Saturday, September 28, 2013, 3pm: The public lecture on the mindful brain is supposed to start; it is a charitable event for the ILC foundation. Over 60 people turn up and some are still at the door. We begin 15 minutes late introduction by Robyn; I then guide a short meditation before embarking on my lecture. A break, and then Q&A. Instead of finishing at 5:30, questions from participants keep coming until 5:50. Robyn and I have never done this before we invited a panel of experts to participate in answering peoples questions. They are all sitting and movement meditation students of ours with years of experience in mindfulness practice, all of them also accomplished professionals in different fields (doctors, psychotherapists, teachers and more).

I have taught these students for years. We have gone through many trials and tribulations together, exploring the vast landscapes of human suffering and joys, the great spaces of human experience. Over time, every single one of these students taught me as much as I taught them. At times some disliked me, or they disagreed with me. They protested, complained, inquired, doubted, disappeared, came back, opened up, feared vulnerability, took risks, mustered courage, criticised, admired, fell in love, became passionate, experienced anger, rejected the teachings with frustration, fell into despair, got lost, found a new identity, settled, calmed down, became tenacious, became patient, began to accept with curiosity, gave themselves space space space (a sigh) contemplating, reflecting, holding in awareness, reserving judgment, open to the unknown, beginners mind, waiting, watching, knowing that everything worthwhile takes lots of sweat and time wisdom.

They were experts not because they passed an exam or published intelligent papers. They were experts in the humble ways they engaged with the audience asking questions. They spoke from experience, an experience based on the foundation of thousands of hours of mindfulness practice. They gained experience in taking themselves seriously and knowing that they are the instruments of their lived lives. They often gained their expertise despite themselves, against their grain and against all odds, pushed by the winds of destiny. This enabled them to be profoundly connected with the participants from the audience asking questions, fellow human beings on the same journey to peace.

These panel members have lots of experience getting lost or stuck and not giving up, but know to work all the harder at investigating their predicament. They have experience in failure and learning from setbacks and dead ends. They are experts in circling around the grail of vulnerability, opening, softening and penetrating deeper and deeper across endless layers of conditionings and releases. All that has made them experts in presence, just being; and when they forget, lose it, turn reactive and fall into autopilot, awareness kicks in quickly and repair is possible. They are experts in flexibility, knowing there is no perfection, knowing there is more to unlearn, knowing that being free and easy in the market place is the name of the game.

In this way, they are transparent to themselves and to others, not dogmatic, but connected and open to the complexity of existence, and able to give freely of themselves. They know that the highest form of knowledge is love.

In the presence of such distinguished students of life, I cannot help forgetting the distinction between teacher and student. This is what mindfulness does to all of us. The layers of ignorance and pain soften, and the foundations of wisdom come to bear and inspire our journeys together. In fact, there was a point where teacher, panel and audience were one, a large cauldron of accumulated life experiences interweaving in a moment of cross-pollination. Many members of the audience were experienced students of mindfulness themselves, and the newbies, those who had never yet had exposure to this work, through their curiosity were already unsuspecting teachers of beginners mind. Dont we all know that asking a question means we intuitively already know the answer? There was a moment, a long moment in fact, when bodies, hearts and minds opened beyond the layers of distortions and fears, filling the whole atmosphere of this creating-space-yoga room, and where audience, panel and presenter were all experts beyond the limiting categories of our puny egos. There were so many moments, where it seemed to me we all felt how the only answers worth giving are the ones that lead to better questions.

Thank you all, audience, panel, Sandy, ILC and Robyn for the gift of your presence.

Dr. T.

One of the most elusive and difficult conditions to bear and treat is chronic pain. In this article I refer to three forms of chronic pain physical, emotional/mental and existential/spiritual. These three forms are similar in quality, in that they torture and can lead to despair. They are however dissimilar in distractibility as you move from the physical to the mental and finally the existential form, it gets easier to find ways of distracting yourself from the pain. In other words, physical chronic pain is the form that is most in your face, inescapable and hard to find distraction from. In an ironic twist of logic, of the three forms it is therefore also the most efficient teacher of awareness. As you read on, you will therefore see me focus on physical chronic pain.

Pain is radically subjective and therefore invisible to direct observation. Only its ripple effects become visible: a bad mood, unhappiness and possibly dysfunctionality; an inability to cope, facial distortions and lamentation as the expression of suffering. Depending on a persons attitude towards their chronic pain it can become exhausting to be around them, because one feels so powerless to help. One then tends to withdraw, and the person in pain feels like a burden and also withdraws, which creates social isolation as a secondary problem. Often people with chronic pain are not understood or believed, and sometimes even seen as faking and malingering. In children with chronic pain conditions it can even go so far as to put honest and caring parents into situations, in which they are accused of child abuse and their children taken away by the Childrens Aid Society. Chronic pain is awful, because it is relentless and real, yet elusive, difficult to quantify and difficult to treat.

Pain in general can be seen to be experienced along the two dimensions of how treatment-resistant and chronic it is. The less amenable to treatment it is and the longer it lasts, the less subjectively bearable it is and the more mindfulness training becomes important. This means that without mindfulness chronic untreatable pain is sure to cause despair and disability.

Along this ‘bearability spectrum’ we can categorize pain as a way to help us organize our thinking around the issue of mindfulness. The easiest pain to bear is the short-term one we know to be due to an underlying condition that is transient and treatable, such as the pain of breaking a leg. I will call this category 1 pain. A bit more difficult but still bearable is the longer term pain we know to be due to an underlying condition that is treatable, such as certain back pains (category 2). It gets more difficult when the underlying condition cannot be treated and the only way to get rid of the pain is pain medication or operations (category 3), because these pain treatments tend to be only partially effective and have side effects which negatively impact the quality of life. The most difficult situation is the one where not only the underlying condition is not treatable, but the pain itself is also resistant to treatment (category 4). These cases may sometimes belong to a subsection, in which the pain appears to be untreatable because we know little if at all anything about the underlying condition, the underlying condition is not recognized and missed, or access to treatment is difficult or unavailable. In these cases new medical discoveries, increased social awareness of a diseases prevalence and increased medical access to treatment can suddenly move the situation into a more bearable category 1, 2 or 3 pain. An example of this would be the Ehlos-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), which has inspired the work of the ILC foundation. However, just because more insight into the disease through research, more social awareness of its existence and more access to treatment has allowed some children to become pain-free more of the time and has significantly improved their lives, does not mean that they cease to struggle with the impact of this devastating illness and some side effects of treatment.

Pain has a complex physiology that spans a whole spectrum of bodily structures and hormones. Let this paragraph wash over you like a pleasantly warm wave of Caribbean ocean water and dont focus on details. Involved in the production of pain are peripheral receptors everywhere in the body that create signals traveling along attached nerve fibers, which converge in the spinal cord and ascend through the brainstem, the limbic system and the cortex all the way to the most evolved of all brain parts, the master integrator of the whole organism called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC). At every level along the way multiple parallel interactions and feedback loops between different brain centres and the body participate in the processing of pain and the unleashing of biobehavioral responses that attempt to return the organism back to safety and health. Engaged are not only the neurons of the nervous system with its neurotransmitters (Serotonin, Oxytocin, Acetylcholine, Norepinephrine, Opiates, Dopamine, Histamine just to name a few), but also the hormonal system from brain to body, including the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands. Among many other hormones they secret Cortisol that affects the whole body, including blood pressure, blood glucose, the immune system, the whole metabolic energy system and the muscular-skeletal system. The glia cells in the brain (outnumbering the neurons by 5-10 times!) as well as the Nitrous Oxide system in the body are also involved in complex ways we are only just beginning to understand.

With chronic pain the organisms attempts to heal often fail and a vicious cycle ensues. The very ways the organism tries to get rid of pain in fact only serve to boost defensive processes that increase tension and further worsen the pain. Pain causes fight, flight and freeze survival responses. The person tenses up as a consequence of the constant barrage of suffering that feels like torture. Distraction is part of such defensive survival responses and often seems to be an effective way of making the pain more bearable, but in the long run the exact opposite happens. The tensions created by avoidance behaviors make the pain only worse as they block the organisms healing potential. As the person becomes increasingly mobilized in an attempt at avoiding increasing pain, the organism gets weakened and stiffened, which only increases the pain further. This is a vicious cycle largely driven by our inbred autopilot reactivity honed over many years of life. In other words, the vicious cycle of chronic pain is nourished by a restricted sense of self-awareness.

What you need to take away from this are just three fundamental principles:
1. Pain is NOT the sensations from receptors in the body or the nerve impulses traveling up the neurons all the way to the cortex. Let me first say it in scientific terms: Pain is an emergent state of embodied self-awareness across the entire neural networks, and it is a re-representation of all the earlier processes of information. In plain language this means that pain is a subjective experience or a state of awareness that arises from the totality of all those nerve impulses across the whole body, but is not those nerve impulses themselves. In other words, pain is not a concrete thing, but a subjective state of self-awareness.
2. The MPC (see above) gives us the ability to modify our states of self-awareness. In the case of mindfulness training, we modify our state of self-awareness from being defined and restricted by autopilot reactivity into the direction of greater presence, which includes more openness to the totality of our human experiences, more acceptance of what is whether we like it or not and more curiosity towards all the ways we construct our reality. Being mindful is thus an expanded state of self-awareness, which is incompatible with autopilot reactivity. It is now hugely interesting to know, but also quite logical, that the mindful state of self-awareness is largely incompatible with the restricted, pain-filled state of self-awareness, since suffering from chronic pain is mostly due to autopilot reactivity. By altering our state of self-awareness we can alter and even extinguish the experience of pain. This means that body receptors may feed the same input signals to the brain like before, but how we experience it all and emotionally relate to it can be so permanently changed that the experience of pain significantly decreases and sometimes even vanishes.
3. Because pain is a state of self-awareness, the issue of awareness is key. Awareness is what gives us the space and freedom of choice. This leads to a paradox: The only way out is the way through. In order to liberate ourselves from the suffering created by pain, the reflex of trying to get away and distract from the pain does not work. Instead, we have to learn to dive right back into the pain and the body, and attend to the full experience of it all in embodied self-awareness. You now probably wonder what embodied self-awareness is?

Embodied self-awareness has to be distinguished from conceptual self-awareness (Alan Fogel, Body Sense). Most people live most of their lives trapped in conceptual self-awareness. This is a more precise way of saying that we live in our heads, caught up in the train of our thoughts we deeply believe in. You are likely quite familiar with the experience of having a pain in your chest and being flooded with thoughts telling you that you . probably have a heart attack / which may kill you / you are too young to die / what a pity / you wont see your grandchildren / when did you last review your will? / you wanted to travel to Borneo before dying / had you only taken more time off 10 years ago when you were in good health / what a mess / you dont want to leave your loved ones / how are they going to cope without you? / you were just in the middle of renovating your cottage and now what will happen? / is the doctor going to be able to save you? / maybe it is not a heart attack, but a lung cancer / if so, could be an early stage / you smoked until 15 years ago / etc. etc. etc. These thoughts completely envelop you and define your sense of self. They are concepts created in the cortex, which is why the resulting state of self-awareness is called conceptual. Without being grounded in embodied self-awareness conceptual self-awareness is extremely limiting and stress-inducing when it stands alone (as it does most of the time for most people). Needless to say, this thought world you are entrapped by causes huge stress, even though it seems to you that all you are doing is problem-solve in order to get out of this situation. You are actually not problem-solving that much at all, but mostly ruminating and getting in the way of real healing.

Embodied self-awareness is very different. You would experience the sensations in your chest in great detail: 3-dimensional size and shape of the sensations; their quality (knifing, burning, searing, throbbing, compressing, etc.); their intensity and the way they change from moment to moment; how far they reach and how they transition into other sensations in the shoulders, the abdomen, the neck etc.; you would differentiate these sensations from those that accompany emotions such as anxiety, sadness, regrets etc.; you would notice the barrage of thoughts and how they threaten to take over, yet you would let them unfold in the background and continue to stay rooted in your body. In embodied self-awareness you would allow the organism to be open to the full spectrum of energy and reality without undue interference, thus maximizing its own healing potential. Once seen by the doctor you would eventually find out that you just had a .. panic attack, and that all your catastrophic thoughts, so well-disguised as rational problem-solving ones you so deeply believed in, were just that thoughts, and not reality. In short, conceptual self-awareness is limiting and toxic when not embedded in embodied self-awareness, and embodied self-awareness is the royal road to mindful self-awareness.

The ILC foundation is rightly so involved in helping children with chronic pain by addressing all angles of pain management. This includes spear-heading research, providing access to treatment, raising awareness of the problem, developing a residential treatment program, and coordinating an encompassing approach to these childrens plight including medication, surgical interventions, familial support, parent involvement, psychological interventions and social accommodations. We could say this: One of these many treatment facets is mindfulness training, both for children and their parents, so that they can all learn to develop the all-important state of embodied self-awareness that is fundamental to mindfulness and so important for healing. We can however also say this: Underlying all problem-solving about and all treatment approaches to chronic pain and illness in general lies a fundamental choice between staying within the limits of what can be done, and opening the gates widely to how our state of being (self-awareness) can so immeasurably enrich and enhance what can be done. This is the choice between staying on autopilot or moving into mindfulness, which astonishingly is often also the choice between no or only slight pain improvement and painlessness.

Before I get to the core issue of mindfulness and pain in this article, let me preempt a frequent misunderstanding that occasionally comes my way. Just because I focus on mindfulness and the aspects of pain management related to it does not mean that I am against medications, operations or any other approaches that help people cope with pain. If competently used with discernment, they are all very worthwhile and part of an encompassing approach to pain. All I am doing here is focus on what I specialize in as people come to me for help with chronic pain. So lets zero in on the core issue of mindfulness and chronic pain.

Some medical practitioners are sometimes so overwhelmed by their patients demand for relief and so desperate to offer something, that treatments are offered (often surgeries) which at best do not improve the situation, at worst make it significantly worse with each further intervention. When the underlying reason for the pain is untreatable, the focus becomes the pain itself, and patients often end up walking around with a whole pharmacy of medications that leaves them drugged, sluggish and too tired to function often with limited results. So then comes the million-dollar question: What if nothing more can be done? What if what has been done so far helps, but you are still left with substantial impediments to a good quality of life because treatments have side effects or because they only partly work? What if pain medication does not work or you dont tolerate it, operations only make things worse and are not an option, and your specialists and medical practitioners politely distance themselves and give up on you, because there is just nothing else they can offer? What if this is as good (or as bad) as it seems to ever get? What if (to put this question into a completely different context) you cannot change your circumstances, the way you cannot change the circumstance of (taxes and) your mortality?

When I sit with some of my patients referred to me by pain clinics and hear their tragic stories, I can sense the emotional relief I represent for the health practitioners who send these patients to me. It is as if they were saying to themselves and their patients: There is nothing else I can offer you just go and see Dr. T and hell do something with you. So here we then sit together, these suffering human beings full of agony and despair, and I, receptacle of these patients projected last hope, bearing my own lifes suffering as we all do, as limited in my knowledge and my ability to offer relief as both my patients and colleagues, having nothing else to offer but my presence. But presence is so unknown to most people. For some patients coming to see me represents the last struggle to hope for something we can do, and when they realize that even with me there is nothing we can do, I can see their final disappointment on their faces, the last hope having just vanished, as if I had just given a dying dog the last kick that sends it over the edge, and they sink into resignation and giving up. Some patients are in this state already the moment they walk through the door into my office. Paradoxically, it is exactly in this final letting go, in this final surrender to impotence on both our parts, patient and healer, that something radically and completely new arises we call presence.

In fact, this is when we begin to explore the difference between resignation and surrender, impotence and getting out of ones own way, ignorance and unknowing. Resignation, impotence and ignorance are states of defeat at the end of the line of what can be done. Surrender, getting out of one’s own way and unknowing are states of vulnerability at the core of the journey to Being. In this moment of transition from doing to being it begins to dawn to my patients that the way to healing is not the way of doing more, but the way of being differently, and this journey towards greater Being involves exactly the opposite of doing, let alone doing more it involves learning to undo and to embrace not knowing in order to make space for something completely new we call wisdom. What is astonishing is to discover over months and years of practice and training in this direction how chronic pain changes, morphs, decreases and eventually even disappears, when we have allowed ourselves to move through paths and regions of Being and Reality that were totally unexpected and unfathomable. If this sounds like voodoo to you, I have good news for you: We are nowadays in a position to scientifically show and explain why mindfulness and dropping into Being has such powerfully healing effects on the human organism. Of course, science cannot explain everything, but many people only find access to the seemingly fuzzy world of Being and the goodies that arise from that when they feel reassured by the relative objectivity of scientific insight.

One last word a word of grounding and realistic perspective: As amazing as the results of mindfulness training can be, as unfathomable as the outcome of practice always is, as hopeful as the journey reveals itself to be, and as profound as the effects of mindfulness are on the body and the mind, please beware: This journey does not follow our rampant contemporary cultural naivet, our tendency to drama and reality shows, and a general human propensity to seek what is fun, fast and easy. If for a moment you allow me to put it in biological terms, the plasticity (ability to change itself and rewire) of our brain and body is not only real, but also slow as compared to our expectations of instant results. To avail ourselves of the power of brain plasticity we are required to engage in steady, committed, longterm practice, combined with a good dose of courage and patience. The formula for success in this area may not be one you relish to hear: Failure plus hard work = success. To put it simply, mindfulness practices are easy, but it is difficult to become the one who practices. This is why we have to work with a good teacher your worst enemy is yourself.

One of my most dedicated meditation students who has moved within the span of 4-5 years from being a disabled, walking pharmacy just about to consider a third back operation for disabling chronic back pain, to living a very different and much improved life style, put it to me this way in a recent email:
Imagine that no meds now for over a year and recently I’ve been waking up occasionally with significantly reduced pain. Seems inexplicable but I know the correct response equanimity, no attachment. A world away from when I was first referred to you. Apart from pain management I have a deeper insight to life and how we should live it. And for that I am very appreciative. And so the journey continues!
He has many moments of painlessness, and when the pain arises, it is not debilitating. As he puts it, this journey is not just about the pain, but about the fact that by changing our state of self-awareness through mindfulness, the pain turns into our teacher of lifes unfathomable mysteries and the gifts are immeasurable.

Copyright 2013 by Dr. Stphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Really not much.

Last night you were cornered by an assassin, whose intent it obviously was to shoot you with his handgun. You didnt know why he was in a rage. You were petrified and begged him to calm down and not to kill you. He shot and the bullet entered your neck just into the right jugular. You were still conscious looking at his face as you felt the warmth of blood seeping into your neck tissue, expecting to soon lose consciousness and die.

Where does THAT come from? The scene was too unbearable for you, and during the dream you remember deciding to wake up, which you did very anxiously. Your fight-flight system in high gear you had escaped the nightmare. This felt like a mixed blessing although you had escaped the violence of the dream state, you could not really feel relief and pretend it was just a dream. On the contrary, you felt you had been forced to distance yourself from a hotspot in your neurofirings that is still there, even though inaccessible to your waking consciousness, knowing that it will continue to cause chaos below your awareness. The intensity of the traumatic energy exceeded your window of tolerance.

You wish you could have had more observing power during the dream state to actually stay awake as you died, deeply connect with your assassin and get to the bottom of this neurofiring chaos you know little about. There is healing in shaking hands with the enemy. After all you are the assassin; you made yourself into the assassin by disowning the energy flow the assassin has come to represent. What motivates you to create this particular drama?

Sitting in meditation you settle into the great space of silent Being, massaged, decomposed, digested and transformed by the subtle strength of emptiness. You have stepped out of realitys way. You dont meditate anymore it meditates you, and you feel how its energy begins to fire up the antechambers of the crime scene, purifying everything in its path. You cannot begin to fathom the impenetrable method with which reality moves towards healing. All you can do is be really awake, trust and surrender. The meandering ways reality moves make no sense.

Did I say the crime of the dream is inaccessible to your waking consciousness? It is true that your conceptual self-awareness dominates in day-to-day living, that going back to the crime scene is aversive and furthest from your good citizen preoccupations. But you know to look closer! Your hands gripping the steering wheel too tightly as you drive to do some errands, a strangely dampened mood as you pick up a prescription, suspiciously insistent ruminations around the anticipation of seeing your friend at 2 oclock, why the memory of helping your father stack a pile of firewood at the age of about 9?, seemingly out of the blue craving an ice mocha even though you are well fed, your walking pace definitely accelerated for no reason, and as you walk you hit your heels more forcefully onto the pavement than usual.

You notice, you take a deep breath, shake your body a bit as you relax your walk. You stretch a bit and settle into the outbreath and sit down in stillness for a moment as soon as circumstances allow. You listen as you penetrate your body with awareness because you know that only embodied self-awareness can get you further. You begin to feel the insidious suffering you were not aware of a moment ago. Is it connected with the dream? Partly, but there are certainly many other influences.
You want the tension to all go away quickly and on demand; but it doesnt it lingers (you remember that the interoceptive neurofibres are not myelinated and therefore slow in neuroprocessing) and you are clear on your meditation tools. Thats all you need, knowing that you know what you are doing as you meet the immense complexity of Being, and then patience, perseverance a thousand years project! You dont understand the connection to your dream, and yet you sense it, like the hound dog following the scent of its pray. You intuit the assassin he is just good at hiding. You know that like most of us, you survived your share of wars, and you experience the scars. Now it is a matter of waiting it out in awareness, allowing the neurons to rewire in their own time.
For much of it you just dont know and have no choice but to yield to ignorance yet you are on some sort of knowing path, a different kind of knowing, a healing process.

Your journey touches me. The many unanswered questions make so much sense. We all can learn from walking with you on this adventure of discovery. We may even teach others how to walk that path. How can we teach the unknowable?

Copyright 2013 by Dr. Stphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

The Mindfulness Lecture in Numbers…

9 Seasons

22 Lectures
44 Hours
800+ Participants

It is hard to believe that we just completed our 3rd year of the Mindfulness Lectures. While the numbers are impressive, what they don’t reveal is the blended magic that has come from combining the Creating Space Yoga community with the Mindfulness Centre community. The product has been an incredible network of like-minded individuals which has created a curious, supportive and growing community.

I always walk away impressed by the diversity and intelligence of the group of people that participate each month. I feel very grateful and very proud of the slow growth of these lectures and the quality of information and discussion that is shared.

A big thanks to Dr. Treyvaud for leading us down this insightful path and an enormous thanks to all of the participants who join us each month. Only through a strong and active community are we able to continue to bring you these lectures. We thank you for supporting us. We enjoy spending the time with you.

Earlier this month we sent a survey out to those individuals who attended the lectures this year. The response was great and the feedback so valuable. It was so insightful that I wanted to share some of it with you.

Have a wonderful summer. We are excited for the upcoming fall lecture dates!

Robyn Bowman

Cheryl Smith: Do you find that people are increasingly interested in Mindfulness Meditation? It seems to come up all the time in news articles, etc. these days.

Stephane Treyvaud: Yes, its certainly an emerging awareness. The thing about it is that like anything else that becomes an emerging awareness, you have a lot of relatively superficial enthusiasm that accompanies it. I see that a lot of people do a lot of talk about it, but when it comes to actually developing the staying power, to actually engaging in the process that changes the neuro-circuitry of the brain, the number of (those) people who pursue it to those depths quickly shrinks. So thats the part that needs to be worked on. Everyone wants liberation from suffering and everyone wants to feel good, but everyone wants to feel good the easy way. And the thing is that there is no easy way of engaging in that because there are no shortcuts. Thats the atmosphere that I find. But the simple fact that awareness of mindfulness spreads is very important and the fact that theres a lot of interest and (people) come to lectures and think about it and talk about is all good. I dont know how much it will be translated into actual long-term rewiring, because thats the hard part.

CS: I see that the upcoming lectures at CSY studio are all around relationships. Can you talk about your thinking as you were developing these talks?

ST: There is really a fascinating finding in neurobiology and that is that the same circuitry that is responsible for our ability to connect with each other is also responsible for allowing us to connect with ourselves. So at the core of mindfulness training, at the core of meditation training, is (the possibility) of developing a deeper relationship to oneself. You can see, given what I just said about the neuro-circuitry, people sometimes ask, yes but isnt that (just) selfish navel gazing, sitting there paying attention to yourself, taking all this time every day, an hour a day of practice. Isnt that a selfish navel gazing? Well its actually the opposite. What youre actually doing is developing and engaging this circuitry, called the resonance circuitry of the brain, that deepens ones ability not only to relate to oneself, but to another person. This is why at the core of mindfulness is kindness, love and attunement. So thats why I decided to do these lectures, where we are going to focus on this particular aspect of mindfulness, which is a different one than the focus we had in the spring and the fall. There are a lot of interesting things to say about it, so its worth a little series on this topic.

CS: I was intrigued by this last one on the story of your life and the importance of narrative. We do like to have things explained to us through narrative, and we can remember things through narrative as well. Did you want to talk a little bit more about narrative and storytelling? Is it an interest of yours or is it strictly that you like to hear peoples stories?

ST: The move towards health and wellbeing happens when (we) move towards integration, and integration is a process whereby the parts of an organism differentiate from each other and then link. In order to move towards integration as human beings, we have to move towards a wholeness in all aspects of who we are. These aspects can be summarized in nine domains of integration, which correspond to nine major neuro-circuitries of the brain. One of them is called autobiographical integration; (this is) the way that we create our stories out of the non-verbal experiences of life. Because we are storytelling animals, there is no escaping that. The problem is that in that process of developing stories about our lives from the non-verbal experience of living, a lot can go wrong. A lot can go wrong depending on various factors, including what happened to us in childhood and how different parts of the brain (are connected) to each other, such as left and right brain, or the cortex to the rest of the body. What was discovered clinically is that there are different ways that people talk. You can actually sense, by listening to a person, whether that person has shut down this storytelling ability, whether that storytelling ability is so overwhelmed that they cant make sense of whats coming from inside, or whether they are well integrated and able to make sense of whats going on.

So all you need to do is sit down with a person, ( and) you ask personal questions like, why are you here? Whats going on in your life? And then they tell you, this and this and this, Im not happy about this and then you ask, tell me a bit about your Dad, and Mom, etc.. The way they tell the story tells you whether there are issues in the storytelling capacity, from which you can then come to conclusions with regards to the original childhood challenges that shaped them. So thats what this is all about.

CS: Can you give me an example. If you had a patient in front of you and they are describing their parents. What are some of the things you would notice in the way they would tell their story?

ST: To give you a simple example, I would ask you, what kind of a person was your father when you were a child? And your answer might be, Oh he was great.

I would ask, Can you tell me a bit more?

Oh, he was fine.

What kind of a relationship did you have? What do you mean when you say he was great?

He was fine. He was a Dad like all the others. I have no complaints.

I would continue by asking, Okay and how about your Mother?

Oh she was great.

And what made your mother great?

Well, she cooked and cleaned and took care of us.

And what kind of a relationship did you have with your mother.

Oh, a good one.

What do you notice about this persons answers and what consequences can you draw?

CS: Well, its not very detailed or observant or nuanced.

ST: Yes its very truncated, its very schematic. In fact its deeply distorted because no narrative like that can be true because theres no such thing as, my mother was great. People are complicated and complex. So that points to a certain problem with the way that this storytelling neuro-circuitry was affected and shut down, and with a deep lack of access to this persons inner world.

CS: And was that because the person was overwhelmed or bullied? They werent allowed to have thoughts other than those thoughts?

ST: There are several possibilities here. One possibility is that the parents were very avoidant, either withdrawn and absent or (created an environment where) nothing of emotional significance was ever talked about. That would usually be the case. When people have had the opposite, very traumatic parents who were very aggressive, usually the picture is different, the dialogue is different.

CS: Maybe these types of parents are themselves damaged, having experienced the same type of relationship with their own parents .

ST: Yes, of course, its a chain of events passed on from generation to generation which is why the work we are doing is so important because we have an opportunity to interrupt that chain of events for our children.

CS: On another topic entirely, do you find it interesting how popular TV reality shows are today? Were watching relationships being played out on these shows, and they seem pretty fake, but they still have an enormous audience. Why do we like to watch this when weve got our own lives to lead? Are we looking for guidance or role models? Or do we like to feel superior to these people who are often unwittingly humiliating themselves? Or have we always been watching human relationships in the theatre and on TV dramas and this is just the latest incarnation.

ST: Its an interesting question. The immediate thought that comes to mind is voyeurism, that we love to peek into the secrets of others because we are unable to access our own secrets. I dont know why reality shows would be more appealing than a theatre piece with actors, because of course every time you go to a theatre, every time you go to a performance, in a sense, you live through the story and actors, you live a piece of human life, it is very cathartic, it teaches us something. Maybe reality shows are so popular because they give us the illusion of bringing us even closer to ourselves because its in reality its actually happening, its not just play. That aspect may actually be the consequence of a numbing effect in society. I believe that we live in a society that has been profoundly numbed with regards to the earth and the body. Everything has to be bigger, louder, wilder, faster, more intense, more violent, because the decibel and intensity (level) of fifty years ago just doesnt do it anymore. We are so numbed, because we live more and more in disembodied lives. So maybe thats a part of an evolution of why these reality shows are exploding.

CS: Can you tell me a little bit about the format of the Mindfulness lectures, and who you see them being for?

ST: Im aiming it at human beings (laughs). Im just talking about one tiny little aspect of the work that we do, mindfulness and the importance of it, and the connection to the larger social and political processes, so whoever is interested in it

CS: So people who are meditators, non-meditators .?

ST: Anybody will find something interesting here. People will be exposed to looking at the importance of our relatedness and of our inter-connectedness on all scales, from the very personal to the socio-political and ecological. Thats what will be talked about, so anybody who has an interest in that is invited, which should be the whole of humanity!! (laughs) The structure of the lectures is similar to last term again, I will talk and there will be an opportunity to ask questions, as usual. I will also, at the beginning, introduce the sessions with a little meditation practice. In fact, Im thinking that this time, because of the topic, the first session I will introduce with a practice where people will interact.

CS: There may be people who will read this interview on the website, but they will not be able to attend the lectures. Do you want to give some practical advice on how to start a meditation practice, or just one very practical piece of advice on starting a meditation practice.

ST: The first thing that I would recommend to anyone who wants to start a meditation practice is to find a good teacher. Its so essential because we are so complex, and the way our mind works and our body works and our attention when you do it on your own, youll be very likely to very quickly get into a snag. You dont even notice that youre in a snag; all you know is that the thought comes up, oh this isnt helpful, this isnt for me. And you move on (quit meditation). So find a good teacher, thats kind of fundamental. The second thing that Ive come to after many, many years of experience is I absolutely stress and begin with connecting with the body. Thats what I call the somatic practices, learning to pay attention to the body, which of course includes the breath because the breath occurs in the body. How to do that I cant explain. Thats more complex. But bring your attention into your body and explore the connection with the body. Thats just the absolute foundation. From there everything else arises and moves.

On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a chat with Dr. Stphane Treyvaud about his upcoming lecture series at Creating Space Yoga. Dr. Treyvaud is an Oakville-based psychiatrist who treats adults in a private practice, but also runs a Stress Reduction Clinic that teaches Mindfulness Meditation to reduce stress, manage chronic pain, and help prevent disease. He gave a series of well-attended lectures last year at CSY and has returned to do another four lectures this term on other aspects of the practice of meditation.

Dr. Treyvaud was born and raised in Switzerland, but came to Canada in 1983 to finish his psychiatric training at the University of Toronto. He had an interest in studying a more integrated type of psychiatric medicine, one which encompassed both mind and body, and U of Ts program was broad and interesting. In 1986, he began a 2-year fellowship in child psychiatry at U of T, and then went into private practice in 1988. Dr. Treyvaud is multilingual and speaks French, Italian, German and English, and has also studied Latin and ancient Greek quite extensively.

CS: Can you speak a little bit about the first lecture (Sat Oct 1), which explores the idea of wisdom and ways we can see ourselves truthfully.

ST: This is a complex issue we are unavoidably biased by our conditioning (cultural, personal historical, genetic). We are always seeing things subjectively. However, there are some universals, things that are universally human we all have a brain and a body with the same basic structures there are some universal ways that we meet life that were going to share. There are some universal truths that we know from experience, and if we heed them, life is going to be worthwhile, meaningful; if we dont, life is going to be full of misery and suffering. When I talk about seeing things the way they really are it is the ability to see the way things are distorted by our conditioning, to see through that; and to be able to share with each other the universal truths that make life worthwhile. Here is a simple example: If I scare you, you will not be relaxed, the whole body and mind goes to tension. (When) your whole body is in tension, you will start to distort things that is a truth that is universal all over the world, for you here in Canada, for a pygmy in the jungle etc. so that is a universal truth if we want to see things in a clear way, we must be relaxed, must not be afraid. We need to be able to relinquish the defensiveness that prevents us from penetrating reality in a deep way so thats an example of how we learn to actually see what is universally human.

CS: How will these lectures be different from the series you did in the Spring?

ST: (Laughs) Sometimes I tell my long term meditation students that really, Im always talking about the same thing, but using different ways of saying it in order to keep them coming ..people have a big laugh. There are some very simple principles (in studying mindfulness meditation), and its always about the same thing, however its so simple we dont see it, we forget it. We get lost in our complicatedness. But yes, it will be different.

There is (an Indian parable about) an elephant of truth. You have several blind men who come to this elephant and each man describes the elephant of truth. One man touches the trunk and says, oh, the truth is like a long snake. Another blind man gets to the ear of the elephant, and he says, no, no, no, the truth is like a cabbage, and the other blind man ends up getting to the tail of the elephant, and he says no, no, no, the truth is like a brush. So the trick is to learn the kind of mindful awareness that allows us to see beyond our limitations, to perceive the whole elephant of truth. When I give lectures, its always about the elephant of truth, but we get at it from different points of view, and each point of view highlights a different principle that can get in the way of us seeing it.

CS: Do people need any background in meditation to come to the lectures?

ST: No, no, no, they dont need any background at all. Thats what these public lectures are all about Im not assuming they are committed to meditation they might be simply curious, and many people may have never done it (meditation) they are just curious about it and want to see what this is all about. Those who want to pursue it will take the courses I run. I see this (lectures at CSY) as a way to raise awareness in the general public so people may feel invited to realize that deepening ones awareness is a healing thing, a good thing in life, and they may be inspired to take steps to pursue that more. So thats how I view my audience.

Its not only the content of what I teach, not just about giving information, like a math class. Its also the fact that I am embodying that attitude people will have an experience of themselves with a teacher (who embodies mindfulness). I touch people not just with the content, the words, but all the non-verbal aspects of embodying mindfulness and the way that that energy manifests itself as living truth.

CS: What is the format of these lectures? Will it be the same as in previous lectures with a short meditation/relaxation at the beginning, a lecture, and then a question period?

ST: Yes. I was thinking of doing it similarly, perhaps with less demarcation. Perhaps with a little meditation practice after a certain amount of lecture, I havent nailed it down yet.

CS: I really love the part where people ask you questions. They have such interesting questions; at the last lectures, you could tell that the people with questions had been through something and they were trying to deal with it, and they were putting something out to you. And I think you do very well with the one-on-one. I feel like youre inspired by the questions, so theres this lovely energy around that interaction. I think you like it.

ST: Yes, yes, its my preferred part. Because thats the part where I feel I really teach, where I really can help people move. Its when they ask the question. I help them, even more so in my meditation courses but still, (its through the questions) that I feel I can really help.

CS: You really welcome questions.

ST: Yes.

CS: May I ask you about your meditation practice? How did you come to it, and how often you meditate, etc.?

ST: Yes, of course. Students ask me about this often, motivated by a view of the teacher as a special person who has it all figured out, so they can figure out how to get to that point but I tend to start with the statement: My journey is exactly like yours, there is no shred of difference. Yes, Ive had my unique story of how I got to it, but everybody does. The years and years of struggle, not practicing, falling off the wagon, coming back to it, getting into defenses, throwing it all out, coming back to it, back and forth, and finally one day coming back to it and it really sticks. Thats my story like everybody elses story. Thats the foundation.

Theres my particular story of how I got to discover that. I was almost a professional violin player when I was young. At one point I wasnt sure whether I was going to have a career in music or medicine. I was playing very intensely and very well, giving concerts etc.. By the time I was 16, I had developed a strong stage fright. Before one of the concerts I was supposed to give, several weeks before, I had a rehearsal and it was absolutely catastrophic. So my violin teacher at the time, she said, okay, I want you to start to do certain things she put me on what was for me a completely incomprehensible program of doing nothing else but like this with my violin [he demonstrates by dramatically drawing an imaginary violin bow down on an exhalation with a loud haaaaa). I did that for two hours a day! And I was only allowed to do that not allowed to play the piece. I had no idea what she was doing.

She would check up on me twice a week. And when it came close to the concert I would do it for her, and she would say, No, no, no youre not centered, let go. Dont do anything, let IT happen. Centre yourself in your pelvis. And slowly I started to discover that notion of non-doing. Of centering down in the heart, into the earth. A few days before the concert, after not having played that piece at all for weeks, we had a rehearsal, and she said, just play it. And it went absolutely brilliantly. I knew the piece already. It was about allowing the wisdom of my body to take over.

After the concert, she said Id like you to meet somebody.it was Karlfried Graf Durckheim, the first westerner who brought Zen to the west. He was a Zen master in the Black Forest, not far from where I lived, and during all the many years I worked with my violin teacher, I did not know that she had been his student for decades! thats how I got to meet Karlfried Graf Durckheim, and when I was 17, I began my training in Zen meditation. I trained with him and then I got busy and I got caught up in the monkey mind (busyness and distraction) and then I lost it and I came back and I lost it and I came back and over time, slowly, as I went through life, shit happens and all these kind of things, you struggle and come back and eventually came the moment when that kind of work became a way of life. Thats how it works.