Your Mindfulness  Journey in a New Year – 2020

As we begin a new decade and continue on the mindful path, on behalf of the Mindfulness Centre team I wish everyone a wonderfully wholesome, healthy, successful and peaceful new year. As we leave 2019 behind, we also leave some times of difficulty and other times of excitement behind.

For me personally, as many of you know, I have been somewhat out of sight as I had my right hip replaced in the summertime and required time off to heal. Unfortunately, the complication of a torn muscle required me to undergo a second surgery in December 2019. It has been quite a painful and at times anxiety-provoking experience that has been and continues to be both physically and mentally challenging. This has lent itself to much mindful learning, but not much teaching, writing or blogging. Fate seems to call me to listening duty rather than teaching, which is why I had to postpone teaching the Mindsight Intensive. Before the end of June I hope to still be able to present a series of advanced, intensive mindsight sessions, which will undoubtedly be imbued with some new insights from my ordeal. I am in the process of formulating several topics that swirl in my mind. Out of sight, however, does not mean out of mind, and with the help of our wonderful, small, but mighty team I have continued to contribute to the shaping of our Centre, while the team members were keeping the ship afloat.

In fact, it has been quite a productive year as three new programs were introduced at The Centre in addition to our MBSR-X programs. These included the Mindful Self-Compassion Program led by Linda and Marlene, Mindfulness for Low Sexual Desire in Women led by Alexandra and Marlene, and Mindfulness and Art led by Maria. These programs were very well received. Depending on teacher availability they may be offered again this year.

Particularly exciting for me was the re-writing, revising and editing of the new Dynamic Mindfulness manual which accompanies the MBSR-X program. This also included the re-recording of guided meditations and teachings we use in the program. Many thanks to Dr. Linda Macdonald for walking this at times arduous, at times exhilarating, path of writing with me. The complementary synergy between us has allowed our Centre to flourish and grow, in addition to helping illuminate our personal growth edges as individuals.

We are most excited also to announce the arrival of Dr. Jackie Ang to our team. She has begun assessing for the MBSR-X programs and will be continuing to train with us. She is a most welcome addition to the team and we look forward to the new life she injects with her kind, receptive presence.

So, cheers to the new decade with its offerings of new frontiers of possibilities, as we allow our minds to open to their inherent spaciousness and fill us with creative ferment and musings. This continues to be the core principle of our modus operandi, to meet challenges of our work in creative ways, challenge or modify accepted theories on the basis of our own experiences and re-formulate our discoveries through improved frameworks of understanding.

It is with much gratitude that I am able to realize the vision for the Mindfulness Centre through the collaborative efforts and interchanges of the wonderful team at the Centre. Thank you Dr. Linda Macdonald, Marlene Van Esch, Alexandra Peterson, Maria Hernandez, Reena Mathur, Barbara Boodhan and Dr. Jackie Ang.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

A new year, brings new mindfulness programs for 2019

When we sing “auld lang syne, my dear” to bring in the New Year, we are essentially cheering to days gone by, which is why we sing the song to remember the good times. The song is a Scots-language poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to the tune of a traditional folk song – now world famous. A rhetorical question is asked at the beginning of the song: should old times be forgotten? The answer is that ‘a cup o’ kindness’ should be had, in order to look back on the past. For all of us here at the Mindfulness Centre in Oakville that sentiment seems really appropriate this year-end, as we look back on our work in 2019 and reflect on all that was accomplished by our staff, patients, and participants in order to improve what we do. We eagerly send out each newsletter throughout the year and we appreciate those of you who read and review the information we provide. It was a busy and active year: we increased both our staff and the number of programs and workshops we present. This year has just flown by and it is hard to believe that in just a few weeks we will be entering into a new year.

PSYCHOTHERAPY

In addition to Dr. Treyvaud’s longstanding psychotherapy practice, in 2019 we were pleased to formally announce that we now also offer psychotherapy with our two therapists Alexandra Peterson and Marlene Van Esch. People seek therapy for a wide variety of reasons, from coping with major life challenges or childhood trauma, to dealing with depression or anxiety or simply desiring personal growth and greater self-knowledge. Depending on the client’s needs and personal goals for therapy, client and therapist may work together for as few as two to three sessions or as long as several years.

Our psychotherapist’s unique approach:
• Incorporates mindfulness and the latest research from Interpersonal Neurobiology into the psychotherapeutic process,
• Dives deeply into how the mind interacts with the brain and how disorder and rigidity can be transformed by rewiring the brain into integration and harmony,
• Facilitates the use of empathy and insight to foster a deeper understanding of self and others within relationships, and
• Promotes the development of a coherent life narrative that facilitates a shift towards health and wellbeing.

NEW PROGRAMS LAUNCHED

We successfully launched two new programs in 2019!
Mindfulness Through Art: This six-week (18 hour) program is led by Maria Teresa Hernandez. Participants are immersed in artistic expression as a way of exploring the foundations of mindfulness, including aspects of Interpersonal Neurobiology. Open to all from beginners to experienced artists, participants experience the benefits of mindfulness by cultivating creativity and art-making. The first offering of this program was well received and we look forward to offering it again in 2020.
Mindfulness-Based Treatment for Low Sexual Desire: This eight-week (18 hour) program for women is taught by Alexandra Peterson and Marlene Van Esch. It is an evidence-based, mindfulness therapy group for treatment of low sexual desire in women. Participants are encouraged to reconnect and engage with their sexuality while learning a variety of mindfulness exercises that cultivate present-moment awareness.

A FEW FUN FACTS

The numbers below illustrate how valued and sought after our services are, as we constantly strive for excellence in providing the most current and up-to-date information and transformative techniques possible.

In our programs, groups and workshops we welcomed 398 participants. Barb, one of our administrative assistants, made us aware that our doors opened 5,368 times as patients and participants attended our programs and groups. Assessments and individual patient appointments saw our doors opening another 633 times. Luckily, our hinges are still intact!

We are pleased to announce that another doctor will be joining our team in 2020, and we will formally introduce her in our newsletter and on the website in the New Year.

We wish all of our newsletter readers all the best of the holidays and a happy new year – and don’t forget the “auld lang syne, my dear” to bring in the New Year! Our team looks forward with optimism and confidence to serve our patients, participants, and the community in 2020.

Best Regards,
Your Mindfulness Centre team (in alphabetical order):
Barbara Boodhan, Dr. Linda Macdonald,
Reena Mathur, Alexandra Peterson,
Dr. Stephane Treyvaud, Marlene Van Esch

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Understanding the Dream Experience

Wherever you look, there is mind, and wherever is mind, the opportunity for mindfulness presents itself – that means everywhere and all the time. It is not just about meditation, but about insight into one’s inner world, empathy for others, and integration of the energy flow within ourselves and between each other. The stories we tell are part of the landscape of mind to be mined for the hidden treasures of meaning our illusions have so deeply buried.

A dream I recently encountered comes to mind: “I see this woman approach me”, recounts the dreamer, “and there is nothing threatening about her. While dreaming I remember that in the past seemingly harmless people appearing in my dreams would suddenly turn nasty and attack me or even try to kill me. So I make a proactive decision to preempt such a possible development (you may call this a lucid dream). Instead of waiting for her to approach me further, I begin to take initiative to approach her. In doing so the atmosphere of the dream becomes very windy and a strong gale blows against me. I have to fight the wind force against me but do manage to make progress in getting closer to her and find out who she really is. This is when I woke up, feeling satisfied that I had overcome the danger of being attacked, and relieved to have been able to take control of the situation.”

It used to be a common occurrence in his dreams – seemingly harmless people suddenly turning against and threatening him, causing him to wake up in a panic from these nightmares. After lots of psychotherapy and meditation practice, this rarely occurs anymore, and in this dream, we see further development in his strength of consciousness, as he takes charge of getting closer to dissociated contents of childhood conditionings. The fact that he is able to reflect while he dreams and choose a different path than he would have in the past speaks for his developed capacity to be strongly aware of being aware and not see himself anymore as a passive victim. Dissociated and non-conscious content being unknown, in dreams it tends to present itself as something foreign, other than oneself, often other people we don’t know or animals. In this case, this woman is a non-conscious aspect of himself that represents some problematic energy and information flow he has not mastered yet since in the dream the mind’s attentional system focuses a spotlight on her.

The dreamer is prescient and experienced, knowing himself well enough that what appears harmless can suddenly turn nasty if he is not attentive. It is almost a cliche to mention that in his childhood his mother was emotionally somewhat unpredictable and his father rather angry and aggressive. That is an old story he knows well and has worked through ad nauseam. But attachment conditionings run deep and take a long time to be undone. The dream shows how the dreamer can see behind appearances of his own mind’s productions and has achieved the capacity of observation and some objectivity about his own mind processes. On some level, he realizes while dreaming that the dream is dreamt up and a production of his mind. He is able to transcend the childlike naïve trust in appearances that very often used to betray him. He can take on the potential enemy before this hidden part of himself has a chance to evolve into an enemy, because he knows the woman to be just a hidden part of his own information processing. His intention to pay attention to the hidden intention of this almost invisible part of himself opens up a whole new relationship dynamic to himself, a whole new state of integration.

The gale strength winds tell us that there is more to do, more awareness strengthening to practice, or maybe they simply tell us that being fully transparent to the unknown of the non-conscious will always be a challenge to be reckoned with. While fighting these winds there was a tinge of anxiety, because he knew that the hidden power of this woman could kill him. But he also knew that it would be nothing more than one aspect of him trying to kill another. He was ready to die to see the truth, the truth of what this woman hides because he somehow knew that all that would die is a constructed illusion about himself.

This reminded him of a dream 15 years ago, in which he saw this stupendously beautiful iguana sitting on a large branch of a tree. It was mind-bogglingly colorful, displaying shimmering shades of blue, green, red, orange, and yellow. He was awestruck by how beautiful such a creature can be, when he suddenly discovered a tiny little handle on its side, suggesting that there was a door he could open. He did open this door, and to his amazement and deep disappointment, he discovered that the inside of what seemed like the most beautiful living creature he had ever seen, was simply a mechanical clockwork. Of course, the archetype of the Wizard of Oz comes to mind, but the echo from this old dream is quite audible in his present dream. It is frightening to discover that what seemed alive is in fact lifeless, and at the time he could identify with the sense of living a life driven more by internalized expectations of others than by his own authenticity. Not now anymore, but he now knows very viscerally how toxic illusions can be. He knew that ultimately the gale-force winds, the touching of that woman could fully dissolve the magic of this play he had written that night, in order to show more of himself to himself. Fifteen years ago the clockwork was the disappointment of discovering lifelessness in beauty; this time the woman turned attacker would have revealed her clockwork nature to a dreamer much stronger and more self-assured than then. It would not have been a beauty to be debunked, but dangerous enmity.

The iguana was too beautiful to be real, and this woman as a potential killer was too dramatically dangerous to be a real enemy. All this is, all these nightmares are in the mind in conflict with itself creating unnecessary fireworks.

This whole dream experience, and drama the dreamer authored for himself to gain more clarity about his inner world, includes every level of energy and information processing we humans have, from the physical/somatic to the emotional and cognitive. The dream reveals a story that was originally concealed and requires psychotherapy to be understood and integrated. At the same time, the dream is steeped in a whole nonverbal world of implicit energy processing beyond the reach of stories, requiring meditation to be penetrated and integrated. The evolution I expect to see some time in the future would manifest in a dream, in which the dreamer not only knows that this woman is a stranger not to be intimidated by and actively pursued for understanding. In a future dream, the dreamer would recognize himself in that woman and embark on a mediative action between two dream characters he would know beyond intuition are both aspects of himself.

Copyright © 2018 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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Mindfulness is about how we live, not a theory to be indulged.

Having the opportunity to witness fellow travelers and students expressing with succinct beauty and force how the directly experienced journey really looks like from within, always touches me. It is a particular treat to be directly engaged in exchanges of such nurturing and healing richness. What follows is a recent example in the form of an email exchange (for reasons of confidentiality I will call the person I had this exchange with Suzanne)

Hi Dr. T.,

Something is coming up in my practice that I thought I would write to you about. I may not even do a good job of describing this to you right now, because it feels like I am very spooked by it.

Recently, in my practice, choiceless awareness seems to be the practice I naturally initiate. I am finding a good connection with my awareness, just seeing where it is and what that feels like, instead of getting caught up in the what’s and the why’s. I think this is where my freak out started.

In my psychological work, I have been noticing recently how narrow my definition of myself is and how greatly that limits me from having the kind of relationships and the kind of fulfilling and happy experiences I want to have. I am noticing how confining it is to limit my definition of self by past experiences and gyp myself of all that I could potentially be (or not). It feels a bit like I am trying to let go of my narrow self-identification in my practice as well and that is massively terrifying me.

I think about what about this could be so terrifying, and really it’s just a fear of the unknown. Some part of me recognizes from your teachings and what I know of this practice that what I want is likely on the other side of all of this – a sense of freedom, moving from one thing to another, without identifying with it or getting caught up with it, a sense of ease and some sort of liberation that I fantasize about.

I am trying to put all this together (the psychological and the spiritual (?)) and figure out how to move forward, but, to be honest, am a bit paralyzed by my fear. So I thought I would reach out to you. What do you think?

Hi Suzanne,

Yours seems like quite a classic stage in one’s growth towards wisdom. Assuming a definition of the spiritual as dealing with our relationship to the ineffable emptiness of Being, notice how the psychological can quickly and imperceptibly become spiritual and vice versa. From the conduit of direct sensory experience we move into the constructor of psychological insight, only to then have to transcend both into the vast emptiness of nameless Being. (When the spiritual is defined within the context of a personal relationship with God, things can become more complicated and confining, given that only the self or remnants of it can maintain such a relationship, and all identifications with a self are by definition limiting and confining, including how they limit the notion of God).

Coming back to the other definition of spirituality I much prefer, as you rightly point out, when you let go of conditioned identifications with old patterns of being and gain greater flexibility and freedom of Being, you encounter the ‘unbearable lightness of Being’, accompanied by the insight of the self’s illusory nature. The more you investigate the self, the more it dissolves into a puff of fleeting energy flow, leaving you with nothing of what you were used to have, and everything you never dreamed of being. In fact, from this perspective, psychology with all its formulations of a senses of self, quite generally seems to me like a verbal clothing worn over the indecent and therefore often unacceptable nakedness of its core called the emptiness of Being, so as to allow it to appear in public. Our work in mindfulness consists of trying to stalk this retreating nude – not an easy task, because it demands this constant shift between the tangible verbal world of energy manifested as form and the intangible world of the formless nameless.

As you know, freedom comes with responsibility, and responsibility is what prisons relieve us from. Freedom from prior prisons can routinely be first met with anxiety, until we get used to the larger landscape. Although ultimately liberating, new senses of self that are not as limited as the old ones can be very disconcerting at first.

I am sure there will be much more to explore, but I hope these thoughts may help clarify a few things a bit.

With kind regards,
Dr. T.

Hi Dr. T,

Thank you for your response.

It’s interesting, it’s been a few days since I sent this email and because I didn’t get a response “in time”, things became slightly more psychologically challenging. Or another way to say that is that a lot has come up that I am seeing and learning so much about myself from! It’s kinda cool, even though massively emotionally challenging to keep perspective at times. This being said, the spiritual and what I had said in my email seems to have retreated to the background a bit. To the extent that I even had to reread my own email to remind myself what I had said/felt. The connection with it isn’t much there now.

It’s amazing how much a narrow identification and the conditionings can take over and make an experience, which was so convincing and tangible a few days ago, seem just like theory now.

I’m glad at the very least I still have my awareness to watch this go back and forth, and though it gets emotionally challenging sometimes, I try to keep investigating the difference and the shift (as you said) just to learn and explore. It’s cool.

The only problem with this approach and also with what I had said before is “what do I identify with if I don’t identify with the emotional or the stories?”. I think back when I had written that email to you, at least I had a very small connection to my awareness and that calmed this down a bit. Now that’s gone and the psychological is a bit more anxious, so avoidance seems tempting.

The interplay between psychological and spiritual (definitely the way you describe spiritual, not the religious constructs of “god”) is very interesting and something I’ve been noticing for a while now! And how we need a stable healthy construct of “self” first as a tool to explore what’s beyond. Trying to build this and I see how the psychological can still cause fear causing me to retreat to what’s not the unknown, even if deep down there is always the knowing that it is a construct and the convinced “nagging” that it doesn’t stop there and there is more.

Thanks,
Suzanne

There you go, Suzanne, the retreating nude! And by the way, you write eloquently with a depth of insight.

The barrel of a gun (and the heat of emotions) always seem to bring the tangible of form and manifestation to temporary victory, and the shy nakedness of awareness itself is always ready to temporarily cede the limelight. Conditionings and attachments to form are powerful and superficially reassuring, and the stories we weave ensnare us like spiders catch their prey in their web. Ironically, there is indeed a lot to learn from these webs of meaning, and as you rightly say, a strong sense of self, however illusory it is from a spiritual perspective, is the prerequisite for the ability to withstand the pounding waves of existential insights that gradually dissolve our whole constructed world into its empty essence. Follow the shifts from substantiality to ephemerality without resistance, and flexibly surrender to the back and forth from the open plane of possibilities to the peaks of activation. Your sentiment that this journey to nowhere is cool, is a cool and useful bonus that motivates to press on through pain and resistance!

Your connection to awareness beyond identification with your stories does not mean identification with awareness. That’s the beauty of realizing the impermanent nature of everything: Identification is not necessary anymore, even if it arises and passes like everything else, and this movement from form to formlessness and back is the revelation of life’s mysterious ways. Fear disappears the moment the illusory is not taken for reality anymore. Then, we discover that who we really are is what cannot be known or named and grasped, not what we can define and put into a neat little cage.

With kind regards,

Dr. T.

Hi Dr. T.,

Your second paragraph brought me to tears, because running in the hamster cage is getting utterly exhausting, and being afraid of something that (somehow) seems peaceful isn’t making sense.

I appreciate your encouragement when needed. It is definitely interesting to watch it go back and forth. “Oops look at this, I’m wound up”, “ah, what’s this feeling of flexibility and okayness. Wow”.

I’ll keep looking and see what happens. It can get a little exhausting to yo-yo. I have some more giving in to do.

Thank you for your email,
Suzanne

Copyright © 2018 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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The difference between aloneness and lonesomeness

Meditation is often misunderstood as a solitary activity – sitting alone in silence on a pillow. This could not be further from the truth.

Our brain is the relational organ par excellence. We are deeply wired to relate to both others and ourselves. More than any other species or animal on this planet we are shaped by relationships. Of all the animals we have the longest childhood spanning about 28 years, all of which revolves around learning to be human through relationships with our primary caregivers. Indeed, it is through our relationships to each other that we become who we are and come to know ourselves.

In meditation you attune your observing self with your experiencing self, engaging the resonance circuitry of the brain responsible for our fundamental relatedness. This same circuitry is the one responsible for our attuned relationships with others. This is why meditation harmonizes our relationships to others, and attuned relationships with others facilitate our meditation.

To learn and sustain a meditation practice we are continually engaged with teachers and other meditators, and it is through this meaningful and attuned engagement with a teacher and others that we develop via resonance circuitry the capacity to be attuned to ourselves. When we have internalized these attuned and healing relationships to our teachers, we develop the capacity to be alone. This means having the ability to be alone without feeling stressed about it, due to the fact that our aloneness entails our internalized relationships. Only through this capacity to be alone, paradoxically a deeply relational state of being, can our meditation reach the depths it is meant to reach, including the vast realms of emptiness.

Refer to my recent blog ‘Alone or Lonely?‘ for more on the difference between aloneness and lonesomeness.

Copyright 2019 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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The Brain, DMN and Consciousness

Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, approximately ten billion bits per second arrive on the retina at the back of our eye. The optic nerve attached to the retina sending impulses back to the visual cortex, has only one million output connections. This means that only six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only ten thousand bits per second make it to the visual cortex. After further processing, visual information feeds into the brain regions responsible for forming our conscious perception. Surprisingly, the amount of information this conscious perception is made of amounts to less than 100 bits per second. From ten billion (10,000,000,000) to 100 bits per second – if that was all the brain took into account, this thin stream of data would hardly produce a perception. To add to this picture, of all the synapses in the visual cortex, only ten percent are devoted to incoming visual information from the retina, so that the vast majority of visual cortex connections must represent internal connections among neurons in that brain region. This shows how little information from the senses actually reaches the brain’s internal processing areas, and how extensive the processing of information through internal connections within the brain really must be. What you see is mostly what your brain constructs from scant data coming from the outside world. I guess Shakespeare hit the nail on its head: “Sir, what you see is not what you see!”

You may think that the brain lights up in different ways when you perform different tasks, and that it turns off when you are at rest. Far from it. There is a persistent level of background activity, called the default mode, that is critical for overall brain functioning and the planning of future actions. When your mind is at rest (daydreaming, meditating, sleeping), dispersed brain areas chatter away to one another, and the energy consumed by this ever-active messaging is twenty times higher than the energy the brain uses to accomplish specific tasks. Everything we do marks a departure from the brain’s default mode, and the energy used for such specific activities is only about five percent more than what the brain already consumes in this highly active default mode. During specific activities, the default mode continues underneath. Because this background default mode of high energy consumption is difficult to see and was difficult to find, brain scientists gave a reverential nod to dark energy in astronomy and called it the brain’s dark energy. This dark energy was later found to be predominant in four widely separated areas of the brain, the lateral parietal cortex, the lateral temporal cortex, the medial parietal cortex and (no surprise) the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Together, these areas constitute the default mode network (DMN), thought to behave like an orchestra conductor issuing timing signals to coordinate activity among different brain regions. Damage to the DMN may be involved with a whole series of mental and physical disorders. In this way, the brain integrates all its regions in a way that allows them to function and react in concert to stimuli. Integration is the key.

Moving from neuron to narrative, I write about neurons in order to shed light on the story of meditation. We only use very little information residing in the outside world to know that world. Instead, we mostly construct a perception of that world by means of a staggering amount of internal brain processing involving neural networks that are widely distributed throughout the nervous system. To do that effectively, it is essential that the integrative function of the DMN be intact and unfold in optimal ways. Proper brain hygiene, which includes time for play, goal-oriented focusing, sleeping, physical activity, connecting with others, non-focused day-dreamy downtime and time for inner reflection, ensures such brain health.

Central to these aspects of brain hygiene is time for inner reflection, also called ‘time in’. This is what we hone through mindfulness meditation. We harness the power of the master integrator of the brain, the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC), to create a still point, different from, but not unlike sleep, a state of concentrated and ultimately effortless rest. This allows the brain to get out of its own way. Were I to put my money on something, I would put it on the hypothesis that this concentrated rest optimally activates the DMN for its sweeping integrative function throughout the body-brain. Integration is the linkage of differentiated parts and stands at the core of health. For integration to occur, the ability to differentiate between the parts of the whole system and then connect them by holding them in awareness is key, not problem-solving. Open awareness of the details of the mind’s landscape discovered through focused attention changes everything it becomes aware of. Relative to neurons, we are talking about the differentiation and linkage between widely distributed brain regions, neural networks and neurocircuits; relative to narratives, we differentiate between the different somatic sensations, feelings and thoughts, between embodied and cognitive self-awareness, and ultimately between the different narrative threads we weave about our lives. Holding all that in awareness, after having gained a clear and detailed view of our energy flow through focused attention and kind intention, we then allow the DMN sweep to creatively reconnect in ever new ways all these parts moment-by-moment, thus forever changing everything in its wave-like repetitive surf movement.

Following the principle of the DMN sweep, and with the same ease we try to move from neurons to narratives, from science to subjective experience, in examining the intricacies of our internal world we need to learn not to focus too much on solving problems, but on finding new connections instead. This is the hallmark of creativity and health. If you are depressed, it is more important to stop fighting the obvious, deeply examine the space of darkness and find out how you create a dark reality devoid of connections to other possible ways of constructing reality, than it is to try to solve the problem by substituting negativity with positive thoughts. This latter project usually only partially works, because positivity that tries to replace negativity without exploration of the relationship between the two, only leads to the repression of darkness, which then lurks in the unconscious depths waiting to return with a vengeance at the first opportunity that arises.

What makes us sick is the combination of lack of clarity about the differentiated details of our internal sea and lack of connection between these details. What paralyzes people in depressive states is the lack of connection between the darkness and the larger context of the living organism, not the presence of darkness itself; for darkness is always around as a matter of course in human life. It is not about here and not wanting to be here, nor is it about there and wishing one was there, but about the ways here and there are connected or not. It is the nature of transitions from one mental state to the other that is crucial for integration and healing. Like in the Tango, with its unique aspect of improvisation also so prevalent in brain functioning, the excellence of either dancer is secondary to the couple’s ability to move in mutual attunement. Without the latter, no amount of expertise will put you in awe of the dance’s inspired aspirations. We need great curiosity and acceptance in simply being, as we closely examine the complex intrigues that make up the story of the mental state we don’t desire – more so than the conscious problem-solving wish to get rid of the undesired state. In approaching our inner world this way, we stimulate the brain’s creative propensity to find and create new connections, and that very process is the one that will lift us out from underneath the wreckage of chaos or rigidity.

The DMN works largely below the radar of consciousness. In order to reach the non-conscious realm, or more accurately, to become permeable to the constant flow of energy and information from non-conscious body and mind processes, we have to surrender to the unknown. The most powerful forces that influence our lives are not the ones we know about and are conscious of, but the ones we don’t know our mind has decided to adopt and work with as its own.

Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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