Tag: integral mindfulness

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Meditating on the Self Mindful Resilience Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness

Mindfulness – Facilitating Your Own Experiential Learning

Dear Integral Meditators,

This week I have led a couple of mindfulness workshops and discussions where I have defined mindfulness as an activity that facilitates and enhances your own experiential learning. In the artile below I explain a bit about how this works.

In the spirit of the journey,

Toby

Mindfulness – Facilitating Your Own Experiential Learning

Mindfulness means placing your awareness and attention on a particular aspect of your life in order to get to know it better. By paying greater attention to what you are actually experiencing in that area, you start to observe the process of cause and effect that is going on, and learn from it.

An example: engaged mindfulness with regard to resilience
So, let’s say I want to develop my experiential learning around the subject of resilience. Here is a short engaged mindfulness process I (and you) can work with to do so:

Step 1: Write a short paragraph in response to the following three questions in turn. Write reasonably quickly and without editing your response too much:

  1. Resilience to me means –
  2. I feel most resilient when –
  3. Times when I notice I lose my sense of resilience include –

Having written your response to each question then sit quietly and, based around your answers to questions 1&2, build a feeling of resilience in your mind, body and heart based around the definition that you have created and the past experiences of it that you have had. Breathe the energy of this resilience into your body, so that you can feel it as a tangible energy as you are sitting.
Before you conclude, you may then like to consider your answer to question 3; recalling a time where you tend to lose your sense of resilience. Recall this situation strongly enough that you can feel the stress of it threatening to break down the feeling of resilience that you have been building in the exercise up to this point. Practice consciously retaining your sense of resilience even when it is under pressure in this way.
Finally, before you finish the exercise think about the next 24 hours and select a particular situation you know you will be experiencing where you are going to deliberately practice the mindful resilience that you have been building in the exercise.

So there you go, a simple engaged mindfulness practice that you can use to facilitate and accelerate your experiential learning around the theme or resilience. Actually you can use the exercise above to mindfully develop any quality you like, simply replace the word ‘resilience’ with the word you want to explore and off you go!

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

Saturday November 21st, 2.30-5.30pm – Connecting to Your mindful Inspiration (Full details out shortly)

Saturday November 21st, 2.30-5.30pm – Living Life From Your Inner Center – Meditations for Going With the Flow of the Present Moment

Integral Meditation Asia

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Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness

Meditation as a Way of Life

Dear Integral Meditators,

Is meditation something that you sit down and do each day as a formal practice, or is it more fundamental, a whole way of approaching life? The article below explores that latter option.

Yours in the spirit of meditation,

Toby

Upcoming Courses at Integral Meditation Asia :

Special offer for 1:1 Coaching For January at Integral Meditation Asia  (Via skype or face to face)

Sunday 1st February – Mindful Self-Leadership: Take Control of Your Life Direction and Wellbeing Through Awareness, Curiosity, Courage and Care

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 

 

Meditation as a Way of LifeThe commitment to contemplate life deeply
One way of defining meditation is simply a commitment to contemplating and investigating life deeply. This definition is useful as it takes us away from the idea of meditation as something that you do as a formal practice for 10minutes, 30 minutes, an hour a day, and indicates that it is really a fundamental stance toward life; to be a true meditator is to be committed to looking at your work, your relationships, your sex life (or lack of it), your philosophy and so on… deeply. It means to be dis-satisfied with superficial surface experiences and hungry for real experience, to make your life your own and not just a pastiche of what somebody else told you life should be.The temptation to stay on the surface
We are without a shadow of a doubt the most educated set of human generations that has ever lived. We have the potential to look deeply into our life and find patterns of meaning and consequence, but do we? Despite having the capacity to look deeply, many of us avoid it. We content ourselves with the superficial, with the easy. We pay attention to that which society guides our attention to, we define ourselves according to the prevailing trends and beliefs, we avoid the voice within us that calls us to look beyond the surface and the comfortable because it makes us uncomfortable, makes us feel vulnerable, and also makes us feel genuinely powerful (which is perhaps the most scary of all).

To be a meditator means to be committed to go beyond the surface patterns of our life each day, and contemplate the depths.

The courage to go deeper
Being a meditator is an act of courage, curiosity and care; commitment each day to connect and heal the hidden parts of ourselves that are damaged, the curiosity and interest to develop the powers of our body-mind-spirit to the next level, and to care about our lives and the lives of others enough to go beyond indifference, numbness and apathy, which each day tempt us to fall back into a state of passive unconsciousness.

It is a 24hour practice!
From this we can see that to be a meditator in the true and broader sense of the word is quite an heroic activity. It is demanding, it is inconvenient, it is sometimes tiring, it causes us to make difficult choices, it may mean we have to spend time alone.
What is the reward of this all? The reward of committing to contemplate life deeply? The reward of being a meditator? It is that we get to feel truly alive in way that cannot be taken away from us.

Related article: Life-fullness

© 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 

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Inner vision Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Meditation and Psychology Mindful Resilience Mindfulness

Non-resistance – Tapping into A deeper level of relaxation

Superficially relaxation exercises relating to mindfulness might look quite simple, almost to the point of superficiality, but in reality the capacity to become and remain deeply relaxed consistently in life is a profound achievement.
Why so? Because to be able to remain truly and deeply relaxed in the face of all the nonsense that everyday life throws at you implies the achievement of three inner qualities that are not easy to attain:
Self-trust – The knowledge that your mind, judgment and convictions are not vulnerable or susceptible to emotional pressure
Self confidence – The belief that, whatever the challenge you have you are confident in the power of your mind to be able to respond appropriately and effectively
Self-esteem – The feeling and experience that you are deserving of happiness in life, and that you are confident of your own intelligence and its capacity to find solutions to your life’s problems (in this sense you could say that self-confidence is actually a subset of self-esteem).

Non-Resistance – Relaxing into our challenges as a way of practising mindful resilience and recovering from mental ‘hits’ faster.

Rather than theorizing, what I want to do in this article is demonstrate from my own experience how non-resistance works. The other night as I was falling asleep I was suddenly struck by a set of unusual feelings of loneliness, accompanied by images of myself in a big empty house. Caught by surprise by these feelings, I felt my body and mind resisting and trying to reject and deny these feelings, to try and ‘escape’ from them. Catching myself, I then altered my approach, consciously relaxing into the feelings of loneliness, immersing myself in them like submerging myself into the water of a swimming pool. By relaxing and practising non-resistance to the feelings, I found that after a short while they naturally dissipated and I fell asleep feeling relaxed and content; I was able to process and remain resilient to the emotional challenge through the practice of relaxational non-resistance.
Next morning I receive an email from a corporate client regarding a deal I thought was locked up. Turns out they have decided to go with another facilitator, instinctively following the momentum that I had created from the night before, I again practice non-resistance to the email and my emotional reaction to it. I allow it to flow through my body and mind, opening my chest and relaxing deeply. The result – my recuperation and regeneration time from that setback is VASTLY accelerated (not to say that there was no swearing mind ;-)), and I proceed through the mornings work and activities feeling  fundamentally good despite the setback.

So, two related, practical examples of the practice of non-resistance there which I hope will give you some idea as to how to start practising it yourself.

How does non-resistance relate to the qualities of self-trust, confidence and esteem? 
The capacity to practice non-resistance under stress depends to a large degree on how you have developed these three qualities within yourself. If you don’t trust and feel confident in yourself, it is very difficult to relax into an experience that directly threatens your wellbeing. If you don’t have self-esteem it can be difficult not to believe that on some level setbacks in life are confirmations that happiness is not something you deserve to give yourself each day.

Non-resistance is a practice that you can start today and find real benefit, but that to be a master of deep relaxation; you have to earn it over time.

Related articles: Non-Striving, The Shadow Child, Soft Forms of Psychic Self Defence.
© 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 

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Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Meditation techniques Mindfulness Presence and being present spiritual intelligence

What is Mindfulness? – Remembrance, Penetration, Assimilation +1

Dear Integral Meditators,

This mid-week article attempts to give a really practical working definition of mindfulness that will enable you to see how it might be applied to multiple circumstances in your own life.

 

Yours mindfully,

Toby

What is Mindfulness? – Remembrance, Penetration, Assimilation +1 

What is mindfulness?

To be more present is the most common generic answer that you might receive when you ask such a question. What I want to do in this article is to give a clear working definition of mindfulness and its process, and talk a little about its applications. This working definition has four parts.

Part 1: Remembrance
First of all to be mindful of something means to keep it in mind. Therefore if you want to practice mindfulness you need to be able to develop the skill of being able to remember, or keep in mind that which you wish to be mindful of over an extended period of time, without forgetting it. To take the simple example of the breathing, if you wish to practice mindfulness of the breath you need to be able to focus on the breathing without forgetting it!

Part 2: Penetration
So, why bother being mindful of the breathing (to stay with this example). The purpose of being mindful of the breathing is to gain an intimate knowledge of it, to understand it truly, or to put it another way, to penetrate it. If you are mindful of the breathing for a while you start to discover its nuances; how it reflects and describes your emotional state, how it relates to how you feel about your body, how it reacts to the different thoughts as they pass through your mind. Previously the breathing seemed like an uninteresting object. Now as a result of being mindful of it, it begins to reveal its secrets and wisdom to us. The penetration of our object is the second part and goal of mindfulness practice.

Part 3: Assimilation
Stage three of mindfulness practice is to assimilate the knowledge and wisdom that your remembrance and penetration have given to you, and to make them a part of your life. When we discover the wealth of information and knowledge that our breathing is giving us about our emotions, thoughts and body, we can then start to use that knowledge to do things like:

  • Treat our emotions with more compassion and positive control
  • Help us to deal with stress and anxiety more wisely and detect it earlier
  • Help us carry our body in a more relaxed and confident way
  • To open our mind out to our reality even when we may feel like closing it.

This third stage of assimilation is the process of learning to apply your mindful insights in a way that has real, tangible effects on your daily life.

Stage 4: Expression 
The fourth stage of mindfulness practice is to then demonstrate and communicate the essential energy and wisdom that you have gained into your daily life. To demonstrate to others what it means to be mindful of your breathing and the benefits that come. You can do this just by example, or there may be some form of formal way in which you teach it.

So, there you go, Mindfulness = the process of remembrance, penetration, assimilation and expression. The nice thing about this definition is that you can use it to develop mindful penetration of any number of different objects. For example there are 33 different objects that I outline in the “One minute mindfulness” section of my meditation blog. Once you know what mindfulness consists of you can even create your own mindfulness practices to help you accomplish the goals that you have in your own 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