Where is your spiritual home? The midweek article below explores one answer to this.
Yours in the centre,
Toby
Finding Your Spiritual, Physical Home
What do you think of when you think of the words ‘my spiritual home’?
One way of relating to this question is as the place on earth, the geographical location where you feel most deeply connected and nurtured, perhaps the place where you were raised, or a place where you “found yourself”.
A classical meditators way of relating to this question is to identify the formless timeless dimension of existence, beyond all places and locations as our spiritual home, the place where we find God or Enlightenment.
Within the path of the Greenworld there is a different answer; home is simply in the centre of the six directions. Wherever you go, wherever you are, there is a direction in front, a direction behind, a direction to the left, a direction to the right, a direction above and a direction below. Your spiritual home is in the centre of these, “wherever you go, there you are!”
This may all sound quite obvious, but it is also very profound. The centre of the six directions is a place that you can recognize and rest in at any time, regardless of whatever else is going on in your life.
Sitting or standing simply recognize the direction in front, and behind, to the left and to the right, above and below. Feel your body mind and soul in the centre of that space. Looking for home? There you are.
What skills are you trying to develop as a meditator, and how would you measure your meditation practice as successful or not? In the article below I outline five fundamental skills that need to be developed equally in my opinion in order to make our meditation practice successful and qualified. Although it is only my opinion, these five skills are those that I have observed are common to virtually all forms of meditation school, and hence they can act as a kind of template for building our own meditation practice making it as balanced and rounded as possible.
Enjoy!
Toby
Five Inner Skills we develop Through Meditation
This weeks’ article is kind of the companion version to last weeks on the Five Stages of Meditation Practice . Whereas the five stages focuses on the general development of a meditation practice from beginners to advanced, the five skills outlined below are generally developed together in tandem with each other as one progresses through different levels of meditation practice.
Skill 1: Stilling and focusing the mind This is perhaps both the first and the last of meditation skills; learning to still the thinking mind and moving into a space of inner stillness. From this stillness we can then move into a state of focused activity in meditation. Stilling the mind forms the basis of any subsequent meditation practice and gives us access to temporary peace of mind whenever we wish to find it in our daily life.
Skill 2: Developing ones creative imagination skills This means developing the ability to consciously and deliberately create and visualize meaningful images so that we can see, feel, smell hear and taste them within our inner vision. It also means sensitizing our inner vision to any spontaneous images, thoughts and information’s that may start to pop into our mind during meditation that have some form of meaning. This second aspect of developing our creative imagination means learning to distinguish between random, meaningless distractions and images that have meaning and value.
Skill 3: Healing and regeneration This is the skill of being able to connect to that which is wounded, damaged and in need of healing within ourself and help it to become well.
Skill 4: Directing energy This is the skill of learning to be sensitive to the subtle energy in our own body and within our environment. By becoming sensitive in this way we can gradually learn to consciously direct this energy in ways that is beneficial to ourself and others.
Skill 5: Mediation This skill means developing the capacity to connect to ‘higher’ or ‘deeper’ energies within our consciousness and learn how to mediate that deeper positive, creative energy into the outer world through our own body-mind. Actually, we are all mediating some form of energy into the world all the time (positive or negative according to our mood, emotional state, use of words etc…). Meditation gives us the capacity to start mediating energy in a conscious way from the inner world into the outer world by learning to embody certain primal energies, for example love, creativity, wisdom and so on…
All of these five skills start by being developed formally in our sitting meditation practice, but over time they increasingly become a part of our everyday awareness. As we go about daily life we
Remain in touch with a sense of stillness even when active
Make conscious, positive use of creative images
Act to heal and regenerate that which is damaged within ourself and others
Direct subtle energy appropriately and mediate positive energy into the world through our conscious daily activity with others
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.
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:
Our unified body-mind starts to perform at a level that is far greater than our body and mind could ever do as individual units. As a result our capacity for creative growth in all areas of our life increases. Whether in our work, our relationships, sports or spiritual development the capacity to develop and maintain a unified state of body-mind dramatically increases our potential and performance.
The harmony created between our body-mind creates a space of concentrated stillness. This stillness and harmony gives us a deeper inner peace and stability within which we can start to access higher, deeper and more subtle levels of consciousness that lie beyond our everyday body-mind. Thus it acts as a doorway to the next level of meditative or consciousness development.
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-arisingof 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.
I hope the first few days of the new year have been good for you, and that as you gaze into the landscape of 2014 you can feel the potential for new levels of growth and connectivity within your inner and outer life. This weeks article is a contemplation on the power that each of us has to mold and define our daily experience using the power of our conscious mind.
Yours in the spirit of the courage of consciousness,
Toby
The Conscious Self in the Landscape of the Mind
Imagine yourself in a landscape. It could be within wild nature, it could be in a cityscape, it could be a mixture of both. Feel the largeness of the sky above you and the landscape around you. Sense the relative fragility and smallness of your physical self in relation to the landscape around.
Now imagine that the landscape around you is the landscape of your mind and consciousness. The sky above is the infinite vastness and (relative) abstraction of your spiritual being. The monolithic structures around you such as mountains, oceans and skyscrapers are well established structures in your subconscious mind. The weather and the coming and going of people and creatures are like the thoughts and emotions that come and go in each moment and in each day. Within the landscape of your mind your conscious self is like the tiny, seemingly fragile physical body.
To be a meditator means to build the power of your conscious mind in the face of forces that seem much larger than it so that it becomes the difference, the defining factor in all your experiences.
Building the power of your conscious self means that in the face of past trauma, physical or mental sickness, difficulties in building a future, temptation, peer pressure, overwhelming emotion or any other challenge it is YOU, small and sometimes insignificant as you may feel remain the chooser and the master of your inner landscape.
The path of meditation and the path of courage are not too different.
“We are all meant to be mothers of God…for God is always needing to be born.” ― Meister Eckhart
Normally in meditative literature we are used to seeing ourselves being compared to children, and the Divine being compared to a mother or father figure. But what if we, as Meister Eckhart does in the quote above, reverse that and instead think of God or the Divine seeking continually to be born into the world and express itself through us?
What if we think of ourselves as the Mothers of God? How does this change our perception of who we are and what we might be capable of?
The question to then enquire in our meditations and contemplation’s for the beginning of 2014 and beyond is
“What is it that I feel within me that is seeking to be born and express itself through me at this time?”
Or alternatively “What will be my labour of love this year?”
Sit down for a few moments, see yourself as a mother of the divine. Go deep within yourself and see what the Universe has placed there there waiting to be born, wanting to be birthed.
Christmas comes around the same time as the winter solstice (northern hemisphere the 21st/22nd December). It is the time when the light of the sun, having reached its lowest ebb begins to gradually become stronger once more, eventually taking us into spring. Here is a simple meditation image that I like to contemplate around this time:
Imagine you are a seed in the ground in a winter landscape. Up until now you have been dormant, almost as if dead, but now at this time of the year something awakens deep within you; a spark of light, an awakening of life, right within the centre or core of yourself as a seed.
As you meditate on the image of the seed, feel a renewal of light and life deep within your heart of hearts; an awakening of the first seeds of your highest potential as you move forward in to a new cycle of life in the new year.
You may not know what this new cycle of life will bring, but for now there is no need to worry about that. For now simply sit quietly and acknowledge the first awakening of this new life deep within you and allow it to nurture and renew you.
What happens when you throw a boomerang away from you? Of course we all know the answer, it comes back to you. The mystical aspect of practicing deliberate kindness, compassion or any other related positive act is that it tends to come back to you in unexpected but consistent ways. The upshot of this is that if you want to have kindness and compassion expressed toward you, the best way to achieve this is go out there and start practicing it yourself to others.
You might think of it as a form of enlightened self interest where we are creating a win-win situation;
Fulfilling the happiness of others by practicing kindness and consideration for them and,
At the same time helping ourselves create the cause to receive similar treatment now and in the future
Perhaps the most important time to pick up this practice is precisely the time when we feel least like doing it; when we are feeling hard done by, upset or alone or uncared for. If at this time we can remember the boomerang of practicing kindness we can make the effort to go out and express caring for others and ourselves, send something positive out into the world so that we are inviting similar energy to come back to us.
Often an act of kindness has an immediate positive effect upon us; the act of caring itself makes us feel better, or invites a caring response from someone else. It also seems to work in more general ways. For example as a bouncer on the Student Union for three years during my University days I was generally calm and caring. As a result I found myself rarely in fights or trouble, and the punches and head-butts that did get thrown at me always seemed to ‘miss’ (and this was not because I was any good at fighting!)
Another example is I have a tendency to leave my wallet, phone and watch in public places (yes, I know, I’m a mindfulness teacher, I shouldn’t’t be leaving things around all the time!); the toilet in Starbucks, dropping money behind me on the pavement, in the changing room at the sports center and so on…yet they always seem to come back to me in the hand of some kind person.
Of course there is no guarantee that tomorrow I won’t have my wallet stolen and get beaten up in the process, but I do have a strong sense of how my own positive intention actively protects me from the worst that life can throw.
Practicing the boomerang of kindness
So, if you want to take this practice up for the week, just imagine that you have the boomerang of kindness in your hand as you are going about your day. Whenever you have the opportunity, throw it at people. Do it as much as you can, safe in the knowledge that every time you throw it out kindness, consideration and compassion will come back to you some way, somehow.
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.
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’!
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 Toby,
I don’t know about you, but for me the run in toward Christmas has been a busy one, and I feel my body and mind a little fatigued as a result! With this in mind in this weeks article I thought I’d share one of the very simple healing meditation forms that I use to keep me pepped up and invigorated through challenging times
As you can also see below I’m also putting out a special coaching offer for December and January, so if you have been wanting some really intensive coaching focus on your life-journey and meditation practice, this is a really good opportunity to take advantage of! The coaching can be done face to face or via skype.
Yours in the spirit of healing and wellbeing,
Toby
On Healing and Meditation
Traditionally meditation was and is associated with the quest for enlightenment, and for contact with God. More recently it has drawn attention for its capacity to relieve stress and promote inner calm, but what about its capacity to heal the mind and body of sickness and ailments?
There are various traditions of healing meditation, from Qi gong meditation and the Tantric traditions in the east, to the Quaballistic (Tree of Life) and nature based spiritualities of the west, to the tribal Shamanic traditions that you find across the world.
The meditation that I outline below is a very simple healing meditation that I use quite extensively myself. The technique is simple, but the depth at which you are able to practice it depends upon your capacity as a meditator. It can be very effective if you are a beginner, but as you grow and become more advanced, you will find this technique will grow in power and effectiveness as you grow.
A Basic Healing Meditation Form
Sit on a chair with the soles of your feet comfortably on the floor. Take a few moments to focus on your breathing, calm your mind and bring your attention into the present moment.
Focus on the Earth beneath you. See and feel within the heart of the Earth there is a huge ocean of light and energy. See two streams of this energy rising up and connecting with you through the soles of your feet, filling your whole body with light and in particular forming an intense ball of light and energy within the centre of your chest.
Now focus your attention upon the sky above you, feel light and energy from the stars, sky and universe flowing down into your body and filling your whole body from top to bottom. In particular see it gathering in the centre of your chest so that you now have a very bright and intense ball of light and energy in the centre of your chest filling being fed by the energy of the Earth below and the sky above.
See and feel this ball of light and energy as being alive and pulsing with energy.
Optional: Bring your hands up to the level of your chest with the tips of the fingers a few inches apart, palms facing inward toward the ball of light. Use your palms to ‘hold’ and focus the ball of light, increasing its intensity.
See and feel the ball of light in the centre of your chest ‘pulsing’ energy out into your body, filling the organs, muscles etc from the centre of the body out to the skin with healing light and energy.
If you have any particular organ or area of the body that needs healing, or where you are aware of fatigue or blocked energy, see and feel the light going into that area.
Begin by doing this just for 5-10minutes at a time, build up to 20.
Finding Your Spiritual, Physical Home
