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Dynamic Mindfulness is a term I coined for a systematic meditation technique I developed in the course of honing an integrated view of human nature encompassing both traditional descriptions of human subjective experience based on thousands of years of collective human experience and the newest insights gained into the way our embodied brain functions. The uniqueness of this approach lies in the fact that each step taken during meditation, which can be defined as a way of using one’s mind to rewire the brain through attentional and awareness training, correlates rather specifically with what we nowadays know about the brain and its workings. In memorizing the different steps of this technique we simultaneously tour the functional anatomy of the brain, giving our meditation practice a particularly tangible and embodied sense of reality.

At first blush the term ‘Dynamic Mindfulness’ may seem like a tautology, since mindfulness is naturally dynamic. A closer look at the way we experience life makes it clear though that juxtaposing these two notions of ‘mindfulness’ and ‘dynamic’ is not as redundant as it seems. All you need to do is a quick experiment looking out the window onto a country landscape for example and notice what you see. Your thoughts will abound with nouns such as trees, grass, a field, a mountain, a river, a horse, a house etc. The reality that all these nouns are in fact verbs, processes unfolding before your eyes, escapes us for the most part, even though intellectually we can all agree that it is the case. Experientially we do not pay attention to the dynamic nature of reality, focusing instead on its static appearance. We then live our lives accordingly, out of touch with the dynamic nature of reality, manipulating objects instead. We live as if we were part of a large canvas of objects interacting with each other, out of touch with and unaware of the fact that every object, including ourselves, are processes unfolding in the first place. This leads to such phenomena as ‘bringing my sore knee with a torn meniscus to the doctor to be fixed’, thus leaving myself out of the equation of the healing process, oblivious to the fact that I, my knee, my relationship to my knee and the whole organism the knee is part of are all intertwined dynamic processes involved in both the reason for the torn knee and its healing. Such an approach to the living organism that we are is limiting and therefore causing unnecessary suffering.

Why do we objectify reality into a collection of interacting nouns and forget the deep dynamic nature of reality as verb? The reason has to do with three mechanisms by which we forget the deep dynamic nature of reality. They relate to the nature of beliefs, the relationship between the left and the right brain, and psychological development through childhood.

1. The first mechanism by which we forget the deep dynamic nature of reality 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.
2. As for the second mechanism, 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.
3. The third mechanism is deeply embedded in our childhood development. As we grow from a young child into preadolescence and adolescence, our capacity for abstraction evolves. Young children are not capable of complex abstract reasoning (thought differentiation). Their world is concrete, and their not yet very evolved reasoning capacities not very differentiated from fantasy (Piaget: concrete operational stage). This 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.

Dynamic Mindfulness investigates these mechanisms that distort our sense of reality. It is the experiential realization that

1. All objects of observation are energy and information flow (EIF),
2. No object of observation can ever be seen in isolation from all other objects of observation (interbeing),
3. Every object of observation is both caused by a multitude of other objects of observation and causes a multitude of other objects of observation (this is, because that is; this is not, because that is not),
4. There is a relationship between the objects of observation, the known, and the subject that observes, awareness or the knowing,
5. Every observed object is automatically modified by the awareness brought to the object,
6. Awareness and its objects is the dualistic aspect of awareness, and
7. Awareness itself encompasses both the knowing and the known and is non-dualistic.

In Dynamic Mindfulness we base our work on a 5-dimensional view of reality as we explore the 5 aspects of human experience in an integrated fashion:

1. Physical dimension: The brain, the body and behavior as they are objectively observable and measurable through science.
2. Somatic dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as body through physical sensations and emotions.
3. Psychological dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as psyche through emotions, thoughts and narratives in relation to day-to-day living.
4. Existential dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as sense of an independent and embodied self and human organism (or bodymind) in relation to its own finite existence within the boundaries of time and space.
5. Spiritual dimension: The mind as it is subjectively and transcendentally experienced as dissolution of an independent sense of self in relation to the nameless, timeless and spaceless essence of reality called transcendence.

Because we express these different aspects of experience through action, one form being language, different facets of consciousness in different experience modes will be expressed in different language modes. In Dynamic Mindfulness we need to familiarize ourselves with these language modes, learning how to use and interpret them. The four 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 aspect 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.

Dynamic mindfulness gives us a systematic and clear roadmap to explore awareness, which we define as the subjective experience of consciousness. Awareness entails four aspects we learn to become familiar with:

1. The objects of awareness (i.e. the content of awareness, the known, experience phenomena),
2. The subject of awareness (i.e. the witness, the knowing),
3. The dynamic process by which the subject and its objects are related, and
4. The quality of the whole awareness experience.

Dynamic Mindfulness highlights the way awareness is an EIF (energy and information flow) tracker and modifier, tracking everything it modifies, and modifying everything it tracks. Why? Because where awareness goes, neurons fire, and where they fire, they rewire. Result? Awareness differentiates details of what seems uniform, thus dissolving rigidity, and creatively links disparate parts that seem unrelated, thus ordering chaos.

In Dynamic Mindfulness we use a very specific set of practices and tools that first close all the doors of avoidance the organism is conditioned and used to mobilize, then lead us through the processes of differentiation and linkage to integration. We explore in a sequential and systematic way first the objects of awareness, and once we are solidly anchored in the world of phenomena, we then move on to the much more difficult topic of the subject of awareness. We proceed by first grounding ourselves in the world of objects of our experience through stable concentration as the core tool for differentiation, spacious equanimity (COAL – curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) as the core tool for linkage, strong somatic awareness without which no liberation from identification is possible, and clear view of the different categories of experience. In a later stage, we then move on to explore the witness, the subject of our experience, including the relationship between the objects of awareness and awareness itself, until we ultimately discover the non-dual foundations of reality and Being.

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

Nothing satisfies me more than to discover the world in a grain of sand. A few moments of lived life can reveal the fundamental laws underlying our embodied awareness. Looking at the small and seemingly insignificant has the advantage of being available any time and everywhere. It also requires that we slow down to see it, and by using words we can free its treasures from the grip of irrelevance. In my newsletters and blogs, what I prefer and most of the time endeavor to write about is just that.

The grain of sand is this present moment, and this present moment is Grand Central Station, the nodal point where all the energies of reality converge in the complex human experience of being alive. Our evolutionary and cultural conditioning, our conditioned patterns of behavior, movement, thought and feeling, our memories and anticipations, and the novel experiences we never encountered before, all converge in this nodal point of a multidimensional continuum called reality.

Reflecting on the present moment, which extends to a few seconds of lived life, is like unpacking a symphony, listening to its interpretation by the orchestra of our organism, and realizing by the end of it that one has penetrated reality, truth and time to its timeless essence.

To describe these moments adequately words need to meet the expectations of eloquent discourse. They should delightfully embody the liberating lightness of being, and be free to imperfectly hint at the unspeakable truth of stillness and silence. They can truly be what they are supposed to be, signifiers suspended between what they signify and the consciousness they both structure and express in space and time.

Do you hope to glance at this newsletter between two other urgent emails in the long list of things you have to get done today? If that is the case, don’t hesitate to unsuscribe, because I do not write for you. No, sorry I am wrong – I do write for you, but for the authentic you who is perhaps buried under the rubble of the hectic shell of you skidding through time on the surface of life. I write for the you who yearns to hear the faint whispers of the soul, and that you, the ‘real you’ you may barely know, demands that you slow down, that you treat language mindfully with the respect it deserves. For language is your soul’s translator who shapes your consciousness in such as a way as to become intelligible to others as you express yourself.

I like to believe that my words are not facile infomercials for the addicted monkey mind, but that they invite you to slow down, and according to your needs, to give each sentence the contemplative space it deserves. I hope you take the time for reflection, the time to mindfully engage in the movement of grabbing a dictionary if necessary and look up a word you may not be familiar with. I am not trying to be cryptic and complicated for the hell of it. On the contrary, I am trying to be as precise as reality can bare, as evocative as language allows and as simple as the complexity of the bodymind demands. But I am also trying to do justice to the complexity of truth.

Sami languages of Norway, Finland and Sweden have as many as 300 words for snow. If you don’t need to penetrate the depths of truth you don’t need a sophisticated language. Short soundbites sounding like horses slurping water are enough to grunt something irrelevant to your neighbour. But short soundbites do not capture the finesses of what human consciousness is capable of expressing. To know snow in all its complexity you need apparently 300 words, and to express the magical details of truth that are encapsulated in the flow of a present moment, you need not only many words, but also creative and novel ways of stringing them together.

Mindfulness has to extend to our capacity to formulate what often seems unspeakable, and to express what’s nameless through the power of metaphor. Our use of language reaches its full potential when we mindfully give it the time it deserves to evoke in us through the power of reflection an appreciation of the full complexity of reality and truth. Then, reading becomes a meditation in its own right with the power to reveal to us the great mystery of Being.

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

In last Thursday’s Mindsight Intensive course a student I will call Sarah shared with us her direct experience of the doors of avoidance I talked about within the context of Dynamic Mindfulness.

Movements of our limbs is one of those doors of avoidance. To create safety the brain uses physical movements of our arms and legs. You are certainly familiar with this phenomenon. Before your meeting with your disgruntled boss for example you see yourself fidgeting, nervously picking your fingers, rhythmically moving your foot back and forth in fast motion or frequently changing body position. Unconsciously engaging in these movements creates a superficial sense of internal pressure relief, but never addresses the cause of our restlessness. Were you in such circumstances making a point of relinquishing control of your limbs and keep them absolutely still, the finer internal energy flow of emotions and thought patterns would surface more clearly into your consciousness, and you would be much better able to explore how you create your internal hell, realize distortions you engage in and modify your outlook to your advantage.

Through experimentation Sarah was astonished to realize so viscerally how powerful movement can be in obscuring our view of our internal world. When in complete physical motionlessness of formal practice she deliberately moved just one finger, the spaciousness of awareness with its focused and stable attention got disrupted and her view of the internal energy flow became murky, like water becomes murky when the sediment that has settled at the bottom gets stirred up. This direct realization of the doors of avoidance I had been talking about was just the sideshow to the main story of this blog.

In describing her experience Sarah wanted to know what the scientific explanation of this phenomenon was, and that was what immediately piqued both my and her curiosity. The question was motivated by more than just intellectual curiosity. There was a sense that her subjective experience, as powerful and clear as it was, required scientific validation. Why was her experience not enough for her understanding of reality? Why did she need a scientific explanation to validate her experience? This profound question brought tears to her eyes, an expression of sadness that would take her some time to understand within the psychodynamic context of her childhood experiences. However, beyond the conditioning of her childhood there was an existential learning in store, and that was the radical primacy of subjective experience. Let me explain.

Carl Jung once talked to one of his students about a dream one of his patients had, which involved this patient walking on the moon. In telling this dream he spoke as if the patient had actually been walking on the moon, which struck his student as somewhat odd. The student asked somewhat perplexed: “But he was not really walking on the moon, only metaphorically so in the dream?” To which Jung answered: “No, no, he absolutely and really had been walking on the moon.” At that moment the student experienced an orthogonal shift, as John Kabat-Zinn would say, “… a transition from a two-dimensional ‘flatland’ into a third spacial dimension, at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two” (J. Kabat-Zinn, Coming to our senses, p. 350, Hyperion, 2005). This is the fundamental shift I invited my students to explore during our exploration of non-dual awareness, and which Sarah was about to experience in a direct embodied fashion. It was the shift into realizing the fundamental primacy of our inner world, from which all sense of meaning emerges.

The shift is radical, from a strongly conditioned conventional consensus reality that is ultimately incomplete and therefore a mere superficial appearance, to a spacious, unconditioned view of what is often referred to as ultimate reality, which is capable of recognizing conditioning as it arises. This absolute reality is awareness itself, more fundamental than conventional reality and every bit as real, the knowing capacity of mind itself beyond a knower and what is known. We tend to see ourselves as inhabitants of a world we are born into, and which we experience as conventional everyday reality of lived experience ‘out there’ created by the way our brain processes information from our external five senses. The deep conditioning at the root of this view creates a consensus trance we all share, akin to a dream world we don’t recognize as such. The orthogonal shift created through awareness feels like an awakening from this dream, more often than not experienced as nightmare, and we recognize how like fog the dream obscured our view of the horizon that opens up multiple degrees of freedom we did not know we had before. Suddenly we realize that seeing ourselves as inhabitants of a world we are born into is limited, and that in fact in every moment of our lives a world is born and vanishes in us, provided we allow ourselves to recognize our identity as the timeless Being that we are.

Sarah experienced this shift in slow motion as it unfolded in front of our very eyes. From seeing herself as arising and passing in a world, she shifted into seeing a world arising and passing in herself. The moment of her realization did not require scientific validation, as if science was more fundamental than our experience. Instead, accepting her experience as complete in itself opened the door for her to deeply honor awareness itself and its manyfold manifestations. At that moment, when she was able to let go of the conditioned need for a rational scientific explanation, she honored her deep, unique subjectivity without any attachment to what is supposed to be. She discovered the pleasure in living in a world that is either not supposed to be, or already there as it is, and that does not have to be anything. The healing effect of deeply listening to herself that way consisted of knowing that when we rest in awareness anything can happen, and we don’t have to make ourselves be like what other people want us to be or what is going to be accepted.

Consider this: When you touch the chair you are sitting on, you will never know the chair in itself. The closest you can come to knowing the chair is by way of translation, the very specific way your senses cause neurofiring patterns in your body and your brain. You can ultimately only know your own neurofiring patterns, not the chair itself, and if you had a very different brain, the chair would look and feel very differently, leading to very different conclusions about reality. When we honor that fact we realize the primacy of awareness, and our sense of Being profoundly expands in many new directions, providing untold degrees of freedom that reduce our conditioned and optional human suffering.

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

A psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher recently wrote me the following email: “I do have a question as my ‘mind’ struggles, and wants clarity about so many things! Maybe all things cannot be explained! As a therapist (teacher) and student of life, fear arises in me as I read the article on ‘Zen Lost in Translation‘. A fundamental aspiration, of ‘no harm’ or non-violence, for me only opens the experience of doubt, as I ‘do the best I can’; yet is this good enough, and when or how do we know if we are doing harm?”

This is a very important question for any teacher or psychotherapist. In my mind and experience, the answer is multilayered.

Since the human capacity for self-deception is limitless, we never know for sure how we are doing. This is the great doubt that is existentially unavoidable and very healthy to cultivate. It leaves us with the first task of not doing major harm for sure, and the second task of knowing that most of the time we are fostering healing. The two words ‘major’ and ‘most’ are important here, as there is no perfection. What follows should automatically prevent us from doing major harm, assuming an at least average intelligence and integrity. Now how about ‘tolerable harm’?

The fact that some time we make tolerable mistakes is unavoidable. This leads us to the next step, which is to make sure we recognize mistakes and when we have done harm as soon as possible. Given there is no perfection, making a mistake is in itself not a problem, as long as we know how to handle it. Part of competence is the ability to recognize mistakes fast and repair them. For repair it is very important to engage our clients, patients and students, because the capacity to repair is an integral part of healthy intimacy and health in general. This helps us recognize the psychological principle that perfection is a toxic ideal to be replaced by the search for what is optimal, because it is the optimal that has the greatest healing potential through the notion of being ‘good enough’. The best parent for example, is not the perfect one (God forbid we were raised by perfect parents – they keep generations of therapists in business!), but the ‘good enough’ one who has personal insight, is aware of his or her limitations, is capable of attunement, and is able to engage the child in repair.

Then, the idea of doing ‘the best you can’ is a tricky one. It is only valid if you have high standards and constantly hold your nose to the grindstone by having checks and balances in place. ‘Doing your best’ without checks and balances is not good enough. Guide posts in the work with clients are like the Scylla and Charybdis Odysseus sailed through: When our clients thrive we know we do good; when they don’t, they feel stuck, we feel stuck or we feel uncomfortable, then it’s time to question and dig deeper into what we are doing, reaching out to a teacher if necessary.

Next, learning and growing is a life sentence, which means that we never cease to expose ourselves to new learning, no matter how well things are going or how successful we feel. We do that by reading, taking courses, working with teachers, and take in new ideas and the most recent discoveries of our time.

Last but not least, when things are going brilliantly and the wind of success soothingly caresses the ravenous fibres of our ego, that’s when the alarm should sound: What am I overlooking? Where do I go from here? What’s next after this pleasant phase that will inevitably pass like everything else? Where is the next challenge lurking? How can I move beyond where I am?

Never smell the roses on the side of the path for too long – only long enough to revitalize and realize they all fade away. Then move on, move on, move on ……

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

From a former student I recently received the following question by email:

“In the MBSR program I heard people ask how they can love what happened to them when they bring attention to the unpleasant and painful sensations surrounding a traumatic event? How can they love the pain in the body? The steps one is supposed to take are to follow the sensations, note, open, soften, allow, accept, and then love. I personally direct love and compassion to myself, even with this experience of pain, but not the pain itself.”

“How can I love pain, tragedy and all the awful things that occur in the world?” This is a frequent question that puzzles novice meditators.

The sun does not discriminate where it shines. It shines as strongly on ISIS death camps as it does on Buddhist monasteries. Such is awareness and love. It is indeed about loving the pain as fully and completely as we love our children. The left brain problem-solving mind cannot comprehend that and seeks ways of avoiding this truth such as ‘I cannot love my pain, but I can love myself’. The mind seeks pleasure, not truth, and therefore is conditional in its love. In the literature this is often referred to as ‘eros’ love, as opposed to ‘agape’ love, which is not the same. The spiritual agape love we are talking about in mindfulness is indeed impossible to imagine, hard to embody and very misunderstood. The reason lies in the dual stance of the problem-solving mind, which can only think in terms of opposites, good and bad. From this limited perspective, one loves what’s good and hates what’s bad. But when this conceptually limited view is transcended and replaced by a non-dualistic view based in awareness, the love we discover can love Hitler AND go destroy him to protect life, humanity, decency and ultimately him from himself. Heinous acts come from pain and ignorance (or the breakdown of the social engagement system blocking access to the medial prefrontal cortex – MPC), pain comes from chaos and rigidity – it all requires the embrace of awareness to heal and integrate. That awareness is love.

More specifically, when unpleasant experiences arise within us, whether they be cognitive, emotional or physical in nature, the steps are to bring curiosity to the experiences, openness to whatever is present and acceptance to what is present whether we like it or not. This attitude of curiosity, openness and acceptance is tantamount to love. In other words, by approaching experience in this way, it is an act of love and self care, in and of itself. It is not that we need to manufacture anything else, least of all some feeling of love the way we remember loving our children on a good day. So when we say we ‘send love to the sensations inside ourselves’, we simply approach them with curiosity, openness and acceptance, which feels very spacious, aware and loving. It is not that we ‘love’ from where the pain originated (for example a past trauma), because that hurting part of ourselves is incapable of that kind of presence and love. Rather, we learn to be with what is present now, including this pain, by sitting firmly in the seat of awareness in the MPC. This then means we actually do develop a loving attitude to whatever pain is present, meaning that we are curious, open, accepting and therefore present, aware and loving. With this attitude, pain and tragedy become our teachers, unimaginable sources of useful information and wisdom.

“What is the difference between loving pain in this spiritual way and masochism?” you may ask. The latter belongs to the dualistic world of the problem-solving mind, which seeks pleasure in all possible ways. In masochism, excessive pain is sought out and pervertly woven into the mechanisms with which we seek pleasure. The pain does not get transformed, but used. More of it is sought out all the time, since the pursuit of pleasure is an addiction without limits, eternally feeding the hope for deliverance from suffering that never comes. Agape on the other hand does not seek pain, but embraces the inevitable pain that is always already there as part of the human condition. It does not chase after pain, but is a particular way of relating to it that does not engage it in any positive or negative way. It simply shines the light of insight onto it, making it of course the work of awareness. Everything awareness holds in its embrace gets transformed, not used. Since awareness dances to the tune of curiosity, openness and acceptance, all transformation that occurs through its embrace moves towards greater integration and harmony, which manifests as abiding peace independent of circumstance and love. The pain energy turns into fuel for insight, transformation and wisdom.

So yes, until we deeply love everything, including pain and all the unsavory aspects of existence, we haven’t experienced mindfulness to its fullest. This is one of the messages in Christ’s crucifixion – the ability to be fully present and awake, flexible and free in the face of life’s hardships and our existential challenges. It is hard to take at first, yet so simple: curiosity, openness, acceptance ….

What better way to close this blog with Rumi’s poem THE GUEST HOUSE, commenting exactly on this subject:

This being human is a guest-house
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Say I Am You, poems of Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, Maypop 1994

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Recently a gentleman who had taken one of my workshops asked if he could come in to see me and discuss his meditation practice. I did not know anything personal about him at all. He explained that he had attended a Zen center to learn meditation, but that his practice was stalling and he was confused with regards to instructions that did not seem to work for him. During practice he struggled with strong feelings stemming from past life events and did not know what to do with them. He approached his Zen teacher who said “just forget the past and the future and stay in the present moment, because this is the only moment you ever have”. In addition, he was in a lot of physical pain and therefore tried to bring attention to his physical body sensations by systematically scanning his body from one end to the next, only to be told that “this is not meditation! – Empty your mind, and when thoughts occur, just send them away!” He noticed that these instructions did not work for him, and came to see me to explore why.

This is Zen lost in translation. His teacher seemed unable to be there where he was on his journey, and these instructions, assuming he heard them right, are based on faulty assumptions about the nature of the organism that we are and do nothing more than undermine the student’s progress. The consequence is that he was not getting anywhere. These situations arise from three aspects of the student-teacher relationship, either because the teacher is not skilled enough, the student distorts what the teacher says or a combination of both. As an example of how difficult it is for students sometimes to process instructions correctly, I routinely teach the technique of aiming and sustaining attention on a chosen focus. When students come back a week later and discuss their home practice, they very often talk about how they were practicing thinking about the chosen focus. ‘Bringing attention to’ and ‘thinking about’ something are two entirely different actions, the latter being counterproductive and leading to failure. So let’s unpack the two main mistakes inherent in the instructions my lady heard, two problems I indeed encounter quite frequently.

The idea of forgetting about the past and the future and staying in the present moment is an absurdity that is based in a lack of knowledge about what the present moment is. It is not an infinitely small point in time and reality, separate from a past or future supposed to be ‘somewhere else’ and ‘not real’. The present moment is the reality within which we are fully embedded, while the past and future are fully embodied representations of reality created by the embodied mind. These past and future representations of reality are deeply real as they are embodied in our neurocircuits and cells. The present moment is at first a rich fabric of directly experienced energy flow lasting about one to two seconds, containing three major experience components, (1) the experience of how we have been conditioned by the past and the way that conditioning manifests in the present, (2) the experience of how we anticipate a future on the basis of our past conditioning and the way that anticipation and conditioning manifest in the present, and (3) the fresh and novel experiences arising in the present that are neither conditioned by the past nor anticipated as a future. In other words, to mine the depth of the present moment means to clearly see how the past is alive in the form of memories and gets reenacted through conditionings in the present, how the future becomes alive in the form of anticipations based on past conditionings in the present, how novelty arises in the present, and how all of these elements interact.

Such is the way humans are wired, and letting go of the past or the future means to discover both as they manifest in the present, see how they interfere with the free flow of energy by having coalesced in rigidity or dissolved into chaos, and undo those knots of chaos and rigidity. Only when we understand this can our practice take off and soar like an eagle in the sky. The moment we realize that the present moment entails all past, novelty and future as we directly experience it from moment to moment, we discover the timelessness of awareness within the present moment. Our view of the present moment then shifts through a succession of deeper insights, starting from a philosophical left-brain assumption that it is a dimensionless point in time excluding past and future, to the embodied realization that it is a short time span of richly embodied experiences involving past, present novelty and future, to the final realization of it being a timeless space alltogether outside time, where notions of past, present and future simply entirely dissolve.

Now to the notion that paying attention to the body is not meditation. The problem here is a category mistake, or a teacher’s unconscious identification with a tradition and confusing the generic elements of meditation with tradition. Let’s go back to basics. Meditation is a two-tiered process, in which we first actively and effortfully learn to aim and sustain attention on a chosen focus (concentration) with an attitude of curiosity, openness and acceptance (equanimity), and later discover how we end up able to receptively and effortlessly dwell in awareness itself. In brain terms, we learn to bring the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) on line as the master integrator of the brain and the body.

Now here is the rub: The organism that we are has at least 9 different clusters of neurocircuitry, all of which need to become integrated or harmonized in order for us to experience liberation from suffering. Forget one and you will never find the kind of peace and serenity that is independent of circumstance. In addition, we are hierarchically wired (see ‘The sixtine brain‘ in this website): Cognition (thoughts) is dependent on the body, but the body is not dependent on cognition, even though both influence each other. This means that the body is primary and fundamental, and if you permit me to use this downtrodden term ‘enlightenment’ so many people use without having the foggiest knowledge of it, enlightenment is impossible to discover without going through the body and penetrating its unfathomable depths.

Discussing the 9 domains of integration I mentioned above is beyond the scope of this short essay, but be it said that in meditation we have to learn to clearly differentiate all the different categories of experience, mainly perceptions of the external world, physical sensations in the body, emotions, thoughts and awareness itself. In addition, a thorough exploration of the nature of our body and its physical sensations is essential.

In essence then, meditation means learning a few tools with which we observe the nature of or own experience and diligently applying these tools with great precision to our journey of exploration. The instruction to ‘just quiet your mind’ is plain nonsense as you can discover within a nanosecond of trying to do just that. The same with ‘sending thoughts away’. In the same way you most certainly will start thinking of a pink elephant if I instruct you not to think of a pink elephant, your mind will become more crowded and thoughts more insistent than ever if I instruct you to quiet your mind or send thoughts away.

To discover and learn the right tools for meditation requires the help of an experienced teacher who has clarity of view as direct experience, and is not caught in left brain rationalizations, dogma or blind tradition. It also requires an apprenticeship in hearing and listening on the part of the student, because a lot of the time what we think we hear or do is not at all what was said or what we actually do. Meditation includes addressing the totality of the organism that we are with the proper tools, including our mysterious body, our busy mind, the stories we weave about our lives and awareness itself. The gentleman in question who came to see me did not get anywhere, because his teacher did not know him well and failed to see that he had an alcohol addiction that needed attention first; he was also in great emotional pain because of traumata he went through that required attention to his life stories, and he had several physical conditions with chronic pain for which he needed guidance on how to address his body. When people come to me to explore meditation, I am therefore always in the habit of asking them what drives them to want to meditate. Upon closer inquiry the full catastrophe of our human lives reveals itself, and as a teacher it is important to know how to navigate these complexities and provide the student with proper guidance, which entails a multifaceted approach to suffering.

Life is complex, human beings are complex, reality is complex, and there is no way simplistic cookie cutter views of human nature and equally simplistic instructions will lead us anywhere but to more suffering.

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.