Categories
Awareness and insight Energy Meditation Enlightened Flow Enlightened love and loving Integrating Ego, Soul and Spirit Life-fullness meditation and creativity Meditation techniques Primal Spirituality spiritual intelligence Stress Transformation

Combining your Witnessing with Tantric meditation

“You are not a drop of love in the ocean. You are the entire ocean of Love in a drop.”

Dear Integral Meditators, 

This week’s article looks at combining your basic witnessing practice with a Tantric meditation form. If you enjoy it you would be welcome to join us for the Tuesday & Wednesday sessions this week, where we will be working with this meditation directly.
 
Tantric practice is also the subject of a new series of classes & sessions that I will be leading in May:
Starts Tuesday 6th, Wednesday 7th May, 7.30-8.30pm – Embodied Transformation – An integrative introduction to Tantric meditation
Starts Saturday, 10th May & then weekly, 5.30-6.15pm – Embodied Transformation – Saturday Tantric deep-dive meditation sessions
If you are motivated to come on this journey with me, you can do so live, online or via recordings.
 
In the spirit of the Ocean-you-Are,

Toby
 



Combining your Witnessing with Tantric meditation
 
Tantric meditation is a tradition of meditation originating primarily, but not solely in the east. It emphasizes the unity of body, sensuality, and spirit. In some of its forms it stops at the awakening of a sense of the Body-as Spirit. In it’s more complete forms it takes this sense of embodied spirituality,  merging it with transcendent consciousness to create the path to a fully awakened, non-Dual state. This article outlines a combination of basic witnessing with simple Tantra to supercharge your meditation, and your energy levels.
 
Deeper into Witnessing – Transcending and including
 
Basic witness practice is sitting in meditation as the observer self, detaching in a healthy way from the contents of your consciousness. You simply hold this position and practice watching calmly. Deeper witnessing involves developing the capacity to:

  • Transcend the content of your consciousness by witnessing
  • Simultaneously include and embrace that content in an unconditionally warm and loving manner

One analogy for this is that you witness like the sun, which shines its light objectively on the world, whilst simultaneously embracing it with its warmth.
 
Bliss and Love, your basic Tantric ingredients
 
Love and inclusion
 
Breathe into your heart and feel the natural, original Love there. Experience it as an embracing warmth and care that builds and grows as you breathe. Let your body soften to this feeling, so that it as you stay centred in Love. A nice object of meditation here is the Rumi line:
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
Altered to focus on Love:
“You are not a drop of love in the ocean. You are the entire ocean of Love in a drop.”
 
Bliss and transcendence
 
Breathe into your lower-belly, sacral region and sexual organs. Connect to the basic Bliss of your Life-force in the body. This is the basic bliss that, when activated biologically becomes sexual attraction, and ‘peaks’ in the experience of orgasm. Breathe and let the feeling of bliss build a bit in your loins. Then imagine this Blissful feeling rising as an energy from your sexual organs to the base of the spine, and then up the spine and back of the head to your crown. Feel a ball of light building above your crown, filled with transcendent Bliss and the freedom that comes with it.
 
Creating a Love-Bliss Witness
 
Bring the ball of transcendent Bliss down from your crown to your heart, where it merges with the inclusive, all-embracing Love. So, you have a feeling of Love-Bliss-Consciousness at your heart.
Now identify your True Witness Self as being Consciousness composed of these two qualities; Transcendent Bliss and an All-inclusive Love. With this set up you can then either:

  • Witness the content of your consciousness with this Love-Bliss Witness or
  • Rest in the ocean or sky-like experience of the Witness itself, enjoying the feeling of blissful ‘Fullness & Emptiness’

 
A final position here is then to practice viewing the content that you are witnessing as arising from the Ocean of your Bliss-Love Witness, not two things, but one thing arising simultaneously, which gives you an approach to a Non-Dual expereince.
Once you are familiar with the above practice, you can ‘short-cut’ sometimes by generating the Bliss in your sacral region, and then just feeling it rise-up directly to meet the Love in your heart. But going up to the crown and then down again has the initial advantage of mixing the Bliss with the freedom of higher levels of consciousness available at the crown.
 
Related readingSky & sun, freedom & fullness
Re-awakening to your Bliss
All you need is Love – Contemplative Non-Duality


© Toby Ouvry 2025, 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


Follow Toby onLinkedInYouTubeInstagram

Integral Meditation Asia

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

Categories
A Mind of Ease Energy Meditation Inner vision Integral Meditation Life-fullness Meditation and Psychology Mindful Resilience Motivation and scope Presence and being present

Seven ways to mindfully grow your love & compassion

“Remember times when you have felt and experienced a connection to different types of love and compassion. Activate those feelings in the present moment, enjoying them and looking for ways that you can express them to yourself and others today”

Dear Integral Meditators, 

This week’s article explores seven different ways you can practice to consciously grow & develop your love & compassion. It contains links to previous articles that I have written in detail in each domain.
 If you want to give your love & compassion a real turbo boost, then come along this Saturday for the Integral love & compassion meditation workshop.

Wishing those that are celebrating it a very happy & prosperous new year of the wood dragon! All welcome online or live for the Lunar New Year Meditation 2024: Connecting to your inner Dragon this Tuesday.
 
In the spirit of expanded care,
 
Toby


Article: Seven ways to mindfully grow your love & compassion

1. By consolidating your present experiences of love & compassion

Remember times when you have felt and experienced a connection to different types of love and compassion. Activate those feelings in the present moment, enjoying them and looking for ways that you can express them to yourself and others today.
 
2. Through improving our capacity to give & receive it from ourself & from others
Practice the discipline and joy of being able to both give and receive love. This can be practiced in three ways:

  • In our relationship to ourself
  • In our relationship to other human beings and different orders of life
  • Between ourself and different aspects of place, landscape all the way up to planetary and universal levels

3. Recognizing & appreciating the goodwill that we are receiving all the time from others
Really trying to notice and appreciate the goodwill that comes you way during the day from different people and sources. This goes all the way from the daily consideration of friends, family, and colleagues, to the incidental assistance and benevolence from relative strangers we meet each day. Once you start to see it, we start to see that goodwill, connection and consideration are all around us!

4. Expanding the scale of your love
This can be done in two ways:

  • Transforming your sense of the boundaries between yourself, others and your environment. If your idea of yourself is as the earth herself, then its easy to love all the living beings who live there, as they are extensions of you@
  • Secondly, we can work on expanding the scale of your love & compassion from egocentric (me only) to ethnocentric (my family, tribe, race only) to world-centric (all living beings) systematically as a principle and extension of our loving impulse

5. Developing greater courage & objectivity in our relationship to the pain & suffering that could be increasing our compassion
Here we are working on changing our relationship to our own and others suffering, learning to encounter it with less aversion and repression. By opening our eyes to pain in a skilful manner we can use it to build the strength of our compassion, and potential for compassionate action.

6. Distinguishing three types of relational love, & growing them equally
As well as the scale of our love, we can also develop the types of love that we experience. One way of dividing love into types is agape, filia & eros:

  • Agape is the compassionate and caring love of a larger being to a smaller, dependent one. The classic example of this would be parental love, from mother or father to child
  • Filia is brotherly or sisterly love, or love from peer-to-peer, the love of friendship
  • Eros is the creative love existing between those where there is a mutual attraction. The classic example is that of romantic lovers.

7. Expanding your idea of romance & romantic love
Speaking of romantic love, we can grow it by expanding our idea beyond just being between human lovers. We can experience it also in:

  • Our relationship to ourself, as in between the soul and personality
  • In relation between ourself & spirit
  • With landscape, nature and sense of place
  • In relationship between ourself and art, or ourself and our art/work

Article & content © Toby Ouvry 2024, 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


Follow Toby onLinkedInYouTubeInstagram

Integral Meditation Asia

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