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A question posed by one of my students triggered this article. In one of the sessions of the Mindsight Intensive I talked about the importance of intuition and introduced the topic with a story about the famous Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani, whose specialty was to report on the Far East, where he lived most of his adult life.

During the seventies a psychic told him not to ever fly during the year 1993. If he did, he would put himself in grave danger. Left-brain, successful political journalist as he was, divination and psychic abilities were certainly not topics he would have ever concerned himself with. The years passed and he forgot about the episode. But as 1993 approached, the memory came back to mind and he began to think about it. Although not into divination, he was an intuitive man, and curiously the psychic’s suggestion began to resonate with him. Although the prediction of catastrophe intrigued him, what really captured his imagination was to contemplate how different his life would become if he, as a journalist who has to fly for professional reasons all over the place, did not fly for one year, and what unexpected experiences and opportunities may arise from implementing this idea. To make a long story short, he did follow through with it. The experience profoundly transformed his life and he wrote a book about it. During that year, the World Health Organization finished an important project in the Far East, and invited 15 or so journalists from several major world-renouned newspapers and magazines to board a helicopter and go see this project and report about it. He would have been among them, but because he did not fly that year, with his consent somebody else was assigned to the mission in his stead. The helicopter crashed shortly after take-off or before landing (I don’t remember which) and everybody was of course wounded to differing degrees of severity.

My student argued that statistical probability amply explains the possibility of such a string of events without having to invoke some kind of extraordinary predictive powers psychics claim to have. From a scientific point of view, he added, there is no obvious causal link between his decision not to fly because a psychic told him so, and the fact that he was not on this ill-fated helicopter.

My student is entirely right, but also misses the whole point of what this story teaches us. Intuition is one of the nine functions of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) and as such absolutely vital for health and wellbeing. The subjective experience of intuition is profoundly a right-brain function and its truths are not scientifically accessible. In fact, something very different and deeply meaningful is at stake here.

Let me try to unpack Terzani’s experiences first. It is a fact that 15 years prior a psychic ‘predicted’ (whatever that means) that he would be in grave danger should he fly during the year 1993. It is a fact that for whatever personal reason Terzani, an otherwise rational man, was deeply touched by the psychic’s advice not to fly, and that he chose to follow the advice. It is interesting to note that in his decision to follow through with this, Terzani was much less impressed by the prediction of doom than he was by the thought that such a decision may profoundly alter his life in meaningful ways. It is a fact that because of his decision he was not invited to take the helicopter and someone else replaced him, and it is also a fact that this very helicopter happened to crash during that same year he was not flying.

Now here is the crucial idea: This sequence of facts and events makes for a good, even profound story that is healing for the soul. The narrative function of the brain develops a compelling story that is subjectively deeply meaningful. The story is not a scientific fact, but more like a Shakespearean play. Humans create meaningful stories to make sense of their lives and be connected to their context. This is the reason we go to movies and theatres. The question whether the psychic really had predictive powers or whether it is just chance is irrelevant. What is relevant here is that Terzani engaged his MPC’s intuitive function and put it to good use to direct his life. There is a compelling sense of being attuned to the cosmos that arises when we know how to follow our intuition and weave meaningful life narratives, despite the fact that none of it is scientifically provable. The art is to be able to live the stories fully, knowing that they are not scientifically true, but subjectively meaningful. In his situation I would personally have felt blessed that I was not on the helicopter because I had decided not to fly that year, not because there actually exists a scientifically proven causality between the two, or because God actually blessed me to avoid the crash (maybe he/she did, maybe not!), but because my brain’s construction of an assumed causality feels deeply meaningful. This is a crucial difference, the one between an actual and an assumed causality. The first is scientific and gives us objective information about how the material world works, but rarely feeds the soul; the second belongs to the brain’s narrative function, to the story-telling function that is so important for physical, psychological and spiritual health. It feeds the soul, because the narrative function, if integrated, is a manifestation of our fully embodied psychological and existential reality expressing our subjective truth. It is this reality, and not the scientific one, that makes for the experience of having lived a meaningful life, and it is this reality we learn to explore through mindsight.

There is a condition such narratives need to meet in order to be healing and meaningful. They have to be coherent. This means that they have to resonate with all levels of organismic neuroprocessing; to put it in common parlance, they have to resonate with the gut, all the way up to the heart, the head and the spirit. (I use these vernacular terms to make it easier for laypeople to understand. Scientifically speaking, these terms denote different levels of neuroprocessing: ‘the gut’ corresponds to sensorimotor processing, ‘the heart’ to emotional processing, ‘the head’ to left-brain cognitive processing, and ‘the spirit’ to integrated awareness processing.) Coherent narratives emerge from an integrated state of the organism, where there are no major dissociations, defenses or repressions. How can a narrative be coherent when it does not meet scientific criteria? In our example, how can I have a coherent narrative with respect to having been spared a crash because I heeded a psychic’s advice, when there is no scientifc evidence for it, when in other words you may think that ‘the head’ cannot possibly be on board? The answer is simple: In exactly the same way you find deep solace from a Shakespeare play. I am totally aware that I create a narrative that imputes a causality where none may really be, and I can deeply enjoy this because I do not pretend to make a scientific statement. Conversely, it will not surprise you to hear that in all those instances where patients of mine have created beliefs about causalities that don’t really exist, they developed symptoms of all sorts. Applied to this example, I would develop a belief that the link between my following the psychic’s advice and being spared the helicopter crash is actually scientifically causal. In pretending that something is scientifically ironclad when it is not, the left brain would show its characteristic tendency to delude itself and be unreasonably certain, which would pretty soon create in me other cognitive and emotional distortions. Dysregulation in my energy and information flow would ensue and I would fall into chaos and/or rigidity and develop symptoms.

Coherent narratives require resonance between all levels of neuroprocessing, the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit. This equally applies to intuition, such as the one that told Terzani that no matter what, the idea of not flying for one year may turn out to be life-changing. How do we know the difference between integrated intuition and other experiences that come from old conditionings or unresolved internal conflicts? Have you ever ‘followed your head’, gotten it wrong and then realized that you should have ‘followed your heart or your gut’ instead? Or you followed your gut, only to later realize you should have listened to your head? As I see it, true intuition is an integrated process, in which gut, heart, head and spirit are all involved and either in resonance with each other, or if not, the MPC is aware of the reason for the discrepancy and can clearly decide which level of neuroprocessing is the accurate one. Let’s keep in mind that intuition seems to involve the neural plexi around the inner organs of the torso, in particular the intestines, the heart and the lungs. The impulses from those regions are then sent up the spine all the way to the MPC, where they reach consciousness in an integrated fashion. It is not easy to distinguish true (integrated) intuition from false intuition.

The best advice I can give with regards to intuition is to pay attention to the signals and messages coming from all four levels of processing, the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit, and observe how they relate to each other. If they are in conflict, the conflict needs to be understood. It can mean many different things. The gut may be right, but our parents’ influence on us was to ignore the body and we end up defaulting into the head, even when it is wrong. The heart may be wrong because as children we learned to accept our parents’ dysfunctional marriage as normal, but we don’t listen to the head because we are in love. I could go on with many more examples. If all four are in sync, chances are you are on the right track. If there is a conflict between two or more of them, you need the wisdom from the MPC to discern which one is right. That is not always an easy or clear decision. At the end of the day, the more complete your capacity to be consciously embodied, the greater your intuition’s power to guide you.

To come back to our story, what applies to intuition also applies to the stories we create. To be coherent, they require accurate processing on all four levels of the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit. In addition, we also need to be clear on what type of story we create. If it is a scientific one, it requires scientific rigour. If it is an intuitive one, it needs to be meaningful and compelling in a complete embodied and intuitive fashion, the same way Hamlet is the expression of timeless truths about human existence without them being scientifically true. So if in Terzani’s shoes I felt that the psychic protected me and guided me in the right direction, it wouldn’t be because I believed the events were linked by a scientifically causal connection (although there theoretically could be one and science has just not progressed to the point yet of being able to explain our ability to predict the future), but because with these events I created a psychologically and existentially meaningful story my left brain can accept as such.

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

We are voracious. By continually misappropriating thoughts and actions as ours, we grow to monstrous egoic proportions. Just look closely for a moment and you will quickly discover that only the tiniest fraction of what you do and think you are, really comes from you. Most of our life belongs to nobody and automatically unfolds without a name, without our slightest participation. If further unchecked, this misappropriation will be our collective demise.

When you discover the extent of your true absence, you realize that no ‘you’ was ever there in the first place. That is the essence of peace that allows us to see both life and death as beautiful. When we can feel and act without making any of it ours, we save the world.

Dr. T.

In anticipation of the fall a few sobering words. I am known to be a party pooper. Life is not just beautiful. Sapiens is mostly a tragic figure. In its entire history (with only few localized exceptions), humanity as a whole has never proven to be capable of anything else than self-destruction. As of this writing, there is no evidence of the contrary – we are racing against a wall at 200 km/hour with no meaningful sign of slowing down, happily counting our pennies.

Consider this true story: In 1983, the Russian atomic control center’s alarm went off that the US had launched several missiles against Russia. The commander at the time chose not to believe the computers because he did not trust them. He waited until the missiles could be directly detected by radar. By that time it would have been too late and the Russians would have had just time to fire off a counter attack. The moment came, and the radars did not detect anything. It was a false alarm by a glitch in the computer.

One atomic bomb today far exceeds the destructive power of all bombs used during the second world war. If in 1983 the Russians launched just one atomic missile to the US, over 50% of the North American population would have been dead or gravely wounded. The US would then launch a counterattack on predetermined targets, which would basically wipe out most if not all life on this planet. Just sit quietly for a moment and ponder this: What kind of a species, what kind of a brain creates such folly? Where does your cherished mindfulness enter the equation?

It is difficult to imagine anything different than homo sapiens being doomed, because we are deeply enslaved from within. The environmental destruction train we have unleashed has long left the station of irreversibility and nature has begun to shake us off. Mind you, our planet does not care. It has done that many times before, wiping the slate clean and making room for new evolutions, and it will do it again. It is one thing though when cataclysmic cosmic events change the landscape; it is another to destroy ourselves when we could enjoy the bounty of this marvellous universe for many more centuries to come. To realize how dire things are on this planet, you need to look closely and read the fine and not so fine print of scientific evidence. Like the boiling frog anecdote, environmental changes occur gradually and we happily bicker about which tea set is most appropriate for afternoon tea while the boat is already sinking and we are about to be cooked to a crisp. Where does mindfulness come into play?

Educated to compete and pursue unlimited growth, when the economy shrinks from 7% to 3% we panic, and we argue about whether carbon reduction targets should be met 30, 50 or 100 years from now! We are on the same road like the former inhabitants of Easter Island. Their mindset and class system dictated that vast amounts of timber be used for elaborate temple constructions and buildings for the upper class. Locked in by this mindset they continued pillaging the island until every single tree was gone. With the last tree the ecosystem that sustained them was also gone and the society collapsed. What role does mindfulness have in this?

Rampant social injustice destroys us. The dog eats dog world we project on nature reaches all the way to humans where sapiens eats sapiens. The survival of the fittest is well alive and thriving even in civilized societies that profess to be humanistic. We chase return of capital, yield, profit and relentless expansion at the expense of others and nature. The terrible tyrants of yesterday have morphed into the politically correct corporations of today. We live in the bubble of a limitless imaginary world of our own creation, out of touch with the limited reality of the natural planet that sustains us. Where is mindfulness to be seen?

Other species were doomed in the past because of external natural circumstances such as meteors and climatic shifts which destroyed their sustaining environment. We are doomed because of how our psyche works. Quite simply, we have the powers of creation and destruction, yet are in the unfettered grip of our grandiose left brain with its unsavoury characteristics.

We think we know it all and that we can go it alone without nature. So we waste and pillage, counting on nature to clean up after us.
We are plagued by unrealistic expectations and play like Peter Pan without regard to the limitations of resources. So we consume far beyond what is reasonable.
We are paranoid, unable to trust and inspire trust, and always in need of feeling in control. So we compete out of fear of survival and are in a constant state of war with nature and others.
We are overly optimistic and unrealistically positive, so we endlessly postpone dealing with the reckoning that sits at our doorstep.
We are in denial about our shortcomings, so we entertain grandiose ideas about our ability to solve problems.
We are unreasonably certain and see the world in black and white terms, so we dismiss everything that does not fit our agenda and launch like the apprentice sorcerer into activities and experiments far beyond our expertise.
We create stories and opinions that are woefully wrong and out of touch with reality, but don’t even notice it because our theories always reflect back on and confirm themselves. When reality does not match our fantasies about it, we will invent lies to confirm our delusions. So we act in terribly destructive ways and become the authors of countless suffering.
We manipulate truth with the loudness of our voice. So who has the loudest voice has the truth.
We manipulate reality by controlling the means of argument such as pseudo logic and detachment. So we ignore the truth that emotions and intuition hide.
We are hugely reactive and incapable of wise discernment. So we make terrible decisions that have terrible consequences.
We are unable to see the long-term picture and have a short memory for history. So we never learn from our experiences and repeat destructive courses of action again and again.

On a global scale I have no solution, because the energy flow that determines the behavior of masses is way beyond anyone’s control. The only point of influence is the individual, not just because the individual is the only one capable of saving himself, but because masses can change direction when enough individuals change direction. Despite my realism (or pessimism?), whether we’ll globally succeed or not in changing direction as the global family of sapiens is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, we can put ourselves on the right side of history.

To be on the right side of history means to examine the instrument with which we play the tune of our lives, learn from it and apply its lessons. One of the tools (and possibly the most powerful one) is mindfulness. On the surface it seems like mindfulness has taken off like wildfire, at least in Europe and North America. This is not the first time. Thousands of years ago whole countries embraced its principles. But on the large scale of masses its depth gets diluted, not surprisingly hijacked by the left brain which molds it to its particular worldview. Today, mindfulness as a nice idea, a cool trend that fits into our lives between a golf game and dinner, has reached epidemic proportions. With it comes a sense of gratuitous facility with which we play with the toy of mindfulness – with the result of course that changes are much diluted. Mindfulness has morphed into the MacMindfulness of people trying to rewire the brain to make things better. But making things better is more a side effect of mindfulness than its soul. It is fast-food-mindfulness lacking access to the nutritious potential of its depth. I hear Shania Twain’s line pop up in my mind, ‘… that don’t impress me much!’

Will we really free ourselves from the scourge of the left brain gone berserk with 10 minutes a day of mindfulness as we try to cure our high blood pressure? Not a chance! The tens of thousands of years of evolutionary conditioning will wipe us out before we say boo, even with lower blood pressure. So making things better is noble, but not where it is fundamentally at.

With mortality bestowed upon us, we are the lucky ones. Richard Dawkins writes: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

Mortality is an opportunity to discover our nature as ‘that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred’. With mindfulness it is not illnesses we need to cure. It is mortality itself. Yes, we need to cure mortality, or put differently, we must learn to die from death, not from illnesses. In our left-brain narrow-mindedness of MacMindfulness we chase after the cure of disease and the removal of pain. If you are old enough, you know all too well that this does not work.

To cure mortality is to heal and cure our lives by gaining access to our birthright, the nameless vastness of timelessness. Only then true liberation from suffering can be found, trust and love can flourish, and the missiles can be taken down. There is a reality we are blind to, that is far more real than the one we think we see. The material world is not the end all and be all. Beyond it lays the promised land of pure awareness, our real identity transcending the limitations of time and space. It is the land of birthlessness and deathlessness, where birth and death are transformations of the same unknown we are made of. It is also the land of humility, justice, reverence for life and love. It is the land of nature if we know how to listen.

The fine dining of mindfulness is the big challenge we are taking on this year (as we have every prior year), but with a twist: One of the Mindsight Intensive groups will be devoted to non-duality and its mysteries.

Dr. T.

There is such a thing as Avoidance Yoga. Indeed I suspect most Yoga studios in North America offer Yoga as a workout routine, not a meditation, thus contributing to the strengthening of avoidance mechanisms. One of my students is a case in point.

During one of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Programs I introduced the first Yoga session by asking participants to step onto their mats as the metaphor for stepping into the present moment. The instruction was to then listen to the fine whispers of the body and let IT tell them how to move.

This particular participant I shall call Lucy was frozen and could not move, even though she had attended Yoga classes for 2 years prior to this session. As I invited her to tell us what was happening in her body and why she felt frozen, she reported feeling extremely anxious, embarrassed about her body, and that she ‘did not want to go there’. “To go where?” I asked, to which she replied “to go where it hurts”. Following the call of mindful attention I invited her to turn to exactly what she did not want to face, upon which she broke down into tears and sobbed. She told us how she has always hated her body, indeed herself (with a long childhood history of events explaining this state of affairs), and she always tried to avoid feeling this pain, which is deeply embedded in the implicit memories of her body. The Yoga she was involved in for 2 years that used movement as an avoidance was perfect to perpetuate her suffering under the disguise of helping her feel superficially better.

The brain uses movements of the limbs not only to act in the world, but also to avoid awareness of embedded emotional pain. Her 2 years of Yoga practice did just that – reinforcing her defenses against emotional pain by enlisting muscular movement. This occurs in typical Yoga classes where you are asked to imitate the teacher’s postures. Once invited to approach movement in a different way, not as a mechanism of avoidance or as a thing to do to achieve a posture, but as an energetic process that wants to integrate those parts in us we have unconsciously dismissed as too painful to deal with, Yoga moves into an entirely different direction. It becomes what the word itself ‘Yoga = yoking’ originally meant: To yoke and reconnect our superficial conscious life with the deeper life of hidden truths we have long forgotten. Instead of working with our muscles, tendons and fascias, we work first and foremost with the brain.

Dr. Treyvaud

Newsletter December 13, 2015
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Reflections December 2014
Reflection December 2014
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Announcement September 2014
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Announcement March 2014
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Announcement December 2013
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Special communication March 2013
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The introductory mindfulness programs, also called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Programs (MBSRPs), are 12-week introductory programs teaching the practice of mindfulness and the development of mindsight. They take place several times per year, often several groups running parallel every week.

We do have a waiting list, because there are occasionally last minute cancellations due to unforeseen circumstances. However, only people who have been assessed by either Dr. Treyvaud, Dr. Macdonald or Dr. Kelford can be put on the waiting list.

All these programs are mostly taught by Dr. Macdonald. Dr. Treyvaud teaches 1 session (#11) in each program.

12 weekly meetings plus 1 whole day retreat for each group:

Spring 2018:

• Mondays 2pm-5pm, April 2 – June 25, 2018 (12 weeks),
  whole day retreat 9am-4pm, Friday May 18, 2018 – FULL!
• Tuesdays 10am-1pm, April 3 – June 19, 2018 (12 weeks),
  whole day retreat 9am-4pm, Friday, June 1, 2018 – FULL!
• Tuesdays 3pm-6pm, April 3 – June 19, 2018 (12 weeks),
  whole day retreat 9am-4pm, Saturday June 2, 2018 – FULL!
• Wednesdays 5pm-8pm, April 4 – June 20, 2018 (12 weeks),
  whole day retreat 9am-4pm, Saturday June 9, 2018 – BOOKING NOW!
• Thursdays 10am-1pm, April 5 – June 21, 2018 (12 weeks),
  whole day retreat 9am-4pm, Saturday June 16, 2018 – FULL!

Sign-up now for the fall sessions from September to December 2018!

To register please follow the instructions here.