Category: mind body connection

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Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Integral Meditation Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques mind body connection Motivation and scope One Minute Mindfulness spiritual intelligence

Love as the Journey Towards Wholeness; Three Awareness Perspectives

Dear Integral Meditators,

I hope you have had a good week, the last few weeks for me seem to have been a period of adjustment making on different levels, and challenges that reflect those adjustments. Of course adjustments, changes and the challenges that go with them are all a fundamental part of the fabric of our life. One thing that I find with a daily meditation practice is that it really helps me to negotiate these periods of change and adjustment in an energetically ergonomic way; one learns to expend enough energy to meet the demands of the situation, and enjoy the learning that comes from it, without chasing ones tail unnecessarily and getting exhausted…

This weeks article focuses on love as the journey toward wholeness, I hope you’ll find that it treads the line between looking at “big”ideas and staying grounded and practical!

Yours in the spirit of wholeness through love,
Toby
 


Love as the Journey Towards Wholeness; Three Awareness Perspectives

There is a close relationship (ideally) between the experience of love and the practice of meditation. If we say that love is essentially the journey toward the experience of wholeness within ourselves, and define meditation as a practice that takes our mind from the experience of distraction and diversity toward a state of unity and oneness, then I think it is not difficult to see how they support and enhance each other:

  • Whenever we experience love (for example toward another person), our heart and mind expand, connect and unify in a way that closely resembles a relaxed, open, meditative state
  • Whenever we focus the mind in an un-distracted, unified state in meditation, we can begin to feel the flow of love and life-force in our body

In this article I want to look at three ways in which we can use meditation and mindfulness as a part of our journey toward wholeness and love.

Meditation as an inward journey toward love and wholeness
The first way in which we can experience love through meditation is by journeying deeper into the true nature of our own consciousness. If we go beyond the awareness of ourself as a physical body, and then beyond our awareness of oursef as a psychological collection of habitual thoughts, feelings and images, we discover the formless, timeless, witnessing dimension of self that lies beyond.
This formless, timeless self is referred to in the great wisdom traditions as the True Self, so called because it is the self within us that remains constant and unchanging through-out our life. It is also called the Universal Self, because the formless, timeless, witnessing self within me is exactly the same as the formless, timeless, witnessing self in you, in all human beings, animals, plants and indeed anything that possesses consciousness. So, by connecting to the formless, timeless self we connect to a dimension of our being that is constantly and experientially in a state of oneness, wholeness and love with everything else in the Universe.

Meditation as an outward journey toward love and wholeness
The second way in which we can experience love and wholeness through meditation is by making the effort each day to expand our circle of concern so that it becomes progressively larger and larger. We start by extending love empathy toward ourself, then our family and friends, then people we don’t  know, then people we may not like, expanding ever outward to include all living beings (yep, animals and plants too).
To experience love in this way is to be mindful that everyone matters, and to make our decisions based around this recognition. Of course we can’t avoid making decisions that hurt others at times, or that will harm them one way or another, but to live in a state of love means to live in a state where everyone is included, and we make our decisions based around an awareness of this inclusivity.

Opening the heart; facilitating the ongoing giving and receiving of love in our life
The third way we can grow our love each day is to make sure that our heart is energetically open to the giving and receiving of love. You can feel whether your heart is energetically open right now by tuning into the centre of your chest-space. Is this area of your body open and dilated, allowing energy to flow? Or is it contracted and closed, unable to give or receive love or life energy? If you spend most of your time with your heart energetically closed, then you will end up like so many of us do feeling starved of loving energy and feeling isolated and  alone even when surrounded by others.
Yes, when you open your heart to the world you may feel more vulnerable, and yes it does take courage (and discernment), but if you take that risk then you will feel alive each day with the energy of love, and allow your life to be informed by that love. The alternative is to live in a mental “ivory tower” heart closed, risking nothing but gaining nothing. You can deaden the pain in your life by closing your heart, but by doing so you cut yourself off from the flow of love, which is a high price to pay indeed.

One Minute Mindfulness for Practically Integrating the Three Above Techniques:

  1. Spend a minute dropping your mental baggage and resting in the formless, timeless, witnessing dimension of your consciousness, recognize that on this level of your consciousness you are actually and literally always in a state of oneness and wholeness with all other living creatures, and the whole living universe. Rest in the love baby!
  2. Take a minute each day to care about someone (human, animal, plant) that would normally be outside of your circle of concern. Make the effort each day to include more and more living things in your circle of love and wholeness
  3. Through-out the day be mindful of your physical heart space. Is it energetically closed, defended and dead, or open, alive and flowing? Try and consciously increase the amount of time in your day that your heart is in a dilated, open state of giving and receiving love.

© 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 Biographical Energy Meditation Enlightened love and loving Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology mind body connection Presence and being present Shadow meditation

Yoga and Meditation Should Make You More Peaceful Right? (Reflecting on Kundalini Awakening)

Dear Integral Meditators,

This weeks article focuses on the issues arising from the increased power that can come from meditation and yoga practice, in particular looking at the effects kundalini can have our consciousness. I think this is an important area to be aware of in terms of negotiating it appropriately, and recognizing that it as a natural stage that we go through as meditators.

Yours in the spirit of balanced inner power,
Toby

Yoga and Meditation Should Make You More Peaceful Right? (Reflecting on Kundalini Awakening)

In my final year of University I reduced my “hard exercise” routine and took up yoga for the first time in order to make more time and energy for my studies, and to rest my body a little which was getting tired from me throwing it around all the time. The book around which my yoga practice was based (which I did religiously for between 30mins to 1.5 hours a day) was a set of asanas such as you would find in a lot of common yoga classes. So I just did these poses as well as I could, and felt better for it.
On the final page of the book there was a short description of what it felt like when your kundalini, or life force energy got activated by the yoga poses; how it felt like a snake curling up the spine from the base toward the crown of the head. I read this and did not think about it too much, but duly after a few months of practice I could feel it rising from the base of my spine at the end of each session as I lay on the floor relaxing.
There were three principle effects of this initial stimulation of my kundalini:

  1. My Sex drive increased fairly dramatically (when the kundalini rises the first chakra it rises into is the sacral chakra, which is the sexual/emotional centre)
  2. My awareness of inner and outer conflict, and feelings of superiority/inferiority with regard to others in social situations was substantially and not very pleasantly increased (the second chakra that the kundalini moves into when it rises is the solar plexus chakra which is to do with ego and the power drives of the personality)
  3. I started to experience regular and consistent “expanded” states of transpersonal awareness (a result of the kundalini hitting the higher energy centres from the heart level upward)

With regard to the fist effect I was relatively lucky in that I had a compassionate and frankly very tolerant girlfriend at the time who was able to absorb that part of my personality change with somewhat bemused amusement.
The second effect, the increased awareness of (perceived) conflict or negative emotions around other people made me rather more reclusive and more reluctant to engage socially, as the experience of doing so was not all that pleasant in the face of the energy changes in my body and the effect that it has on my mind.
The third effect, that of expanded states of awareness (I had not done ANY meditation at this stage of my path) was that I became even more of a space kadet than I had been before! Quite fun, but not exactly enhancing of my fundamental inner peace OR my functionality as a person…

So, my first basic point here is that when yoga and meditation really start to awaken our inner powers (through kundalini and other factors), the effect can actually be quite volatile, and needs careful thought and awareness to negotiate. In the long term, and treated in the right way, increased sexual energy, a sense of power at the personality level, and access to expanded awareness have the potential to make our life far more happy and fulfilling. However there is also a lot of potential for any one of these factors to go wrong, and start causing problems on one level or another…

Dealing with Kundalini Awakening in Meditation
Subsequent to my initial kundalini awakening described above, I then did actually start meditating, and periodically found myself grappling in my meditation either with sexual imagery that would NOT go away, or with powerful images of conflict, sometimes violence. Initially I found it quite perplexing, but in the long term I found that the best thing to about it was nothing much. When I sat down in meditation and started to focus my mind, my kundalini would naturally start to rise into my sacral chakra (cue sexual images; “Hello ladies!”). If I then left these images alone and relaxed, the energy would continue to rise up into my third, or solar plexus chakra, often giving rise to images of conflict and power struggle (“Hello violent, sweary people!”), but again if I just left them alone (not feed them or fight them) then the kundalini would just continue to rise up to my heart and the higher energy centres, and by the 5th minute or so if my meditation I was up and running in a state of expanded awareness. Eventually over time this process became reduced to

  • an initial strong feeling of sensual bliss shortly after sitting down
  • followed by and enhanced feeling of power in my personality
  • followed by a release into a consistent state of formless meditation, nice simple and minimal.

I feel like a bit of an old man taking about this now, as this stage of my practice was a long time ago, but I think it is a stage that we all go through as we practice (with different subjective experiences resulting), and it is important to negotiate it well…
Of course you still have to learn to deal with sex, power and expanded awareness as it applies to your daily life and relationships (bit more complex as you can imagine), and get it right on that level. But that is a subject of another time!

© 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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A Mind of Ease Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques mind body connection One Minute Mindfulness Shadow meditation

Re-Contextualizing Our Biological Fear

Dear Toby,

This weeks article looks at biological fear, and how we can work to mindfully re-direct its functioning in our mind so that it is working for us rather than against us in our life. This re-directing of our biological fear and learning to relax into a mind of safety and ease is one of the topics that I will be covering in this coming Saturdays Mind of Ease  workshop.

The topic of this coming Wednesday’s meditation class is the five types of unconscious mind. It is a subject that I have not taught before in a public class, and it it tickles your curiosity, do feel free to come along, even if you have not been able to make all the classes in this series. I think there will be a lot to stimulate you both in terms of you curiosity and your consciousness development!

Yours in the spirit of a mind of ease,
Toby

 

Re-Contextualizing Our Biological Fear

Our biological fear is that part of our body and brains’ programming that essentially works to ensure our survival. It is extremely ancient and the strategy that it has is based around paranoia. Its reasoning is that the more paranoid you are about potential threats to your wellbeing the more likely you are to survive. For most of human kinds history this has worked very well, as up until quite recently there have always been genuine threats to physical survival, such as wild animals and head-hunters who, if you were not alert really could end your life prematurely.
However, in our present time, where our immediate physical surroundings are relatively safe, as often as not our paranoid survival based programming often gets in the way of our happiness and ability to relax and enjoy our daily existence. It unconsciously prevents us from appreciating the good things that we have, exaggerates threats to our safety and wellbeing, focuses on all the negatives in our life, keeps us highly stressed, makes us feel like we are living in a dog eat dog world, and generally living in fear of what could go wrong in the future.
As a result we often feel like we are under some form of physical or psychological attack, even when right at that particular time we are under no immediate threat. I’ve represented this situation in the diagram below. The big circle is the ambient biological fear pervading our mind, and making us feel as if we are under attack all the time, thus unnecessarily adding to rather than subtracting from the real and present challenges that we actually do have in our life.

So what is the solution to this? It is basically a two-fold move that we need to make:

  1. Recognize that we have this biological fear ticking away in the background of our mind, and make sure that we are not letting it run the way we approach to and experience of our life.
  2. Regularly learn to recognize and rest our awareness in the relative physical and psychological safety of the present moment.

This recognition of safety in the present moment then provides a new basic context for our mind and life where the underlying feeling is one of relaxation and ease. Within this new context the other biological and psychological aspects of our experience (including our biological fear) can function appropriately and in their proper place. I’ve represented this in the diagram below, where you can see the recognition of safety in the present as a big circle of awareness that provides a context for the rest of our moment to moment experience. In this new arrangement our biological fear remains in our mind, able to perform its function of detecting threats to our wellbeing and safety, but doing so without inhibiting and blocking other mental and emotional factors in our mind that cause us happiness and wellbeing.

Recommended one-minute mindfulness for the week:
Spend 1 minute, three times a day sitting quietly, following your breathing and recognizing that, right at this moment you are not under any immediate threats to your physical or psychological safety. Rest at ease in this experience and try and take it as much as possible into the rest of your day.
© 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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Meditation techniques mind body connection Motivation and scope One Minute Mindfulness Presence and being present

Meditation at Christmas – Mindful Eating

Dear Integral Meditators,

Sincerest best wishes to you and your family for the Christmas season  from myself and Integral Meditation Asia. Enjoy this weeks article!

Yours in the spirit of the journey,

Toby

Mindful Eating As Your Object of Meditation

The Christmas season is upon us, which, amongst other things involves gathering together to enjoy food in (hopefully) good company. With this in mind I got thinking about the different methods I have come across for transforming the act of eating into an act of meditative awareness. In general we eat every day, and so having a method of transforming eating into a mindfulness practice is invaluable for any meditator, as it means that the act of eating itself strengthens ones meditation practice and the practice of states of mind that lead directly or indirectly to the experience of happiness and/or insight.
In particular at Christmas which can have many spiritually and culturally connotations, mindful eating gives us a chance to enjoy the interface between our meditation practice and the enjoyment of delicious food.  I have outlined five techniques below from you can take your pick, or alternate between. With this in mind, here we go:

1. Eating with detachment – Delicious as the food may be, the great wisdom traditions of the world have always advised that food is in fact not a true source of lasting happiness, and have thus recommended that we temper our attachment to what we eat, and enjoy it without getting completely consumed by mindless gluttony. For those that have learned to practice detachment in a balanced way, the insight is that a certain level of detachment actually enhances the pleasure from any given activity, and this is also the case with food. By mindfully eating with a certain level of detachment the amount of enjoyment from the sensual experience of eating actually increases.

2. Eating with an altruistic intention – You can enjoy your food whilst at the same time motivating yourself to use the energy that you get from the food to bring benefit to the world. This is the kind of classic “Bodhisattva training practice” that one finds for example in Mahayana Buddhism. Before one eats one might think something like “My main wish is to be of benefit to others, in order to do this I am now going to sustain my body by eating this food”. With this in mind you can then enjoy your food in the same way that you normally do, but behind it lies a compassionate and loving motivation.

3. Regarding what is eaten as a manifestation of primal bliss and emptiness – This method is primarily a tantric method (for me one I learned within the Tibetan tradition),and consists of regarding the food that is eaten as primarily a manifestation of the causal, formless bliss that underlies that whole of the manifest world. Thus one eats with the recognition that behind the world of ordinary appearances (such as the food one is eating) lies the ever present bliss and spaciousness of spirit. This practice requires a certain level of experience in meditation, but it can be a fun one to play with even on a more elementary level of practice.

4. Eating with appreciation – Before one eats time is taken to appreciate the cooks, the circumstances in one’s life that make such nutritious/delicious food to be possible, the trees, plants and animals that provided the ingredients.  Eating with gratitude and appreciation provides a wonderful inner context for the enjoyment of good food.

5. Eating whilst putting down your baggage and having fun – In meditation classes I often tell people at the beginning of the session to put down their mental baggage before we begin to meditation. Similarly we can take the beginning of a meal as an opportunity to put down our mental baggage and engage in the simple act of eating in the present moment with enjoyment, like a mini eating meditation. If your mind is pre-occupied with its usual nonsense, there is always the danger that we waste the fun and enjoyment of food simply because we are mentally elsewhere!

Enjoy your food!
© 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

Please feel free to share this newsletter with people you think may enjoy it. The only thing we ask of you is to please forward the entire newsletter including the contact and copyright information. Thank you.

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Energy Meditation Meditation techniques mind body connection

Energetic Self-Healing

Hi Everyone,

I hope this message finds you well, this weeks article focuses on a practical healing technique that you may be surprised at both the simplicity and effectiveness of, enjoy!

The other practical piece of news from Integral Meditation Asia is that there are now structured meditation and life coaching programs, lasting from 3-6 months available. Up to this time I have been doing 1:1 sessions with clients on an ad-hoc basis. This new structure is designed to offer those that are interested in longer term coaching and personal growth work a format that provides both structure and consistency at a price that is very reasonable I think. If you are interested, do feel free to check out the link!

The run up to Christmas always seems to be a time where old established patterns suddenly come into a state of flux, a time of letting go and seeing how, and of trusting.

Yours in the spirit of integrated energy healing,

Toby

Upcoming Classes and Workshops at Integral Meditation Asia in January 2013

Wednesday 9th January, 7.30-9.30pm:  ”The Essential Meditation of the Buddha: A Two Hour Mini Workshop”

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

Energetic Self-Healing

One of the things that I have really been struck by over the last year is how relatively easily and quickly I have been able to heal minor injuries in my body (mostly sports related) with the aid of a little meditative awareness, and conscious direction of subtle energy (synonymous with the Chinese concept of “Qi”, or the Yogic word “Prajna”) to the area of my body where the injury lies. I have been meditating and working with subtle energy for a long time, but I really have the feeling that this sort of self-healing through energy awareness is something that anyone can do with a little practice. With this in mind, what I am going to do now is explain a simple technique for energetic self-healing that you can try yourself with any minor injuries, with areas of the body that are tired / weak and need a little healing assistance.

Step 1: Connecting to energy
For this type of meditation I recommend having your feet on the floor, either sitting in a chair, or standing. Actually once you are used to it you can even do it lying down, but in the beginning just to get a feeling for it, I recommend upright with feet on the floor.
Relax and focus your mind deep within the earth beneath you. See within the centre of the earth a huge ocean or reservoir of subtle light, energy and life-force. See this life-force flowing up from the earth into your body through the soles of your feet, filling it from head to toe with light and energy.
Take a few slightly deeper breaths, as you breathe in feel all the cells in your body breathing the light into themselves, being energized and refreshed by it. As you breathe out feel the light and energy expanding through your cellular structure, relaxing the cells and releasing stuck energy and tension.

Step 2: Focusing the energy on the area that needs healing
Now focus your mind on the area of your body that needs healing work. See the light and energy in your body focusing in this part of your body.
For example if it is your shoulder joint, see the light gathering very intensely into that shoulder in general and into the dead centre of the shoulder joint specifically.
Now, as you breathe in really focus the energy intensely in this area, seeing the light going as deeply and intensely as it can into the heart of the injury. As you breathe out feel the whole injured area lighting up like a light bulb. As you are doing this you may feel some sharp pains in the injury as the energy starts to penetrate and circulate through the damaged area.
Breathe like this for as long as feels appropriate, 2-4 minutes should be fine for one go.

Step 3: Relaxing in stillness
Finally, simply spend a short period of time relaxing in physical and mental stillness, and in particular relaxing the injured area as deeply as possible. Just relax in deep stillness for a minute or so, or as long as you wish.

End

If you can do this meditation for five minutes, two/three times a day you may be surprised at the good effects you can get. As I say, I don’t believe you need to be an expert meditator to get solid practical results relatively quickly.

Once you are familiar with the basic process explained above, you can also use this technique to also work on healing damaged emotions and feelings. Basically you use the same technique, but you focus on the area of the body where you feel the damaged emotion/feeling, rather than the physical injury. Other than that the process is basically the same.
© 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

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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 Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques mind body connection Presence and being present spiritual intelligence Zen Meditation

Zen Meditation on the Body Within the Body (Within the Body)

Hi Everyone,

This weeks meditation article focuses on the Zen meditation on the body within the body. The first part of the meditation, separating our actual body from our conceptual image of our body is a traditional Zen technique. The second part, dropping the body and resting in the pure awareness body is my own addition that I use when I teach the meditation to classes. So it is my own “invention” so to speak, but it is entirely within the spirit and intention of Zen practice.

Yours in the spirit of clear perception,

Toby

Article of the Week:

Zen Meditation on the Body Within the Body (Within the Body)

Our Three Bodies and the Three Dimensions of Existence Highlighted By Zen

All the great wisdom traditions of the world point out that our world is a multi-dimensional one, with these different dimensions  coming together in communion to form the totality of our being and experience.
In the Zen meditation on the body within the body, three of these dimensions are emphasized as objects of meditation, each of these bodies in turn corresponding to a particular dimension of reality.
The Three bodies are:

  1. Our conceptual body, or the conceptual image that we hold in our mind of our physical body
  2. Our actual physical body as it is in the sensory world
  3. Our formless energy body or  body of consciousness

These three bodies in turn correspond to three fundamental dimensions of our reality and moment to moment experience:

  1. The conceptual or intellectual dimension of our existence
  2. The non-conceptual dimension of our existence
  3. The spiritual or formless dimension of our existence that forms the ground or basis of dimensions one and two.

The meditation is called the body within the body, because our non-conceptual body is concealed or hidden by our conceptual body, or body image, and our  body of consciousness is hidden behind the sensory perception of our non-conceptual body. Hence through meditation we discover different bodies behind or within what we thought was just one body.

The Purpose of the Meditation on the Body Within the Body

The purpose of this meditation is to help us develop awareness of what in Buddhism is called dualistic appearance, which is the appearance of an object (such as our physical body) together with the projected mental image of that object (in this case the body). According to the Buddha, all of our suffering and pain arises from the confusion that dualistic appearance creates in our mind.
To take a simple example, an anorexic person with a very skinny body observes his/her body and projects the mental image an unacceptably fat body on their actual body. As a result they continue to starve their physical body even though it desperately needs nutrients. In such a person their idea of their body and their actual body are completely confused, and so as a result they cause themselves suffering and harm.
The above example is an extreme one, but in reality all of us experience this type of confusion more or less all of the time, our idea of reality and the actuality of our reality do not match each other and so as a result we experience confusion, delusion and suffering.
The first point of the meditation on the body within the body takes our physical body (initially) as its object, and shows us how we can become mindful of the difference between our actual body our conceptual image of our body so that we no longer confuse the two in harmful ways.
The second point of the meditation is to cultivate the skill of dropping all appearances, conceptual and non-conceptual, and learning to rest our mind in the natural, open state of pure awareness that is our body of consciousness.

The Meditation

Stage 1: Meditating of the conceptual image of your body
Sitting comfortably in meditation, start to examine times in your life when you have had different experiences of your body, times when you may have hated it, times when you have been proud of it, ashamed of it, embarrassed by it. Try to observe how in each case the way in which you experience your body at those times is actually in large part dominated by a conceptual image of the body, rather than the body itself as you are experiencing it from moment to moment. Try and observe how your conceptual mind projects its imagined image of a body onto your body.

Stage 2: Meditating on the non-conceptual experience of your body
In the second stage of the meditation simply focus on the sensory experience of your body and breathing as they are in the present moment. Using the body and the breathing as an anchor, try and drop all conceptual thoughts as completely as you can, and just experience the physical body as it is, free from your idea of what it is. Try and become as familiar as you can with this non-conceptual experience of your sensory body as you experience it in the here and now.
This experience of the body as it is is called “the body within the body” because it is the body that we “discover” when we drop our conceptual image of our body. Our mental image of our body normally hides our actual body from us (!)

Stage 3: Meditating on your body of consciousness
In the final stage of the meditation simply try and let go of all conceptual and sensory experiences altogether, and allow your mind to rest in the “pure awareness body” or subtle formless energy body that acts as the ground from which arises both our conceptual and sensory experience.  Try and gently sustain your experience of this formless or “spiritual” dimension of existence for the remainder of the meditation.
This third meditation stage and third “body” is called “the body within the body, within the body” because it is the body that is normally hidden behind the mask of the phenomenal world, or the body of form. When we drop our body of form, the body of consciousness appears, or is revealed.

Practice When Going About Our Daily Life

  1. During your daily life try and remain consciously aware of the different images and perceptions that your mind is projecting upon your body, accept the images that are useful and helpful, but do not buy into images that are destructive, deluded or unhelpful. Be mindful not to be fooled by them!
  2. Try and come back to your basic sensory or non conceptual experience of your body by regularly dropping your conceptual thoughts and focusing for short periods on the sensory body and the breathing.
  3. Regard both your conceptual and non-conceptual worlds as appearances arising from the ground of your (Universal) or body of consciousness, like a dream arising from the clarity of deep sleep, or clouds arising within and clear sky.

© 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
Enlightened love and loving Essential Spirituality mind body connection Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

Six Aspects of Sacred Sexuality

Hi Everyone!

In this week’s article I give a quick guided tour to the uses of sexual energy in spiritual practice. I would venture to say that most of you may not have seen all these different practices in a single article, and I hope you’ll find it of interest!
Detailed below is also the meditation class routine for April, full details to follow in next week’s newsletter.

Yours in the spirit of sacred creativity,

Toby

PS: If you enjoyed this article and would like to find out how you can use the latest meditation technologies to enhance your bliss and joy, then click here: Digital Euphoria

 

Article of the Week:

Six Aspects of Sacred Sexuality

The following is a list of the different uses that sexuality has been and is used for in the different wisdom traditions of the world. Of course each of them contains elements of each type of sacred sexuality within their tradition, but because different traditions emphasize particular uses of the sexual energy, I use them as descriptive terms for the particular “genre”. For example Taoism uses the sexual energy extensively for healing, so I call this type of sexuality “Taoist sexuality”.

As you read through the six below, some you may feel familiar with, others may not be so well known to you. All are very useful when used in the right context, but as with any spiritual practice appropriate discernment should be used in its practical application.

Shamanic Sexuality– Here the sexual energy is generated specifically with the intention of being used for traveling to different locations on the inner world in one’s “astral body” or “energy body”. From one point of view you can mentally project yourself to anywhere you want in the universe just by thinking of it, but if you want to travel to an inner world location in your energy body more energy is required and sexual energy works very well to fully charge the subtle body for its journey. Shamanic sexuality is also used in a healing context, assuming the authenticity and integrity of the Shamanic practitioner.

Taoist Sexuality– In Taoist sexual practice the sexual energy is deliberately generated and then circulated energetically within the body so as to regenerate areas of the body that have become weak nor deadened, and to clear our energetic blocks that are perpetuating and may have even been the original cause of an illness. It can also be practiced by healthy individuals and couples to promote energy levels and long life.

Tantric Sexuality – Here sexual energy is generated with the intention to circulate it through the subtle energy centres of the body in order to promote expanded and enlightened states of awareness.
Another aspect of tantric sexuality is the sexual union of ourself with a divine “other” which is to say the divine appearing in a God or Goddess form, which in turn can enhance the expanded and enlightened states of awareness that are the goal of tantric sexuality.

Psycho-spiritual/Psychoanalytical  Sexuality– The point of this form of sexual practice is, to quote Robert Masters to release “Release sexuality from its obligation to make us feel better”, and to engage in sexual activity with our partner specifically with the intention to open to our psychological vulnerability and explore whatever emotional/energetic pleasure or pain may come up during the interaction consciously and honestly. I suppose this could be thought of as a form of healing sexuality, where the emphasis is placed upon psychological healing.

Non-Dual Sexuality– Non dual sexuality can be practiced simply by deliberately mixing any experience of sexual or sensual bliss with formless emptiness, or inner and outer space, and then remembering that the sense of bliss and the sense of space arise from one primal, non-dual source of all that is.

Biological Sexuality– This is where you use your sexual energy to have babies. It is a s sacred as all the rest, although it is not always presented in a format that is obviously sacred

A final point on all the above is that all of them require dedication and a willingness to confront challenges and difficulties as well as bliss in order to gain authentic results.

© Toby Ouvry 2011, 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