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I recently talked to a lady who was inquiring about the Mindsight Intensive she wanted to join. A comment she made in the course of the conversation piqued my interest and gave me food for reflection. She noticed that in my blogs and other writings I occasionally refer to Jesus, and she concluded that I must have some kind of Christian affiliation she could not relate to. She was very interested in my courses, but would not be interested in sessions about Jesus, because she is agnostic and does not believe in religion, God, a creator or a higher power. Her interest is in consciousness, she said.

What struck me was a subtle, yet pervasive fallacy I encounter frequently with my students. A fallacy is an incorrect argument from either a logical or a rhetorical perspective. Nowhere are fallacies more frequently used than in politics for example, where distortions and outright lies are packaged in a way as to sound logical for the sole purpose of achieving results through communication. Fallacies are also frequent in everyday thinking, as in the case of the lady I talked to, unconsciously created by the complex workings of the brain.

Fallacies lead to misunderstandings and confusions that cause students to get stuck on their journey of self-discovery. As part of our inquiry in mindfulness, they have to be recognized and corrected. In this case, if one is interested in consciousness, then one must be interested in all phenomena and manifestations of consciousness, in all constructions of reality that shape consciousness and can be apprehended by it. The student of consciousness is a student of knowing itself, examining all the ways we claim to come to an awareness of reality, and all the ways we construct views of reality.

By virtue of excluding religion from the purview of her inquiry, this lady may be unwittingly caught in exactly the same kind of dogma and belief she thought she wanted to distance herself from. Instead of the Christian or the religious dogma, she subscribes to the agnostic dogma. Referring to agnosticism as dogma may seem strange if we accept that the agnostic believes it is impossible to know anything about God or the creation of the universe and therefore simply refrains from having any opinion about it. The reason I use the word dogma in this context lies in the fact that this lady wasn’t just saying she has no opinion about Jesus, but that religion was of no interest to her, thus excluding an important facet of consciousness from inquiry. It is an inescapable fact that human consciousness creates stories and beliefs around a protagonist called Jesus, and that these phenomena need to be explored if we want to get to know human consciousness. As students of consciousness, which mindfulness practitioners are, we need to be interested in all phenomena of consciousness, including the rational, the irrational, the logical, the illogical, the dogmatic, the open-minded, the provable and those experiences that are beyond what can be proven, explained or even described. Coming back to my conversation, it may also be that what this lady meant to say is that she was not interested in belief and dogma, but in direct experience. If so, there is still a potential issue to be addressed, because the proper reading of sacred texts such as the Bible has to my mind nothing to do with dogma or belief, and everything to do with the exploration of consciousness and the direct experience it affords us. The challenge consists in how to read sacred texts and properly differentiating their content from the cultural context they arose from. To this aim we need to deal with language modes as expressions of different levels of consciousness as you will see below.

Dogma is a set of beliefs accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted. This set of beliefs forms the basis for the construction of an ideology or belief system, and cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the ideology itself. This is the reason why within a particular dogma questioning is frowned upon and gets you to be burned at the stake. Implied in every dogma is also a tyrannical authority that legislates what is right and wrong. Dogma rests on beliefs, and beliefs are states of mind, in which a person thinks something to be the case, whether there is empirical evidence to prove it or not. You may wonder why beliefs are so rigidly held despite their often flagrant absurdity, and why dialogue with people who hold strong beliefs is virtually impossible. There are likely many ways of answering this question. I will highlight three mechanisms that are relevant within this context.

The first mechanism pertains to how the brain processes beliefs in its main sensory areas, the very same areas where we perceive pain. As surprising as this might seem, belief centers are not located in the flexible intellectual thought-based areas of the frontal cortex. Instead, they are located in the sensory areas that we rely so heavily on to keep us safe. It is through our perception of pain sensation, touch, pressure, position, motion, vibration, temperature, sight, sound, smell and taste that we test reality and decide how to change and adapt for survival. Our beliefs, deeply embedded and embodied in these brain areas that define our concrete reality, define who we are in a very fixed and defined way, and are therefore not easily amenable to exploration and questioning.

The second mechanism already discussed elsewhere, by which rigid belief structures arise, is the objectification of reality into a collection of interacting nouns, coupled with a loss of awareness of the deep dynamic nature of reality as verb. To make a long story short, the problem-solving left brain is for most of us unfortunately not properly integrated into right-brain functioning and therefore quite literally a lose tyrant without checks and balances controlling our lives. Its mode of functioning is to parse reality into bits without noticing context, and then crystallize these bits as conceptual things or objects in our awareness. In addition, contrary to the way the right brain presents reality to our awareness in the form of direct experience, the left brain gone rogue only represents it to us conceptually. Locked into such a controlled, objectifying construction of reality as a virtual world of interacting things or objects, we are incapable of seeing the deeper truth, namely the fact that the perception of things as objects is but a rough, imprecise, disembodied and limited view of reality (although under certain circumstances useful in its own right) that misses the deeper truth of reality as a limitless dynamic field. This comes with a hefty price, the price of a very bad habit, the habit of unnecessary, optional suffering.

The third mechanism is deeply embedded in our childhood development. As we grow from a young child into preadolscence and adolescence, our capacity for abstraction evolves. Young children are not capable of complex abstract thought differentiation, which is the reason why there is no logical conflict in their minds when they envision Santa Claus fly on a sleigh and descend through the chimney to bring gifts. As we grow older our capacity for abstraction and differentiation of complex thought processes increases, and what seemed conflict-free and logical in the past suddenly poses serious logical problems. In other words, our ability to differentiate complex mind processes from one another and realize different facets of consciousness changes and grows as we age. For different complex reasons I cannot possibly elaborate on here, many people remain stuck in preadolescent ways of thought processing and remain incapable of sophisticated reasoning. The result is an overly concrete, rigid, dissociated view of the world full of conflicting parts, coupled with an unawareness of inconsistencies. Its hallmark is belief and dogma. An example of that is the creationist belief in how the physical universe came into being, which is essentially a version of the Santa Claus story. I am not saying that the physical universe cannot possibly have come into existence through an act of divine creation. I am simply identifying creationism as a rigid dogmatic structure, when it manifests socially in the form of schools that forbid the study of evolution in their curriculum, thus expressing more the anxieties of their proponents than anything worthwhile about truth or reality.

Belief and dogma are therefore always a closed system with an inherently strong feel of being embodied and therefore ‘real’. As such it is by definition rigid and unquestionable. Whether we like it or not, this dogmatic aspect of how we construct reality is an aspect of consciousness we always have to take into consideration when we explore consciousness and our way of using it to live our lives. Belief and its flexible sibling called thought are not easy to distinguish, and they relate to each other as form and formlessness. A tree requires a measure of harmony between form (rigidity) that allows it not to collapse and formlessness (chaos, flexibility) that allows it not to break in the wind. Our consciousness is similar, having to navigate certainty and uncertainty in a healthy balance, otherwise we fall into extremism, the extremes of sloppy ‘anything goes’ thinking or rigidly held beliefs. Nobody can escape beliefs, but when one thinks one can and is not aware of the inherent existence of belief in consciousness, unconscious dissociations occur. In the case of this lady, she thought being agnostic is different from being religious, when in fact she is just as ‘religious’ as believers in religion, just that her ‘religion’ has an abstract tyrant called agnosticism. The way out of this conundrum is to recognize the ubiquitousness of belief, and cultivate an attitude of flexibility and openness towards them that allows one to examine, explore and question them. The moment that is achieved, one is free. In her case, she would be able to explore agnosticism and Jesus as forms of consciousness with the same rigor and intensity.

We have four different direct experience modes and four different language modes. Each experience mode has a preferred language mode. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the four different experience modes are the physical, the psychological, the existential and the spiritual. Physical experience consists of physical sensations and is nonverbal. Psychological experience is verbal and pertains to the coherence of autobiographical narratives. Existential experiences pertain to the arising and vanishing of our sense of self, and spiritual experiences transcend the sense of self to include the nameless nature of spaceless and timeless nondual reality.

We express these different levels of experience through action, a special form of action being language. Both action and language manifest different facets of consciousness in different experience modes. The four different language modes allowing us to access different facets of consciousness and different experience modes are:
1. Unstructured everyday language: It re-presents and expresses a running commentary on life experience. The criterion of truth is unexamined subjective experience.
2. Left-brain descriptive language: It re-presents external reality as being separate from the speaking subject, and gives us objective knowledge into the physical world. The criterion of truth is out there in the physical world – if it corresponds to something physical and concrete in the world, it must be true. The speaking subject is minimally involved. It emphasizes aboutness. Examples are history, biography and science.
3. Left-brain conceptual or dialectic language: It re-presents internal reality as being separate from the speaking subject, but less separate than in description, and gives us knowledge into the psychological world. The criterion of truth is in its internal consistency or coherence – if it sounds logical and well thought out, it must be true. The speaking subject is more intensely involved. It emphasizes aboutness. Examples are psychology, meditation, philosophy.
4. Right-brain metaphorical language: It presents the whole (internal and external) reality as lived by the speaking subject (no subject-object separation) and gives us knowledge about how to live. The criterion of truth is in its efficacy when lived and compelling sense of wisdom. The speaking subject and the objective world he/she lives in manifest as a whole in the here and now. It emphasizes direct experience and wholeness. Examples are myths and metaphors, sacred stories.

The challenge is to become aware which level of experience is being accessed with what language mode. They all express different facets of consciousness that give us clues about the nature of reality. No level of experience is better or worthier of inquiry than any other. They all need to be investigated in an integrated fashion. When we master that, we are not in danger of confusing facets of consciousness, language modes and levels of experience, and we will gain the freedom to access reality in its complex entirety without dissociating any part of it. We will get a glimpse of the whole elephant.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

I am next to a swimming pool in my home and both a fish and a little bear swim very fast in it. In my bedroom, a brown rabbit hops around and a mouse tries to find her way into the folds of a crumpled blanket lying on me. I try to get rid of the mouse, who keeps escaping me. But finally I can catch her by the tail and put her outside. The rabbit is obviously my pet and does not bother me. In the kitchen the cook rehearses a play. He is cross-dressed as a female cook and ends up above the ceiling rafters erupting into a belting sound while grimacing and being filmed. A black gentleman on a majestic black horse enters the scene and lifts the cook onto the horse. The horse stares into my eyes.

This is what I dreamt the night after I lost all the work I had done on this blog, because I made the ‘bad decision’ of not re-saving the work I had done after the computer did something funny. The blog was finished. I lost it all and had to start from scratch. It was 11:45 at night.

For a moment I was furious, but then soon forced to heed my own pronouncement I explain later in this blog, that there is no such thing as a bad decision unless it is taken carelessly, in haste or with a disturbed mind. Mind you, maybe I had a disturbed mind this late at night, but I thought I had done a very good job with my blog. So I went to bed stressed and did not have a restful night’s sleep. On my way to sleep I asked for guidance during the night to find the inspiration to tackle the business of rewriting my blog the next morning.

We are often afraid of taking bad decisions and strive to take good ones. Barbara as I will call a patient of mine, recently brought this problem to light in a dramatic fashion, when she displayed a panic-size fear of taking bad decisions.

Apart from exploring some of the psychodynamic reasons for her anxiety, which included being raised by rather controlling and overanxious parents, I also asked her to define what a bad or good decision is. Her answer seemed obvious, as we all would probably define it in the same way. A good decision turns out to yield good results, a bad one bad results. In other words, attributing a valence (whether it is good or bad) to a decision as we usually do is always a judgment after the fact, since at the time of making the decision we cannot possibly know the future, even less our decision’s outcome. Such a judgment after the fact presupposes that we impute to the moment of decision-making a knowledge that was not available at the time. Our brain being an associative organ, when untrained it very easily and readily connects experience contents together that have nothing to do with each other, and then makes it appear as if they belonged together. This leads to an impossible quagmire: At the time of decision-making we can become extremely anxious because we impute the capacity of attributing a valence to our decision at the time of decision-making, when this is in fact impossible, and when the result of our decision turns out to be less than desirable, we beat ourselves up for not having the power of foresight and being able to foretell the future. Very exhausting!

We therefore have to begin to tease out the different elements of decision-making in order to understand what is really going on and put an end to our suffering.

There are immediately three problems with the definition Barbara gave. One is that the decision is defined in terms of future results nobody can ever predict, since the future is unknowable. One cannot include unknowable future information in the definition of a good or bad decision just before or at the time of decision-making. The second problem is that attributing a valence to a decision such as good or bad is very arbitrary. Good means that the outcome pleases or meets our expectations, bad is what disappoints or doesn’t meet expectations. Does that really make sense? Cannot a disappointing outcome sometimes be very good and vice versa? Thirdly, unforeseen events, so called outliers, routinely occur after we have taken our decision, that completely change the landscape of our lives. Such events are prone to create a distortion in our thinking, causing us to retrospectively construct a sense of badness and weave it into our perception of the decision-making process, even though we were fairly certain at the time of decision-making that we had taken a good one.

The first problem has to be addressed by using available information at the present moment of decision-making. We can only make decisions considering the circumstances of the moment. Present circumstance has two aspects: an external and an internal one. External circumstance we mostly cannot control. It is what reality presents to us in the moment, including the physical location we find ourselves in, the historical and local events of the time and the time available to make the decision. Internal circumstance is a different story. It means the psychological state we are in at the time of decision-making, particularly to what degree we are attuned to and integrated within ourselves, have a clear view of the situation and have access to information and knowledge that is important for decision-making. How much access to information and knowledge we have can only be partially controlled through diligent fact-finding and reaching out to people who can be helpful to us.

Human knowledge is finite and the unknown or unknowable far vaster than our knowledge will ever be. As long as we do our homework of finding out as much as we can at the moment of decision-making, we need to develop the necessary humility to know that our decision-making will always be tentative and limited in its power to put in motion the future we envision for ourselves. Clear view has to be trained. The ability to think clearly and sift through the complex entanglement of our physical sensations, feelings, thoughts and intuitions, is not just given to us. If we haven’t learned it in our childhoods through intelligent and attuned parenting, we have to acquire it through our own work of self-discovery. Attunement and integration is also the result of good parenting or later self-exploration.

The likelihood of making ‘good’ decisions thus increases with increasing capacity for humility, clear view and attunement to ourselves. However, it would be foolish to think that we will always be optimally humble, clear and attuned every time we make a decision. And even if we are, or think we are, the human capacity for self-deception is limitless. We can therefore never make the perfect decision, but only the best possible one considering the circumstances of the moment. We can only make perfectly imperfect decisions.

The second problem is our attribution of valence to decisions. Can a decision ever be good or bad, unless it is taken carelessly or in a mentally disturbed state? We can certainly feel more or less on top of things in the moment of decision-making, but given that we have presumably done what we can to make the best possible decision, our sense of comfort or discomfort cannot possibly be a measure for the valence of the decision itself. The decision is always just what it is, a decision, neither a good or a bad one.

Moreover, decisions that turn out to lead to less than desirable outcomes are opportunities for looking at the circumstances of the decision-making moment with fresh eyes, looking at old unskillful patterns we repeat even though they lead to undesirable results, and engaging in new creative actions in the moment. Take the invention of sticky notes for example. The researcher involved was working on trying to synthesize a super-strong glue for airplane wings I believe. Unbeknownst to him his team made a calculation mistake, and when they went to manufacture it, the glue turned out to be super-weak. While working on correcting the problem he had this flash of insight that his super-weak glue could be used for other purposes, thus the sticky notes. Take Roosevelt, who became president of the United States despite having his brilliant career as a congressman cut short by polio, which paralyzed him and subsequently caused a state of deep depression. How about Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, my former Zen teacher, who had his major enlightenment experiences while on death row for a year after the second world war, then went on to become the first Westerner to bring Zen to the West? And what about the person who misses a flight to attend an important meeting because they tried to squeeze in a task before leaving, and later hears on the news that the plane they would have taken crashed? History abounds with such examples, making it clear to my mind that it is nothing but hybris to judge decisions we make as either good or bad. They are simply the best possible ones considering our circumstances at the time of decision-making, just good-enough – no more is possible. Once the decision is made, the rest is but further fodder for the inquiring mind to grow and learn, to stretch known boundaries and walk towards the sunset of wisdom.

After these reflections Barbara’s anxiety had all but disappeared. She now felt empowered that she could make a necessary decision knowing, that right from the outset she only had limited information, and that she was not in a position to feel confident about her decision, because she did not know exactly what she really wanted. Her decision was going to be a tentative one, which could lead her to a place she does not presently feel she wants to be in. However, she was now free to embrace the imperfection of her decision, open to tackling the possibility of a less than desirable outcome with openness, curiosity, flexibility and creativity, learning from the process in the meantime. All her life her overanxious parents had raised her to obey and follow their decisions without making her own. This ended up causing her untold anxiety and stress. In this situation she pleaded with me to make a decision for her. What was entirely new for her was my guidance in simply teasing out the intricacies of her situation in detail, thus freeing her to see clearly and come to make her own perfectly imperfect decision, without me ever telling her what would have been the right or wrong one. Her relief was palpable.

This version of my blog is more complete than the original one I lost the previous day. I ended up doing a better job the next day than I had done the day before. Losing it all led me to have a disturbed night in between the two versions, and the question is whether my dream answered my prayers for inspiration. It is quite chaotic, partly expressing my stressed state, but also giving me the gift of having to hold this seemingly incomprehensible chaos under the one umbrella of my awareness. My blog last night was more left-brain logically constructed at the expense of creativity, thus not doing as much justice to the complexity of this topic. My writing today was more fluent, weaving left-brain logic to a much larger extent into right-brain contextual complexity than yesterday. This allowed me, I believe, to capture the topic in a more complete way without losing its logical threads.

The number of animals in the dream is significant. They were the center theme weaving through it all. It felt to me as if I was invaded by animals, suddenly finding myself in a richly animated world of creatures that all have very different forms of consciousness and therefore ways of constructing reality. These other forms of consciousness, which feel more ‘animalistic’, body-centered and incomprehensible to the rational mind, enriched my work today as I was writing this blog. The human drama occurring in the dream felt like a Shakespearean play around animal forms of consciousness that wanted to be integrated into the hyper-rationality of my left-brain thought patterns. The dream felt both disturbing and hilariously bizarre like a farce, weaving different characters into a complex web of interactions and explorations that disturb the familiar order of things. Of course there is much more one could read into the dream, but I clearly needed to be disturbed, to be shown different types of awarenesses and greater freedom of creativity, in order to be more open to and inclusive of all that I myself don’t know, thus hopefully doing the topic of decision-making better justice.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Occasionally I receive patients referred to me by their family physician, because after a meditation retreat they develop different kinds of psychiatric symptoms, such as panic attacks, generalized anxiety, depression or psychotic symptoms like hallucinations. They usually attend such retreats to come to terms with personal life issues, and on the retreat they receive bad advice when psychological material arises that causes emotional pain. For example, when strong emotional and cognitive activations arise in the form of thoughts and memories, they may be told not to pay attention to the content of these thoughts and stories, and simply redirect their attention to the breath. The explanation given is that the stories we create are just unreal fantasies and productions of the mind without real meaning, and that they need to be let go of. The more people then try to follow this advice, the worse they get, until they get overwhelmed by a full-blown psychiatric syndrome.

A psychiatric assessment of such persons often reveals significant childhood problems in their relationships to their parents, which end up deeply affecting their whole lives. As adults they then develop different kinds and degrees of symptoms and discontent, for which they seek help in whatever way they see fit.

The advice meditation teachers give seems often formulaic, and therefore plainly wrong in many cases. Meditation teachers of all sorts are often rigidly wedded to their method, unable to meet their students where they are. When this happens, meditation can become toxic or ineffectual, causing harm and alienating people from this training.

It is important to distinguish mindfulness from meditation. Mindfulness is a state of being, while meditation is a technique. Mindfulness is a way of being in the world that is characterized by presence and non-identification with subjective experience. Rather than being preoccupied and constantly caught up in internal and external dramas, we can be ‘free and easy in the market place’ as they say in Zen. Meditation on the other hand is a technique, by which mindfulness can be developed and achieved. But it is not the only technique.

To understand this a bit better, a peak into our brain is necessary. Roughly speaking, as Daniel Siegel describes, the brain has nine sets of neurocircuitries, called domains of integration, all responsible for organismic health. To be well functioning, each domain has to be integrated, meaning harmoniously connected within itself, like each section in an orchestra. In addition, all these domains have to also be integrated among each other. If one domain does not function properly, we develop symptoms of one sort of another. One of these domains is called narrative integration. This means that to lead a healthy life we need to be able to construct coherent narratives of our lives. What that in turn means is that we will develop psychological and even physical symptoms and be sick, if we are not able to make detailed sense of our lives, where we come from, how our history has affected us, and how we got to become who we are now.

Even if embedded in the vast non-verbal world of behavior, intuition and the body, this process of making sense is profoundly verbal and related to our human capacity to tell stories. Meditation does not address this narrative integration in any direct way, because it only focuses on the process of thought arisings, not on their content. When narrative integration becomes an issue, which is very often the case when people report emotional and thought activations, we need to be able to explore the stories of our lives and make sense of them. This requires talking and relating in some form of psychotherapeutic intervention as a way of bringing mindfulness to the story contents we create. This is in itself an additional technique apart from meditation to develop mindfulness.

Some in the meditation community love to say that stories are just concocted phenomena of the mind of no real interest, and that meditation is the art of learning to see verbal formations, cognitive processes and thoughts coming and going without entering their content and getting caught up in them. That is true from a meditative perspective, and learning how to do that is central to the meditative path and the exploration of deep existential truths. However, this addresses other domains of integration, not the narrative one. If one ignores narrative integration that is so central to health, one can meditate until the cows come home, and one’s gains will always be limited by the deficiency in narrative integration. In other words, forget about deep spirituality and existential insight into the depths of your existence, if you haven’t done your homework of also bringing order into the way you understand the stories of your life. For that meditation will not help directly.

My patients who come to see me in a crisis following a retreat experience exactly this lack of proper guidance. When meditation teachers give the right advice at the wrong time, the organism rebels. Meditation students often need help in recognizing the need for psychotherapy and an in-depth exploration of their narrative world. When they don’t get it, they become symptomatic. When it comes to the thoughts and stories our mind creates, we have to respect both aspects of these cognitive brain productions. We need to learn through meditation to just see them as transient phenomena that come and go and that we don’t need to identify with. Once released from the hold their content has on us, the mind’s deeper nature can be revealed to us. But we also need to bring the same discerning observation to their content, realize how deeply lacking in coherence and mindful understanding our stories often are. We than have to immerse ourselves in the examination of the story line that has made us who we are and our relationships the way they are, and realize the different options we have at our disposal to change and modify these stories to our benefit. Once we understand them through psychotherapy as the spectrum of possible stories we can live by, another aspect of the mind’s deeper nature will be revealed to us.

Thoughts and stories are Janus-faced. They have a double nature of process and content that is inextricably intertwined. We cannot ignore one aspect without destroying the other. They both require our attention with the tools appropriate for each. When people meditate when they should be in psychotherapy and vice versa, no meaningful progress occurs. Lack of proper guidance and knowledge in this regard will lead to dangerous consequences.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

One of my patients feels stuck in her psychotherapy with me. After some gain a cycle of defeat repeats itself. She wants to get off her antidepressant. When she does, she slowly gets more overwhelmed, depressed and hopeless about her progress with me. Without telling me she then goes back on the medication, knowing that it never left her particularly content about her life, but still somewhat better than the strong feelings she has without it. Her sense that she is a hopeless case does not recede, but suddenly she reveals that she believes I also see her as a hopeless case. Although I would not put it in exactly those words, I acknowledge to her that I am at a loss with her. I don’t know how I can help her any further.

This would reasonably be the time to part company or refer her to somebody else. In fact, this is how she came to me after she experienced a similar fate with three therapists before me. The last one sent her to me ‘for mindfulness’. Whenever she goes to see someone new, she creates a fantasy about what this new person will contribute that nobody else before has. The fantasy is always about a new technique she has not yet been exposed to. With me it was ‘mindfulness’, and her attempts at meditating remained fruitless. She got to the point of feeling that she wanted to crawl out of her body and came to the conclusion that meditation is not for her.

Previous therapists and her family physician told her that this is as far as therapy can go, and that with regards to her depression she is like a diabetic, who requires Insulin. Obviously, they said, your brain does not produce enough of whatever neurotransmitters the clinician believes she needs and she will simply have to take the antidepressant for the rest of her life. The fact that she relapses every time she tries to get off it despite having been in psychotherapy, is obvious proof of that theory. Or is it?

So here we are, she and I, both agreeing that we are at a loss. She formulates it in terms of being a hopeless case, while I tell her that I cannot work with her as long as she makes decisions about her medications without asking me first. So she decides to get off it again, and the same cycle begins again. She becomes overwhelmed, feels she cannot cope, is sad and crying all the time, and there is nothing in our psychotherapy that is helping her. This time, she tells me about her wish to go back on medication, and whether I agree that it makes sense. She is afraid of losing her job and not being able to parent her two daughters properly.

I present her with a choice. I am not against medication, by the way. It has its rightful place in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. But medications are over-prescribed, robbing people of the possibility for profound brain rewiring and psychological growth. In addition, psychotherapists trained to access the unconscious more deeply than scratching the surface, are hard to come by. In her case, I am not convinced that there aren’t hidden psychodynamic issues that are very difficult to get at and require an unusual amount of perseverance. So I suggest a shift of view: That her state is not a problem, but an opportunity for deeper exploration. The choice is to go back on medication and essentially stop psychotherapy, since years of it have not gotten her beyond some initial gains she made, or stay in this state and see what happens. The problem, however, is that she has told me everything there is to tell me. On the surface there is no issue to work through anymore, and we both agree that we are at a loss. What is new for her and she did not know until the point of asking me, is that I feel I do not know how to help her any further. She feels like a hopeless case, and I feel helpless to help her any further. This now being consciously on the table, why am I not letting her go, finish the therapy and encourage her to go back on her medication? She can’t see the opportunity I spoke about.

I tell her that there is likely an important difference between the way she and many others have viewed her situation of hoplessness in the past, and the way I see it. Just because she feels there is no more hope for her, I said, and just because I feel unable to help her further at that moment, does not mean that we can not settle into this shared feeling of powerlessness together. In other words, I am not willing to accept that just because we both feel that is the end of it, we actually should part. I am not going to abandon her just because she appeares like a hopeless case. The whole situation of hope- and powerlessness on both our parts is as valuable a phenomenon constructed by both our psyches together in relationship as any other we have explored in the past. Why and how did we get to this point? Telling her that is a pivotal aha-moment for her. This is an utterly different and totally new shift for her.

She begins to tell me how she wants to leave people in her life, particularly her husband, when they disappoint her. She starts to realize how alone she has always felt in life, and that the core of her aloneness never had any place in any relationship. She begins to see a dynamics in her childhood relationships to her parents she never saw before, and she felt deeply understood by me as I did not abandon her in her worst moment of fear of abandonment. To protect herself from this terrible and unmanageable aloneness she could not make sense of, and which is largely outside of her consciousness, she unconsciously sets defense mechanisms in motion that sabotage intimacy and prevent painful healing processes from getting into motion. One of the results is that like all previous therapists before me, I developed a sense of being ineffectual with her and unable to help her any further.

The therapy takes a new turn. While this is happening, she has to live with these intense feelings of overwhwelm, constant sadness, fear of ‘losing it’ and other painful emotions for about three to four months. This is an important point right here: She has to learn to live with the pain and not try to get rid of it or pathologize it as being medical like diabetes. The silver lining during this very difficult time is the fact that, compared to before my intervention of staying present with our mutual sense of helplessness, there now is an unexplainable sense of lightness and safety within her suffering that had never been there before. She feels inexplicably more grounded and solid, and not alone anymore, and can trust in my ability to lend her my MPC (medial prefrontal cortex) while she is rewiring hers. Rather than feeling overwhelmed, she can now feel incompetent and explore this feeling without believing in it; rather than feel she is going to fall apart, she can now consciously allow herself healing moments of falling apart while observing the processes with compassion; instead of feeling like she can not parent properly, she can now accept her present limitations and set clearer boundaries with her children; and rather than always wanting to leave her husband when things do not go her way, she can articulate her fears with him and engage him in supporting her.

And now a nugget for meditators. In the midst of this struggle she starts meditating again and discovers that these unconscious themes that had emerged from the therapy were previously locked in the form of implicit memories in her body. Consequently, being still in meditation means getting in touch with unspeakable emotional pain deeply locked in her body, which is why she feels like she wants to crawl out of it and had to abandon meditation as not being ‘her cup of tea’. Now that she has access to the complex non-verbal attachment processes of her life through her relationship with me, including the narratives that belong to them, but which she previously could not make sense of, meditation can become a powerful tool for her to go deeper into the mechanisms by which she creates her reality. Without the narrative integration of her life stories into coherent ones, she would never have access to meditation, no matter how hard she would try.

About nine months later she is symptom-free, having gradually improved along the way. From then on, whenever her vulnerability gets triggered by stress, she recognizes the early signs, knows what to do and is always able to process it quickly without developing debilitating symptoms. So far, after being off her medication for 2 years, she continues to do well without it.

I would like to close with a word of caution. For various complex reasons this path does not work for all. Sometimes it is obvious from the start that this is not the right path to take. Sometimes one has to try first before finding out whether it works, and sometimes one can be pretty confident that it will work. It all depends on the circumstance of the person involved. One size never fits all. Through this article I wanted to give a glimpse into the laboratory of our psyche when this path is the right one to take.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Let’s be clear about the difference between a hallucination and an illusion. A hallucination is a perception of something that does not exist. If I sit in my Oakville office and see a gorilla sitting across from me, it is a hallucination, because there is no gorilla. My brain made the gorilla up. We can experience hallucinations in all sense modalities, touch, sight, sound, smell and taste, giving rise to tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory and gustatory hallucinations (some are more common than others). By contrast, an illusion is the distorted perception of something that exists and is already there. For example, a straight stick with one end at the bottom of an aquarium diagonally sticking out above the water. Because of the water’s refraction of light the stick will seem like it is broken, even though it is not. Or imagine walking in the dark out in nature and suddenly you jump thinking that you saw a snake, when it is just a branch lying on the ground. Unless we suffer from a mental illness, take mind-altering drugs or experience any other unusual mental state, hallucinations are relatively rare. They won’t concern us here. Illusions however are common. In fact so common that we don’t realize how much of reality as we see it, is illusory. The brain creates many illusions we are utterly unaware of and that can only be discovered through special tests. When spiritual traditions such as the Vedanta mean that the physical world is illusory, they don’t mean it does not exist, but that the way we see it is so distorted as to cause suffering.

Once upon a time, a father of three sons died. In his will he left the following instruction as to how to divide his 17 elephants among his three sons: The eldest son was to receive half of the elephants, the middle son one third, and the youngest son one ninth. Upon reading the will, the three brothers became understandably upset, because in order to divide the elephants that way, the would have had to cut some elephants in half. They did not know how to solve the problem, when one of the king’s ministers happened to ride to town on his elephant and hear about their conundrum. He sought them out and gave them his elephant. With deep gratitude the three brothers proceeded to divide the elephants. The first brother took half of 18, thus 9 elephants. The second brother took a third of 18, thus 6 elephants (that’s 15 so far). The third brother took a ninth of 18, thus 2 elephants, bringing the total to 17. The 18th elephant became redundant and the minister took his elephant back and rode away.

This story is a metaphor for the useful illusion, a process so fundamental on our journey of mindfulness that it lies at the core of wisdom. The useful illusion is the distorted, yet helpful way we perceive reality. As we meditate and learn to look deeply into all elements of experience, we differentiate between perceptions of the world, sensations of the body, and cognitions (thoughts) of the mind. We realize how impermanent they all are, and how the structures we believe to be so solid are in fact nothing but energy flow in space. We look for mountains, but end up seeing perceptual energy flow coming and going. We look for a body, but we end up finding sensory energy flow temporarily organized in a certain way. We look for a mind, but we end up finding cognitive information flow arising and dissolving every split second in front of our observing awareness. We look for a self that endures, but all we end up finding is the non-self elements of perceptual, sensory and cognitive energy flow coalescing and dissolving every moment. By the end of it all, through precise and deep observation we realize that we are left empty-handed. Instead of finding wonderful things, we find energy flow, but even that dissolves upon closer observation into nothing at first. If we don’t stop there, but continue to investigate nothing, we realize that nothing is still something, the thing called nothing, which like all things we thought existed, turns out to be no thing. We have a word for this no-thingness: Emptiness.

Emptiness is reality and awareness itself. It cannot be described or captured in words. It cannot be intellectually or conceptually understood. It is the nameless, timeless and spaceless reality that stares us all in the eyes when we learn how to look. It is therefore not somewhere else or only accessible at another time. Since it transcends both space and time, and we have not been trained to see it, it is hidden in plain view – right here, right now. It is the most fundamental aspect of reality there is; in fact, what I should more accurately say is that it is reality itself – unadorned, direct, immediate, inescapable. Our ancestors discovered that, only when we discover this fundamental truth in the form of direct experience, not just conceptually, our suffering stops.

To come back to the elephants, the beauty of our human condition is that the scaffolding of illusions with which we see the world as we leave our childhood behind, enter adulthood and pay our taxes, is exactly like the 18th elephant – a useful scaffolding affording us the precious opportunity of liberation from the scaffolding itself. Without the bodymind and its illusions about life, we could not solve the challenge of liberation from suffering, the same way the three brothers could not solve the problem of their father’s will without the 18th elephant. But once we see through the nature of illusions and the distorted ways we see our bodymind and the world, the radiant reality of emptiness emerges from the clouds of ignorance, the same way the solution to the puzzle the three brothers were struggling with elegantly emerges with the ephemeral appearing and disappearing of the 18th elephant.

The nice thing is that we don’t need to worry, struggle or go through hoops. All we need to do is embrace our embodied existence fully for the length of our bodies’ existence, pay our taxes, have kids, buy a home, find fulfilling work – and then examine the illusions of this existence deeply. Like Sirens these illusions beckon us to come and explore their indecent nakedness hidden behind their clothing of diverse appearances and distortions. As we engage, they retreat like mirages, shy to reveal their naked essence to the inquiring eye. Once these retreating nudes have nowhere else to retreat to, like mirages, their nakedness reveals itself to be exactly also their insubstantiality, the oasis of emptiness that delights with its refreshing treasures of awareness itself. Then, like the airplane piercing through the cloud blanket into the space above, where the blue sky timelessly reigns, liberation into the timeless truth of the nameless, of God, always present, always available, just not seen, automatically ensues as we systematically shed our multiple layers of ignorance. We don’t have to learn anything new – we only have to unlearn the old learned distortions that cloud our view.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

I recently asked one of my students how her practice was going. She was cursing me, she said. Her practice had gone so well before, but since she dug deeper into her life through psychotherapy, it had become so uncomfortable that she wished she could just go back to the innocent state she was in before she started all this. I quipped that the innocent state must have really worked well for her, given that it lead her to seek help. She laughed. So now her practice had dwindled, and instead she had taken to consuming boxes of cereal by the truck loads. I hoped it was at least whole grain cereal!

This is a common challenge. Meditation practice changes constantly, moving through easy and difficult periods all the time as we work our way through deeper and deeper layers of illusions and ignorance. What to do when the going gets tough? Her sense was strong that she ‘needed a break’ from practice because it was so challenging. The question is what this ‘needing a break’ really means and how to handle it.

For the untrained monkey mind ‘needing a break’ means metaphorically having started the ascent of a mountain, finding it too hard and simply abandon the mountain, or having termites in the basement, having started to deal with them, but finding it too challenging and slamming the door to the basement shut. That is not helpful. All boxes of cereal will do is make you fat! Not only are they not good for you, but they don’t solve the ongoing issue that plagues your life.

‘Needing a break’ can be interpreted much more skillfully. You are working with the window of tolerance of energy flow. What does that mean? Our organism is energy flow, and the brain regulates that energy flow so that the organism stays healthy and survives. This regulation occurs within a spectrum of energy flow patterns, from the chaotic on one end of the spectrum to the rigid on the other end. In between is the harmonious flow, which corresponds to health. When we fall into chaos (anxiety for example) or rigidity (depression for example), the brain tries to bring us back to harmony and health by mobilizing certain mechanisms.

In meditation, we engage the MPC (medial prefrontal cortex) to regulate energy flow in a new and more efficient way, which corresponds metaphorically to how a sailor navigates the ocean with all his instruments and experienced skill. We learn not to start a mountain climb unprepared, but have all the tools we need with us in our backpack. Depending on the nature of the energy flow for the meditator or the quality of the weather for the sailor, that navigation can become really difficult. There comes a point, where the meditator faces such strong headwinds in the energy flow that it becomes difficult to be in one’s own skin. This is the work we do with the window of tolerance for stress. The borders of the window is where the regulation of energy flow becomes difficult and borders on either chaos or rigidity. When the energy flow is so unruly as to trespass the borders, we are not in control anymore; chaos or rigidity have taken over and the fight/flight system is in full swing. We become reactive instead of responsive. In that reactive state we don’t handle stress constructively anymore and our meditation becomes unproductive.

Depending on the combination of lived history and innate temperament, we all have different sizes of windows of tolerance for the variations in energy flow. But we all have windows with borders, and at some point we need to know how to skillfully handle the instances when the energy flow threatens to trespass the borders. That is the moment when we may feel we ‘need a break’.

Rather than give up, we have to realize that working with the window and its borders is part of meditation. The single most frequent mistake meditators do is to not emphasize the attitude of COAL (curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) enough, without which the window tends to become significantly more restricted. COAL widens our window and allows us to continue our investigation of experience phenomena, even when it becomes difficult. Part of COAL however is also knowing when to back off, not giving up in a state of flight, but continuing the process of meeting our experience with curiosity and steadfastness. This new kind of ‘taking a break’ looks very differently from the ‘giving up/flight’ type. Rather than giving up, we take charge in a new way.

We won’t flee to the cereal box, but we will judiciously chose an activity that is wholesome, will allow us to continue our observations and at the same time also fall back into the window of tolerance. If you are in sitting meditation, this might include switching to walking meditation, or doing a few stretches, maybe a soothing bath or a drink of water, all activities done with judicious discernment and awareness, until we are back within the borders of the window and the brain feels safe, at which point we immediately get back to sitting meditation. Knowing how to constructively work with the window of tolerance is an art and a crucial part of a successful practice, because we cannot deeply observe and investigate our nature with a brain in panic. The brain needs to feel safe.

Safe does not mean easy – the practice can feel very challenging. Safe means not overwhelming, within the window of tolerance of today. As long as you feel you are in charge accompanied with a sense of mastery, no matter how difficult your experience is, your meditation practice is effective and you are rewiring your brain furiously. The moment you feel out of control in a fight/flight or even freeze state, Your practice is counterproductive, you only reinforce miswirings and you are wasting your time at best, if not hurting yourself. With time and practice, during which we cultivate our work at the edge of the window, the window expands and we become increasingly resilient. We then don’t need the cereal box anymore to find a sense of having a break.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.