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.

What is this freedom from suffering everyone participating in diverse spiritual traditions talks about? Easily we end up imagining some disembodied state of purity that is unencumbered by the trials and tribulations of a solid body doomed to illness and decay. We may also silently hope for the disappearance of pain or equate freedom with the ability to get and do what we want. Nothing could be further from what freedom is all about as this old Asian story tells us.

A citizen goes to visit the king, who has a vast reputation for being wise, and asks: “Sire, does freedom in our lifetime exist?”
“Absolutely it does”, responds the king, immediately proceeding with the question: “How many legs do you have?”
Surprised by this question the citizen looks at himself, then answers: “Two, my Sire.”
The king: “Are you able to stand on one leg?”
“No problem”, says the citizen.
“So try and decide on which leg you want to stand”, invites the king.
The citizen reflects for a while, then lifts his left leg, remaining standing on only his right leg.
“Very good!” says the king, “now lift also your right leg!”
“I beg your pardon, Sire? That is impossible!”
To which the king responds: “You see, that is freedom! You are free, but only to take the first decision, none after that!”

Freedom is not liberation from reality. Quite on the contrary. It is liberation into reality, the ability to ‘be free and easy in the market place’ as they say in Zen, a sense of great flexibility in the face of life’s unpredictable waves of challenge. Freedom means that we have learned to get out of our own way, out of the way of how things are whether we like it or not, out of the way of how nature unfolds according to patterns all of its own beyond our comprehension. When we are free, we embrace the inevitable with ease and graciousness, and when we fail to be so gracious, we don’t become aggressive towards ourselves, but lovingly hold our limitations in the healing womb of awareness.

Freedom is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, because no stretch of the imagination can conceive what freedom is except for making it seem what it is not … easy. Freedom entails taking on the responsibility for the recreation of our lives in every moment we can remember to do so. Because no moment is free of defilements, every act of recreation is an act of purification. Freedom is the equanimity we find in the inevitable human condition of purgatory. Freedom requires suffering the way Nelson Mandela’s liberation required 27 years of imprisonment. The liberation from purgatory is not another place somewhere else such as we imagine paradise to be, but paradise is the full acceptance of purgatory, while hell is its stubborn rejection.

Only the infinite spaciousness of awareness, combined with a loving stance towards what is, can give us access to the deep peace that comes with realizing that hell and paradise are just the two masks of freedom.

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

A student recently made an astonishing discovery. It was not astonishing by virtue of its monumentality, but by virtue of its subtlety. He had practiced mindfulness for several years by examining the different domains of experience in detail, such as physical sensations, emotions, thoughts and perceptions of the external world. Attention and equanimity were the main tools with which he explored. In this year’s course on non-duality, the focus has been more intensely on awareness itself than ever before. He struggled at first with this different emphasis, because he realized his intention to be mindful focused mainly on how he could focus attention. In comparison to attention, awareness seems so ephemeral and intangible.

It suddenly dawned on him that he had practiced concentration and differentiation of experience phenomena without really realizing to what extent awareness itself was available to him. Harnessing the power of attention had been his main focus, and awareness became unconsciously available to him ‘through the backdoor’ so to speak, but not directly and consciously. Awareness being unconscious may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is not, because like tunnel vision we may not have access to the internal reflexivity of awareness. Let me explain.

Awareness has what I would call an internal and external reflexivity. The internal reflexivity is the fact that awareness is aware of itself; external reflexivity means that awareness is aware of anything else.

Let’s begin with external reflexivity, since it is the more familiar and accessible of the two. Awareness being aware of anything else implies that awareness is aware of objects of awareness. Awareness, the subject, is aware of its objects. The knower is aware of the known. We become more closely acquainted with objects of awareness by momentarily focusing awareness on them. This focusing of awareness is how attention is defined. As we pay attention, a subject (me) pays attention to an object (say the chair). This stance is how we are used to facing the world we live in and is characterized by dualism (from Latin ‘duo’ meaning ‘two’), the dualism of a subject apprehending objects of experience. Thus the expression ‘awareness (subject) of whatever we are aware of (object)’. The metaphor of the mirror can be helpful here: The mirror reflects all the objects that happen to show up in front of it. The moment you (the subject) stand in front of a mirror (awareness), there suddenly appears a second you (the object) inside the mirror you now can see and know as an object. The moment an object enters the field of awareness, it becomes known as an object.

Internal reflexivity of awareness is a completely different kettle of fish. When we refer to awareness being aware of itself, it only superficially appears to be a relationship between two entities, awareness and awareness. The limitations of language and conceptual thinking do not afford us any other way of expressing an experiential fact that is difficult to capture in any other way. In truth, when we talk of awareness being aware of itself, we mean awareness being aware as itself. We mean an identity of awareness as awareness, not a relationship between two aspects of awareness. There is no duality of a subject called awareness being aware of an object called awareness. Instead, we denote a non-duality without a subject-object distinction, whereby awareness is inherently aware in a reflexive way both as itself (internal reflexivity) and of anything else (external reflexivity). For easier comprehension this internal reflexivity can be pictured imagining standing and taking a step towards yourself, or the sun illuminating itself. It is only possible by making an orthogonal shift into a new dimension, the dimension of being. The way to take a step towards yourself is to drop into the awareness of yourself as Being. The same applies to the sun, which is self-illuminating and unlike the moon does not require any other source for illumination. To come back to our mirror (awareness), it is self-reflexive in that the mirror can not mirror itself. It simply is itself, and as such inherently reflexive.

We can go through life never having conscious access to the internal reflexivity of awareness. You may wonder ‘so what’? The answer is as simple as it is profound. Without that access you will never know who you really are, and by not knowing that, you don’t know the instrument with which you live your life. You thus perpetuate a profound split in your being, which naturally comes with a lot of suffering and all its consequences.  We can go through life only partially aware, meaning that we are aware of all the ten thousand things of the world, of all the contents of awareness that are seen through the dual lens of the subject-object split, without knowing that we are aware, and thus not knowing who we are. Our habit of creating a split between the observer and the observed is so deeply ingrained that the moment we focus awareness in the form of attention, we focus on something, and awareness of awareness is lost and inaccessible. The unified field of awareness, its unity and self-reflexive nature beyond the dualistic subject-object split, remains for most people inaccessible to be realized, even though it is always there. The defining moment for my student was to realize that by focusing attention he could not only become aware of subjective experiences, but that he could also become aware of being aware.

Awareness is a bit like the light in the fridge. Whenever you open it, you are usually hungry and look for the objects inside the fridge. You do not notice that the only reason you can actually see what’s in the fridge is because the light is on. You notice even less that the light is on whenever you open the fridge, and when the fridge is closed you have no way of knowing whether the light is on or not. Whenever you ask yourself whether you are aware right now or not, the answer is always ‘yes’, the same way the light is always on when you open the fridge. If you do not ask the question, or you are not aware of being aware, you have no way of knowing whether you are aware or not, the same way you have no way of knowing whether the light is on when the fridge door is closed. Awareness is more than awareness of things, it is also awareness as Being. Without access to this fundamental aspect of awareness, we lose access to vast swaths of the infinite context within which we exist, of the infinite context we actually are.

Whatever we focus on becomes the object of our attention, and awareness itself, also referred to as awareness of awareness, can never be an object of attention, of its own focusing or knowing. It is always the subject that knows itself as subject, thus eluding us as long as we look for it the way we look for things. As strange as it might seem, we cannot pay attention to awareness; attention being the focusing of awareness, we can only pay attention as awareness. Whatever we pay attention to becomes an object of attention or awareness that can never be awareness itself. The astonishing part, therefore, is that we can be intensely steeped in using awareness through its focusing aspect of attention without realizing that awareness itself is directly available to us. The way it is directly available to us is a highly unfamiliar process this student only just discovered. It is not by focusing on it, but by realizing that we have all along already been it. This discovery made my student realize to what extent awareness is also the defining force for inner peace.

Awareness reveals context to us, the fact that we are intricately interwoven in a vast web of infinite causes and consequences beyond our wildest comprehension. Context gives us a sense of belonging that relaxes us and opens the door to discovering complexity. Complexity breeds humility, because we realize there is an intelligence at work in the universe far greater than what we can ever imagine. Humility leads to wise and skillful action, which in turn manifests as love.

The meaning of our lives may just simply be to seize the opportunity to use awareness as our guiding light. Life is our opportunity to bring awareness into motion, and not let it slumber in the darkness of unconsciousness. Awareness in motion is not about what be pay attention to, but what we discover we are all along. Not surprisingly, this turns out to be love.

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

Arnaldus de Villa Nova (1240-1311 AD), a physician, theologian and alchemist of the Middle Ages, wrote that verse. The words refer to the philosopher’s stone, the unseemly pebble lying on the side of the road – despised, neglected and rejected by those not in the know. What is the hidden mystery so easily overlooked in the stone? The Tibetan story of the dog’s tooth gives us a clue.

A merchant travels to India. His mother asks him to bring back a relic. He forgets. Before his next trip she asks again and again he forgets. About to return home from his third trip and having again forgotten to pick up a relic, he removes a tooth from the skeleton of a dead dog at the road side and brings it home to his mother, telling her that it belonged to a great saint. Delighted, his mother worshiped this tooth; other women join her from everywhere, and eventually they all see bright rays of light radiating off this ‘relic’.

Thus the old Tibetan saying: ‘When there is veneration, even a dog’s tooth radiates light’.

This is the story of the extra-ordinariness of the ordinary. It does not matter where you are, at church, around the kitchen table or on the battle field, or what you do, walking, working, cleaning, parenting or meditating – it is the manner with which you are attentive to this moment, with which you hold an object, touch the world around you and act in your life that determines the healing power of your influence. If you realize that with awareness and presence everyone of your actions becomes a gesture from your Being, the sacred reveals itself in every detail of your everyday life.

You don’t need to travel to India, visit the pope or go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to find the sacred. “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet” (Kafka).

Seek moments of stillness and solitude to make space for feeling the movement of your arm as your hand brings a piece of apple to your mouth. Don’t wait until it is too late after you had a stroke and your arm cannot move anymore, to regret not having seen the awe-inspiring perfection and sacredness of your capacity to move. Everything within and around you is waiting to be felt, heard and seen like a flourishing child seeking her parents’ loving recognition. When you bring this kind of dedicated attention to your life, the ordinary comes alive as the sacred expression of your timeless Being.

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

‘Hanging out’ is an important principle to follow in meditation. Sustaining attention with COAL (curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) is in fact what hanging out is all about. Yet hanging out denotes something more.

There is an element of ease and ‘no care in the world’ in it, yet also filled with presence. It emphasizes lingering in time, letting the fire of time cook the meal of awareness to perfection. It is a bit like going whale watching. You take the boat (use your tools of concentration with COAL), then bop around on the waters of the ocean waiting for these magnificent creatures to emerge. Except that when you hang around in meditation you do not know what you are waiting for; in fact you are not waiting for anything except perhaps Godot. You hang around to be burned alive, to be dissolved by the wear and tear of time, and to be devoured by truth. Hanging out means relinquishing control and allowing nature and reality to speak, allowing emptiness to manifest. Here is a quote from F. Kafka describing something similar: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Hanging out includes just being without any attachment to what it is supposed to be. Find pleasure in living in a world that is not supposed to be, or that is already there as it is, and that does not have to be anything. Deeply listen to yourself and be OK with what you like and don’t like. As you hang out, anything can happen. You don’t have to make yourself be like what other people want you to be or what is going to be accepted. You don’t have to do something that already exists because so many other people are doing that. Enjoy the isolation of your own inner world of complex experiences and don’t worry about what people think. Respect yourself, your instincts and your emotions. Every day you do everything you can do be a good person, so why should someone else with their trials and tribulations, their thoughts and ideas affect you more than you affect yourself? Hone the ability to be in touch with genetic memory and instinctive patterns that we all secretly know from thousands of years of evolution.

When you hang out in this place of respectful and sustained attention, your expectations shed like the colored leaves of autumn, and you find yourself there, just there, for no reason at all. Even your attention softens. Rather than fleeing back into its distracted jerky mode resembling the activity of a fruit fly, attention softens into its quiet pool of stillness, not moved by you, but gently rocked by the siren call of the source. You just hang out, patiently letting time extend its tentacles in all directions towards eternity. Wherever you hang out, you wait; no you don’t even wait, you make your home there.

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