July 2025 – Toby Ouvry Meditation

“I am not the center of the universe; but I am the center of my universe”

Dear <<First Name>>,

This week’s article explores the relationship between mindful self-responsibility & receiving help from others. Another way of thinking about this is the interface between your intra-personal dynamic (relation to self), & your inter-personal dynamic (relation to others & the world). I hope you enjoy it!

In the spirit of self-determination,

Toby

Being self-determining vs receiving help

You are not the center of the Universe, but you are the center of your life

I’ve written quite a lot in the past about becoming a self-determining entity. Self-determination means recognizing that you are the most powerful force in your life (not in the universe, just your life!), and to take ownership of that power. This then enables you to direct your life creatively toward the good. It means recognizing two positions that help to balance each other:

I am not the center of the universe, so I can relax and stop being so neurotic about all my relatively insignificant problems and challenges
I am the centre of my universe, so what I chose and do is of vital and central importance to my life. It’s not anyone else’s job to ‘save’ me, I need to be the master of my own ship!

Becoming self-directed

‘No one is coming to save me’ is one of my ‘quotes to live by’. I find that in difficult situations, stopping looking outside of myself for help and just focusing on what I can control, and what I can do for myself is both calming and empowering. It is not a shutting off from outside help, it is just a clear recognition that it’s really my job to look after my life and its direction. It’s not:

Not my Mum’s job
Not my partners
Not my business-partners
Not my children
Not my friends
Not my boss’s
Not my employees

It’s my job and responsibility to work through and work out the challenges in my life to the best of my ability, and I do in fact have some ability!

Although no one is coming to save me, many people may like to help!

Becoming self-directed means that we are not looking for someone outside of ourself to save us, and we are doing what we can to move forward in our life challenges. The paradox of this is that, when other people see us being like this, it is an attractive quality. People tend to like and even feel inspired by others that they see being pro-active, intentional, and taking responsibility for themselves. Consequently, even though we may not be asking for help, quite often we find friends, family and colleagues offering help and assistance freely and happily. So, there is a virtuous cycle that gets established between being self-determining and receiving help.

Abandoning your power, cutting yourself off from assistance?

There are two ‘extreme’ positions that we are trying to avoid here:

Being a victim, not trying to help ourselves effectively, and over-asking, or expecting others to solve our challenges
Becoming so narrow in our sense of self-determination that we cut ourself off from the assistance of others, even if it is freely offered, and would be of help to us

Being self-determining doesn’t exclude ever asking for help, or accepting it when offered. It just means that we are taking solid responsibility for ourself, and being personally pro-active. Becoming self-determining even includes getting good at asking for help when appropriate.

In conclusion then, being a self-determining person, and receiving / asking for help can be seen as complementary capacities that when put together make our life both easier and fuller of creative potential!

Related article: Becoming a Self-determining entity – Five stages to mindful self-leadership
© Toby Ouvry 2025, 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

All upcoming classes & workshops

Ongoing on Tuesday’s & Wednesday’s (live & online), 7.30-8.30pm – Weekly integral meditation classes

Ongoing Tuesday & Wednesday’s weekly, 7.30-8.30pm – Embodied Transformation – An integrative introduction to Tantric meditation

Ongoing on Saturdays weekly, 5.30-6.15pm – Embodied Transformation – Saturday Tantric deep-dive meditation sessions

Saturday 16th July, 9am-12.30pm – Breathwork Workshop – Improve physical health, wellbeing & inner peace though deep breathing

Saturday 23rd August, 3-4.30pm – One Heart Open Day: Sound of Zen meditation with singing bowls

Tuesday 2nd & 3rd September, 7.30-8.30pm, & then weekly – Integral Meditation from the Perspective of Zen – A 10 week series

Saturday 6th September, 5.30-6.15pm, & then weekly – Zen meditation Deep-dive – A 10 session practice series

Saturday 20th September, 5.30-6.30pm – Autumn equinox balancing & renewing meditation

Follow Toby on: LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram

Integral Meditation Asia

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

“Reduce your device time & increase time spent enquiring into interdependence to go from feeling ‘over-connected & lonely’ to ‘Inter-connected & supported’”

Dear Integral Meditators,

I’ve recently facilitated some corporate workshops on ‘Digital Detox for Corporate Professionals: Reclaiming Focus and Productivity’. Creating this workshop & seeing people’s response to it has really opened my eye’s to how chronic the problems around overuse of devices are for us these days. In the article below I explore a simple flip to go from ‘over-connected, overwhelmed & lonely’ to ‘inter-connected & supported’. I hope you enjoy it!

I’m almost completed with the new meditation programs starting in August/September, you can see the full line up in the Whats On section beneath the article.

In the spirit of connected,

Toby

Inter-connected or over-connected?

What is my relationship to the world? Is a question is one worth asking yourself and seeing what sort of answers and perceptions come back to you. Your sense of your relationship to the world is fundamental, it forms the basis of most of your other perceptions, choices and experiences in life. For many people, the temptation is to experience ourself as someone coming into life from the outside, an outsider who dies not belong, and has to ‘fight’ to earn their place. Life is a battle to belong, rather than an enjoyment of your sense of already belonging.
A ’flip’ that I continue to enjoy is that of being born from life, rather than into it. To quote from a previous article on the subject:

“Our relationship to it is like that of an apple or a leaf to an apple tree. The apple emerges from the Life of the tree itself, not as something separate from the tree. The life of the tree gives rise to the apple. The apple arises from the tree itself, in the same way that the tree came from the life in the apple that it grew from.
You are like the apple being born from the apple tree. The life in you is a part of Life, you are an expression of Life, and Life is you.”

Being ‘born from life’ gives us a sense of effortless belonging, which is a great and un-lonely place to begin feeling into our connection of self-to-world.

Observing interdependence – Inter-connected & supported

We can strengthen our sense of feeling connected to the world by seeing, through contemplation, the way in which we are all interconnected. There are innumerable ways in which we can do this, to give three short examples:

I am writing this article on my parents dining table. To be able to use this table I rely on the carpenters that made it, the wood supplier, the trees it came from (and by implication the forest, not to mention my parents’ hospitality!
I can do the same thing with the computer that I am writing on; so many people involved in the supply chains that put the machine together, created the software and so forth, for me to then buy and use relatively effortlessly
I’ve just finished a coffee whilst writing. Again, to get the coffee to me relies upon the water from the tap, the coffee supply chain, the supermarket, the coffee plant, the land that the coffee plant grew on…

In any aspect of my life, if I start to look at the interdependence that doing what I am doing relies upon, my wisdom-eyes open, and I start to see how intimately and fully I am connected to everything else in the world. From this comes gratitude of course, but also a fundamental reduction in my loneliness. I am always inter-connected, and in this way never alone in a lonely way!

Over-connected & lonely

The above two states of being and feeling interconnected contrast sharply with the experience of many people who are what you might call ‘over-connected’ through their phones and being online all the time. Our devices enable us to be ‘connected’ and ‘in-touch’ all the time, however this experience paradoxically leads many to feel lonely, left-out (and afraid of being left out), isolated and yet compulsively over-connected.

A few practice points:

Reduce, and manage wisely the amount of time you stay connected to the world through your devices
Use the amount of time you save from reduced device time to develop the wisdom of interconnectedness and belonging outlined in sections one and two of this article. This wisdom does not need to be hard work, it’s really just about grounding yourself in the recognition of it. Your inter-connection is fed easily and gently by the recognition!

© Toby Ouvry 2025, 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

Saturday 23rd August, 3-4.30pm – One Heart Open Day: Sound of Zen meditation with singing bowls

Tuesday 2nd & 3rd September, 7.30-8.30pm, & then weekly – Integral Meditation from the Perspective of Zen – A 10 week series

Saturday 20th September, 5.30-6.30pm – Autumn equinox balancing & renewing meditation