meditation and resilience – Toby Ouvry Meditation

Dear Integral Meditators,

What are the primary qualities that you rely upon for your own inner resilience? The article I have written below outlines three important areas for developing our inner resilience in an integrated way, using mindfulness.

In the spirit of resilience,

Toby

Three Levels of Inner Resilience

Imagine your consciousness is like an ocean.
Imagine the challenges that come at you in life are like the waves, wind and rain on that ocean.
Imagine your mind is like a well built boat. To have a resilient mind is to have structures and habits of thought and emotion in your mind that are able to withstand the outer challenges of your life such as setbacks, and the inner challenges of your life such as periodic low self-belief or perhaps depression. It is the structure of the boat that provides the resilience.
Imagine your body and body awareness is like the sailor on the boat. In order to stay balanced s/he has to keep his centre of gravity low, his body responsive and flexible so that she can ride the waves without getting tipped overboard. This is like the resilience of flow; the ability to keep the energy in your body flexible and flowing in response to the ‘hits’ that you take each day. You are able to recover from setbacks quickly because difficult energy flows through you, it is not held as tension or rigidity within the body; nothing gets stuck.
Imagine that you can also dive beneath the waves to a depth where the turbulence of the surface no longer disturbs you. By diving and immersing yourself deeply in the ocean you are able to find relief and regeneration from the relentless weather, to find a space of peace and deep calm. This type of resilience through immersion is developing the capacity to dive beyond the world of thoughts and feelings to a deeper level of your awareness where a sense of relaxation and regeneration can always be found no matter how tough your life gets.

The resilience of flow then is about mindfully learning to let tension and stress flow through your body so that it does not build up or stay and you recover from it quickly.
The resilience of structure is the structures you build in your mind to deal with setbacks and emotional challenges in a robust, strong and flexible manner.
The resilience of immersion is the skill of learning to dive deeply into your consciousness periodically to a place beyond thought where you can find renewal and regeneration.

If you put these three together you have a truly resilient mindfulness!

If you would like to take the practices indicated in this article into your daily life, simply dwell for a few minutes each day on the image of yourself as a sailor in the sea of life, in your sturdy, well structured boat, keeping your body flexible and flowing, and periodically diving deep into the ocean beneath you to a place of deep calm.

© 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

Dear Integral Meditators,

How resilient are you to the pressures of life? What are the factors that you can introduce into your mind in order to increase your mental resilience? This weeks article looks at how mindfulness can help with this.

Yours in the spirit of mindful resilience,

Toby

Developing Your Mindful Resilience

Back in the days when I was a Buddhist monk, one of the things that myself and many of my ‘colleagues’ noticed after going on meditation retreat was that it was quite startling how quickly we reverted to our normal habitual behaviours and consciousness level upon returning to the ‘real world’ and our daily routine, after all the work we had put into our retreat and meditation, it sometimes seemed like in everyday terms little had changed.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the years since, and it has really inspired me to try and create what I think is a truly well rounded and resilient mindfulness training that is truly going to enable people to change their lives for the better through mindfulness and meditation practice.

So what is mindful resilience? Here is a working definition – “Mindful resilience is the capacity to remain actively aware, creatively productive, constantly learning, happy and effective in life and at work, even when faced with pressure, stress and tension from both within our mind and from our external environment”.

What then are the skills that you need to be able to develop mindful resilience as a way of life? Below I list what I believe from my practical experience are key practices:

1. An understanding of the three experiential levels of our consciousness
What is it within us that we are trying to create mindful resilience within? Within our mind. There are three domains of our mind, each of which has a particular type of resilience that we can leverage upon.
The first is our sensory-physical awareness, the second is our mental awareness and the third is our experience of awareness itself. Each of these levels or aspects of our mind has a particular type of resilience that we can leverage upon. A practitioner of mindful resilience needs to know how to access each of these levels of mindful resilience.

2. The capacity to relax into tension and other forms of stress
For your mind to be resilient under the pressure of real life situations you need to understand how you can relax into tension and other forms of stress. The first stage of this is learning how to relax into tension so that it does not prevent you functioning effectively, the second level involves learning to actually redirect the stress so that you are actually making use of it. (See for example my article on stress transformation )

3. The ability to create and sustain a positive inner dialog with yourself
We have an inner conversation going on within our mind all the time. For sustainable peace of mind, inner resilience and creativity you need to be able to make that dialog positive and productive where possible, but also know how to deal with the negative, difficult challenging aspects of that conversation when it arises (please note; repressing it or pretending it is not there will not create resilience!).

4. A commitment to appreciating the good and the challenging in your life
A practitioner of mindful resilience commits to both noticing and dwelling upon the good in your life whilst also learning how to appreciate and genuinely value learning and growth facilitated by the challenges, friction and difficulty. As Jim Mclaren would say “Don’t waste your suffering!”

5. Focus!
To be resilient you need to train your mind to be strong, to focus and concentrate, both when the object of mindful concentration is just one thing and also when the situation demands that you be aware of multiple factors at the same time. In reality this means learning that there are different types of focus, and know how to apply them appropriately.

6. Being truly comfortable with silence, uncertainty, open spaces
Undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable aspects of a mindfulness and meditation practice is developing the capacity to relax into a deep and regenerative experience of stillness and silence when we are sitting in formal meditation practice.
In order to bring this truly and deeply into our daily life there also needs to be the capacity to relax into the open spaces of un-certainty, un-predictability and un-knowing that come up time and again in our everyday real time reality . The purpose of getting comfortable with these three “un-s” is not so that we become a victim of them, but so that we can learn from them and take the opportunities they have to offer us.

Want to get started with your own mindful resilience practice?
There is obviously a lot contained within each of the points above, but here is a very short way to get started.
Stage 1: Consider the definition of mindful resilience: “Mindful resilience is the capacity to remain aware, creatively productive, constantly learning, happy and effective in life and at work even when faced with pressure, stress and tension from both within our mind and from our external environment”. Take a little time to dwell upon it.

Stage 2: What sort of images and symbols come to mind when you contemplate this definition? Select an image from your imagination that represents the energy and experience of mindful resilience as you understand it. Take that image as a focus point for your attention for short periods at regular intervals during the day, reminding and encouraging you to explore your capacity for mindful resilience.

© 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