Recently, Idanim conducted a 1-hour masterclass with one of our experts Toby Ouvry, meditation and mindfulness coach at INSEAD School of Business, Singapore campus, on the fundamentals of mindfulness meditation. This session was dedicated to help people discover how to harness their senses, mind, and consciousness to live in the present moment for heightened awareness and controlled thoughts.Watch the video below to find out what is the meaning of meditation in the complete masterclass conducted by our expert Toby Ouvry.
In this blog, we will be sharing some of the key takeaways from the masterclass. Toby answered the question - “What is the meaning of meditation?”. He explained that mindfulness meditation means to focus our attention on an object that, when we contemplate it, causes our mind to become positive, calm, and happy. He spoke about the 3 areas within our field of awareness i.e the senses, the feelings and the thoughts and explained about them. He further added that while senses are more on the outside, the awareness in mind is more subtle. For example, a sense is like a landscape that can be seen by everyone but what one’s mind perceives is limited to them only. Let’s talk about these primary fields of awareness in detail:
Meditating on senses: It is like experiencing your body like a mountain, your thoughts and associated feelings as clouds, and your mind or consciousness as the sky. By relating to the solidity of your body as being like a mountain, you can re-contextualize how you experience your thoughts and feelings. Being less easily swayed and manipulated by them, you bring solidity to your experience of the present moment.
Meditating on mind: Practicing meditation with your mind, you ground your body like a mountain and watch your thoughts as if there are clouds in the sky. Use these thoughts, the clouds, and the awareness to make yourself present. You need to focus on the lighter, brighter clouds or thoughts rather than gloomy ones.
Meditating on consciousness: When you practice mindfulness with consciousness, you watch your thoughts and notice the spaces between thoughts, drop into these spaces and extend them significantly, and insert a short pause or still-point at the bottom of each breath to help get comfortable in that sky-like space of your conscious awareness.
The class ended with a live guided meditation practice on all of these fields of awareness, followed by Toby taking up a few questions from the audience. By the end of the session every one in the audience could answer what is the meaning of meditation. You can learn about the audience's frequently asked questions about mindfulness meditation here.
