This is an interesting quote from Herman Hess’s “Steppenwolf”:

“…his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same isolation and despair.”

I find it very interesting to think of self criticism and self hate as really just being the flip side of egotism. We are very quick to out down ourself and other people for being egotistical, but seem much more tolerant of people (including our own selves) who are overly critical of themselves and have low self esteem.

If we really realize that these two activities are  EQUALLY egotistical, then how would that affect our current view and tolerance of self criticism?

© 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

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Check out Toby’s Meditation Classes. 

My home computer is very slow. Today things reached a bit of a head for me, I was working at home and getting very frustrated by my computers ever increasing slowness, the more I tried to do, the slower it got!

I found the answer after taking a break for 20 minutes. I adopted a strategy of opening no more than one, maximum two programs at a time on the computer, so that it has less to process at any given time. The result is that it worked a treat, the computer started working a lot faster, and I also found that consciously trying to do only one task at a time actually made my time at the keyboard a lot more mindful, spacious and enjoyable.

From now on I am going to adopt this practice with all computer work, not just when I am on a super slow one!

© 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

Enjoyed this post? Why not sign up for Toby’s free Creative Meditations E-Newsletter?

Check out Toby’s Meditation Classes. 

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

Hi Everyone,

Continuing on the emotional intelligence theme from the last few articles on the mental fitness blog, here is a simple, practical technique for upgrading your emotional intelligence.

Psychologist Albert Ellis created a simple, three stage process for understanding how our emotions develop called the ABC model.

Put briefly it looks like this:

A – The ACTIVATING EVENTS that stimulate emotions in us

When we experience a difficult emotion there is always an activating event or interaction that triggers it. Quite often if we have not developed our emotional intelligence it will appear that this event is the primary cause of the emotion that we experience.

B – The BELIEFS that cause us to react/respond to the situation in a particular way (note we have conscious and unconscious beliefs)

This is the second and far more hidden cause of our emotions. Within our mind we have a complex structure of belief that arises from what we have been taught and experienced previously in our life. We experience our life through a complex web of conditioned beliefs that arise from our past experience

C – The emotional CONSEQUENCES arising from the activating event and our belief

Finally, in the third or “C” stage we see the actual emotion that has developed as a result of the coming together of the activating event (stage A), with the belief structures in our mind (Stage B). Stage C sees the development of a fully fledged emotion arising from an inner and outer cause reacting together.

Three Questions to ask ourselves based around the ABC model

The next time you find yourself struggling with a difficult emotion, ask yourself these three questions:

1) What is the outer cause or activating event of this emotion?

2) What is the inner belief structure in my mind that has stimulated this emotion?

3) Based around the understanding I have developed from questions one and two, what is the most intelligent, compassionate (toward self and others), and empowering way I can respond to this emotion?

Thanks for reading!

Yours in the spirit of emotional intelligence,

Toby

Hi Everyone,

Last week I looked at how it can be very useful and fulfilling to identify some of the Compelling Moments in Your Life and use them as objects of contemplation and meditation. This week I want to focus on the difficult or challenging decisions that we have made in our life and why it is important to integrate these into our meditation and awareness training.

When we make a difficult or challenging decision, generally we do so with an awareness that there will be consequences that we will have to deal with. However, having made the decision it is easy to then forget that we made the decision and start blaming other people or circumstances for our problems. Here are a couple of examples:

• If we make a decision to be a care provider for a family member who has a long-term illness, initially we may do so willingly as we are clear about why we chose to care for them (out of love). However, as the months and years go by, and we have to make one sacrifice after another for this person, it can be easy to forget that it was our choice to care for the person and instead we start blaming the person for the troubles and sacrifices that we are making in our life.
• You decide not to go for a job that pays substantially more than your present one, but you choose not to because you have ethical concerns about what it may ask of you. A friend or colleague of yours applies for a similar job, and soon you see him/her driving around in a nicer car than you, taking their family on exotic holidays and so on. Seeing this it is easy to forget the reasons you did not go for the job, and simply feel regretful or jealous of your peers newfound resources.

In both of the above cases the person has made a GOOD decision for the RIGHT reason. However, s/he will have to remain mindful of the choice s/he has made and renew it EVERY DAY in order to avoid feelings of bitterness, resentment, envy and so on.

Difficult choices are difficult because they have very real consequences that may not be easy to accept. Difficult choices are often made with higher or deeper motivations in mind, and so in order to avoid suffering as a result of making these choices, we need to REMEMBER WHY WE MADE THEM!

 How I avoided feelings of envy and bitterness toward my friends and peers upon leaving my life as a Buddhist Monk

Somewhere in the middle of my University Fine-Art Degree in the early 90’s I made a definite choice to dedicate ten or so years of my life to the serious investigation of meditation and spirituality. After leaving University this choice took me deep into meditation practice and ended up with five years as a Buddhist monk, making absolutely no money, but acquiring a lot of spiritual knowledge and experience.

Ten years down the line in the Christmas of 2002 I found myself in Singapore having left my life as monk with about fifty bucks in my pocket, and cheap hotel accommodation for a week. As I moved back into secular life, I started to reconnect to my friends and peers. All of them had more money than me, many had a home and family, some had exiting and fulfilling careers. Outwardly it looked like I was WAY behind all these guys and I could feel feelings of bitterness at my situation, envy, thoughts of being a “worthless nobody” all coming up in my mind.

One of the found to be most helpful at that time is just to think back and realize that where I was now was 100% a result of my choices ten years before. I had made a choice at University to follow the “spiritual rabbit hole” as far as it would take me, and that I did. So, there was a price that I paid for this, which was the development of my secular life, monetary wealth, security and status (and let’s not talk about the amount of potential good sex that I gave up please!). I had chosen to give that up, there was no one else to blame. Was it worth it? When I thought about why I had made the choice, and the inner wealth that I had acquired as a consequence it was a no brainer OF COURSE IT WAS WORTH IT!

By remembering my difficult choice I was able to overcome my insecurity, bitterness, envy and all of the other unpleasant emotions that I was having, and this is why remembering your difficult, existential choices is important!

So, what are the difficult choices that you have had to make in your life, and that you now need to remember in order to avoid suffering and pain now?

If after reading this article you can note down two or three of your own difficult choices, and make the effort to remember why they were worth making, then this article will have served its purpose. 

Thanks for reading,

Toby

PS: Quick reminder for those in Singapore of the charity meditation on “Welcoming in the Spring and the Chinese New Year of the Rabbit” tomorrow, Tuesday 8^th February. Hope you can make it!

PPS: If you enjoyed this article, you can sign up to receive automatic notification of Toby’s articles in the box the top right hand side of www.mentalfitnessnow.com

Article © Toby Ouvry 2011. You are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@tobyouvry.com

 Hi Everyone, 

Following on from my previous article on defining and developing your emotional intelligence, here is a short exercise that if you do it will rapidly provide you with some insights about your emotional life and how you can broaden and diversify it, thus increasing its quality and breadth. 

Step 1:

If you were to write down how many emotions, positive and negative you experience in any given day or week how many do you think you would find? Try it and see, for most people it would tend to be about ten to twelve

 Step 2:

Now write down over a five minute period all of the emotions that you can think of. Chances are by the end of five minutes you will still be writing. If you think about it there are probably fifty or sixty that you can come up with without trying too hard. Buddha listed 84,000, but let’s stay with our own personal list and work with that for now!

 Step 3:

Look at your list of all emotions that you have gleaned from step 2 and select:

• One positive emotion that you are already experiencing and would like to cultivate more of in your daily life
• One positive emotion that you are currently not experiencing at all in your life, but you would like to start integrating
• One positive emotion from your step 2 list that can act as a counter to one of the negative emotions that you have listed in step 1. For example, if a negative emotion that you list in step 1 is “irritation”, then you might select “calm” from your list of all emotions.

These three emotions are your “key emotional growth emotions”. Write these three key emotions down and paste them somewhere where you will see them regularly.

 Step 4:

For the next week, next month, or other set period do one activity each day that is specifically geared to developing one, two or all three of your key emotional growth emotions. Each activity can be of a length that is suitable and realistic. It could be a simple three minute meditation where you focus on each positive emotion as you breathe for one minute each in turn. Alternatively it could be an entire activity that you do. For example to use the irritation/calm example above, you could go for a walk on the weekend where you specifically use the time and atmosphere to cultivate a sense of inner calm.

 So there you go, a simple four step method for enjoying your emotional life more!

 Thanks for reading,

 Toby

PS: For events and classes by Toby, click HERE .

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© Toby Ouvry 2011. You are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Hi Everyone,

Over the next few articles on the mentalfitnessnow.com blog I want to look at the fundamentals of emotional intelligence. Over the past couple of decades emotional intelligence (EQ) has received an increasing amount of attention as people realized that it takes more than just the development of the intellect (IQ) to create a balanced, rounded and happy person! One of the more prominent books that champions EQ is “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman, which is a good read for those that really want to look at the subject in depth.

The many types of intelligence:

The first thing to understand is that human beings have not just one type of intelligence, but many types of intelligence. One of the first people to articulate this was Howard Gardener in his Theory of multiple-intelligences where he listed eight principal intelligences that human beings possess, and which a well rounded education should help to develop. Since Gardener coined the term “multiple intelligences”, others thinkers have come up with other definitions of what exactly they are, but in general there is a consensus agreement that we have somewhere between 8-12 primary intelligences that can be developed and measured.

So, developing emotional intelligence exists within the overall context and discipline of developing our multiple-intelligences. Human beings are so talented! I often think that it is a shame that so many of us are not making more of an effort to develop these multi-dimensional talents. But we can start, and we can start today, beginning with our emotional intelligence! 

Emotional intelligence defined:

To start working with any type of intelligence, we need to have a working definition of what we mean by it

“The ability to understand emotional energy, and to be able to positively create, positively control and evaluate emotions in ourself and in groups effectively”. This is what we mean when we say emotional intelligence or EQ, at least within the context of these articles. 

So, what are emotions?

The first step in developing our EQ and emotional mastery is to be able to identify emotions as they exist and function in our lives. Let’s start by looking at two descriptions of emotions:

1. Emotion is - The level of energy that lies between our mind and body. Emotion arises from the inter-action of our mind upon our body and vice versa.

When your body is tired, the tired feeling in the body makes it easy for our mind and thoughts to turn negative. Conversely, a good night’s sleep and the feeling of a well rested body make it easy to maintain a happy positive mind.

When your mind is happy and thinking positive, the feeling created in the mind makes it easy for the body to feel happy and balanced. Conversely when the mind is unhappy and thinking negative we can feel lethargic, and negative in the body. So, emotional energy is this feeling level of our being that lies in between our mind and body.  

2. Emotion is - The “feeling tone” of any given level of our being; physical, sexual, mental etc…

Every level of your being has a feeling tone, almost like a musical note or colour associated with it.

 When your physical body feels well if you listen to it, you can “hear” its health like a beautiful clear note in your cellular structure.

If you feel into the quality of a thought pattern that you have in your mind, you can observe that it has a resonance or vibration quality. Angry thoughts, confident thoughts, loving thoughts all have a certain tone that is unique to them and differentiates them from other thoughts.  

These feeling tones are the emotional aspect of your personal experience.

Similarly, you can also observe that places, landscapes and buildings have their own “feeling tones” which are their emotional qualities.

Getting started

Getting started with emotional intelligence means first of all learn to watch yourself and your daily experience, and observe closely the emotional level of both you and your environment.

Take the time to watch how the energy of your mind and body are interacting together to create feelings. Listen to the “feeling tone” of your thoughts. When you go to a new place, observe the underlying emotional ambience that lies behind and within the physical appearance.

Watching closely like this will enable you to begin to start gaining practical knowledge of your own emotional being and how to start working with it.

Yours in the spirit of emotional intelligence,

Toby 

PS: The Meditation and Qi gong program for January 2010 is out. Plenty of good stuff available for both beginners and more advanced!

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

Why does it take work to feel good about yourself and who you are in a non-egoic way and generally have a positive,healthy self image? Here are a few reasons:

• Because if you live in a consumer society the people and corporations who want you to buy things know that you will be more inclined to do so if you believe that you are incomplete, unworthy and worthless. A lot of adverts that we see each day are basically saying “Feeling bad, feel like a nobody, don’t worry, just get this product and you can be someone just by owning it!”
• Because our biological brain is trained to see fear, negativity and threats in a fraction of a second, whereas it takes our brain at least 10-30 seconds of focusing on a positive object for its impact to register in the same way. This is why you have to focus for definite periods each day on the good and the positive in your life, because otherwise your survival based brain will tend to kick in and keep you locked in fear and vulnerability mode.
• We have inherited psychological programming’s from our education, parents and family ( often no fault of their own, they inherited it from their parents and so on…), TV and the internet that cause us to re-enforce the negatives; You need this type of job to be accepted, you need to look like this to be lovable, if you are not part of this societal group you are a looser…the list goes on.
• Because in order to develop a healthy self image we need to continually fight against the laziness and “path of least resistance” approach in our mind that would really rather just remain stuck in dysfunction and negativity rather than haul its ass out of the mire and start building a genuinely happy and positive relationship to ourself and our life.

What to do about this?

Well, you need to do SOMETHING to improve your self-image, and do something each day without fail! The main thing to realize is that it is not going to happen by itself, so you need to take responsibility for it!

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@mentalfitnessnow.com

CATCH TOBY’S WORKSHOP ON “HOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF YOUR STRESS” NOVEMBER 14^TH AT SANCTUARY ON THE HILL!

When trying to develop and appropriately thick skin to deal with the challenges and attacks that life and our relationships throws at us we can fall into two extremes:

•  We can be too sensitive to what others say or do to us, making us emotionally vulnerable and negative at the slightest hint of criticism
•  We can become too sensitive, blocking not just the attacks that other people direct at us, but also the love, complements and positivity. This starves us of the positive emotion and feeling that we need to be emotionally healthy and inwardly whole 

To avoid either of the two extremes we need to develop what could be thought of as a “semi-permeable thick skin”.

This semi-permeable psychological skin protects from:

• Verbal attacks and negative energy from others
•  Negativity coming from our own “inner-critic” the voice in our head that always sees the mistakes that we make
•  Enables us to strain out the negativity and take on the positive lessons when we or our work are critiqued by others
• Protects us from negative ambient energy, for example in an office where there is a lot of anger, competitiveness of jealousy

However it allows the following to penetrate our energy field and mind, allowing us to appreciate them fully:

• When someone complements us, we take it in and appreciate it in a non-egotistical manner
• We are able to receive emotional support and kind words from others. Loving in relationships is about REVIEVING as well as giving
• When we are offered something of beauty in a now-moment. For example seeing a sunset as we ride on the bus, receiving healing energy from trees as we walk through the park
• When it is appropriate to feel grateful and appreciative of something good that is happening in our life 

Exercise for developing your semi-permeable thick skin

See yourself surrounded by a semi-permeable bubble of protective golden light. In crowded environments you can shrink it to the contours of your body, so it becomes like a body glove.

During the day practise learning when to consciously open up your golden bubble and allow positive energy into your energy-field (as in the examples above), and when to consciously close it down and make it an impermeable wall of protection (as in the examples of attacks above).

The idea with this exercise is to be able to consciously oscillate between being appropriately open and vulnerable (able to take positive energy in) and appropriately closed and protected, blocking negative attacks and energy, preventing it from damaging or crippling us.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you MUST seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@mentalfitnessnow.com 

CATCH TOBY’S WORKSHOP ON “HOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF YOUR STRESS” NOVEMBER 14^TH AT SANCTUARY ON THE HILL!