Awareness, Surrender and Meditation.

In my previous blog ‘The core secret of mindsight – Get out of your own way‘, I explored the notion of doing less to gain more, a fundamental principle in mindsight training. In this blog we are exploring three pairs of opposites students often confuse with each other, and that can get in the way of our getting out of our own way. The three pairs of opposites are ignoring versus suppressing or pushing away, surrendering versus giving in, and faith and belief.

In advanced meditation training, we learn to clearly delineate what we call the scope of our attention, which is how wide or narrow the attentional focus is. For example, our focus of attention can be wide, when it includes the somatic sensations in our whole body, or narrower, when it includes somatic sensations in the left foot only, or somatic sensations in the whole body related to the breath only. This variation in focus size is the attentional scope. To delineate it clearly, we not only need to cultivate the powerful intention to strongly aim and then intensely sustain our attention on the focus. We also need to ignore distractions that want to ‘knock at the door’ of our attentional scope, in order to intrude and monopolize attention. Here is where confusion sometimes kicks in, as students don’t know the difference between ignoring on one hand, and suppressing, repressing or pushing away on the other.

Ignoring only means not giving the distraction any energy, and it does not mean investing additional energy in making it disappear or push it away. Metaphorically, we only make sure that people with a parking card can access our parking lot, and don’t worry about preventing them from checking it out and trying to get in. The subtlety is profound, because it maintains the focus of our intention on what we can control, intending to aim and sustain attention, not on what we cannot, the appearance and strength of distractions. We stop making unnecessary mental noise as we calmly observe.

We can only control how we pay attention and what we pay attention to, not what appears in the awareness field. By not trying to interfere with what arises in the awareness field, a futile endeavor anyway, but simply anchor ourselves in the power of clear view, we get out of our own way by allowing the energy and information flow to unfold unfettered before our alert eyes with curiosity and acceptance.

What I just described is a form of surrender – to the wise principle of only controlling what in fact we can control. From this observation, it becomes clear that surrender is an active act of wisdom designed to align ourselves with the laws of nature and not fight against them. Surrendering means to not try to push the river you cannot push anyway, and use your precious energies for what you can influence. It comes with strength and a peaceful state of mind quite free from suffering. This active act of wisdom entails knowledge of course, a contextual, left-right-brain-integrated knowledge of reality’s complexities we call faith. Surrender and faith are twins and reinforce each other. To have faith means to know the unseen, be transparent to the non-conscious and be informed about the limitless human capacity for self-deception. We then realize that what appears is never what is, and engage in the task of surrendering to the totality of the context that is larger than ourselves.

Giving up is quite the opposite of surrendering. It is the consequence of exhaustion due to the foolishness of trying to control the uncontrollable. It is a suffering state of mind created by misinformed, deluded and distorted views of reality that never match what we aspire to. When we give up, we passively accept defeat in the face of ignorance, instead of actively learning from retreat when it is the wise thing to do. Suffering is ignorance, of course, invariably based on erroneous beliefs. Giving up and belief are also twins that reinforce each other. To believe is the act of disavowing wisdom for the convenient shortcut of conditioned ignorance, giving one’s power up to an arbitrary external authority. We remain stuck in confusing the appearance of things for reality, and therefore condemned to a relentlessly painful tunnel vision.

Ignoring distractions for the sake of alert clarity and surrendering to the inevitable laws of existence for the sake of harmonious peace, both contribute to the basic process of getting out of our own way for the purpose of Being.

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

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Consciousness and Mindsight

Does this sound familiar? You consciously decide to have a snack and you go ahead and have one. You then decide to put on laundry, and you go down to the laundry room to do it. It then occurs to you that it’s a good idea to get married to your partner, and you arrange to do so. And by the way, it’s time to buy a house, and off you go and look for houses. Finally, you decide to watch some TV and there you go, watching it. This is more or less how your day unfolds, just with many more decisions you believe having consciously made. But is that really what goes on?

Far from it. Here is the real story: The complex organism that you unconsciously decide somehow that its time to have a snack. That unconscious decision is made ‘without you’ on the basis of complex previous conditionings your organism developed over your life time to ensure survival, and it is made before you even have the faintest idea that you want to have a snack. Your organism then creates the conscious illusion that it is you who decided it is snack time, and you proceed going to the kitchen. By the way, after you had your snack you erroneously think you wanted, you feel bad because you ate some junk food and are trying to lose weight. The same process unfolds with the laundry, your decision to get married, to buy a house, watch TV and all the other decisions you make that day. In short, you are more of a zombie than you ever thought and your autopilot is having a field day.

Every living creature is an energy processing mechanism, whose biological processes and functions are highly sophisticated calculations that ensure it creates copies of itself and survives. This is called an algorithm. An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. A cooking recipe is such an example: You follow the instructions and always get the same result. Biological algorithms (animals) calculate probabilities and undergo constant quality control by natural selection (evolution). Humans are no exception. They are algorithms ensuring propagation and survival. Sensations, emotions and thoughts are the calculations that ensure the organism produces copies of itself. Over 90% of our decisions, big and small, are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires. For most of what you need to survive and have kids, you don’t need to be there. Your organism draws on millions of years of evolutionary experience to get you through this life just fine without you. What you believe to be ‘your self’ making conscious decisions like a CEO of a corporation, is mostly a constructed illusion that for the most part is as controlled by the algorithm as anything else. By the time you believe you are making a decision, your organism has already made it for you, long before the illusion that you consciously made it is created.

The problem is that life is not easy, and many of us have gone through rough childhoods and other life traumas. All our organism is concerned about is survival, not the good life. The decisions it therefore makes are based on whatever ways it has learned to survive as best it can. The mechanisms used to survive become entrenched as energy and information flow patterns that define the organism’s decision-making, and although they were adequate to survive, most of the time they fall short when it comes to making attuned, contextual and wise decisions. Because the experience of making conscious decisions is largely illusory, and therefore our ability to modify the decision-making process when necessary inaccessible, we live lives that often flow in the exact opposite direction than we would wish for. This state of affairs can take the form of the following question: “Why do I wish so badly to get married and have children, yet keep engaging in destructive relationships that go nowhere?”

Give yourself the gift of close observation during a typical day of your choice, and each time you decide to do something, ask yourself who made the decision. You will soon realize that by the time you believe you had the thought of doing whatever you think you decided to do, the thought was already there a split second before you consciously became aware of it and decided to act on it. And even closer observation will reveal after the fact that you had already sensed complex somatic and emotional experiences in your body you were utterly unaware of. In other words, the decision to act was made by your organism, not you, prior to you having the illusion of making it. The brain cleverly attributes an organismic decision it has already made to you, but after the fact! We can go so far as to discover that you, the self, is a construction after the fact that occurs as part of the organism’s attempt at making sense of life.

If you now panic or fall into disbelief, questioning what you thought was your free will, I can confirm that as far as we can tell, free will is overrated. We are more autopilot automatons, deluded about being conscious, than you would ever believe, and that is the bad news. Sorry, I should say this is in many ways good news, in that evolution made sure our mechanisms for survival and decision-making are out of our hands, because if they were, we would make a terrible mess of them and would not have survived past the ape stage. But yes, it is also bad news, because like the civilization of the Easter Island, we are heading straight towards the cliff of extinction, both individually in our lives and collectively on our planet, without the ability of doing anything about it. Evolution, as you can see, has its limitations. Longterm, our species is likely to fail to adapt to its own genius, like the apprentice sorcerer and many other species before us. I sound like a prophet of doom – or am I wrong?

Again, closer observation, both scientifically and through meditation, reveals an interesting escape hatch. We may have precious little free will, but once the decision to act made by the algorithm has become conscious, we can decide how to proceed, or even whether to proceed or not. The moment we become conscious, we can participate in the modification of energy and information flow (EIF), and we have free won’t. For example, once we become conscious of the decision the organism has already made to have a snack, we can participate in how we go about it, in deciding what we might want to snack on, or whether we should have one in the first place. Thing is that by the time we become conscious of snack time, so much unconscious reality processing has already taken place, that we don’t have access anymore to where the decision comes from, and whether it is really snack time, or more appropriately grieving time displaced onto physical hunger and the illusion of hunger for food. By being so deeply unconscious and disconnected from the very energy and information flow processes that inform our decisions, we have already profoundly gotten in our own way! Why? Because in its unconscious EIF processing the organism uses old, well-worn decision paths that include old ways by which we used to participate in the regulation of EIF not relevant anymore today – we live in the present with irrelevant decision-making patterns from the past that cannot possibly do justice to the new demands of present circumstances.

But how do we get out of our own way and access free won’t, when everything moves so fast, and actions follow our decisions within split seconds? Evolution also gave us the gift of the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC), with which we can train ourselves to observe the very processes, by which we construct reality in the first place. Not only can we see the world as it appears to us, but with the MPC’s help we can learn to examine how we construct our experience of the world such as to make it appear to us the way it does, and thereby learn to use our access to consciousness and capacity for free won’t to its fullest. In other words, we can learn to examine our very mind, with which we create our experience of living. That kind of mind training is admittedly very hard and not for the fainthearted, but it leads to mindsight, the capacity to see more clearly how our mind works, and how we construct our reality.

What are the secret ingredients of this ‘getting-out-of-our-own-way’ skill and what kind of training does it entail? What is the core essence of what we need to learn as we tap into the dormant power of the MPC? Now that we understand the mechanism by which we become automatons, we can find the remedy to mitigate the zombie effect. We gain the power of choice the moment we become conscious. Even though our organism will (fortunately) continue its algorithmic task of keeping us alive come hell or high water, and use every available trick of the brain trade to create useful illusions for the purpose of survival, and even though we will always come relatively late to the unconscious neuroprocessing party pushing us to automatic decision-making, the moment we become conscious of what the algorithm is serving us, we can intervene.

We can STOP (Stop, Take a breath, Observe, only then Proceed) and start monitoring EIF more closely without giving into the impulse for immediate action, a technique for which Daniel Siegel uses the acronym YODA (You Observe And Decouple Automaticity). This is the first step in getting out of our own way! Through such monitoring of EIF we see more clearly what goes on inside the black box of automaticity, and we begin to disentangle the processes, by which our organism tries to make sense of reality and put useful mechanisms for living successfully in place. We begin to get wind of the upcoming party way before it has started and are able to join the planning committee. We can then participate in novel and creative ways in the modification of the EIF we have begun to monitor and gotten to know more deeply, thereby doing justice to the new demands of present circumstances, all the while respecting the wisdom of old patterns for their time, yet accepting their present obsoleteness. This is the second step in getting out of our own way, as you modify the EIF you have monitored and cease to perpetuate old conditionings that have lost their usefulness! Last but not least, with such deep knowledge and awareness of who and what we really are, with such deep respect for the limitations of our consciousness while simultaneously harnessing its immense untapped potential, we come to realize that we cannot possibly ever have or be in control of our organism, that we will never be able to push the river. Instead, with wisdom and humility we come to realize that by simply monitoring and modifying EIF as described, we can exert control in the way we surf the waves of life’s ocean. The open complex system that we are then spontaneously liberates itself from the grip of chronic chaos and rigidity, moving towards greater integration instead. This is the third step in getting out of our own way, when you relax in the realization that you cannot control the weather and the ocean’s moods, and begin to invest your precious energies into the training to become a skilled surfer instead. With experience you then learn to do less to gain more, until eventually technique becomes inbred in you, a way of being without effort. Monitoring, modifying and creating new EIF become second nature, and you can then surrender to the SAP of consciousness that integratively transforms without effort: Stillness, Alertness and Pleasure. This fourth step is the quintessence of virtuosity on your journey through the unbearable lightness of Being.  

Even though I am admittedly quite skeptical regarding humanity’s capacity to survive in the long run, whether mindsight will ever save us from our own engendered demise, I shall not know. But what I do know, is that in the meantime, we can place ourselves on the right side of history, and do what we can to cultivate this precious mindsight skill for the benefit of as many fellow human beings as possible. For that, dear reader, please GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY!

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

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The tangible truth of reality lies in human suffering, and its exploration leads to the discovery of the truth about the universe.

Humans have conquered the world thanks to their ability to create and believe in fictional stories, which bring them together under one imaginative umbrella and motivate them to act in support of the story. Our stories make it possible for thousands of people to rally behind them. That is how we identify ourselves as Canadians, pray in church, vote for a political party, enjoy the theater, apply a legal system and organize parades and festivals. That’s how all human movements work, from religions and political parties to the pursuit of causes and the way we live our daily lives.

Through stories we find meaning, and build our identity and collective institutions. This is why we have to believe in them, and doubting our stories is very frightening. Our brain contributes to this state of affairs by locating beliefs in its main sensory areas and not in more intellectual thought-based areas, causing beliefs to acquire a particularly strong sense of being real, even though they are not.

We are inescapably embedded in our story worlds, which are worlds of human invention, not reality. On this level of invention, our stories can be more or less coherent, more or less attuned to reality, and therefore more or less beneficial and healthy. It is therefore very important to have access to solid tools that allow us to make coherent sense of these stories.

But stories they always remain, and all stories, without exception, are human inventions. They are fictional and simply constructions for being a story, not reality itself. Being as deeply embedded in our stories as we are, we are very bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality. Reality and the universe just do not work like stories – as far as we know, there are no cosmic dramas and no stories in the universe, and when we look deeply at who we are – ephemeral energy vibrations that appear and disappear – the inner dramas of human creation are just that: Fictional creations, not reality. Outside the bubble of our stories, there is neither meaning nor purpose to be found.

To understand death, we have to understand life, and to understand life, learning how to distinguish direct experience of reality from indirect interpretations of reality through stories is crucial. To understand experience, we need to examine the body, because between us and the world there are always somatic sensations. We never react to events in the outside world – only to sensations in our own body and experiences in our minds.

And then we will discover what Buddha discovered 2500 years ago: That everything is impermanent and constantly changing, nothing lasts and has any enduring essence, and nothing can create lasting happiness and is completely satisfying. Period. No imaginable story will ever change that, although stories delude us into beliefs that bury that truth. We are so deeply embedded in the stories we create that we don’t even notice anymore that the ‘reality’ we see is a construction.

So how can we touch the truth beyond the stories we concoct? By getting to know our bodies that never lie, our pain and pleasure, and the optional suffering we create from pain and pleasure through the stories we weave. The tangible truth of reality lies in human suffering, and its exploration leads to the discovery of truth about the universe. Spinning webs of stories is not a suitable place to start taking on the big questions facing humans about the universe, the meaning of life, our own identity and the nature of existence – instead, invest the time, energy and effort into examining human suffering and observing what it is all about. What we then discover aren’t stories.

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

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Awareness – Wiring your brain for mindfulness rather than mindlessness.

Here are two related questions that two students recently asked about mindfulness meditation:

“I am confused about control. There seems to be a contradiction: On one hand it feels like we take control in meditation, on the other hand we learn to relinquish control. What’s the solution?”

“If surrender is the wisdom to differentiate between what we have control over and what we don’t, then wouldn’t it make sense to ‘let be’ or ‘surrender’ to anything that comes into our field of awareness during formal practice without trying to force or coax our minds to establish a predetermined focus of attention? Sometimes I feel that by disciplining ourselves to follow such a structured set of rules, we are establishing certain conditioning, which happens to be the very thing that we are trying to get away from.”

Both questions address a very central point in meditation: We indeed learn to take control, but on a level we are not used to being in control, and we learn to relinquish control on another level we are inappropriately in the habit of trying to take control. We also learn to engage in the investigation of the mind. Just a few hours of meditation will show anyone that one has hardly any control over oneself, let alone any insight worth its salt into the nature of mind. As of 2019, the only possible direct access to my mind goes through self-observation, a methodical, continuous, and objective process that requires a technique to be learned. Through mindfulness practice we establish a new kind of conditioning that wires the brain for mindfulness rather than mindlessness.

The current age of the universe is 13.8 billion years. Planet earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Life seems to have started 3.5 billion years ago. Humans have been around for at least 2 million years and anatomically modern humans for at least 300 thousand years. For most of life’s evolution there existed nothing even close to human consciousness. Various life forms thrived through several cycles of climatic changes and even mass extinctions without anyone ever making conscious decisions as we think we can. For most of this gigantic evolutionary time frame during which planet earth was teeming with life, the lights were on and nobody was home. These life forms evolved in such a way as to grow and multiply like sophisticated biological robots, perfectly adapted to multiply in their natural environment.

Every living creature is an energy processing mechanism, whose biological processes and functions are highly sophisticated calculations that ensure it creates copies of itself and survives. This is called an algorithm. An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems, and reach decisions. A cooking recipe is such an example: You follow the instructions and always get the same result. Biological algorithms (animals) calculate probabilities and undergo constant quality control by natural selection (evolution). Humans are no exception. They are algorithms ensuring propagation and survival. Sensations, emotions and thoughts are the calculations that ensure the organism produces copies of itself. Over 90% of our decisions, big and small, are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions, and desires. For most of what you need to survive and have kids – at least at the time we were hunter-gatherers – you didn’t need to be there. Your organism draws on millions of years of evolutionary experience to get you through this life just fine without you. What you believe to be your self that makes decisions like a CEO of a corporation, is mostly a constructed illusion that for the most part is as controlled by the algorithm as anything else.

Just because humans developed a consciousness capable of exploring both the world and itself, does not mean they are any less algorithms on autopilot. We now know from certain scientific experiments that decisions are made by our organism before we become aware of having made them. ‘You’, whoever you think that may be, is not the master of your organism and rarely the real decision-maker – your organism is, cleverly giving you retrospectively the impression that you made the decision when you haven’t. Millions of years of evolutionary experience equipped us well for autopilot surviving – you certainly would not want such highly important organismic functions that ensure survival to be controlled by your whims. Survival is non-negotiable and has to be ensured with iron-clad precision and predictability.

But there is a catch: With the development of a uniquely human brain structure called the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC), we developed the capacity to re-flect. This means having the mental ability to step outside the organism’s algorithmic calculations and observing them from a distance. In other words, we gained the ability to make algorithmic activity the object of our observation and reality something we can think about, reflect upon, and ultimately manipulate. We can manipulate our own cognitive functions, and reflect upon the world and our own experience. To achieve this feat our brain creates the illusion of a self we call ‘me’, which appears to be in charge when it really isn’t. This creates an interesting dilemma, whereby we gain the capacity to reflect upon and manipulate reality as if we had free rein to make free decisions and be in control, all the while the amount of control we have is far less than we ever imagine, allowing the experienced algorithm to still remain the real boss. In other words, even the part of our minds that is able to reflect, to think about thinking and reality, even that part is deeply under the influence of the algorithm and far more automatic than we think.

With the capacity to reflect we began to be able to put our curiosity and creativity in the service of experimentation. This means that we began to be able to do things that we are ‘naturally’ not made to do. I imagine a hominid a couple of millions of years ago wondering one day what would happen if she deliberately stayed up all night instead of going to sleep – you would never encounter a robin being able to do that. Another early human may have thrown a pebble against a rock and noticed a spark, thinking to himself that the spark looked eerily similar to the fire the last lightning storm unleashed and that he may be able to reproduce it himself. In mind terms, humans began to be able to use a small part of their brainpower to modify algorithmic processes within the very limited range of making changes in both the physical and social environment. While this worked fairly well as long as we were totally embedded in nature with limited capacities to act against its algorithmic principles since the agricultural revolution 10 thousand years ago it has become a real problem. As Yuval Harari points out in his book ‘Sapiens’, humans began to manipulate the lives of animals and plants. While people as individuals did not benefit from this change, it gave humans as a species the advantage of being able to provide more food per territory, assemble more people into a social unit and multiply exponentially. Only the few in charge benefited from this, while for most people this new arrangement meant keeping more people alive under worse conditions – from an evolutionary point of view a very successful development, since evolution’s currency is the number of DNA copies. Producing more than what’s needed opened the door to luxuries, which tend to become necessities with time, generating new obligations. And so the vicious cycle of stress was born: We have more than we need, including more time on our hands, creating a sense of entitlement for things to stay that way; entitlement morphs into a sense of necessity, creating new obligations and opportunities. Before we know it, we are caught in an inescapable trap that turns life into a treadmill that makes our days more anxious and agitated. Without us knowing it, for all the great discoveries humans have come up with, most of our decisions are still made by the algorithm, not ‘us’.

With this cognitive revolution of minds able to reflect upon reality that spawned a cultural evolution beyond our genes, our organisms took a beating. Most of our ability to reflect is compartmentalized to be focused on external reality. By ‘external’ I mean the reality that presents itself to our consciousness outside the very processes by which we create reality. Don’t forget, the brain is not like a computer that receives information from you, stores it exactly the way you put it in or it receives it and lets you retrieve it in the same form as you stored it. The brain not only takes in information from the outside world but also from inside the body and inside itself, processing the whole shebang in ways that create a constructed reality it then projects on the world, including the organism’s own view of itself. In other words, the spontaneous reflection of the untrained mind is compartmentalized and limited to the results of our mind’s processes as they are projected outward onto reality, and do not include awareness of how the mind creates the reality we see in the first place. We are very good at creating and inventing new things, in a misguided illusion of freedom make decisions that outrageously disrupt our organism’s optimal energy flow, and mistakenly believe that we are much more in charge than we really are, but we are lousy at exploring the very processes by which we create reality, in other words, the processes of the mind itself.

I am sure you can see now how this situation leads to catastrophe, both personal and collective. We disrupt the organism’s capacity for integration without knowing how we do it and even that we do it, causing untold suffering, breakdowns and illnesses. Collectively, we barrel down the same path, disrupting and destroying the ecosystem that sustains us. In both cases, we damage and destroy the very context that gives us life – organism and ecosystem. This brings us back to our two students’ questions. The algorithmic power to ensure survival at the expense of thriving and short-term gain at the expense of long-term wisdom, and the power of the treadmill of habit to follow the algorithmic principle of DNA quantity over life quality, both are so deeply conditioned and solidly ensconced in millions of years of evolution that ‘letting be’ just like that without special training would simply perpetuate our path to destruction.

In our capacity for reflection that is ordinarily compartmentalized to only be applied to external reality, there lies a gem. It is the hidden treasure of mindsight. We have the ability to turn our attention towards the very processes of mind that create our reality and open our awareness to encompassing the processes by which we are. The algorithm being what it is, a powerful program that unfolds on autopilot whether we like it or not, we need an equally powerful counter-process of investigation and awareness that can take the algorithm on and elucidate its mysteries. This requires that we enlist and activate a latent potential that lurks hidden behind the facade of automatism. Our capacity for reflection has Janus qualities: It can be in the service of the algorithm that was established millions of years ago when we lived embedded in nature and DNA survival was the only game in town, and it can also be put in the service of an algorithmic transformation so badly needed for long-term thriving in a world, in which we have transcended our natural embeddedness long ago. To this end, ‘letting be’ has to be learned, because it is otherwise just not available to us. All we know is how to do and we are hopeless at undoing; all we know is how to feed the illusion of control and we are incapable of realizing how little control we have; all we know is interfere and we have no clue how to allow millions of years of organismic wisdom to show us the way; all we know is the illusion of making decisions and we don’t have the faintest knowledge of the fact that all we can do is allow, suppress or modify decisions the algorithm has taken long before we become aware of them; all we know is striving and we fall short when it comes to being.

To develop the latent capacity to get out of our way after having examined what mind is, and let the spontaneous process of integration towards health, wellbeing, and no-suffering evolve, we have to introduce a new set of conditioning into the algorithm, one that expands our view of reality to encompass the whole context of being, including how we create reality in the first place. That takes training, because we are for the most part not spontaneously wired for that. Although we will never completely escape the algorithm of the organism that we are, this is our chance to develop a point of reference outside the algorithm’s reach, capable of eliminating the suffering the algorithm can’t help create. Paradoxically, we then discover that ‘I’, the self, is an illusion, like it would be an illusion to believe a corporation has a CEO named John, when in fact it only has a board of directors all with the same first name John. Realizing there is no such ‘I’ in charge, that the algorithm is in charge, and that from moment to moment many different energy flows vie for dominance following algorithmic rules, is deeply empowering, because like in the wizard of Oz, we cease wasting energy fighting the illusion of self. Instead, we can relax into the awareness of the river of internal events unfolding whether we like it or not, realizing that our power lies in how easily and elegantly we can navigate the obstacles the river flows through.

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

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The relationship between the darkness we face in both life and meditation, and the light we all so fervently seek.

When I saw these little meditating skeletons ornate with a Santa hat, a whole slew of complex feelings and ideas came to mind, inspiring me to use them for a Christmas blog. I wondered how Coca Cola, Santa, skeletons, meditation, Christ and festivals of light such as Christmas, Hanukkah and Diwali are all connected? Sit down with a tea as I did, as we embark together in reflection, leaving entrenched belief systems you may have at the door waiting.

We all live in this world:

At least in North America, our imagination of the archetype of a saint named Nicholas being kind to children and bring them gifts is inextricably shaped by Coca-Cola. “The Santa Claus we all know and love — that big, jolly man in the red suit with a white beard — didn’t always look that way. In fact, many people are surprised to learn that prior to 1931, Santa was depicted as everything from a tall gaunt man to a spooky-looking elf. He has donned a bishop’s robe and a Norse huntsman’s animal skin .” It was Coca Cola’s involvement that shaped our present North American Santa.

By all accounts, St. Nick’s story begins in the fourth century AD in what is now modern-day Turkey. A man named Nicholas became the bishop of a village called Myra. He was later canonized, and soon became one of the most popular saints in Christianity. That’s about all we know for sure, but much of the folklore surrounding Saint Nick speaks of his kindness and generosity toward children, in a world where those attitudes weren’t easy to find.

Present-day secular and commercial cultural phenomena are all inextricably interwoven into our tens of thousands of years old imagination, and deeply influence our neurofiring patterns and how our brains get shaped and our minds conditioned. Coca Cola represents the multitude of daily concerns and influences that tend to flood our consciousness, get us lost in making mountains out of molehills, and causes us to lose track of what is really important.

Christmas at the time of the winter solstice:

The winter solstice has captured the human imagination throughout the ages and inspired festivities, rituals and religious beliefs across cultural boundaries everywhere. Christmas is just one of those celebrations. History books can easily tell us all about how people’s imagination has digested this time of year with pomp and circumstance of various kinds.

This is the time around the longest night and shortest day, the time when one movement ends and a contrary one begins, where metaphorically new light is born into the darkness. Christ symbolizes not just new hope in a world of suffering, but the new spark of awareness lighting up the darkness of our ignorant autopilot mindless ways of living. We also find this theme of new light illuminating human darkness in Hanukkah and Diwali.

You can find the embodied form of this celebration right now in your breath. Release your tensions down into the earth in the following out-breath, and let go as best you can of all of you into the surrender of the long pause at the end of the out-breath. Remember that one day, on the last day of the form your energy flow took during this lifetime, you will expire one last time before the major transformation of ‘your’ energy flow into new flow patterns. Stay in this pause at the end of the out-breath for as long as it lasts. During those moments of absence of breathing movement, explore with your attention the vast darkness and spaciousness within the grain of sand of just those few moments, having given away all of you as best you could. Lightly rest in this deep stillness of Being that neither calls, regrets nor promises anything. For those few moments, if you have really surrendered all of you to this space where nothing seems to happen anymore, and you don’t need to go anywhere, achieve anything or improve anything anymore, the past and future have both vanished and you can rest in the timeless emptiness you may never have paid attention to before. Wishes, expectations, regrets, and all resistances are gone, and you wait for nothing while being everything. Suddenly, without your doing or planning anything, without a past or cause, from seemingly nowhere, a new impulse emerges from the unfathomable depths of darkness, a new arising from the open and vast potential of emptiness, lighting up your consciousness with a new inbreath, a new form that will unfold through endless cycles of becoming and disappearing, as it has done so countless times before. And time is born again, not for long, even if for an eternity until the next out-breath has expired, for eternity is still imprisoned in time. Thing is – all you need to do is be available for the ride, which means you need to be aware, and when you are aware, you wake up out of time into the timelessness of Being.

We are not of this world:

Not being of this world requires a bit of explanation: It means that we are not who we think we are and what our deluded belief systems want us to see. And so the skeletons are far from macabre!

We are very solidly wired for survival, and evolution has proven how powerful we are in ensuring the survival of our species – so far. Nature and evolution are mainly concerned about creating organisms that can make duplicates of themselves in the most predictably efficient way. Survival of as many specimens as possible under any, even if terrible circumstance, is the name of the game. That should not surprise you: Look around and make an educated guess about what percentage of people live a content, peaceful and serene life without undue worry, unhappiness or suffering; not many! The good life we all so passionately strive for is of no evolutionary concern. For such survival to be ensured, the organism has to be wired in a way as to not be able to interfere with whatever mechanisms it needs to survive. How does nature do that? By wiring organisms as sophisticated automatons with incredible capabilities for adaptation, and in our human case, what is included in the automatism is most of consciousness. Humans are thus automatons believing they make free decisions, when in fact most of their decisions is automatically wired into the system. There is a scientific word for this, and what I am about to tell you is by now recognized scientific knowledge: Human beings are algorithms, and the vast majority of all decisions we make, including what car we buy or what mate we chose, are automatically decided by the algorithm and not by ‘us’. Algorithms are methodical sets of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. A cooking recipe is an algorithm: You follow the steps and always come up with the same dish. Humans with their thoughts and emotions are just such algorithms – complex calculation automatons that ensure their reproduction and survival. It is both astonishing and humbling to realize how little say we have in ‘our decisions’.

You may now wonder where awareness, liberation, free will and the possibility to reduce suffering come in! Humans are also wired for the capacity to be aware of being aware, or the ability to reflect upon their own experience. However, this capacity is by far not as accessible as you may think, and as I mentioned above, also largely subject to the automatic algorithmic organization of our organism. What this means is that even when you think you are making decisions based on free will, they are mostly not. The decisions we believe we freely make are far more automatic and conditioned by evolutionary wiring and past experience than we ever imagine, and because algorithmic survival mechanisms only afford us a short-term view of reality (how to get food for tomorrow and escape the lion today), our decisions are short-sited and at this stage in our evolution woefully inadequate to ensure the species’ survival. All is not lost though. Through a particular attentional training that leads to the development of mindful states, we can mobilize a potential we are also wired for, and that we did not need with the same urgency when we were roaming the forests and savannas during our hunter-gatherer times. This potential allows us at least to some degree to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the algorithm and make more authentically free decisions with an expanded consciousness that allows us to have an overarching long-term view of the whole. In doing so, we actually broaden the contexts within which we understand reality, and with each broader context we situate ourselves in, reality looks much different than what it looked like when we were imprisoned by a narrow view. We realize we are not of this world, because who we really are transcends our limited view of ourselves as physical organisms.

The skeletons are thus far from macabre! At first blush they are symbols of death reminding us of our mortality. That is only true from the narrow perspective of having identified ourselves with the body as who we are. Who we really are is far more complex than that and transcends this narrow view as I have shown elsewhere. Contemplating our physical mortality has a great silver lining: We tend to take life for granted as we mindlessly sail through its circumstances, as if they were determined, certain and predictable. Reminding ourselves that nothing lasts helps wake up our middle prefrontal cortex for reflection and a more present life. When we look more closely, we are much more than our bodies, and the skeletons become a symbol of timeless being beyond what our blinders allow us to see.

So yes, we are both in this world, but not of this world, as Jesus is supposed to have said, and our skeleton sitting in contemplation during this holiday time of winter solstice is a perfect opportunity to reflect on our lives.

Light and shadow:

Light and Shadow by Franklin Carmichael

This picture of Franklin Carmichael hangs on the wall in our office. It has always inspired me to think about the relationship between the darkness we face in both life and meditation, and the light we all so fervently seek. What is so fascinating to me is how in our attempts at decreasing suffering, we search, strive and struggle to find peace, happiness, liberation or whatever we call God, not noticing that it all is already so naturally there, ready for the taking. When the days get shorter to approach the fall equinox, we mourn the summer; when they get really short to approach the winter solstice, we dread the winter. When they get longer to approach the spring equinox, we pine for spring; and when they get really much longer to approach the summer solstice, we rejoice and forget it will not last. Never are we there where the action is, always wanting something else than what we have or what is.

Now is the time to let nature inspire our fundamental mindfulness principle: Embrace the darkness. Darkness is not the absence of light, but the chrysalis stage of transformation from one energy pattern to another. Darkness means creative fermentation below the visible surface, while everything on the surface seems frozen. Darkness is the lively activity of growth inside the grass we watch and can’t see growing. Darkness is the recognition of blindness before anything else can pierce through it. Like the pause at the end of the outbreath, surrender to it completely. Relinquish all grasping to an old, well worn and familiar view of who you are, and embrace the transformative chaos of the dark. Only then can what’s really novel be recreated and resurrected into a new form, a new temporary identity, like the phoenix rising from the ashes or Christ from the cross. This universal archetypal theme of rebirth is found cross-culturally in many traditions. When we embrace it, learning to ride the phases of transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly over and over again without resistance, our transcendent, timeless and nameless Being beyond all cycles of becoming and vanishing radiates through the cloud cover of our ignorance and illusions, as it always has beyond time immemorial.

Much suffering starts with the abhorrence of the darkness, which takes many forms in everyday life. But without honoring the darkness, no breakthrough ever leads to transformation. There is no light without the shadows of its source. The darkness is the fermenting potential, where everything begins, unseen within its protective womb. The deep meditative path is a training in recognizing the call of the dark, and join its source for renewal and transformation. This time of year inspires this introverted orientation towards the stillness of Being.

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

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Managing anxiety and mindfulness principles

For anonymity’s sake let’s call my student Sean. For years his anxiety was debilitating! He has struggled with it for about 30 years and sought help in many different ways, including counselling and medication treatment. After a course of individual psychotherapy with me, as well as intense involvement in the practice of mindfulness meditation, he eventually got to the point of being able to live without medication, most of the time symptom-free. Maybe once or twice a year he experiences a very manageable recurrence of the anxiety, which he meets with his mindfulness skills.

This article is not about the successful treatment of anxiety disorders through mindfulness meditation. Instead, I want to show how a mindfulness practitioner with quite considerable long-term meditation experience deals with the occasional recurrence of symptoms, particularly when they are extreme. I also want to highlight the mindfulness principles involved in this process.

Sean came to see me recently, because at the beginning of September his anxiety started to reemerge after having been anxiety-free for some time. Nothing unusual had happened and there was no external reason for the recurrence of his anxiety. His anxiety was very bad this time around; it worsened to the point of being almost intolerable and lasted an unusually long time of approximately two months. At its worst, he couldn’t stand it anymore and two things happened: He began to consider the possibility of going back on Cipralex, an antidepressant with a strong anti-anxiety component he is familiar with, which worked well for him in the past. At approximately the same time, he called my office to make an appointment, with the intention of exploring with me anything he might possibly overlook in his psychological approach to his anxiety. Unexpectedly, these two actions of booking an appointment and intending to go back on Cipralex caused the symptoms to vanish. By the time I recently saw him, he almost wondered why he was there with me.

We first talked a bit about how he was managing his anxiety and what mindfulness principles he was applying to deal with it. What he told me was very revealing of quite a skilled mind working with the adversity of an affliction. With many of the principles of meditation that he had learned, such as the recognition that thoughts are not facts, giving emotions a wide spaciousness through allowing and letting be, and sheer tenacity and perseverance, he maintained a deep curiosity about how far this ‘internal catastrophe’ can go. As if he was watching a storm pass by, he simply allowed the inner storm to unfold with as little resistance and as much awareness as possible. Over the years of meeting these symptoms in this fashion, he discovered that nothing more catastrophic happens than an enormous feeling of unpleasantness washing over him, including at times the very unpleasant experience of feeling he is going to die. He discovered a sense of pride and strength in his ability to look the monster directly into the eyes, realizing that the only thing he had to fear is fear itself. Unlike years ago, when such anxiety would have caused him to be out of commission and unable to function normally, he can now continue to go about his life’s business as usual.

He also has access to Ativan, a minor tranquilizer with specific anti-anxiety properties. This is not the kind of medication that would be wise to take on any regular basis, which is why he uses it only very rarely if there’s really no other option, at most maybe one minimal dose tablet once a month if he is really very anxious. He explained to me that he always waits until the storm is over and the anxiety subsides, because it helps him disidentify from the experience, find strength in not allowing the anxiety to control him and significantly decrease the impact the anxiety has on his life. After the worst of the storm is over, he sometimes feels quite exhausted, at which point he may take an Ativan tablet to give himself a good rest. This approach to his anxiety is wise, because while he prevents himself from backing down when the anxiety is at its worst, and instead continues to hone his mindfulness skills to change his relationship to the anxiety, he effectively engages the brain cells in a massive rewiring process that leads to greater integration of his organism, a decrease of symptom strength and the hold it has on him, and therefore longer periods of symptom-free health.

Anyone with some therapeutic experience reading this may wonder, whether he does not actually traumatize himself by doing what he does. The answer is an emphatic no, as long as one important condition is fulfilled: Throughout this process he needs to feel that he is in the driver’s seat, that in other words he remains within his window of tolerance for stress. If during the storm he was to lose his capacity to be aware and apply his mindfulness meditation tools, and instead fell into an unmanageable panic, then yes, it would not make sense to try to be heroic; there would be a real danger of causing more harm than good. After many years of intense mindfulness meditation training, this is clearly not his situation anymore.

A few questions remained: Why did the symptoms disappear the moment he made an appointment and considered taking Cipralex, why did the symptoms start in September when his children are now grown and independent, and there is no back to school stress anymore, and is it wise to go back on Cipralex, which is the kind of medication he would have to take daily for at least a 2 to 3 months period? My answers were not pronouncements written in stone, but hypotheses Sean will have to examine as he continues to develop his expertise in dealing with his anxiety.

The moment he decided he might go back on Cipralex at the height of his anxiety, could in fact psychologically be the moment he surrendered his left brain’s compulsion to solve the problem. Although he was using some cognitive tools to remind him that his thoughts were not reality, this whole anxiety phenomenon can never be resolved with his left brain function alone. It requires an integration of the left brain with the contextual, nonverbal right brain. By surrendering to the possibility that he psychologically may not be able to overcome his anxiety, he relinquished in fact deeper resistances to experiencing these anxious energy flows. The result is an even greater spaciousness with which he relates to his own anxious experience, accompanied by a decrease or even disappearance of the symptom.

Booking an appointment with me would have been an act of faith by hoping I may have some answers up my sleeves that could help him. This could be called a placebo effect, which in fact is not anything negative, but a powerful psychological force that helps us tap into the unknown potential of the organism that we are. Metaphorically speaking, by calling me he actually reached out to his own internal unknown potential for healing. It is not surprising that this would mobilize healing energies that at least temporarily would make the symptoms go away.

With regards to the symptoms appearing in September, I reminded him of all the years his children were growing up and the busyness of life resumed in the fall after a quiet summer. I pointed out the possibility that after many years of conditioning, September has now the symbolic meaning of back-to-school stress, despite the fact that his children are gone and there is no back-to-school stress anymore. Whenever September approaches, his unconscious implicit memories of years of stress, now deeply embodied in his brain’s neurofiring patterns, get activated . This idea struck him as very resonant, causing an immediate additional sense of relief while we were talking. Knowing about this possibility will make it possible for him during the end of summer when fall approaches, to pay particular attention to the fine somatic sensations in his body and whatever faint memories of past years they cause. This may allow him to recognize the mechanism, by which implicitly encoded stress signals from previous years begin to stir in his body when the fall approaches and eventually lead to the development of anxiety.

We can ask an even more radical question: Why bother with such intensive mindfulness meditation training, when one could just take Cipralex and presumably live effortlessly happily ever after? The answer is simple (not simplistic), complex (has many facets) and compelling. On medication people often feel numb or not quite themselves, and they don’t like the side effects. Even with medication the symptoms often don’t disappear and are more likely to be just mitigated. If they do disappear, it is usually time-limited, and over time they tend to return, at which point other medications need to be tried or the dose has to be increased, causing an increase in side effects. Last but not least, the person learns nothing about the psychodynamic meaning of their symptoms, causing unresolved or psychological conflicts to continue to feed the tendency to develop such symptoms and stress, and thus interfere with the overall integration of the organism that promotes the person’s health.

When I talk about these things, highlighting the psychological mechanisms involved in psychiatric symptoms and trying to elucidate the complex decisions that have to be made between psychological and psychodynamic growth and medication treatment, people sometimes come to the wrong conclusion that I am against medication. Far from it. Medication is one of our tools in our toolbox, which wisely used can be extremely beneficial. The problem nowadays lies in the fact that biological advances in medicine have been so spectacular as to eclipse the importance of the mind in our human lives. Whether we like it or not, the mind is still the most important organ we have, and without paying attention to, training and respecting the mind, our attempts at curing illnesses, maintain function and healing fall far short of what is potentially possible.

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

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