Category: Concentration

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Awareness and insight Concentration Meditation techniques Presence and being present

The Importance of Your Memory as an Object of Meditation

Hi Everyone,

We all know the old saying “You can’t change what has happened in the past”. On an obvious level this carries definite truth, but if we look a little deeper we find that in reality we change the past every time we think about it. To see how this is the case, let us consider a simple example:

Let’s say at work yesterday I made a simple mistake. Today I happen to be feeling generally happy and confident, and so when I remember the mistake I made at work yesterday I find it east to laugh off. When others make fun of me for it, I laugh with them. Life is good, and so my memory of a past mistake and its significance is generally benign and has no power to cause me upset.

Fast forward to tomorrow, I wake up feeling generally out of balance; I sense old fears and agitations in my mind as I go to work. Mid- way through the morning someone mentions the past mistake I made two days ago. Because the general climate of my mind is negative and turbulent, as soon as I remember my mistake mentally I start attacking myself for being so stupid, I feel embarrassed by the mistake. The gravity of my error seems significant enough to knock me further off balance.

In this example we have two different days, two different REMEMBRANCES of the SAME event. Each time we experience the past event in a new way according to our present state of mind. From this we can see that we do indeed have very real power to change the past each time we remember it.

To take our memory as our object of meditation means to be mindful of the power that our mind has to re-invent the past, and to ensure that we are mentally framing past events in a way that is constructive and serving us, rather than a way that is causing us to be trapped in a cycle of misery, pain, discontent and so forth.

Your life is your meditation, and meditating on positive use of memory is an important meditation practice to develop!

Thanks for reading,

Yours in the spirit of the journey, 

Toby

PS: All are invited to the new two part meditation class, Tuesday evenings February 22nd and March 1st: “Landscapes Of The Mind: Finding Inner Power and Balance In Your Life Through Meditation on Wild Nature And Landscape” .

If you are not in Singapore, the classes will be available for purchase as recordings.

© Toby Ouvry 2011. You are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Concentration Meditation and Psychology Motivation and scope Uncategorized

Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 2 – Looking at How You Can Meet Your Higher Needs Through Meditation

Hi Everyone! 

A couple of week ago I took a look at how it is that meditation can help us to meet some of our basic needs, or needs 1-3 in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I this article I want to look at how meditation helps us to start to satisfy our “higher” needs; specifically needs 4-6 of Maslow’s hierarchy:

4.  Esteem needs – Competence, approval, recognition

5. Aesthetic and cognitive needs – Knowledge, understanding, goodness, justice, beauty, order, symmetry

6. Self Actualization 

4. Esteem Needs – Competence, approval, recognition.

One of the basic things that any form of authentic meditation technique will improve is your concentration. With better concentration your ability to be competent in any given area of expertise that you set yourself is going to improve. So, meditation helps your esteem needs in this regard by helping you increase your mind power and therefore become competent faster. This in turn will likely lead to approval and recognition from your teachers, peers and society.

With regard to the need for approval and recognition, I would say that consistent meditation will help you to make approval and recognition into a preference rather than an all consuming need. This is because meditation takes us gradually away from “doingness needs” and toward “beingness needs”

  • “Doingness needs” are the needs that we have to prove our worth by deeds, job titles and all the other bench marks that conventional society lays down as meaning “successful”.
  • “Beingness needs” are the needs that arise from already seeing, feeling and experiencing ourself as whole, complete and worthy as we are. Meditation encourages a daily connection to our own state of beingness, that is to say as whole, complete and worthy as we are right now. In a state of beingness, our own needs are perceived as being already met, and so our “needs” actually start to focus more and more on the needs of others around us. We are happy as we are, so we have more energy to focus on the wellbeing of others.

In conclusion, when our beingness needs are met (which they will be increasingly through balanced meditation), of course we can be happy when we are measured as “successful” by the conventional benchmarks of society, but if not it is no big disaster, as our sense of beingness ensures that we feel happy and complete as we are. 

5. Aesthetic and cognitive needs – Knowledge, understanding, goodness, justice, beauty, order, symmetry

With our beingness needs increasingly being met by meditation (as outlined in section 4 immediately above), an increasing amount of energy is opened up within us to look into “bigger questions”:

What is the meaning of life?

Why am I here?

What is fairness?

What is justice?

What is beauty?

This is level 5 of Maslow’s Hierarchy, our aesthetic and cognitive needs. A regular meditation practice will not answer these questions per-se, as a lot of meditation practice is about reducing the content of the mind, not filling it! However, what meditation will do systematically over time is to open us up to a full functioning awareness of our intuitive, archetypal and spiritual minds. This naturally helps us to articulate a considered response to the big questions that are posed by our aesthetic and cognitive needs.

A final point; meditation prevents us from getting “stuck” on the existential questions that are posed by this level. “What is the meaning of life?” is a question that may never be fully answered, and this is right and good. Meditation enables us to recognize the point where question asking and philosophizing ceases to be useful and relevant, and to move into states of silence and pure awareness. 

6. Self Actualization:

Actually, up to the last century or so, the main focus of meditation has traditionally been enlightenment, or needs associated with levels 5 and 6. It is only in more recent times that meditation has been advocated as a potential solution to the stress, mental busyness and anxiety of modern life, which has made it useful and relevant on the level of our survival needs  (levels 1&2 of Maslow’s hierarchy) and level 3, emotional wellbeing. Through history the predominant reason that people have meditated is to commune, merge and create a state of union with their spiritual being, which in turn exists in a state of one-ness or unity with the Universe. So, in terms of the sixth and highest level of our needs; Self Actualization, or enlightenment, meditation is actually the most effective, tried and tested method for accomplishing this need.

Thanks for reading,

Yours in the spirit of Self Actualization,

Toby

 PS: Info on this Wednesdays Qi gong class HERE

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Concentration Enlightened love and loving Motivation and scope

Motivating Yourself to Meditate Part 1 – Looking at How You Can Meet Your Needs Through Meditation

Hi Everyone,

One reason why people find it difficult to hold down a regular meditation practice is that it is very easy for meditation to get knocked down our priorities list. It seems like there are so many things that need our attention. It is easy to think that we have so many “important” priorities that we can put off meditating until tomorrow, and so it goes on. We never really get serious or consistent about our meditation practice because it is not enough of a priority.

So, what I am going to do in this and next week’s article is have a look at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and see how meditation can help with these basic needs.  If we have a clear idea about how meditation helps us with our human needs, then we will keep it high on our priority list and make sure that we do it! 

A quick outline of Abraham Maslows hierarchy of human needs, he starts with the most basic first, and then ascends in terms of depth and complexity:

  1. Physiological needs – Food and drink
  2. Security needs – Shelter, physiological safety
  3. Belongingness and love needs – Affiliation, acceptance, affection
  4. Esteem needs – Competence, approval, recognition
  5. Aesthetic and cognitive needs – Knowledge, understanding, goodness, justice, beauty, order, symmetry
  6. Self Actualization

How meditation helps us with these basic needs:

Needs 1&2: Physiological and security needs

I am guessing that if you are reading this article, you will have your basic food, drink and shelter needs being met. You may not be in Buckingham Palace, but you aren’t homeless either right? Although many of us have our basic needs met, many of us remain stuck psychologically in “survival” mode, fighting our way through a hostile universe oblivious of the good fortune of having our basic needs met.

Meditation helps us with this by helping our mind to be calm enough to appreciate and enjoy the fact that our survival needs have been met. Meditation gives us the presence of mind to enjoy life’s simple pleasures; Food, drink, shelter and a basic quality of life. Without peace of mind studies show that those in first world countries are no happier than those in 3rd world countries. Meditation makes sure this does not happen to you! 

Need 3: Belongingness and love needs

A daily meditation practice is a statement to yourself that you are important and lovable enough to deserve happiness and peace of mind. Belongingness and love needs are often projected outward onto other people, but in reality our primary love relationship is with ourself. If we get this right it will help our love relationships to others.

Meditation also puts you in touch with a source of love inside you that might be termed as “Universal” or unconditional. This love starts to rise up in our mind whenever we truly touch mental peace and calm (see last weeks article on the “Two Main Lessons of Love”). You deserve to receive love every day right? So give yourself that pleasure by sitting down and doing a bit of meditation every day! One final point here, meditation by its nature makes us more mindful, relaxed and aware. This quality of mind helps us to see that there is love being directed toward us all the time by our friends, family and colleagues. A relaxed, meditative mind can open to this love and receive it deeply into our being, instead of shutting it out.

So, next week I’ll write a few thoughts on needs four, five and six, but I think if you contemplate the above three, there is plenty of reason to renew your determination to find time and space for at least a little meditation each day! 

Thanks for reading,

Yours in the spirit of the harmonious meeting of our higher and lower needs!

Toby 

PS: Two opportunities for meditative activities over the next week:

  1. I will be facilitating a Qi Gong workshop for beginners this Sunday, 9th January. Qi gong is a whole world of meditative movement exercises for health and wellbeing, if you have been interested in learning how to start a practice, this is an ideal opportunity!
  2. Next Tuesday sees the start of a new series of Tuesday classes entitled  “Finding Your Outer Balance, Inner Harmony and Spiritual Centre Through Meditation on the Tao, Yin Yang and the Five Elements”. Recordings will be available if you are interested but not living in Singapore!

 PPS: Relating to point 2 above, I have started a new series of articles on meditating with the Tao and Yin Yang on my Qi gong blog. You can find the first article HERE.

Like this blog, if you wish to receive automatic updates of these free articles from my Qi gong site, then you can simply sign up on the top right hand side of the page after you read the article on the Tao and yin/yang.

© Toby Ouvry 2011, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Concentration Meditation techniques Motivation and scope Presence and being present

Two things that you need to do before you sit down and start to meditate

Firstly, before you do the two things, you need to actually set aside the time to meditate, and, when the appointed time comes you need to sit yourself down and get on with it!

There seems to be a never ending stream of excuses that our distracted mind uses to avoid the things that will make us most happy, like meditation, so take a NO EXCUSES APPROACH!

Having done this and sat down, here is what you need to do:

1)      Create a safe space – Decide that for the next 5, 10, 15 minutes, or however long you have set aside, you are in a safe space where you can relax. Draw the boundary around your meditation time. After you arise from meditation, the world may indeed come to an end, or your worst fears may be realized. Alternatively, when you get up from meditation you may win the lottery, or get asked for a date by George Cluny, Yelena Isinbeyeva (or insert God/Goddess of choice). The point is that for the time you have allocated for your meditation is down time, relaxation time, YOUR time, time to be present with yourself and not worry about the past or future.

2)      Make a strong decision to focus! – Beyond relaxation, meditation is also about building the strength and focus of your mind. It is like inner weight training or fitness training where your mind is building muscle and stamina. If you start your meditation wishy-washy, then you are probably going to continue that way, so it is really important to get focused and stay focused during the short period of time you have set aside for your meditation practice.

Two life skills that you will develop from this:

If you practice like this at the beginning of your meditations you will learn

1)      That it is possible to create a “safe space” at many times in your day, not just when you are meditating

2)      How to FOCUS. Now, there are many more things that could be said about focus, but for now let’s just reflect on the fact that ALL SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE, IN WHATEVER DISCIPLINE KNOW HOW TO FOCUS!

That last sentence is a good object of meditation in itself…

Yours in the spirit of relaxed focus,

Toby

PS: For those of you in Singapore, this coming Tuesday 21st December there will be a special Winter Solstice meditation at Sanctuary on the Hill with myself. All proceeds will be going to the River Kids Project. See you there!

Categories
Awareness and insight Concentration Enlightened service Positive anger

Act your rage – Three useful ways of thinking about and using your anger

One of the things that was emphasized in my Buddhist meditation training (and this holds true for most contemplative spiritualities) was that there is really nothing useful about anger, it was entirely destructive. This is further backed up by statements such as “one moment of anger is enough to destroy the merit (good karma) that you can create over aeons” and “a moment of anger can cause you to have a hundred negative rebirths in the future”.

My present take on anger is that it is a powerful emotion that is basically neutral in nature, and that can be used in positive or negative ways.

Anger is NOT the same thing as raw aggression, cruelty, bullying, hatred, acting to deliberately harm. It can just as easily be expressed as personal power, positive assertiveness, the powerful/wrathful expression of compassion and so on…

With this in mind, here are three useful analogies* for what positive anger can be like:

  • Anger is the T cells, or white blood cells of our psychological immune system – It is the aspect of our mind that becomes alert when there is a threat to our wellbeing, and acts to defend
  • Anger is the protector of our psychological boundaries – When there is someone or something that is causing  an abuse of our psychological self, positive anger can act to defend and ward off that abuse and restore appropriate boundaries
  • Anger is like an illuminating fire – Yes anger is hot like a fire, but it can also be illuminating like fire. In Tibetan Tantric Meditation the higher expression of anger is said to be ‘clarity’. If we can separate our anger from our confusion, sometimes we say things in a much clearer and more wise way than we would ever have the courage to do without the impetus of anger

Dealing with anger is not easy, but that does not give us an excuse to shy away from the responsibility that we have for harnessing it to our compassionate impulses and using it for the best and highest purposes of ourself and the World.

*These analogies if first heard from the work of Ken Wilber and Robert Masters

Related article:

In order to find real happiness, first you have to get mad as hell!

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first

Categories
Concentration Meditation techniques Presence and being present Uncategorized

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew comments on his own daily meditation practice

(This is extracted from an interview that Lee Kuan Yew recently did with the New York Times, I am not going to add or subtract anything from it, just present it as it is – Toby)

Q: “Tell me about meditation?” (Seth Mydans, New York Times/International Herald Tribune)

Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew: “Well, I started it about two, three years ago when Ng Kok Song, the Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, I knew he was doing meditation. His wife had died but he was completely serene. So, I said, how do you achieve this? He said I meditate everyday and so did my wife and when she was dying of cancer, she was totally serene because she meditated everyday and he gave me a video of her in her last few weeks completely composed completely relaxed and she and him had been meditating for years. Well, I said to him, you teach me. He is a devout Christian. He was taught by a man called Laurence Freeman, a Catholic. His guru was John Main a devout Catholic. When I was in London, Ng Kok Song introduced me to Laurence Freeman. In fact, he is coming on Saturday to visit Singapore, and we will do a meditation session. The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. It is most difficult to stay focused on the mantra. The discipline is to have a mantra which you keep repeating in your innermost heart, no need to voice it over and over again throughout the whole period of meditation. The mantra they recommended was a religious one. Ma Ra Na Ta, four syllables. Come To Me Oh Lord Jesus. So I said Okay, I am not a Catholic but I will try. He said you can take any other mantra, Buddhist Om Mi Tuo Fo, and keep repeating it. To me Ma Ran Na Ta is more soothing. So I used Ma Ra Na Ta.

You must be disciplined. I find it helps me go to sleep after that. A certain tranquility settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping. I miss it sometimes when I am tired, or have gone out to a dinner and had wine. Then I cannot concentrate. Otherwise I stick to it… a good meditator will do it for half-an-hour. I do it for 20 minutes.”

Q: “So, would you say like your friend who taught you, would you say you are serene?”

Mr Lee: “Well, not as serene as he is. He has done it for many years and he is a devout Catholic. That makes a difference. He believes in Jesus. He believes in the teachings of the Bible. He has lost his wife, a great calamity. But the wife was serene. He gave me this video to show how meditation helped her in her last few months. I do not think I can achieve his level of serenity. But I do achieve some composure.”

Read full transcript here 

Upcoming October workshop with Toby: “An introduction to meditation as a way of overcoming stress, anxiety and mental busyness.”

Categories
Awareness and insight Concentration Motivation and scope Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Uniting the body, mind and heart: The three levels of mindfulness that we evolve through

Following on from my earlier articles on gratitude and self-love, and articles on spiritual intelligence in general, here are three levels of mindfulness that we can distinguish.

As we develop our meditation practice we gradually evolve our experience of mindfulness through three levels. The three levels are as follows:

– Controlling the desires of the selfish / unconscious heart and instincts

– Engaging the mind, heart and body in communion with our actions and with life

– As an intuitive union of the mind, body and heart in all that we do

Level 1: Controlling the desires of the selfish / unconscious heart and instincts:

At this level mindfulness is basically used as an act of concentration and willpower extending mainly from our mind. We have decided that we wish to live a more conscious, engaged life and we realize that in order to do this we need to start exerting control over our selfish and uncontrolled desires that are leading us to experience repeated patterns of pain, stress, anxiety and emptiness.

We use our mindfulness to consciously direct ourself toward positive actions, ways of thinking and being in the world. At this stage our mind and willpower are like an animal tamer, and often our heart and instincts can feel a bit like the wild animal!

Level 2: Engaging the mind, heart and body in communion with our actions and with life

At this level of mindfulness we have developed a certain level of skillfulness. During our daily actions our mind, heart and body are co-ordinated in a more harmonious whole (as opposed to each going in their own direction, often pulling against each other).

We learn to bring the attention of our thinking mind, our feeling heart and our bodily senses into our actions in a mindful manner that makes life a deeply felt and fulfilling experience. We start to reap the rewards of our mindfulness practice, the main one being that we find that even small or seemingly mundane activities become causes of deep happiness and contentment. Our mindfulness enables us to experience first hand the truth that happiness can always be found in the present moment.

Level 3: As an intuitive union of the mind, body and heart in all that we do

At this stage we no longer a have to exert a large amount of effort to keep our mind, body and heart in a mindful, synchronized whole. The energetic “communication wires” between these three levels of our being have become well established. This means that even when we temporarily loose our mindful awareness, our feelings, thinking and body awareness tend to remain intuitively happy and harmonious through force of long habit.

Attaining the third level of mindfulness indicates a time in our practice where effort and hard work are replaced more and more by a sense of naturalness and flow extending from our deep communion with life on all levels.

Upcoming events with Toby:

Tuesday 15th September, new series of 3 classes on “How to express enlightenment in the market place of daily life”

Three body Qi gong classes with Toby in September and October

© Toby Ouvry 2010, yuu are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Categories
Awareness and insight Concentration Inner vision Meditation techniques Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

The three stages of meditation practice as an art-form

The first stage is using meditation as an art-form to learn to calm the mind, overcome distractions and develop inner peace.

The second stage is using the inner peace and focus you get from the first stage in order to deepen your experience of concentration, awareness and insight.

The third stage is accessing and stabilizing the subtle inner abilities/gifts that you become aware of through stages one and two; understanding what they and learning how to apply them practically/creatively as a way of being of service to the world.

The first stage you could call the art of peace, the second stage you could call the art of concentration and insight, the third stage you could call the art of creative or spiritual service.

Let’s say you start meditating tomorrow, for twenty minutes a day for the next fifteen years. By the end of the first five years you will have probably become competent at stage one. By the end of ten years you will probably have become competent at stage two. By the end of fifteen years you will have a working knowledge of stage three. This will give you a foundation. 

Fifteen years may seem like a long time, but if you are persistent for the first two or three years, it may well be that you will have ceased being all that goal oriented and learned to simply enjoy the journey that the art of meditation offers to the human traveller.

As the practitioner of any genuine art form will tell you, there are no short cuts to genuine mastery! 

PS: Brief plug for the new series of meditation classes on “How to develop our spiritual intelligence and inner wisdom” starting this Tuesday 24th August, I guarantee it will be of interest to any meditator or aspiring meditator. For those not in Singapore it is available as a series of three recordings. 

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first.

Related article: Is your meditation a form of therapy, and art-form or a spiritual practice?

Categories
Concentration Meditation techniques spiritual intelligence

Concentrating from the Heart – Both meditation and life are much easier when your head and your heart are in the same place!

One of the perennial questions that I get asked, and that meditators across the world struggle with on a daily basis is “How can I keep my mind focused in meditation? It seems so difficult!” Here is one technique that I practice and sometimes teach to people that I describe as ‘learning to concentrate from the heart’.

It is based around the observation that, if you are engaged with an object of meditation emotionally and from your heart, then your mind will tend to find it easy to keep its focus. However, if you are trying to focus your mind in meditation but your heart is somewhere else, then you it will be a constant struggle as your mind strives to be in one place, and the heart seeks to be in another. Below is a basic technique that is quite easy to understand, and once you have practised it a few times, you will be able to adjust it according to your point of balance and creatively make it your own. 

Learning to concentrate from the heart:

1.  Bring to mind something that moves your heart and body to a state of love and engaged emotionality. The potential object is very varied here; someone you love, the most significant kiss of your life, sitting by your favourite river, stamp collecting, a past heightened mystical experience, a project that excites you… The main thing is that it moves YOUR heart, engages YOUR emotions, awakens a certain sense of rapture within YOUR heart and body that you can feel tangibly and deeply.

2. Once the feeling is there, use the breathing to breathe the energy of the experience in and out of your heart space (center of your chest). As time goes by, keep the feeling, but allow its intensity to reduce slightly, and gradually increase your focus on the breathing so that the heartfelt emotion is being combined with a single-pointedness of concentration on the breathing.

Practice being able to combine the arousal and engagement of your heart with the single-pointedness of your concentration in this way.

3. When you are familiar with the basic process described in points 1&2, you can then practice shifting your point of focus away from the original object that engaged your heart to a new meditation object. For example you can shift the rapture of your remembrance of your first love (or your first stamp collection) onto a feeling of love for living beings as a whole, Or the feeling of compassion that you had as a nine year old for a kitten to a love for all the animal kingdom.

The main thing I want to flag up with this article is that meditative concentration without engaging the heart is hard work. Meditation with the heart engaged makes it relatively easy to keep focus, and induces the levels of bliss and rapture that we can experience through meditative concentration much more readily and rapidly! 

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com