Category: One Minute Mindfulness

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One Minute Mindfulness

The Six Stages to an Integrated Enlightened Self

Here are six stages or realizations in the journey toward the experience of enlightenment as explained by the great wisdom traditions of the world that emphasize meditation as a daily practice. Of course each of them would explain it with different words and emphasizing slightly different aspects of the path, but broadly speaking these six points would be common.

1. I am not my ego (the mental idea of who I think I am), I am a unified harmonious body-mind, living in the present moment.

2. I have a physical body but I am not my body.

3. I have a mind (a continuum of feelings thoughts and images) but I am not my mind.

4. I have an individual soul/divine spark/Buddha nature, but I am not that individual soul.

5. I am the Universal Witness-Self, the timeless, formless witnessing awareness that lies at the heart of all living beings and all of creation.

6. I am the integrated sum total of all the above “selves” allowing the divine to express itself creatively through me in my daily life from moment to moment.

© 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

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One Minute Mindfulness

Filling Your Mind With Empty

One of the things that I habitually struggle with, (along with much of the rest of the world I imagine) is simply the sheer quantity of information that we have to process each day. It is not really a matter of the information being good or bad in quality, it is just that sometimes the sheer volume just seems to get unmanageable.

I think that this challenge is one of the areas where a meditation practice has the MOST to offer. If you have some familiarity with meditation, then you know that relief from the stress of information overload is never far away, as you havedeveloped the skill of being able to empty your mind at will.

Once developed this skill can be used anytime anywhere. For example my mind was feeling very “full” yesterday evening. After dinner I had a 20-30 minute walking and bus journey to the local tennis court for an evening game. I used that time just to focus… on absolutely nothing (beyond the absolutely logistically necessary). By the time I reached the tennis court my mind felt empty, spacious and refreshed, my appetite for life returned.

Consciously focusing on nothing much is not the same as just “checking-out” mentally, rather it is learning to enjoy the inner space of our mind that is always there but that we are not often aware of.

© 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

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A Mind of Ease One Minute Mindfulness

Saying and Giving Thanks

Quite often the temptation can be when we are feeling out of sorts, lonely or unfulfilled in some way to look for something self-centred and pleasurable with which we can indulge ourselves and therefore (we hope) feel better.

One of the things that I have been doing when I have been feeling out of sorts recently is to respond to the dissonant feeling by thinking “Who can I thank for something that they have done for or with me recently?” I will then if appropriate literally write a quick thankyou letter to that person if appropriate, or otherwise just mentally thank them for the service that they have provided me with. You can say thankyou to a huge range of different people. For example my practice today included:

  • A parent of a classmate of my daughters who looked after my daughter on a playdate last week (I wrote and actual email)
  • To my wife for the frank conversation over lunch
  • To the man who took my tennis court booking on the phone
When you are feeling out of sorts, turning your mind to other people and acknowledging their value and kindness to you is often a great way to feel better fast!

© 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

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One Minute Mindfulness

Grateful for a Home to go Back to Each Night

Commuting home on an evening in a city like Singapore the temptation can be to try and ignore the fellow travellers on the bus or metro and go back into your shell. On with the ipod and try to forget you are surrounded by people.

Last night I was not in the mood for doing anything on the bus making my way home. Looking around I noticed that about half of the bus were migrant workers, phones glued to their ears phoning home to Bangladesh, Myenmar or wherever. They were all going back to makeshift lodgings, one room with many people sleeping inside, most often no air conditioning, up early the next day for more long work in the sun. All of this thousands of miles away from their homeland and the people most dear to them. Maybe ten or twenty years of their precious life would be spent this way

Reflecting on all this as I focused outward on my fellow passengers my journey home became a meditation on empathy and compassion for them, and a sense of “Gee, I’m glad I’ve got a home to go back to each night, and my loved ones close at hand.”

Seems like noticing who you are commuting with can be worthwhile!

© 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

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One Minute Mindfulness

Computer Mindfulness

My home computer is very slow. Today things reached a bit of a head for me, I was working at home and getting very frustrated by my computers ever increasing slowness, the more I tried to do, the slower it got!

I found the answer after taking a break for 20 minutes. I adopted a strategy of opening no more than one, maximum two programs at a time on the computer, so that it has less to process at any given time. The result is that it worked a treat, the computer started working a lot faster, and I also found that consciously trying to do only one task at a time actually made my time at the keyboard a lot more mindful, spacious and enjoyable.

From now on I am going to adopt this practice with all computer work, not just when I am on a super slow one!

© 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

Enjoyed this post? Why not sign up for Toby’s free Creative Meditations E-Newsletter?

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One Minute Mindfulness

Stress Relief and the Stress of Meditation

Therapeutically meditation has gained a reputation for helping manage stress, and there is a lot of hard evidence to support this. There is no doubt that learning to relax the mind through meditation can help enormously in dealing with stress.

However, one thing that is not so well publicized is that meditation can actually be a cause of another type of stress, developmental stress. When you start to meditate you are increasing the creative power of your mind, and also unlocking many of the latent abilities that you carry within your consciousness. As your creative power and inner abilities begin to grow and develop this naturally gives rise to developmental stress, which basically means the healthy stress that comes from growing and changing.

So when you meditate there is always this balance to be found between the stress that you are relieving through your mediation, and the healthy developmental stress that you are invoking through your meditation. Finding that balance is an art that all practicing meditation need to understand.