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I invite you to visit us behind the scene, where things are messy. We prepare, we teach, we supervise, we train, we plan, we implement, we dream, we fail, we regroup, we change directions, we struggle, we disagree, we sweat, we are tired, we rest, we succeed, we enjoy, we laugh, and we are ferocious. In what follows, just a little snapshot on what is going on and what we envision, knowing that everything may turn out differently than expected.

Dr. Linda MacDonald has continued to teach all the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs, extended version (MBSRP-X), which integrates the know-how and practice of mindfulness with the latest knowledge about the brain in Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB). I come in to teach and meet everyone in sessions 10 and 11. This has so far worked out quite well and students’ feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, because it exposes our students to 2 very different styles of teaching. While Linda lays the painstaking groundwork of moving the students along little step by little step through the basics of mindfulness practice, I can then take the students through their paces in exploring what they have learned, what they have missed, where they struggle – often without knowing it, and where the road ahead lies. Linda and I have identified certain areas, where the material could be presented in a more concise form so as to enhance efficiency of learning.

The number of referrals to our Centre and the MBSRP-X is continuing to grow, and our referral base includes now over 800 family physicians, plus many other agencies, pain clinics and individual therapists of all stripes from all over the Golden Horseshoe. This gives me the opportunity to thank all those thoughtful physicians and clinicians for their openness of mind as they encourage their patients to explore mindfulness. Even though between Linda and I we perform about 9 new assessments a week, we now book first assessments into November. Our waiting times are getting longer and we are therefore looking for ways of expanding our capacity. We are pursuing a few options to improve on this challenge. We are continuing to actively seek physicians and psychiatrists, who have some mindfulness training and are willing to join our team, train in the integration of mindfulness practice and IPNB, and then begin participating in assessments and leading MBSRP-Xs.

Marlene Van Esch, MSW, is a social worker with more than 10 years experience working with individuals, families, parents, and youth groups of diverse cultural and social background. She joined us as a student in training to learn to teach mindfulness. She is right now job shadowing Linda in teaching the MBSR-X programs, will be soon participating as a student co-therapist in a longterm psychodynamic psychotherapy group, and has been attending the Mindsight Intensive among other activities. We have enjoyed her participation and are looking forward to our continued collaboration.

This past academic year was the first time I presented the Mindsight Intensive with slide shows, and all the sessions have been video taped. Slide shows and accompanying handouts for each topic are available to participants online. There are four categories for each session: Guided meditation, brain talk, main talk and Q&A. The idea is to eventually make the recordings available online. However, this is easier said than done and the work involved is enormous. The next step is now going to be the development of a new and updated website that will have a contemporary feel and functionality, allowing me to expand in this direction. Although the website should be up some time in the late fall, its e-commerce portion will take longer to appear. I am also working on a system that allows course participants to gain free access to the lectures and recordings on line.

Last but not least, our cozy office houses at least 9 groups per week in addition to all the individual patients who come every week. More often than not it now feels like Grand Central Station, and we may have to consider a move to a larger office, although again, we don’t know exactly when and how this will occur.

Both Linda and I deeply appreciate the opportunity we have to teach and mingle with so many talented, thoughtful, enthusiastic, mindful and dedicated students, who always challenge us, ask pointed questions and do not let us get away with anything. We invite you all, dear students, to actively participate in the growth of our Mindfulness Centre. This can be done by sending in your questions, thoughts and suggestions via email, and also by taking on certain tasks of your interest that Linda and I alone cannot possibly get all done.

Enjoy the rest of a great summer!

Dr. T.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

When I ask my patients why they feel a certain way, why for example they feel depressed or anxious, they sometimes say they don’t know, and in the same breath often add that they were told they have a chemical imbalance. In their minds what that implies is that like the pancreas in diabetes, their brain has some sort of physical deficit that causes the symptom, and that like Insulin, they have to take medication for the rest of their lives to compensate for the deficiency. This way of thinking gets reinforced when they have parents who suffered from similar symptoms, because genes, so the logic goes, must have passed on this problem. In other words, apart from managing the symptoms through medication, there is little that can be done to remedy the situation, since it is a ‘biological’ or ‘physical’ defect that can only be controlled, not cured.

This reasonable train of thought that applies to the pancreas, does not to the brain – or I should say, is far more complex when we deal with the brain. The pancreas could be crassly compared to a hormone factory. It produces a number of hormones and enzymes. That’s it. If it is defective, there will be a lack of hormones, and there is little you can do. Yes, you can change your diet to modify how much Insulin you need or how efficiently Insulin gets metabolized, but if the Insulin cells are defective, there will be less or no Insulin, and the Insulin cannot change the damage in the pancreas.

Not so with the brain. The brain also produces hormones in the hypothalamus, but its main function is much more exotic. It is an information processor and mapper. It processes energy flow that gets picked up by the internal and external senses, maps different energy flows against each other by making maps of what is going on in the body as it interacts with the environment, then maps those maps (called metamaps) in a multilayered process, until this metamapping becomes incredibly complex. At this complex stage we then refer to the processing of energy flow as information processing. When you make a map of your backyard for example, you are creating a relationship between your actual yard and thoughts you have about the yard. As the brain does the same, but in unimaginably more complex ways, it creates relationships between different levels of information processing and different aspects of reality, including itself. The brain is thus a relationship organ, managing the relationships between the organism and its environment, the organism and itself, and the brain itself with itself. We could say that while the pancreas produces Insulin, the brain ‘produces’ relationships between different levels of information processing. Two more points: (1) When information processing and mapping reaches a certain level of complexity, we seem to experience that as thinking. Thoughts are thus energy flow that points beyond itself, called information flow; what it is pointing to is the content or meaning of the thought. (2) This whole complex process of metamapping acquires the quality of awareness. All in all, the way we experience these relationships between different levels of information processing by the brain is called mind. In short (and admittedly too short to be entirely accurate), while the pancreas produces Insulin, the brain ‘produces’ mind, and mind, unlike Insulin, ‘has a mind of its own’ that is not reducible to the brain, and that in fact can change the wiring and structure of the brain, because the brain is neuroplastic (can rewire itself).

Insulin and mind could therefore not be more different in their relationship to their organ of origin. What’s special about mind is that it contains the ‘you’ who can be in charge by directing attention, and directing attention in certain ways wires the brain. You can use your mind to rewire the brain, and you cannot tell what is primary, the mind or the brain. Objective neurofirings (brain) cause subjective experience (mind), and vice versa. Sometimes neurofirings cause subjective experience, sometimes the other way round, and most times it is impossible to separate the chicken from the egg. Biology causes psychology and vice versa. The brain is minded and the mind embodied. Applied to our notion of chemical imbalance, when you cry for example, there is bound to be a chemical imbalance – the question is where its cause lies: Is a brain-altering substance or physical impingement causing sadness and crying, or is the mind in pain causing alterations in chemical brain functioning expressed as sadness and crying? This shows you how relative the notion of a chemical imbalance is, and that addressing this question is central to the development of a sound treatment approach. To simplify and clarify our discourse, let’s call a chemical imbalance due to a brain alteration a biological chemical imbalance (BCI), one due to a mind alteration a psychological one (PCI).

The way the body and the brain are built and function is partly transmitted from generation to generation through genes – we all know that. What does not get enough attention in the medical community is that the mind also gets transmitted from generation to generation, and the entity of transmission is called the meme. Don’t worry too much about the meme, but this is just to say that if your dad is constantly angry and taking it out on you as a child, your dad’s angry mind will be passed on to your mind, which gets structured by the anger in certain ways that will cause your mind to be dysfunctional. Because of the inextricable interaction between mind and brain, your dysfunctional mind will cause changes in your neurofiring patterns and even your brain structure to cause a dysfunctional brain with a chemical imbalance. No genes involved whatsoever!

Practically speaking this has huge implications for how psychiatrists need to counsel their patients. To deliberately oversimplify in order to make a point, a patient with a psychological chemical imbalance requires primarily psychotherapy and meditation, since mind is the cause of symptoms and needs to be treated in order to fix the imbalance. A patient with a biological chemical imbalance requires primarily medication, since the cause of symptoms is in the brain. The reason this is far too simplistic lies in the fact that the mind can rewire the brain and the brain can change the mind, which means physical brain problems can sometimes be addressed through the mind and mind problems through the brain with medication. At other times the combination of both medication and psychological interventions are the most efficient. Therefore all kinds of subtleties of treatment combinations have to be considered that are too complex to elaborate on in this context. However, an important point emerges from all this: Mind is to a large extent unconscious, and as Voltaire already said long time ago, ‘the heart has its reasons that reason does not know’. Just because we may not understand why we feel a certain way, does not mean there is no hidden reason in the recesses of the mind (in fact there almost always is!). Just because we cannot make sense of our own mind does not mean the cause must be in the genes! Once we acknowledge that, we can also rest in the knowledge that the mind methods we have to help the mind are designed to get at precisely those hidden themes in our lives that cause havoc without us knowing that they do or even exist.

In my practice, in which I do not deal with illnesses such as schizophrenia, where primary brain dysfunction is likely the norm, I mostly see people who suffer from mind problems, not brain problems, and yet so many of my patients are previously treated by other professionals as if they had no mind, as if the mind could not rewire the brain, and as if they had a dysfunctional brain that requires medication. Immediately reaching for the prescription pad when a depressed patient enters the office has two ‘advantages’: It is the kind of quick fix we all tend to crave, and it absolves the patient from months and years of hard mind work. Patients are institutionally encouraged to feel that they have nothing to do with ‘their depression’, and that the doctor can fix it. This attitude may be appealing in theory, but it is akin to treating pneumonia with Tylenol. It does not get at the cause of the problem, even if it alleviates the symptoms, and therefore the medication-induced improvements are more often than not unsatisfactory, incomplete or outright ineffective in the long run. To be told you have a BCI, when in fact you suffer from a PCI, is counterproductive and at best yields unsatisfactory results, at worst can make patients much worse.

Never forget, therefore, no matter what kind of illness you struggle with, that as a human being you are minded. You have a mind, and your mind is simultaneously very subtle and powerful. One way or another, whether your ailment is physical, psychological or spiritual, the skill and proficiency, with which you know how to use your mind, will be the single most determining factor in how well you will navigate life’s complexities. As Buddha said, ‘your untrained mind is your worst enemy, your trained mind your best friend’. If you ignore your mind, you will keep creating untold suffering for yourself.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

I am told you want soundbites with pictures.

Apparently, to capture your attention I have to be short and as dumbed down as possible. I am told that to be complex is an insult to your stressed sense of busyness. I know you signed-up but don’t open the emails you signed up for, never mind even click more than once when you see them. Just too much to do and worry about. Not again one more newsletter, a nuisance that requires time and leisure to read and contemplate. After all, aren’t we past the age of languorous snail mail that forced us to wait 3 weeks before we received an answer to a letter?

God forbid there is a space for reflection between my inbreath and your outbreath – it could actually yield challenging thoughts and insights! I know I am encouraged to join a sleeping mob of humans, who live as if we had no minds, vote for whoever symbolizes the power they have disowned within themselves, and gorge on short, flashy soundbites that satisfy their attention deficit minds, addicted to the lure of facile parochialism at the expense of deeply nourishing, but much harder to come by contextual perspective. Such perspective requires time for reflection and a good dose of calming neurotransmitters that tone down your need for excitement to make space for more patient curiosity.

I know your attention span has shriveled to the amazing size of a fruit fly’s, just long enough to register a tweet and cultivate the mind of a twit. I belong to those fools who write longer pieces only few people apparently read, because cultivating the mind is a thing of the past. Even in the new McMindfulness world order, in which everybody and their uncle not only practices, but teaches mindfulness, I mostly see trivialities and regurgitations of undigested mindfulness sound bites. The mindfulness soldiers selling Big MindMacs march on everywhere, spewing out trivialities fit for mindful robots.

I cherish the people who do not seem to participate in the new McMindfulness and lulu yoga world order, and yearn to do justice to the complexity of reality, of who we are and what our mind is. I obstinately teach and write for those who honor the mind and are humbled by its enormity. I am simply unable to dumb you down, dear reader, because the awe-inspiring mystery of your essence forces me to stop, take stock, reflect and meet you on levels deeper than we both imagine.

I therefore (foolishly?) invite you to study, to take time to read and gain perspective. I write for an educated audience, because to understand the reality of our lives more deeply, we need to guide our inner genius out of its numbing slumber into the light of awareness (education from Latin e-ducere = to bring out, lead out, guide out of its dormant state).

Education does not just mean university education, but the education of the mind that allows us to develop the capacity for reflection, resilience and deeply attuned relationships. Uneducated people don’t reflect and look to their chosen authority to tell them what the right thing to do is. The uneducated mind is not only your worst enemy, but also the one who asks what others can do for you. The educated mind is your best friend and will take on the task of asking what you can do for your life, the people in your life and the planet as a whole.

I invite you not to let any stone remain unturned, and as one of my students who has invented a new word would say, let yourself be treyvoked.

With kind regards,

Dr. T.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

By Dr. Treyvaud|April 2nd, 2017|Mindfulness

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One of my students wrote the following email after a session of the Mindsight Intensive, in which I talked about the power of impermanence to cultivate presence:

“Your talk last Monday has had a profound effect in me (on me?). Specifically, when you said that if we reminded ourselves of the impermanence of everything, every time that our loved ones left the house, instead of taking for granted that we *will* see them later, we actually looked them in the eye and lived/cherished/embraced that moment with a sense of gratitude and love.

You didn’t use exactly those words, but these are the words that describe the feelings this awareness has brought to me.

Each time that I hold my son when he is being fussy before his naps or bedtime, I hug him a little bit longer without any feelings of tiredness, frustration or wanting to put him down quickly so that I can have a few minutes of alone time. I feel only the deepest senses of love, gratitude, happiness and calmness. In return, he has fallen asleep much more quickly and peacefully this week. Coincidence? Perhaps. A shift in my energy flow affecting his energy flow? More likely

Experiencing these moments in this new way brings tears to my eyes, every time. I’m not entirely sure what the tears are saying, probably many different things, but I feel that my connection with my son has deepened this week.

Thank you for dedicating your life to this work so that I have the opportunity to learn from you. I am so grateful to be in your presence each week and never take our time together for granted.”

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Particularly in psychiatry, patients often complain that they are immediately handed out a prescription the moment they see their doctor for psychological and emotional issues. Despite the discomfort associated with it, they frequently do not not know what else could have been done and they are not aware of alternatives. They resign themselves to taking the medication because they are in emotional pain and don’t know how to get better. They often end up taking these medications for years to come, because they are told that they have a chemical imbalance like the diabetic has an insulin deficiency requiring medication. They are told the medications are harmless and they might as well take them as a prophylactic measure to prevent a relapse. When they try to get off the medications, they experience a return of symptoms and don’t know any other interpretation than that they are obviously dependent on them for proper functioning. The problem is that medications have side effects, including for some a sense of moving through life like a zombie without much passion or sense of meaning. Medications also sometimes lose their effect over time and they prevent the person from engaging in the necessary brain wiring changes they need to grow into health. The result is nothing short of a social scourge creating a whole generation of people who have lost the capacity to develop resilience. There are undoubtedly people who need medication, sometimes for a short period of time, sometimes for a lifetime, but by far not as many as are actually taking medications. The number of people on unnecessary psychiatric medications is staggering and the symptom of a far deeper problem: namely the fact that as a society we do not foster education in the human mind. We raise our children, educate, teach and live our lives as if we had no minds, and that applies no less to the medical and even psychiatric community.

Living as if you had no mind means to be in the dark about the fact that the brain is not like a camera, providing a faithful reflection of captured reality. Instead, it is a mapping organ that constructs a reality from ‘raw’ data from the senses. However, the senses have an anatomical and physiological architecture that limits the spectrum of information they capture and pass on to the central nervous system. In short, we only see what we construct, and what we don’t construct is experienced through the restricted dimension of neural architecture. For better or for worse, in living life we largely create our own reality, and if we don’t know that, we either feel victimized by what happens to us or miss out on the opportunity to change our lives by changing the way we use our mind.

To give you access to the narrative and imaginative difference between an inquiry that assumes no mind and one that does, let me give you two very different examples of how patients can be approached. This is taken from a patient I have followed for many years. For obvious reasons of confidentiality I changed the name and certain biographical details. I will use the psychiatric assessment as the tool with which to show you this glaring difference and the wide-ranging consequences in treatment that flow from it.

This patient I will call Belinda saw a psychiatrist and a CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) therapist starting about two years prior to her coming to see me. CBT is a form of psychotherapy that can be very effective in depression and that focuses on changing destructive and distorted thought patterns. It typically focuses on current thought patterns, issues and even problem-solving strategies, but does not delve into making sense of a patient’s history. She had seen her psychiatrist 1x/month to monitor the medication, which had to be changed or adjusted a few times because of side effects. She had also seen the CBT therapist 1x every other week at first, then 1x/month during the two years before she came to see me for a second opinion. The treatment results were unsatisfactory to her and her family physician thought that coming to see me and be exposed to a different approach might be helpful. In my chart I have a copy of the psychiatric assessment performed by my predecessor, the text of which I will use to compare the two approaches. The way the assessment is written gives clues as to the method and process used to get to know and understand the patient. To make this accessible for a short essay, I will condense the information in both my colleague’s and my assessments. Here is the gist of how my predecessor saw Belinda:

Belinda, 40 years old, has been anxious and depressed for about one year, although these symptoms have existed in a mild form for many years before that. She does not sleep properly – can fall asleep, but wakes up after a few hours and cannot get back to sleep. She ruminates incessantly, worried about the future and feeling guilty about past decisions she made. Her mood is low, she lacks motivation, finds it hard to concentrate, cries sometimes for no reason but mostly feels numb, can barely get out of bed in the morning and even fantasizes about dying. At times she is overtaken by dizziness, light-headedness, racing heart palpitations, a feeling of not getting enough air and fear of fainting. It feels like she is going to have a heart attack. In her family history her father was a depressed, abusive alcoholic and her mother had an anxiety disorder. A paternal grandmother also suffered from depression. Belinda’s marriage is ‘normal’ apart from a few challenges she figures everyone has. She has a good job and the family is financially secure. She cannot find any reason to feel this way. Diagnostically the psychiatrist concludes that she meets the criteria for a major depressive disorder and a panic disorder. She is told that her illness is genetic, given that there is a family history of depression, anxiety and alcoholism, that she has a chemical imbalance, and that the recommended treatment is a combination of an antidepressant with an anti-anxiety medication and a sleeping pill to rebalance the brain chemicals. A course of CBT is also recommended as an adjunct to treatment, so that she can learn to substitute destructive thought patterns with more constructive ones.

My colleague’s assessment note reads pretty much the way this last paragraph sounds, and I am sure that in reading this you probably find the story and the psychiatrist’s view of the patient reasonable – and it is to a limited extent. What is not visible in this assessment is what is left out due to the fact that my colleague’s approach assumes that Belinda’s mind is not shaped by history, experience and relationships, and that therefore Belinda has nothing to do with her illness. Her psychological symptoms are treated like physical symptoms, in that it is assumed they have no psychological meaning, but only a physical reason. Because her mind is assumed to exist independent of her history and relationships, it is also not part of the approach to understand Belinda’s autobiographical narrative. If you cough and have a fever for example, there is no meaning to the symptoms other than to say that they are the effect of a physical dysfunction, the reason for which can be found through medical tests. How you tell your physician that you cough and have fever is of no relevance – the physical findings speak for themselves and upon further investigation they reveal the nature of the illness. When it comes to the psyche and the mind, however, reducing emotional symptoms to physical processes in the brain and the body (chemical imbalance, genes) does not do justice to the fact that the mind functions according to its own laws that are different from the laws of physiology, and that the mind is storied and deeply relational. The mind cannot be reduced to the brain and the body, even though brain and mind interact.

How did the same patient look like through my assessment, which assumes that we all have a storied mind that has been shaped by our history and our relationships? The story Belinda initially tells would sound exactly the same, but the therapist’s assumptions and interventions would be very different and lead not only to a very different assessment process and relationship with the patient, but also to a very different understanding of Belinda’s situation and to different treatment conclusions. I will insert in italics thought processes, assumptions and questions I introduced into the conversation, and which Belinda often felt nobody had ever asked her before. You will see how much longer the story will be than the biologically oriented assessment of my predecessor.

Belinda, 40 years old, has been anxious and depressed for about one year, although these symptoms have existed in a mild form for many years before that. “How long before that?” Belinda adds that she probably has felt sad since at least adolescence. She does not sleep properly – can fall asleep, but wakes up after a few hours and cannot get back to sleep. She ruminates incessantly, worried about the future. Her mood is low, she lacks motivation, finds it hard to concentrate, cries a lot for no reason, can barely get out of bed in the morning and even fantasizes about dying. At times she is overtaken by dizziness, light-headedness, racing heart palpitations, a feeling of not getting enough air and fear of fainting. It feels like she is going to have a heart attack. “Why do you feel so depressed and anxious?” She first says that she feels depressed and anxious because she can’t sleep, her mood is low, she has palpitations etc. Now notice how her mind tricks her into not answering the question – it is as if when asked why the river flows into the ocean you would answer that it is because more and more water keeps flowing into the ocean. She does not notice at first that she is not able to penetrate deeper into the reason for her symptoms. When I point that out to her, she first notices that the previous therapists never asked her that question and at first she says she does not know, and that there is no reason for her to feel that way, given that her life is otherwise pretty normal. Again, what was quite clear to me at this point is that the reasons for her suffering were so deeply repressed by her mind that she had no access to them. She then ended up repeating what her previous therapist told her, that it must be a genetic chemical imbalance.

“What were your parents and your relationship to them like?” She now starts crying and describes not only an abusive father, but also a short-tempered, constantly stressed, overly critical mother who never had time for the children and was emotionally quite cold and angry. In her family history her father was a depressed, abusive alcoholic and her mother had an anxiety disorder. A paternal grandmother also suffered from depression. “It must have been very painful to have been raised in those kinds of family circumstances!” She agrees. “And how do you think that affected you growing up?” Now she remembers having been a bed wetter for many years and having had trouble concentrating at school because she was so preoccupied with what was going on at home. She therefore failed high school and had to finish it through correspondence classes later on while working for money. She felt so lonely and unhappy at home with her parents that she married her husband to escape her family of origin. “So what is your marriage like?” Although her husband has a good job, he is like her mother, emotionally absent, critical and putting her down a lot, but she has gotten used to it and finds that ‘normal’ like other of her friends’ marriages. This is what she meant before when she said that her marriage is ‘normal’ apart from a few challenges she figures everyone has. In short, her marriage is a major source of sadness, depletion and stress. Thanks to her intelligence she has a good job, and the family is financially secure, but the family atmosphere is everything but secure.

She now admitted that there are likely many reasons for her to feel this way. Although she diagnostically meets the criteria for a major depressive disorder and a panic disorder, it has now become clear that in the course of her childhood the dysfunctional family atmosphere wired her brain to develop a dysfunctional mind that causes a lot of suffering. As an adult she perpetuates the mind habits that cause her to be depressed and anxious without knowing that she is creating her own suffering.

The genetic theory is very much in question, first because there are no genes that without fail cause these dysfunctions. A lot hinges on gene expression, which is dependent on environmental influences. Humans not only evolve through gene mutations that propel natural evolution, but also through the way we pass on our minds (emotional and thought patterns) to our offspring through cultural evolution. Generally speaking, natural evolution moves at a snail’s pace as genes mutate very slowly over thousands of years, which is why our brains (hardware) are likely very much the same as the brains of our ancestors living 30,000 years ago. On the contrary, cultural evolution is fast and the dominant factor in human evolution, which is why compared to our ancestors our brains are wired differently (different software). When it comes to psychiatry, I have come to understand that the same applies; I am rarely impressed by genes in understanding my patients’ suffering, but over and over again do I see how generations after generations pass on dysfunctional mind habits to their offspring, thus perpetuating suffering against their often good intentions to make it better for their children. It is crucial to reiterate that because our mind is embodied, when we use our mind in unhealthy ways, we miswire our brain and the brain of those we interact with, and end up developing ‘chemical imbalances’ in ourselves and our loved ones. Fortunately, this cycle of suffering can be stopped. I see it all the time in people who have gone through the process of learning to use their minds to rewire their brains, allowing them to stop passing on their parents’ sufferings and miseries to their own children. They have learned to use their minds to correct chemical imbalances in themselves.

In Belinda’s case there is certainly enough evidence of disturbances in her parental attunements to explain why her brain was shaped by these psychological influences to provide her with a deeply conflicted mind. She clearly has a chemical imbalance, but in this view it is due to the way she has learned to perpetuate faulty thought and feeling patterns and behaviors to cause her own suffering. Given her capacity for insight, her motivation to look at herself, the fact that she was able to cope and the human mind’s embodiment, the recommended treatment was primarily a combination of psychological tools to help her get to know and use her mind to rewire the brain. Medication was very much optional and in the long run not needed. As she engaged in a longterm (3-5 years) combination of psychotherapy and mindfulness training, she ended up divorcing her husband who categorically refused to see his part in the marital misery and therefore refused help. She eventually worked through all the issues from her childhood and found a new partner, with whom she was able to engage in a healthy marriage. She now lives happily, her ‘chemical imbalance’ rebalanced through the healthy use of her mind. Her symptoms have disappeared and she has no need for medication.

Continuing to do what we did in the past and hope for different results in the future is one of the definitions of insanity. For all those patients who unnecessarily take medication (and there are far too many of them), the corollary is that ignoring the mind and taking medication instead allows them to maintain insanity and feel better. This is how people for example stay in unhealthy marriages despite their toxicity, masking the pain these relationships create with medication that allows them to function and keep the status quo. Learning to use the mind to rewire the brain is not for the faint-hearted and implies being prepared to make profound life changes, some of which can be very difficult to implement. The advantage of this path lies in the solidity of the result and the frequent liberation from medication dependence.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Let me first warn you, dear reader, or perhaps excite you: This is a longer piece, one to read with leisure and time to reflect. Don’t try to start between two bites of a hamburger – we will lose each other. Have a seat, join me for a cup of tea, if possible next to a fireplace with a crackling fire, and let’s begin together a fascinating, hopefully for you, as it is for me, deeply meaningful journey.

Chances are that you have sought both medical and psychological help of one sort or another in your lifetime. You may have dealt with doctors trying to help you with chronic pain, seen human resources professionals, guidance counselors, personal coaches, counselors, social workers, psychotherapists, psychologists or psychiatrists, visited medicine men or women, gurus, Reiki masters, clairvoyants, psychics, Tarot readers, astrologists and more, and you have likely downloaded meditation recordings, work books and other self-help materials of all sorts. Have you ever asked yourself what you were actually doing by reaching out like that? To put the question differently, what do all these professionals have in common? What and who are you actually trying to understand when you are dealing with a disease? My thesis is that in all these cases, and without knowing it, you were curious about your mind, and seeking help and guidance in how to best deal with it. As you may have noticed however, doing so efficiently is easier said than done, and the mind is vexingly complex and difficult to get a grasp on.

Imagine I asked you as part of a group of people to assemble 4-word sentences from sets of 5 scrambled words, and half the scrambled sentences contained words like forgetful, bald, RRSP, Florida, gray, wrinkle, bald, healthcare, golfing, cane, etc., and then I would ask you to walk down a hall to another examination room to do another task. In a similar fashion I would also ask someone else as part of another group of people to do the same, except that the list of words would be seedling, forest, sunshine, computer, hockey, rocket etc., and they, too, would walk down the same hall to the same examination room. Do you know that you and your group would walk down the hall at a significantly slower pace than the other group? This was an actual piece of research at New York University by John Bargh, showing how we are constantly influenced by forces in the mind we do not have the faintest idea exist. In this case, the first set of words your group was exposed to all have a relationship to old age, while the second set doesn’t. The simple unconscious suggestion of old age influences your thinking and actions in what you can see is a significant and measurable way. This is called priming. The moral of the story?

You cannot approach your mind as if you knew much about it, and as for your senses, don’t trust them unless you are trained to properly work with them. As pretentious as this may sound, the mind as this most personal, private and intimate of phenomena you seem to own, is more foreign than the most distant of galaxies. What makes it so treacherous is that the mind is brilliant in its ways of making you believe that you are in charge, that it belongs to you and that therefore you know it well. Based on this assumption it can become your worst enemy and you don’t even notice it. It is like having a mole in your midst, getting repeatedly betrayed by life and not having the faintest clue that your worst enemy is the one you see in the mirror each morning. Like the drunk who at night searches for his lost key under a streetlamp, because that is where he can see, we believe that what we consciously see is reality, when in fact it is deeply constructed, molded and manipulated, and the reality we don’t see is so much vaster than the one we see.

What we are conscious of is a fraction of what determines our lives, our behaviors, decisions, actions and aspirations. Most processes that influence who we are and how we act in life are not conscious in one form or another: Either they once were conscious and went underground, they did not yet surface into consciousness or they never will. The brain has a way of filling the blanks of ignorance with made-up content so that we don’t even realize what we don’t know and we can blissfully rest in our ignorance, believing we know it all or best. After all, are you not the boss of you? No, you are not, by a very long stretch not. The clue that this is so can be found in the universal human complaint when, barring unexpected external events, despite all our efforts life does not unfold the way we wanted, hoped for or planned. We thought we paddled south and end up at the north pole – how can that be? Easily – there are other much more powerful bosses in your mind than who you believe is you. Without serious study and exploration you will not have the faintest chance to release yourself from the Kafkaesque conundrum of being ruled by invisible masters like in Kafka’s novel ‘The Castle’.

In keeping with a long tradition until Daniel Siegel came along about 10 years ago, notice how I have been talking about the mind without defining what it is. Because we believe to be so familiar with this most intimate of ‘things’ we call the mind, we don’t even bother defining it, assuming that we all must instinctively know what it is. At the same time, if we start trying to define it, we are likely to get embroiled like the builders of the tower of Babel in messy arguments without commonalities to ground ourselves in, and we will begin to argue about minds, intellects, souls, spirits, psyches, consciousnesses, true selves, true natures, and more. I am thus grateful to Daniel Siegel for his attempt at a definition of mind, which he based on a consilient view of the human condition that takes into account what commonalities there are in the energy and information flow (EIF) of being human across different ways of knowing reality. As grateful as I am to Dan for teaching me how to think about the mind, to mention the definition here would make no real embodied sense to anyone who has not explored these realms in depth, and besides, someone will for sure argue with me about the definition and want to define it differently. Now, that’s OK, and the exploration of the mind is exactly about inviting such questioning and dissent. Not only that, but as you will see the mind is not ‘a thing’, an object, but rather a process, a moment-to-moment unfolding that is always in flux, changing itself as it arises in a recursive way. Don’t shudder at the word ‘recursive’, as I will explain it to you in due course. In order for me to define the mind, more a verb than a noun, in a way that makes sense to you, I first have to take you on a tour of discovery into energy and information flow (EIF). Follow me please in this unfolding story, the purpose of which is to not only tell you a story you can receptively enjoy, but also change your thinking about the mind in the process. You will change your mind about the mind forever, and never again underestimate its far-reaching tentacles that can ultimately reveal to us the vast unfathomable mystery of unknowable reality.

The work to get to know your mind is not only huge and lasts a life time, but also the most difficult task you will ever take on. Count a good 10 years and 10 thousand hours of training and practice to begin to feel some sort of consistent mastery in your acquainting the mind and its nature. To study the mind you need to study both science and sentience, what science tells you about the objectively knowable, externally observable and quantifiable world, as well as what your private subjective experience tells you about the personally knowable, externally non-observable, unquantifiable inner world. So on we now go to energy and information flow.

The universe can be seen to fundamentally consist of change. Look around and as far as you can see, everything changes. Even the apparently most rock solid mountains change and there will not be anything you will ever find that does not change. If you examine more deeply what ‘everything’ is that changes, you will find that it comes down to energy. According to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc², all the ‘stuff’ or matter you see is energy. So energy in a constant state of change is fundamental to reality.

The brain is a mapping device. With its immensely complex neurocircuitry, energy that flows from the outside world through our external senses and from inside the body through our internal senses into the brain, gets spun around many brain cell networks (both neurons and glia). This spinning of energy through successive layers of increasing complexity is a process akin to mapping. One spin cycle leads to a map of the original energy flow. An additional spin cycle creates a map of that first map, called a first-level meta-map. And so it goes on through levels and levels of meta-mapping until the original energy flow has changed so much and has become so complex that it turns into a new phenomenon, a new kind of energy flow with a new quality that the original energy flow did not have. In the brain’s case this new quality is the fact that the original energy flow now points beyond its own flow. It has suddenly acquired a content, a meaning, and such transformed energy flow we call thoughts, which flow like energy, but also mean something else than what they are. Nobody has any idea how that occurs, and how physical firing patterns in the neurons, consisting of electrical currents and neurotransmitter releases within and between neurons, become thoughts, even conscious thoughts, and the whole world of subjective experience. Coming back to our energy flow, both the sensations of heat in your palms and a thought about your grandmother are energy flow, only that the heat in your palm is just what it is, heat, while your thought, also energy flow of a new sort, points to something other than itself, your grandmother. It has a meaning, a content, and energy flow with content we call information. To lovingly complicate things for you a bit, I should mention here that scientists have quite generally differing opinions on what is more fundamental in the universe, energy or information. Some consider energy the carrier of information, others say information is fundamental and energy results from that. Be this as it may, to satisfy our need for precision (and my obsessive nature), I will be talking about energy and information, always keeping in mind that information is a form of energy, and possibly vice versa. Since energy and information as mentioned above are always subject to change, we will be talking about energy and information flow, or short EIF, as a fundamental aspect of reality.

One way to define energy is to say that it is the potential to do something. It moves and combines in many different patterns and forms, such as particles, light, sounds, molecules, organisms, galaxies, mind and consciousness. Energy waves arise in patterns or changes of energy flow that emerge moment-by-moment. When I say ’emerge’ I mean more than just ‘arise’. What I mean is that some EIF patterns have a way to combine into larger wholes, such as the human organism. In other words, individual energy patterns get linked together, forming a certain balance between keeping their individual uniqueness, yet linking with other patterns to form a pattern network. The pattern network that is created from the coming together of all these smaller patterns emerges as a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Because it is larger than the sum of its parts, it has characteristics that the individual parts don’t have, and those characteristics are called emergent properties. This means that to study this grater whole, we have to use laws and principles that govern such greater wholes, and we cannot use the same laws and principles we used to study its parts. Moreover, this greater whole with its emergent properties recursively regulates its own emergence. In other words, as the greater whole emerges, it immediately has an effect backward down into the dance between its individual parts and regulates this dance in accordance with what it requires on the level of the greater whole. Of course, this greater whole is also in relationship with its environment, exchanging energy flows with it. The word we use to define this whole shebang, greater wholes that function like that, is ‘open complex system‘ (OCS). The human organism, the brain, the mind, our relationships, all are open complex systems. The state of an OCS depends on how balanced the linkage is between its parts. If its parts retain too much of their uniqueness and are not linked enough to each other, which means they are too differentiated (cancer cells), chaos ensues and the whole system becomes dysfunctional (illness). If on the other hand its parts lose their uniqueness and become too much linked (arteriosclerosis), rigidity ensues and the whole system again becomes dysfunctional (disease). If however there is a nice balance between differentiation and linkage, the system is optimally functional and integrated (health), meaning that it becomes flexible, adaptive, coherent, freely emergent and stable.

Coming back to our beloved EIF, just keep in mind that OCS are EIF combined in many layered patterns. We said earlier that energy is the potential to do something. Of course, it follows that as OCS emerge, they follow the law of energy being the potential to do something. The question arises, whether we can measure or even experience this potential, and how we would do that? Here it is: Say your energy flow in this moment is to watch TV and be engrossed in a fascinating movie. The potential for a change of your energy flow towards standing up and going to take the garbage out is very low, maybe 2%. In fact, because the thought of garbage is not in your consciousness at all, the probability that you are going to empty the garbage at that moment is even 0%. However, imagine that while you watch the movie you suddenly hear the garbage truck arriving and you remember that you have forgotten to take out the garbage. Immediately you think of the garbage and the fact that you could possibly take it out for it to be taken away by the garbage truck, and the probability for you to do that jumps to say 50%. The possibility that you might do other things, including watching the movie, is still there, but the probability of staying to watch the movie has now decreased from 100% to 50%. You then realize that you haven’t taken the garbage out in a long time and you really have to get it out. Suddenly the probability that you will interrupt what you are doing to take out the garbage may skyrocket and you quickly get up to do that. In this case the probability of the take-out-the-garbage EIF has risen from 0% to 50% at first, and now to 95%. Why only 95%? Because between the moment you decide to take the garbage out and the moment you actually get up and do it you may die of a heart attack. So now the open possibility to do anything else is still there, but its probability has decreased to almost zero. The moment you actually get up, the probability of the EIF to take out the garbage is 100%, and the possibility for other things has now morphed into the actuality of taking out the garbage. This long story tries to explain to you how we measure the EIF’s potential to actualize: The potential of any EIF to move into a particular direction is measured as its movement between possibility and actuality along a spectrum of probabilities. As I am writing these lines the probability of me getting up and driving to the airport is almost 0%, meaning that the EIF of getting to the airport remains only an open possibility, since I just came back from vacation. If however I get tired of the winter and while writing these lines I intend to call my travel agent tomorrow to book a southern vacation, the probability of me getting to the airport has now increased to say 30%. If I then write my last lines before the taxi picks me up to go to the airport, the probability has jumped to 95% and within a few minutes will be 100% as the ‘getting-to-the-airport’ energy flow becomes actuality.

Since our organism is EIF like anything else in the universe, we can make a few statements about how energy and information flow in the form of our human organism. First of all, the energy flows in the form of organs, including a brain, an extended nervous system throughout the body and a body. So the energy flows within the organism and we can say that the physical body is the mechanism by which energy and information flow. The EIF of our bodies is also in EIF exchanges with other human organisms, our environment and the universe at large. In other words, the EIF of our organism is also in relationship with the world around it and thus between organisms. Finally, these two forms of EIF that we are as human organisms, a mechanism within in the form of a body and relationships between organisms, combine to give rise to a third form of EIF, a third OCS that defines who we are, and this is called the mind.

Since everything is energy and information flow, there is thus no reason to exclude the mind from also being based in energy and information flow. I will now just repeat what I have already said above, but in this new context of mind. The mind is based on a system of energy and information flow that happens to be very curious about itself and the world, and capable of examining itself. We call this kind of EIF system an open complex system. What that means among other things is that the interactions of the different parts of the system of the mind, such as the organs, the body and our relationships as we saw above, give rise to a new level of EIF, a new OCS called mind. This mind is not reducible to its parts, meaning that the whole (in this case the mind) is larger than the sum of its parts and has to be understood on its own terms, the same way that you cannot study traffic by examining how its components, the cars and drivers, are built. This phenomenon is called emergence. The whole then (in this case the mind), recursively influences and modifies the processes by which its parts interact to give rise to the mind, and that is called self-regulation. In other words, self-regulation refers to a process whereby the mind changes the very processes that lead to its own becoming.

We have now shown how the mind is self-regulating as it emerges from the interactions of its parts and recursively influences the very way it emerges. Its main parts, the body and relationships, are also open complex systems in themselves, the body being the mechanism by which energy and information flows, and relationships the way we share energy and information flow. So the mind emerges from a mechanism of EIF being shared in relationships as the regulator of EIF. Arisen from both within the body and between bodies in relationships, the mind is both within and between. Within it gives rise to our  internal mindscapes (inner subjective experiences with thoughts, emotions, memories, dreams etc.), between to our social mindspheres (shared cultural contents). However, mindscapes and mindspheres are not really separate, because unlike the body, which is bounded by the skin, the mind is both internal and relational at the same time, thus marking a space that is the one location of mind. Siegel calls that location ‘withinbetween’.

EIF has one more peculiar characteristic. Being at the foundation of the universe, energy and information changes within 4 dimensions known as width, length, height and time. In this 4-dimensional space-time continuum, energy and information can flow in the form of microstates on the level of the tiniest particle dimension that follow the laws of quantum mechanics, or it can flow in the form of macrostates such as all the ‘things’ we can see, following the laws of classical or relativity physics. Here comes what’s peculiar: On the quantum level, the fourth dimension, time, is bidirectional and reversible, which means that the notion of time as we know it is not applicable and we may well be able to replace it by the experiential notion of timelessness. On the level of classical physics, however, time is unidirectional and irreversible as it follows the second law of thermodynamic that says that the universe evolves to ever greater levels of disorder and chaos (entropy). Now even that is strictly speaking not quite correct: The business with entropy is correct, but even in our macrostate world time is a brain/mind construction to deal with change. You can say that the sense of time is the way the mind makes sense of change across probability patterns, or the way it makes sense of probability patterns of occurrence across change. Yesterday has a 100% probability as it has happened and is actualized. Tomorrow, and the further you go into the future, has almost 0% to 0% probability as it is wide open as infinite possibility. Today, now, is always emerging as we  speak and has a very high probability on its way to being actualized. So that was a bit of an aside, but if we want to stick to our familiar experience of flowing time, entropy is one of the reasons why we as our bodies are mortal, folks, and how we experience our embodied time-bound existence! It stands to reason that given the mind’s essence as regulator of EIF, and EIF having both feet in different worlds so to speak, the timeless micro-world and the time-bound macro-world, the mind has both qualities of time-bound and timeless EIF. Therefore, we might not be as mortal as we think, and able to partake in a timeless mystery of existence beyond our views that are limited by the time-bound nature of our embodiment.

We have now enough background on the mind to venture into defining it. This definition as you will see encapsulates all the facets of its elements as we have explored them above. So here it is: The mind can be defined as a process of EIF that is embodied and relational, emergent and self-organizing, and that regulates (meaning monitors and modifies) EIF both within and between in a world that spans the time-bound limitation of an embodied existence and the unimaginable spaciousness of timeless vastness. This process of mind can be seen as having four aspects we can detect through direct experience and we use in our work with the mind: (1) Self-organization: There is no director inside us that controls the workings of the mind. (2) Information processing in the form of subjectively felt, therefore conscious experience that is both personal/internal and relational/external, such as conscious thoughts, memories, emotions, sensations, perceptions, beliefs, hopes, dreams, longings, attitudes, intentions, and relations. (3) Consciousness, i.e. the fact that we are aware, including the knower and the knowing. (4) General non-conscious information processing in the form of non-conscious thoughts, memories, emotions, sensations, perceptions, beliefs, hopes, dreams, longings, attitudes, intentions, and relations.

To summarize and circumambulate the mind again, here is what we can say: (1) The first aspect of mind is that mind emerges from energy and information flow. (2) This EIF in the form of mind not only correlates with EIF in the form of neurofirings in the brain, but also EIF in the form of energy and information exchanges between people in our relationships and with the world and the universe at large. This means that mind is not limited by either skull or skin, but is both fully embodied inside you and relational between you, others and the world around you. Keeping this embodied and relational nature of mind in mind, always remember that when I mention the mind, it is not just about an intellectual faculty, but a whole organismic human experience that includes all levels of neuroprocessing, the body, emotions, thoughts and relationships. Your mind is in your head, in your heart, in your guts, in your toes, in your children’s neurofirings, in everyone you ever met, in your cat and your dog, in everyone you never met, and likely even farther than that. (3) Most of the EIF of mind arises as non-conscious information processing, a fact we are largely unaware of because we quite literally never know what we don’t know. This means that the brain and the mind have sophisticated ways of filling cracks, gaps and ignorance with internal constructions that have nothing to do with reality – illusions and delusions so to speak, which we then mistake as reality. (4) In ways we do not yet understand, the arising EIF becomes known as subjectively felt, therefore conscious experience that is both personal/internal and relational/external. These are the contents of the mind, such as perceptions, sensations, imaginations, feelings and thoughts. (5) EIF in the form of the actual knower, as different from the known content of subjectively felt experience, is an integral aspect of mind that can be explored separately, and the combination of the knower with the known is the knowing we call consciousness, also an aspect of mind in its own right. (6) This whole energy and information unfolds in an orderly way through successive stages of complexity to constitute what we call mind, which means that the mind is a regulated and regulating EIF that ensures at least the survival, if not the wellbeing of the human organism. From complexity theory we know that this regulation is not somehow imposed by an external factor, but that the mind, like the whole human organism, is a self-regulating open complex system. What that means is that the EIF that arises as mind directly regulates in a recurrent feedback loop the very processes of EIF that give rise to mind. (7) Last but not least, given the roots of EIF in both the timeless world of microstates and the time-bound world of macrostates, we can use our mind’s regulating function to help us navigate our painful mortality by accessing our timeless and immortal essence that transcends not only our embodiment, but also our time-bound left-brain imaginative capacity. This we do through our practices of integration, which include mindfulness meditation and mindfulness-based psychotherapies.

Did I say ‘integration‘? You may wonder what that is – or not after having read so far. Seemingly redundant perhaps, I will go over this aspect one more time in a different way. Self-regulation is typical of an open complex system such as the mind. Its characteristic is that its overall state depends on the way its individual parts relate to each other. Like all open complex systems, the mind has many components that all have their own individual characteristics, but are also meaningfully linked with each other. In other words, the components of mind are like the players in an orchestra simultaneously differentiated from and linked to each other. If there is a balance between differentiation, the part’s ability to maintain its own uniqueness, and linkage, the part’s ability to collaborate with other parts, we have what is called integration, and when the mind experiences integration, we subjectively experience that as health and wellbeing. If some parts are not able to collaborate well, holding on too fast to their own uniqueness, such as you could imagine in an orchestra the first violins wanting to play what they want without considering what the rest of the orchestra plays, then we have too much differentiation, which manifests as chaos within the system. On the other hand, if the parts lose their identity and connect too much with other parts, such as in an orchestra you could imagine the first violins, the flutes and the cellos deciding to play the same notes, then you have too much linkage, which results in rigidity. Both chaos and rigidity are subjectively experienced as painful, and all the diseases you find in medicine and psychology can be assigned to one of those states of the open complex system that we all are, chaotic, rigid or a combination of both.

The point of all this is that we can actually learn to use our mind to rewire and integrate the brain, harmonize and integrate our relationships, and contextualize and integrate our existence. That is what mindsight is all about, which we can for example develop through both meditation and psychotherapy, keeping in mind that meditation and psychotherapy integrate different aspects of our minds. Mindsight is the ability to have (1) insight into our own internal subjective experience, (2) insight into other people’s inner subjective experience, called empathy, and (3) the ability to consciously regulate EIF away from chaos and rigidity towards integration and harmony. The way we regulate is by first learning to monitor the EIF of mind, which includes monitoring (1) the five main categories of subjective experience (external perceptions, internal sensations, emotions, thoughts and relationships), (2) awareness itself and (3) the way self-regulation unfolds; then we modify the monitored EIF towards integration, and there are many ways to do that I cannot get into right now. Both processes of monitoring and modifying are complex and require training and skill, but when earnestly pursued with patience and perseverance, lead to the most unexpected and unimaginable insights into this wonderful reality that keeps eluding us as long as we do not mind our minds. I would like to finish with Buddha’s words, or at least paraphrasing him: The unexamined and untrained mind is your worst enemy, the examined and trained mind your best friend.

I wish, dear reader, that you may now have become curious about the mind, your mind, our mind, no mind, and hopefully meet me again on the journey of minds into timelessness.

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