Ralph struggled for years digesting childhood trauma, because he never could reconcile a repeated tug of war between two mind states that kept painfully repeating themselves in everyday life. Either he reflected on his trauma and he felt like he was intellectually examining someone else’s experience from afar without much details of experience, or he got plunged into reliving the trauma in all its details and felt he was drowning in a tornado of unbearable pain. This left him at a loss as to which view point is the truth.

Our organism is fundamentally energy flow organized into a temporarily well orchestrated collection of interrelated energy flow processes of different kinds and complexities. As such we are energy flow processing machines capable of modulating this energy flow in different complex ways that manifest as different organismic structures, from cells to organs, organ systems and minds. As energy enters our organism through its senses, it first flows in an unencumbered way, only limited by the structure of each sense organ that specializes in capturing a limited aspect of the universe’s energy flow. For example, our eyes only capture the energy flow of light between the wave lengths of 400-700 nanometers. X-rays, infrared or ultraviolet light with wave lengths outside this visible spectrum are not captured by our eyes. This energy that flows unencumbered from the environment into the organism gives rise to what we call ‘direct experience’, and is referred to as ‘bottom-up processing’ or ‘conduit’. Direct somatic sensations in your body are an example of this. When you are fully immersed in the conduit, you feel you are in the middle of direct experience like being in the middle of the market place with all its noises, smells and other sensations, like being in the streets of Paris or in the process of eating a meal. In the midst of the traumatic tornado of his past, Ralph is in the conduit.

This energy then flows through the peripheral nervous system into the central nervous system up the ladder of increasingly complex elaborations by the different levels of the brain. In this process this ‘pure’ energy gets mixed in with and influenced by memory and organization of prior experience, thus turned into a constructed energy form we call ‘top-down processing’ or ‘constructor’. This constructed energy form manifests in different ways, one being thoughts about the direct experience of conduit, experienced as a distant intellectualized conceptualization of direct experience, like looking at the market place from a hill top afar, like looking at a map of Paris with pictures or reading the menu before a meal.

What’s important is to realize that both conduit and constructor are essential aspects of human experience, none more important than the other. The problem arises when we get locked in either place. Ordinarily we get locked into a life lived from the point of view of the constructor, without access to the conduit, thus losing access to a tremendous amount of information necessary for a fully embodied, alive and healthy life experience. People with trauma like Ralph often experience the distressing opposite of getting locked into reliving the trauma in the conduit, thus losing the necessary perspective for living a balanced life.

For Ralph the revelation came when I pointed out the pros and cons of each view, and the fact that far from being contradictory or conflictual views of different realities as he saw it, they are complementary and convergent views of the same reality. Imagine walking a trail in the jungle, experiencing nature in all its full and impactful glory, and experiencing this same jungle viewed from the space station with all the context of this marvelous blue planet in a cold, vast and scary universe.

While abstract and virtual, the constructor is also immensely flexible, capable of tremendous creativity in developing new maps, viewpoints, stories and understandings. The constructor makes human civilization and culture possible. The conduit is much more fixed and concrete. While the constructor can easily appear stale, dead, cold and not nourishing like a menu in comparison to a meal, the conduit is fresh, vibrant, alive and nourishing like the meal itself. The conduit is always just freshly emerging in the present moment, presenting reality by conveying the sense of presence that the constructor, always only re-presenting reality, is unable to. Through the presence of the conduit we live and relive direct life in all its infinite details in a constantly new and fresh process of emergence and recreation. Meanwhile, the constructor roams the far-away times of non-existence, the past that is no more except in the form of its repetition in the present, and the future that is not yet except in the form of anticipation in the present. The uniqueness and specificity of conduit experience contrasts to the averaged, invariant experience of the constructor, giving the conduit the power of presence and directly lived life, and the constructor the power of re-presentation, planning and problem-solving. As such, in the conduit vibrancy and aliveness come with excitement or fear, while in the constructor abstractness and virtuality come with calmness or numbness. Through the conduit we dig up memories that are locked in our bodies in their implicit form, making them available to the constructor in their explicit form. The conduit allows us to tap into the richness of moment-by-moment energy flow, the constructor helps us use this information to develop coherent narratives about our lives. In short, we need access to the conduit to feel alive and access to the constructor to gain perspective. Through the conduit we feel, through the constructor we learn. Mastering access to both in a balanced way is what wisdom is all about.

Ralph needed to learn how to freely navigate with his attention and awareness these shifts between conduit and constructor. His organism was like a dysfunctional orchestra with corners of rigidity and chaos everywhere that impeded him to function harmoniously as a whole. He needed to harness the power of a central integrator, of a good orchestra director so to speak, to bring those parts into harmonious collaboration. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) is what has this function in our brains, and through meditation and psychotherapy we harness its power of master integrator.

Each time he moved into the conduit, aided by the tools of mindful inquiry he was learning, he faced the fear of re-experiencing old traumas in real time by holding the experience in the loving embrace of his MPC’s awareness. Then, instead of being re-traumatized by simply reliving the trauma on autopilot, the relived experience and its correlated neurofiring patterns became a bit more reconnected with the whole organism that he is, a bit more integrated. This made it possible for him to be a bit better able to meaningfully interact with the rest of his mind, instead of remaining sequestered in dissociated chunks of energy flows. Conversely, each time he moved from the conduit into the constructor, equally aided by the tools of mindful inquiry, after having relived and reexamined another chunk of dissociated conduit experience in more detail, he could develop a more coherent narrative of his life’s story, a more coherent map of the scary jungle of his energy flow, a more comprehensive view of the conduit terrain. Toggling back and forth like that, from danger to safety and back, from immersion into the jungle of direct experience to the perspective on the wide context of his existence and back, his picture of reality became increasingly complete, differentiated and complex (as opposed to ‘complicated’, the way it was before when he was caught in chaos).

Such evolution comes with an increased sense of relief from suffering, a decrease of symptoms and greater health. It is important to mention that the techniques and tools necessary to deal with the conduit and the constructor are partly different, which is why the combination of psychotherapy and meditation is so crucial. This may be a little too simplified, but roughly speaking the constructor is only fully accessible through psychotherapy, while the conduit only through meditation. Ultimately, Ralph discovered that both conduit and constructor show an aspect of the same truth; both your expedition into the jungle and your space walk at the space station reveal different aspects of the same truth, aspects we need to lovingly and wisely hold in the great arms of our awareness with openness and acceptance, without excluding any view. Only then do we discover how these different perspectives are not conflicted, but complementary, and that TRUTH beyond this truth or that truth, can only be intuited by embracing all of its different manifestations into one whole.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Your limitless capacity for self-deception

A student asked:

“If the blind spot can be so convincing, and so can the illusion of separateness, how do we know connectedness and oneness is not also an illusion? How do we know that ‘it’ (if I have even the faintest idea of what I am talking about, I think you call it the ‘nameless’) is actually a thing? How do we know it’s not yet another fabrication of the mind, especially my mind that longs to feel connected?“

I have often said that the human capacity for self-deception is limitless. This may suggest that attempts at getting a glimpse of any kind of encompassing truth is hopeless. If that is the case, we might as well give up our inquiry into reality, stop our explorations in mindfulness and mindsight, go home and smell the decaying roses of a fleeting lifetime with as little awareness as possible until we vanish six feet under. In fact, if you approach life from a purely left-brain problem-solving perspective without a good dose of defensive protection against the complex stirrings of your unconscious, you might well find yourself in such a hopeless pickle.

Now see what happens when you reflect more deeply on your limitless capacity for self-deception. What I mean with ‘more deeply’ is an engagement of your right brain in connection with your left brain, guided and harmonized by your master integrator, the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC). Practically speaking, this means experiencing this statement (the limitless capacity for self-deception) with the full array of your potential for experiencing reality fully, including your thoughts and intellect, your fantasies and images, your memories, your feelings, your somatic sensations, your five external senses experiences, your sense of relatedness to the large context of social relationships, your sense of embeddedness in the large context of ecology, geography, our planet, and the universe, and your awareness seemingly holding all that jazz like a loving mother holds her baby in her arms.

What happens is that even our limitless illusions reveal a mysterious spaciousness around them that dissolves all noise and activity into a vast stillness of unspeakable depth. Imagine looking at a long stick in an aquarium, partly submerged in water, partly sticking out on top. Because of the refraction of light it appears broken, and yet you know it is not. The illusion is real and inescapable, and yet your mind in this case knows a deeper truth that is not accessible through the senses. Our situation with ‘ultimate truth’ is not dissimilar. Awareness reaches beyond the appearances created by the mind, revealing reality beyond the categorizations of our mind, beyond the either/or’s of our intellect, beyond our cherished words and stories that need to capture in order to understand, and cannot know without capturing.

So here is the thing: The nameless is not a thing. Let me back up for a moment. Everything we know is a thing in the widest sense of its meaning. The universe is made of things, and not nothing. Even nothing is a thing we can conceptualize, that thing called complete absence of things. Our cognition is made of bits of information flow called thoughts, which are also things. We think with things called thoughts, and each thought points to another thing elsewhere in the universe. A chair is a thing, an atom is a thing, energy is a thing, freedom is a thing, a black hole is a thing, dark energy is a thing, everything is a thing in its widest sense because our mind thinks with a currency (our thoughts) that is also a thing.

When I then say that the nameless is not a thing, I make a very simple, although somewhat surprising statement. Without waxing esoteric, I simply say that the nameless is no thing. It is not a thing, and since ‘nothing’ is also a thing we can conceptualize, it is also not nothing. In other words, the nameless cannot be conceptualized, therefore cannot be thought, imagined, named, described, or intellectually known. It’s that simple. You needn’t look any further. You just have to give up thinking about the nameless, trying to figure it out – you can’t. So if you just surrender that way, something shifts in your level of awareness, and you quickly realize that the nameless is a reality outside the purview of the mind.

The flatland example makes the challenge clear: Imagine being a two-dimensional being in a flatland. A sphere moving through your flat world would first appear as a point, then grow into a line up to a certain length, before decreasing in length again to become a point and finally vanish. It is as if the mind was this 2-dimensional flatland, unable to ever see the sphere. It only sees the size-changing lines. Our mind cannot see the nameless. In order to see it, an orthogonal shift is needed, where we can gain access to a further dimension, much like a vertical shift out of our two-dimensional flatland would suddenly open access to the 3-dimensional world, in which we can see the sphere for what it really is. Mindfulness and mindsight training do exactly that, give us access to dimensions of reality that are always there, but never seen or realized.

How do you KNOW that THAT is not also a fabrication of your mind? Because you REALIZE that THAT is beyond mind. This realization is as clear as day and far more real than the partial truths of our story-telling mind. What makes it so clear is its independence from senses and mind, and ironically we find exactly that so disconcerting. The nameless is this non-graspable nameless luminosity that reveals to us an unshakable truth of peace and serenity beyond all movements of mind, time, world, and circumstance, in which all suffering simply stops. The orthogonal shift from line to sphere is as real as when you wake up from a dream. How do you know that when you have woken up from a dream you are not in the dream anymore? You just know. Mind you, you may then be in a new dream you need to wake up from, and that is exactly the goalless journey of awakening – there are levels and levels of increasingly refined awareness, each level shedding completely new light on the previous level. This is why the direction is clear: The path is the goal!

When you are grounded in this truth, no matter how you slice it, all appearances reveal the same nameless essence as their core. And in this core, if you really live from there, humility and love converge to allow you to accept the limitless illusory constructions of your embodied existence with equanimity, KNOWING in a non-intellectual, non-dual sense of wise contemplation, that your embodied existence is just a temporary movement of timeless, nameless and unfathomable potential, always about to be born, to emerge, to pass and to vanish, only to be reborn into another form. This is the famous I AM or I AM THAT I AM beyond the ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ that all spiritual traditions talk about when they refer to who you really are. As they would say in Zen, the nameless is neither a thing, nor nothing, nor both, nor neither.

Enjoy the new vista!

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Learn more about self compassion »

“Where I specifically get stuck is around the “sense of self” and “non-self”. This is a real learning edge for me. I clearly see separation, although many of my spiritual teachers (including you) tell me otherwise. I still think there’s a “Jane Doe”. I get it that if I have a conversation with someone, I can impact their thoughts and behaviour. I also get that my conversation with them can then impact interactions with others. But I don’t see the greater interconnectedness and “non-self” that you describe.”

The central notion to be considered is ‘context’. Here is an example: When you want to build a house, Newton’s laws of physics work perfectly well. In fact, they are the only laws that can be used successfully. But if you want to understand chemistry, galaxies or the finest manifestations of matter, they don’t work anymore. This is to say that Newtonian physics is perfectly valid within a certain well defined context, within certain parameters of reality.

Human beings are organisms in the form of open complex systems with a certain defined anatomical and physiological structure, with sense organs that are also limited by their structure and physiology. We construct a view of reality that is defined by the capacities and limitations of the way our organism is built. Think of this deeply for a moment: You do not experience and see unfettered reality, but what your organism constructs on the basis of a vast reality it is part of, and that is largely inaccessible as such.

And now, let’s get a bit more complex.

Yes, what I said is accurate, sort of, but there is more. We are capable of meta-awareness, of thinking, as well as thinking about both thinking and our experience at large. Like a map, thoughts stand for a reality they represent, and we are capable of manipulating them in lieu of the reality that gets mapped, thereby transcending the limitations of our senses and discovering features of reality that are otherwise inaccessible through our senses. That is what science and philosophy are all about; but not only science. Our mindfulness and mindsight practices also allow us to develop levels of consciousness that go beyond the mind and its sensory constructions to discover features of reality way beyond our common unexamined day-to-day experiences of life.

In lectures of the Mindsight Intensive I have extensively talked about ways our brain is wired to create illusions as a way of protecting the integrity of our organism for survival. These illusions are sometimes more like delusions, meaning that what we subjectively experience does not correspond at all to what is really going on. The eye’s blindspot is such an example. Sometimes they indeed are more illusions, meaning that we do experience what is, but in a distorted, modified or incomplete way. The sense of self is such an example.

As an important survival mechanism humans construct a sense of self from the physiological processes of the body. That I am a passing, impermanent entity that lives a life is clearly an aspect of reality, and the way I experience this entity is in the form of a sense of me as myself. That entity is me, and when I don’t look at it more closely, I end up saying that ‘I am’ this organism. I can also say that the psychological experience of being a distinct organism in nature takes the form of a notion called ‘self’. This is a sloppy conclusion, because saying that this entity is me is only relatively true, relative to a restricted view that is based on a limited use of consciousness.

Look more closely, and you will soon discover that defining who you are by the boundary of your skin is quite problematic. Temporally, when do you start existing? Before your parents’ sperm and egg join, right after, when you are a 3 month embryo, a 7 month embryo, when you are born? Microscopically you have a vast microbiome in your body with billions of microbes that are responsible for your health. Are they you or part of you? Molecules of all sorts are exchanged between your organism and its environment, are they you when they swim through your blood stream and not you anymore when they depart? Where is your mind that has wired your children’s brains and many other people around you, and are other people’s minds that have wired your brain you? As you age and die, molecules and atoms that constantly came and went during your life time and upon your death continue to come and go in new directions, are they you? If you define yourself by the boundary of your skin and your legs are amputated, are you still you? If you define yourself by your personality and you develop Alzheimer’s, are you still you?

For many, identifying one’s sense of self with the apparent boundaries of this organism with a skin that appears like a boundary, is quite problematic and causes a lot of suffering. The way I see who I am can be the source of a lot of anguish when I don’t look deeply into the nature of reality through deeper contemplation. Context is everything. Relatively speaking, like when I build a house, certain local principles of viewing reality can be sufficient for survival, to pay taxes and save for retirement. From a contextually more encompassing perspective, beyond taxes and retirement, there are meaningful existential questions about our existence, our lives and the universe, which cannot be addressed with a conventional state of consciousness designed for survival only. We realize that who we are is far more complex than who we may think we are, and figuring out these deeper truths is profoundly liberating, decreases one’s suffering and provides us with a sense of meaning that is deeply healing and loving. This cannot be done philosophically, but has to be an embodied experience of reality that opens up through mindfulness and mindsight training.

In other words, the sense of self is not a problem per se, and the work does not consist in getting rid of it. The problem lies in our capacity to look deeply and our relationship to the inevitably existing sense of self. If we take it at face value as it presents itself to our awareness in unexamined everyday life, we are likely to suffer, because we only see the tip of the iceberg, believing that it is the whole iceberg. We need to first develop a strong sense of self, meaning a solid sense of the open complex system that we are as it regulates itself for survival throughout a lifetime. In other words, we first have to learn to feed ourselves, work, pay taxes and save for retirement in order to survive. Once that is achieved, we can look deeper and recognize that the tip of the iceberg is part of a much grander reality, much of which is hidden from view and requires special training to be discovered.

No-self then is not a thing that is opposed to this other thing called ‘self’. It is a notion that denotes the impossibility of defining who we are as a separately defined thing. No-self is the realization that who we really are transcends any notion, any nameable essence or entity we can imagine. The self is just the tip of the iceberg, the restricted view of an identity that transcends the boundaries of the skin. The nameless context of unfathomable reality is who we really are, and until we deeply realize that, in the sense of discovering it as a deeply lived reality, not just as intellectual concept, we will tend to continue suffering in more or less subtle ways.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Last year I bought a new shredder for the office – a Fellowes shredder. I kept its box and used it in our group room as a little ‘table’ to put papers as we teach. On it is the photograph of a ferocious bulldog determined to hold on and shred whatever it can grip in its powerful jaws. Over the course of time, some people wondered about the emotional impact of this creature on people learning to meditate. It looks menacing, wild and unfriendly. Doesn’t it represent exactly the opposite of the serenity we try to impart in a meditation program?

David, one of our students, took matters into his hands and one day came in with a cute, elegant and stylish little wooden table he donated as a replacement for this horrible box. We were delighted; however, the moment we considered getting rid of the box, a strange affection for the bulldog emerged. Its picture ended up being cut out from the box as the box went into recycling. The sense was that this bulldog, as ferocious as it appeared, was also serving a function, almost a protective and even motivating function. It didn’t take long for David to snatch the cut-out picture and return it to us a few weeks later, nicely framed for our group room. Thank you so much!

Indeed, we have come to love our little ‘fellow’, as it fearlessly stares at us, ready to jump into action, and doggedly pursue whatever goal has to be pursued without flinching. Although seemingly ferocious and maybe even frightening on the surface, he has come to symbolize to us the dogged determination, with which the work in mindfulness and mindsight needs to be pursued. Given that the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, it is not surprising that meeting one’s mind is the most difficult task we’ll ever take on, especially given its enormous complexity and the many ways it can fool us. It takes great patience, tenacity and staying power to practice an hour a day, knowing that it takes 10 years, 10 thousand hours to deeply rewire the brain on this 1000-year journey.

So after all, our little fellow is our friend, our ally on the journey into the unknown jungle, where the task of slaying dragons awaits us.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

When I ask my patients why they feel a certain way, why for example they feel depressed or anxious, they sometimes say they don’t know, and in the same breath often add that they were told they have a chemical imbalance. In their minds what that implies is that like the pancreas in diabetes, their brain has some sort of physical deficit that causes the symptom, and that like Insulin, they have to take medication for the rest of their lives to compensate for the deficiency. This way of thinking gets reinforced when they have parents who suffered from similar symptoms, because genes, so the logic goes, must have passed on this problem. In other words, apart from managing the symptoms through medication, there is little that can be done to remedy the situation, since it is a ‘biological’ or ‘physical’ defect that can only be controlled, not cured.

This reasonable train of thought that applies to the pancreas, does not to the brain – or I should say, is far more complex when we deal with the brain. The pancreas could be crassly compared to a hormone factory. It produces a number of hormones and enzymes. That’s it. If it is defective, there will be a lack of hormones, and there is little you can do. Yes, you can change your diet to modify how much Insulin you need or how efficiently Insulin gets metabolized, but if the Insulin cells are defective, there will be less or no Insulin, and the Insulin cannot change the damage in the pancreas.

Not so with the brain. The brain also produces hormones in the hypothalamus, but its main function is much more exotic. It is an information processor and mapper. It processes energy flow that gets picked up by the internal and external senses, maps different energy flows against each other by making maps of what is going on in the body as it interacts with the environment, then maps those maps (called metamaps) in a multilayered process, until this metamapping becomes incredibly complex. At this complex stage we then refer to the processing of energy flow as information processing. When you make a map of your backyard for example, you are creating a relationship between your actual yard and thoughts you have about the yard. As the brain does the same, but in unimaginably more complex ways, it creates relationships between different levels of information processing and different aspects of reality, including itself. The brain is thus a relationship organ, managing the relationships between the organism and its environment, the organism and itself, and the brain itself with itself. We could say that while the pancreas produces Insulin, the brain ‘produces’ relationships between different levels of information processing. Two more points: (1) When information processing and mapping reaches a certain level of complexity, we seem to experience that as thinking. Thoughts are thus energy flow that points beyond itself, called information flow; what it is pointing to is the content or meaning of the thought. (2) This whole complex process of metamapping acquires the quality of awareness. All in all, the way we experience these relationships between different levels of information processing by the brain is called mind. In short (and admittedly too short to be entirely accurate), while the pancreas produces Insulin, the brain ‘produces’ mind, and mind, unlike Insulin, ‘has a mind of its own’ that is not reducible to the brain, and that in fact can change the wiring and structure of the brain, because the brain is neuroplastic (can rewire itself).

Insulin and mind could therefore not be more different in their relationship to their organ of origin. What’s special about mind is that it contains the ‘you’ who can be in charge by directing attention, and directing attention in certain ways wires the brain. You can use your mind to rewire the brain, and you cannot tell what is primary, the mind or the brain. Objective neurofirings (brain) cause subjective experience (mind), and vice versa. Sometimes neurofirings cause subjective experience, sometimes the other way round, and most times it is impossible to separate the chicken from the egg. Biology causes psychology and vice versa. The brain is minded and the mind embodied. Applied to our notion of chemical imbalance, when you cry for example, there is bound to be a chemical imbalance – the question is where its cause lies: Is a brain-altering substance or physical impingement causing sadness and crying, or is the mind in pain causing alterations in chemical brain functioning expressed as sadness and crying? This shows you how relative the notion of a chemical imbalance is, and that addressing this question is central to the development of a sound treatment approach. To simplify and clarify our discourse, let’s call a chemical imbalance due to a brain alteration a biological chemical imbalance (BCI), one due to a mind alteration a psychological one (PCI).

The way the body and the brain are built and function is partly transmitted from generation to generation through genes – we all know that. What does not get enough attention in the medical community is that the mind also gets transmitted from generation to generation, and the entity of transmission is called the meme. Don’t worry too much about the meme, but this is just to say that if your dad is constantly angry and taking it out on you as a child, your dad’s angry mind will be passed on to your mind, which gets structured by the anger in certain ways that will cause your mind to be dysfunctional. Because of the inextricable interaction between mind and brain, your dysfunctional mind will cause changes in your neurofiring patterns and even your brain structure to cause a dysfunctional brain with a chemical imbalance. No genes involved whatsoever!

Practically speaking this has huge implications for how psychiatrists need to counsel their patients. To deliberately oversimplify in order to make a point, a patient with a psychological chemical imbalance requires primarily psychotherapy and meditation, since mind is the cause of symptoms and needs to be treated in order to fix the imbalance. A patient with a biological chemical imbalance requires primarily medication, since the cause of symptoms is in the brain. The reason this is far too simplistic lies in the fact that the mind can rewire the brain and the brain can change the mind, which means physical brain problems can sometimes be addressed through the mind and mind problems through the brain with medication. At other times the combination of both medication and psychological interventions are the most efficient. Therefore all kinds of subtleties of treatment combinations have to be considered that are too complex to elaborate on in this context. However, an important point emerges from all this: Mind is to a large extent unconscious, and as Voltaire already said long time ago, ‘the heart has its reasons that reason does not know’. Just because we may not understand why we feel a certain way, does not mean there is no hidden reason in the recesses of the mind (in fact there almost always is!). Just because we cannot make sense of our own mind does not mean the cause must be in the genes! Once we acknowledge that, we can also rest in the knowledge that the mind methods we have to help the mind are designed to get at precisely those hidden themes in our lives that cause havoc without us knowing that they do or even exist.

In my practice, in which I do not deal with illnesses such as schizophrenia, where primary brain dysfunction is likely the norm, I mostly see people who suffer from mind problems, not brain problems, and yet so many of my patients are previously treated by other professionals as if they had no mind, as if the mind could not rewire the brain, and as if they had a dysfunctional brain that requires medication. Immediately reaching for the prescription pad when a depressed patient enters the office has two ‘advantages’: It is the kind of quick fix we all tend to crave, and it absolves the patient from months and years of hard mind work. Patients are institutionally encouraged to feel that they have nothing to do with ‘their depression’, and that the doctor can fix it. This attitude may be appealing in theory, but it is akin to treating pneumonia with Tylenol. It does not get at the cause of the problem, even if it alleviates the symptoms, and therefore the medication-induced improvements are more often than not unsatisfactory, incomplete or outright ineffective in the long run. To be told you have a BCI, when in fact you suffer from a PCI, is counterproductive and at best yields unsatisfactory results, at worst can make patients much worse.

Never forget, therefore, no matter what kind of illness you struggle with, that as a human being you are minded. You have a mind, and your mind is simultaneously very subtle and powerful. One way or another, whether your ailment is physical, psychological or spiritual, the skill and proficiency, with which you know how to use your mind, will be the single most determining factor in how well you will navigate life’s complexities. As Buddha said, ‘your untrained mind is your worst enemy, your trained mind your best friend’. If you ignore your mind, you will keep creating untold suffering for yourself.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

I invite you to visit us behind the scene, where things are messy. We prepare, we teach, we supervise, we train, we plan, we implement, we dream, we fail, we regroup, we change directions, we struggle, we disagree, we sweat, we are tired, we rest, we succeed, we enjoy, we laugh, and we are ferocious. In what follows, just a little snapshot on what is going on and what we envision, knowing that everything may turn out differently than expected.

Dr. Linda MacDonald has continued to teach all the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs, extended version (MBSRP-X), which integrates the know-how and practice of mindfulness with the latest knowledge about the brain in Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB). I come in to teach and meet everyone in sessions 10 and 11. This has so far worked out quite well and students’ feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, because it exposes our students to 2 very different styles of teaching. While Linda lays the painstaking groundwork of moving the students along little step by little step through the basics of mindfulness practice, I can then take the students through their paces in exploring what they have learned, what they have missed, where they struggle – often without knowing it, and where the road ahead lies. Linda and I have identified certain areas, where the material could be presented in a more concise form so as to enhance efficiency of learning.

The number of referrals to our Centre and the MBSRP-X is continuing to grow, and our referral base includes now over 800 family physicians, plus many other agencies, pain clinics and individual therapists of all stripes from all over the Golden Horseshoe. This gives me the opportunity to thank all those thoughtful physicians and clinicians for their openness of mind as they encourage their patients to explore mindfulness. Even though between Linda and I we perform about 9 new assessments a week, we now book first assessments into November. Our waiting times are getting longer and we are therefore looking for ways of expanding our capacity. We are pursuing a few options to improve on this challenge. We are continuing to actively seek physicians and psychiatrists, who have some mindfulness training and are willing to join our team, train in the integration of mindfulness practice and IPNB, and then begin participating in assessments and leading MBSRP-Xs.

Marlene Van Esch, MSW, is a social worker with more than 10 years experience working with individuals, families, parents, and youth groups of diverse cultural and social background. She joined us as a student in training to learn to teach mindfulness. She is right now job shadowing Linda in teaching the MBSR-X programs, will be soon participating as a student co-therapist in a longterm psychodynamic psychotherapy group, and has been attending the Mindsight Intensive among other activities. We have enjoyed her participation and are looking forward to our continued collaboration.

This past academic year was the first time I presented the Mindsight Intensive with slide shows, and all the sessions have been video taped. Slide shows and accompanying handouts for each topic are available to participants online. There are four categories for each session: Guided meditation, brain talk, main talk and Q&A. The idea is to eventually make the recordings available online. However, this is easier said than done and the work involved is enormous. The next step is now going to be the development of a new and updated website that will have a contemporary feel and functionality, allowing me to expand in this direction. Although the website should be up some time in the late fall, its e-commerce portion will take longer to appear. I am also working on a system that allows course participants to gain free access to the lectures and recordings on line.

Last but not least, our cozy office houses at least 9 groups per week in addition to all the individual patients who come every week. More often than not it now feels like Grand Central Station, and we may have to consider a move to a larger office, although again, we don’t know exactly when and how this will occur.

Both Linda and I deeply appreciate the opportunity we have to teach and mingle with so many talented, thoughtful, enthusiastic, mindful and dedicated students, who always challenge us, ask pointed questions and do not let us get away with anything. We invite you all, dear students, to actively participate in the growth of our Mindfulness Centre. This can be done by sending in your questions, thoughts and suggestions via email, and also by taking on certain tasks of your interest that Linda and I alone cannot possibly get all done.

Enjoy the rest of a great summer!

Dr. T.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.