Category: Awareness and insight

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Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Shadow meditation Uncategorized

Soft Forms of Psychic Self Defence

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article looks at some somewhat counter-intuitive forms of inner psychic defence, which I hope you will enjoy and be able to relate to.

Yours in the spirit of strength in softness,
Toby

 

Soft forms of Psychic Self-Defence 

Normally when we think of psychic self-defence, both in the sense of defence from the negativity of others, from an energetically negative environment, or from our own negativity (depression, anger, jealousy etc…) we tend to think in terms of positive thinking, visualizing defences around us (a golden bubble of light that deflects the negativity etc…), fighting the negative, blocking it out, not letting it in, never giving up. These are what might be called the “hard” forms of psychic self defence, rather like karate and judo are called “hard” martial arts in the sense that they fight force with force, in a pattern of blocking, throwing and punching.
Of course there are the “soft” forms of martial art, which involve taking the force of your opponent and using it against them. This soft technique involves yielding to your opponents attack, and then re-directing the energy. The principle of the soft forms of psychic self defence that I am about to try and explain work on this same principle of non-resistance to negative forces. You let them flow in and around you using the principle of non-resistance, but the act of non-resistance itself acts as the dissipator of the negative force, rendering it non harmful. The soft forms of psychic self defence are in some ways a little more “advanced” than the hard forms, but they are well worth the effort because once you get the hang of them dealing with negativity becomes far less effort-full, and far more ergonomically efficient. Negativity is understood as simply an energy that can be flowed with and re-directed, rather than something to fear.

To explain these soft forms of psychic self defence I am going to use two images, because they speak very well to the “feeling” of the technique.

1) Sinking to the bottom of the swimming pool. 
Lets say I am fighting a regularly occurring depression. That  depression is like a swimming pool. Normally my way of dealing with it is to fight it, trying desperately to keep my head above water, but often finding myself struggling desperately at mid-depth, feeling surrounded by the movement of the emotion. The soft form of defence is this; rather than trying to stay afloat, deliberately I completely relax the mind and allow myself to self to sink down to the bottom of my “swimming pool of  depression”. At the bottom I simply rest and relax, surrounded by the water, deeply intimate with the emotional centre of the depression. I stay there quietly for a while, resting at the bottom of the pool (which is at the “centre” of the emotional vortex of the depression. When I am ready, having regained my strength, I push off from the bottom of the pool toward the surface. Because I have found the bottom of the pool, it is easy to push powerfully and easily back to the surface.

2) Removing sticks from the river bank
I’m talking to another person, who is downloading a lot of negative emotion and bile at me, and I am not feeling strong, in fact I am feeling overwhelmed by their negativity.  In this analogy the other persons “river of consciousness and energy”  is flowing into my river of consciousness. All of my own negative issues are like branches sticking out from the side of the river bank into the water. Any negative energy coming from the other person that is similar to any of my negative issues gets “caught” on the one of the branches, thus getting stuck and building up in my mind and energy system, making me feel overwhelmed.
The technique here is to mentally take out all of the branches from the river of my consciousness. As I feel the persons energy flowing over and through me, I note that some of my issues get triggered by their negativity. However, rather than tensing up, I consciously keep my body and mind relaxed, so that any negative energy flowing onto my river of consciousness from the other person does not get “stuck” but rather flows straight through me and out of my energy system, meeting nothing to get “caught” on.

So, two images there. The soft forms of psychic self defence are subtle and kind of counter intuitive, which is why using images and analogies works best to try and explain them. However, if you use the images I have given above I think it should not be too difficult to get a practical feeling for them, and begin to experiment with the soft form of psychic self defense in your own life.

© Toby Ouvry 2013, 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 Meditation and Psychology Presence and being present Primal Spirituality

On Real Men, Daffodils and Chihuahuas

Dear All,

This weeks article looks at ways in which we can encourage ourselves to get out of the ‘ordinary appearances’ that so often prevent us from living a full and vibrant life.

Quick reminder of this coming Wednesday’s  “Introduction to Meditation From the Perspective of Zen” . There are maybe three or four places left, so if you do want to come I do need to know, thanks! If you can’t make the Zen class physically, but are interested in the MP3 recordings of it, then it is available in this format.

Wishing you a week of non-ordinariness,

Toby

Upcoming Classes and Workshops at Integral Meditation Asia in January 2013

Wednesday 16th January, 7.30-9.30pm: “An Introduction to Meditation From the Perspective of Zen”

Sunday 26th January – 9.30am-12.30pm – Three Hour Workshop: ”Meditation for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention – An Introduction to Contemporary Meditation Practice“

To register or for further enquiries: Email info@integralmeditationasia.com, or call 65-68714117

On Real Men, Daffodils and Chihuahuas

Ordinary appearances
From the perspective of Tibetan Buddhist Tantric practice, one of the main obstacles to us breaking free of our patterns of suffering and pain, and living in a truly creative and liberated state is ‘ordinary appearances’. Put very briefly this means that we see what arises in our daily life as the ‘same old same old’, rather than the reality (from a tantric perspective), which is that each moment of our life is a living encounter and dialog with the divine who/which is in each moment encouraging us to recognize our own inner creative nature, and encouraging us to dance and sing our way through life, rather than remaining stuck in the banal, the unthinking mainstream, the unexceptional and often actually being afraid to connect to and be “who we really are”.

Things that take you out of the spell of ordinary appearance
Some afternoons I jog down the canal to an exercise station to do a little bit of fitness work. Often at about that time there is another guy there, maybe in his 50’s. He has a kind of David Beckham mid-90’s hair cut, with red highlights, and he jogs down with his dog, a Chihuahua that last week was carrying a daffodil in its mouth as it trotted along beside him. I think he must be some kind of night club owner or something, but the thing that strikes me about him is that he is clearly entirely comfortable with his lack of conventionality. We normally have a friendly chat about man-stuff (actually mostly sound approximations, his english isn’t that good, and my mandarin is similarly limited, but with man-talk it is mainly about making the right primal sounds to let each other know that it is one ‘real man’ talking to another, right guys?) before we go off and sweat away in our own corner of the playground.
For me, seeing this slightly eccentric but entirely ‘comfortable in his own skin’ guy, within his flower carrying dog reminds me that life is not ordinary. Seeing him each week makes me smile and laugh a bit, and encourages me to keep on pursuing my own ‘out of the ordinary’ path with humour, enthusiasm, care and creativity despite the obstacles that come up.

Breaking the consensus of ordinary appearance in the world
Like me I am sure that you to have some slightly out of the ordinary people, sights and happenings that occur in your life each week, or if you think you don’t, then have a look out this week and see what you can find. You can use these encounters if you want just to consciously jolt you out of your ordinary, mundane perception of your life, and see your life as an opportunity to dance a little (inwardly or outwardly) to the tune of the divine, and to connect creatively, fully and with care to who you are, who you meet and what you are doing.

© Toby Ouvry 2013, 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 and Psychology Meditation techniques Presence and being present Primal Spirituality Uncategorized

The Inner Sharks of the Mind

This weeks article takes an example from nature as a way of gaining insight on how to deal with the disturbances in our mind that we might normally try and run away from. Sometimes an image really does speak a thousand words, and I find this particular image very helpful in both dealing with my own issues and also trying to communicate to others how to work with inner challenges in a more meditative and watchful manner.

Yours in the spirit of staying on the tail of the shark,
Toby

The Inner Sharks of the Mind

There is quite a famous nature documentary sequence where a seal is being attacked by a white shark. Having escaped from the shark’s jaws one time, rather than making a run (or swim) for it, the seal instead stays behind the sharks tail, following it very closely, until it gets close enough to the land to quickly leap on shore. Rather than running away or confronting the shark the seal dealt with the threat by staying close to the shark, watching and following it very closely.
I find this image an extremely useful one when thinking about how to deal with imbalances, fears, attachments and other negative or volatile forces in our mind. The temptation can be when we sense a threat to our inner well being is either to run away from it (or go into denial), or to get into a confrontation or battle with it. Both of these techniques take a lot of energy and sometimes the act of confronting or running actually creates even more damage.
A more meditative and energy effective method is to act like the seal. When we sense the imbalance or negativity, try to get as close as you can to the experience. Rather than pushing it away, observe its movements closely with as little judgment as you can. Follow the negative emotion, energy or feeling like the seal staying on the tail of the shark; don’t confront or run away from it, just be behind it and watch its movements very closely.
The interesting thing about this technique of watching and following is that quite often the act of watching and following the disturbance will actually act to dissolve away the tension that has been created. By following the thoughts and fears that you are afraid of they actually seem to dissolve away.

Practical Technique

Step 1: Pick a difficult mind that you regularly run away from or get inwardly “beaten up” in a confrontation with. Name it and decide that you are going to try this new technique on it. For example you might think “I am now going to follow the shark of my insecurity, staying on its tail”.

Step 2: Watch your (continuing the example) insecurity, don’t run away from it or confront it, just be with it, relaxing and going with its movements.

Step 3: After a while you may notice that the power of the hold that your insecurity has over you has decreased. When you are ready, simply let go of the insecure mind and let it dissolve away. Then spend a short while resting in a state of non-conceptual awareness and enjoy the feeling of relaxation that arises from temporarily having liberated yourself from one of your persistent fears.

© Toby Ouvry 2013, 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 Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Are You a Product of the Times or the Subject of Your Own Inner Time?

Hi All,

This weeks article looks at the difference between being a product of outer time, the a subject of your own sense of inner time. Another way of putting this is how can we deal effectively with the outer forces impinging upon our life, whilst at the same time honoring that which is arising from our own sense of individuality?

Yours in the spirit of the harmonization of inner and outer time,

Toby

Article of the Week:

Are You a Product of the Times or the Subject of Your Own Inner Time?

To be a product of the times is simply to be a product of the prevailing cultural, social, biological, economic and other environmental forces that happen to be dominant during the era when you are alive. It basically implies that you as an individual are less powerful than the forces that surround you, and hence it is the surrounding forces that mold you as a person, and not your sense of own inner direction.

To be the subject of your own inner time means to have a sense of your own “inner compass” so to speak, or inner direction, and to be prepared to make your life a product of that inner direction and compass, rather than a product of what you are being told to be from the outside.

Another way of putting it might be that, when you are the subject of your own inner time you become self determining. You can go against the flow within the society within which you live, even if it means a degree of isolation, hardship or unpopularity.

So, to be a product of the times means to be created or formed by forces outside yourself.To be the subject of your own inner time means who you are is more a conscious articulation of that which is inside you.

As meditators, or as people who aspire to conscious and creative living (one definition of a meditator?) two of our main jobs are:

  1.  To be aware that inevitably you are, to a greater or lesser degree a product of your times, and to think carefully about this. What aspects and energies of your times are positive and worthwhile participating in, and which are best not identifying with and working to not participate in? To give an example of this one prevailing energy of our time is that of inter-communication and inter-connectivity. There are lots of positive ways in which we can participate in this, by using the Internet to become well informed and to establish relationships with worthwhile people who can help us grow. However, we would be well advised not to participate in neurotic over-communication and email/sms addiction that so many people seem to have become thoughtlessly caught up in these days.
  2.  To be aware of our sense of inner or subjective time, and regularly ask ourselves “What is it within me that is creatively emerging and wishes to express itself in the outer world?” 

The challenge about that which is emerging from within your own sense of subjective time is that it takes acts of creativity, energy and courage to bring it into the outer world and express, there are no guarantees that people will like it or approve of it, maybe they will even completely ignore it! I often think of Vincent Van Gough as an example of this. During his lifetime he sold only one painting (and his brother owned an art gallery, so he really was totally ignored and under appreciated by the public) and it was only after his death that people gained an appreciation and understanding of what beauty he had created.
So, when you start following your own inner compass and bringing forth that which is within you then hopefully you won’t be completely ignored like Van Gough was, and indeed many people become very appreciated when they start acting appropriately and creatively on their inner urges.  But it may well be that, at least in the beginning you are.
The interesting thing is that if you really are the subject of your own inner time, then even if no one else cares, you’ll do it anyway, and you will enjoy it!

© Toby Ouvry 2013, 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 Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Motivation and scope One Minute Mindfulness Presence and being present

Light-Heartedness as Your Object of Meditation

Hi Everyone,

Light-heartedness is the theme of this weeks article, a seriously important meditation if you ask me!

 

Happy meditating!

Toby

Taking Light-Heartedness as Your Object of Meditation

Light-heartedness is a state of mind and being that combines the elements of serious mindedness and deep caring with a sense of lightness and fun. It avoids the extremes of either:

  • Being over serious and heavy in our approach, or
  • Resorting to purely superficial/hedonistic fun as an “escape” from the pressures of our life.

Sometimes life can feel like an attritional battle that we are fighting and this is often partly because the imbalanced attitude that we are adopting toward our challenges only adds to the burden. Consciously practising light heartedness is a very good way of increasing our stamina and ability to bear our burdens effectively whilst at the same time having more genuine fun.
The ability to practice light-heartedness arises from the insight that fun and seriousness are not mutually exclusive poles, but qualities that can be (and need to be) combined together in order to experience life fully and richly. When you are having fun with someone whom you care for deeply and seriously, that fun is enhanced and much deeper in quality. When you are in a serious situation and you are able to retain an element of lightness and relaxation, then that serious situation can become fun, and the levels of consequent fulfilment arising from it increases correspondingly.

To be light-hearted is to hold things lightly whist caring deeply.

How to meditate on light-heartedness

“Breathing in I hold it lightly,
Breathing our I care deeply”

Take a situation in your life; at work, at home, in your relationships or whatever. With this situation in mind take a few meditative breaths. As you breathe, focus on the two sentences above:

  • As you breathe in consciously introduce the theme and quality of holding the situation lightly, maybe smile gently to yourself as you do so.
  • As you breathe out open yourself to a deep caring for the situation; don’t duck that which demands that you take this situation with appropriate seriousness.

Continue breathing in this way until you feel as if you have found the balance in your attitude between lightness/fun and caring/appropriate seriousness. You might think of this light-hearted attitude as being like a kind of “playful, involved detachment”. Become familiar with this state of light-heartedness by just breathing with it for a little while longer.

Once you are familiar with light-heartedness as a meditative exercise (and the exercise need only take 3mins or so to practice at any given time) then your job becomes to consciously sustain this attitude whilst in the middle of your daily activities, so that it becomes a habitual approach to what you do. Whenever you feel like you have lost your link to light-heartedness, simply come back to the breathing in the manner described above and re-establish it in your awareness as an approach.

As well as increasing the quality and genuine fun on your own personal experience, I think light-heartedness is a great social skill to have. People naturally appreciate and gravitate towards people who radiate caring and lightness. Why wouldn’t they? Instinctively I believe it is how many of us would like to be, but perhaps don’t quite know how.

This article and meditation technique is an invitation to the “how” of light-heartedness, enjoy!

© 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 Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Motivation and scope

Balancing the Development of Your Ego and Spirit

Hi Everyone,

The concerns of our ego and the concerns of spirit are often set up as being mutually antagonistic to each other, but is this really the case? This weeks article looks at ways that we can begin to synchronize our ego and our spiritual selves in to a complementary unity, where they are mutually supporting each other.

Yours in the spirit or harmonization,

Toby

 

Balancing the Development of  Your Ego and Spirit

Within the traditional spiritual worldview the ego is often set up as the opponent or enemy of spiritual life. Similarly in traditional psychoanalytic circles, spiritual experiences are reduced to merely pre-rational fantasy, or at best treated with deep scepticism.
An integral perspective to self-development attempts to bring together egoic and spiritual development into a complementary, mutually supporting unity, even though our ego-self and our spiritual-self are two very different levels and modes of being.

For the purposes of this article what I mean by ego is as follows:
The ego refers to the different psychological structures that combine together to create our functional personality or “psychological- self” that exists in the day to day world of conventional time and space.

What I mean by spirit is as follows:
Our spiritual self is the timeless, formless dimension of our being that is liberated from all suffering, and that experiences itself as being in union and communion with all life and the Universe as a whole.

These two dimensions of our being as I say are very much contrasting, almost “opposite ends of the spectrum of self” so to speak. In this article I am going to present developing the health of the ego as having three facets or aspects:

  • Going somewhere
  • Doing something
  • Being someone

Conversely, I am going to suggest that cultivating a healthy connection to our Spiritual self has three aspects:

  • Relaxing deeply and going nowhere
  • Doing no-thing, or practicing non-doing
  • Being no-one.

To develop our ego and spirit in a complementary manner, we need to be able to do develop our skill in BOTH of the above sets of activities.

Going Somewhere/Going Nowhere

To develop and maintain a healthy ego you need to have goals in life and strategies that give you a way of moving toward the achievement of those goals. Without such goals and strategies the ego loses motivation and becomes vulnerable to many forms of psychological ill health.
Developing one’s connection to spirit involves regularly creating and entering into spaces where you consciously drop all your goals, forget about “direction” and focus all your awareness in being absolutely and fully where you ARE without any idea of going anywhere else!

Doing Something/Doing No-Thing

Healthy ego growth requires that one fills one’s time with healthy and appropriate activities in ones personal, work and relationship life that keep our personality and “everyday self” (ie: our ego) engaged, happy and learning.
Connecting to our  spiritual self  involves deliberately entering periods of doing no-thing in order to cultivate our awareness and connection to what lies beyond the world of things, and to decrease our attachment and over identification with “what we do” and mistaking it for “who we are.

Being Someone/Being No-one

A sound ego-self is a self that has a clear sense of positive identity, an “I” that is resilient, realistically optimistic, has self-worth and self-compassion, that sees itself positively in relation to other people it is in relationship to, and to the world in which it finds itself.
To create a relationship to and identification with our spiritual self involves regularly dropping all of the ideas and images that our ego has about who we are, and temporarily becoming a nobody, or a no-one. This is because it is only when we drop our fixed idea of who we are as an individual that we can start to experientially identify with the “self that we are” on the metta, universal or spiritual level.

Doing Both/And

The main point here is that in order to develop our ego and our spirit in complementary tandem we need to get comfortable with the doing both of the above sets of practices:

  • We need to be going somewhere as an ego, whilst regularly creating spaces for “going nowhere” in our life, within which we can cultivate awareness of our ever present spiritual being.
  • Be doing something as an ego in the sense of keeping our self constructively occupied and learning whilst also getting comfortable with spiritually doing no-thing, that is to say cultivating absolute contentment and comfort with your“being-ness” rather than staying stuck in your “doing-ness”.
  • Be someone as an ego in the sense of developing a healthy self-identity whilst simultaneously being no-one in the sense of learning not to over identify with our ego-self and embrace the larger sense of self that lies beyond the world of form.

A Challenging Balance

Negotiating the balance between ego development and spiritual development can be quite a challenge, but once we start to get a feel for it and start to really synchronize our ego and spirit together in harmony the results in our life in terms of the deep health of our being are indeed profound.
© 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 Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Meditation techniques mind body connection Shadow meditation The Essential Meditation of the Buddha Using the Energy of Negative Emotions

How to Stop Painful Feelings Becoming Negative Emotions

Dear All,

Normally in conversation we use the word feelings and emotion as if they were the same. This weeks article looks at the distinction that can be made between emotions and feelings, and how this can be used in order to prevent difficult emotions arising from painful feelings. I think you will find it useful!

Many thanks to those of you who signed up fro and attended the first of the Integral Meditation Practice Six week course, it was great to meet and spend time with you last Wednesday, you can read details of this coming weeks class below.

Yours in the spirit of awakened feelings and emotions,

Toby

 

Stopping Painful Feelings Becoming Emotional Suffering

This is a continuation of the exploration of Insight Meditation that I began in last week’s article entitled “Insight Meditation – Improving Your Subjective Experience by Developing Your Objective Perspective” – Toby

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:

  1. I see a person who has wronged me in the past, instinctively an unpleasant feelingarises. I then start to reflect on the harm that they have caused me and develop anger or resentment. This anger is the emotion, arising from the psychological process of paying attention to the harm done in combination with the initial unpleasant feelings.
  2. 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.

From these two examples we can start to see the basic distinction; pain is simply the feeling arising within the moment. Emotion is that which we experience when we combine a feeling with a psychological process of focusing on the feeling in a particular way.

With regard to painful feelings, quite 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 caused to arise.

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:

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

So, what to do?? An Insight Meditation Form 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. Here we are fully acknowledging what is there and giving them 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 in this article 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 oras 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 negative feelings within us the need a bit of tender loving care, and spending a little time just breathing with them and paying them benevolent.
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!

© 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 Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Meditation Recordings Meditation techniques mind body connection

Insight Meditation – Improving your subjective experience by developing your Objective Perspective

Hi Everyone,

This week’s newsletter has a new dimension added to it that I am hoping to make a regular feature, which is regular short meditation recordings that I will be creating and posting on my meditation blog for people to listen to and download. This week’s guided meditation is a nine minute insight meditation practice focusing around caring for the physical body. Click on the link to have a listen:

Poem of Care for the Physical Body Meditation Free Recording 

This week’s article below discusses insight meditation using the “Poem of Care” as a practical example. After reading the article I hope you’ll feel enthused about just how simple and effective mindfulness and insight  meditation can be, and feel like you really have an understanding of how it works!

 

Enjoy the Meditation Recording, and have a great week!

Yours in the spirit of insight,

Toby

*******

Insight Meditation – Improving your subjective experience by developing your Objective Perspective

Often when people talk about being objective in their life it seems like in order to become so they need to cut themselves of from their subjective or feeling experience of the situation. Conversely in order to really enter into a situation fully often what seems to happen is that we abandon our objectivity and plunge deeply into a feeling-based experience of the situation.

Pushed to an extreme, we can find ourselves caught between these two polarities:

  • Being objective = being cold and uncaring
  • Being subjective = being totally bound up in our feelings and lacking in perspective

Of course what we really need for an enjoyable and balanced life is to be able to bring both our objective and subjective perspectives together in a balanced holism, and this is one of the main benefits that insight meditation can give to us.

How does this work?

The basic dynamic of insight and/or mindfulness meditation (I am using the two terms here synonymously) is this; we begin by deliberately taking an objective perspective on our object of meditation in order to bring fuller conscious awareness of it. After having observed our object of meditation objectively for a while, we then consciously extend a positive subjective feeling or emotion to the object that we have been observing objectively.

Improving your objectivity improves your subjectivity

So, the essential idea with insight meditation is that by initially taking a step back and observing your world objectively, you can then consciously project/extend positive and beneficial subjective feelings into that world that will increase your ability to participate enjoyably and benevolently in that world.

A concrete example please?

Ok, so let’s take a concrete example that I hope will make this clear and easy to understand.

Below you can see a meditation entitled “Poem of care for the Physical Body”, which I composed a few years back. In this meditation the observed object is the physical body. Each “verse” has two lines, and the way it works is very simple; as you inhale you practice taking an objective perspective on your body, and then as you exhale you extend a subjective feeling to the body.

To take the first two lines as an example:

“Breathing in I am aware of my physical body,

Breathing out I extend care and calm to my physical body”

Here, as we breathe in we deliberately step back and cultivate objective awareness of our body. Then as we exhale we consciously extend the positive, subjective feelings of care and calm to our body.

In the second two lines this continues:

“Breathing in I am thankful to my physical body,

Breathing out I extend my love and gratitude to my physical body”

As be breathe in, we objectively recognize that there are many ways in which our body is serving us well in every minute of every day. With this recognition we then breathe out and extend the subjective feeling of love and gratitude to our body.

From this example you can see that insight meditation works to improve our subjective experience (in this case of our body) by working  to improve our objective experience first, and then bringing that objective perspective together with our subjective feelings in benevolent partnership, as opposed to the dissonant conflict that so often exists in us between these two poles of our being!

Here is the full “poem”, please note that you can listen to and or download a short (9min) recording of this meditation on my meditation blog that I have done here:

Poem of Care for the Physical Body Recording

Poem of Care for the Physical Body

1. Breathing in I am aware of my physical body,

Breathing out I extend care and calm to my physical body,

2. Breathing in I am thankful to my physical body,

Breathing out I extend my love and gratitude to my physical body,

3. Breathing in I am aware of psychological tensions I hold within my physical body,

Breathing out I release this tension,

4. Breathing in I feel at home in my physical body,

Breathing out I rest within that homely space.

Final thoughts

Sometimes the conflict between our subjective experience and objective perspective has a complex history that needs a skilled third party perspective to untie the complexity and re-fashion that relationship in a new way. This is one of the main functions of the 1:1 coaching that I offer as a service. However, the regular practice of simple insight meditation forms such as I have explained above can really go a long way to improving the dynamic between our objective experiences and subjective feelings. The Poem of Care for the Physical Body is a short, simple and profound way of beginning the journey of insight-through-meditation.

 

Categories
Awareness and insight Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Meditation Recordings Meditation techniques mind body connection Presence and being present Uncategorized

Guided Insight Meditation: Care of the Physical Body

This is a nine minute guided insight meditation on caring for the physical body, you can simply play it from this page Press play icon below) or download it onto your computer (right click on text below) for personal use.

[audio:https://tobyouvry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Care-for-Physical-Body-Insight-Medi-9mins1.mp3|titles=Care for Physical Body Insight Medi (9mins)]

Care for Physical Body Insight Medi (9mins)

Here is the basic script for the Meditation:

Poem of Care for the Physical Body

1. Breathing in I am aware of my physical body,

Breathing out I extend care and calm to my physical body,

2. Breathing in I am thankful to my physical body,

Breathing out I extend my love and gratitude to my physical body,

3. Breathing in I am aware of psychological tensions I hold within my physical body,

Breathing out I release this tension,

4. Breathing in I feel at home in my physical body,

Breathing out I rest within that homely space.

You can read the article that relates to this meditation and gives some further commentary to it here:

Insight Meditation – Improving your subjective experience by developing your Objective Perspective

Happy meditating!

Toby

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Motivation and scope Shadow meditation Uncategorized

Recognizing Three Types of Fear, Meditating on three Types of Courage

Dear Toby,

Many of the daily challenges we face require dealing with a certain degree of fear, and generating an appropriate degree of courage. The article that I have written below tries to place fear and courage in a particular framework which will help people think about how they can start dealing with fear and consciously use courage to live a more full and fulfilling life, less dominated by fear.

I hope you enjoy it!

Yours in the spirit of daily courage,

Toby

Recognizing Three Types of Fear, Meditating on three Types of Courage

The three types of fear are:

  1. Instinctive or biological fear – This is activated when we, or someone we care for are in actual physical danger of some sort and that impels us to act decisively. The difficulty for many of us in this day and age is that our biological fears get activated in situations where there is not actually any manifest physical danger, and we find ourself in fight or flight mode when we don’t need to be. So a major part of dealing with this fear is to allow it to affect us only when appropriate and necessary!
  2. Psychological fear – This type of fear occurs when our ego or self image feels threatened either by what someone else says about us (for example a deliberate or non-deliberate verbal insult), or when we have thought or emotion that our self image deems inappropriate or bad, and so we then try and “get rid” of that bad thought or emotion, or otherwise repress it out of fear.
  3. Existential fear – This to use the definition of existential psychology is the fear that we all face arising from “Being in the face of non-being”. That is to say it is the fear that we experience as a tiny unity of temporary human life in the face of our inevitable death, or movement into non-being. This is a fear that all of us faces and experiences.

Accordingly there are three types of courage that we might think of as qualities that help us to deal with the three types of fear:

  1. Instinctive or biological courage – This type of courage we are called to act upon in situations of actual danger to our life or wellbeing, or the life/wellbeing of someone else. It is a courage that we have to activate generally only occasionally, but it is important that it is present and ready for these occasional purposes.
  2. Psychological courage – This type of courage enables us to appropriately repel the threats to our self image that may come from the negativity of others outside of us, but perhaps more importantly it enables us to appropriately acknowledge the difficult emotions and thoughts that haunt our own mind and make a firm decision not to run from these inner fears, or to distract ourself from them, but face up to them and learn how to deal with them appropriately. One of the best ways we can set ourself up for happiness and wellbeing in life is to keep ourself as clear as possible of repressed or “shadow” fears in our unconscious mind that block the flow of energy in our being and make us feel unworthy of genuine and deeply felt enjoyment. Another point here is that quite a lot of our psychological fear is actually our biological/instinctive fears projecting themselves onto our everyday situation, so it is actually fear number 1 projecting itself onto fear number 2. If we can learn to recognize this, then this can also really help us deal in a more relaxed and down to earth manner with our psychological fears.
  3. Existential courage – The third type of courage is existential courage, which is essentially the courage to live a full and creative life even in full knowledge of the fact that eventually we will die and (from the perspective of the small-self of this life) lose everything. Existential courage encourages us to really think about what is most important in our lives, and make sure that each day we are expressing our core values, working toward goals that really mean something to us, and appreciating the things in our life that we really hold dear. To have existential courage means to live life in the present moment fully and vibrantly for as long as it lasts, and then hopefully to die without regrets!

A meditative perspective on the three types of courage:

As meditators on courage then we are trying to:

  • Be mindful of our instinctive courage, calling upon it when necessary and control our biological fear when genuine threats are present.
  • Face our psychological fears with courage, acknowledging and dealing appropriately with thoughts and emotions that appear to threaten the wellbeing of our self-image.
  • Consciously leverage on our existential courage to live a full and meaningful human life.

A final point here is that as we meditate we also start to have experiences that temporarily transcend our existential fear as our self-sense expands beyond our ego. When in meditation we start to develop a sense of ourself as being part of a Universal being or consciousness that did not start with our biological birth and will not end with our biological death, we do start to genuinely transcend our natural fear of death. However, in my experience, even after a part of our awareness does transcend our small self, and identify with its deeper Universal nature, there is still a substantial part of us that still has to work with our life as an individual human, and still has to leverage substantially on the three types of courage in order to deal with the three types of fear.

© 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