Meditation & Mindfulness for Creating a Mind of Ease, Relaxed Concentration and Positive Intention – An Introduction to Contemporary Meditation Practice

Date: Saturday March 28th 

Time: 2.30-5.30pm

Location: 501 Bukit Timah Road #04-04 Cluny Court Singapore 259760 (Click HERE to see map)

One sentence summary: This three hour workshop offers a practical introduction to meditation and mindfulness that aims to integrate the fundamentals of traditional meditation practice with contemporary insights from psychology and neuropsychology.

Meditation and mindfulness are simply put, ways of training our mind and attention to focus consciously and deliberately upon objects that give rise to inner wellbeing, harmony and happiness.

What you will learn

Simple meditation and mindfulness techniques which can be condensed into a ten minute daily practice that:

·        Reduces and transforms anxiety and stress, releases unwanted tension from your body-mind.

·        Helps you to build an intention toward yourself and others genuinely based around warmth, friendship and love

·        Trains your mind to take in, focus upon and appreciate the positive in your life

·        Develops your concentration skills (the ability to focus one-pointedly upon a single object/task), and in particular a special type of relaxed concentration, or lucid awareness

·        Enables you to connect with and relax deeply into the natural  inner space and silence of your mind

·        An increased capacity to witness the contents of your consciousness as an observer, rather than being completely identified and wrapped up in it.

Again, all of these skills can be consolidated into a daily meditation practice that can be done in ten minutes!

The Structure of the Workshop:

1^st Hour – An explanation of what meditation is, followed by an introduction to and practice of  the basic seven stage meditation on how to develop a mind of ease, relaxed concentration and positive intention.

2^nd Hour – Questions and answers, followed by meditation on awareness of our stream of consciousness, and learning to orient our mind around thoughts and perspectives that give rise to happiness, wellbeing and appreciation.

3^rd Hour – Talk on how to develop inner focus and concentration, and how to relax into the natural inner space and silence of the mind. Practice of meditation for developing concentration and awareness of the inner space and silence of the mind.

You will also receive:

·        Extensive workshop notes giving a detailed of the meditation practices that are taught.

·        Three ten minute MP3 meditation recordings that you can take away and listen to as a support for your personal practice

Cost of Workshop: Sing $130 per person

CLICK HERE TO MAKE PAYMENT FOR MIND OF EASE WORKSHOP VIA PAYPAL

To register or for further enquiries: Email info@tobyouvry.com, or sms 65-96750279

About the facilitator Toby Ouvry

Toby is a British meditation and mindfulness teacher, and the founder of Integral Meditation Asia. He has been practicing and teaching meditation for over nineteen years, five of which were as a Buddhist monk within the Tibetan tradition. In his teaching and coaching he combines practical meditation techniques from the world’s great wisdom traditions with the cutting edge practices that are currently emerging from both the integral and evolutionary consciousness movements. You can find out more about the work of Integral Meditation Asia and Toby by going to www.integralmeditationasia and www.tobyouvry.com.

Toby's meditation articles are moving

This is the last post that Toby will be writing on the meditation-singapore blog. Toby will, from now on be posting his meditation articles on the new tobyouvry.com meditation blog

If you have already subscribed to receive updates from the meditation-singapore blog, you will continue to be informed of meditation articles by Toby on the new site, THERE IS NO NEED TO SIGN UP AGAIN ON THE NEW SITE.

For those of you who are visiting this site for the first time, you will find plenty of articles to enjoy, but please be aware that Toby's latest material is now being posted on a weekly basis on the above mentioned site.

The healing power of awareness; the topography of insight meditation

Next Tuesday 29th June I will be beginning a new series of classes entitled “Insight, awareness and the awakening of our spiritual vision” , so I wanted to spend a little time in this week’s blog post reflecting upon some of the subjects that we will be tackling in these classes.

I want to begin this article by paraphrasing Roger Walsh in a conversation that he had with Ken Wilber. Basically he said that one of the amazing things about our minds is that, if we let it, our mind has this incredible power to self-heal, self-actualize (that is start to move naturally toward an enlightened state), and self-transcend (that is to move naturally toward the deeper/subtler level of consciousness immediately beyond its present state of growth) itself, without our having to do anything too much other than allow it.

What Roger is basically saying here is that, if you regularly cultivate states of relaxed and lucid awareness in your day to day routine, then the innate power of this relaxed and lucid awareness will have a powerful healing effect upon your mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. The problem for so many of us is that we perceive our relationship to our mind as a perpetual battle, where the main object that seems to be standing in the way of our inner growth is the mind itself!

One of the principle forms of meditation that we can use in order to start making friends with our mind, and begin to access and experience it’s amazing powers of self-healing is insight meditation. The main activity of the mind in insight meditation is simply to observe the different levels of our awareness without getting in the way. Because of this insight meditation is sometimes called “choice-less awareness” whatever comes up, we just watch, don’t interfere.

There are four basic levels of awareness that insight meditation helps us to cultivate awareness of; gross, subtle, very subtle and non-dual. We will be looking at these in depth in the classes, but what I want to do below is to outline them and then outline a simple meditation form that we can do on each of these four levels. This way even if you are not able to attend the classes (or listen to them as a recording), you can still get a basic practical flavour of what insight meditation involves.

A basic map or topography of insight meditation awareness:

Level 1: Gross awareness
This level is basically our awareness of our environment, senses and physical body.

Sample insight meditation exercise for this level:
Be aware of everything that you hear for a period of time. Note all the different layers of sound that your ear awareness is picking up. As I am sitting now I can hear some distant cars, the fan on the table next to me, the typing as my fingers work on the type-pad, I can hear the sound of my breathing in my inner ears. Just sit back, relax and enjoy the layers of sound flowing into your moment to moment awareness.

Level 2: Subtle awareness
This level basically observes the flow of thoughts, feeling and images that flow through our mind on a moment to moment basis. On this level there is a range of subtlety, from the everyday thoughts of our waking mind to the more subtle experiences of the dream state and of day dreaming. Basically this is the realm of inner form, or thought-form.
Sample insight meditation exercise for this level:
Simply sit down and observe the flow of thoughts, feelings and images the flows through your awareness. Imagine that you are like a person sitting by the side of the river of your mind, observing the constant ebb and flow of mental images and feelings that passes by you.

Level 3: Very subtle awareness
This level observes the formless inner space of our very subtle consciousness that is causal to, and lies behind our mental consciousness and sensory consciousness. If you imagine your thoughts and feelings are like clouds, and your very subtle formless conscious is like the sky that contains those clouds.
Sample insight meditation exercise for this level:
Continuing to watch your mind, become aware of the spaces between your thoughts. Allow your awareness to sink deeper and deeper into these spaces, as if you were entering into a clear open sky-like space. Let the cloud-like forms of your thoughts and feelings gently dissolve away into the sky like space of pure, formless awareness.

Level 4: Non-dual awareness
This levels is where the sense of yourself as an observer of the formless space of your consciousness (as in level 3 above) dissolves away, and you are left with a unified (non-dual) experience of primal awareness, just one single experience in the mind with no conceptual ideas of duality at all.
The way to approach this level of practice is through the level 3 exercise. The more you practice this gradually you will feel yourself moving toward this non-dual state.

So, my basic point in this article is that if you allow your mind to consciously relax on a regular basis, then you are giving yourself a chance to activate its natural self healing awareness. If you want a particular in-depth method to develop your minds self-healing mechanism, then insight meditation offers one such tool.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first.

Finding inner space within your mind by focusing on outer spaces

An ongoing motivation for both beginners starting meditation and those who are more experienced practitioners is simply the need to create and preserve a sense of space within our mind which we can relax into and use to keep the rest of our busy lives in perspective. One technique I use regularly that I find creates a sense of inner space very quickly is to focus on an awareness of the outer spaces that exist in our physical environment. The mind basically becomes like what it focuses upon, so when you focus on an outer physical space, this in turn quite naturally starts to give rise to a sense of an inner space within our mind. Here is one example of a way in which you can do this:

Making your mind BIG
We have been using this technique recently in the class I facilitate. Once you have sat down in a comfortable posture, become aware of the sky and stars up above you and the earth beneath you, allow your awareness to become big and open like the sky above you, and vast solid and stable like the Earth beneath you.
After you have done this, extend your mind horizontally around you, out to the horizon of the land, to the north, east, south and west. Extend your awareness as far out as you can to feel the curve of the Earth’s surface all about you. Now you have a sense of your mind as being BIG, and spacious, taking in the vast physical spaces all around you.
Stay with this feeling for as long as you like, let yourself relax as much as possible into your sense of the big space all around you; above, below, and extending out into the for directions of the horizontal/horizonal plane.
If you do this for a while, you will find quite quickly that a sense of inner space and calm arises within your mind. By focusing on the big space outside, you start to feel the big space inside!

A final point here is that I have found that this meditation helps ANY problem that I may be facing and that I am concerned about. When your mind feels big, then problems seem much more manageable. In a small mind consumed by itself and its own challenges, even small issues can take on a distorted life of their own!

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST gain Toby’s permission first.

Compassionate listening

Last week in my weekly meditation class, I brought up the old definition of meditation that I think many people find very helpful:
“Prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening to God”
If our mind is talking to itself all the time, how are we going to be able to listen to the intuitive wisdom, or the “still small voice” of our spiritual self as it offers us advice, support and consolation in our life’s journey?
So, listening in a reflective, meditative manner is important for this reason. It is also important as a practise for helping us to develop our compassionate and ethical heart when dealing with other people. If, when we are with others we consciously quieten our mind and really attend to what they are saying, they will notice and appreciate what we are doing for them. There is a book by Michael Ende called “Momo” that is about this power of listening. Momo is a little girl who is able to heal all those who come to her simply by deeply and attentively listening to the stories that they tell her about their life.
The second aspect of really listening to people is that we will really see where they are coming from, and so be much more likely to act in ways that are appropriate and helpful to both them and us. As a result our basic practise of ethics or positive action will improve.

So, when you are with others, try and see your listening to them as a meditation, it will help both them and you!
I want to end this article by outlining three ways NOT to listen that I had drummed into me during my Tibetan Buddhist training, using the anlalogy of a pot:

Don’t be like an upturned pot
An upturned pot cannot receive any liquid into itself. Similarly, when we are with others, if we are not really listening, we are like an upturned pot, they are talking, but nothing is going in!
Don’t be like a leaky pot
A pot with a leak cannot not hold what it liquid, it is useless. If we are not really paying attention, even if we hear what is being said, it simply “goes in one ear and out of the other” so to speak!
Don’t be like a bad smelling pot
You pour fresh juice into a dirty and bad smelling pot the fresh liquid becomes contaminated instantly. Similarly, if we are listening to someone, and there is a continuous negative inner commentary going on in our mind, this poisons everything that we are hearing. As George Michael once said (was it the title of one of his albums?) “Listen without prejudice”

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST obtain Toby’s permission first, and cite Toby as the author.

Related articles:
30 Second methods for developing your compassionate heart and ethical intelligence technique 1: Breathing with your compassionate role model

Experimental ethics; strengthening your compassionate and ethical heart through personal experience

Experimental ethics; strengthening your compassionate and ethical heart through personal experience

One of the biggest barriers to our practice of compassion and ethics is the old and VERY outdated idea that by doing good and being compassionate we somehow have to sacrifice our own happiness and well being for someone else. The key to overcoming this is understanding that practising good actions and compassion is really a form of enlightened self interest; the reality is, by doing good we will feel good to!
To gain firsthand experience of this, think of a compassionate act, great or small (NO act is too small) that you engaged in recently. When you bring it to mind and focus on it, how does it make you feel? Feels good to have done it right? So, my suggestion for a 30 second compassionate experiment is this:
Whenever you do something caring, compassionate and or ethical, take 30 seconds after the event just sit, breathe with and appreciate what you have done. It is not ego we are talking of here, just recognition and appreciation of the act. At the end of that 30 seconds you will feel good, and this feel good factor will strengthen your intention to do such acts again; you’ll want to do good because you KNOW it makes you feel good!

Doing good because it makes you feel good is a COMPLETELY different act from “doing the right thing because we feel obliged to”, which in the long term tends to deplete our energy and, consciously or subconsciously resent the “sacrificial “actions that we are engaging in.

NOTE: This is the second in a series of articles on 30 second techniques for strengthening your compassionate heart and ethical intelligence, click HERE to see the first article.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, please do not reproduce without permission

30 Second methods for developing your compassionate heart and ethical intelligence technique 1:

In the Tuesday meditation classes that I facilitate we have just finished a set of 3 classes on compassion and ethical intelligence, so over the next few days I am going to post four of the meditation techniques that we have been using that can be done in 30 seconds, as a way of pepping up our compassionate heart.

Technique 1: Breathing with your compassionate role model.

To do this exercise first you have to think of someone whom for you is a role model in terms of their compassionate heart and compassionate action. This could be a figure of spiritual inspiration, such as Quan Yin or the Buddha, it could be a figure from history such as Ghandi or Mother Theresa, of it could be someone from your own circle of friends and family who for you embodies these qualities. The main thing is that they should, for you embody the energies of compassion and ethics, and when you think of them you can feel their energy inspiring and strengthening your own compassionate and ethical impulses.

Once you have selected the figure that you wish to work with here is what you do:
- Mentally visualize them sitting next to you or in front of you.
- Feel their compassionate energy radiating from their heart
- As you breathe in, feel yourself connecting to their compassionate heart and ethical courage and breathing it into your own heart space.
- As you breathe out, feel the energy that you have taken in expanding out from your heart, filling your body and energy field.
- Breathe in this way for 30 seconds, then relax and finish.

Try doing this three times a day for a week, you can do it anywhere any time. Physically we may find ourselves alone, but mentally and spiritually there are always sources of inspiration available to us, anywhere, anytime. I find it useful to do when I hear of bad news or disasters around the world, it helps keep my mind steady and courageous.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, please do not reproduce without permission