Yearly Archives: 2020

Mirror, Mirror … In The Brain

The mirror neuron A mirror reflects back to us what we cannot see directly. We cannot directly see the inner subjective experience of someone else, and yet the capacity to ‘put ourselves into someone else’s shoes’ is essential for human survival, good relationships, and health in general. What does it mean to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and how do we do that? […]

By |2021-01-20T17:01:06+00:00December 22nd, 2020|Mindfulness|

The Often Elusive Sense Of Who We Are

Thrive to live meaningful lives in health and well-being Occasionally, as during this past week, important insights of potentially universal interest arise from the work in self-exploration in my psychodynamic groups. What we can learn from the detailed work the group members were involved in, is worth sharing for the benefit of a larger audience. For reasons of confidentiality, no identifying details are mentioned of course. […]

By |2021-04-06T13:51:26+00:00October 12th, 2020|Essays, Mindfulness|

In The Beginning Is Now – Mindsight Intensive

The Mindsight Intensive course begins soon, and during the preparation, the notion of a beginning intrigued me. Not only are we at the beginning of an academic year, but to me, the fall is also the beginning of a descent into the unconscious realms of our psyche, in which we roam during the winter, and hopefully derive great benefit from the creative potential to be unleashed for the upcoming spring and summer. […]

By |2021-04-06T13:53:46+00:00October 4th, 2020|Mindfulness|

The 2020/2021 Mindsight Intensive Curriculum

Mindsight Topics and Programs for wisdom, peace, and equanimity. As usual, this year’s program will introduce new topics not emphasized or explored before. We will expand our tools beyond mindsight to include mindful action from a deeper understanding of the power of the present moment. This program will be heavily experiential, immersing students into the direct and in-depth exploration of direct, intimate experience through mindsight, both internally with themselves and externally with others. Our goal is wisdom, peace, and equanimity NOW, not tomorrow. […]

By |2021-05-11T14:00:39+00:00September 7th, 2020|Mindfulness, News|

Long-term intensive group psychotherapy – a magnificent therapeutic modality in danger of extinction

Group Psychotherapy provides exactly the kind of safe, but intense transformative environment some of us need to heal deeply. On June 14, 2020, Dr. John Salvendy, co-founder and first president of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association sadly passed away. In 1984 he became my group psychotherapy supervisor during my psychiatric residency at the University of Toronto. Within 3 years he taught me everything I needed to know to begin my own 35 years of group psychotherapy practice. […]

By |2022-04-10T16:23:42+00:00July 26th, 2020|Mindfulness|

Our COVID-19 Program Approach

Navigating our mindfulness and therapy programs in COVID times. Our government is following a general world-wide trend of beginning to loosen our social isolation so that society can get back to more ‘normal’ interaction patterns, work, and economic prosperity. Within this context, our team had to decide when we can start meeting with our patients, students, and participants in person again. […]

By |2021-08-11T19:26:34+00:00July 3rd, 2020|Short reflections|

Why Transcendence And Emptiness Are Pure Love

When we train our minds to expand consciousness In my two blogs ‘Initiation Renaissance In Our Pandemic Times’ and ‘Wu Wei’, I wrote about a subjective, yet universally accessible dimension of reality that opens up like wakefulness emerging from a dream, when we train our minds to expand consciousness through successive stages of depth and integration, all the way to the realization of the transcendental emptiness of Being. […]

By |2021-04-06T13:58:28+00:00May 30th, 2020|Mindfulness|

WU Wei

Life unfolds between moments of doing something and moments of doing nothing. One is the opposite of the other in the same dimension of external appearances. Life seems to pendulate between the polarities of activity and rest. But that is just the surface. There is a third doing belonging to another dimension: Non-doing at the core of both doing something and doing nothing. This non-doing is the secret bridge to life’s dimension that in its becoming and disappearing, arising and fading, is independent of whether we do something or do nothing. From the depths of this other dimension of life, or of Life (with capital L) if you so want, the law of Being manifests as one of the most essentially human characteristics – presence. [...]

By |2021-05-18T13:45:13+00:00May 9th, 2020|Mindfulness|

Initiation Renaissance In Our Pandemic Times

Mindsight in Our Pandemic Times COVID is one of those unpredictable natural phenomena that throws the whole of humanity into multi-level turmoil, challenging much of how we thought we can live our lives. We are forced to reflect, review and rethink how we live on this planet, making it improbable to hold on to the old consciousness horizons we were used to. This can be seen as a form of initiation we are willy-nilly subjected to. […]

By |2021-05-25T14:29:17+00:00April 18th, 2020|Essays, Mindfulness|

Counteracting Our Mind’s Deceptive Ways – The Case For Careful Self-Monitoring

Counteracting Our Mind’s Deceptive Ways in Meditation The Case For Careful Self-Monitoring We constantly intend many things in life, but all too often what turns out does not correspond to what we intended. We then blame factors outside our control, rather than noticing that we undermine our own intentions. How so? A very simple mechanism plays a predominant role: We forget to self-monitor, assuming that once an intention has run out of the gate, the stars are properly aligned for all concerned neurofirings to shoot in the same direction as they do the intention’s bidding. This could not be more wrong! Just because we intend something, does not mean that our actions actually follow what we intend at all. […]

By |2021-05-25T14:38:01+00:00March 18th, 2020|Mindfulness|
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