“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.

No newsletter since the beginning of April! Not intended, but imposed by circumstance. We were so busy teaching close to 150 students this past winter and spring, and still maintaining team time to reflect, that every day seemed like newsworthy of a newsletter. Out of sight however does not mean out of mind, and you need to know that here at The Mindfulness Centre still waters run deep. The atmosphere of deep inquiry is vibrant and pulsating with a steady stream of questions we wrestle with. The mindsphere of our community of dedicated practitioners, teachers and students is rich in enthusiasm that never tires to ask better questions. We never take anything we think knowing for granted, nor are we satisfied with less than the most stringent rigor in how we approach mindfulness and mindsight.

This is why in this great mindfulness party that has swept over Western society we can appear to be party poopers. Our teaching is set up to follow many of our students’s work over the long term. Some are in longterm psychotherapy as they combine mindfulness training with psychotherapy, others attend the year-long Mindsight Intensive for several years. This affords us teachers the privilege to follow our students deeply into the salt mines of their minds and efforts, and not surprisingly, discover that meditation is like love: shortterm infatuations and love affairs are quite different from longterm marriages. All around us we hear of the promises and successes of mindfulness that has drawn immense crowds to the party, and we are exposed to thousands of recordings and apps that purport to teach you how simple and easy the road to bliss is. We just don’t see it. We see a lot of infatuations, flashy mindfulness neon signs, intellectual fluff, lack of conceptual and practical rigor, uninspired cookie-cutter approaches to teaching that ignore the mind’s complexity, and failure to embody mindfulness as a way of life.

We all know that junk and fast food is cheap and easy to find, but not good for your health. As teachers we see how enthusiastic most of our students are as they begin the journey in mindfulness by taking the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs. Half-way through the program we begin to see them struggle, by the end of the program they all think this has been a most rewarding, deep and transformative experience – several months later the majority of those students are not practicing anymore and mindfulness has joined the longing chorus of shelved New Year’s resolutions that are seemingly impossible to actualize as a way of life. What’s really going on?

At The Mindfulness Centre we are fascinated by this phenomenon, and it is our mission to start our work where most end up hitting a dead end. We know this challenge is based on the enormous complexity of the human mind and our limitless capacity for self-deception. Jesus knew that over 2000 years ago when he said that many are called but few are chosen, so did Buddha a few centuries earlier saying that we need to want liberation from suffering more than a drowning person wants air. We make no bones about emphasizing how incredibly difficult this journey is, how failure is the norm to be expected, and how the real work starts when we begin to fail and give up. By the way, a good and solid infatuation can lead to deep and lasting love, and we always enjoy and celebrate our students’ good intentions and enthusiasm, even though we know that sooner or later it is bound to crash. It is when the going gets tough though that the tough have to get going, and we become especially excited and intrigued when students have crashed and they reach out for help to push through the mindsight sound barrier, in order to go deeper and achieve long-lasting and permanent mindful traits.

’10 years, 10 thousand hours’ is our mantra when people ask us about what to expect over what period of time. Mindfulness meditation and the development of mindsight, the capacity to perceive your own mind and the mind of others, is the hardest thing you’ll ever take on in your life, and even though it is a marathon, the longterm rewards are remarkable, profound and deeply healing and liberating.

Good luck to all!

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

One of my students wrote the following email after a session of the Mindsight Intensive, in which I talked about the power of impermanence to cultivate presence:

“Your talk last Monday has had a profound effect in me (on me?). Specifically, when you said that if we reminded ourselves of the impermanence of everything, every time that our loved ones left the house, instead of taking for granted that we *will* see them later, we actually looked them in the eye and lived/cherished/embraced that moment with a sense of gratitude and love.

You didn’t use exactly those words, but these are the words that describe the feelings this awareness has brought to me.

Each time that I hold my son when he is being fussy before his naps or bedtime, I hug him a little bit longer without any feelings of tiredness, frustration or wanting to put him down quickly so that I can have a few minutes of alone time. I feel only the deepest senses of love, gratitude, happiness and calmness. In return, he has fallen asleep much more quickly and peacefully this week. Coincidence? Perhaps. A shift in my energy flow affecting his energy flow? More likely

Experiencing these moments in this new way brings tears to my eyes, every time. I’m not entirely sure what the tears are saying, probably many different things, but I feel that my connection with my son has deepened this week.

Thank you for dedicating your life to this work so that I have the opportunity to learn from you. I am so grateful to be in your presence each week and never take our time together for granted.”

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