this ‘phase’ in your work to complete a piece, and you know that the main thing to do is “keep calm and carry on”, steadily working through this phase. You learn that it is part of a natural cycle, and when it happens it just indicates that you are at a certain stage of the creative process. You don’t panic, after a while it can even be enjoyable in a funny way.
Similarly as a meditator you learn that sometimes your mind just goes through dark phases. Sometimes you know the reason, sometimes not, but either way you come to understand through sitting with these dark phases in meditation that they come and go. They are just a part of the processes of life, like the weather; sometimes sunny, sometimes thunderclouds. Either way there is no need to panic, just be present with it and allow it to work itself through your system in a non-harmful way.

Understanding How Beauty is Both Spontaneously Ever Present, and at the Same Time has to be Worked at and Re-created all the Time

As an artist you learn through observing things from multiple angles and points of view that everything has its own type of beauty. As a result, wherever you look you can appreciate something about what you see. At the same time actually creating a  beautiful and authentic piece of art work is a very demanding endeavor requiring a lot of effort physically, mentally and spiritually of the artist. In this way beauty for the artist is something that s/he can always see in what s/he observes, but at the same time the creation of beauty is always effortful and challenging.
Really with meditation practice it works the same way, after meditating for some time you get to a stage where even if there is pain and confusion in your mind, there is also an ever present stillness and beauty that is available to you at all times, you just have to remember it. However, in another sense the daily process of thinking positive, acting out of integrity, creating harmonious relationships often seem to take just as much work and effort as they always did!
This seems to be the paradox of both outer and inner beauty; they are ever present and yet they demand constant effort to create and recreate. However, being in touch with the ever present aspect of inner and outer beauty (which are really states of being) helps us to keep even-minded amidst the struggles and strains of trying to effort-fully create a beautiful inner and outer life for ourselves and others.

© 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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A Mind of Ease Awareness and insight Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques

Going Beyond the “Do This” and “Do That” Mentality

My daughter has just turned six, and one of the things that I have noticed about our relationship recently is that it has been possible for me to start changing my relationship to her from a lot of “do this” and “do that” instructions to a much more process based “Why don’t you try this?” or “What will happen if you think about it this way?”. Her gradual increase in age and maturity, combined with my own gradual maturing as a parent has allowed our relationship to evolve from being somewhat dictatorial to much more co-creative.

How we often use the “do this / do that” mentality with regard to the way we treat ourselves
One of the things that has struck me when thinking about the changes in my relationship to my daughter is how often we get caught up in a “do this” and “do that” relationship to ourself. “Instead of  approaching situations and challenges in our life with an open, flexible and enquiring mind, often we will simply react in a pre-programmed way, based around our past experience. Internally we order ourselves around with no real sensitivity to what is actually happening and this kills our ability to respond authentically and creatively.
For example I may find myself mentally punishing myself for not having made more effective use of my time during the day. The conversation goes something like:
“You should not have got sidetracked by this, you should not have wasted time doing that, you don’t deserve to relax this evening because you have not achieved what you wanted…” the instructions and judgments go on and on…

What we can replace the Do this/do that mentality with
One of the things that we are trying to create through a meditation practice is enough self-awareness  to be able to respond to our immediate circumstances as they are, without projecting judgments or old values onto them. What we are trying to do is replace the automatic “do this” and “do that” voice of our judgments and past mental programs with questions like:
“What is this situation showing me or offering to me?”
“What are the real emotions behind what is being said here?”
“What is the most creative thing I can do in this situation?”
“What is my most authentic response to what is happening here?
By bringing questions such as these to the forefront of our mind in our daily life we can start to over ride the automatic “do this” and “do that” orders coming from our subconscious mind and start to live a life that involves more freedom, more authenticity and more happiness.

Awareness exercise:
The art of going beyond our “do this” and “do that” mentality lies in replacing these inner orders with a question that stimulates our enquiring mind and creativity. The next time you can hear and feel your old judgments barking orders at you as you try and cope with a life challenge, consciously place this question in the centre of your awareness:
“What is this situation helping me to see and learn?”
Try and stay with this question for a few minutes and observe the creative ideas that start to emerge from the inner space that the question allows.

PS: Heads up on the new series of meditation classes starting at the beginning of September 2011 “Meditations for Creating a Mind of Ease, Appreciation and Positive Intention”. Follow link for details!
© 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 Inner vision Primal Spirituality

Meditating on the Four Seasons and Four Stages of Our Life

I’ve been back in the UK now for a few days, enjoying the particular ambience of the English summer time, all the birds in the garden are looking extremely plump and well fed, the flowers are all in bloom and the dragon flies are flying around the pond, showing off their beautiful green and red colourings.

One of the major “diagrams” or maps of the spiritual path as explained in the western tradition is the Wheel of Life, which essentially consists of a circle with four points on it. These four points correspond to the following basic energies and directions:

North: Winter, night time and the earth element
East: Spring, morning and the air element
South: Summer, noonday and the fire element
West: Autumn, evening and the water element.

In addition the four seasons on the wheel spring, summer, autumn and winter also correspond to the four stages of a human (or any other creature’s) life, namely childhood, youth (young adult), mature adult (parental) and old age.  From this we can start to see that our own life moves in a natural cycle that is very much like the four seasons of the year, and also the four stages of a twenty four hour cycle; morning (childhood), noon (young adult), afternoon (maturity) and night (old age).
In the picture that I have posted with this article you can see these correspondences depicted in an artwork that I have created:

  • A pathway in the north (top of picture) leads to a winter landscape
  • To the right hand side is a pathway opening to a spring landscape
  • At the bottom is a gateway opening to a summer landscape
  • On the left hand side there is a pathway leading to an autumn landscape.

Meditation on breathing with the four seasons and stages of life
From the above we can see that our life, like the nature of which we are a part moves in cycles. We can begin to develop a subjective feel for this by meditating in the following manner:

  • As you begin to inhale feel the awakening of new life in your body-mind, like the energy of spring and childhood within you.
  • As you progress through the second half of the inhalation, feel the awakening of the energy of summer and the prime of your youthful-self awakening within you.
  • As you pause briefly at the top of your breath feel your body-mind  to be full of vital energy and life-force, like a landscape in mid-summer.
  • As you begin exhaling feel yourself connecting to the energy of autumn and maturity.
  • As you move into the second half of your exhalation, feel yourself connecting to the season of winter, and to the wisdom of old age.
  • As your breath ceases at the bottom of your exhalation, meditate briefly on death, and the end of the brief life cycle of your last breath. Note how it is from this ‘death’ that a cycle of new life emerges with the beginning of the next new breath.
  • Continue this cycle of breathing for as many breaths as feels comfortable, and end with a period of silence, stillness and deep calm.

This is a nice meditation to do outdoors in direct contact with nature and the seasons themselves. Also, contemplation of the ‘Four Seasons’ artwork that I have done can also be a helpful tool for getting a feel for how the four seasons and stages of our life flow together in a circle, one after the other, and how we can create this cycle of energy within ourselves with each in-breath and out-breath.

© 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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Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques spiritual intelligence

Meditation on Connecting to your Magical Self or Inner Magician

I have recently been working on re-titling and writing notes for some artworks that I completed back in 2005. The first of these, “The Magician” you can see in the image on this page. The image itself is meant as a way of visually connecting to our “Inner Magician”. The inner magician is that part of our inner self that is both creative and magical within us, and that if we harness it effectively has the power to change our daily life and experience for the better.

So, who or what is our inner magician? Here is a working definition:

“The higher expression of our inner magician is that part of self that is able to work with the higher, deeper and spiritualized expression of magic.”

Magic in this context means the following:

  1. Being able to affect or change one level of our reality by working on it from the level or plane of reality above it.
  2. Engaging our creative imagination vividly and consciously to “sculpt” our experience of any given situation for the better.
  3. Not being content to let good ideas remain in our head, but actively finding ways of expressing those ideas concretely in our daily life.

Let’s take a closer look at these three aspects of magic:

1) Being able to affect or change one level of our reality by working on it from the level or plane of reality above it.
In its simplest terms this means that you use your  mind and thoughts to change your physical and emotional reality for the better, and you use your spiritual or intuitive mind (which operates on a level beyond thought) to change your thinking patterns for the better.

A simple example might be this:
– If I experience physical pain because of an injury or illness I use my thinking mind to remain positive, telling myself that the pain won’t last forever, and encouraging myself to practice patience. This is using my thoughts to positively affect my physical reality.
– If I find myself having repetitive negative thoughts about my pain and illness, then I can temporarily suspend my thinking (this is really where meditation comes into the picture) and move into a state of mind beyond thought. Doing this enables me to release the momentum of all the negative thoughts that I was having, so that my mind becomes a “clean slate” so to speak which I can then replace the negative thoughts with more appropriate and affirmative ones.
So this is a very simple example, thinking mind works magic on physical world and emotions, spiritual mind works to affect and control the thinking mind.

2) Engaging our creative imagination vividly and consciously to “sculpt” our experience of any given situation for the better.
We think that there is a concrete reality “out there” waiting to be discovered that has some kind of fixed or inherent qualities. Actually this is not quite the case. What happens is that the “bare facts” our outer reality meets our mind, which then imagines or projects its own ideas onto that outer reality.
From this we can see that what we experience in life has something to do with the “facts” of our life, but equally as much it also has to do with our imaginative response to those facts. To work with magic is to realize the power of your imagination to co-create any given situation in your life, and leverage on that imaginative power effectively. For more on this you can read my past article “Taking your creative imagination as your object of meditation”.
Our imagination is deeply and powerfully magical, it can create great art and great bliss, or it can create our own private hell.

3) Not being content to let good ideas remain in our head, but actively finding ways of expressing those ideas concretely in our daily life.
Our magical self realizes that any good idea that we understand, create or hear about is an INJUNCTION. An injunction is somewhere between an invitation and an obligation. So this means that when we have or hear a great idea we recognize that our understanding of this idea is INVITING us to use the idea as a practical tool with which we can change our life for the better. By virtue of our understanding of the idea we could also say that we have an obligation to try and integrate that idea into our life. If we just let that idea remain in our intellect that would be a great waste right? Many of us are guilty of this; having great insights and ideas about our life, but not implementing them, thus wasting them.
So, our magical self or inner magician is delighted when good idea comes our way and immediately seeks ways to start expressing these ideas in a practical way to change our life for the better.

Practical Work
If you want to follow up on this article on a practical level, here are two suggestions:
1) Use the image above as an object of meditation in order to help you to intuitively connect to your own “Inner Magician”.
2) As soon as you have or understand a good idea intellectually, immediately ask yourself “How can I make this idea a concrete, practical reality in my life?” Do whatever you can to act upon your answer to this question.

© 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
Concentration Meditation techniques

Meditation Technique For Brain Relaxation, Non-Conceptuality and Falling Asleep at Night.

Dear Integral Meditators,

How has your week been? I’ve been experiencing a few changes in routine which have been creating quite a lot of mental busyness for me, so this week’s article returns to the perennial meditation theme of “how to calm the mind”. I think you will find the technique that I describe very accessible and easy to use!

Yours in the spirit of calmness and clear seeing,

Toby

 

 

Meditation Technique For Brain Relaxation, Non-Conceptuality and Falling Asleep at Night.

This technique is designed to help people address one of the main problems that we face in meditation; Finding that we are thinking too much even whilst trying to concentrate our mind. It is also a technique that I particularly use when trying to go to sleep at night and want to clear and relax my mind. Actually it can be done anywhere whenever you have a spare moment which is one of the things that makes it so useful.

It can also be a useful meditation tool for calming down after emotional trauma, for stopping cyclical negative thoughts and also finding temporary relief from psychological difficulties such as depression.

The basic premise for the meditation is that your brain is your “organ of thought” so to speak. By bringing your physical brain into a state of deep relaxation it can actually be relatively easy and natural to calm the mind.

Meditation for Relaxing the Brain 

Sitting or lying down, bring your attention to your head, and in particular the area around the temples, forehead, eyes and eye sockets. Spend a short while consciously relaxing these areas of the face and head.

Now become aware of your brain and spend a few moments sensing it as a whole.

Once you have a sense or feeling for the brain as a whole, start scanning through it with your awareness. As you go through each part of the brain consciously relax each area. I normally start with the two frontal lobes of the brain immediately behind the forehead, as the front part of the brain is associated with the generation and functioning of conceptual thoughts. Spend awhile really relaxing all the tension from the front section of the brain. Once you have done this move to the mid-section of the brain and focus on relaxing it in the same way. Then move onto the back of the brain. Finally move down to the brainstem that connects to the brain to the spinal cord and release tension from it.

Perform this scanning meditation through the brain two or three times, then move back to a general awareness of the brain as a whole. You will find that with the brain relaxed in this way your mind will quite naturally quieten down and you will experience a sense of inner spaciousness and calm. Stay with this feeling of mental relaxation and calm for as long as you wish.

As I said, this is an easy and simple technique to use, you don’t have to be any kind of meditation expert to start practicing it by yourself and experiencing the benefits!

Here are a few other techniques from articles that I have written that are specifically designed to help reduce conceptual thought quickly:

Finding Inner Space in Your Mind by Focusing on Outer Spaces

Calming the Brain Fast! Mouth Breathing

Meditating “Cold Turkey”

Still Point Breathing Meditation

Categories
Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Uncategorized

Four Tips for Meditating at Home and Beware of Second Hand Statues!

This week’s article focuses on tips for meditating at home. There is a great article that I read this week by Maria Kapaln (Author of “The Guru Question”) called “10 Spiritually Transmitted Diseases” I really do encourage you to have a look through it. There really is a lot of nonsense masquerading as spirituality these days, and this article gives some really clear pointers for developing your own discernment and ability to clearly see the difference between genuine spirituality and either ego-manifesting-as-spirituality, or just plain confusion.

Enjoy the article below!

Yours in the spirit of the ongoing journey,

Toby

Four Tips for Meditating at Home and Beware of Second Hand Statues!

Of course we all enjoy the support and interactive atmosphere of a meditation class and the occasional retreat, but the fact remains that if our meditation practice is ever going to truly transform our consciousness, then establishing a daily practice is really what we need to focus on. With this in mind here are four ideas regarding how to support your home meditation practice.

1) Just get your bum on the seat!

As we go about our daily activities we get used to the neutral momentum of “doing stuff”. This means that when it comes to the time we have designated for meditation our mind tells us there is “just one more thing” that we need to do before we meditate. Before we know it is late, and we have to go to work, or we are too tired to focus effectively and the day’s meditation opportunity goes begging. The only solution to this is to discipline yourself to STOP, SIT down and BEGIN! You’ll start to feel better as soon as you do!

2) Get your family to support you.

Your family, flatmate, friends are all going to benefit from a happier, more focused and aware you right? So let them know that you have/are trying to develop a meditation practice, and have set aside a particular time each day to do so. Explain that it is going to be of benefit to them as well as you, and ask them to support you and remind you when the time comes for you to say “excuse me for 20 minutes!” We are social animals and getting others to help and support you really helps.

3) Don’t try and do too much in the meditation session itself

Many of us are already struggling with information overload in our life, and so trying to do a meditation form that is overly complex and/or where we have too many expectations can be counterproductive. Make your meditation time spacious; don’t give yourself too many different things to do. On my website I have plenty of meditation techniques that I explain, but it really can be as simple as focusing on two things: Sitting still and practicing “non-doing” for ten minutes!

4) Set up places in your home where you can sit down and meditate comfortably.

I have set up in the living room, two of the bedrooms and the roof balcony small arrangements of candles, crystals and other objects that, when I sit in front of them immediately helps put me in the mood and mindset for meditation. If one room is occupied by other members of my family, I simply go to the space that is unoccupied. Having physical places that you associate with meditation and relaxation in your home really helps you to settle into a regular dally habit!

Watch out for second hand statues!

A final point I want to end with is that, if you are considering putting antiques or otherwise second hand statues or crystals in your meditation space take care. Particularly with second hand religious statues they can come to you “ready energized” in the wrong way by its previous owners. I was reminded strongly of this when I recently acquired a very finely crafted ceramic Quan Yin statue. It looked great, but I placed it in the meditation “shrine” in my bedroom and promptly got woken up that first night feeling extremely energetically uncomfortable, and after tossing and turning for a while was gifted some nasty dreams before waking up in the morning. The entire disturbance was coming from the dissonant energy that the statue had been energized with in its past.

So, what to do? Don’t worry; there is no need to throw such statues away! I have placed mine amongst the pot plants in my garden (see picture above) , where it will remain for six weeks or so and where all the negative elemental energy (for elemental energy think “physicallized mental energy”) can dissipate and be released from the statue to be absorbed and transformed by the natural elemental energy of nature. Once our Quan Yin has been “neutralized” then we will be able to place her wherever we want with no disturbing side effects!