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Resource-Based, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness – A Contemporary Approach To Mindfulness
Our organism is a structured and interactive collection of variously patterned energy flows, such as the individual cells and their interconnections, the hormonal and organ systems, and the different aspects of the mind including awareness, cognition/thoughts, emotions, and somatic sensations.
These energy flows are in a constant process of self-regulation for survival and thriving, which unfolds through self-monitoring and appraising how fluid and adaptive the different energy flows and their intricate interactions are at any one moment. Once a determination is made that these energies flow sub-optimally, the organism proceeds to modify them by creating, tapping into, and using resources in such a way as to achieve maximal integration towards health and wellbeing. Mindfulness meditation and psychotherapy are two ways of working with regulation and enhancing its successful unfolding. In psychotherapy, the therapist is a central resource the patient can lean on to learn to access her own internal resources. In mindfulness meditation, the meditator is alone without the benefit of another person’s support during formal practice, often left to discover his internal world as a collection of neighborhoods he would rather not have to visit alone. This can lead to an overwhelming struggle to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, for which simply following prescribed meditation instructions and techniques is no match. Conditioned and engrained energy flow patterns established during a lifetime of unconscious creation of suffering can interfere with the application of practice techniques and bring the meditator’s practice to a halt.
The question is: Why can mindfulness meditation become so unmanageable?
During the last one to two decades, interest in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) revealed that around 10% of the population experiences PTSD and 70% of adults have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives. In trying to elucidate the effects of trauma on the human brain and our psyche, it became clear that more people than previously believed are suffering from some degree of trauma. Patients with complex trauma (protracted childhood trauma through abuse that deeply affects the adult’s life) are often misdiagnosed with a bipolar affective or borderline personality disorder, and therefore doomed to receive inadequate treatment that does not address the core problem.
The word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek ‘wound’, and in this context refers to the psychological wound incurred through certain circumstances. Trauma is not just an event, although some events are potentially more traumatizing than others, but refers to the way an individual processed certain stressful life events in the past.
The extent to which an individual will become traumatized depends on two sets of interacting factors:
1. The objective characteristics of the event, and
2. The subjective characteristics that define the individual’s mental energy and efficiency.
Combined, these two factors give rise to a spectrum of trauma severities, whereby certain susceptible and fragile individuals will experience trauma under less severe circumstances, and strongly resilient individuals may not be traumatized having lived through more severe circumstances.
What does it mean to be traumatized? To try to put it simply, imagine the starlings’ murmuration – swarms of hundreds of birds dancing in perfect unison through the sky without a leader who coordinates the dance. In the same way, our organism, our brain, and our mind consist of an amalgamation of thousands of varying neurofiring and energy flow clusters that are patterned to interact collaboratively so as to provide us with a certain sense of cohesion, allowing us to live a more or less satisfying life.
Through their functional interconnectedness, these energy flow patterns are constantly self-regulating, and there is no lead energy flow, despite the fact that we like to think we are in control of our lives. Neuroception is the term coined by Steven Porges for the way neurocircuits self-regulate by distinguishing whether a situation is safe, threatening, or dangerous. This ongoing process of appraisal is how our autonomic nervous system evaluates information from our senses about our environment and the state of our body. The collection of thousands of parts our organism is made of interacts efficiently to solve conflicts that may arise and adapt to changes.
When the organism goes through experiences it interprets as traumatic, certain energy flow patterns cease to be well connected with the rest of the organism or even overwhelm the overall energy flow.
This puts us into a state of fear or anger, which combined with various degrees of mobilization or immobilization leads to various psychologically unsolvable situations. A historically recent scientific discovery has revolutionized our understanding of nervous system energy processing. Steven Porges’ polyvagal autonomic nervous system theory has immeasurably deepened our understanding of how human beings process their energy flow through the spectrum of safe, unsafe, and catastrophic experiences. Frank Corrigan‘s later expansion of our understanding of trauma processing and its treatment through Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) provides further tools I have integrated into my trauma-informed mindfulness meditation technique.
An example is the child of an abusive parent; the child needs her parent and the attachment system gets the child to seek proximity to the parent, while the parent’s abuse causes terrible fear and anger. As a consequence, the child experiences an unsolvable psychological situation of attachment with fear or anger and no way out. To survive, the organism uses its specialized and sophisticated, polyvagal defense strategies to isolate some of those overheated neurofiring patterns from the rest of the overall energy flow and put in place substitute mechanisms to hold the whole system together. This process of isolation can be mild in the form of compartmentalization or more severe in the form of dissociation.
Let’s take a fun detour: The nervous system, both somatic and autonomic, embryologically stems from the outer membrane enveloping the fertilized egg, which eventually becomes the skin. At some point in the evolution of the embryo, a part of that membrane begins to differentiate into nerve cells, which then migrate into the center of the fertilized egg, becoming the nervous system.
Remember that a membrane’s function is to regulate the traffic of substances across it between the outside world and the inside of the cell. It can thus be seen as a relationship organ, regulating the way the outside world and the inside milieu of the cell relate to each other. As it differentiates into the nervous system and migrates inward presumably becoming the ‘mem-brain’, it does not lose its relational function. The nerve cell is the only cell in the body that does not produce anything. Instead, it is an electrical and biochemical information conduit that passes information from one end of the nerve cell to the other, and then through synapses to other nerve cells. Like the membrane, its function is relatedness. This makes the brain the relationship organ par excellence.
Healthy brain and mind functioning thus depend on the establishment of as much connectivity between all its elements and parts as possible. Since the brain’s potential neurofiring patterns exceed the number of known particles in our universe, the potential to grow as human beings is limitless during our lifetime. Chronic interruptions of that connectivity through childhood trauma, for example, are what causes psychological and somatic symptoms, as well as trauma, with all the suffering we can create for ourselves. Logically then, the essence of psychological therapeutic interventions is about reestablishing connectivity by stopping the process of connectivity interruption.
Just because a cluster of neurofiring patterns has been sequestered away does not mean it ceases to be active.
On the contrary, like unprepared musicians in one part of an orchestra, these dissociated parts continue to actively disrupt the whole system; because they are not integrated into the whole, they produce various psychological and physical symptoms that can be conceptualized as frictions within the system, which are caused by the organism’s inability to coordinate its overall energy flow in a smooth fashion. In surveying the whole patient population I have treated over the past 40 years, I can say that most people experience at least some degree of such disintegration throughout their lifetime, and we can find a wide spectrum of severity of such dissociation.
In light of these relatively new discoveries, approaches to psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation have been developed that are sensitive to what we now know about trauma and our polyvagal processing, and are therefore referred to as trauma-sensitive approaches, such as the one I developed.
An important aspect of such approaches is called ‘resourcing’, which refers to how healing trauma requires that surging traumatic memories must be met within the safety of a strong and loving sense of self.
Without that, just applying meditation techniques will not provide the necessary safety for trauma memories to be relived and rewired in an integrating fashion. This is the reason why so many people fail at attempts to apply mindfulness in their lives. In order to heal traumas, we have to be able to draw on internalized loving, strong, courageous, benevolent, and wise energy flows, and to do that we need to be able to create, tap into and use resources that are available to us from deep within ourselves. In psychotherapy, we have a therapist who can provide these resources until we have been able to internalize them, but in formal mindfulness meditation practice, we are alone having to face ourselves, whoever we may be.
Resourcing has thus been recognized as crucial to psychological healing in general, not only for traumatized individuals.
However, this has not always been so, despite the fact that over two thousand years ago, so history scholars tell us, Buddha was exquisitely skilled at teaching everyone who wanted to meditate the exact meditation technique that was uniquely suitable for them.
When I was first introduced to Zen by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, who had already modified the original Zen instructions in a way that made them more accessible to Westerners, the original Zen instruction to meditation was short and not sweet, but brutal: ‘Just sit!’. No wonder Zen with its ‘just sit!’ invitation became somewhat of an exclusive club only a few people could stomach. For those with any degree of trauma, ‘just sitting’ most often would lead to retraumatizing experiences that would stall their progress in meditation and cause them to become psychologically more troubled than before.
With today’s knowledge about the brain and the mind, and in particular, about our polyvagal wiring, it is clear that for a successful journey in meditation, we need to know how to properly resource as a way of gaining the necessary strength needed to then roam our pained internal neighborhoods alone. I am therefore suggesting the term ‘Resource-Based Mindfulness Meditation‘ for an approach to mindfulness that embeds the necessary techniques of attention, awareness, and kindness within a solid cocoon of both internal and external resources we can draw upon any time to make sure our inner journey towards healing remains safe and productive.
The importance of accessing, creating, and knowing how to use resources when working with the mind is not just limited to trauma, but quite generally a central concern for anyone wanting to successfully work with the complexity of the human mind.
Plenty of scientific evidence for the importance of resourcing is now available, and we can now practice very specific exercises and mindfulness techniques that have been shown to have scientifically established targeted effects we can count on.
As far as mindfulness meditation is concerned, this requires a resource-informed, trauma-sensitive modification in our approach to meditation that honors each meditator’s unique mind configuration and conditioned hindrances for maximal results. ‘Resource-Based Mindfulness‘ introduces a new, modified approach to teaching and learning mindfulness requiring exposure to resources as an integral part of learning.
Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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More Blog Posts
Forgetting that we have a mind.
Before you worry about symptoms such as depression and anxiety and how to improve or get rid of them, before you get your blood boiling arguing with people who can't deal with anything beyond their own viewpoint, before you develop and become ensconced in your own opinions, before you vilify who disagrees with you, before you shake your head wondering how seemingly obvious facts cannot be agreed upon, before you assume you have no blind spots, before you despair that crowds never learn from history, before you become bitter at humanity's collective stupidity, before you get passionate about religion, mythology, and archetypes, before all that, wouldn't it make sense to inquire into the source of all of it - these symptoms, views, opinions, thoughts, actions, distortions and, frankly, miseries?
While it does not take rocket science to realize that the source of it all is the embodied human mind, for most, embarking on its exploration is at best a big challenge, at worst insurmountable, non-sensical or incomprehensible. How many times have you heard nonsense like “I don’t believe in psychology”, as if the existence of the moon were a matter of belief? How often do patients enter their physician’s office complaining of being anxious or depressed, and are sent home with a prescription without one question that would try to understand how their mind creates such suffering? Many people, including professionals who should know better, live and act as if they had no mind.
The mind is the source of all subjective phenomena and experiences, and we are astoundingly unaware of it. Our mind’s task is to ensure survival and the propagation of our species, not to ensure we live our best life. To this end, it needs to be efficient, rather than concerned about maximizing its potential. Efficiency results by pairing down information processing to the bare minimum. Embedded in the way mind functions are mechanisms that cause reality distortions, delusions, wild beliefs, and a profound obliviousness of one’s own ignorance. Whether we like it or not, our mind drives our lives like our heart pumps blood through our veins. The universe's natural processes have caused us to evolve that way, and for better or worse, we are stuck with a mind that functions sub-optimally as it creates profound reality distortions that seem at first blush to have successfully allowed us to multiply and propagate towards earth dominance. In the long run, however, it turns out that humanity may end up stampeding dangerously close to extinction. To thrive both individually and as a species we must come to terms with our rather dangerous mind and train ourselves to use it beyond its basic survival mode by accessing its inherent potential evolution has graciously also built into it. That takes work, training, effort and patience.
Our human mind provides the capacity for reflection. The mirror reflects what’s in front of it, meaning that as reality beams itself onto the mirror’s surface, the mirror beams it back to us as an image we can then examine from the outside. Notice how what gets examined by looking at the mirror is not reality itself, but an image of it. Our brain provides a similar process in the form of consciousness, whereby it maps reality in a virtual form we then can observe and manipulate. However, while the mirror reflects reality exactly as it is, the virtual reality consciousness creates is not only a map of reality, but that map is modified into a new creation. The brain as mapper functions as our central relationship organ that enables us to reflexively develop a relationship to reality and ourselves by having access to a virtual, mapped and modified reality we can ponder and manipulate. This is how we are self-aware.
As an aside, the mind is more than the creator of a virtual adaptation of reality we can reflexively relate to and have a relationship with. It can transcend self-awareness, and knowingly experience reality and awareness without the detour of mapped mirroring duality. That is the shift from observation to being, from knowing we exist in a universe to realizing we are the universe. More about that in another context.
The eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina, but you don’t see it. You have the impression of enjoying a seamless field of vision without two black holes in the middle, even though the holes are there. The brain manages to fill in the missing information to make the field seem seamless. Extrapolate that to the whole brain to realize that to function effectively for everyday survival our brain adapts our field of consciousness in two ways: It fills what’s missing to provide a sense of continuity and simplifies available information to not overwhelm you. It hides blind spots from you to provide continuity and withholds information to ensure efficiency. Both these mechanisms distort reality to ensure survival, while simultaneously laying the foundations for ignorance and suffering.
We each have many blind spots, but the core blind spot affecting us all is the proclivity to live as if we had no mind. We use our minds without realizing the extent to which our experience of reality is created by our mind. Without our conscious knowledge our brain creates the reality we experience. We don’t notice that the reality we experience is our brain’s creation. We mistake our brain’s constructions for reality. This results in a dangerous situation, in which we ignore the fact that our experience is subjectively constructed. We mistakenly believe that what we see and experience is automatically true, and because it seems true it seems real, and because it seems real it cannot be changed. Our primordial blind spot towards the brain’s constructions robs us of freedom of choice, of the power of clear view, wise discernment, and respectfully compassionate mutual understanding.
Our mind’s constructions seem so real that we hold on to them for dear life and want to shove them down other people’s throats without exploring their veracity. We get strongly identified with what we believe we know, emotions take over, and the capacity to hear each other vanishes. Identification with mind processes is the single most destructive problem in the way humans use their minds. Emotions suffocate the mind’s spaciousness to freely consider, question, doubt and explore, and before we know it, we are in conflict. If we cannot agree on facts, emotions drive us to use force to impose our views instead of inquiring more deeply into the divergent realities, and if necessary, compromising to try to resolve complexities. Force can take the form of yelling and screaming at each other, or legal and physical action.
The reality our mind constructs and we can have a relationship with, is in fact threefold. We first have objective reality, which is what happens in the universe independent of whether we know about it or there is anyone around to witness it. This reality consists of energy flow that is independent of how our brains and minds construct reality, and therefore as far from information as energy flow can get. The black death virus killed thousands of people without them knowing what viruses are or being able to see them. Although this is the easiest reality to agree upon, like in the case of flat-earthers, emotions still manage to cause distortions of objective facts.
Subjective reality is our own private experience nobody else has access to. This energy flow is entirely within as a construction by our own brain and mind. Although it is largely independent of objective reality, it is profoundly shaped by interactions with others. Even if everyone denies that I am in pain, if I experience pain, it is totally real for me. That is a difficult reality to agree upon, because seeing it from the outside requires trust and our capacity for empathy.
Then there is intersubjective reality, which is the reality of stories. This energy flow is deeply symbolic in the sense that language and stories are symbolic, therefore experienced as information flow, and a mutual co-creation with others. It is the reality that emerges through mutual narrative construction and is neither objective, nor subjective. It only exists in the interpersonal realm containing people who are willing to participate in it by accepting the shared reality. One such reality is money, but there are many others such as all collective ideas we can share. Money means nothing and has no reality unless it is shared in the interpersonal space. This is also a difficult reality to deal with, because it depends on the mutual capacity to regulate the multilayered energy flow between our intuition, our emotions and our intellect. When that occurs, empathy and clear insight become possible, allowing a degree of harmony within the intersubjective dance of energy and information flow to emerge. Any dance couple may dance a Tango, but those in conflict will not be able to present a harmonious dance.
To manage these three realities we each have a relationship with, requires a good deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation many people don’t have. Much of the time, the mind remains transparent like air to our eyes, invisible or not known, yet profoundly determining how we relate to real reality and live our lives. Like children playing in a house on fire, we remain oblivious to the many ways our ignorance of mind causes suffering and destruction all around.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
Silence and stupidity are the foundations of mental health.
As biological beings we function in analog mode, shifting from one physical and mental state to another, using intelligence to solve problems and consciousness to guide our intuition to make the best possible choices. In contrast to intelligence, which we also find in AI (artificial intelligence), consciousness involves both feelings and the capacity to self-reflect, resulting in the ability to resist reality and by extension suffer. Our biological organism functions naturally as a continuous energy and information flow changing with time through an infinite number of states (like the grandfather clock that shows the whole flow of time), while AI is digital, based only on two discreet states, 0 and 1, from which it organizes information (like your digital watch that only shows the exact time it is now). AI as an information processing system is completely alien to our organic nature. AI is an algorithm that like a table has no feelings and never sleeps, never needs a rest, never feels anything, and is incapable of ethical consideration (if it seems to have ethical reflections it is because it has been programmed to imitate ethical views, not because it feels anything). In social media it is programmed to make money by eliciting user engagement through emphasis on information that activates feelings in human beings, such as anger, awe, attraction, joy etc. The AI algorithm just chugs along as a soulless, emotionless information process like robots or zombies if you prefer the world of fantasy.
Humans, in turn, need rest, sleep, and the cultivation of various mental states through play, intimacy, physical activity, problem-solving, daydreaming and meditation. Within that richness of mental states lies creativity, and at the core of creativity is silence and stupidity. The cultivation of silence, and by extension unknowing, is paramount for the discovery of contexts within which all knowing is embedded. Stupidity relates to the fact that a majority of thoughts we have are crazy, non-sensical, false, deluded, unintelligible, and mysterious. Like a tree spreading millions of seeds, only a few of which will thrive into a new tree, our mind spews out millions of thoughts and fantasies, only a few of which are reflective of truth and conducive to living the good life. Nevertheless, that prolific productivity is the bedrock of creativity and requires skillful management. If we want to be healthy, we need to create a safe, private space for those thoughts to live, evolve, and be processed within the entirety of the mind. That space is the silence of contemplation and the safety of intimacy. Under the incessant barrage of the AI algorithm through social media we have been robbed of such a space, because we are swept away into the algorithmic stream of likes, dislikes, approvals, disapprovals, comparisons, competitions etc. The energy of stupidity then, is used to feed our narcissistic nature and flow unchecked into the public domain of the internet, with really nefarious results.
We are far from having developed the full potential of mind. More often than not we succumb to our internal algorithm of conditioned reflexes, behaviors, reactions and mindless activities that cause untold suffering. If mind has a choice between easy and difficult, it will always choose easy. Easy is what can be manipulated in the concrete world; it is easier to control the body and fast, for example, than to practice mind concentration. We have a certain command over the body and the external world, but not over our mind. Faced with the challenge of mind exploration, we must engage in a rigorous mind training and learn to observe it without judgment.
Most importantly, non-judgmental inquiry requires the privacy of our own intimate space with ourselves and a few chosen people we trust, where stupidity can have full latitude of manifestation. Caring for stupidity requires free private and intimate time, which should be a basic human right. Stupidity and silence are gold mines guaranteeing mental integration and expansion of awareness towards larger contexts. Once we have incorporated such mind hygiene into our lives, we are better equipped to meet the demands and responsibilities of reality, including social reality, and wisely chose what we responsibly allow into the public domain. The non-judgmental attitude of intimate and private investigation needs to give way to the discerning attitude of social manifestation and public expression. In the public domain it has catastrophic social consequences if anything goes and the first thought that enters one's mind is spewed out. Social authenticity in the public domain has nothing to do with spontaneously spewing out whatever stupidities and unformed thoughts fly through one’s mind. It is rather based on one’s capacity to cogently and responsibly express what is relevant to the demands of any life situation after having sifted through the chaos of one's thoughts. In that sense, opinions must be carefully crafted if we want a society that functions wisely.
This dialectic between internal freedom for stupidity and silence and external responsibility for wisdom and perspective requires a difficult ingredient – the capacity to face the truth. Information and truth are not the same, and most information is not truth. We are flooded daily with plenty of information, but truth is a rare and costly kind of information integration process that requires hard work and time to be discovered. Truth is costly because it demands research and investment. Fiction and fantasy (not as literary genres) are cheap and don't require any investment; they can be made as attractive as you would like them to be. They are simplistic, deluded and disconnected from reality. Truth on the other hand is complicated and complex, often painful and unattractive, and the hallmark of our mind’s connection with reality.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
Important changes to the Mindsight Intensive program 2024-25
1. Administrative introduction:
In order to accommodate divergent needs of individual students in the group, I am considering modifications in the group's process. After the first 10 weeks of the fall trimester, during which we lay foundations together as one group, we might explore the possibility of giving students the opportunity to continue through the winter and spring in one of two separate streams of their choice depending on their perceived needs. The decision to continue as one group or split into two will organically emerge from a process of discussion within the whole group when the time comes.
Here are the two streams:
- There are those who primarily feel the need to develop and consolidate the scaffolding of meditative technique as their main objective.
- Others feel generally quite confident in their mastery of meditative technique, and are therefore more focused on exploring the psychodynamic, socio-political, existential and spiritual implications of embodying the daily meditative attitude their mastery of technique affords. This includes the expansion of awareness into the modes of nothingness and emptiness.
These two interest streams are paradoxically both complementary and potentially conflicting. On one hand, mindfulness practice invites the student to cultivate beginner’s mind in a non-striving, non-hierarchical fashion. On the other hand, there is a sequential evolution of skill in one’s ability to apply meditative techniques, much like when one learns to play an instrument, creating a hierarchy of skills and stages the meditator walks through over time. Mixing students from both streams in one group is important as it allows for mutual fertilization of experience, expertise and wisdom. By the same token, this differentiation of needs sometimes requires different teaching approaches and emphases in the material that is taught. Naturally, I always endeavor to navigate those two streams within the group as a whole in a way that allows for integration of the two.
2. Long-term commitment:
Students who are interested in the Mindsight Intensive already have mindfulness experience. Therefore, they are all familiar with how challenging it is to embody mindfulness as a way of life. It is therefore assumed that everyone signing up seeks immersion into the hard work required to meet defenses and avoidances head on that can sometimes arise during practice. This can only be achieved through the long-term effort that facing our mind’s complexity deserves and demands. The program is thus structured to run through a whole academic year of thirty sessions, and students with different, more short-term needs who might want to leave after a trimester or two should not join. The work’s intensity requires group cohesion and safety, as well as a shared sense that we can count on each other to work through tough challenges and moments together.
3. Session structure:
Every session will have the following elements:
- A meditation guided by me of at least 1/2 hour.
- Time for processing individual students’ journey through the trials and tribulations of their practice. This is the difficult part, because it requires from each student to honestly take on and address difficulties, defenses and avoidances that may arise during their practice and their daily lives. Ignoring these challenges invariably causes the journey to falter and shrivel back into the automaticity of the monkey mind.
- Theoretical considerations necessary to make sense of our mind explorations presented by me, and sometimes elaborated through group exercises and processing.
4. Immersion at home:
- In every session I will suggest homework. By diligently following and practicing the homework, the student can enter a path of transformation that will automatically and effortlessly unfold.
- Before starting the program, please make sure to rearrange your schedule so that you can dedicate around an hour/day to formal mindfulness meditation practice. This may vary at times depending on both external circumstances and internal mental states, but aiming for that amount of time will ensure rewiring and transformation. Although formal practice time can occasionally be broken up throughout the day, what ensures penetration of depth (see my blog ‘Depth in Mindfulness’) is the long uninterrupted stretch of time that inevitably causes deeper conditionings and unconscious forces to emerge into the light of awareness.
- Throughout the duration of the program, students can request ad hoc individual sessions, should they feel that the available group time has not provided the opportunity to address important issues that arise. For this to be covered by OHIP, you must have been seen by me in consultation through your family physician’s referral within the last two years. If you are not a regular patient of mine, ask Reena whether you must first get your doctor’s referral to see me or not.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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