Category: Presence and being present

Categories
Awareness and insight Inner vision Meditation techniques One Minute Mindfulness Presence and being present

Dropping Your Conceptual Leaves

Hi Everyone,

This week’s article focuses on the value of adopting a periodically more minimal mental approach to our life’s challenges.

Yours in the spirit of the journey,

Toby

Dropping Your Conceptual Leaves

Seasonally the beginning of November in the northern hemisphere sees the change from autumn to winter, the leaves having started to turn brown and whither in September and October now begin to drop from the trees in earnest, leaving behind the naked skeletons of the trees across the landscape. Life in nature, although still present becomes much more minimal and quiet with the onset of the winter months.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been using the image of a tree in late autumn and winter as an image in meditation. I become the tree and imagine my leaves dropping away. As I do so I also feel all my excessive conceptuality and mental baggage dropping away. I let go of ideas and preconceptions and just allow myself to rest in this state of minimal awareness, like the stillness of a bare tree in winter, its life quiet and hidden but nevertheless fully present deep inside its structure.

Dropping your conceptual ‘leaves’ like this on a regular basis is a very healthy thing to do. So many of our ‘problems’ are actually just labels that our overly conceptual mind has placed upon things that disturb us, rather than being vitally important life problems in themselves. Quietening our mind and sitting in silence allows us to see which of our problems are really worth solving, and which can be solved simply by dropping our mental label of them as problems.

As you can see I like to meditate with the energy of the seasons, so the coming months are a period where I deliberately set aside a little more time for very simple silent sitting meditation, as a reflection of our movement into the latter part of the year. You might like to consider this too!

Practical suggestion.

Take the tree dropping its leaves image described above as your object of meditation. Become the tree. As you drop your leaves feel your conceptual thoughts falling away also. Sit and relax deeply into silence. Once your mind is quiet you can drop the image of the tree if you like, and just focus on the inner silence.

© 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?

Check out Toby’s Meditation Classes. 

 

Categories
Awareness and insight Inner vision Meditating on the Self Meditation techniques Presence and being present Tree of Yoga

Finding and Meditating on Your True Self

Who am I? What are the characteristics of my True or “Real” Self? This is one of the fundamental questions that the great wisdom and meditation traditions of the world all ask, and when we experientially find the answer in meditation it always indicates an enlightenment experience.
One of the key understandings we need in order to search for our True Self is that it is theultimate subject, it looks out onto the world and at objects from a subjective point of view. The True Self is always the subject of your consciousness.
If we have something that we think may be our True Self, we can see if we can turn it into an object with objective qualities. If we can do so, then we can be certain that that thing is not our True or Real Self.

Lets’ take a few examples:

Is my body my True Self?
Certainly much of the time our sense of self is based around the feelings and experiences of being in a physical body. If someone says to us “You look like a bit of a fatty today!” we will most likely respond as if they have insulted our real self! But hold on, if we check it is actually quite easy to change our subjective identification with our physical body into an objective experience. For example we say “My body”. This indicates that the body is the possessed and we the self are the possessor. Since we can observe our body as an object in this way we can conclude that it is not our True or Ultimate Self.

Are my mind, feelings thoughts and opinions my True Self? 
Like the physical body we can generate extremely strong self-sense based around different feelings, thoughts and opinions that our mind generates. However, like our body it is possible to take an objective stance and watch our mind objectively, so our mind fails the subjectivity test too.

Is the body-mind combined my True Self?
The combination of body and mind is a tempting thing to place our sense of self upon, but since we have already seen that both can be objectified, it follows that the combination of both can’t be the True Self.

Is my spirit my True Self?
Many spiritual people would jump onto this one. The True Self must be the luminous, formless ground of being that we discover when we go beyond the mind into silence and the inner space that lies beyond the mind. However, although a subtle and deeper aspect of self than the body or mind, our spiritual being can be observed objectively like the everyday body and mind, thus it too fails the test of being the True Self, the only aspect of self that we cannot turn into an object.

The Witness Consciousness
What is it that remains constant whether we are observing our body, mind or spirit? Termed most often as the “pure witness consciousness”, this aspect of self has only one quality; it is the witness of whatever is arising in our mind. Beyond this witnessing there it has no other qualities! This is our True Self. It remains at all times the same, whether we are focused on our physical world, mental world or spiritual world.

The Non-Dual Self
Moreover it is the same witnessing consciousness in me that is in you, the witness within me and the witness within you are indistinguishable. Thus by connecting and meditating upon the witness self we connect to the Universal Self, that unified Self that lies within the heart of all living beings without exception and looks out through an infinite number of pairs of eyes!
By meditating upon the True Self or Witness Self we also therefore arrive at an experience of Unity with the Selves all other living beings. Multiple selves in infinite living beings become the one True Self looking out through the eyes of all. In this sense by discovering our own True Self we have also discovered the Non-Dual Self, the One-Self that lives in all living beings.

Meditating on the True Self
The above explanation of how to find and connect with the True Self as I mentioned is implicitly found in all of the great wisdom traditions of the world, but the wording borrows most explicitly from the Hindu Vedanta tradition. Essentially meditating on the True Self is very simple, but infinitely deep and can be done in two parts as follows:
1)  Observe the flow of your awareness from moment to moment, become aware of that which is watching and observing the flow of sensory, mental and spiritual objects though your awareness. Recognize this subjective, witnessing awareness as your True Self and focus upon it gently.
2) Once you have some familiarity with step 1, then become aware that the witness awareness that you are now recognizing as your True Self is the same witnessing self or True Self within everyone else. In this sense it is the Universal or Non-Dual Self that is present in yourself and every other creature that you meet. As you are placing your focus upon your witnessing awareness, integrate the recognition that it is the True Self and also the Universal Self, the Self that is one in all and all in one.

There you go, simple enough for a beginner, deep enough for the most practiced Yogi!

© 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

Categories
A Mind of Ease Meditation and Psychology Presence and being present Shadow meditation Uncategorized

Mindfully Tolerating the Unhappiness of Others

Today my daughter came home from from school quite unhappy about something that, from an adult perspective was clearly a “not important”. I could feel my irritation building, my answers to her were becoming shorter and more pointed. Something like “I’ve got enough hassle, why are you bothering me with this nonsense” was what I was saying to myself in my mind.

Then I stopped, there were now two unhappy, irritable people whereas previously there was only one. I took a deep breath and decided to make more space and kindness for her in my heart and mind. Maybe it was not important from an adult perspective, but surely her pain is worth the attention and care of her father?

Five minutes later the problem seems to have been resolved happily, where there were two unhapy people, there were now two happy ones. If we look closely tolerance and kindness can create win win situations in many areas of our life!

© 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?

Check out Toby’s Meditation Classes. 

 

Categories
A Mind of Ease Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Motivation and scope Presence and being present

How to Meditate on Gratitude

Why Should we Meditate on Gratitude? What are we Trying to Achieve?

The function  and purpose of meditating on gratitude is to train our attention in such a way that even when we are under pressure and feeling unhappy in some way we never lose sight of the things in our life that are there for us to appreciate, value and feel grateful for. Moreover, when we are not feeling unduly under pressure or unhappy, the practice of gratitude helps us to substantially enhance and stabilize our happiness and sense of wellbeing.
Meditating on gratitude is a way of leveraging more fully upon the existing good in your life. By consciously noting and appreciating that which is there to be thankful for, the amount of happiness that you get from that person, object of event increases exponentially. Whenever we take someone or something/someone for granted we minimize the amount of wellbeing that we can derive from our relationship to it or them.

Success in Meditating on Gratitude.
One of the main signs of success in our meditation on gratitude comes when we start to realize that there is something that we can be appreciating and feeling happy about in each and every moment of our life. There is in fact an abundance of things to feel positive about in everyone’s life, it is just a matter of training our attention through meditation to be aware of it!
Our biological brain is hardwired toward picking our faults, threats and dangers in our life. This was good for our survival when we were fighting of bears and tigers and other tribes, but in today’s modern world this tendency to pick out the negative serves most often to inhibit our quality of life and constrict the amount of potential happiness that we experience at any given moment. The meditation on gratitude is designed t remedy this issue.

How to Meditate on Gratitude.
The perception can be that meditation is an activity that you do sitting down in silence, and then once you get up you then start doing something else. In reality however good meditation involves training our attention through-out the day to focus on objects that make us calm, peaceful and happy.
Correspondingly this meditation in gratitude is something that you can in the midst of your daily activities in spare moments.

The Basic Practice:Finding short periods of time to come back to a mind of gratitude and appreciation.
Think about the way in which your day is structured and try and come up with 5-6 one minute slots where you can consciously come back to a mind of gratitude, and focus on it for just that very short period of time. By doing this over the period of the week you will start to create some strong practical habits in your mind that naturally incline toward valuing, appreciating and feeling grateful for the good in your life.

What Should I feel Grateful For?
There are almost innumerable things that we can choose to be grateful for, three main areas are:
– Gratitude appreciation for ourself and our own actions. Give yourself a regular pat on the back for the positive efforts you are making!
– Gratitude and appreciation for others in our life who help or assist us in some way.
– Gratitude and appreciation for the Earth, for nature and the opportunity to participate in life

Some Samples From my own journal
Of course there are many other different things that we can focus on as objects of gratitude and rejoicing. One thing that I find really powerful is actually writing down the thing that I am feeling grateful for, either actually at the time or later in the day. Writing down our object of gratitude makes it really stand out in the field of our awareness, and therefore has a powerful and accelerated effect upon our development of gratitude (and yes, writing can be very much a part of our meditation practice!).
Here are some examples from my own journal over a twenty four hour period:

9th September

3.15pm – I am waiting for my daughters’ bus to arrive, there is a pleasant breeze blowing through the bushes and flowers, the sky is cool and overcast. Next to me on the wall a little family of sparrows observes me closely whilst preening themselves. I take a moment to appreciate and soak in all of these gifts from the natural world, freely available to me as long as I care to notice.

6.15pm – Whilst waiting at the bus stop on the way to the shopping centre I took a minute to appreciate the trees around me, and the calming energy that they gave me at a time when I was feeling a little bit irritable. I also took the time to notice the sun setting behind the clouds and value how pleasant it can be to view the light of the sun when it is hidden behind light cloud.

9.30pm – Took time after my evening meditation to appreciate myself for making the time and effort to meditate. I also spent a short period of time enjoying and appreciating the evening moon and its cooling and calming light!

12.30am – Reflected on the enjoyment that both I and my daughter are getting from reading “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” together each evening.

10th September

8.30am – Took a few moments whilst watering the plants on our roof to appreciate and feel gratitude for the good energy that they give to us and the way in which they visually enhance our living space.

11.15am – Spent a few moments appreciating myself for having done the vacuuming and other cleaning tasks around the house, as well as feel grateful to the makers of the vacuum cleaner for saving me time by making such an effective machine! Finally felt grateful for our pleasant apartment.

2pm – Felt gratitude for the excellent Japanese vegetarian meal that I had just participated in, and for the efforts of the people who had created such an excellent alternative Japanese vegetarian restaurant!

4.15pm – After spending an hour taking research photos for my new project, I took a moment to feel grateful for the fact that I have such a relatively large amount of time to devote to my artistic practice in my life.

As you can see none of the above are hugely unusual or remarkable events. Enjoying the daily happiness that gratitude can give is simply a matter of training your attention to look in the right directions every day!

© 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

Categories
Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Presence and being present

Thoughts As Affirmations: Three Questions To Help Make Your Thoughts Your Allies

“It’s repetition of affirmations that leads to belief, and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen – Muhammad Ali”

The practice of affirmations – positively worded statements about your life repeated to yourself verbally or mentally or written down – has been given a lot of credence in recent years and appears in various forms of therapy. For example; cognitive psychology, hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, creative visualization and some forms of meditation.

From the perspective of transforming our experience through affirmations, one of the most important things to realize is that each thought that we think and word that we say is an affirmation, positive or negative, that re-enforces a belief that we have about our experience and reality. So, from this point of view, the most important aspect of mastering affirmations is being more aware of everything that you think and say, and being as careful as possible to energize only those thoughts and beliefs within you that are helpful and beneficial.

For example if I have injured my body in some way, and mentally I start to complain to myself about how unjust it is that I am injured and how the Universe always seems to be against me, then those thoughts are affirming a negative perspective on the situation. As a result, if I don’t check my thoughts and make appropriate adjustments, then my experience of that injury is going to be a negative one.
If on the other hand I notice that my mind has started complaining, and I ask myself “Is this way of thinking really serving me and helping me to have the best experience of the circumstances?” My answer will most probably be “no!” If I then make the effort to find a new perspective and way of thinking about my situation, then it will become an affirmation that I can use to directly change my experience. For example if I have an injury I may choose to see the situation as a chance to rest my body and allow it to recharge its energies.
Mindfulness of our thoughts is a big part of daily meditation practice. As meditators we understand that each thought is affirming something positive or negative about our experience, and our job is to focus on and energize the thoughts and beliefs that are most helpful, benevolent, and evolutionary to ourself and the other people involved in the situation.

Asking Yourself Three Questions – A Practical Exercise For Turning Your Thoughts Into Positive Affirmations

Step 1: Select a particular life situation to work on that is happening to you at this time, and where you sense that your mind is affirming negative beliefs and thoughts that are hindering your ability to deal with the situation.
If you can it is good to do this exercise in a notebook where you can actually write down your questions and answers as the written word is a more powerful affirmation than an affirmation that is simply thought or verbalized. BUT it is still worth doing as a mental exercise if you really don’t have a pen and paper available!

Step 2: Ask yourself three questions. Write down each question and your reply to it in turn:

  1. What are the negative thoughts and affirmations that I am holding with regard to this situation?
  2. What are the thoughts and affirmations that I can hold in this situation that will enable me to gain a better experience, and that will enable me to respond in the most creative and life-affirming way?
  3. What is the kindest and most compassionate (to both myself and the others involved in the situation) mental approach and perspective that I can affirm in this situation?

Step 3: Practice affirming your answers to these three questions.

  • Your answer to the first question shows you what thoughts and beliefs you want to avoid affirming and energizing.
  • Your answers to the second and third question are the thoughts, perspectives and beliefs that you need to affirm. Whenever you think about your life situation, immediately bring your mind back to your answers to these three questions and affirm accordingly!

© 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

Categories
Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Meditation and Psychology Motivation and scope Presence and being present Shadow meditation

The Role of Courage in Meditation

Two Types of Courage

In order to build a successful and authentic meditation practice you need courage, and the two types of courage that I want to highlight today are the courage to initiate, and the courage to persist. You need the courage to initiate to get through all the excuses and distractions that are in the way of you starting or restarting your meditation practice, and just ‘put your bum on the seat’ so to speak. You then need the courage of persistence, which is really a steady type of willpower, to simply keep going on a regular basis week in week out, so that your practice has a chance to bear fruit. Without these two types of courage, the inner clarity, wellbeing and centeredness that is within the grasp of anyone who persists in meditation will remain out of your reach.

Two Types of Meditation: Sitting With the Silence and Sitting With the Noise

When many people approach me for the first time to talk about meditation, the most common reason for them wanting to start meditating is that they want to find some headspace, some inner silence that they can relax with. They then tell me that they simply cannot stop their mind chattering, and so they find it “impossible” to actually start a meditation practice. What we need to realize (and this is really important) is that before we can enjoy “sitting with silence” we first need to enjoy the process of “sitting with the noise”, that noise being the inner noise of our mind incessantly chattering with itself!

The way to learn how to sit in silence is first to get comfortable sitting with the noise of your mind. Over time and out of your daily or regular practice of sitting with the noise of your mind you will gradually start to notice an inner silence emerging, at first only occasionally in brief flashes, but the gradually emerging more and more fully as time goes by.

The Story of Tom

Back in the 90’s, when I was a Buddhist monk teaching meditation in the north of England I had a man in his 70’s come to my meditation class called Tom. Tom was an ex coal miner. He was in constant discomfort due to rheumatism, and his wife was a mental and physical invalid (Parkinson’s disease I think) to whom Tom was the sole care giver. He arrived at my class for the first time in deep despair regarding the loss of his wife, of his own physical fitness and of many of the other good things in his life that had previously made it enjoyable. He made a courageous choice to sit down for 20minutes at the beginning of each day to meditate, a choice to which he stuck to. He used to describe his meditation to me, saying that usually for the first 5-10 minutes all of the anger, despair and sadness would well up within him about his life and about how unfair it all was. Then, at some point in the middle of his meditation, patches of silence would start to appear, and the noise in his mind would quieten. Usually, for the last few minutes of his meditation he said, he would find a state of deep peace, and those few minutes at the end of his meditation were enough to get him through the rest of the day.

Tom’s story is a simple story of courage and persistence in meditation. His description of his own meditation experience shows the truth of how very often before we experience peace in meditation we first have to sit with the “storm” so to speak. The way to meditate in silence is first to get comfortable with sitting with the noise!

Practical Work: Get Comfortable Sitting With The Noise

Pick an amount of time that you can commit to every day, from 3-20minutes. Resolve each day during that time to generate courage and self-compassion, and then simply “sit, breathe and be” with the noise inside your mind. Forget about immediately making your mind silent, just focus on sitting breathing and being with what is there, pleasant or unpleasant, happy or sad.

If you do this consistently each day the inner silence will emerge in its own time. If you make this a lifetime practice the inner silence will grow organically within your life a tree. A tree grows too slowly to spot the changes from day to day, but from month to month, year to year it grows from a fragile seedling to a mighty tree.

Long Term Results

The final thing that I want to mention about meditating on inner noise and inner silence is that eventually, after you have been meditating for quite some time you will discover that you are equally happy to experience inner noise or inner silence, you realize that they are really just two sides of the same coin and not so different in reality.

This can be difficult to grasp conceptually without experience, but an analogy may help: In the same way that a bright, sunny day and a thunderstorm are both “weather”, so a loud noisy mind and a silent one are just “mind”. If you are sitting in a strong house looking out of your window, a storm and a sunny day can both be interesting and enjoyable to experience. Similarly once we have grounded our awareness in the centre of our being through meditation, both noise and silence are equally enjoyable 😉

© 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

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Presence and being present Shadow meditation Uncategorized

The Self-Healing and Self Evolving Power of the Mind and Six Tips For Releasing the Shadow Self

Whenever we engage in meditation or any other activity that promotes greater self awareness, we automatically begin to activate two innate capacities within our mind: Its capacity for self-healing and its capacity for self-evolving.

The minds capacity for self-healing is basically means that, whenever we move into a meditative state, the process of being aware of our mind, whether it I in a state of bliss or pain (or somewhere in between) has a beneficial healing effect upon our mind. Awareness heals.

The minds capacity for self-evolving means that the process of sitting and being alert and aware in meditation brings to the surface of our mind all the latent higher qualities and talents that we might not be aware of or, may even be afraid of.

Meditation makes you more aware of your creative gifts and talents and will over time create an energy in you that actually DEMANDS that you start expressing these talents in your life.

From this we can see that, as well as bringing you greater peace of mind, meditation can also be quite challenging in the sense that:

  • You become more aware of all that is damaged and that needs healing within you
  • You start having a lot of creative urges that start to PULL you toward higher and greater achievement in your life.

If you are not prepared for these side effects they can actually be a bit shocking, and you might even feel that you may be doing something wrong. Actually as often as not it is just your minds capacity for auto-healing and auto-evolving kicking in!

So, although the minds capacity for self-healing and self-evolving  are good things they also challenge us, bringing us face to face with the two aspects of our shadow self:

  • The DARK part of our shadow self; the damaged part of self which we have disowned and rejected, and
  • The LIGHT part of our shadow self; that latent greatness and talent within us that is as yet unknown and unexpressed.

With this in mind here are six tips for starting to get friendly with your shadow self. They are the basic elements of what I call a “Six point shadow reclamation process” that I use with coaching clients, and teach in Integral meditation Asia classes and workshops.

Step 1:

See it – Pay close attention to both strong positive and negative emotions that get triggered in you by people, events, places  or things. Be alert to the meaning that there is in the fact that your mind has been triggered in this way.

Step 2:

Feel it – Rather than immediately repressing or pushing away the strong emotions, thoughts or images that get triggered in your mind, get used to feeling into them, holding them within your conscious awareness

Step 3:

Communicate with it – Once you have some experience of steps 1&2, you can then try inwardly communicating with the person or thing that is triggering the shadow emotion. For example if a person fills you with revulsion, try visualizing them in front of you and asking “what is it about you that is creating such strong feelings of dislike?” – see what answer comes back. (Please note you are not actually communicating with the physical person, but trying to connect to that part of yourself that has been triggered!)

Step 4:

BE it – Practice mentally imagining that you have become the person that you fear or admire. Become that angry person that you run away from all the time, imagine yourself AS that great public speaker that fills you with so much admiration.

Step 5:

Own it – Practice taking responsibility for your shadow self and emotions, the light and the dark:

-“Yes I really am angry and hurt deep down, it is not always the other person that is angry”

– “It’s my job to make the most of this talent, no one else is going to do it for me!”

Step 6:

Transcend and transform it – This is the final step, and needs to be done at the END of the other 5 steps. A BIG mistake people make is to try and transcend their shadow self too soon, before they have properly seen it, felt it, communicated with it, been it and owned it.

To transcend and transform the shadow self simply means to recognize it is NOT your true or ultimate self, but nevertheless it has a potential place and function within your everyday personality of ego self. For example:

  • Your previous fear of anger and projection of it onto others can be transformed into the ability to be powerful and polite with difficult people
  • Your previous admiration of another person’s public speaking skills is transformed into your ownership of that talent within yourself, and the development of your own talent as a passionate and persuasive speaker.

If you simply think about the above six points, and start to try them out in your daily life, I think you will find that you can start to get a feel for this process.

Here’s to the maximization of our minds capacity for self-healing and self-evolving!

© 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

Categories
Awareness and insight Enlightened love and loving Inner vision Integral Awareness Presence and being present

Re-Awakening To Your Bliss

When was the last time you enjoyed bliss? By bliss I mean not just an isolated experience of pleasure in either your physical, mental or spiritual bodies, but an experience of pleasure that touched them all three levels of your being  and brought them naturally back into alignment and harmony with each other?

Perhaps when you read the paragraph above the experience of bliss seems a little bit abstract, something difficult to attain, something that happens to us only occasionally and even then caused by something outside of ourselves, something that “happens” to us, rather than something we ourselves create?.

In my opinion and experience the experience of bliss is a lot simpler and more accessible than that. As  human beings and as living creatures, we are all NATURALLY full of blissful energy. Energy is what we are, and in its natural state, our sensory, mental and spiritual energy is deeply blissful and pleasant.

So, if this is the case, why does experiencing bliss seem like such a difficult experience for us? Well, put very simply, most of us live too much of our life “in our head” or in an abstract mental state divorced from the depth and pleasure of our own natural energy. Get out of your head and step back into your moment to moment direct experience of life and bliss starts to return.

Two ways to begin re-connecting to your bliss:

1) Remembering and experience of bliss.

You can try this one right now. Recall a past experience of genuine bliss. Spend a minute or so remembering it and re-creating it in your mind, until you can feel a bit of that blissful energy in your body and soul. Now let go of the memory, and simply focus of the sensation of bliss in your body-mind. There it is, still there even though you have let go of the memory. This exercise helps show you that bliss is a state of being that is present within you right now, it is not something that you have to go out and purchase, or fight hard to obtain.

2) Taking moments in your day to touch bliss

Try and do five short activities (of one minute maximum) every day that are specifically focused on generating bliss. For example I can look up from my keyboard now and just observe the sky and the cloud formations, as I really drink in the richness of that visual experience, I can feel a natural gentle bliss beginning to flow through my being, it is not just an intellectual appreciation, it is a feeling that I can feel relaxing me and expanding into my physical, mental and spiritual being. So there you go, one minute of bliss!

Later I might give my partner or child a hug, and really focus on the experience of bliss that rises from the physical, mental and spiritual touching of two human beings. Again, another minute of natural, easy bliss.

If you like you can make a list of things that make you feel blissful and then just make sure you touch one or other of these activities a few times each day.

Life should be blissful. The interesting thing about true bliss (not to be confused with craving and attachment) is that it makes us less selfish, more giving, more sane and more happy. As it turns out the most important thing to do if you want to re-awaken your bliss is to REMEMBER it, as it is always there!

 

A final warning: Most people these days do seem to have forgotten their bliss, and are tied up in complicated mental knots. Resolve firmly not to be like them;-)

Thanks for reading, and here is to a blissful week ahead!

Toby

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

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

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Presence and being present

Article: Meditating on Your Body as a Landscape, and the Beauty of Ageing

Hi Everyone,

When we see natural objects in a landscape, such as trees, rocks, cliffs, mountains, lakes and so forth, very often we judge them to be beautiful. For example when we see the way in which a trees branches and bark has twisted and morphed over time we think of this as a tree with character, a tree with a deep sense of spirit. Likewise an old but well maintained house is very easy to love and appreciate.
So, if we think of old objects and aspects of landscape as having character and beauty as they age, what about our own bodies and their signs of ageing? To appreciate the beauty of our own ageing process requires the ability to, at least temporarily, step outside of the intense way in which we have been culturally programmed to value youthful looks only, and instead look at the way in which time changes our features as being something natural, something to be embraced, and finally as something that in many ways actually enhances the character and DEEP beauty of our looks.

To start to work experientially with this idea, you might like to try the following simple meditation:
– Sit or stand in front of a mirror. Close your eyes and relax for a few breaths, as you do so think to yourself that, when you open your eyes you are going to see your face (and your body if you can see it) as a landscape.
– When you open your eyes, try for a while simply to stare at your face without thinking or analysing too much, just try and see and accept it as it is. It can be a good idea to smile gently in acceptance of yourself and what you see.
– Then, thinking of your face as a landscape, reflect on the story behind the  lines that you can see on your face (if you are still young, imagine the lines that will be there!), how each crease and bump has arisen from countless times when you have smiled or laughed, countless times when you may have experienced pain or even cried. Think of the lines on your face as beautiful in the sense that they describe the depth and character that you have created within yourself in the years that you have lived in your body. Think of the lines as describing the knowledge and wisdom that you have within your heart. Reflect that, as time goes by and these lines deepen on your face, as long as you are trying to live your best life, the deepening lines will represent the flowering of a deeper human beauty within you.
Continue this mindful exploration for as long as you like, finish when you are ready.

So, of course we don’t want to grow physically “old before our time” so to speak and I really think that daily meditation and Qi gong are one of the very best methods for staying physically and mentally young for as long as possible (Note, also free, all they require is a little gentle discipline!). However, middle and old age come to us all, and we are at a tremendous advantage in terms of personal happiness if we can embrace them openly, value them, and consciously override the fear and resistance that mass consciousness encourages us to develop toward ageing process.

Thanks for reading,

Yours in the spirit of the journey,

Toby

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

Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Presence and being present

Meditation for Tapping Into The Natural Creativity of Your Mind

Hi Everyone,

Do you consider yourself to be naturally creative? The following meditation is a simple technique for tapping into awareness of the natural creative quality of the space within our mind, and learning to direct and harness it in a positive way in our life.

Sit down and take a few deep breaths, relax your body-mind as you breathe out, feeling tension leave you on your outward breath.

Now start to become aware of the space within your mind, over a period of time, try and make the inner space within your mind as big as possible, imagine it becoming as big as the sky, or as big as the whole Universe.

Now look at this space in your mind. Initially it seems lifeless, just an empty open space, quite pleasant and peaceful, but not much else. However, if you start to look a little more closely at this space, it is this inner space itself from which all the thoughts, images and feelings within your mind are emerging. If you watch closely in this way you start to see that the “empty” space of your mind is actually a continuously creative source of energy, thinking, images and feeling within you.

Once you have observed this, focus once more upon the inner space within your mind, this time recognizing that this space is a creative, living source of energy, ideas and life force for you. How does it feel to experience directly your own natural inner creative potential? Our creative power can seem like such an elusive beast, yet actually here It is, under our nose all the time within the inner space or formless nature of our consciousness!

Most of the time we don’t use the creative energy of our inner space very well, because as soon as it arises we unconsciously direct it towards old, familiar patterns of thinking and feeling, so the thoughts in our mind don’t feel very creative or inspired at all. Indeed it can feel like our thinking and feeling energy are a burden, a stuck record in our mind that always remains the same whatever we try and do to change it.

Meditating on developing a more lucid and heightened awareness of the creative nature of the space within our mind encourages us to start making use of it in a more flexible, useful fashion, allowing us to respond to the challenges of our life in a more spontaneous and liberated manner. If we do not take responsibility for making good use of the creative energy within our mind, then we can find ourselves oppressed by this creative energy, as again and again it flows into thought patterns that are unhealthy and create feelings of stress, anxiety, fear and unhappiness.

Here’s to enjoying the creative inner space within all of our minds!

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Toby

PS: This weeks meditation class topic:

You are multi-talented! Meditating on multiple-intelligences as a way of finding inner wholeness

PPS: Related articles that might be of interest to you:

Nurturing your natural intelligence and natural dignity

Finding your deep creativity (in three easy steps)