Month: April 2026

How to stop difficult feelings becoming negative emotions

Post author By Toby
Post date April 28, 2026

“Can you distinguish your feelings from your emotions? Oftentimes this skill can help you navigate stressful situations more successfully, & with less effort!”

Dear Integral Meditators,

This week’s article looks at how to distinguish feeling states from emotional states, & use it to navigate difficult circumstances more easily. If you enjoy it, then I invite you to my Mindfulness for emotional intelligence masterclass this Saturday 25th April, 2.30-4.30pm, live or online!

This week’s Wednesday & Saturday class continue our inner-smile meditation series, which is also focused on mindfulness around emotions. All welcome.

In the spirit of ease,

Toby

How to stop difficult feelings becoming negative emotions

The difference between feelings and emotions

One of the most useful distinctions in Buddhist insight meditation that I have found is the distinction between feelings and emotions. Broadly speaking feelings are simply the experience of that which is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. By contrast emotions arise from a psychological process that involves thinking in a particular way about a feeling. Here are two simple examples:

I see a person who has wronged me in the past, instinctively an unpleasant feeling arises. I then start to reflect on the harm that they have caused me and develop anger or anger. This anger is the emotion, arising from the psychological process of paying attention to the harm done in combination with the initial unpleasant feelings.
I am sick, giving rise to unpleasant feelings in my body. I start to think about how this sickness is ruining my only two weeks of holiday in the year and I start to develop the emotions of frustration, despair and sadness.

Here we can start to see the basic distinction; pain is simply the feeling arising within the moment. We experience emotion when we combine a feeling with a psychological process of focusing on the feeling in a particular way.
With regard to painful feelings, often we compound the pain they cause us by focusing on them in a way that causes us to experience emotional suffering, as in the examples above. The key therefore in preventing painful feelings becoming full blown emotional suffering is to avoid thinking about them or focusing on them in such a way that negative emotions are stimulated.

Some sources of painful feelings

The five sources of painful feelings below are a non-exhaustive list, but it gives an idea of the variety of different sources that can cause painful feelings within us. Any of them if focused on in the wrong way can cause negative emotions to arise:

Physical pain arising from sickness or injury
Pain or irritability arising from hormonal or other biological or energetic imbalances within the body
From people who say or do harmful things to us or have done so in the past
From psychological and/or existential anxiety, e.g.: Worried about not being good enough, fear of dying, fear of stepping out of comfort zone etc…
From spiritual crisis; for example, when the old self or ego structures are collapsing in order for a new level of self-sense to arise.

An insight meditation for acknowledging and releasing negative feelings

Here is a brief insight meditation form that we can use to prevent difficult feelings turning into negative emotions:

Stage 1: Breathing in I am aware of my painful feelings,
Breathing out I acknowledge those feelings fully.
Stage 2: Breathing in I experience my tight grasping at those painful feelings,
Breathing out I relax my grasping at those feelings,
Stage 3: Breathing in I detach from those feelings,
Breathing out I extend compassion and understanding to those feelings.

In stage one as we breathe in, we become consciously aware of any painful feelings we may be experiencing, as we breathe out, we acknowledge them fully. Often, we try and repress or deny negative feelings, which in turn allow them to build and transform into negative emotions. Fully acknowledging what is there and gives feelings the attention they need in order to be addressed.

In stage two we observe how we are clinging to these painful feelings, grasping at them tightly. Then, as we breathe out, we consciously release that tight grasping, energetically relaxing our body and mind.

In stage three we detach from those painful feelings, at the same time as extending a feeling of compassion and understanding toward them. We combine the objective experience of detachment with the positive emotional tonalities of compassion and understanding.

Suggestions for Daily Practice

The essential point is that feelings can be distinguished from emotions, and we can prevent negative emotions from arising by avoiding focusing on painful feelings in the wrong way.
The brief meditation technique I describe above can be done as a two-minute exercise or as an extended meditation, taking a few minutes to focus on each of the stages. It is a meditation that is worth doing sometimes even if we are not fully aware of any negative feelings inside us, as often it will bring to light feelings within us the need a bit of tender loving care.
Of course if there are also practical things that we can do to alleviate the negative feelings, like taking medicine, or having a conversation to clear the air with our partner about a hurt we have then this should be done to!

Related reading: “Insight Meditation – Improving Your Subjective Experience by Developing Your Objective Perspective”

© Toby Ouvry 2026, 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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Mindful of – the quest for safety & excitement

Post author By Toby
Post date April 20, 2026

“How can you start co-creating a greater sense of both safety & excitement in your life today?”

Dear Integral Meditators,

This week’s article looks at how to transform conflicting desires into complementary desires. Its a topic that comes up quite often in my Life-fullness life coaching, and in my executive coaching, and getting a hang for it can open up lots of positive possibilties.

This week’s Wednesday & Saturday class continue our inner-smile meditation, with the focus being on ‘Meditating on the lungs & on transforming sadness/depression, cultivating courage.’ All welcome!

In the spirit of integration,

Toby

The quest for both safety and excitement

Our contradictory desires

One of the challenges that we face to our sense of even-mindedness in life is that we have desires. Not just desires, but conflicting desires that actively seem to be pulling against each other!

We want safety and excitement in life
We want money but also plenty of free time
We want our body to look good, but don’t want to suffer from exertion

The list could go on, but I want to just double click on the safety and excitement and look at that as a primary example. One of our most feared emotions is, well, fear itself! Many of us feel uncomfortable about fear, and act to avoid it, and its subsidiaries, insecurity and anxiety. We desire safety, physically, psychologically, spiritually, and take out the element of risk, uncertainty, and danger (real or perceived). In an attempt to experience safety:

We choose to trade the hours of our day for work that pays a salary
We settle into a predictable romantic relationship
We stay with known patterns and activities in our life

The issue with this then becomes that our life feels boring, predictable, unexciting. This then blocks another common desire, the desire for excitement in life, for variety, change, growth, adventure! To get excitement in our life we have to create a degree of risk, an encountering of the unknown, a place where the result is not guaranteed.

If we aren’t careful, we find ourself locked between the horns of these two desires. Our desire for safety stifles the excitement we crave. The excitement we crave threatens our sense of safety and stability. Either way we are unhappy, or feel unhappy because it looks like a loose-loose paradigm, we feel condemned by the contradiction.

From contradictory to complementary – Both and, not either or

In my Life-fullness life coaching, and in my executive coaching, quite a lot of what I do is help people spot contradictions or conflicts in their life, and work on balancing them out, turning them into mutually enhancing polarities that can propel them toward a better experience. In the case of safety and excitement, I can create a greater sense of safety by:

Recognizing that I am physically safe almost all the time, and that the illusion of danger on the biological level is often merely an imbalance in my nervous system
I can create psychological safety by choosing to be mindful of my inner narrative, supporting myself, not attacking myself
I can articulate my vision of a greater intelligence in the universe that is benevolent toward me, thus learning to recognize and rest in a sense of spiritual safety

By cultivating in this way, I can feel more secure in life, satisfying my desire for safety. Having done this, I can then use that sense of safety to take more positive risk, and court excitement in my life! With my broader sense of safety, I can:

Be a bit more socially daring/entertaining, without being afraid of judgments
I can assert my wishes and desires for a fulfilling work life, not just staying silent and keeping on keeping on for fear of change
I can take up activities I am not yet good at but want to be, and not be so afraid of looking foolish as I do so

With my healthy sense of safety, I can cultivate MORE excitement in my life, and my desire for both becomes a mutually supporting, virtuous cycle.
How can you start co-creating a greater sense of safety and excitement in your life today?

© Toby Ouvry 2026, 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

Ongoing on Wednesdays – The inner smile – Meditations for inner regeneration & connecting to the Earth – An 8-week course

Ongoing on Saturdays – The inner smile & Earth healing deep-dive – An 8 session practice series

Saturday 25th April, 2.30-4.30pm – Mindfulness for emotional intelligence masterclass

Tags inner growth, integral meditation, integral meditation asia, integral mindfulness, meditation, meditation in singapore, mindfulness, mindfulness in Singapore, mindfulness meditation, power of mind

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Are you building self-esteem or self-alienation?

Post author By Toby
Post date April 13, 2026

“What are the areas of your life that you tend to get stuck in self-alienation? How can you start using self-acceptance in these situations, strengthening your self-esteem in the process?”

Dear Integral Meditators,

In this week’s article I look at self-alienation as an object of mindful enquiry. In my view self-alienation is a common, pervasive issue for many people. If we can start to see it, we can start to deal with it! It is a topic that comes up with regularity in both my shadow coaching work, and my therpeutic mindfulness coaching.

If the subject interests you, then you might enjoy the Mindfulness for emotional intelligence masterclass on Saturday 25th April, 2.30-4.30pm.

In the spirit of integration,

Toby

Are you building self-esteem or self-alienation?

Self-esteem is

One way of thinking about self esteem is as having two parts:

The part that considers ourself to be worthy of happiness and to have value
The part of us that feels capable and effective in the face of life and life’s challenges

If you have self-esteem as a foundational building block of your psychological experience of life, it will affect almost everything else in a positive way.

Self-alienation is

Self-Alienation happens whenever we turn away from, reject, or repress awareness of an aspect of ourself. We literally cut ourselves off from a part of who we are, and this part becomes a stranger to, or alienated from our conscious self. Nathaniel Branden wrote a book ‘The disowned self’ on the subject of all the different ways in which we alienate ourself from ourself. It mostly does not happen consciously, very few people wake up saying to themselves “Today I am going to practice self-alienation, and dis-own different parts of myself.” Nevertheless, without knowing it many of us do exactly this, without understanding that it is happening, or how we are doing it.

Why & how we create self-alienation when trying to create self-esteem

Let’s say I am deeply disappointed about not getting a job opportunity that I had interviewed for and had a good chance of getting. To protect myself from the difficult feelings and ‘lowness’ of feeling disappointed (and like a ‘loser’) I repress them, banishing them from my consciousness. By doing this I am trying to protect my self-esteem, but what I am really doing is alienating myself from the part of me that feels disappointed. This ‘disappointed self’ is the very part of me needing support and acknowledgement in that moment. Instead, I turn away from him and disown him.
In this example my instinctive efforts to protect my self-esteem actually sabotage it, and make me weaker by cutting myself off from a part of me. Secondarily, and just as importantly, sub-consciously a part of me will know that I have done this, and will know that we have ‘betrayed ourself’ on some fundamental level. This further lowers our REAL self-esteem, but tragically it has been done to protect the very self-esteem that we are damaging.

Self-acceptance as a route to genuine self-esteem

Let us say that, in the face of my disappointment over the job opportunity, instead of repressing and alienating my disappointment I turn towards it, acknowledging and accepting it. I allow myself to feel and experience my emotions, expressing a degree of understanding and care toward the part of me in pain. By bringing into consciousness the wounded part, and choosing to accept and look after it I:

Increase my self-esteem by displaying both courage and competency in the face of a challenge
I keep my personality from being divided against itself, it remains interconnected and in integrity
I actually pass through the disappointment much more quickly, feeling much more resilient and adaptable as a result

Self-acceptance becomes a route to higher self-confidence and self-esteem, preventing the disastrous (and often unconscious) results of self-alienation and dis-association.

What are the areas of your life that you tend to get stuck in self-alienation? How can you start using self-acceptance in these situations, strengthening your self-esteem in the process?

Related reading: Choosing to be on Your Own Side
Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 2 – Meeting Your Deeper & Higher Needs Through Meditation

© Toby Ouvry 2026, 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

Ongoing on Wednesdays – The inner smile – Meditations for inner regeneration & connecting to the Earth – An 8-week course

Ongoing on Saturdays – The inner smile & Earth healing deep-dive – An 8 session practice series

Saturday 25th April, 2.30-4.30pm – Mindfulness for emotional intelligence masterclass

Tags inner growth, integral meditation, integral meditation asia, integral mindfulness, meditation, meditation in singapore, mindfulness, mindfulness in Singapore, mindfulness meditation, power of mind, self-alienation, self-esteem

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Mindfulness, emotions & your MRVA’s (Mass rapid value assessments)

Post author By Toby
Post date April 6, 2026

“If we can allow ourselves to skilfully acknowledge & experience difficult emotions, there is a corresponding release of a range of positive, enjoyable emotions.”

Dear Integral Meditators,

This week’s article focuses on emotions & how you work with them as a major lynch-pin of your energetic resilience. Its something that we will be exploring in depth in the new Wednesday and Saturday meditation series on building confidence & resilience with the inner-smile practice.

In the spirit of integration,

Toby

Mindfulness, emotions & your MRVA’s (Mass rapid value assessments)

In my upcoming meditation series on building confidence and energetic resilience in life, we will be focusing on developing a range of mindful skills, including:

Healing and regenerating the energy of your physical body and internal organs
Revitalise and transform your emotional vitality
Build a warm, empowered & confident relationship to your life

To really get these skills to work effectively, we need to understand the energy of emotions, their power, and how to get them to flow healthily within us. Emotions are psych-somatic, partaking of both our bodily and mental energy. A good relationship to emotions opens our life-force and joie de vivre tremendously. A blocked or combattative relationship to our emotions tends to constrict our life-force, limiting our energy in life no matter how hard we try. Here is a working definition of emotion from Nathaniel Branden, for the purposes of this article

“An emotion is a value-response. It is an automatic psychological result (involving mental and somatic features) of a super-rapid subconscious appraisal. Emotions are psychosomatic embodiments of value judgments…Since emotions are the product of complex integrations of ideas beliefs and experiences, they cannot be commanded out of existence, neither by and act of will or by repression. It is a disastrous error to imagine that an emotion – merely because it is judged undesirable – can be repressed or dismissed with impunity.” *

Emotions happen very quickly then, as our body-mind engages in many ‘Mass rapid value assessments’ (MRVA’s). Once an emotion has been stimulated, it IS, whether we like it or not. So how should we approach it. To quote Branden again:

“If we acknowledge and permit ourselves to experience our painful or undesired feelings, without self-pity, and without self-condemnation, we facilitate the process of healing integration.” *

If we can allow ourselves to skilfully acknowledge and experience difficult emotions, a corollary benefit will be the release of a whole range of positive, enjoyable emotions.

How to acknowledge and experience emotions

A simple way to begin is to sit down, sense into yourself and simply describe the emotions you are feeling. You can either do this organically with whatever is there in the moment, or with regard to a particular emotion you are struggling with. As you do this you will notice there are both bodily and mental aspects to it. My go-to practice for years now has been something called sentence completion. You create a sentence stem, and then complete it, either writing or verbally around ten times, in whatever way occurs to you, as quickly and non-judgmentally as you can.

Here is an example around depression:
If I allow myself to experience and acknowledge the feeling I am calling depression within me –

I feel like there is a huge weight on my shoulders
My eyes stare from hollow sockets
My mouth hangs open like a zombie
I want to sleep for a thousand years
I feel overwhelmed by all the things I have to do
I resent others for leaving me with all the responsibility
I feel confused about what to do next
The world feels like an insurmountable mountain
I can feel myself more present in my body now, landing and feeling stronger
I feel a release and renewed enthusiasm and I move through it

Here you can see that, by the end of the sentence completion I’m already kind of pulling out of the difficult emotion, and moving toward something better. Better still, I have processed the emotion and an now move on from it into the next part of the day in freedom.
All this can sound a bit too good to be true until you actually try it, but once you get the hang of it all sorts of possibilities start to open up!

* Quote: Nat Branden, from ‘the Disowned Self’, chapter on the undiscovered self (Page 27 & 33)

Related reading: Mindfulness around emotions
Accepting & recycling your difficult emotions
Connecting to higher, deeper emotions (Enjoying emotional resilience)

© Toby Ouvry 2026, 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

Starts Wednesday 8^th April, 7.30-8.30pm, & then ongoing – The inner smile – Meditations for inner regeneration & connecting to the Earth – An 8-week course

Saturday 11^th April, 5.30-6.15pm SG time, & then ongoing – The inner smile & Earth healing deep-dive – An 8 session practice series

Tags emotional mindfulness, inner growth, integral meditation, integral meditation asia, integral mindfulness, meditation, meditation in singapore, mindfulness, mindfulness in Singapore, mindfulness meditation, power of mind