Over the last few months I have had the good fortune to be able to catch up with a few old friends from school days. The conversation immediately becomes 200% more engaging and compelling between us when we discover that we have been through a similar psychological challenge or difficulty, or where we have come face to face with a part of ourselves that we did not like to admit was there. When this happens the tone of the conversation always goes from ‘pleasant’ to genuinely soulful.
Last weekend I facilitated astress transformation workshop. It was great to see people becoming excited about the ways in which they could make use of the parts of themselves and their personality that they considered obstacles to happiness, that they considered ‘dysfunctional’ or weak.
We spend a lot of time investing in our ‘persona’, the face that we present to society; to cultivating and preserving a mask behind which we can hide our insecurity and vulnerability. We protect this mask, strengthen it, try to keep both it and ourselves ‘looking right’ in the eyes of those around us. Any cracks that appear in the mask often invoke a crisis in us, something we should avoid at all costs.
The funny thing is that when circumstances come together to crack open the mask of our persona, it is often the very opportunity that our soul has been waiting for to shine its light into the world, to start making a difference.
It’d be a shame to miss such opportunities because we were too busy trying desperately to repair our mask.
You may have heard the story about the way a great poet evolves:
First his/her poetry is simple and bad,
Then it is complicated and bad,
Then it becomes complicated and good,
Finally at the level of mastery it becomes simple and good.
If you want to develop your meditation and mindfulness practice it is also like this. The key is to recognize that that way to become a great meditator is to accept and enjoy being a bad meditator so that organically over time you become a good one, and eventually a master.
Of course this is a way of approaching any task in life. When I first started trying to run a business as an ex-monk and ex-artist I was simple and bad at it, then I was more complicated but still quite bad! Now I occasionally peak to the complicated and good level, with occasional ‘zen moments’ of good simplicity, rapidly lost!
If I could pick a skill that I would like to pass onto my daughter as she grows up, I think the skill of learning to be simple and bad, but then to persist and be happy to fail well and learn would be in the top three. If she has this skill she can become good at whatever she wants, and success in one form or another will be, as a result difficult, to avoid. If she has this, she will be fine.
Because I have this skill of being mindfully happy to be simple and bad whenever necessary, I know ultimately I’ll be fine, and in all probability successful in my chosen endeavours.
The article below is an encouragement not to forget to to be playful, no matter how serious it gets!
Yours in the spirit of the deep and the light,
Toby
Seriously Light/Lightly Serious
It is very easy to mistake taking something seriously for taking something ‘heavily’. It is very easy to use false humour and lightness as a way of avoiding things that we should be taking seriously, or not giving the amount of focused attention that an issue deserves.
Is it possible to take something seriously and yet keep the quality of our mind light and flexible? I think it is. For example:
I can recognize a shortage of money or resources without getting heavy or depressed about it, whilst thinking seriously about how I can go about making up the shortfall
I can listen to someone talking of their pain and loss seriously and with compassion, honoring it, whilst at the same time consciously not letting my mind become heavy with the burden of what I am listening to
I can recognize that I have made a mistake and pay attention to correcting it without giving myself a complete mental hammering for having made that mistake
I can have a huge ‘to do’ list without it causing me to get tense, and negatively serious about everything I haven’t done
I have a choice when faced with serious changes and uncertainties in my life, the temptation due to the fear can be to get tense and over-serious, but there is always the option of being serious but light!
I can be physically tired, but the strain on my body does not mean I have to take the experience without humour and goodwill (but get a good night’s sleep as soon as I can!)
I can feel vulnerable and insecure about something, and I can mindfully take care of that insecurity within myself with compassion, whilst at the same time seeing the humour in my paranoia
If you like over the next few days, experiment mindfully with this idea of serious lightness. It’s possible to be deep without being heavy, and it is possible to be light without being superficial or foolish.
How much does your mind and imagination have to do with your energy levels? The article below explores this question and invites you to participate mindfully in the creation of energy in your body by using your mind and imagination well.
Finally, iAwake Technologies are having a 30% sale on all products, you can see my own write up of how useful I have found them HERE.
Yours in the spirit of energy following mind,
Toby
When Your Energy Level Follows Your Mind and Imagination
A couple of days ago in the morning I was in a state of despair, my mind and imagination was telling me there we so many projects that I had to do, so much uncertainty around the success or failure of each one, it was all unmanageable, I felt exhausted! In an act of supreme will I swatted aside the doubts and started focusing on the write up for an event that I was due to put on in a month’s time. At this point I am struggling to find any energy at all.
By the time I finish the write up it is past lunch time, I’m so excited about the event that I have just written up that I feel on top of the world, I feel like the man, life is great, the world is watching me on the way to success. I feel super energized, high on energy.
Later that evening I discuss with my squash partner after a game how the employees at his company (engineers and technicians) are not likely to be interested in mindfulness training. “The most important thing in a corporate training event for these people,” he says “is to get to the bar as quickly as possible”. I feel less euphoric than I did at lunchtime but steady within myself, “It’ll be patient work to change the world I think to myself.” My energy level is steady; not high, not low. Three different times of day, three different states of mind and imagination, three very different levels of energy resulting. What is the mindfulness lesson here? Mind and imagination are really important factors in your sense of how much energy you have, so be careful not to get crushed by negative imagination and use positive imagination to your advantage when it is working for you, but stay steady if it isn’t, because it does not indicate the end of the world.
When I first started doing qigong meditation the essential discipline was to hold a particular sitting or standing posture and imagine energy travelling and circulating through your body in a certain way. This was the principal that ‘energy follows mind’: if you focus your mind in energy moving in a certain way, it does so. We have a remarkable power to heal ourself and affect our own energy levels each day simply by learning to control, direct and imagine it using the powers of our mind. You can see a very simple meditation forms that follow this principle on my qigong blog here: Building and strengthening your energy body.
So, whether it is paying attention to the way your mind is imagining a situation to be, or whether it is practising a discipline that requires the use of our imaginative faculties such as qigong meditation the message is clear; your mind and imagination do affect your energy levels significantly, so do pay mindful attention to them!
Decisions, choices, options. The article below invites you to start making these parts of your life a mindfulness practice.
Yours in the spirit of mindful decision making,
Toby
Six Mindful Questions for Effective Decision Making
We have never had so many choices as we have in today’s society.
We have never had the freedoms that we enjoy, or the opportunities.
Perhaps human have never been as busy as we are today, and so each day we have to make more decisions than ever before.
Our freedom to choose is a wonderful thing and a fantastic opportunity, but the fact is that for many of us it is a cause of anxiety.
What is the right choice here?
What if I decide on the wrong thing?
What if I get blamed for my decision (I don’t want responsibility)?
Here are the six questions I ask myself whenever I’m faced with a choice that is of any consequence (and sometimes even small ones are).
What is my personal perspective and experience of this situation?
What does this situation look like if I consider it objectively and impartially?
What is the perspective and experience of others involved in this situation?
What core values am I trying to express and embody in this decision?
What will the short term consequences of this decision be?
What with the long term consequences of this choice be?
If you pop these six questions to yourself and think about them mindfully, I have found they act very well as a revealer of what really needs to be done, of what short cuts should not be taken, of what means the most to you, and what (where possible) will create a win-win situation for all concerned.
It also gives you a confidence and (relative) certainty in the validity of your choice that counters the anxiety and fear that so many of us experience in the face of the many choices we make each day. You may not be ‘right’ all the time, but at least you are making your choices on the basis of meaningful and mindful criteria.
This last few days I have been bothered by whether or not I should continue taking my daughter to squash lessons on Saturday mornings. The location has changed, the commute has become 3 times as long, I have ‘many important demands’ upon my time, it would have been very easy just to ‘let it slip’, I could have found plenty of excuses. I asked myself these six questions and the answer came back very clearly to persist. There is effort involved, but by the mindful insight provided by the six questions, my direction and decision is clear. It is a small daily example, but all decisions are important in that they ask us core questions about how we wish to engage in our life, and engage the freedom, power and privilege that comes with having a choice.
You may think of ‘productivity’ as word that you would associate more with your professional development that your individual personal development, but in the article below I look at how our individual happiness is also dependent to a degree upon our productivity, and how we can create a win-win relationship between our personal happiness and professional growth.
Yours in the spirit of mindful productivity,
Toby
Your Blueprint for Mindful Productivity
Productivity is the act of supporting our existence by translating our thoughts into reality*, our ideas into objects and products, of bringing knowledge, goods and services of all kinds into existence though our creativity.
We should be interested in productivity as individuals because productivity gives rise to achievements, and this in turn gives rise to a particular type of happiness and confidence. As employers and members of organizations we should be interested in teaching ourself and others in the organization productivity, because it will help to give rise to a successful, confident and happy organization that people will want to work in and stay in.
So what are the building blocks of productivity, and how can mindfulness help nurture it? Here are a few practical thoughts:
1. We need to be having creative thoughts, and to believe that we are capable of such thoughts – In all of the major domains of our life we need to realize that we are creative agents, and that what we do makes a difference. In our relationships, at work, in our leisure activities we need to challenge ourselves to think intelligently about what we want, and then act productively on those ideas to make them a reality.
2. We need to believe something that comes from ourself can be worthwhile – Ask yourself the question “Do I really believe that an idea that I have can be of real value and make a difference in the world?” If you really believe that then productivity and manifestation will be a natural extension of your belief. If deep down you don’t believe in yourself and the power of your ideas, then even if you have the most amazing ideas they are going to get lost behind a myriad of excuses and distractions. It’s actually ‘easier’ to just become a consumer rather than a producer, but by becoming so we deny ourself so many fundamental forms of happiness.
3. We need to measure how many of the creative thoughts we have make it into reality each day – So we’ve decided we are going to really believe in the power of our ideas (not easy to do on a deep level), and we’ve decided to become a producer. Then you need to ask yourself the question each day “How many thoughts and ideas have I translated into reality today?” You literally look at how many of your thoughts you have actually translated into the domain of our everyday reality.
If you are an aspiring poet, that means writing something
If you are a marketer it means communicating your message to your audience, today
If you are a teacher like me, it means producing materials that can be taught and then inviting people to participate
What productive activity have you done today?
4. We need to appreciate that which we produce – Don’t let your achievements go unnoticed. Don’t finish one thing and then immediately go onto the next. Savor it first; allow the pleasure of your own productivity to feed and nurture your being so that you can sustain enthusiasm for the process.
5. Rinse and repeat each day until it becomes a part of the fabric of how you operate Being mindful of points 1-5 above is your basic blueprint for sustainable productivity each day. Remember, you’re not doing it to please someone else (although it might), you are doing it because you are choosing to take pleasure in your own productive power, the power you have to be a cause in life, not just an effect.
*Paraphrased definition from ‘Honoring the Self’ by Nat Branden, chapter 12 on Rational Selfishness.
This weeks newsletter looks at how you can use mindfulness to link already existent skills that you have to activities where you may not have thought to apply them.
Yours in the spirit of skills hidden in plain sight,
Toby
Mindfully Accessing Your Transferrable Skills
Today I gave a talk at the Singapore Stock Exchange on mindful trading. One of the other speakers was a great guy called Dave from Salt Lake City. Earlier in his life he had been a professional drummer with a band. Now, as a trader he said he found that his intuitive skills as a musician helped him to see patterns in his trading charts that had become a major way in which he had developed his ‘trading style’. Dave had found a transferrable skill from his life as a musician which he was now applying to his life as a trader.
A few years ago I was complaining to my Dad that I was at a disadvantage as a business owner because I had no background in ‘selling’ or sales. My dad pointed out to me that I had a lot of experience in listening as a counsellor teacher and coach. He then pointed out that a lot of what being a good salesperson is about is firstly listening to other people to understand their deep needs and wants; if you can do that you are then in a very good position to provide a service or product that they will want. I suddenly discovered that I had a hugely useful transferrable skill that I could use as a businessman that I hadn’t even thought about before and that I could draw a lot of confidence from (thanks Dad!). When I first started meditation practice in the early 90’s I was able to build my meditation practice better and faster by applying the understanding of under-training and over-training that I had picked up from playing sports, another transferrable skill of great value.
The fact is that many of the skills that you currently have are transferrable to other areas of your life. Not only that but they are transferrable to any new activity that you take up. The more quickly you can make the link between a skill that you already have and its potential value in a new situation, or in a different domain of your life, the more quickly you can start using it.
A great mindful question to ask yourself when faced with a new challenge, stage or activity in your life is “What transferrable skills do I have?” Almost certainly you will be pleasantly surprised how capable you are.
What makes a colour beautiful? The answer is a bit deeper than first glance. Similarly with our emotions, it is not always the bright, shiny ones that are of the most value, or even the most beautiful.
Yours in the spirit of emotional depth and beauty,
Toby
Your Emotional Colour Palette
As some of you may know my original training was as an artist (which I still practice actively), and I often think about the development of the mind, emotion and consciousness in terms of colour and texture. One of the observations that I have taken from my work as a painter is that whether a colour is beautiful or ugly, harmonious or jarring has as much to do with the colours next to it as the colour itself. For example we may think of grey as a very plain boring (even depressing) colour; but if you watch the way a grey sky can give depth and vibrancy to the green leaves of a tree, or give new definition to the foam on the waves of the sea, then we start to realize that grey has its place. Similarly the dark browns and blacks of soil give background to the beauty of vibrantly coloured flowers, the early nights and darkness of the winter evenings gives context to the vibrancy and buzz of the long sunny summer ones. As a painter if you can grasp this concept, then you will become a much better painter; you will get to know your greys and blacks and browns s well as your yellows, oranges and bright blues. You will understand how to put them together in your picture to produce a beauty that has true depth, texture and nuance.
You can see the first picture I have posted with this article by Ben Nicholson above (one of my favourites) that shows a good example of this in a sea landscape. The greys, blues and blacks provide a context for the brighter yellows, blues and reds to come alive. The second picture below is a cityscape by my daughter Sasha. I think you can really see in this one how the dark grey building in the center really gives substance to the bright yellow and pink buildings on either side. Without the grey the bright colours would look anaemic.
So, when we think about the landscape of our emotions, it can be wise to get to know the grey, brown and black ones as well as the bright cheery, pretty ones. If we are prepared to look at them all together, without favoring one over the other, we may discover that each emotion, the sad ones as well as the happy ones all have their place in our life, all have their own beauty, and their own gifts to offer us.
As a mindfulness or meditation practitioner, it can be a nice exercise to simply sit and open to our emotions and moods, benevolently embracing them all as we find them, and then consciously learning to wisely weave them into a beautiful painting (or song) each day, a painting that includes browns, blacks and greys as well as red, yellow and blue.
This weeks article describes a simple but profound meditation process for bringing your thoughts and feelings into a state of integration and harmony. When our thoughts and feelings are on the same page, it opens up a whole new dimension of both happiness and effectiveness within us.
Yours in the spirit of integrated thinking and feeling,
Toby
If you feel properly you will think clearly
What is it that gets in the way of clear thinking? You might have the idea that it would be easy to think clearer if only you did not have all these intense emotions within you that seemed to be getting in the way of your thought processes:
“If only I was not so angry I would be able to deal with the person who said that awful thing to me”
“If only I wasn’t so anxious I could just relax and get down to my work”
“If only I was not so jealous I could enjoy my relationship more and with a clearer head”
In this scenario emotion and thought are set up against each other as adversaries within ourself, one pitted against the other.
Actually, the emotion only becomes an obstruction to clear thinking when we repress, deny or otherwise push it away from our conscious awareness and try and bury it within ourselves. When we do this our body becomes tense and armored, our mind becomes cloudy and foggy, and a gap appears between what we think, what we feel and what we do.
When we acknowledge and accept the emotions we feel without denying them, we will find that we tend to experience a clarifying of our thought process, and an inclination to act in ways that are congruent to that thinking:
“Because I feel angry with my friend for what they did, I am going to tell them about it, not violently and explosively, but calmly and clearly, because I know that what I am feeling is anger”
“I know that I am feeling anxious at work right now, and I understand why, accepting the way I feel I will now get on with what needs to be done”
“Jealousy is not a pleasant emotion to experience, but there is a reason for it that I think I need to talk through with my partner”
One of the primary ways that meditation can help you in a practical is to use it as a way to bring your thoughts and feelings into integration with each other. Simply to sit down and use awareness of your body and breathing to become more deeply aware of how you are feeling. As you sit with your body and breathing, you can even mentally describe to yourself (or even out loud) what the sensations are that you are feeling in your body, and what emotions these are connected to. You will be surprised if you do this regularly how quickly you can bring to your conscious awareness emotions that have been hidden from view to you for years. As they come into view, just focus on acknowledging them and experiencing them consciously. You will find that if you do this your head will start to feel clearer, and that you will be able to think and express yourself more clearly. Energy that was previously locked up in the repression and denial of emotion will become available to you for positive and appropriate self-expression.
A final point, as you do this exercise you may be surprised how much positive emotion and feeling you suppress. Excitement, joy, love, sensual and sexual feelings can be experienced by our ego as being as ‘dangerous’ as anger, jealousy and so forth. So it is not all about reconnecting to difficult emotion, it is also learning to feel positive emotions more deeply and enjoyably.
Superficially relaxation exercises relating to mindfulness might look quite simple, almost to the point of superficiality, but in reality the capacity to become and remain deeply relaxed consistently in life is a profound achievement.
Why so? Because to be able to remain truly and deeply relaxed in the face of all the nonsense that everyday life throws at you implies the achievement of three inner qualities that are not easy to attain: Self-trust – The knowledge that your mind, judgment and convictions are not vulnerable or susceptible to emotional pressure Self confidence – The belief that, whatever the challenge you have you are confident in the power of your mind to be able to respond appropriately and effectively Self-esteem – The feeling and experience that you are deserving of happiness in life, and that you are confident of your own intelligence and its capacity to find solutions to your life’s problems (in this sense you could say that self-confidence is actually a subset of self-esteem).
Non-Resistance – Relaxing into our challenges as a way of practising mindful resilience and recovering from mental ‘hits’ faster.
Rather than theorizing, what I want to do in this article is demonstrate from my own experience how non-resistance works. The other night as I was falling asleep I was suddenly struck by a set of unusual feelings of loneliness, accompanied by images of myself in a big empty house. Caught by surprise by these feelings, I felt my body and mind resisting and trying to reject and deny these feelings, to try and ‘escape’ from them. Catching myself, I then altered my approach, consciously relaxing into the feelings of loneliness, immersing myself in them like submerging myself into the water of a swimming pool. By relaxing and practising non-resistance to the feelings, I found that after a short while they naturally dissipated and I fell asleep feeling relaxed and content; I was able to process and remain resilient to the emotional challenge through the practice of relaxational non-resistance.
Next morning I receive an email from a corporate client regarding a deal I thought was locked up. Turns out they have decided to go with another facilitator, instinctively following the momentum that I had created from the night before, I again practice non-resistance to the email and my emotional reaction to it. I allow it to flow through my body and mind, opening my chest and relaxing deeply. The result – my recuperation and regeneration time from that setback is VASTLY accelerated (not to say that there was no swearing mind ;-)), and I proceed through the mornings work and activities feeling fundamentally good despite the setback.
So, two related, practical examples of the practice of non-resistance there which I hope will give you some idea as to how to start practising it yourself.
How does non-resistance relate to the qualities of self-trust, confidence and esteem?
The capacity to practice non-resistance under stress depends to a large degree on how you have developed these three qualities within yourself. If you don’t trust and feel confident in yourself, it is very difficult to relax into an experience that directly threatens your wellbeing. If you don’t have self-esteem it can be difficult not to believe that on some level setbacks in life are confirmations that happiness is not something you deserve to give yourself each day.
Non-resistance is a practice that you can start today and find real benefit, but that to be a master of deep relaxation; you have to earn it over time.
