mindfulness and emotions – Toby Ouvry Meditation

“By starting to notice and to play around with your emotional tones, you discover that you can ‘change the song of your life’ like a composer re-working her compositions.”

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article points out some playful ways to work with your emotional experience and range using mindfulness, I hope you enjoy it!
Last call for the 2021 New year releasing and inviting meditation, The Wednesday live class is already full, there are a few live slots for the Tuesday session, and of course online attendance is possible.

I am currently plotting the events for January 2021, watch this space!

In the spirit of composing your feelings,

Toby

Your emotional feeling tones

One way of thinking about emotions is that they are ‘The feeling tone associated with any experience’. By experience here I mean a broad range of things:

Different thoughts you have
Of a conversation or social interaction
Of a place; its atmosphere and ‘tone’
Of an image or memory that comes into your mind
In response to something that happens to you
Of a time of day

Each experience has a different feeling tone, like the note on a musical scale. Moreover, our own feeling tones are interacting with the emotional tones of other people and of our environment. Sometimes this creates a beautiful symphony, and sometimes this creates an almighty racket!
We are not in charge of the feeling tones of others, but we can start to become more aware of our own habitual feeling tones and patterns. If we do this we can then start to see how we can change our feeling tones and moods for the better, and put them into more beautiful ‘musical combinations’ with each other. Ways of starting to do this include:

Noticing the feeling tone that arise with particular thoughts, images and memories you have. Rather than looking at the content of the thought, look at the emotional tone of it.
With particular patterns of thought and image, you will notice that the feeling tones they produce for you are brighter and more harmonious. You can focus on deliberately holding these thoughts and images as a way of raising the vibration of your feeling tones.
You will notice that there are some images related to landscape and place that, when you think of them naturally raise your emotional tone. Likewise passages of music, images of characters in stories that you know (and so on) can all lift your overall feeling tone.
If you notice that you get stuck in a negative or ‘low level’ feeling tone, you can practice just experiencing it as a feeling tone, rather than taking the content too personally!
If you notice that a friend or colleague you spend time with really lifts your feeling tones, then deliberately open to them and allow their tones to affect you when you are with them. Similarly, if there is someone whose emotional tones bring yours down, then when you are with them, then practice ‘closing’ your energy to them in their company, so you are not so affected.

In a coaching session the other day I explained to a client that sometimes it is like your range of feeling tones is a bit like being one type of composer. Maybe if you notice are a more ‘serious’ composer like a Wagner or a Beethoven, you might like to introduce another composer into the mix. For example, you could practice creating more playful feeling tones like a Mozart or a Vivaldi. Or if your feeling tones are all ‘heavy metal’ you might like to practice creating feeling tones like a Prince, Taylor Swift or other more whimsical pop star. Of course this works the other way around; if you are all Taylor Swift and Mozart, maybe practice bringing a bit more gravitas into your feeling tones.
When you start to work mindfully with your feeling tones, it can be very creative and playful. By starting to notice and to play around with your emotional tones, you discover that you can ‘change the song of your life’ like a composer re-working her compositions.
Enjoy playing with your feeling tones!

Article content © Toby Ouvry & Integral Meditation Asia 2020. you are welcome to share, but please cite the source, thanks! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Tues 29th & Weds 30th Dec, 7.30-8.30pm – 2021 New year releasing and inviting meditation
About the class: This meditation session is focused upon setting up the 2021 new year energies in a way that invites the best possible experience moving forward. We will be:

Releasing and letting go of energies, events and experiences from the past year that may hold us back from moving into our full potential, and
Developing a flexible, soft, ‘beginners mind’, renewed and ready to be ‘born again’ with energy and enthusiasm in 2019
Focusing both consciously and intuitively upon the inviting of new energies, aspirations and goals that we wish to bring in and manifest over the course of the new year

Full details…

Re-starts Monday January 11th! – 7-8.30pm – The Men’s Group – The path of conscious manhood

How can you move from coping to thriving in your life as a man?

Much is asked of men in their traditional roles as fathers and sons, partners and husbands, students and teachers, employees and employers. The men’s group is a professionally moderated and confidential forum for men. A forum is a safe place for exploring, learning and sharing the successful perspectives, skills, and strategies needed to address and manage the unique issues, problems, and triumphs in our community.
Read full details…

Life-fullness – The Integral Life-Coaching Program with Toby

Are you looking a coach who can help you to:

Meet the challenges, stress and changes that you face in a more effective and mindful way
Become happier within yourself, in your relationships and at work
Be actively accountable for finding a sense of balance/well-being in your life and fulfilling your personal potential?
Guide you to find and operate from a deeper sense of meaning, motivation and connectivity in your life?

Read full details…

All upcoming classes and workshops for at IMA in December:

Ongoing – Weekly Tuesday, Wednesday Online class schedule

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby (Bukit Timah)

Ongoing on Tuesday evenings, 7.30-8.30pm – Tuesday Meditation for stress transformation and positive energy with Toby (East Coast)

Tues 29th & Weds 30th Dec, 7.30-8.30pm – 2021 New year releasing and inviting meditation

Re-starts Monday January 11th! – 7-8.30pm – The Men’s Group – The path of conscious manhood

January 16th & 23rd – Shamanic meditation and mini-retreat (Details to follow!)

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Books * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching * Meditation Technology

Dear Integral Meditators,

In the the foreground or background of each moment you experience, there is a mood, emotion and ‘atmosphere’. The article below explores how to start working with these mindfully in your life.

In the spirit of moods and atmospheres,

Toby

Engaged Mindfulness book is on a special 10% offer for the next until end Tuesday 11^th Dec)

Christmas is coming up, if you are looking for a meaningful, inexpensive present to pass out to friends, why not order a few copies of ‘Engaged Mindfulness’? It’s a short, 45 page primer on integral mindfulness, broken up into short 1-2page sections. Click here to order your copies…

Mindful of your moods, emotions and dispositions

This article focuses on how you can start to work with emotions, moods and dispositions, for the purposes of enjoyment, as well as becoming more effective in your life. Let’s start with a few definitions:
Emotions are temporary energetic reactions to particular events; what someone said to you, something that you hoped for not happening, something unpredictable occurring, an experience of good fortune etc. Although they are temporary, if you start watching them you’ll start to notice that have a particular habitual range emotions that you use in your life. This is rather like an artist who has a love or habit of working with a particular colour range.
Moods are emotions that you tend to spend quite a lot of time in. They become the background ‘atmospheres’ within which you live much of your life. Anxiety or curiousity, lightness or heaviness, resentment or appreciation, optimism or pessimism are all examples. They are like the typical ‘weather’ that you might expect to experience in a country at a particular time of year and season.
Dispositions are what you might think of as the primary moods that we tend to live in. We spend such a lot of time in them that they become pretty much our personality; they form some of the basic ways in which we experience our self as a personality.

Something to notice about emotions, moods and dispositions is that you are pretty much always in one – it’s useful to be aware of and take it into account because they open or close avenues of possibility and action for us in each moment. For example, an attitude of optimism opens up emotions of appreciation, pleasure and lightness, but may make us blind to certain problems that we need to look at realistically. Similarly, an attitude of pessimism closes certain desirable emotional states, but also invites some interesting insights into areas of risk in our life that we might do well to look at.
Simply asking ‘What are the moods and emotions present for me in this situation?’ will make us aware of what is there and how it is affecting us.

Centring in difficult moods and emotions
If you are experiencing a difficult mood or emotion, then, rather than try and shift out of it or get rid of it immediately, it can often be most useful to simply recognize it, and centre yourself, so that it isn’t keeping you off balance. Once you are aware and have centred yourself, you can them make a choice whether you want to try and shift out of the mood/emotion or stay with it and see what it has to offer you in that moment.

Identifying your habitual range of mood and emotion.
If you watch your moods, emotions and dispositions you’ll start to have a sense of the ‘mood options’ that you have available to you. You can start to cultivate particular emotions and moods in particular situations where they will serve you particularly well.
You’ll also notice that you have particularly inspiring moods and emotions within your range that open up avenues of action and possibility that will help you go experience life better in the moment and get you where you want to go. So consciously cultivating these moods is a good idea! For example, I have a little post-it message on the picture above my lap-top right now that says, ‘Everything is possible!’ This reminds me to open to and live in a mood that is particularly meaningful and helpful to me right now.
So, a good mindful question to go with this last section might be ‘What mood or emotion can I cultivate that would serve me best in this situation?’

© Toby Ouvry 2018, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation AsiaOngoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Ongoing on Tuesday evenings, 7.30-8.30pm – Tuesday Meditation Classes at One Heart with Toby (East coast)

Monday 6.15-7.15 & Wednesday 12.15-1.15 – Integral Meditation classes at Space2B on Stanley Street

Saturday mornings 9-10.15am : 1st,15th, 22nd, 29th December – Qi Gong workout and meditation class

Tues & Weds, 4th, 5th December – Monthly Astrological meditation – on ‘Sagittarius – I perceive/understand’

Saturdays December 15th & 22nd – Mindfulness group coaching sessions with Toby

Saturday 15th December, 1-4pm – Integral meditation practice: Optimize your inner calm, strength and energy

Tues & Weds Dec 18/19th, 7.30-8.30pm – Winter Solstice balancing & renewing meditation

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Books * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching * Meditation Technology