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Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Meditation and Psychology Uncategorized

Honesty, Release and redirection -Three Levels of Non-Judgment

Dear Integral Meditators,

Non-judgment is a word that it often used in mindfulness and meditation circles, but what does it really mean? I give my own thoughts on this below.

In the spirit of non-judgment,

Toby


Honesty, Release and redirection -Three Levels of Non-Judgment

Within certain types of mindfulness and meditation practice a lot of emphasis is placed on the practice of non-judgment, that is to say observing what we are seeing or experiencing without making a snap value assesment about it. Here are three levels to consider in any practice of non-judgment that will afford a slightly deeper and more complete experience of it, as well as avoiding a few of the pitfalls that it is easy to make.

Stage one: Recognizing you have made a judgment
Before you let go of a judgment, you need to admit and acknowledge you have actually made a judgment. Spelling out judgments that make us uncomfortable is often not easy;

  • I feel guilty because I am angry with my partner or child
  • I have a racial or cultural prejudice against this person
  • I’m scared and covering it by being aggressive
  • I am jealous of my colleague and their success

If you try and jump to a non-judgmental space before this first stage, you can easily simply use the practice of non-judgment as a way of denying or repressing your judgments, which will actually decrease your capacity for self-awareness and your ability to release and transform your judgments.
You might call this stage honesty, as this stage entails looking nakedly at what is there and admitting what we see and find.

Stage two: Non-Judgment
Having fully acknowledged the judgments that you actually have, you can then spend time accepting and releasing the judgment:

  • I accept and release my guilt for being angry with my partner
  • I accept the reality of my cultural prejudice, and let it go
  • I note and release my aggression and insecurity
  • I note the jealousy that I experience toward my colleague, and whilst acknowledging and owning that feeling, I note that my deeper identity is not that feeling

You might call this stage release, as it involves the actual experience of letting go of the judgment.

Stage three: Better judgment
The experience of non-judgment is a very worthwhile experience in and of itself, and it can lead to some very relaxing states of mind in meditation (See my recent article on the Man or Woman of No Rank), but I believe that one of the main functions of practicing non-judgment is so that we can then replace our habitual and unconscious judgments withbetter conscious judgments. Better judgments come from questions such as:

  • What is a better way to work with my anger toward my partner or child?
  • What perspectives can help me I evolve beyond my cultural prejudice?
  • Can I find a creative, non-destructive use for my insecurity?
  • Can I care deeply about my own professional success without being automatically jealous of my colleague’s achievements?

You might call this stage redirection, as the practice of better judgment leads to the redirection of energy previously caught up in negative judgments into new and life-affirming directions.

As we move towards the new year, what are the judgments that you would like to practicehonesty, release and re-direction around in your life?

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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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creative imagery Enlightened love and loving Essential Spirituality Inner vision Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditation and Psychology

Keeping the Magic

Dear Integral Meditators,

From myself and Integral Meditation Asia here’s wishing you all the very best for the Winter Solstice and Christmas seasons!

Toby


Keeping the Magic

I’m sitting in my parents’ house writing this article the day before Christmas eve, I’ve spent the afternoon with my daughter and her cousins around me getting excited about the presents under the Christmas tree, the old debate as to whether Santa Claus is real has been aired, the attempt to co-erce the parents into disclosing the contents of the presents has been attempted and resisted.
For the kids the world is still magical, wondrous, exciting, enchanted, but what about the adults? For myself my mind is full of the challenging contents of the past year and how it will continue into the next, there is always the temptation to feel jaded, ordinary, worn out. How can we keep the magic in our life, the sense of excitement, the wonder and the youngness of our mind as our bodies gradually get older? Here are a few things that have kept me in touch with the magic and wonder over the last week or so.

  • Firstly I have understood from the Big history project that the entire content of our universe (which is still expanding at the rate of light years per second) originated from a space smaller than the size of an atom. If that isn’t magical and mind blowing I don’t know what is.
  • When I look into the eyes of my friends, my family, people I have known for a long time and people that I meet only momentarily, I realize I am staring into a warm, living space of immeasurable depth and mystery. Sure I experience it most deeply with people I love,  but it never ceases to surprise me how it happens with people I connect and exchange a smile with just once, a momentary exchange of goodwill and humanity
  • When I reflect on the last year in with friends I am drawn back again and again how the difficulties that I have faced have been the platform for my greatest learning’s and growth. There is something retrospectively magical and hilarious about how all the things that I resist and wish away as they are arising change magically into things that I am glad happened/are still happening and feel grateful for
  • There are always opportunities to experience deep, personal love, to give it and receive it, it is always magical and it makes all the difference

What are the experiences, reasons and things that help you keep connected to the magic and the wonder in your life?

Related article and meditation: Renewal

Check out the Upcoming workshops and events at Integral Meditation Asia
© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 creative imagery Essential Spirituality Inner vision Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Mindfulness Presence and being present spiritual intelligence Uncategorized

The Man or woman of No Rank

A lot of the suffering, pain and confusion that we experience in our lives comes from the attachment that we have to the roles that we habitually play in our life. The man or woman of no rank is a meditation technique that allows us to:

  • Become more aware of this attachment and over-identification we have with roles
  • Enables us to let go of them and see that we are not these labels
  • Helps us use these labels and identities effectively and appropriately in our life

You can do this contemplation in a formal meditation, or you can do it just sitting casually on your sofa or any quiet space…

Think about the roles and identities you play in your work, observe your identification with them for a while, then set them aside, temporarily let them go, realize you are not this role or label.

Extend the same process to:

  • Yourself as a partner, husband, wife
  • Yourself as a son or daughter
  • As a father or mother
  • As a person from this country, or area
  • From this social class
  • From this level of education
  • From yourself as a man, or as a woman
  • Explore any other areas where you have a strong identity to a role; ‘big strong guy’, ‘the shy type’, ‘the peacemaker’, the ‘fortunate one’ or ‘unfortunate’ one, and so on; any place where you see that you are attached or very identified with a role or label.

Step by step strip away your roles and labels. Rest in the space where you are simply a man or woman of no rank, just a person, not better or worse than anyone else, equal with the highest and the lowest of them all. Sit in a space where you are just a human being, maybe even just a ‘being’. Live this space deeply for a while.
When you return to the world, of course playing roles is inevitable, but if you practice being the man or woman of no rank you can liberate yourself from these labels, and the discover that you can use them consciously to explore and fulfill your own potential, be of service to the people around you and the world.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 Energy Meditation Enlightened Flow Essential Spirituality Integral Meditation Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

The Four Subtle Experiences in Meditation

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article looks at the path of meditation in three stages, focusing in particular on the second stage, developing and engaging subtle experiences. It is useful to know about these ‘intermediate’ levels of the meditation experience because it enables us to appreciate and explore them without the danger of thinking that they are the end of the journey.

Yours in the spirit of the meditation journey,

Toby

 


The Four Subtle Experiences in Meditation 

In meditation generally there are three stages:

  • Balancing, stilling & harmonizing the body-mind
  • Developing and engaging subtle state experiences
  • Moving into or exploring  the formless/timeless dimension of consciousness

In order to get to the second stage of engaging subtle state experiences, you need to first need to still and unify your body-mind through relaxation, calming and stillness. You can read more about this first stage of meditation here: The first task (and achievement of meditation).

If you can achieve this, then you then naturally start to move into the subtle level of meditation which comprises of four main types of experience:

The intuitive /ideational – This is where your mind starts to come up with ideas, insights and intuitions, quite spontaneously and effortlessly. These ideas may be quite abstract, or they may be entirely pertinent to very specific life situations that you are going through. They are often characterized by their capacity to see patterns, meanings and relationships in apparently random and disparate experiences.

The subtle energetic – This is an awareness of subtle energy flowing through our body and mind in ways that we would not be ordinarily conscious of. This dimension of meditation experience is explained in various ways, in terms of the movement of energy through the energy meridians, the chakras and kundalini, the microcosmic orbit and so on.

The expanded emotional – This is the experience of emotions that go beyond our ordinary every day personal range of emotions, and includes experiences such as

  • Causeless and spontaneous joy
  • Unconditional affection and love
  • Openhearted compassion for all living beings
  • Deep equanimity

The visionary – This means an awakening to spontaneously received visual images of people, places things and sometimes even entire inner worlds. It is a little bit like dreaming, except the images are experienced whilst in full consciousness, and they are distinct from our imagination, that is to say they have an objective quality that is separate from the random images arising from our everyday thinking and imagining mind.

These four subtle types of experience will then give way to the third stage of meditation experience:

The formless – This is the experience of the formless timeless domain of the mind and consciousness that lies beyond both our sensory awareness and our thinking mind. Initially our experience of the formless simply an open spacious experience of awareness with no thoughts in it. However, after a time this deepens, giving rise to various forms of experience of deep unitive and non-dual experience where we experience ourself as ‘one’ with our world and universe, and where our experience of the subject-object, doing-being  divide disappears into a pure experience of is-ness.

So, once you have settled down into your meditation, and your body-mind are feeling a calm and relaxed, these are the four major subtly meditation experiences that you can start to identify, work with and build your experience of: the intuitive/ideational, the subtle energetic, the expanded emotional and the visionary. These in turn will gradually give way to experiences of the formless dimension of meditation experience.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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
Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Mindful Resilience Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness

What Real Power Does Mindfulness Give You?

Dear Integral Meditators,

When you think of mindfulness, do you think of power? If not the article below explains why you should!

 


What Real Power Does Mindfulness Give You?

We talk about mindfulness in terms of relief from stress, bringing more presence to our life and so on, but what about power?
One way mindfulness (when well practiced) gives us greater power is by giving us awareness of choice. The more consciousness we bring to any given situation, the larger the number of choices we will be aware of regarding how to act, how to feel and how to approach the situation.  Conversely, the less conscious awareness that we bring to a situation, the fewer the choices that we will have, and therefore the less power.
Without mindfulness we are essentially limited to our instinctive and habitual patterns of reacting and responding to our life’s challenges (and joys), with mindfulness we can even innovate choices, options and possibilities that we have never considered before as we actively bring our intelligence to bear upon the situation fully.

Our mind is basically our primary tool for surviving, adapting and thriving in the outer world of our career and relationships, and the inner world of our relationship to ourself. Mindfulness is the practice of learning how to use and apply the potential of our mind in daily life. Looked at in this way there is nothing more powerful and valuable than mindfulness. Do you have time for a little now?

Related articles:
You Always Have a Choice
Six Mindful Questions for Effective Decision Making

Check out the Upcoming workshops and events at Integral Meditation Asia

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Mindfulness One Minute Mindfulness

The Easiest Way to Avoid Death

 

Dear Integral Meditators,

What does it mean to live like you are alive? That could have been another title for the article below.

Yours in the spirit of being alive,

Toby


Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in December:

Sunday December 14th, 9.30am-12.30pm – An Introduction to Meditation From the Perspective of  Zen


The Easiest Way to Avoid Death

…is to avoid living. If you just fit in, do what others are doing, stay out of (too much) trouble, forget about what your real, deepest and most visceral desires are, and generally anesthetize yourself from the reality that you are alive, then the pain and anxiety of the inevitability of death won’t worry you too much. If you anesthetize yourself from life, your feelings and your reality, then you can arrive at death and act with genuine surprise, “Hey, how can this be happening to me, this isn’t fair!”

If on the other hand you commit to life, to being alive, to bringing as much consciousness, value and feeling and vibrancy to each moment of your life, then inevitably you are going to become more and more aware that your life is fleeting, impermanent, and that it will inevitably end, sooner or later (we don’t know). To be vitally aware that we are alive is to invite awareness of death and impermanence, and to feel the anxiety and challenge of that awareness.

The thing is that, by committing to be alive now, and feeling the anxiety of our transience, we are truly and urgently in a position to make use of the opportunity to be alive, to make a difference, to communicate values and meaning whilst we can.

Or we can sleepwalk through life and then act angry when we are about to die.

It is our choice, today, each day.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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
Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Primal Spirituality spiritual intelligence

The Gifts and Wounds of Our Ancestors

Dear Integral Meditators,

The article below explores how we can consciously bring to light the way in which our ancestors have played a role in who we are and what we experience today.

Yours in the spirit of gifts and wounds,

Toby


The Gifts and Wounds of Our Ancestors

Living as securely, affluently as we do to today, and having the choices that we have has a lot to do with the efforts of past generations. Specifically to us as individuals, our immediate ancestors, parents, grandparents and great grandparents have a lot to do with the opportunity we have today to lead a happy, fulfilling and creative life today. You could say we are the inheritors of their gifts.

Conversely we are also an inheritor of their wounds, their unresolved inner conflicts, their vulnerabilities, their struggles, their blindspots & their burdens. Quite often the gifts and the blindspots of our ancestors are interrelated. For example:

  • I am aware of the gift of freedom that I was given from my Grandfathers in their fighting, surviving and perhaps killing in the two world wars. I am also aware of the emotional wounds and handicaps that come with such a sacrifice.
  • I am also aware of the gifts of my Grandmothers as women; their sacrifice and their patience. I am also aware of the wounds that they carry from playing this role and the limitations that it placed upon them.

Thematically, many of the issues that we may now be facing in our life are a continuation of the patterns of previous generations. For most people this goes on quite unconsciously, but by bringing mindfulness and reflection to our relationships to our ancestors we can develop the capacity to consciously guide and direct the energy that flows into us from our ancestors, and thus make better use of it.

A mindful reflection on your ancestors
Take the image of an ancestor that you wish to connect with and reflect upon, perhaps from an old photo. Visualize this image in front of you and allow your mind to mindfully free-associate for a while; notice the feelings, images and memories that may come up.
Now ask your ancestor (as if they are actually present) three questions:

  • What are your gifts to me?
  • What are your wounds?
  • What is it that you wish to communicate with me at this time?

Listen for the answers that come back, and dwell for a while in a state of:

  • Appreciation for gifts received
  • Healing and release of wounds inherited
  • Clear understanding of their message from them to you at this time in your life

We are the ancestors of future generations
Another question that we need to ask ourselves regularly is of course; what are the gifts that I wish to pass onto future generations, and what are the wounds they will have to deal with if I remain the way I am currently?

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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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Gods and Goddesses Greenworld Meditation Inner vision Integral Awareness Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditation and Psychology Primal Spirituality Shadow meditation Stress Transformation Uncategorized

Mindfully Integrating the Animal and Instinctive Self

Dear Integral Meditators,

What is your animal or instinctive self? What part is it playing in your life? Why is it important to be mindful of it? The article below offers some thoughts in this subject…

If you are interested in going a bit deeper into your animal and instinctive self, then do check out the Shadow Self workshop on Sunday the 30th November!

Yours  in the spirit of the journey,

Toby


Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in November/December:

The Meditation for Creating a Mind of Ease Online Course

Tuesday 25th November, 7.30-9pm  – Evening event – Integral Mindfulness –Co-creating Professional Success and Personal Wellbeing within Organizations and Leaders

Sun 30th Nov, 9.30am-12.30pm – Living Life From Your Inner Center – Meditations for Going With the Flow of the Present Moment

Sun 30th Nov, 2pm-5pm – Finding Freedom From What Holds You Back in Life: Practical Meditations And Techniques For Working With your Shadow-Self – A Three Hour Workshop

Sunday December 7th, 9.30am-12.30pm – Meditations for Activating, Healing and Awakening our Ancestral Karma

Sunday December 14th, 9.30am-12.30pm – An Introduction to Meditation From the Perspective of  Zen


Mindfully Integrating the Animal and Instinctive Self

Your animal and instinctive self is raw vitality. It is the wild and feral part of yourself that has been around for millions of years on the planet, it is entirely at home in the body, with sexual instinct, with fighting, with doing what is necessary to survive in a tough and uncompromising world. It is also a part of you that has a natural dignity, an unconscious affinity with the whole, that feels entirely at home in a body, on the earth, participating in life.
Obviously we need to exert a certain benevolent control over our animal self, but for many of us the animal and instinctive self has become an enemy, a source of terror, of embarrassment, of shame. We often try and lock our animal self in the cellar of our mind, pretend (and hope) that if we ignore it or pretend it is not there for long enough it will go away and leave us in peace.
There comes a time for all of us where it becomes necessary to make friends with our animal self, to learn to make positive use of our instincts, to stop repressing our passions and instead start consciously and heartily expressing them in our life in positive and authentic ways.
The conscious integration of the rational and self with the animal and instinctive self gives the soul within us all the tools and power it needs to start making a difference in the world and manifest its desires. Without the vital dynamism of the animal self the civilized self becomes a ghost, a cardboard cut out, a shell. It’s very difficult for the soul to do something with a shell!

If you are suffering from an absence of vitality, a lack of confidence, a sense of inner conflict, connecting and communing with your animal and instinctive self is definitely a good area within yourself to investigate!

Questions for becoming more aware of and reclaiming our instinctive and mindful self:
Where is my vitality?
What is my animal self asking of me?
What might it mean to make positive use of my instincts?
How can I make friends with my animal self?
How can I put my animal and instinctive self to positive use?

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Motivation and scope Presence and being present

Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 2 – Meeting Your Deeper & Higher Needs Through Meditation

Dear Integral Meditators,

This is the second in the series of ‘Motivating yourself to meditate’ articles, you can read the first HERE if you have not done so already.

In the spirit of enjoying our deeper and higher selves,

Toby


Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 2 – Meeting Your Deeper & Higher Needs Through Meditation

In the first in this series of articles on motivating yourself to meditate I took a look at how it is that meditation can help us to meet some of our basic needs, or needs 1-3 in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I this article I want to look at how meditation helps us to start to satisfy our “higher” needs; specifically needs 4-6 of Abraham Maslow’s human needs hierarchy:

  1.  Esteem needs – For competence, approval & recognition
  2. Aesthetic and cognitive needs – For knowledge, understanding, goodness, justice, beauty, order, symmetry
  3. Self-Actualization needs

4. Esteem Needs – Competence, approval, recognition.
One of the basic things that any form of authentic meditation technique will improve is your concentration. With better concentration your ability to be competent in any given area of expertise that you set yourself is going to improve. So, meditation helps your esteem needs in this regard by helping you increase your mind power and therefore become competent faster. This in turn will likely lead to approval and recognition from your teachers, peers and society.
With regard to the need for approval and recognition, I would say that consistent meditation will help you to make approval and recognition into a preference rather than an all consuming need. This is because meditation takes us gradually away from “doingness needs” and toward “beingness needs”

  • “Doingness needs” are the needs that we have to prove our worth by deeds, job titles and all the other bench marks that conventional society lays down as meaning “successful”.
  • “Beingness needs” are the needs that arise from already seeing, feeling and experiencing ourself as whole, complete and worthy as we are. Meditation encourages a daily connection to our own state of beingness, that is to say as whole, complete and worthy as we are right now. In a state of beingness, our own needs are perceived as being already met, and so our “needs” actually start to focus more and more on the needs of others around us. We are happy as we are, so we have more energy to focus on the wellbeing of others.

In conclusion, when our beingness needs are met (which they will be increasingly through balanced meditation), of course we can be happy when we are measured as “successful” by the conventional benchmarks of society, but if not it is no big disaster, as our sense of beingness ensures that we feel happy and complete as we are.

5. Aesthetic and cognitive needs – Knowledge, understanding, goodness, justice, beauty, order, symmetry
With our beingness needs increasingly being met by meditation (as outlined in section 4 immediately above), an increasing amount of energy is opened up within us to look into “bigger questions”:

What is the meaning of life?
Why am I here?
What is fairness?
What is justice?
What is beauty?

This is level 5 of Maslow’s Hierarchy, our aesthetic and cognitive needs. A regular meditation practice will not answer these questions per-se, as a lot of meditation practice is about reducing the content of the mind, not filling it! However, what meditation will do systematically over time is to open us up to a full functioning awareness of our intuitive, archetypal and spiritual minds. This naturally helps us to articulate a considered response to the big questions that are posed by our aesthetic and cognitive needs.
A final point; meditation prevents us from getting “stuck” on the existential questions that are posed by this level. “What is the meaning of life?” is a question that may never be fully answered, and this is right and good. Meditation enables us to recognize the point where question asking and philosophizing ceases to be useful and relevant, and to move into states of silence and pure awareness.

6. Self Actualization: 
Actually, up to the last century or so, the main focus of meditation has traditionally been enlightenment, or needs associated with levels 5 and 6. It is only in more recent times that meditation has been advocated as a potential solution to the stress, mental busyness and anxiety of modern life, which has made it useful and relevant on the level of our survival needs  (levels 1&2 of Maslow’s hierarchy) and level 3, emotional wellbeing. Through history the predominant reason that people have meditated is to commune, merge and create a state of union with their spiritual being, which in turn exists in a state of one-ness or unity with the Universe. So, in terms of the sixth and highest level of our needs; Self Actualization or enlightenment, meditation is actually the most effective, tried and tested method for accomplishing this need.

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology

Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 1 – Looking at How You Can Meet Your Needs Through Meditation

Dear Integral Meditators,

Why meditate, why continue meditating? Why is it worth persisting? The article below considers these questions….

Thanks for reading!

Toby

 


Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 1 – Looking at How You Can Meet Your Needs Through Meditation

One reason why people find it difficult to hold down a regular meditation practice is that it is very easy for meditation to get knocked down our priorities list. It seems like there are so many things that need our attention. It is easy to think that we have so many “important” priorities that we can put off meditating until tomorrow, and so it goes on. We never really get serious or consistent about our meditation practice because it is not enough of a priority.
So, what I am going to do in this and next week’s article is have a look at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and see how meditation can help with these basic needs.  If we have a clear idea about how meditation helps us with our human needs, then we will keep it high on our priority list and make sure that we do it!

A quick outline of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, he starts with the most basic first, and then ascends in terms of depth and complexity:

  1. Physiological needs – Food and drink
  2. Security needs – Shelter, physiological safety
  3. Belongingness and love needs – Affiliation, acceptance, affection
  4. Esteem needs – Competence, approval, recognition
  5. Aesthetic and cognitive needs – Knowledge, understanding, goodness, justice, beauty, order, symmetry
  6. Self Actualization

How meditation helps us with these basic needs:

Needs 1&2: Physiological and security needs
I am guessing that if you are reading this article, you will have your basic food, drink and shelter needs being met. You may not be in Buckingham Palace, but you aren’t homeless either right? Although many of us have our basic needs met, many of us remain stuck psychologically in “survival” mode, fighting our way through a hostile universe oblivious of the good fortune of having our basic needs met.
Meditation helps us with this by helping our mind to be calm enough to appreciate and enjoy the fact that our survival needs have been met. Meditation gives us the presence of mind to enjoy life’s simple pleasures; Food, drink, shelter and a basic quality of life. Without peace of mind studies show that those in first world countries are no happier than those in 3rd world countries. Meditation makes sure this does not happen to you!

Need 3: Belongingness and love needs
A daily meditation practice is a statement to yourself that you are important and lovable enough to deserve happiness and peace of mind. Belongingness and love needs are often projected outward onto other people, but in reality our primary love relationship is with ourself. If we get this right it will help our love relationships to others.
Meditation also puts you in touch with a source of love inside you that might be termed as “Universal” or unconditional. This love starts to rise up in our mind whenever we truly touch mental peace and calm (see article on the Two Main Lessons of Love). You deserve to receive love every day right? So give yourself that pleasure by sitting down and doing a bit of meditation every day! One final point here, meditation by its nature makes us more mindful, relaxed and aware. This quality of mind helps us to see that there is love being directed toward us all the time by our friends, family and colleagues. A relaxed, meditative mind can open to this love and receive it deeply into our being, instead of shutting it out.
So, in my next article mid-week next week, I’ll write a few thoughts on needs four, five and six, but I think if you contemplate the above three, there is plenty of reason to renew your determination to find time and space for at least a little meditation each day!

Read part 2 of this article: Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 2 – Meeting Your Deeper & Higher Needs Through Meditation

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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