Tag: uniting mind and feelings

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A Mind of Ease Awareness and insight Inner vision Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology One Minute Mindfulness Presence and being present

Meditation, the Salt Analogy and How Our Self-Sense Changes as Our Meditation Practice Evolves

The salt analogy is this; if you put a teaspoon in a cup of water, stir it in and then taste it, it tastes horrible. However, if you take a bucket of water, stir a teaspoon full of salt into it and then take a sip of it, it will still taste basically ok.

In a similar way, if your mind is habitually small, contracted and claustrophobic then even small sufferings and challenges are going to have substantial power to knock you off balance and cause you pain.

If on the other hand you make a point of habitually relaxing in into the natural expansive space and stillness of your mind, making your experience of it as big as possible then this will mean that you will be able to bear small challenges and sufferings without any problems, and even larger challenges will have much less power to throw you off balance. You will be able to bear them with a much larger degree of equanimity.

At its simplest there are three objects that our sense of self can identify with; our body, our mind or the spacious awareness that surrounds and contains our experience of both our body and our mind. As small children our identification is almost exclusively with our body and sensory awareness. As we grow up our identification shifts from our body to our mind as our ability to think, feel and conceive in complex ways develops.

If we then as adults take up meditation our self sense shifts once more from the mind to the spacious witnessing awareness that surrounds and embraces our mental and sensory experience. The shifting of our self sense from the mind and body to our spacious witnessing awareness is one of the main goals of meditation; it creates a balanced, open inner environment that is able to bear our trails with equanimity and courage, and able to enjoy the gifts that life gives us with conscious appreciation.
I had my fortieth birthday last week, I was thinking about my approach to ageing, and one of the main things that came out of my contemplation is that it is really not so difficult to accept the gradual changes as my body gets older. This is because a substantial proportion of my self-sense is almost always resting in the experience of spacious witnessing awareness that has developed over seventeen years or so of meditation. Ageing just isn’t that big a deal for me, or at least I can say that it is a teaspoon of salt in a very large bucket!

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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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Inner vision Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Using the Energy of Negative Emotions

Going From Deluded Pride to Divine Pride

What is deluded pride?
Deluded pride is quite simply a view of ourself that considers us to be more important or significant than we actually are. It causes us a lot of pain because when we are filled with pride we are vulnerable to the criticisms of others and to our own insecurities (indeed deluded pride may be seen as an attempt to mask our deeply held insecurities). It also prevents us from building healthy friendships and relationships where both parties are considered equals, rather than having one ‘top dog’ and one ‘underdog’.

The core causes of deluded pride
The two major cause of deluded pride are firstly to perceive ourselves as inherently separate from everyone else (as opposed to interconnected), and thensecondly to be caught up in feelings of inferiority. When we feel inferior to others, or when we feel that they threaten our self esteem we tend to overcompensate for the threat by developing deluded pride. If you watch the inner commentary going on in your mind at such times, you will see that it automatically starts coming up with reasons why that person is stupid, or inferior to you and also reasons why you (or your group) are superior to them.
Feelings of inferiority are so deeply embedded within the minds of us human beings that the deluded pride that we develop in order to compensate for it can come in many ways, some very insidious. The subtler manifestations of deluded pride are just as present in spiritual groups and institutions as secular ones.

Humility
One of the main solutions to pride is traditionally the practice of humility. However, many practitioners of humility unintentionally fall into the extreme of simply accepting their own feelings of inferiority as being reality, and thus rather than actually being humble, they are in reality simply staying in their comfort zone, which is simply feeling inferior to others.
Genuine humility I think is a mind that sees our self as no more important or significant than anyone elses, but also includes the caveat that we are also no less important than anyone else. Thus when a person with a lot of deluded pride comes into our life, or we need to stand up for ourselves in any way we are able to do so effectively without being inhibited by our false humility.

Three Types of Non-deluded Pride
You can take non-deluded pride in yourself and what you are or what you do. Indeed it is necessary to take non-deluded pride in what you do if you are going to fulfill your potential. To take a simple example a school teacher who is proud of her profession and the role she plays in helping her students is going to tend to be a good teacher. Without pride in what she does, inevitably the standard at which she does her job will drop.
In this sense you could say that non-deluded pride is very much about caring, caring about what you do, who you are and the effects that you have on your world.

With this in mind here are three types of non deluded pride

Pride in Our Abilities and Achievements
As shown with the example of the teacher above, someone who appreciates their own abilities and the things that they can achieve with them is going to fulfil their potential. We can have pride in what we do without considering ourselves inherently better or superior to others.

Pride in Our Humanity
To be human is to have the ability to go beyond the demands of our biological and socially constructed self and hold ourself to standards of caring, loving and acting skillfully and wisely beyond that which animals are capable (no offense to them!) I think you could safely say that most humans do not have enough non-deluded pride in their own humanity. If they did have such appropriate pride they  would no doubt be many more people fulfilling their genuine human potential than their actually are!

Divine Pride
In Tibetan tantric practice (which I engaged in explicitly for a decade or so) there is a central practice called “divine pride” where you strongly imagine yourself as already being an enlightened deity.  This Tibetan form is a relatively complex form of divine pride, but the essential divine pride that we can all cultivate is simply the recognition that we are all aspects of a single spiritual essence evolving in many varied and diverse ways within time and space.
Our outer form may be that of a single humble human, but the divine essence that flows through us is truly divine spirit-in action. One of the main goals of meditation practice is to learn to recognize this spiritual essence, and take non-deluded pride in it as our true Self or identity.

Final Thoughts
I suppose my main point in the above writing is that both deluded pride and non-deluded pride arise from the same fundamental emotional and mental energy, and that non-deluded pride plays a very important part in both our overall psychological wellbeing and the ongoing evolution of our consciousness. For it to play its role appropriately we need to liberate our pride from the delusion of inflated self importance and from the carousel of our habitual inferiority/superiority complexes. This is not easy, but it is most definitely worth it!

 

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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 Meditation techniques Positive anger Shadow meditation Using the Energy of Negative Emotions

Fertilizer for the mind and body – Using the Energy of Negative Emotions

Dear Integral meditators,

I hope this newsletter finds you well, this weeks article is a practical meditation technique for working with the energy of negative emotions, which is a theme that I will be building on in articles over the next few weeks.

Yours in the spirit of the ongoing journey,

Toby

Article of the Week:

Fertilizer for the mind and body – Using the Energy of Negative Emotions, a Simple Meditation Technique

In my recent article on “Darkness Emerging as Light” I suggested that the essential energy of negative emotions can be re-worked and re-directed in our life to become a force for the good, and even a force revealing our own enlightened nature. The meditation below is a simple (though not always easy) technique that we can use to:

  •  Work directly to re-direct and transform the energy of  powerful negative emotion
  • Work with at the beginning of a meditation if we are being directly bothered by a negative emotion/thought pattern present in our mind
  • Simply wish to diffuse and recycle ambient negative emotional energy in our bodymind, making it available for us to use in other more positive ways.

The technique is somewhere between a contemplative meditation where we are working with the mind, and a qi-gong type meditation where we are working with the ‘qi’, ‘prajna’ or energy of the body.

Step 1
Sit comfortably in meditation, recognize and rest in a sense of being in a “safe space” for a short while, a safe space meaning here the recognition that at this present time there are no imminent physical or psychological threats to your safety.

Step 2
Bring to mind the negative emotion and accompanying thought patterns that you wish to work with. Try to create it intensively enough so that you can really feel it in your body. This stage can be a bit tricky in that, whenever you try and look at a negative emotion directly it tends to ‘hide’ or ‘disappear’ (and of course there is a lesson in that), so you may have to have to tease it back out again into the open.

Step 3
Ask yourself “Where is the energy of this emotion principally located in my body?” You will probably find that it is somewhere in the torso, between the sacral area and the heart centre, but if it appears to be somewhere else then you can go with that. The main thing is that you should feel you have located the physical and energetic ‘epicenter’ of the emotional disturbance so to speak.

Step 4
See the emotion in that area of your body as being a ball of tightly knotted black light in the centre of that area of your body. At this point let go of the object of your negative emotion (eg the person or situation that has upset you) and simply focus on the ball of light in the body.
See and feel in the centre of that ball an intense point of white light, so that the dark, knotted energy starts to glow from within. Gradually see and feel the knotted dark energy unraveling and lightening. As the energy lightens, it is released from that specific point in the body, and is released and redistributed evenly throughout the rest of the body.

Using the breathing
If you like you can use the breathing to help facilitate this:
As you breathe in, breathe into the centre of the dark energy, seeing the point of light inside growing intensely.
As you breathe out see the point of bright light in the centre expanding through the knotted dark energy, breaking it up and re-distributing it through the body, thus making the energy that has been trapped in the negative emotion re-available for us to use.
(Those of you that are familiar with the way I teach breathing in qi gong will find this basic pattern of breathing familiar, energizing the body upon inhalation, and allowing the energy to flow freely through the body upon exhalation. Here it is the same basic principal applied to a specific area of the body where there is a strong emotional charge).

Step 5 
Conclude the meditation with a brief period of silent awareness, just breathing and focusing on the body as you experience it in the present moment.

Final thoughts
Repeated use of this meditation will sensitize you to build ups of emotional energy in general, and once you are familiar with the basic technique enable you to modulate emotional energy in the body on a more organic, free-form basis.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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 Integral Awareness Motivation and scope

Living by the Light of Your Own Mystical Vision

Hi Everyone,

This weeks article is a little bit of a reflection on how mystical vision is something that we all partake of, and how we can go about integrating our own mystical expereinces a bit more into our own daily life. Enjoy!

Yours in the spirit of the journey,

Toby

Upcoming Classes

Thursday Morning Qi gong Classes

Wednesday 13th June, 7.30-8.30pm – Meditation Class: “How to Integrate Mystical States and Peak Experiences into Your Daily Life”

 

Article of the Week:

Living by the Light of Your Own Mystical Vision

For the purposes of this article we will be using two terms to encompass the meaning of mystical vision; “peak experiences” and “mystical states”.
A peak experience as any personal, subjective experience that we may have that expands our sense of self and beyond its normal, ordinary day to day egoic boundaries.
A mystical state we will define as any experience that moves us into a state of extra-ordinary communion/communication and/or union with the absolute, or the divine.
Put simply both of these types of experience open us to a sense of something bigger than ourself.

From the above definitions we can see that peak experiences and mystical states really work together in tandem; whenever you have an experience that moves us beyond our normal ego boundaries, implicitly we move into a state of deeper communion and union with the universe.

Everyone who has ever led an extra-ordinary life has led a life that was informed by and attuned to their mystical visions. Actually there are very few people who have not had some kind of mystical vision in their life, but for most of us what happened was that we had the experience and then we kind of forgot about it and fell back into the kind of everyday hum drum existence that was the path of least resistance for us.

With this in mind, I would now like you to think of at least one or two experiences in your life that fit into the definition of a peak experience or a mystical state. Spend a minute or two re-creating that experience in your mind and allowing the feelings and images associated with it to pervade your mind and body.
Once you have done this I would then like you to ask yourself the question “What can I start your do today to bring my daily life and actions in line with the spirit of this experience?”
Pondering this question you may conclude that all you need to do today is simply to make your actions at the office or at home a little more loving and considerate,   or you may decide that you want to make a more radical change or shift in the patterns of your life. The main thing is to make a choice to include this state of awareness in your life more, revisiting it and allowing it to inform the choices and actions that you make each day.

Suggested Practicum
This week simply bring to mind your past peak experiences/mystical states, and sit with them for a minute or two. Having done this try and then keep them in mind during your day so that they consciously inform all that you do, say and imagine.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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 Enlightened love and loving Gods and Goddesses Inner vision Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Positive anger Presence and being present Primal Spirituality Shadow meditation

Darkness Emerging as Light

Hi Everyone,

Instinctively we shun difficult and dark emotion in our search for happiness and wellbeing. But what if the secret to finding really dynamic, enlightened happiness was to be found within those dark emotions themselves? This weeks article explores this idea.

Yours in the spirit of darkness as light,

Toby

 

 

Article of the Week:

Darkness Emerging as Light

Often we hear the spiritual path as described in terms of light fighting against the darkness and conquering it, as if the darkness within us is something so intractably unhelpful and evil that the only constructive thing that we can do is to get rid of it or destroy it.
Consequently when we come across dark and destructive emotions in our mind, the tendency can be to shun them, try and get rid of them, repress them, and fight against them.
A closer examination however reveals that really the process of enlightening our dark emotions and impulses is more a matter of transforming and re-working their essential energy so that from their dark and chaotic core light emerges. If we gain practical experience and insight of this we realize that darkness and light are really two aspects of the same essential energy, merely appearing in different ways.
We can find a precedent for this in the Tibetan Buddhist tantric tradition, where the energy of the five core elements of existence can appear on the emotional and mental level either in their distorted form, or their liberated form.

Element – Earth, Distorted Energy – Arrogance/pride, Liberated Energy – Equanimity/balance/generosity

Element – Water, Distorted Energy – Anger/aggression/violence, Liberated Energy – Clarity/mirror wisdom/penetrating insight

Element – Fire, Distorted Energy – Possessiveness/compulsiveness/obsessiveness/consumerism, Liberated Energy – Discriminating wisdom, compassion, appropriateness
Element – Air, Distorted Energy – Envy, suspicion, jealousy, Liberated Energy – Spontaneity/ free and fluid capacity for action
Element – Space, Distorted Energy – Intentional ignorance/introversion/depression, Liberated Energy – Unrestricted intelligence/Pervasive wisdom.
So, this is not an article on Tibetan tantric Buddhism per-se, rather the point of listing the above set of correspondences is to indicate that all negative emotions are expressions of a core creative energy that has been misdirected and distorted. Therefore the way to deal with such misdirected and distorted energies is not to shun them or reject them, but rather to look deeper into them, re-work our understanding of them and re-direct their energy so that it can express itself as enlightened creative energy in our life.
You don’t have to formally be a ‘tantric’ practitioner to do this, but you do need to have the courage and will to look deeply into your emotional pain and darkness and start using your natural intelligence to re-work, re-frame and re-direct that energy in your life. You need to learn to not be afraid of the energy of powerful emotions, but rather to embrace them, recognizing that the energy that intimidates you now is in fact the very same energy that we will later experience  as the light of enlightenment. It is the same basic creative energy seen understood and experienced from a different, larger context and perspective.

So, all of this is not easy work, and it takes consistent time and dedication. If you would like an example of such a re-working from my own life and process you can read an article I wrote called “In order to find real happiness you first have to get mad as hell” which was written during a time when I was specifically re-working my own relationship to the energy of anger.

Practicum

Here is a simple exercise to get started. Whenever you feel a dark negative emotion/emotional space arising in your mind, rather than running away from it, fighting with it or repressing it, try and relax and just feel your way into the “middle” or central core of that emotional vortex. Try and discover that point of stillness that lies at the heart of even the most volatile emotion. Sit there form a while, letting the emotion flow through and over you. Once you are used to this basic activity, then ask yourself the question “How can I re-direct and re-define my relationship to this dynamic and creative energy so that it is working in a liberated way in my life, rather than a distorted way?”

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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 Enlightened love and loving Enlightened service Inner vision Meditating on the Self Motivation and scope Uncategorized

Compassion as Wealth

 

Gaining the Inner Wealth of Compassion

Compassion is a foundational building block of our inner wealth and peace of mind. However, it can be a difficult quality to improve consistently over time. In this article I look at three reasons why it can be difficult to keep developing our compassion sustainably, and three ways that we can start to work to overcome these obstacles.
For the purposes of this article, lets stick to a simple definition of compassion, the wish to free ourself and others from suffering, based upon the ethic and emotions of caring and valuing. In order to access the inner wealth of compassion therefore we need to do two things, open ourselves to the  suffering of ourself and others with a heart that is caring and open.

Here are some of the obstacles to opening to suffering:

  • There is too much of it – It can be overwhelming to contemplate the amount of suffering and injustice in the world. To remain open to it can make us feel vulnerable, confused and seem to “spoil” our ability to enjoy our life. Sometimes even our own suffering seems so intense, how in such a state can we open up to awareness of more suffering, the suffering of others?
  • Attempts to help are not always well received – Sometimes the very people we want to help seem committed to perpetuating their own suffering, and their response to our wanting to help is to react angrily and sometimes hurtfully to our attempts to help.
  •  Disliking ourself, disconnected from others – A final point is that it is very difficult to develop genuine care and love (the basis for compassion) for others if we dislike or hate ourself. Such dislike blocks any compassion that we may have for ourself, and simultaneously locks us in a state of mind where we feel cut off and unable to connect to others. It is impossible to feel compassion for others if we are locked in a viscous cycle of self hatred/dislike within our own ego.

With the above three points in mind, here are three things you can do to to help open to and develop the inner wealth of compassion:

  • Have the courage to open to pain and suffering – Get in the habit of being open to seeing and feeling experiences of suffering that normally you would instinctively shy away from or block out of your awareness. It is not your “fault” that all the pain is there in the world, but it is (if you choose) your opportunity and responsibility to be aware of it and do what you can to alleviate it in whatever big or small way you can.
  • Develop a long term view with regard to how your attempts to help are received – Commit to helping in whatever way you can, and if the people you are trying to help don’t appreciate it, or perhaps don’t understand what you are trying to do, don’t be discouraged. Look at it as a process rather than being to worried about immediate results.
  • Resolve your relationship to yourself – If you can’t connect to others because there is so much conflicting energy caught up in your relationship to yourself, then make it a point to invest in yourself and your ability to develop harmony within yourself. The more harmony and resolution there is within your awareness, the  more space there will be for you to develop authentic care and compassion.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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 Enlightened love and loving Enlightened service Inner vision Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Tapping into the Ever Present Abundance of Happiness

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article looks at how we can find an ever present abundance of happiness “right under our nose” so to speak. I really believe that a practice like this only gets more important and more relevant as our planet becomes ever more crowded and interconnected, and the need for us all to “think as one” becomes more and more of a necessity.

Yours in the spirit of ever present abundance,

Toby

Tapping into the Ever Present Abundance of Happiness

There is a source of abundant happiness that is available to us at all times, no matter how badly your life is going. This abundance of happiness is called the happiness of others.
All you have to do in order to be able to tap into this source of happiness is to be able to expand your sense of self and identity beyond the boundary of your skin andmake your “self” big enough to include other living beings. If you can do this, then any happiness that they have you can partake of, because their happiness is the happiness of your expanded self.

So, then the question then becomes “How can I expand my sense of self to include others?” A key to this is understanding that our self sense is much more flexible than we might think. Whenever we care for someone else our self sense moves out to them and includes them without effort on our part. One simple way to develop an expanded sense of self is simply to consider the body of the Earth or Gaia as being our body (rather than our small physical body that we habitually identify with). If we consider the Earth as our body, then all the living creatures, human, animal and so forth automatically become a part of ourself, and any happiness that they have is our happiness to enjoy, partake of and take pleasure from.

With this expanded sense of self the happiness of all living beings becomes our happiness and thus we are able to tap into an almost infinite source of happiness and joy. We feel as if we have a perpetual abidance of happiness that we can tap into anytime you need to.

Try it now:

  • First expand your sense of self by thinking of your body ans being the body of Gaia or the Earth
  • Then partake of the happiness of one or many of the living beings on the earth, seeing their happiness as your happiness. If someone you know got the job s/he has been looking for, then think of their joy as your joy. See a mother and baby exchanging smiles and affection on the street? That happiness is your happiness.  There are so many possible examples I could give here because there is such an incredible amount of happiness to partake of when you expand your self sense in this way. The only problem you now have is which happiness to enjoy and celebrate!

This way of relating to happiness and your world may seem a little artificial at first, but once it becomes a habit, then it really can feel natural, just Iike second nature.

So there you go a simple method to tap into the perpetual abundance of happiness!

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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 Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques mind body connection Presence and being present spiritual intelligence Zen Meditation

Zen Meditation on the Body Within the Body (Within the Body)

Hi Everyone,

This weeks meditation article focuses on the Zen meditation on the body within the body. The first part of the meditation, separating our actual body from our conceptual image of our body is a traditional Zen technique. The second part, dropping the body and resting in the pure awareness body is my own addition that I use when I teach the meditation to classes. So it is my own “invention” so to speak, but it is entirely within the spirit and intention of Zen practice.

Yours in the spirit of clear perception,

Toby

Article of the Week:

Zen Meditation on the Body Within the Body (Within the Body)

Our Three Bodies and the Three Dimensions of Existence Highlighted By Zen

All the great wisdom traditions of the world point out that our world is a multi-dimensional one, with these different dimensions  coming together in communion to form the totality of our being and experience.
In the Zen meditation on the body within the body, three of these dimensions are emphasized as objects of meditation, each of these bodies in turn corresponding to a particular dimension of reality.
The Three bodies are:

  1. Our conceptual body, or the conceptual image that we hold in our mind of our physical body
  2. Our actual physical body as it is in the sensory world
  3. Our formless energy body or  body of consciousness

These three bodies in turn correspond to three fundamental dimensions of our reality and moment to moment experience:

  1. The conceptual or intellectual dimension of our existence
  2. The non-conceptual dimension of our existence
  3. The spiritual or formless dimension of our existence that forms the ground or basis of dimensions one and two.

The meditation is called the body within the body, because our non-conceptual body is concealed or hidden by our conceptual body, or body image, and our  body of consciousness is hidden behind the sensory perception of our non-conceptual body. Hence through meditation we discover different bodies behind or within what we thought was just one body.

The Purpose of the Meditation on the Body Within the Body

The purpose of this meditation is to help us develop awareness of what in Buddhism is called dualistic appearance, which is the appearance of an object (such as our physical body) together with the projected mental image of that object (in this case the body). According to the Buddha, all of our suffering and pain arises from the confusion that dualistic appearance creates in our mind.
To take a simple example, an anorexic person with a very skinny body observes his/her body and projects the mental image an unacceptably fat body on their actual body. As a result they continue to starve their physical body even though it desperately needs nutrients. In such a person their idea of their body and their actual body are completely confused, and so as a result they cause themselves suffering and harm.
The above example is an extreme one, but in reality all of us experience this type of confusion more or less all of the time, our idea of reality and the actuality of our reality do not match each other and so as a result we experience confusion, delusion and suffering.
The first point of the meditation on the body within the body takes our physical body (initially) as its object, and shows us how we can become mindful of the difference between our actual body our conceptual image of our body so that we no longer confuse the two in harmful ways.
The second point of the meditation is to cultivate the skill of dropping all appearances, conceptual and non-conceptual, and learning to rest our mind in the natural, open state of pure awareness that is our body of consciousness.

The Meditation

Stage 1: Meditating of the conceptual image of your body
Sitting comfortably in meditation, start to examine times in your life when you have had different experiences of your body, times when you may have hated it, times when you have been proud of it, ashamed of it, embarrassed by it. Try to observe how in each case the way in which you experience your body at those times is actually in large part dominated by a conceptual image of the body, rather than the body itself as you are experiencing it from moment to moment. Try and observe how your conceptual mind projects its imagined image of a body onto your body.

Stage 2: Meditating on the non-conceptual experience of your body
In the second stage of the meditation simply focus on the sensory experience of your body and breathing as they are in the present moment. Using the body and the breathing as an anchor, try and drop all conceptual thoughts as completely as you can, and just experience the physical body as it is, free from your idea of what it is. Try and become as familiar as you can with this non-conceptual experience of your sensory body as you experience it in the here and now.
This experience of the body as it is is called “the body within the body” because it is the body that we “discover” when we drop our conceptual image of our body. Our mental image of our body normally hides our actual body from us (!)

Stage 3: Meditating on your body of consciousness
In the final stage of the meditation simply try and let go of all conceptual and sensory experiences altogether, and allow your mind to rest in the “pure awareness body” or subtle formless energy body that acts as the ground from which arises both our conceptual and sensory experience.  Try and gently sustain your experience of this formless or “spiritual” dimension of existence for the remainder of the meditation.
This third meditation stage and third “body” is called “the body within the body, within the body” because it is the body that is normally hidden behind the mask of the phenomenal world, or the body of form. When we drop our body of form, the body of consciousness appears, or is revealed.

Practice When Going About Our Daily Life

  1. During your daily life try and remain consciously aware of the different images and perceptions that your mind is projecting upon your body, accept the images that are useful and helpful, but do not buy into images that are destructive, deluded or unhelpful. Be mindful not to be fooled by them!
  2. Try and come back to your basic sensory or non conceptual experience of your body by regularly dropping your conceptual thoughts and focusing for short periods on the sensory body and the breathing.
  3. Regard both your conceptual and non-conceptual worlds as appearances arising from the ground of your (Universal) or body of consciousness, like a dream arising from the clarity of deep sleep, or clouds arising within and clear sky.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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 Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques One Minute Mindfulness Presence and being present Shadow meditation

There is Always Something to Feel Insecure About

Hi Everyone,

Back in the 1950’s Allan Watts wrote a book called “The Wisdom of Insecurity”. Although written a while back for me it is still one of the most interesting and useful guides on making friends with our insecurity that I have found. This weeks article takes a look at insecurity, and what we can do to start developing a right relationship with it in our life.
This week also sees the first of two meditation workshops over the fortnight “An Introduction to Meditation from the Perspective of Tibetan Buddhism”. All welcome, full details below.

Yours in the spirit of the wisdom of insecurity,

Toby

Upcoming Meditation Classes and Events in March 

Wednesday April 11th – 7.30-9.30pm at Basic Essence: An Introduction to Meditation From the Perspective of Tibetan Buddhism 

Wednesday April 18th – 7.30-9.30pm at Gallery Helios: Our Inner Universe:Meditating on the Different Dimensions of Existence in Zen Buddhism

 

Meditation Workshop: An Introduction to Meditation From the Perspective of  Tibetan Buddhism

With meditation teacher Toby Ouvry

The Tibetan School of Buddhism has a particularly rich and diverse tradition of meditation that can be of great use for the relief of stress, solving of our daily problems and the awakening of our own inherently enlightened nature.

In this two hour workshop Toby will be drawing on his own extensive training  (including five years as a Tibetan Buddhist monk) to give a practical introduction to the fundamentals of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice.

In the workshop you will learn three practical Tibetan meditation forms specifically designed to:

  • Increase your mental peace and concentration
  • Increase your wisdom and compassion
  • Purify the mind and lay the foundation for realizing our own enlightened nature (Using a technique known as “Mahamudra” or “Great Seal”)

These techniques are simple, powerful and profound meditation techniques that can be easily integrated into an existing meditation practice, or used to begin a meditation practice if you are a beginner.

Date and Time: Wednesday 11 April, 7.30-9.30pm

Location: Basic Essence, 501 Bukit Timah Road, 04-04 Cluny Court

(For map of location click HERE)

Course fee:  Sing$50, all participants will be provided with a set of workshop notes and MP3 recording of the workshop for their own personal use.

To register or for further enquiries: Email info@tobyouvry.com or Basic Essence on 64684991

 

Article of the Week:

There is Always Something to Feel Insecure About

Sometimes we can find ourselves feeling insecure about a particular issue in our life. It might be our age, our looks, giving a speech or talk in public, what somebody may have said about us, finding a relationship, or not losing it if we have one. Our children, or work, the list goes on endlessly.

One of the keys to dealing with our insecurity is to realize that, even if we were to find a relief from the particular insecurity that we are feeling at the moment, often as not, rather than experiencing an absence of insecurity, our insecure mind simply seeks out something else to feel insecure and frightened about. If we can see this, then we will also be able to start to see clearly that actually our insecurity is more of a compulsive habit of our mind, and that in many ways the particular object/situation that we feel insecure about at this time is simply the latest thing that our insecure mind has latched onto worrying about.
If we can gain such a subjective insight into the nature of our own insecurity, then we realize that the real challenge lies in developing a right relationship to our insecure mind, with the particular issue that we feel insecure about at the moment being secondary.
Here are a few ways in which you can begin to work with your insecurity in a constructive way:

  1. Recognize that insecurity and unknowing is a natural part of our life and learn to open to its creative possibilities, rather than always trying to find security in narrow minded “certainties”.
  2. Open to the insecurity that you may be feeling on a daily basis. Acknowledge it and make a friend of it. If you try and reject it, repress it or disown it, it will simply recede into your unconscious and try and exercise control in your life from there. If this happens life can feel like a real inner battle between your conscious self and desires, and your unconscious insecurities which keep sabotaging your peace of mind.
  3. Spend a few minutes each day acknowledging the insecurity you may be feeling, and just breathing with it. Once you have acknowledged it consciously, and can feel the full emotion of it in your body, you can then spend a little time releasing the insecurity on your outward breath.
  4. Talk to your insecurity(if you want to do so literally, which can be a more powerful way of doing it, I recommend you don’t do it on the street (!) Alternatively you can have the conversation in a written journal). Ask it to voice its fears to you, and gently and firmly challenge the logic of its assumptions. If you can help your insecurity to see that much of its emotion is unfounded in objective fact, then it will find it easier to relax.
  5. Demonstrate to your insecurity each day that you are a capable leaderof your personality by engaging in concrete actions each day to take charge of your life in whatever way feels appropriate. Our insecure mind is like a child, if it can see that it is in the company of a competent, powerful leader or ‘inner parent” then it will tend to relax and feel safe.

© Toby Ouvry 2012, 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
Enlightened love and loving Essential Spirituality mind body connection Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Six Aspects of Sacred Sexuality

Hi Everyone!

In this week’s article I give a quick guided tour to the uses of sexual energy in spiritual practice. I would venture to say that most of you may not have seen all these different practices in a single article, and I hope you’ll find it of interest!
Detailed below is also the meditation class routine for April, full details to follow in next week’s newsletter.

Yours in the spirit of sacred creativity,

Toby

PS: If you enjoyed this article and would like to find out how you can use the latest meditation technologies to enhance your bliss and joy, then click here: Digital Euphoria

 

Article of the Week:

Six Aspects of Sacred Sexuality

The following is a list of the different uses that sexuality has been and is used for in the different wisdom traditions of the world. Of course each of them contains elements of each type of sacred sexuality within their tradition, but because different traditions emphasize particular uses of the sexual energy, I use them as descriptive terms for the particular “genre”. For example Taoism uses the sexual energy extensively for healing, so I call this type of sexuality “Taoist sexuality”.

As you read through the six below, some you may feel familiar with, others may not be so well known to you. All are very useful when used in the right context, but as with any spiritual practice appropriate discernment should be used in its practical application.

Shamanic Sexuality– Here the sexual energy is generated specifically with the intention of being used for traveling to different locations on the inner world in one’s “astral body” or “energy body”. From one point of view you can mentally project yourself to anywhere you want in the universe just by thinking of it, but if you want to travel to an inner world location in your energy body more energy is required and sexual energy works very well to fully charge the subtle body for its journey. Shamanic sexuality is also used in a healing context, assuming the authenticity and integrity of the Shamanic practitioner.

Taoist Sexuality– In Taoist sexual practice the sexual energy is deliberately generated and then circulated energetically within the body so as to regenerate areas of the body that have become weak nor deadened, and to clear our energetic blocks that are perpetuating and may have even been the original cause of an illness. It can also be practiced by healthy individuals and couples to promote energy levels and long life.

Tantric Sexuality – Here sexual energy is generated with the intention to circulate it through the subtle energy centres of the body in order to promote expanded and enlightened states of awareness.
Another aspect of tantric sexuality is the sexual union of ourself with a divine “other” which is to say the divine appearing in a God or Goddess form, which in turn can enhance the expanded and enlightened states of awareness that are the goal of tantric sexuality.

Psycho-spiritual/Psychoanalytical  Sexuality– The point of this form of sexual practice is, to quote Robert Masters to release “Release sexuality from its obligation to make us feel better”, and to engage in sexual activity with our partner specifically with the intention to open to our psychological vulnerability and explore whatever emotional/energetic pleasure or pain may come up during the interaction consciously and honestly. I suppose this could be thought of as a form of healing sexuality, where the emphasis is placed upon psychological healing.

Non-Dual Sexuality– Non dual sexuality can be practiced simply by deliberately mixing any experience of sexual or sensual bliss with formless emptiness, or inner and outer space, and then remembering that the sense of bliss and the sense of space arise from one primal, non-dual source of all that is.

Biological Sexuality– This is where you use your sexual energy to have babies. It is a s sacred as all the rest, although it is not always presented in a format that is obviously sacred

A final point on all the above is that all of them require dedication and a willingness to confront challenges and difficulties as well as bliss in order to gain authentic results.

© 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