What sort of ideas spring into your mind when you think of the words self-leadership? I have created a five minute video Leaping Like a Tiger – Mindful Self Leadership which you can view here:
Yours in the spirit of leading and leaping,
Toby
Dear Integral Meditators,
Many spiritual paths and religions and take “God-realization” as their object of attainment, but what if you can’t find God? This weeks article takes both a playful and serious look at this issue. Complementary reading would be the article on “The Four Less-nesses of Enlightenment” that I wrote a few weeks back.
Yours in the spirit of the God beyond God,
Toby
Upcoming Meditation Classes and Workshops at Integral Meditation Asia
Coming soon
Does God Exist? A Meditators Perspective (and what to tell your kids)
A couple of weeks ago my daughter Sasha (8yrs) asked me “Does God really exist? After all you can’t really see him or prove he does”. This is a classic response from a child developing her rational faculties and for whom the previous concept of a creator in the sky, a little like a big father or mother, becomes obviously and patently untrue.
For many of us as we move into adulthood it seems like we are faced with a dilemma; either we accept an unseen, unknowable God on faith, or we decide that he does not exist and that there is no God.
The path of meditation offers a second, non-philosophical perspective on the existence or not of God which is put succinctly in the modern day Zen saying:
“There is no-God and he is your creator”
The way I answered to my daughter was as follows:
So, the idea with these three sentences is that they invite a person enquiring after the existence of God to go beyond the world of ideas, philosophy or theology and move instead into a space of experiential, non-conceptual investigation and curiosity.
With these sentences you just need to read them, and then ‘drop-in’ to the space that they invite you into and to be with that space, to be present to something that lies beyond your mind, beyond rationality, beyond ideas.
To the cynic this can just sound like word games, but as I say the idea is to use the words to go beyond the words to a non-conceptual, living experience that you then hold and rest in.
After finishing this article I then asked my daughter “So what did you think of those definitions of God that I gave you?”
“Good” she said, not looking up from her book.
“Really I said? Stop reading and come here for a moment”
She stood up and came over to me. I asked her the same question
“So what did you think of those definitions of God that I gave you?”
She looks at me, smiles and said “Excellent!”
Then she rolls her eyes, puts on her most ironic face, then sits down to read again.
I think that is what you call approving non-approval.
© 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
Support for you Meditation Practice
If you enjoyed the article above, and are interested in sound technology that can help you more easily get into deeper states of meditation, the following two tracks work well with cultivating formless, timeless meditations:
Dear Integral Meditators,
In each moment your breathing is providing you with a wealth of insight about the way in which you are thinking, feeling and experiencing your life. I’ve just created a short, 5 minute meditation on a practice I call “listening to the breathing” that will help you access that insight and use it to increase the amount of understanding, relaxation and ease that you experience in your life. You can have a listen to it right now by clicking here:
Listening to the Breathing Mindfulness Exercise (5mins)
Listening to the breathing is one example of the practices that I will be teaching in a short 2 hour workshop on Mindful Breathing on the 25th March. The full details are below.
Yours in the spirit of listening and awareness,
Toby
Dear Integral Meditators,
This weeks article looks at three domains of our reality that often get confused, and how by cultivating awareness of them we can increase our capacity to respond wisely to the challenges in our life.
Beneath the article there are full details of the “Way of the Enlightened Fool” meditation class on the 11th March. And a final reminder on the course front, the special early bird offer for Meditations for Integrating your Ego, Soul and Spirit on the ends March 6th
Yours n the spirit of wisdom,
Toby
Experiencing, Feeling, Interpreting – Mindfully Processing Our Reality
When attempting to mindfully process our reality effectively, it can be useful to break it up into three parts:
These are three separate and distinctaspects of any event in our life. If we confuse one or more of them with the other, then this can cause a lot of unnecessary confusion and difficulty.
For example if I am already feeling low about myself and someone mentions in passing that I look tired (this is what I actually experience) then I may interpret that comment as an attack and respond aggressively. The other person may become confused or insulted and I may damage the relationship.
If however I break down and analyze the event down into its three aspects, my capacity to respond appropriately and without confusion is enhanced:
So, for this week if you would like to work with this, every time you come across a situation that you find challenging or where it is really important that you react/respond well and wisely just ask yourself these three questions:
Allow these three questions to lead you into a mindful investigation of what is really going on and help you to respond in a wise and thoughtful way.
© 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
Integral Meditation Class: The Way of the Enlightened Fool
Date: Tuesday March 11th
Time: 7.30-8.30pm
Location: Gallery Helios, 38 Petain Road, Singapore 208103 (click HERE for map)
In a sentence: A chance for mediators of all levels and backgrounds to come together and meditate in a powerful and supportive environment.
Overview: These Integral Meditation Classes combine meditation training in the five stages of mediation practice and the five types of meditation skills with a particular theme. This month’s class focuses on an exploration of the enlightened fool.
Crazy Wisdom: The Way of the Enlightened Fool
In common language we normally use the term fool in a derogatory manner, in the same way that we might use the term ‘idiot’. However in terms of our growth as a person and a spiritual being the archetype of the fool has profound and important meaning as:An image that we can use to connect to our playful and creative self
In this class you will be guided by Toby in meditation though a series of imaginative keys to help you gain personal access to your own crazy wisdom and enlightened fool!
Conditions for attendance: As mentioned above, this class is suitable for all levels of practitioner; beginners will feel supported, and more advanced practitioners will find that there is plenty of opportunity to develop, explore and consolidate their meditation.
This class is also available as an MP3 recording for those not able to attend in person.
Cost: $20, you can pay on the day, or make payment online below.
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THE MEDITATION CLASS BY PAYPAL
For more information or to register your attendance contact Toby on info@integralmeditationasia.com or sms 65-96750279
Dear Integral Meditators,
With so many different types of meditation practice around, how do you identify what the stages of meditation training common to all systems really are? This weeks article is an attempt to answer that.
At Integral Meditation Asia I am trying to develop systems of meditation that are easy to follow and practice, and yet include ways of developing these five stages in authentic ways. This article is basically a map that, if you have it in your head as a template you can learn to recognize these stages as your practice develops.
Toby
The Five Stages of Meditation Practice from Beginners to Advanced
Meditation and mindfulness practice covers a large and diverse spectrum of activity, from simple stress management to the quest for spiritual enlightenment. What I want to do in this article is outline five stages of meditation practice that covers this whole spectrum of meditative activity in a summarized but hopefully practical format.
These five stages are perennial in nature. That is to say that they are common to all traditions of meditation, eastern or western. In any particular tradition (Buddhist, Kaballistic, Hundu, Christian etc..) the particular form and explanation differs, but these stages exist just the same.
Stage 1: Balancing the gross body-mind
When we begin meditation the first task is to bring our everyday body and mind into a state of balance and focus, so that they can function effectively in daily life to give us greater happiness, enhanced focus in our tasks, greater appreciation of our enjoyments, as well as improve our awareness of emotions and relationships.
Even at this first stage there are many levels, but they are all centered around developing calmness, focus and self-knowledge on an everyday level (for more info on this stage see my article “The First Task of Meditation”)
Stage 2: Balancing and activating the subtle body-mind
After meditating for a while we start to become more and more aware that there exists within us a subtle level of bodily and mental energy that lies behind our physical body and everyday thinking-mind. Working with awareness of this subtle, deeper level of our body-mind leads gradually over time to the activation of the abilities of our subtle body-mind, such as greatly enhanced intuition, greater empathy and compassion, psychic sensitivity, capacity for energetic healing and so on…
Stage 3: Recognizing and resting in the formless-timeless dimension of existence
After developing competency at stages 1&2 we start to become increasingly aware of a formless-timeless dimension of awareness that lies behind, around and within our body, mind and world.
Initially we sense this as a kind of witnessing awareness. Then, over time as we move deeper and deeper into this formless-timeless dimension it acts more and more as a state which we identify as our deeper self, or true self; a place where we can go to rest and regenerate our energies at any time, and that is a source of both deep inner peace and almost infinite creativity.
Stage 4: Developing ones inner-world communication skills
The “inner worlds” are the subtle worlds of energy and intelligence that lie beyond the physical, everyday world. Having developed stages 2&3 in our meditation practice we start to develop greater conscious awareness of how we are interacting with this inner world.
In our outer word we have work colleagues, friends, places we visit to relax and so forth. In a similar way at this level of meditation practice we start to build a network of working partners, friends and connections that are the equivalent on the inner world level.
Stage 5: Developing and integrating a non-dual experience of stages 1-4.
Having built our experience of stages 1-4 in our meditation practice eventually when we sit down to meditate we experience all four dimensions of our meditation as an organic and integrated whole. For example as we rest in the formless-timeless dimension (stage 3) we may be aware of how our gross and subtle body-minds are coming into a state of energetic balance and harmony (stages 1&2). Occasionally we may have flashes of insight and creativity that arises in our mind stimulated by some form of inner world communication (stage 4).
At the level of stage 5 we are comfortable with all the preceding stages, and our meditation mostly “does itself”. As the Thai teacher Ajahn Chah said, our mind becomes “Like still water that moves, and like moving water that is still”.
A martial arts analogy:
If you think about progressing to basic mastery of levels 1-4 in meditation as being like becoming a black-belt at Aikido, you become a basic level meditation master.
After you achieve your black-belt in Aikido there are a further seven “dans” or advanced levels that you then start to work on. So if you imagine stage 5 is the meditation training equivalent of working on your “dans”; you are focusing on turning your basic mastery into a fully integrated, fluent functional whole.
© 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
Dear Integral Meditators,
At its best meditation is a practice that leads over time to a personal, direct and stable experience of enlightened awareness that is not defined by any religion, theory or philosophy. This weeks article explores the first step…
Toby
The First Task (and Achievement) of Meditation
The first task and result of a decent meditation practice is to create a unified body-mind. This means to become aware that our mind and body are in continuous relationship with each other. When we have a thought in our mind, this translates into a physical energy and posture in our body. For example when our body feels tired or refreshed this easily and often affects the dialog that we are having in our mind.
For most people this relationship, whilst intellectually understood is not seen and experienced in reality; when we are caught up in our mind we become unaware of the posture and energy of our body. When we are focused on our bodily feelings our mind often gets left out.
So then the first task of meditation is to use awareness and mindfulness to see how our mind and body affect each other and to help them to communicate and work together as a single unit or partnership, rather than working against each other and causing each other friction.
When through awareness and meditation we are able to create a unified body-mind then two positive results come:
An image of the unified body-mind
In integral literature the unified body-mind is sometimes called the Centauric level of development. A centaur is a mythical creature with a human head and torso with the lower body of a horse, half animal, half human. Thus the centaur symbolizes the unity of our animal body and rational mind, our instincts with logic, our conscious mind with our unconscious mind.
How to work on unifying your body-mind each day.
Take a topic in your life. It could be to do with work, relationships, any area you want to investigate.
Bringing to mind the subject and allow in your mind to explore it with thought and emotion. Observe the principal patterns of thought/emotion that arise.
Now turn your attention to your body. Be aware of the energy that arises in your body whilst you have been generating the thoughts and emotions in your mind together with the posture that your body has adopted. Observe how thought and emotions create a language of feelings and postures within the body.
Finally, observe with awareness the co-arising of thoughts/emotions in the mind together with feelings/posture within the body. See how they are a single, unified, symbiotic experience. Take this awareness of your unified body-mind as your object of awareness for the remainder of the time you have set aside.
Working with this exercise even for a short time each day over a period of time will help you to instinctively start to view the body-mind as a unified entity and to experience the benefits that result.
© 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
The Tightrope of Kindness and Compassion
I think of practicing kindness and compassion as like being on a tightrope, because there are many ways to ‘fall off’! To really practice them consistently and master them takes a lot of discipline and dedication.
How can you fall off?
It’s easy to practice kindness to others (and yourself) when you feel like it, but what about when you don’t feel like it?
Examples of this might be when you have had a tough day, when you are tired, when someone has wounded you with words, when you feel sad or in some way inadequate, when you feel insecure, when the people around us are not demonstrating kindness. These are all situations when it is all too easy to snap at people, to be unkind, to say inconsiderate things, to switch off our capacity to be kind and express kindness and compassion. We all know these types of situation and how easy it is to lapse.
From this we can see that really dedicating oneself to the discipline of kindness is not for the weak of heart or weak of mind. The flip side of this is that one way to build a truly and deeply strong heart and mind is to dedicate ourself to treading the tightrope of kindness each day
Getting on the tightrope each day
Each day you can begin by visualizing the tightrope of kindness and compassion in front of you. The platform at the other end of the tightrope is the end of the day. The game and the challenge is to stay on the tightrope of kindness all day, expressing kindness and compassion in all that you do, without falling off.
The good thing about a visualization meditation of course is that if you do fall off, then in order to get back on you just need to realize that you have fallen off, and mentally ‘get back on’!
© Toby Ouvry 2013, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:
The courses and workshops for January 2014 will be up shortly.
Special Coaching offer at Integral Meditation Asia for December 2013-January 2014!
Sign up for three 1:1 coaching sessions with Toby (either Meditation, Stress Transformation or Shadow coaching) for only Sing$435! (Usual price Sing$600).
This is a great opportunity to get some very personally focused coaching for a great price. The only condition is that the three sessions must be completed in the month that they start, so start in December the sessions must be completed in December, likewise start in January the three sessions must be completed in January.
Dear Integral Meditators,
If you’ve been under stress or upset recently, you’ll know how strong the feeling is to say or do something to get yourself out of that painful situation as quick as possible. However, often our impulse reactions make things worse rather than better. This weeks article explains by analogy how we can most effectively and quickly get ourself out of our mental and emotional pain by first becoming still.
Quick reminder for those of you in Singapore, Saturday 7th December, 9.30am-12.30pm: Meditations for Transforming Negativity and Stress into Energy, Positivity and Enlightenment – A Three Hour Workshop, it’ll be more than worth your while!
In the spirit of thoughtful action,
Toby
Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia
Saturday December 7th – Meditations for Transforming Negativity and Stress into Energy, Positivity and Enlightenment – A Three Hour Workshop
When You Are Trapped in a Thorn Bush….
…the best thing that you can do first of all is to stop struggling. This stops the thorns digging into your skin, thus preventing the short term pain, and enables you to see carefully what you need to do in order to free yourself one by one from the individual branches, eventually becoming free from the thorn bush and the pain altogether.
When we are in a thorny mental and emotional space, the instinct can be for us to keep struggling and struggling, trying to find a way to free ourselves from the pain. Actually, the best thing you can do in such a situation is to first still your mind, create some inner space and perspective from which you can start to move yourself out of the situation, step by step.
From lose loose to win-win
Feeling pain and conflict in your mind often results in you feeling compelled to act, often unwisely and non-reflectively. These unwise actions in turn create more friction and pain, which in turn compels you to act once more in an unwise manner. A vicious cycle is established between your busy, uncomfortable mind and inappropriate, unhelpful actions.
A habit of stilling your mind and body when you are in pain and simply watching/observing for a while creates a space for your natural intelligence and wisdom to start functioning. This in turn enables you to see what needs to be done clearly so that you can act in ways that are actually going to solve your issues. This creates a virtuous cycle where the stillness of your mind enables you to act wisely, solve your challenges and thus create more peace of mind.
So, the next time your mind feels painful, busy, uncomfortable think of yourself as being in a thorn bush; relax, pause and then when you are ready slowly and mindfully remove each of the branches from around you, one by one.
© Toby Ouvry 2013, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
Hi Integral Meditators,
The dreams and imagined images in our mind can be a powerful source of inspiration and growth. This weeks article looks at how we can go about capitalizing on positive dream and imaginary images that our mind produces by considering them in the light of our golden or bright shadow, or the positive part of our repressed unconscious.
Wishing you all the best in your inner journey,
Toby
Dreams, Meditation and Working with the Bright Side of Your Shadow
The Shadow is the part of ourself that we have repressed or rejected and that lies within our unconscious mind.
Normally when the shadow is talked about it is referred to as the dark, damaged or broken part of our self. However it is also equally true that we reject parts of ourself that are strengths and positive qualities but that we do not believe we are capable or deserving of. For example we might be a potential very good public speaker, but because of an habitually shy or humble nature we repress and deny that capacity and have no awareness that it exists within us.
One of the ways that we can start working with our bright or golden shadow is to look for images and figures that come up in our dreams that seem to indicate a part of ourself that we are not aware of that seems to have positive potential. Once we have identified such a dream figure, we can then work with it in meditation in order to find out what part of our bright shadow it represents, and how we can go about integrating it consciously into ourself as well as expressing it in our life.
Here is one example from my own shadow work: A couple of nights ago I had quite an extensive dream with Robert Plant in it (the former lead singer of Led Zeppelin). In the dream I spent quite a long time chatting and hanging out with him, ending in a concert in a small venue with other related figures like David Lee Roth (ex lead singer from Van Halen).
So, observing the prominence and clarity of the dream I decided to do a little bit of shadow work with it, using the 6 step shadow process that I teach in my workshops on the shadow:
Step 1 – Seeing/spotting the shadow: In this case the subject was already clear, the figure of Robert Plant appearing in my dream
Step 2&3 – Feeling and interpreting the shadow: Recalling the dream, the feelings and ideas I felt when I focused on RP were a feeling of ‘shining’; not being afraid to be centre-stage when necessary and also a commitment to staying at the edge of my creative process. Robert Plant as a lead singer quite obviously embodies the ability to be the centre of attention (which I myself have some aversion to), and his life has always been a commitment to never resting on his laurels, and working on music projects close to his heart, even if they are not popular or famous
Step 4&5 – Being it and owning it: Now I have identified the qualities embodied by my dream image – the capacity to ‘shine’ and the commitment to staying on the edge of my creative process. So during this stage in my contemplation I focused on really integrating a sense of these qualities as a part of ME, a part of who I am.
Step 6 – Integrating it: The final stage of the golden shadow practice is then to focus on integrating and expressing this “new” part of ourself into our daily life.
So for me deliberately placing myself in situations where I am being a little more positively extrovert as well as re-committing to staying on the edge of my own creative process becomes my follow up practice.
A Practice for the Week:
Watch what positive images/figures come up in your dreams (or daydreams if you can’t remember your sleeping ones!). Once you have one or more image/figures to work with, practice exploring and integrating what part of your bright shadow they might represent by using the steps outlined above.
© Toby Ouvry 2013, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
Dear Integral Meditators,
What if happiness were easier than we think, and the only thing getting in the way was that we often find being happy profoundly uncomfortable?
This weeks integral meditations article is in the form of a series of questions that invites us to look a bit deeper into the real causes of our lack of happiness.
I’m in the process of setting up the rest of the meditation program for the rest of 2013, you can see the dates below, full details will be out by next week.
Yours in the spirit of uncomplicated happiness,
Toby
Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia:
Starting Sunday October 7th – Qi Gong for Improving your Health and Energy Levels and Removing Your Inner Stress – A Four Class Series
19th & 24th November – An Introduction to Meditation from the Perspective of Zen Levels 1&2 (full details next week)
October 27th, Dec 1st – Shadow Meditation Levels 1&2 (full details next week)
How Much Happiness Are You Prepared to Tolerate?
What if happiness was easy?
What if the obstacle to happiness was not the fact that it was not available to you each day, but rather the experience of being unconditionally happy was something that you had a very low tolerance level to?
What if being happy actually caused you anxiety on a subtle and unconscious level, life surely could not be this good?
What if you are actually avoiding being happy because a large part of you actually prefers being unhappy, struggling with life?
What if the idea of working towards happiness as a future goal seems attractive to you, but accepting happiness as it exists in the present moment is something that makes you genuinely uncomfortable to the extent of avoidance?
The word meditation and its applied practice really means to ‘ponder deeply upon’, or ‘to look deeply into’. This week your meditation practice is to ask yourself the above questions and the one question below, to ‘penetrate the question’ so to speak.
What if real genuine happiness was available to you right now and the only thing standing in the way of it was your acceptance of it?
© Toby Ouvry 2013, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com