Tag: mindfulness meditation

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Essential Spirituality Inner vision Insight Meditation Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation techniques

Connecting to Your Big Mind

Dear Integral Meditators,

Where is your mind? In your body, in your brain, somewhere else? The article below offers a meditators perspective!

In the spirit of the Big Mind,

Toby

Connecting to Your Big Mind (Is the Mind in the Body or the Body in the Mind?)

A contemporary, conventional view of the mind is that it is inside our body, most often the assumption is that it is in the brain. Our mind sits in our brain, and if we can just figure out our brain, then we will be able to figure out our mind. Right?

The Big Mind
If you have been meditating or practicing mindfulness for a while you will notice that there are times when your mind and energy seem to become open, spacious, almost limitless, transcending the mere experience of your physical body and brain. Even if we are not meditators we will have experienced times where our present moment experience seems to transcend our physical body and brain; perhaps when in love, when in the presence of a beautiful sunset, when we have experienced a profoundly moving work of art, or during a dreaming experience.
In Zen the awakened mind or mind of enlightenment is sometimes called the ‘Big mind’; an experience of a formless, timeless beingness that is without limitation, beyond time, beyond the body and brain,  and beyond the conceptual mind.

The body in the mind
From this point of view our body, and indeed the physical world and universe all exist within the limitless space of our Big Mind. So rather than our mind being in our body, our body is actually contained within our mind! Our brain is seen as a filter that filters out all of the infinite information contained within the Big Mind, enabling us to function operationally as an individual human being in the physical world. If you think about your brain as a computer, and the Big Mind as like the internet, this gives you an idea; the computer helps you to find the information you need from the internet, filtering it out from all the other information on the net.

An Exercise: Experiencing your body and brain in your Big Mind
Sitting quietly, imagine your mind becoming as big as possible; expanding our beyond your body and brain, out into the landscape around you, up into the sky and stars above you, and down into the earth beneath you. Let it become as big as you can, enter into the Big Mind experience. Then think about your body and environment as being contained within your Big Mind; everything you sense, think of and experience is all contained within your Big Mind; it is the context in which everything else is experienced.

Why does this matter?
Spending a period of time each day relaxing into your Big Mind can really change the way in which you experience yourself, your life, your challenges and your joys. Instead of being stuck in your body, you gain access to a bigger, stabler identity that enables you to experience the ups and downs of your life with stability, lightness, creativity and humour.

A final point; your small mind and small life still matters, and looking after it is still important, it’s just that it is contained within a bigger, more spacious identity and context!

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creative imagery Energy Meditation Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Life-fullness meditation and creativity Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques Mindfulness

Working With Your Body’s Cellular Memory Through Meditation

Dear Integral Meditators,

What is the relationship between your body’s cellular structure and how you expereince your life? And how can meditation help influence this relationship in a positive and practical way? The article below explores this topic…

In the spirit of the living body,

Toby

Working With Your Body’s Cellular Memory Through Meditation

Let’s say I meet someone at a party, that person looks somewhat  like someone who hurt me and made me angry in the past. Based on meeting this person that looks like a past acquaintance, my body’s cellular memory is stimulated and I feel myself experiencing not just a mental aversion and hurt, but a tangible energy of hurt that I feel in my body.
Let’s say alternatively I meet an old friend whom I share many good and fond memories of. My body’s cellular memory remembers this old friend, and I feel impelled to embrace them warmly to express my appreciation.
Our body remembers things on a cellular level, and this cellular memory is a powerful force in our life.

Working with positive cellular memories
Take any quality that you wish to develop in your life. Let’s say courage. To activate your body’s cellular memory of courage you can contemplate times in the past when you have felt and acted upon the quality of courage. Focusing on memories of times in the past when you have experienced courage will activate your cellular memory, and your body will re-create the experience of what it feels like to be courageous in the present moment, now.
Once you have re-created that feeling of courage you can then simply sit with it, breathe with it and ‘soak’ yourself in it through meditation, making that quality stronger and stronger within yourself so that over time it starts to become more and more a part of your instinctive way of going and being in the world.

Working with negative or difficult cellular memories
Think of an emotion that you experience periodically that you want to let go of, let’s say resentment or inferiority. Contemplate times in the past when you have felt inferior or resentful, allow your bodies cellular memory to be stimulated so that you have a tangible experience of that resentment present in your body. Now relax and breathe with that feeling; by acknowledging and accepting it you can then learn to actually release and let go of those instinctive feelings in your body, and open up your cellular structure to the influence of new positive emotional programmings.

Closing comments
When working with positive cellular memories, the purpose of meditating on them is to strengthen and consolidate them. When working with difficult cellular memories, the purpose is to release the energetic charge of those memories through awareness, acknowledgement and acceptance. The essential technique is actually quite similar for both, the difference being in our intention and what we do once we have stimulated the cellular memory in meditation.

Which cellular memories would you like to work with this week in your own meditation and mindfulness practice?

Related article: Combining Your Meditation and Mindfulness Practice Together

© 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

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

Saturday October  31st, 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

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Enlightened Flow I-Awake Meditation Technology Integral Meditation Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Mindful Resilience Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness Motivation and scope

The Pendulum Swing of Happiness and Sadness

Dear Integral Meditators,

How much happiness does your aversion for or resistance to sadness cost you? This is the topic the article below explores.

Beneath the article you will see some information on i-Awake technologies latest track Profound Releasing. You can read my own thoughts on this type of meditation technology HERE.

In the spirit of the pendulum swing,

Toby

The Pendulum Swing of Happiness and Sadness

Two days ago a couple of my daughters most cherished dolls were chewed up by the dog. She phoned me in a haze of tears and sadness about this, seemingly wallowing in the upset. Two hours later when I saw her, her mood had changed, she was still a little sad, but already talking jokingly about it, and explaining to me how she was going to fix the dolls, and lightheartedly telling me it was my fault for leaving the door of her bedroom open (which it may well have been!) Over the course of a couple of hours her mod had swung from open hearted sadness to acceptance, humour and smiles.

In the recent Pixar movie Inside-Out there is a moment when the character Joy realizes that many of the happy memories that the child she is in charge of possesses are dependent upon a preceding sad experience that sets up the happy experience. Up to this point in the movie she has been trying to remove sadness from the life of the child, but once she realizes its value, she knows when to get out of the way and let sadness play its part in the life of the child; indeed it is eventually sadness that saves the day!

My basic observation here is that our happiness and sadness are like a pendulum swing; if you allow yourself to experience your sadness, to ‘swing toward it’, then naturally once it has been experienced you will start to swing back again towards happiness. If however you block your sadness and prevent yourself experiencing it, then in some ways you lose the ability to feel genuinely happy. You just find yourself stuck in a state where you don’t feel happy or sad, just neutral, ‘comfortably numb’ as the saying goes.

Learning to swing with the pendulum
So the basic practice here is simply to mindfully learn to swing with our moods from happiness to sadness and back again, without blocking or interfering with the swing too much. Learn to swing naturally into a sad mood and gain confidence from the experience that after a while it starts to swing naturally back towards happiness after it has reached the extremity of its movement.

A practice
First of all get used to asking yourself; ‘How am I feeling right now?’ and really cultivating awareness and connection to your feelings and moods.
Secondly, use the image of the pendulum, when you feel yourself feeling a little sad, relax into the swing of it, don’t try and block it too much; allow yourself to experience it without getting swamped.
If you do this then after a while you will find yourself swinging back towards happiness. Relax into that too, enjoy it while it lasts, but don’t try and cling onto it beyond its time. Learn to participate in the swinging to and fro  between moods of happiness and sadness, to enjoy it with mindful awareness.

PS: One thing that I’ve become aware of with myself and with other people is that as soon as we start to feel emotionally uncomfortable or sad we distract and block ourself from that feeling by taking out our phone and fiddling with it. Becoming aware of this tendency and choosing to just sit with the discomfort or sadness instead of taking out the phone can be a simple mindfulness practice that we can set ourselves that will help us to manage our happy-sad pendulum swing a little better.

© 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 Track: Profound Releasing

Profound Releasing is a deeply transformative, guided meditation, encoded brainwave
entrainment technology designed to help you experience:
●    Letting go of old, limiting emotional patterns
●    Developing more inner strength and groundedness
●    A deepening compassion for yourself and others
●    And a gradual awakening into pure awareness

Our friends at iAwake Technologies are offering up to 20% Off Discount when you
purchase Profound Releasing during its introductory 7-day offer (September 17-24,
2015)
To learn more and listen to the free demo track click here: http://goo.gl/4km9pF

Integral Meditation Asia

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creative imagery Inner vision Integral Awareness Meditating on the Self Meditation and Psychology Mindful Resilience Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness Motivation and scope Shadow meditation

The Quickest Way Through the Rain

Dear Integral Meditators,

When you have a ‘dark cloud’ in your life, do you habitually walk toward it or run away from it? Its an important question, the article below explores why, with the help of a few large furry friends!

In the spirit of walking towards,

Toby

The Quickest Way Through the Rain

The amateur naturalists amongst you may have heard the story of buffalo herds who, when they see a thunder cloud coming toward them walk directly into it rather than away from it. Of course this is a very intelligent thing to do because by walking in and through the rain cloud they actually minimise the amount of time they have to spend getting wet, as the rain cloud passes by much quicker.

Whenever we have a ‘rain cloud’ in our life the instinct can be to run away in the opposite direction from it, hoping that it will go away if we run fast enough. Of course then what happens is that we find ourself being pursued by the rain cloud for a long time, and then when it catches us we have to spend a long time getting wet.

Whatever inner rain clouds you have in your life, the quickest and most effective way to deal with them is almost always by going towards and through them, rather than turning away and running.

Sometimes getting wet is not what you expect
One of the nice things about getting in the habit of walking into your rainclouds is that you discover as often as not that ‘getting wet’ is not as unpleasant as you thought. The experience of accepting a difficult emotion, having a challenging conversation, making a difficult choice, or facing a fear is that, as often as not more pleasant than we thought. If you walk into the rain, sometimes (not always) you may find yourself dancing in it!

If you aren’t ready to turn towards the cloud, then know that
There are some rain clouds in your life that you may not be ready to walk into for whatever reason. If this is the case, then you need to know that you aren’t ready and make a conscious choice to hold it at arm’s length until you are ready. If you do this consciously, rather than running blindly and impulsively away, then you can avoid a lot of the negative effects of repression and impulsive fear.

A mature meditation and mindfulness practice
One of the marks of a mature meditation and mindfulness practitioner is this; they know the value of walking into the raincloud and do it regularly.

An image
Imagine you are sitting in a grassland under a big sky. Next to you is a herd of buffalo. You see a dark raincloud on the horizon. You see the buffalo naturally start walking toward the cloud, as if it were the easiest thing to do in the world, why not follow them in? After all, the quickest way out of the rain is through it.

Related articles: The inner weather of the mind
Breaking like a wave

© 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

Integral Meditation Asia

 

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Awareness and insight creative imagery Inner vision Insight Meditation Integral Awareness Life-fullness meditation and creativity Meditation and Psychology Meditation techniques

Riding the Waves of the Mind

Dear Integral Meditators,

What does it really mean to be in control of your mind and emotions? The article below explores the image of our emotions as waves, and offers mindful perspective on how we can use this image to relax into and enjoy both the highs and the lows of our inner life. Enjoy!

Last call for this Saturday’s Meditation and Mindfulness for Self-Healing  Workshop, if you are curious about what  mindful self-healing entails, then do have a read of my article Three Levels of Mindful Healing.

In the spirit of waves,

Toby

Riding the Waves of the Mind

Our emotions come from many different sources, sometimes it seems like we are in control of our emotions and feelings; they behave predictably and respond to our efforts to stay in control, but at other times they seem to be completely unpredictable and fly in the face of our efforts at control.

Often our attempt to control our mind and emotions involves trying to hold onto pleasant emotions, thoughts and feelings, and running away from or blocking negative/feelings/thoughts. One slightly more skillful way of learning to navigate the changeability of our mind and feelings is to simply learn to relax into whatever thoughts or feelings that we have, riding them like waves on an ocean. From the point of view of this image and method, our ‘negative’ thoughts/feelings and experiences are like the low troughs of the waves on the ocean. Out ‘positive’ thoughts/feelings/experiences are like the crests or high points of the waves.

We are like a rider on a small boat or surfboard bobbing up and down on the waves of our mind; sometimes we find ourself riding a crest, other times we find ourselves down in a trough. The main thing is to pay attention to the movement, keep balanced and learn to relax into the motion as we go up and down; if you are in a trough, just keep relaxed and balanced and after a while you will find yourself rising up again as the waves move. If you are on the crest of a ‘happy’ wave, ride that and enjoy it, relax into it, keeping balanced so that when it changes again and you start going down, you can do so smoothly and easily.

Our emotions, like waves are elemental and wild in their power. In the same way that a skilled sailor can harness the power of the sea by relaxing and working with it, so we can learn to harness the power of our mind and emotions and by relaxing and working with the energy we find there each day.

Mindful Exercise:
You are on a small boat in the open ocean, rising and falling with the waves. It doesn’t matter whether you are on the crest of the wave (emotional high)  or in a trough (emotional low), just keep relaxed, balanced and work with the energy of the waves rather than against it.

Related article: Breaking like a wave
Meditating on the inner weather of our mind

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

SEPTEMBER

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

 

Integral Meditation Asia