Newsletter December 13, 2015
Newsletter November 23, 2015
Newsletter November 14, 2015
Newsletter October 12, 2015
Announcement September 2015
Newsletter July/August 2015
Newsletter June 2015
Newsletter May 2015
Newsletter April 2015
Newsletter March 2015
Newsletter January 2015
Reflections December 2014
Reflection December 2014
Newsletter November 2014
Newsletter October 2014
Announcement September 2014
Newsletter September 2014
Newsletter August 2014
Newsletter April 2014
Announcement March 2014
Newsletter February 2014
Newsletter January 2014
Announcement December 2013
Newsletter October 2013Newsletter August 2013
Newsletter June 2013
Announcement June 2013
Newsletter April 2013
Special communication March 2013
Special communication January 2013Newsletter November 2012
Special communication November 2012
Newsletter October 2012
Newsletter September 2012

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.

Consider this: Most of what exists has no future and no past. Most of the universe moves timelessly along. For time to come into existence or be known you need a human brain (or whatever equivalent organ extraterrestrials may have if they exist). Through us humans the universe becomes aware of itself. On the time scale of the universe our appearance has been a fraction of a second. If no one else in the universe has ever been as conscious as we are, it would be safe to say that the universe has major awareness deficit disorder. Maybe the universe constantly becomes aware of itself and we just don’t know it. Be this as it may …

We crave to see a future and our brains are doing a good job at constructing one for us. Human brains are pretty powerful anticipation ‘machines’ and they use statistical probability and other ingenuous neurological means to have us believe that the future they construct is real. I ‘know’ that in a few hours I will be meeting my son for dinner. Do I know that my ‘knowledge’ is just a thought, a pure virtual construction of my neurocircuitry? Do I know that only my current experience of typing this blog in the surroundings I am presently in, and only the neurofirings experienced as a thought about my future dinner with my son are real? Do I know that in this present moment for me neither son nor dinner exist as fully embodied lived reality, and that neither may ever again exist in my life? If you look very closely, can you see that in front of your presently lived experience of life there is only a wide impenetrable spaciousness of unknowable events? Contemplating this deeply feels like our lives are like a drive in a car with an opaque windshield we cannot see through to the future, and a beveled rear view mirror that gives us a modified and distorted view of the past. Contemplating this deeply feels like death as we relinquish the feeling of reality attached to the virtual constructions of a future by the brain. No future and no past exist except in the form of thoughts. To realize that means that a whole world of hopes, ambitions and expectations collapses and vanishes into thin air to leave nothing but the ever vanishing present. We die – now. Apparently though, when we die before we die, we won’t die when we die.

When we consider the legacy we want to leave behind, this sobering reality takes a stubborn hold in our hearts. All our lives we strive for excellence and to be the best we can be. We strive to fulfill our responsibilities to society and to no small measure ensure our place in the memory of humanity. We hope to be remembered when we pass on. We cherish the admiration from well-wishers during goodbye parties arranged for us when we move on from a role we held for many years, and for a moment we may feel eternal and unforgettable. But when some time later we revisit the places we were so involved in, we discover that most people don’t know who we are; some remember, but we have no place anymore in the web of their lives. Upon our leaving we are immediately replaced by people who take over the reins and take their turn to try to fulfill the dream of immortality. Cemeteries are full of indispensable people.

Memories of our contributions are like the grains of sand and pebbles on the beach – we enjoy their collective accumulation as a beach, not the individual grain of sand. Our contributions to the human condition vary in importance and notoriety. Some gigantic contributions never see the limelight of notoriety, while mediocrity can shine brightly for a while. Very few are sufficiently cherished and remembered to have permanent memorials created in their honor. Even then, their memory mostly lives on as fleeting acknowledgements of times past, buried under the rubble of day-to-day preoccupations with clear and present survival. There is nothing left of the narcissistic gratification that fueled our ambitions. There is nothing left of our dream of immortality. There is nothing left of our self-importance when we crash like a wave on the shores of reality. Even the memory of our existence fades into fleeting thoughts or oblivion in our offspring. There is nothing left – except for the realization that nothing important is left undone when we offer our living presence to the ones we hold most dear, to all the people whose life we touch during a lifetime.

Copyright 2014 by Dr. Stphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

The Mindsight Intensive is an advanced meditation program that runs throughout the academic year. It begins in the fall and runs weekly for 36 sessions until the end of June.

Weekly Meetings:

• Mondays Sept. 25, 2017 to June 25, 2018, 6:30-9:00 pm

Call us to Register – 905-338-1386

This video is a short introduction to the connections between brain and mind in mindfulness practice.

When we prepared the lecture topics and I proposed one on the MPC, Robyn asked me why anybody would want to know about it? My MPCs self-esteem got bruised and I began to defend it by making my case to her not only why it is so important, but also that unless she was a reptile, she likely benefited from her MPC desperately trying to make itself heard right then as we were speaking. Once the lecture was advertised, Robyn sent me an email and asked: What on earth am I going to write about the MPC? To which I responded: A lot of sand, pebbles and dirt. I seemed to have been inspiring to her, because her way of rethinking Yoga through the perspective of the MPC in her post is really interesting and wonderfully refreshing so much so that I felt I had little more to add. So where do I turn now???

One little sequence of words jolted me in Robyns blog. Since in the lecture I already told you about the functions of the MPC, I thought this little jolt might be a good direction to take my blog. Indeed, thanks to the MPC we are capable of awareness of awareness. We are capable of an advanced form of meta-processing thanks to the highly integrative function of the MPC. The seduction is to then deduce that the MPC is the seat of awareness, as Robyn does in her blog. Thats where my sympathetic nervous system went into slight over-activation. Oh mindfulshemindfulhe, not mindfulhemindfulshe as you know from my lecture I dare not criticize the superior gender, and in fact there is a grain of truth in what she says. Without the MPC we would not be capable of the kind of human meta-awareness (a fancy short form for awareness of awareness) we enjoy. And yet, this being said, seeing it as the seat of awareness can lead our minds into the wrong direction.

As I read Robyns blog before writing this one (my sneaky way of letting her MPC inspire my lazy one), I felt my MPC was expanding into and infiltrating my whole body and beyond it the world around me. What may seem to originate from a place in the forehead, through her text became alive in my whole body and the environment I live in. This is Robyns genius, of course, but it also means that there is something to explore with regards to where awareness sits.

Awareness is a process, not a thing, which involves at least three aspects: a known such as the object or the thing (a rose, a rotten apple) that you are aware of and have a sense of; a knowing which is the subjective sense of being aware that something is in the spotlight of your attention; a subjective felt sense or the subjective quality of that of which we are aware, such as your sense of the wonderful scent or color of a rose or the disgusting appearance of a rotten apple this subjective quality forms a bridge of sorts between the knowing and the known in the form of a quality of experience that defines the way the known is bound or appears to the knowing. Does this process of awareness occur in the MPC? Partially.

The way the known, the knowing and the subjective quality of it all appear as awareness involves every part of the organism all the way down to the cellular and molecular level and all the way up to conceptual thought. Awareness is the result of a process of awarenessing that begins at the receptors that respond to stimuli from the external world and the interior of the body, moves through many layers of processing all the way up to the MPC and cognitive thought, and includes the myriads of resulting adjustments and actions the organism engages in as a way of adapting to the demands of the circumstance. In scientific parlance we say that awareness is an emerging property of the living organism as a whole. Were you a cockroach with a completely different set of receptors, organs, cellular organizations etc., you would experience (or maybe not experience but be enveloped by) a very different awareness sense (I can tell you from experience in a previous lifetime when I had to pay for past sins!). To make this more intelligible lets take the example of Beethovens ninth. You would be hard-pressed to come up with an answer to my question where the seat of Beethovens ninth is. As you sit in a concert hall, there is the hall, the audience, an orchestra, a choir, many different instrumental sections of the orchestra, many individual players and their own views on the music, the director, the music score, Beethovens intended imagination and finally the act of performing. All these elements contribute to the emergence of something that appears in your consciousness as the experience of his ninth symphony, yet that experience is not seated in any of the aspects that give rise to your sense of marvel at this exquisite piece of music.

Such is awareness. It does not have a seat anywhere as it roams everywhere. It sits everywhere you pay attention to in your left big toe, in the red Sumac bush, in the feeling of love for your child, in your math homework, in the most distant galaxy you see through Hubble, in the most unlikely non-existing world of your imagination. It has no color, no attributes, no characteristics you can pinpoint and is transparent and clear. It is the coming together (1) of the known (2) and the knowing (3), yet beyond all three. You cannot create, expand, change, lose or find it because it is always already there. You can only get out of your own ways of obfuscating its presence with the help of the MPC.

I am glad I have your MPC on board, Robyn.

Dr. T.