Category: Uncategorized

Categories
Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Presence and being present Uncategorized

Dualistic Appearance – The Dance of Reality & Illusion

Dear Integral Meditators,

When you look at something, what is it that you really see? This weeks article looks at the way in which our mind projects itself onto our reality, moulding it in its own image. I then offer practical method for starting to gain awareness and benevolent control of this process.

In the spirit of the journey,

Toby

Dualistic Appearance – The Dance of Reality & Illusion

Dualistic Appearance is a meditation term originally coined by the Buddha. It means the appearance of an object together with our minds projected or imagined image of what we think is appearing. For example let’s say my partner and I had an argument last night. She comes into the kitchen in the morning and two things will appear to me:

  • The literal body and person appearing to me right there, in the present moment
  • Almost instantly after I see her my mind with project an imagined image of what it thinks it sees upon her, based upon our history, last night’s argument and so on.

So, in fact there are two thing s appearing when I see my partner, one ‘real’; and one a mental projection.
One of the main functions of meditation and mindfulness is to help us to separate our actual experience of each moment from our mental projections, and by doing so improve our ability to feel deeply at home and in touch with each moment of our reality.

The problem of dualistic appearance is that if we have no sense that our mind is projecting this second ‘imagined’ image upon our reality, then it is very difficult to avoid literally living in an illusion. It is like being in a hall of mirrors; we cannot tell what part of our experience is real and which parts merely mental projections. We live out of touch with our reality in a ‘world of our own’ which is often filled with a lot of mental and emotional pain.

The potential beauty of dualistic appearance is that it enables us to project and imagine ideas onto our reality that can change it in radical and positive ways. We can imagine a picture on a blank canvas and then do it. We can find ourself in a difficult work environment and imagine ways in which we can change it for the better. We can bring new realities into existence through the power that our mind has to project images and ideas.

So then, as you start to reflect upon this, you might like to consider how your own experience of dualistic appearance has been working today. Has your minds ability to project itself onto what it experiences been working for you or against you?

Meditation on dualistic appearance – Three basic movements

1. Observing the play of reality and projection – the first stage in meditating on non duality is to observe the process of dualistic appearance and how it happens in your own experience. Let’s say I take the view from my window as I write this. I can see the view itself as it is, and then I can start to see how my mind projects itself upon that view. If I am having a bad day my mind might project ‘bleak meaningless urban landscape’ upon it, and feel depressed. On another day where I am feeling great I can look out the window and project ‘city filled with wonder and beauty!’ Same view, different projection.
2. Dropping the projection & connecting to reality as it is – Once we have observed this play of dualistic appearance, we can then work to ‘drop’ the mental projection and just see what we observe ‘as it is’ without projecting. To go back to the example of me looking out of the window at the view, I simply try and see the cityscape without projecting good or bad, pleasure or pain, beautiful or ugly, or any other form of mental image. I simply sit and see what I see without projecting, resting in that space of alert awareness.
3. Consciously working with dualistic appearance – Once we have developed a basic capacity to sit and observe our experience of each moment without projecting, we can then start to make conscious choices about our projections, and by doing so learn to further take benevolent control of our experience of reality. For example if I notice I am looking out of my window and unconsciously projecting ‘bleak urban landscape’ because I am feeling down, I can recognize that and refrain from re-enforcing or strengthening that projection. Instead I can consciously choose to project a more useful and positive idea of what I am seeing.

This week if you like, take these three stages of working with dualistic appearance and start to work with them in chosen areas of your life, observing how your perception of what is really going on changes when you do so

© 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 events at Integral Meditation Asia in October

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

Saturday 3rd October, 2.30-5.30pm – Going From Over-whelmed to Over-well: Meditation for Quietening the Mind – a three hour workshop

Wednesday  14th October 2015, 7.30-9pm – Evening Event: Integral Mindfulness –Co-creating Your Professional Success and Personal Wellbeing

Saturday 17th October, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention 3 Hour workshop

Sunday October  30th, 9.30am-12.30pm – Engaged Mindfulness: Take Control of Your Life Direction and Wellbeing Through Awareness, Curiosity, Courage and Care – A Three Hour Workshop

Integral Meditation Asia

 

Categories
Awareness and insight Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Motivation and scope Uncategorized

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

Integral Meditation Asia

Categories
Integral Awareness Meditation and Psychology Mindfulness Motivation and scope Uncategorized

What is Mindfulness? (Hint – you are doing it already!)

Dear Integral Meditators,

If someone asked you ‘what is mindfulness’, how would you reply? The article below offers one working definition of mindfulness and how we can start practically applying it to our daily life.

In the spirit of the art of mindfulness,

Toby

What is Mindfulness? (Hint – you are doing it already!)

A definition of mindfulness
I had a conversation the other day with a lady who felt she did not know what mindfulness is. I responded to her that she was already doing it. She asked my why? I told her “When I was a monk the first definition of mindfulness that I learned was that it is an ‘all accompanying mental factor, who’s function is to remember its object’.”
That sounds like a bit a mouthful right? Actually it is quite simple; when we are doing something, mindfulness is that part of our mind that remembers and recalls what we are doing without forgetting it. For example:

  • If I am cooking an omelette, without mindfulness to help me remember what I am doing, after I have cracked and whisked the eggs I will forget my task, and wonder off to do something else, leaving no omelette!
  • If I am in the middle of a conversation, mindfulness helps me hold and remember what we are talking about. Without mindfulness I would forget mid conversation, which would be both embarrassing and impractical.

So from this we can see that we all have some basic mindfulness, indeed without it we would not be able to function at all.

The Art of Mindfulness
Someone who is a mindfulness practitioner then is someone who is interested in increasing both their quality of life and their personal effectiveness by developing and refining their mindfulness in different areas for example:

  • By being mindful of the good things that happen to me in my life I can enjoy and appreciate them more
  • By being mindful of difficult emotions I can learn to manage them better
  • By communicating mindfully I can help people understand what I want of them more clearly
  • By being mindful of my sport I can learn better how to improve

Mindfulness and meditation
Meditation is ‘a mind that focuses on a positive object – an object that when we focus upon it causes us to become happy, balanced, peaceful or otherwise positively oriented’.
In meditation we use mindfulness to focus; if we keep forgetting what we are doing then our meditation won’t be very effective because we will keep dropping or losing our object!
Mindfulness enables us to place our attention on our meditation and hold it there without forgetting.

The function of mindfulness – Practical learning from life
What is it you want to learn about in your life right now? Once you have selected a subject, formulate a ‘mindful question’ that summarizes your intention. For example:

  • How can I bring more meaning to my work life?
  • What really makes me happy?
  • What would it mean to bring my authentic self into social situations and conversations?

You can see here the list of possible subjects is endless, you just select a topic that is important and meaningful to you.
You then practice holding that question in your daily life, thinking about it, and acting in ways that express the answers that you come up with. If you like you can even sit down for a period of time and practice holding that question in your mind, breathing with it and using it as an object of meditation.
If you do this for a week, you will find that your mindfulness practice using this topic enables you to learn a tremendous amount about yourself and the area you are investigating. And there you have a mindfulness practice all of your own.

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *
Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology

Categories
Uncategorized

Meditation and Mindfulness Classes & Workshops at IMA in August 2015

Dear Integral Meditators,

I hope that your meditation & mindfulness practice has been going well over the last month, remember, even five minutes a day has the power to make a difference; short & regular will definitely yeild positive results!

I’m excited about the line up of workshops for August, the full line up you can see below. We have two brand new, never done before meditation workshops; Meditation for Quetening the Mind on 15th, and Mindful Dreaming on the 29th. Add to this some very cool themes for the Integral Meditation evening classes , there is plenty for everyone this month!

In the spirit of the mindful journey,

Toby

********

Jungle Bridge, Sapa, VietnamAUGUST AT INTEGRAL MEDITATION ASIA

Saturday 15th August, 9.30am-12.30pm – Going From Over-whelmed to Over-well: Meditation for Quietening the Mind – a three hour workshop

Saturday 15th August, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Self Confidence – Developing your self-confidence, self-belief & self-trust through mindfulness & meditation

August 19th, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Class – Meditating on with the Five Levels of Positive Intention

August 26th, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Class – Working with the Three Levels of Non-Judgement

Saturday 29th August, 9.30am-12.30pm – Meditation and Mindfulness for Self-Healing and Creating High Levels of Energy

Saturday 29th August, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Dreaming – Meditation Practices for Integrating Conscious Dreaming into Your Daily Life

 

Categories
creative imagery Greenworld Meditation Inner vision Integral Meditation Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Meditation and Art meditation and creativity Meditation techniques Presence and being present Primal Spirituality Uncategorized

Why Meditate on & with Animals?

“When meditations with animals, people often remark that their sense of time seems to take on a completely different quality”

Why meditate on & with animals?

I was asked the other day why I continue to guide workshops and classes on meditating with animals, given that to some of my client group it may seem a bit ‘strange’. Here are a few reasons to consider why meditating with animals is of great value, with a short practice at the end to try it out…

We’ve been doing it a long time

Prior to the transcendent spiritual traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism in the ‘east’ and Christianity/Islam in the ‘west’, human beings practiced an earth based spirituality where communion, learning and interaction with animals in the inner and outer worlds was a main part of our path to awakening and enlightenment. Our ability to do this type of meditation is long forgotten, but it is in our ‘dna’ so to speak, so most people find they can do it and have significant experiences without too much difficulty.

It re-connects us to parts of ourselves we have lost touch with

Meditating with animals connects us with our animal and instinctive nature in a benevolent way. It encourages us to use our imagination and capacity for inner visioning, and it encourages us to learn in a right brain creative, intuitive and visual way, very different from the way most of us use our minds and brains during the day.

It connects us to environmental awareness

Living in urbanized environment as many of us do it is very easy for us to lose touch with environmental awareness and a love for nature. Meditating with animals helps us recover our relationship to the natural world in an experiential way without literally having to travel outwardly to do so.

It can lead us into deep meditative states

When I lead meditation workshops and classes on meditating with animals, one thing that is always remarkable is the deep states of meditation that people go into during the sessions. People often remark that their sense of time seems to take on a completely different quality. Meditating with animals, landscape and nature can take us into these deep states very quickly and powerfully.

It fun!

Imagining playing and adventuring with animals is the sort of thing children do all the time. Meditating as an adult with animals can have an appropriately rejuvenating effect on our playful and spontaneous side! Meditating with animals helps us to get out of our mind and into a renewed contact with being alive.

How to meditate with animals

Here is a very short but in some ways quite complete methodology for the basics of meditating with animals:
1. Sit down, calm your mind for a short time and set your intention to connect in the spirit of love to animals in the inner world with whom you have a meaningful connection
2. With this intention, imagine yourself in a landscape within nature that you know and love, build it strongly in your inner vision.
3. After a while an animal will come to meet you in this environment. Connect to this animal in whatever way feels appropriate; s/he may want to take you on a journey in the landscape, engage in a communication of some sort, or simply hang out and enjoy the peace and calm with you.
4. When you are ready return back to your body and your outer awareness, seeing the inner environment where you have been fading away.

Related article: Wolf Therapy

© 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 August

Saturday 15th August, 9.30am-12.30pm – Going From Over-whelmed to Over-well: Meditation for Quietening the Mind – a three hour workshop

Saturday 15th August, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Self Confidence – Developing your self-confidence, self-belief & self-trust through mindfulness & meditation

August 19th, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Class – Working with our imagination, & the doorway between our inner and outer worlds

August 26th, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Class – Working with subtlety, gracefulness and the inner feminine
Saturday 29th August, 9.30am-12.30pm – Meditation and Mindfulness for Self-Healing and Creating High Levels of Energy

Saturday 29th August, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindful Dreaming – Meditation Practices for Integrating Conscious Dreaming into Your Daily Life

Integral Meditation Asia

Categories
Uncategorized

Calm Excitement

Dear Integral Meditators,

What if you were able to enter into a state of mind where your sense of inner calm enhanced your experience of excitement in life, and your excitement was madfe more enjoyable by combining it with calm? The article below explains how!

Yours in the spirit of calm excitment,

Toby

Calm Excitement

One of the principles of integral meditation and mindfulness  is the bringing together of different, contrasting qualities within ourself into complementary wholes. In this article we will have a look at calmness and excitement.

For many people the experience of being calm or excited is very much an either/or proposition; either I feel excited in a non-calm, non-reflective way or they I feel calm in an inactive way.
What we are going to try and do in the exercise I outline below is to combining our capacity for ease, calm & relaxation with our experience of aliveness, excitement & engagement in life. We will do it in four steps:

1. Mindfully generating calm
Recall a time or a place where you have felt calm, at ease and relaxed. It might be a landscape that when you recall it helps you to connect to that feeling, or a time in your life when you really felt connected to the experience of calm. As you connect to that experience of calm, bring the energy of it into your heart and your body as well as your mind, so that as you breathe all three of these dimensions of your being feel connected to the calm.

2. Mindfully connecting to excitement                                                                               
Now recall a time when you were enjoyably excited or exhilarated. This could be intellectually, emotionally, sexually, spiritually, physically or a combination of these. Connect to the memory, person  or thing, allowing yourself to feel the excitement consciously in your body, mind and heart, noting the different ways in which these different parts of you experience the excitement.

3. Consciously combining the two
Having worked with excitement and calm separately, now work to mindfully combine the two; imagine being excited in a way where a part of you is still connected to a dimension of calm. Then emphasize the experience of being calm whilst at the same time inviting excitement, aliveness and engagement into that space. Become familiar with what it feels like to hold calm and excitement together in your body, mind and heart in a way where they are mutually enhancing and supporting each other rather than contradicting or fighting against  each other.

4. Taking it into your daily life
With the experience of the above three stages you can then go about practicing bringing calm excitement into your daily activities, for example:

  • When you are in an emotionally charged conversation
  • When you are excited and want to prolong the experience in an enjoyable and sustainable way
  • When you feel your excitement is controlling you, you can emphasize calm to bring yourself back into benevolent control of what you are experiencing
  • When you feel your calm is moving toward inertia or boredom you can use your excitement to revitalize your experience

The overall goal of this exercise is to mindfully learn to derive more meaningful fun from our life and the experiences that we come across using this conscious combination of calm and excitment. What situation can you bring your own practice of calm excitement to today?

© 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 Meditation Technology Track: Turning In ~ Ambient Meditations

…relax into deep states of relaxation, de-stressing to the slow drumbeats and nature sounds embedded with binaural frequencies…from Deep Dub composer, Nadja Lind.
On special launch price offer up until 7th July click link to listen to the free demo track and find out more!: goo.gl/jSZTCd

Categories
Awareness and insight creative imagery Greenworld Meditation Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Meditation and Art Presence and being present Primal Spirituality Shadow meditation Uncategorized

Three Dimensions of Mindful Daydreaming

Dear Integral Meditators,

Often daydreaming is set up against the idea of being mindful; to be daydreaming is not to be ‘present’ like we should be when we are mindful, right? But what if we were to make our daydreams our object of mindfulness? What if we were to really pay attention to them? The article below explores this area.

Related workshop to this subject: Saturday 16th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditations for Activating, Healing and Awakening our Ancestral Karma

This Friday evening is the first of two Integral Meditation classes this month, the subject is ‘Stillness, Energy, Positivity and Relaxation -A grounding in the basics of Integral Meditation’. 

Yours in the spirit of conscious daydreams,

Toby

Three Dimensions of Mindful Daydreaming

Daydreaming is often used in a derogatory way, or to indicate that you were not paying attention to something that you should. It has not always been that way. Often daydreaming is set up against the idea of being mindful; to be daydreaming is not to be ‘present’ like what we should be when we are mindful, right? But what if we were to make our daydreams our object of mindfulness? What if we were to really pay attention to them? Here are three areas of daydreaming and three potential benefits of paying attention to them:

Daydreams as a way of processing Your Life
If we pay attention to our daydreams we will see (like night dreams) that dreaming is a method that our consciousness has of trying to resolve the issues, challenges and problems that we are facing in our actual daily life. If I daydream about people verbally threatening me, and I then responding violently this indicates that I may be feeling threatened and insecure or wounded in some way. If I daydream of communicating lovingly or expressively to someone, this may indicate that I am going through a phase where a certain type of positive emotion is awakening in me and my relationships. Our daydreams can give us valuable feedback on how our conscious and unconscious minds are coping with our life. If we pay attention to our daydreams, we may gain valuable insight as to what we can do to help facilitate this daily processing.

Receiving Creative Inputs
Our own unconscious mind is connected to the collective unconscious. Our higher intuitive mind is connected to what you might call a ‘collective super-conscious mind’. There is a huge (infinite?) amount of creative material contained within the collective unconscious and super-conscious minds that we often access unconsciously and without full recognition. Often contact with the collective or group dimensions of mind is communicated to us through the images, intuitions, images and fantasies that we find in our daydreams. By paying attention to our daydreams we can become a lot more consciously receptive to these creative inputs. For example many of the articles that I write upon this blog come into my head largely fully formed as ‘daydreams’ before, during or after my formal meditations.

Being Somewhere Else
When we dream during sleep we often go to inner worlds that appear to be fully formed, have their own stories and rules of interaction. In our daydreams we also find ourselves sometimes transported to these worlds. We can start to mindfully observe the relationship and interaction between the landscapes that we encounter in our outer world, and the inner landscapes of our mind and start to see how they relate to each other. For example I recently read Neil Gaiman’s novel ‘The Ocean at the Bottom of the Lane’ which is full of very vivid dream-like landscapes. In the days subsequent I have been enjoying the observing the very real effect that these ‘fictional’ landscapes and energies have been continuing to have on my perception of my outer reality and perception.

Mindful daydreaming is not difficult to start doing!
All you need to do is sit comfortably and allow your mind to roam freely and without restriction, with just a part of your attention taking a step back and consciously noting what comes up as you daydream. You can even start a daydream journal in the same way you might keep a night dream journal.
Daydreaming shouldn’t be a bad word, and awareness of it can form an important and endlessly creative aspect of your daily mindfulness practice.

Related articles:
Meditating on the Power of Your Creative Imagination
Meditating with the Mirror Self
Dreams, Meditation and Working with the Bright Side of Your Shadow

© 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 May:

Friday 8th May, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre – Stillness, Energy, Positivity and Relaxation -A grounding in the basics of Integral Meditation

Saturday 16th May, 9.30am-12.30pm – Growing Your Mindful Freedom – The Essential Meditation of the Buddha: A Three Hour Meditation Workshop

Saturday 16th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Meditations for Activating, Healing and Awakening our Ancestral Karma

Wednesday 20th, 7.30-9.30pm –  An Evening of Mindful Relationships: Improving Your Relationships and Social Skills Through Mindfulness – A two hour workshop

Friday 29th May 7.30-9.30pm –  Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre – Travelling deeper into the present moment through integral meditation

Saturday 30th May, 2.30-5.30pm – Enlightened Flow: Finding the Ultimate Relaxation and Release from Stress

Integral Meditation Asia

Online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training *
Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology
Categories
Life-fullness Meditation and Psychology Mindful Confidence Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness Uncategorized

Your Long Term Self-Confidence

You can build your confidence in the short term by surrounding yourself with the familiar and the known; by surrounding yourself with friends who are like you and affirm your world view; by doing something you are already good at; by staying with the job or activity that you know well; by acting in ways that you know will earn the praise of others. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as an approach, but it becomes limiting and debilitating if it is the only approach that we have to building our self-confidence, because it also inherently limits our growth and what we are capable of…

…Long term self-confidence building involves a different approach. It involves deliberately looking for the areas and activities of your life where you are uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It means consciously engaging in those spaces where you do not feel a sense of easy or established confidence.

In doing this the short term experience is an absence of assured confidence; a sense of being ‘lost’ or out of your comfort zone; a sense of being separate from familiar markers in our surrounding reality. By repeatedly taking yourself into unfamiliar territory and becoming competent in that space you establish a much greater and deeply rooted self-confidence than you could ever develop simply by surrounding yourself with the familiar and the known, and by continuing to engage only in the things that you are good at.

A couple of examples:
In my own experience establishing my own business after having been a monk and an artist for many years was a source of feeling lost, inconvenienced and way out of my comfort zone for many years in many different ways. However, by persisting in my pursuit and understanding of business (as it serves my purposes as a meditation and mindfulness teacher) has over the years become a major source of my own deeper self-confidence as I have moved repeatedly from incompetence to competence in the domain of business.
Similarly, after leaving my life as a monk where I had been surrounded by a lot of ‘spiritual’ people who shared at least in part my worldview, and going back onto the ‘secular’ world where I had to build relationships and ways of communicating with diverse groups of people who often did not share my world view was initially uncomfortable and inconvenient. However in the long term it because a source of confidence as it built within me a sense of being able to go into any situation and adapt to the ‘cultural language’ that was being spoken there.

The relationship between happiness and confidence
Building your short term happiness leads to the experience of being temporarily happy in environments where you are familiar. Mindfully building your long term confidence leads to a sense that you can be happy anywhere, in almost any circumstances because you have built a deep confidence in your own adaptability and a trust in your capacity to engage successfully with whatever comes up.

Its ‘both/and’ not ‘either/or’!
As with other aspects of integral mindfulness and meditation we are aiming for a win-win relationship in the development of our confidence. We can regularly connect to short term sources of self-confidence in order to re-assure and orientate ourselves, combining this with regularly and mindfully pushing ourselves to engage in areas of our life that make us uncomfortable, and seek to build our long term confidence by getting confident in these areas.

It begins today if you want it to
What is it that you can start doing today in order to build your deeper, long term self-confidence?

© 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:

This Tuesday 21st April! 7.30-9.30pm –  An Evening of Mindful Self-Confidence – Developing your self-confidence, self-belief & self-trust through mindfulness & meditation

Friday 8th & 29th May, 7.30-9pm – Integral Meditation Session @ the Reiki Centre

Full schedule of May classes to be posted shortly…

Integral Meditation Asia

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Acceptance: Expanding Outward

Dear Integral Meditators,

Meditation can be an act of turning inward, but it can also be a way of turning outward, a way of expanding graciously into our world, and by doing so transforming our experience of that world. The article below explores this theme.

Toby

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia :

Tuesday 10th February, 7.30-9.30pm – An Evening of Mindful Resilience – Sustaining effectiveness, happiness and clarity under pressure through meditation and mindfulness

Saturday 14th February, 2.30-5.30pm – Mindfulness and Meditation For Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention 

Acceptance: Expanding Outward

Meditation means turning inward, away from the busyness of the world, right?
Often meditation is thought of and practiced as a way of turning inward, away from the busyness of the world and the harshness of our outer reality in order to find a peaceful inner space where we can go in order to gather ourselves, to focus, to relax and heal.
This is all well and good, but one thing that we may find over time (if this is the only approach that we have to meditation) is that there emerges a division between our inner, quiet meditative world and our harsh, challenging outer world.
Unless we are careful our meditation can become a contraction away from the challenges of our daily reality, a way of avoiding the things that we find difficult to accept in our lives.

Accepting the world to find a different form of peace
One way in which we can turn this around is by practising meditation as an opening to our daily reality; an acceptance of what is there, whether it be comfortable or uncomfortable, pleasurable or painful, easy or difficult.
To start practising this form of meditation now, sit quietly as you would do in an ordinary meditation, and focus on your heart space. Rather than going inward into your heart space, open it outward to an awareness, acceptance and embracing of the reality that you are experiencing right now; your physical surroundings, the emotions of all kinds flowing through you, the happiness and the conflicts in your relationships, the state of the world. Open to everything that comes into your awareness, turn away nothing. Note and gently resist any impulses that you have to turn away from what comes into your awareness as you are doing this.

Embracing the reality of form
The technique that I am describing above, movement outward accepting all that we find can be quite uncomfortable at first. It brings us into a confrontation with all of the things that we fear or are worn down by in our life. However, if we continue opening to what we find we start to find a new form of peace and inner strength. It is a form of peace that does not rely upon turning inward or away from the world, but accepting and embracing everything that we find in our life and experience, all the mess and the untidiness, the highs and the lows, the romance and the tragedy.

If you like, over the next few days or weeks you can try this. When you sit down to meditate, rather than going within, practice accepting and opening to everything that is in your life right now; make your heart so big that nothing is turned away or left out. Don’t turn away.

Related article: What is it that is keeping me from relaxing in the present moment?

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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 

Introducing: Deep Delta
A 40-minute journey that has you feeling like you are floating in a beautiful, calm ocean, moving deeper and deeper into serenity and relaxation.
Special Introductory Rate (20% Off) thru February 8th Only.
Learn More & listen to the sample track: goo.gl/dKpH5l

 

 

 

Integral Meditation AsiaOnline Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Life-Coaching * Live Workshops * Corporate Mindfulness Training * Meditation Technology
Categories
Awareness and insight Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Meditation and Psychology Uncategorized

Honesty, Release and redirection -Three Levels of Non-Judgment

Dear Integral Meditators,

Non-judgment is a word that it often used in mindfulness and meditation circles, but what does it really mean? I give my own thoughts on this below.

In the spirit of non-judgment,

Toby

Honesty, Release and redirection -Three Levels of Non-Judgment

Within certain types of mindfulness and meditation practice a lot of emphasis is placed on the practice of non-judgment, that is to say observing what we are seeing or experiencing without making a snap value assesment about it. Here are three levels to consider in any practice of non-judgment that will afford a slightly deeper and more complete experience of it, as well as avoiding a few of the pitfalls that it is easy to make.

Stage one: Recognizing you have made a judgment
Before you let go of a judgment, you need to admit and acknowledge you have actually made a judgment. Spelling out judgments that make us uncomfortable is often not easy;

  • I feel guilty because I am angry with my partner or child
  • I have a racial or cultural prejudice against this person
  • I’m scared and covering it by being aggressive
  • I am jealous of my colleague and their success

If you try and jump to a non-judgmental space before this first stage, you can easily simply use the practice of non-judgment as a way of denying or repressing your judgments, which will actually decrease your capacity for self-awareness and your ability to release and transform your judgments.
You might call this stage honesty, as this stage entails looking nakedly at what is there and admitting what we see and find.

Stage two: Non-Judgment
Having fully acknowledged the judgments that you actually have, you can then spend time accepting and releasing the judgment:

  • I accept and release my guilt for being angry with my partner
  • I accept the reality of my cultural prejudice, and let it go
  • I note and release my aggression and insecurity
  • I note the jealousy that I experience toward my colleague, and whilst acknowledging and owning that feeling, I note that my deeper identity is not that feeling

You might call this stage release, as it involves the actual experience of letting go of the judgment.

Stage three: Better judgment
The experience of non-judgment is a very worthwhile experience in and of itself, and it can lead to some very relaxing states of mind in meditation (See my recent article on the Man or Woman of No Rank), but I believe that one of the main functions of practicing non-judgment is so that we can then replace our habitual and unconscious judgments withbetter conscious judgments. Better judgments come from questions such as:

  • What is a better way to work with my anger toward my partner or child?
  • What perspectives can help me I evolve beyond my cultural prejudice?
  • Can I find a creative, non-destructive use for my insecurity?
  • Can I care deeply about my own professional success without being automatically jealous of my colleague’s achievements?

You might call this stage redirection, as the practice of better judgment leads to the redirection of energy previously caught up in negative judgments into new and life-affirming directions.

As we move towards the new year, what are the judgments that you would like to practicehonesty, release and re-direction around in your life?

© Toby Ouvry 2014, 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