Category: Motivation and scope

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Practical Rapture (On rapture, beauty and mindfulness)

Dear Integral Meditators,

Rapture is a state of mind and body that we all experience sometimes, the article below explores how we can build our experience of it through mindfulness, and then start putting it to use…

In the spirit of rapture,

Toby

Practical Rapture (On rapture, beauty and mindfulness)

Rapture –  a state or emotion of wonderment, bliss and heightened perception. A state of feeling deeply and primally connected to life and aliveness felt not just in the mind and heart, but in the body.

Peak rapture


We are all familiar to a greater or lesser degree with times when we have had a peak experience of rapture; when listening to music or contemplating art, in moments of new love or romance, in powerful landscape, when we are in a highly creative state, enthused by an idea or an ideal, the temporary peaks we dip into in good meditations. What are the moments in your life where you have felt most closely connected to a state of rapture? Memories like this are important for us to be mindful of as often they are powerful enough to re-trigger a little bit of that peak rapture in the moment we are in right now.

Everyday rapture


If we are mindful, we also start to notice that there are quiet invitations to rapture all around us; in the wind through trees, in the sight or a flower or cloudscape in the sky, in the feeling of comfort on our skin as we sit in a comfy chair. Rapture almost seems like the ‘hum’ of life that you can connect to anytime that you dip your awareness beneath the surface of your mind and what you are experiencing in the moment. To be in touch with your life and the feeling of being alive is to feel slightly blissful, slightly rapturous.

Accessing rapture through mindfulness


Mindfulness meditation by its nature invites us to dip below the surface of our attention, moving to deeper states of awareness that naturally contain some rapture. For example, within the forest monk tradition of breathing meditation there is a stage called ‘the beautiful breathing’. At this stage, which comes after achieving a certain level of competency focusing attention upon the breathing, the body starts to feel effortlessly comfortable, the breathing becomes smooth and even, and the mind moves toward a state of calm rapture. Once this is achieved, then we become able to access a feeling of quiet, everyday rapture at will, or at least more and more often in our daily life.

Thinking and acting from a place of rapture


You can cultivate your experience of rapture then by:

  • Being mindful of your past experiences of peak rapture, and the ones that come up for you in your daily life.
  • Noticing the everyday moments of rapture that are available to you whenever you take the time to notice them.
  • Cultivate a daily practice of mindfulness, where to learn to consciously dip into sustained states of calm rapture regularly.

One fun thing that you can then try doing is thinking and acting from a place of rapture, which is to say:

  • A place that is creative, playful and a little wild.
  • A place that is fulfilled in the moment.
  • A place that contains natural compassion.

Within the boundaries of what feels appropriate, try bringing your rapture mindfully into your everyday life, relationships and tasks. What might start to change in your life today if you did??

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm (next class August 10th) – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

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The yoga of limitation and choice

Dear Integral Meditation,

Is choice always a good thing for us? How can we use limitation to our advantage? The article below looks at how we can use mindfulness to approach both choice and limitation with confidence…

In the spirit of the journey,

Toby

The yoga of limitation and choice

The yoga of limitation and choice are two types of mindfulness practice centered around the process of decision making. In situations where our choices are very limited and where we have multiple choices there are both:

  • Opportunities for specific types of inner growth, happiness and wellbeing.
  • Challenges to our peace of mind and factors trying to sabotage our sense of inner wellbeing

Allowing ourselves to be disciplined by limitation
When I was a monk I deliberately chose to limit my options in life:

  • A very minimal income
  • No sexual or romantic relationships
  • No intoxicants (except the odd expresso!)

Because of this my choices became very limited, which meant I had to practice ‘the discipline of limitation’ living within my means and boundaries. My limitations also enabled me to focus and accomplish the goal of becoming a meditation and mindfulness expert, but even without that I observed that simply having fewer choices makes your life clear and simple; the limitations of your choice give rise to a certain amount of peace if you are able to accept them.
So, to practise the yoga of limitation simply means to be content and accepting of the limitations of your life as you find them each day. This doesn’t mean that you don’t make plans to increase your choices and opportunities in life; it just means you are take advantage of the limitations you find each day, and are not made unhappy by them.

The discipline of choice
Now that I am a layperson in the middle stages of my life I have many choices and options

  • Which personal and business relationships do I pursue?
  • How best to spend and save my money?
  • Am I insured enough?
  • Private or public education for my child?
  • Where to go on holiday?
  • Where to live?

Endless choices, and the more wealth I have, the more choices are born from that…
The interesting thing that I note as I observe my own experience of choice (and many of the people that surround me) is that having all these options can give rise to a lot of anxiety and unhappiness (what if this is the wrong choice? Someone tell me what to do!) In order not to be made unhappy and over anxious by my many choices, I have to be disciplined, decisive and mindful.  When you no longer have the luxury of limitation, mindful, conscious decision making really comes at a premium.

What are the circumstances in your life right now where you need to practice the yoga of limitation; allowing yourself to be disciplined by and content with your absence of choices?
What are the circumstances where you need to practice the yoga of choice; managing the anxiety of having options, and making choices consciously, responsibly and positively?

If you are a mindfulness practitioner, you will know how to take advantage of both types of situation, and have an ongoing experiential grasp of the saying that the time to be happy (in whatever form you understand that) is always now.

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm (next class July 6th) – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

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Three levels of non-striving

“Step deeply into the feeling of non-striving; learn to move easily and smoothly with whatever it is you find within yourself”

Dear Integral Meditators,

Is it possible by letting go of our striving to then learn how to strive better? That is the topic of this weeks article!

Mindful goals coaching offer ends tomorrow, 8th June.

In the spirit of non-striving,

Toby


Three levels of non-striving

In a previous article on non-striving I defined non-striving as “a refusal to be in conflict with yourself and your life. Put another way, rather than seeing yourself in an adversarial relationship to yourself and your circumstances, you practice accepting and working with what is there”.
What I want to explain here is three levels of non-striving that we can work with in our mindfulness practice. These three stages are:

  1. Noticing your inner conflict and striving
  2. Practising non-striving
  3. Striving better

Noticing your inner conflict
This first stage is simply about awareness. You sit down and notice all of the tension, conflict and striving that you have within yourself at this point in time. Without trying to change it, simply notice the tension you may feel about a conversation you had earlier in the day, an unfinished project, an uncertainty that you can’t control, a mistake that you wish you hadn’t made and wish to rectify, something that you are looking forward to and can’t wait for, something that you are sad about and wish hadn’t happened. Simply breath and be present to all of the different types of conflict and striving you notice. Is there one above all of the others that is stronger and stands out? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Relaxing into non-striving
In this stage the object is to progressively drop the different levels of striving and conflict that you feel within yourself.
Take a few breaths to center yourself, then encourage yourself to move into a state of acceptance of yourself, what you find within you, and whatever circumstances you find yourself in. Alternate for a while between the breathing (to center and focus yourself) and entering into a state of easy, relaxed non-striving. With each round of breathing and relaxing, try and enter one step deeper into the feeling of non-striving; learn to move easily and smoothly with whatever it is you find within yourself. You can stay with stage two for as long as you like, it’s good to really immerse yourself in it deeply when you can.

Striving better
In stage one you practiced mindfully noticing the different types of conflict that you have in your life currently. In the second stage, non-striving, you practiced stepping out of that conflict refusing to be in an adversarial relationship to yourself, going with what you find with acceptance. In the final stage, ‘striving better’ you come back to the conflicts that you notice in stage one and ask yourself the question ‘is there any way I can strive better and more harmoniously in this situation?”

  • You might choose to strive more patiently with the project that is stressing you out
  • You might choose to make good for a mistake made without using the fact that you made it in the first place as a hammer that you keep hitting yourself over the head with
  • You might choose to emphasize being playful in a situation that you have been taking overly seriously

There are infinite potential discoveries that you might make and decide to focus on implementing at this stage, the point is that you are using your mindful intelligence to make the quality of your striving wiser, more ergonomic, more realistic.

By using these three stages we learn not just to relax by practising non-striving, but to combine our striving and non-striving into a mutually strengthening and re-enforcing whole. As always with integral mindfulness its ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’!

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday 11th June, 10am-5pm – An Introduction to Meditation from the Perspective of Shamanism

Saturday June 18th, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention – An Introduction to Contemporary Meditation Practice

Integral Meditation Asia

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Independent Interdependence

Dear Integral Meditators,

How can we be more mindful of the space that lies between us as individuals and ourselves as members of a community that we depend upon? This weeks article looks at how we can start to investigate important dimension of mindfulness practice in a practical way.

In the spirit of our inter-relationship,

Toby

Independent Interdependence

To be independent as a person means to be able to think for yourself, form your own (evidence based) opinions, be responsible for your own actions and life direction, as well as fundamentally trusting your own mind and judgment. The benefits of becoming truly independent include becoming a self-determining person who is able to go against the path of least resistance, ignore popular opinion (where appropriate), be alone and do what is necessary to find a way of life that leads to genuine fulfillment of your deeper needs, aspirations and ambitions.

To recognize interdependence means that, whilst being individuals we are also dependent upon others for our basic well being. The bus I took into work this morning, the computer hard and software I am using to type this article, the food I will buy for lunch after I finish both depend upon a huge chain of interdependence from which I benefit directly. In many ways I am completely dependent upon this chain of interdependence, my wellbeing and yours relies upon the community and networks which support us. One benefit of recognizing interdependence is that it encourages us to see the clearly what we receive from others and from our community every day, thus naturally developing appreciation, warmth and a wish to reciprocate that benefit back to others.

So then, to practice independent interdependence means to fully committed to realizing our individuality whilst at the same time recognizing that we are dependent upon the help and support we receive from others, our networks and communities. Interdependence encourages us to feel positive and grateful for what we are receiving, and encouraged to give back in whatever way we can.

There are two extremes that we want to avoid when practicing independent interdependence:

  • Allowing our individuality to be negatively compromised for the sake of ‘fitting in’ to a network we are interdependent with
  • Becoming a negative individualist in the sense of always valuing our personal wellbeing over and above the interests of the communities within which we co-exist. As individuals we see ourselves as equal with others, no more or less important. Indeed, if we learn to value our own individuality appropriately the effect of this is that we will come to value the individuality of other people more, not less.

Finding the middle way
Think about a situation that you may be experiencing right now in your life, perhaps one that is posing a few dilemmas for you. As yourself the questions:

  • What is my individuality asking of me at this time?
  • What are the legitimate needs of the community or network upon which I am dependent in this situation that should be honored?

Your practice of mindful independent interdependence lies in the middle of the dance between these two questions.

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

Ongoing on Wednesday’s, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday  April 16th, 2.30-5.30pm – Living Life From Your Inner Center – Meditations for Going With the Flow of the Present Moment – A three hour workshop

Thursday 21st April 7.30-8.30pm – Monthly Thursday Evening Integral Meditation Classes @ the Life Chiropractic Centre with Toby

Saturday April 30th, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Self Confidence: Developing your self-confidence, self-belief & self-trust through mindfulness & meditation

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Think Well or Don’t Think

“You may be surprised at how quickly being mindful of your thoughts can start to have a real, tangible influence on the quality of your life”

Dear Integral Meditators,

What would happen to your quality of life if you chose to think more carefully about what you think? This weeks article explains a practical method with which you can start to explore this question.

In the spirit of thought-art,

Toby

Think Well or Don’t Think

Here’s a mindful game that you can play with yourself. Take a period of time, say between 3-15 minutes. In this time frame your principle object of mindfulness is going to be your thoughts. The rules are that whatever you are thinking about you should either think about it well or simply stop your thinking. To think about something well means:

  • To take a consciously positive perspective on what is going on or
  • To make an objective mental note/observation or
  • To make the thoughts caring, constructive and/or allowing

This morning I did this exercise on the train to work. I was feeling a little emotionally strained and confused, and it would have been quite easy for my train of thought to reflect that emotionality, creating instinctively negative perspectives on my life. Amongst the thoughts that I brought to mind during the exercise were:

  • It is ok to feel emotionally strained, we all do, but I’m not going to allow that strain to create a negative dialogue in my head
  • Objectively speaking my feelings do not reflect many of the aspects of what is happening in my life, which are fundamentally pretty good – I feel fortunate, and things are essentially on track
  • I’m going to choose to adopt a playful and light stance to my present experience, even though part of me feels a bit wounded right now.

So you get the idea, I am just being really conscious about my thoughts, I’m not letting difficult feelings produce a negative inner dialogue, I am expressing disciplined empathy and care for my experience, I am using an objective perspective appropriately. If my thinking is not in any of those categories, then I simply choose not to think, just to be present to each moment and hold it with awareness.
Give it a try, you may be surprised at how quickly being mindful of your thoughts can start to have a real, tangible influence on the quality of your life. You can also try applying the same principles to your conversation with other people to make it an inter-relational mindfulness exercise.

Sculpting your feelings
One thing that this practice also gives us the ability to do is start using our thinking to skillfully sculpt and shape the way we feel. We can start to use our mind as a precision tool that we can use to benevolently shape our raw emotional energy.

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

February 2016

Ongoing on Wednesday’s (Jan 13th, 20th) 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

March classes coming soon!

Integral Meditation Asia

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The Eye of the Storm – Finding peace in the non-peace

Dear Integral Meditators,

What would happen if in the moments when you were feeling most disturbed and out of balance you were able to find a place of peace within that same moment? The article below explores how you can begin to do so.

In the spirit of the eye of the storm,

Toby

The Eye of the Storm – Finding peace in the non-peace
 
It’s always pleasant and valuable to seek out peaceful times and places in your day where you can cultivate your inner peace mindfully, but it can also be hugely valuable to learn to notice the peace that is present in the midst of the most stressful situations that you find yourself in, for example

  • When you have multiple demands upon your time
  • When your relationships are in crisis
  • When your health is not good
  • When you face setbacks nervousness or uncertainty

If you think about any of these type of circumstances in your mind or life as being like a storm, to find the ‘peace in the non-peace’ means to go looking for the eye of the storm in that moment; to locate and hold your awareness in that center point. You don’t wait for the storm to subside or go away; you actively look for the point of stillness within it as the activity goes on around and within you.
This is a very powerful way to learn to experience peace, as it is directly contrasted with the stress, movement and turbulence of your circumstances. Cultivating peace in this way also makes you more resilient, as your capacity to endure and relax into stress increases.
So, the next time you find yourself experiencing non-peace, remember the eye of the storm and look for the still point within the turbulence, placing your attention and awareness in that place. Find the peace within the non-peace.

© Toby Ouvry 2016, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:

JANUARY 2016

Ongoing on Wednesday’s (Jan 13th, 20th) 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday January 16th, 9.30am-12.30pm – Transforming Your Stress into Happiness – Meditation & mindfulness for cultivating a state of optimal flow in your mind, body, heart and life – A three hour workshop

Saturday, January 30th, 2.30-5.30pm  – Meditations for Transforming Negativity and Stress into Energy, Positivity and Enlightenment – A Three Hour Workshop

Starts 4th February – Transforming Stress into Happiness – An Introduction to Integral Mindfulness Meditation – A Five Week On line Course

Click the link to find out about the special 1:1 meditation and mindfulness coaching offer in January!

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Mindful of: Your Relationship to Giving and Receiving

Dear Integral Meditators,

The article below offers some simple methods for exploring and developing a healthy relationship to giving and receiving through mindfulness.

In the spirit of giving and receiving,

Toby

 

Mindful of: Your Relationship to Giving and Receiving

What is your relationship to the process of giving and receiving? Every day we exchange words, energy and activity with others and our environment  in both healthy and not so healthy ways. How can we use mindfulness to explore how this process is playing out in our life?

Basic awareness practice around giving and receiving
Here is a simple practices you can do to attune yourself to the basic experience of giving and receiving.

  • As you breathe in, feel yourself moving into a state of receptivity and receiving. As you breather out focus on a state of giving. In a literal sense we are taking in and giving out air from and to the atmosphere, but breathing like this also helps us to become aware of the psychological state of giving and receiving that we are alternating between during the day. Do a few rounds of 3-5 breaths like this, with short breaks in between just to explore the experience
  • As a second stage to this exercise, as you breathe in really try and feel yourself receiving energy from the world, and as you breathe out feel yourself giving back to  it. Set up a benevolent cycle of giving and receiving with each breath.

Becoming more mindful of your experience of giving and receiving, and its power
Think of a time when you have received the energy of kindness, care or confidence from someone else. What did it feel like to receive such energy? Was it a powerful experience? Correspondingly think of a time when you gave the energy of confidence, care and kindness to others. What did it feel like to give this? How did the other person/people respond to it? Did you find it easy or difficult?
Now think of a time when you were on the receiving end of difficult energy such as aggression, hatred of confusion from someone. What did it feel like to receive this energy, how did it affect you?
Correspondingly think of a time when you gave the energy of anger or aggression, or anxiety to another person. How did they respond? What did it feel like to give such energy? If you were more aware of what it is like to receive such energy, would you give it out so much?

Giving and receiving in real time with others
As you are going about your daily life, try and be aware of the dynamic of giving and receiving between yourself and the others that you meet.  Become aware of when to open and receive energy from others in a healthy way, and when to close to it. Similarly be aware of how and when you are giving; when it is healthy and appropriate and when it is not really serving either yourself or others. The idea is to try and use your natural intelligence and awareness to set up positive cycles of giving and receiving in your life, so that you are receiving healthy energy from others and also giving healthy and sustaining energy to them in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.

A couple of fundamental mindful questions to ask yourself during the day:
What is it that I am giving or receiving from myself and/or others right now? Now that I am conscious of it, are there any adjustments I need to make?

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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

Integral Meditation Asia

 

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The Pendulum Swing of Happiness and Sadness

Dear Integral Meditators,

How much happiness does your aversion for or resistance to sadness cost you? This is the topic the article below explores.

Beneath the article you will see some information on i-Awake technologies latest track Profound Releasing. You can read my own thoughts on this type of meditation technology HERE.

In the spirit of the pendulum swing,

Toby

The Pendulum Swing of Happiness and Sadness

Two days ago a couple of my daughters most cherished dolls were chewed up by the dog. She phoned me in a haze of tears and sadness about this, seemingly wallowing in the upset. Two hours later when I saw her, her mood had changed, she was still a little sad, but already talking jokingly about it, and explaining to me how she was going to fix the dolls, and lightheartedly telling me it was my fault for leaving the door of her bedroom open (which it may well have been!) Over the course of a couple of hours her mod had swung from open hearted sadness to acceptance, humour and smiles.

In the recent Pixar movie Inside-Out there is a moment when the character Joy realizes that many of the happy memories that the child she is in charge of possesses are dependent upon a preceding sad experience that sets up the happy experience. Up to this point in the movie she has been trying to remove sadness from the life of the child, but once she realizes its value, she knows when to get out of the way and let sadness play its part in the life of the child; indeed it is eventually sadness that saves the day!

My basic observation here is that our happiness and sadness are like a pendulum swing; if you allow yourself to experience your sadness, to ‘swing toward it’, then naturally once it has been experienced you will start to swing back again towards happiness. If however you block your sadness and prevent yourself experiencing it, then in some ways you lose the ability to feel genuinely happy. You just find yourself stuck in a state where you don’t feel happy or sad, just neutral, ‘comfortably numb’ as the saying goes.

Learning to swing with the pendulum
So the basic practice here is simply to mindfully learn to swing with our moods from happiness to sadness and back again, without blocking or interfering with the swing too much. Learn to swing naturally into a sad mood and gain confidence from the experience that after a while it starts to swing naturally back towards happiness after it has reached the extremity of its movement.

A practice
First of all get used to asking yourself; ‘How am I feeling right now?’ and really cultivating awareness and connection to your feelings and moods.
Secondly, use the image of the pendulum, when you feel yourself feeling a little sad, relax into the swing of it, don’t try and block it too much; allow yourself to experience it without getting swamped.
If you do this then after a while you will find yourself swinging back towards happiness. Relax into that too, enjoy it while it lasts, but don’t try and cling onto it beyond its time. Learn to participate in the swinging to and fro  between moods of happiness and sadness, to enjoy it with mindful awareness.

PS: One thing that I’ve become aware of with myself and with other people is that as soon as we start to feel emotionally uncomfortable or sad we distract and block ourself from that feeling by taking out our phone and fiddling with it. Becoming aware of this tendency and choosing to just sit with the discomfort or sadness instead of taking out the phone can be a simple mindfulness practice that we can set ourselves that will help us to manage our happy-sad pendulum swing a little better.

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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

New I-Awake Track: Profound Releasing

Profound Releasing is a deeply transformative, guided meditation, encoded brainwave
entrainment technology designed to help you experience:
●    Letting go of old, limiting emotional patterns
●    Developing more inner strength and groundedness
●    A deepening compassion for yourself and others
●    And a gradual awakening into pure awareness

Our friends at iAwake Technologies are offering up to 20% Off Discount when you
purchase Profound Releasing during its introductory 7-day offer (September 17-24,
2015)
To learn more and listen to the free demo track click here: http://goo.gl/4km9pF

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What is a Meditator?

Dear Integral Meditators,

What is a meditator? The article below offers 5 working definitions, each of which offer an insight into what the meditation process can offer us…

For those in Singapore, a reminder of workshops this Saturday 12th September; 9.30am-12.30 – Meditations For Creating a mind of Ease & 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Dreaming. Wednesday 9th Sept Drop in Medi Class at 7.30pm.

In the spirit meditative hedonism ,

Toby

 

What is a Meditator? 

What is a meditator? Why do you meditate? Here are five definitions of what a meditator is or can be.

1. A wise hedonist – When I was a monk and people asked me ‘Why did you become a monk?’ I used to reply ‘Because I’m a hedonist; I’m making my personal happiness a priority. I have become a monk because I want to set aside time to meditate, and I meditate because I want to be happy, and I recognize that meditation is one of the best ways to do that, because happiness is primarily something that comes from within me.’ I’m no longer a monk, but I still practice meditation for the same reason!

2. Someone committed to self-healing – A meditator is someone who is committed to looking inward in order to see, taking care of and heal the parts of themselves that are injured, wounded or broken and returning them to health. I’m talking primarily about the psychological parts of self here rather than physical self, although meditation can and does have a substantial effect on physical healing.

3. A person committed to developing and consolidating their innerstrengths– If meditation is a mind that focuses on a positive object, then a meditator is a person who is committed to systematically developing their inner positivity, strengths and wellbeing by focusing on and growing these strengths daily, perhaps a little bit like an inner gym-rat!

4.Someone committed to looking deeper – A meditator is someone who is committed to looking deeply at what is going on, and really bringing their intelligence (both mental intelligence and the other types of intelligence we have) to bear upon their life. A meditator is not satisfied with the merely superficial; a meditator is committed to knowing and seeing their reality as deeply as they are capable of at any given time.

5. A walker between worlds – A meditator is someone who is developing their capacity to move consciously and easily between the solid, outer world of matter, the subtle inner world of the mind and the very subtle formless timeless world that lies beyond the mind.  Ideally a meditator should be equally at home in either of these three worlds and equally competent in the skills required to navigate each.

So, any practice that you have in your life for engaging in any of the above five activities might be considered a form of meditation, and make you a meditator of sorts.
If you were to pick one of the five areas above and investigate it a little bit further in your life this week, which one would it be?

Related Article:A Meditation Map – The Art of State Training

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia in 

Every Wednesday, 7.30-8.30pm – Wednesday Meditation Classes at Basic Essence with Toby

Saturday 12th September, 9.30am-12.30pm – Mindfulness and Meditation For Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration

Saturday 12th September, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Dreaming – Meditation Practices for Integrating Conscious Dreaming into Your Daily Life

Saturday 19th September, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Relationships: Improving Your Relationships and Social Skills Through Mindfulness

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The Quickest Way Through the Rain

Dear Integral Meditators,

When you have a ‘dark cloud’ in your life, do you habitually walk toward it or run away from it? Its an important question, the article below explores why, with the help of a few large furry friends!

In the spirit of walking towards,

Toby

The Quickest Way Through the Rain

The amateur naturalists amongst you may have heard the story of buffalo herds who, when they see a thunder cloud coming toward them walk directly into it rather than away from it. Of course this is a very intelligent thing to do because by walking in and through the rain cloud they actually minimise the amount of time they have to spend getting wet, as the rain cloud passes by much quicker.

Whenever we have a ‘rain cloud’ in our life the instinct can be to run away in the opposite direction from it, hoping that it will go away if we run fast enough. Of course then what happens is that we find ourself being pursued by the rain cloud for a long time, and then when it catches us we have to spend a long time getting wet.

Whatever inner rain clouds you have in your life, the quickest and most effective way to deal with them is almost always by going towards and through them, rather than turning away and running.

Sometimes getting wet is not what you expect
One of the nice things about getting in the habit of walking into your rainclouds is that you discover as often as not that ‘getting wet’ is not as unpleasant as you thought. The experience of accepting a difficult emotion, having a challenging conversation, making a difficult choice, or facing a fear is that, as often as not more pleasant than we thought. If you walk into the rain, sometimes (not always) you may find yourself dancing in it!

If you aren’t ready to turn towards the cloud, then know that
There are some rain clouds in your life that you may not be ready to walk into for whatever reason. If this is the case, then you need to know that you aren’t ready and make a conscious choice to hold it at arm’s length until you are ready. If you do this consciously, rather than running blindly and impulsively away, then you can avoid a lot of the negative effects of repression and impulsive fear.

A mature meditation and mindfulness practice
One of the marks of a mature meditation and mindfulness practitioner is this; they know the value of walking into the raincloud and do it regularly.

An image
Imagine you are sitting in a grassland under a big sky. Next to you is a herd of buffalo. You see a dark raincloud on the horizon. You see the buffalo naturally start walking toward the cloud, as if it were the easiest thing to do in the world, why not follow them in? After all, the quickest way out of the rain is through it.

Related articles: The inner weather of the mind
Breaking like a wave

© Toby Ouvry 2015, 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

Integral Meditation Asia