Whenever we engage in meditation or any other activity that promotes greater self awareness, we automatically begin to activate two innate capacities within our mind: Its capacity for self-healing and its capacity for self-evolving.

The minds capacity for self-healing is basically means that, whenever we move into a meditative state, the process of being aware of our mind, whether it I in a state of bliss or pain (or somewhere in between) has a beneficial healing effect upon our mind. Awareness heals.

The minds capacity for self-evolving means that the process of sitting and being alert and aware in meditation brings to the surface of our mind all the latent higher qualities and talents that we might not be aware of or, may even be afraid of.

Meditation makes you more aware of your creative gifts and talents and will over time create an energy in you that actually DEMANDS that you start expressing these talents in your life.

From this we can see that, as well as bringing you greater peace of mind, meditation can also be quite challenging in the sense that:

• You become more aware of all that is damaged and that needs healing within you
• You start having a lot of creative urges that start to PULL you toward higher and greater achievement in your life.

If you are not prepared for these side effects they can actually be a bit shocking, and you might even feel that you may be doing something wrong. Actually as often as not it is just your minds capacity for auto-healing and auto-evolving kicking in!

So, although the minds capacity for self-healing and self-evolving  are good things they also challenge us, bringing us face to face with the two aspects of our shadow self:

• The DARK part of our shadow self; the damaged part of self which we have disowned and rejected, and
• The LIGHT part of our shadow self; that latent greatness and talent within us that is as yet unknown and unexpressed.

With this in mind here are six tips for starting to get friendly with your shadow self. They are the basic elements of what I call a “Six point shadow reclamation process” that I use with coaching clients, and will be teaching in an in depth manner in the upcoming “Finding Freedom From What Holds You Back” shadow classes:

Step 1:

See it – Pay close attention to both strong positive and negative emotions that get triggered in you by people, events, places  or things. Be alert to the meaning that there is in the fact that your mind has been triggered in this way.

Step 2:

Feel it – Rather than immediately repressing or pushing away the strong emotions, thoughts or images that get triggered in your mind, get used to feeling into them, holding them within your conscious awareness

Step 3:

Communicate with it – Once you have some experience of steps 1&2, you can then try inwardly communicating with the person or thing that is triggering the shadow emotion. For example if a person fills you with revulsion, try visualizing them in front of you and asking “what is it about you that is creating such strong feelings of dislike?” – see what answer comes back. (Please note you are not actually communicating with the physical person, but trying to connect to that part of yourself that has been triggered!)

Step 4:

BE it – Practice mentally imagining that you have become the person that you fear or admire. Become that angry person that you run away from all the time, imagine yourself AS that great public speaker that fills you with so much admiration.

Step 5:

Own it – Practice taking responsibility for your shadow self and emotions, the light and the dark:

-“Yes I really am angry and hurt deep down, it is not always the other person that is angry”

- “It’s my job to make the most of this talent, no one else is going to do it for me!”

Step 6:

Transcend and transform it – This is the final step, and needs to be done at the END of the other 5 steps. A BIG mistake people make is to try and transcend their shadow self too soon, before they have properly seen it, felt it, communicated with it, been it and owned it.

To transcend and transform the shadow self simply means to recognize it is NOT your true or ultimate self, but nevertheless it has a potential place and function within your everyday personality of ego self. For example:

• Your previous fear of anger and projection of it onto others can be transformed into the ability to be powerful and polite with difficult people
• Your previous admiration of another person’s public speaking skills is transformed into your ownership of that talent within yourself, and the development of your own talent as a passionate and persuasive speaker.

So, I hope that some of you are inspired to join us in the upcoming shadow classes, but if you simply think about the above six points, and start to try them out in your daily life, I think you will find that you can start to get a feel for this process on your own.

Here’s to the maximization of our minds capacity for self-healing and self-evolving!

© Toby Ouvry 2011, 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

I was listening to a talk by Jean Huston the other day where she mentioned an old Jewish saying that says (I’m paraphrasing) that someone who really loves deeply is laughing for joy on one side of their mouth, and crying out of the other. Loving our life and the world connects us to deep and abiding joy and to a sense of creativity (I often use one definition of love as being the creative or evolutionary force of the Universe) that is out of reach of those who refrain from a deep commitment to loving. However, the flip side of this is that, by loving we inevitably sensitize ourself to the suffering and pain around us, and this empathic quality of love means that we feel the pain of others deeply.

I think one of the reasons that so many people fail to love deeply in their lives is that we get used to repressing our feelings regarding the pain and suffering that is around us. It is almost as if it is a survival mechanism that we are using to get by in life. The reasoning is fairly clear and goes something like: “If I don’t repress the pain that I feel when I look at my own suffering and the suffering of others, then my life is going to be sad and miserable. Repressing the pain just seems like the best thing to do in the face of the toughness and contradictions of life.’”

However, what we do not realize is that, when we repress our empathic response to pain we also repress our love response, our ability to feel deep joy, open heartedness and the resonant laughter of the universe. By repressing our receptivity to pain we also repress our receptivity to love, we become anesthetized to life, walking through our “seven score days and ten” like zombies, never really touching what it really, deeply means to live as an awake human spirit on Earth.

So, let’s really commit to loving deeply, to being that man or woman who is laughing out of one side of their face and crying out of the other. Let’s commit to feeling the world deeply and really loving in our relationships with courage. Yes it is going to be painful, to be really alive means to feel that pain, not pretend it is not there.

The other good thing about feeling the pain is that it makes it imperative for us to act on it, to do something to alleviate the pain of others (an ourselves), to become part of the solution and not disengaged perpetrators of the problem.

 © Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first: info@tobyouvry.com

One of the questions that I am asked quite often at talks, workshops and classes that I facilitate goes something like this: “Are you happier now than you were as a Buddhist monk, leading a relatively simple, worry free life of meditation?”*(see note below)

To this my answer is always emphatically ‘yes’ for the following reason: I am happier now because, since moving back into the life of a layman, I have been practising and repeating the basic happiness skills that I learned as a Buddhist monk repeatedly for many years and I have got better at them. As a result my happiness has steadily improved year in, year out over the seven or eight years since I left the ordained life.  I can also say with confidence that my basic happiness levels will improve steadily in the years to come. This has happened in spite of the added potential stress that comes from running a business, starting a family and all of the other aspects of ordinary life that can be causes of worry and anxiety.

For me this really boils down to the value of consistency and repetition. Quite often when people think about inner transformation there is a gap in their mind between the amount of effort they THINK it will take to change bad habits, and the amount of effort it ACTUALLY takes. When they realize that the change that they are looking for will take longer than they thought, they get discouraged and give up.

So, what we are looking for from a mental fitness point of view is developing the ability to practice good mental, emotional and spiritual habits slowly and steadily over a long period of time. This means becoming more like the tortoise than the hare in that traditional children’s story about the race between the hare and the tortoise. We do not want to start off with a lot of enthusiasm, only to lose it when the going gets tough and give up. Rather we need to practise gentle, sustainable effort over a long period of time, without being in too much of a hurry to see results quickly.

This can be difficult for people in this day and age as we are living in a society that has such a quick-fix mentality, where results are wanted instantly but in my experience there are no such methods for deep sustained happiness and fulfilment. Rather, this comes from repeating good happiness habits again and again until they become hard wired into our system. Once they are hard wired in this way, then happiness really does become effortless because it is just a subconscious habit, and natural way that we have of viewing and engaging our world.

So, the basic message of this article is: find out what genuine good quality happiness habits are, then repeat, repeat, repeat!

* After graduated from University I spend the next decade focusing very intensively on meditation and inner growth, including five years as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. In 2003 I left the ordained life and founded my own personal development business.

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

I was listening to a woman called Marilyn Schlitz the other night talking as a guest speaker at an ongoing series of free online seminars on “The Future of Love” . The perspective that she was bringing to the discussion was basically what current scientific research has to say about the development of love. She was asked what her research had revealed the most important factors for the development of love were. She gave five basic qualities or factors that she had found to be most important for the development of any form of healthy love. What I am going to do is list them, giving a brief sentence of my own indicating what is meant.

1) Intention – If you want to develop love, you have to first have the intention to develop love, and then you also have to be willing to focus on developing the different forms of intention that are found in the practice of love itself. For example we need to practice holding the intention to be caring and kind to ourself and others even when we can feel fear and agitation arising in our mind.

2) Attention – Where you focus your attention during the day will create the way you feel. To develop love an essential practice is learning to focus on ourself and others in a way that stimulates love and affection, not agitation and friction.

3) Repetition – Once we have some basic hands on practices for developing love, an essential factor then becomes simply repeating those actions again and again. We need to become familiar with them so that they become second nature. I think this is really where we need to adopt the tortoise and not the hare attitude: Gradual, regular, consistent repeated practice.

4) Guidance – You want to develop love? Plug into those who have already got some! Read books, attend seminars (like the free one mentioned above), attend classes on love, and hang out with people who have love and who can share both their love and their loving know-how with you. Surround yourself with (to use the Buddhist term) a “love-sangha” or love community!

5) Surrender – Love is always available to us one way or another, but it seems we have many (conscious and unconscious) barriers and defences to letting it in. Are you prepared to surrender to love, in the sense of allowing yourself to be vulnerable and sensitive enough to really feel it deeply? This is a challenge for all of us, but one that we need to meet!

Actually it seems like you could apply these five factors to any inner quality that you wish to develop, the most interesting thing to me is that they are an answer from a contemporary scientist investigating love, so it is not just a subjective opinion.

May you love and be loved!

© Toby Ouvry 2010 Please do not reproduce without permission

Today I want to talk about two very important qualities that you start to build within ourself through any form of mind-body relaxation and/or awareness practice. People reading this article will be coming from a lot of different backgrounds, for some their awareness practice may be simple body-scanning to relax the muscles in their body and manage stress. For others it may be in the form of a regular spiritual contemplation and reflection. Either way, whenever you do any form of activity that stimulates the relaxation response you create an inner space where there is an opportunity to build what I call your natural intelligence and natural dignity. Consciously understanding and thinking about these two qualities can help us to develop them faster and more deeply in combination with any mental relaxation or awareness practice that you may have.

Natural intelligence.

Natural intelligence is simply your innate ability to learn, problem solve and generally figure things out from DIRECT OBSERVATION. When your mind and body are relaxed and calm, you have a NATURAL FACILITY to just look at things and learn about what works and what doesn’t. This natural intelligence does not require a philosophy (though by using it you may develop one), it does not require complex conceptual knowledge, it DOES require you to be able to have enough confidence and inner calm to start to trust and use it effectively. Here are a few example of where I developed and used it in my life:

- At art school as a sculpture student, I had a lot of technical problems that were involved in how to make sculpture effectively; How tall can I build this clay sculpture before it falls over? How can I communicate an emotional idea that I have in my head in a silent three-dimensional form? How can I make an effective sculpture avoiding any unnecessary processes that harm the environment (e.g. fibreglass etc…)? All of these questions can be informed by asking others, looking at other artworks and so on, but for the most part what I needed was just to keep looking, keep observing, trial and error, using my natural intelligence.

- As a mental fitness and life coach. One thing that I have discovered in my teaching and coaching career is that learning different modalities of coaching and learning will only get me so far in terms of bringing real benefit to the diverse group of people whom I coach and assist. The fulcrum of my coaching practice (and the one that I believe makes me the most valuable to others) is the ability to look at people’s lives and situations with my natural intelligence. This enables me to enter into the person’s life, understand its context, observe it, and then ON THAT BASIS offer a series of suggestions that are going to be relevant and useful to that person and that will help them direct their life in the way that they want it to go.

 Natural dignity

Natural dignity is something that every creature has. For example if you look at a mouse or an ant going about its daily business you will start to observe that, whatever dangers it is fending off or jobs that it is doing, they are basically happy to be themselves. An ant is happy to be an ant, it is not thinking about becoming a grasshopper. A mouse is comfortable in its own skin, in its “mouseness”. It is not trying to be something else, and in this you can sense a natural dignity, an unconscious self respect that the mouse possesses in being what it is.

Humans however, amidst all their mental complexity and egoic insecurity very easily loose touch with their natural dignity, the dignity of their humanness and just being who they are. Humans often look at other humans and want to be the other that they see. They look at their bodies and want another, better looking body. They look at their skill sets, consider them inferior and want someone else’s that seem better. Basically we as humans have lost touch with the natural sense of dignity that comes from being comfortable as we are, warts and all. Natural dignity is completely different from being lazy or a slob. Laziness and slobbiness is almost always accompanied by low self esteem and self loathing “I want to be something else, but I have given up trying” it says. Natural dignity is just a sense that you have, when your mind and body relax enough for it to come to the surface that says “I am comfortable in my uniqueness and the validity of my place in this world and in the universe, and I don’t have to validate myself to feel dignified in who I am”.

 So, whatever form of self awareness and or relaxation practice that you have (if you don’t have one, I encourage you to get it!), I would encourage you to nurture and develop your own natural intelligence and dignity within that space.

 © Toby Ouvry 2010, please do not reproduce without permission