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Occasionally I receive patients referred to me by their family physician, because after a meditation retreat they develop different kinds of psychiatric symptoms, such as panic attacks, generalized anxiety, depression or psychotic symptoms like hallucinations. They usually attend such retreats to come to terms with personal life issues, and on the retreat they receive bad advice when psychological material arises that causes emotional pain. For example, when strong emotional and cognitive activations arise in the form of thoughts and memories, they may be told not to pay attention to the content of these thoughts and stories, and simply redirect their attention to the breath. The explanation given is that the stories we create are just unreal fantasies and productions of the mind without real meaning, and that they need to be let go of. The more people then try to follow this advice, the worse they get, until they get overwhelmed by a full-blown psychiatric syndrome.

A psychiatric assessment of such persons often reveals significant childhood problems in their relationships to their parents, which end up deeply affecting their whole lives. As adults they then develop different kinds and degrees of symptoms and discontent, for which they seek help in whatever way they see fit.

The advice meditation teachers give seems often formulaic, and therefore plainly wrong in many cases. Meditation teachers of all sorts are often rigidly wedded to their method, unable to meet their students where they are. When this happens, meditation can become toxic or ineffectual, causing harm and alienating people from this training.

It is important to distinguish mindfulness from meditation. Mindfulness is a state of being, while meditation is a technique. Mindfulness is a way of being in the world that is characterized by presence and non-identification with subjective experience. Rather than being preoccupied and constantly caught up in internal and external dramas, we can be ‘free and easy in the market place’ as they say in Zen. Meditation on the other hand is a technique, by which mindfulness can be developed and achieved. But it is not the only technique.

To understand this a bit better, a peak into our brain is necessary. Roughly speaking, as Daniel Siegel describes, the brain has nine sets of neurocircuitries, called domains of integration, all responsible for organismic health. To be well functioning, each domain has to be integrated, meaning harmoniously connected within itself, like each section in an orchestra. In addition, all these domains have to also be integrated among each other. If one domain does not function properly, we develop symptoms of one sort of another. One of these domains is called narrative integration. This means that to lead a healthy life we need to be able to construct coherent narratives of our lives. What that in turn means is that we will develop psychological and even physical symptoms and be sick, if we are not able to make detailed sense of our lives, where we come from, how our history has affected us, and how we got to become who we are now.

Even if embedded in the vast non-verbal world of behavior, intuition and the body, this process of making sense is profoundly verbal and related to our human capacity to tell stories. Meditation does not address this narrative integration in any direct way, because it only focuses on the process of thought arisings, not on their content. When narrative integration becomes an issue, which is very often the case when people report emotional and thought activations, we need to be able to explore the stories of our lives and make sense of them. This requires talking and relating in some form of psychotherapeutic intervention as a way of bringing mindfulness to the story contents we create. This is in itself an additional technique apart from meditation to develop mindfulness.

Some in the meditation community love to say that stories are just concocted phenomena of the mind of no real interest, and that meditation is the art of learning to see verbal formations, cognitive processes and thoughts coming and going without entering their content and getting caught up in them. That is true from a meditative perspective, and learning how to do that is central to the meditative path and the exploration of deep existential truths. However, this addresses other domains of integration, not the narrative one. If one ignores narrative integration that is so central to health, one can meditate until the cows come home, and one’s gains will always be limited by the deficiency in narrative integration. In other words, forget about deep spirituality and existential insight into the depths of your existence, if you haven’t done your homework of also bringing order into the way you understand the stories of your life. For that meditation will not help directly.

My patients who come to see me in a crisis following a retreat experience exactly this lack of proper guidance. When meditation teachers give the right advice at the wrong time, the organism rebels. Meditation students often need help in recognizing the need for psychotherapy and an in-depth exploration of their narrative world. When they don’t get it, they become symptomatic. When it comes to the thoughts and stories our mind creates, we have to respect both aspects of these cognitive brain productions. We need to learn through meditation to just see them as transient phenomena that come and go and that we don’t need to identify with. Once released from the hold their content has on us, the mind’s deeper nature can be revealed to us. But we also need to bring the same discerning observation to their content, realize how deeply lacking in coherence and mindful understanding our stories often are. We than have to immerse ourselves in the examination of the story line that has made us who we are and our relationships the way they are, and realize the different options we have at our disposal to change and modify these stories to our benefit. Once we understand them through psychotherapy as the spectrum of possible stories we can live by, another aspect of the mind’s deeper nature will be revealed to us.

Thoughts and stories are Janus-faced. They have a double nature of process and content that is inextricably intertwined. We cannot ignore one aspect without destroying the other. They both require our attention with the tools appropriate for each. When people meditate when they should be in psychotherapy and vice versa, no meaningful progress occurs. Lack of proper guidance and knowledge in this regard will lead to dangerous consequences.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

One of my patients feels stuck in her psychotherapy with me. After some gain a cycle of defeat repeats itself. She wants to get off her antidepressant. When she does, she slowly gets more overwhelmed, depressed and hopeless about her progress with me. Without telling me she then goes back on the medication, knowing that it never left her particularly content about her life, but still somewhat better than the strong feelings she has without it. Her sense that she is a hopeless case does not recede, but suddenly she reveals that she believes I also see her as a hopeless case. Although I would not put it in exactly those words, I acknowledge to her that I am at a loss with her. I don’t know how I can help her any further.

This would reasonably be the time to part company or refer her to somebody else. In fact, this is how she came to me after she experienced a similar fate with three therapists before me. The last one sent her to me ‘for mindfulness’. Whenever she goes to see someone new, she creates a fantasy about what this new person will contribute that nobody else before has. The fantasy is always about a new technique she has not yet been exposed to. With me it was ‘mindfulness’, and her attempts at meditating remained fruitless. She got to the point of feeling that she wanted to crawl out of her body and came to the conclusion that meditation is not for her.

Previous therapists and her family physician told her that this is as far as therapy can go, and that with regards to her depression she is like a diabetic, who requires Insulin. Obviously, they said, your brain does not produce enough of whatever neurotransmitters the clinician believes she needs and she will simply have to take the antidepressant for the rest of her life. The fact that she relapses every time she tries to get off it despite having been in psychotherapy, is obvious proof of that theory. Or is it?

So here we are, she and I, both agreeing that we are at a loss. She formulates it in terms of being a hopeless case, while I tell her that I cannot work with her as long as she makes decisions about her medications without asking me first. So she decides to get off it again, and the same cycle begins again. She becomes overwhelmed, feels she cannot cope, is sad and crying all the time, and there is nothing in our psychotherapy that is helping her. This time, she tells me about her wish to go back on medication, and whether I agree that it makes sense. She is afraid of losing her job and not being able to parent her two daughters properly.

I present her with a choice. I am not against medication, by the way. It has its rightful place in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. But medications are over-prescribed, robbing people of the possibility for profound brain rewiring and psychological growth. In addition, psychotherapists trained to access the unconscious more deeply than scratching the surface, are hard to come by. In her case, I am not convinced that there aren’t hidden psychodynamic issues that are very difficult to get at and require an unusual amount of perseverance. So I suggest a shift of view: That her state is not a problem, but an opportunity for deeper exploration. The choice is to go back on medication and essentially stop psychotherapy, since years of it have not gotten her beyond some initial gains she made, or stay in this state and see what happens. The problem, however, is that she has told me everything there is to tell me. On the surface there is no issue to work through anymore, and we both agree that we are at a loss. What is new for her and she did not know until the point of asking me, is that I feel I do not know how to help her any further. She feels like a hopeless case, and I feel helpless to help her any further. This now being consciously on the table, why am I not letting her go, finish the therapy and encourage her to go back on her medication? She can’t see the opportunity I spoke about.

I tell her that there is likely an important difference between the way she and many others have viewed her situation of hoplessness in the past, and the way I see it. Just because she feels there is no more hope for her, I said, and just because I feel unable to help her further at that moment, does not mean that we can not settle into this shared feeling of powerlessness together. In other words, I am not willing to accept that just because we both feel that is the end of it, we actually should part. I am not going to abandon her just because she appeares like a hopeless case. The whole situation of hope- and powerlessness on both our parts is as valuable a phenomenon constructed by both our psyches together in relationship as any other we have explored in the past. Why and how did we get to this point? Telling her that is a pivotal aha-moment for her. This is an utterly different and totally new shift for her.

She begins to tell me how she wants to leave people in her life, particularly her husband, when they disappoint her. She starts to realize how alone she has always felt in life, and that the core of her aloneness never had any place in any relationship. She begins to see a dynamics in her childhood relationships to her parents she never saw before, and she felt deeply understood by me as I did not abandon her in her worst moment of fear of abandonment. To protect herself from this terrible and unmanageable aloneness she could not make sense of, and which is largely outside of her consciousness, she unconsciously sets defense mechanisms in motion that sabotage intimacy and prevent painful healing processes from getting into motion. One of the results is that like all previous therapists before me, I developed a sense of being ineffectual with her and unable to help her any further.

The therapy takes a new turn. While this is happening, she has to live with these intense feelings of overwhwelm, constant sadness, fear of ‘losing it’ and other painful emotions for about three to four months. This is an important point right here: She has to learn to live with the pain and not try to get rid of it or pathologize it as being medical like diabetes. The silver lining during this very difficult time is the fact that, compared to before my intervention of staying present with our mutual sense of helplessness, there now is an unexplainable sense of lightness and safety within her suffering that had never been there before. She feels inexplicably more grounded and solid, and not alone anymore, and can trust in my ability to lend her my MPC (medial prefrontal cortex) while she is rewiring hers. Rather than feeling overwhelmed, she can now feel incompetent and explore this feeling without believing in it; rather than feel she is going to fall apart, she can now consciously allow herself healing moments of falling apart while observing the processes with compassion; instead of feeling like she can not parent properly, she can now accept her present limitations and set clearer boundaries with her children; and rather than always wanting to leave her husband when things do not go her way, she can articulate her fears with him and engage him in supporting her.

And now a nugget for meditators. In the midst of this struggle she starts meditating again and discovers that these unconscious themes that had emerged from the therapy were previously locked in the form of implicit memories in her body. Consequently, being still in meditation means getting in touch with unspeakable emotional pain deeply locked in her body, which is why she feels like she wants to crawl out of it and had to abandon meditation as not being ‘her cup of tea’. Now that she has access to the complex non-verbal attachment processes of her life through her relationship with me, including the narratives that belong to them, but which she previously could not make sense of, meditation can become a powerful tool for her to go deeper into the mechanisms by which she creates her reality. Without the narrative integration of her life stories into coherent ones, she would never have access to meditation, no matter how hard she would try.

About nine months later she is symptom-free, having gradually improved along the way. From then on, whenever her vulnerability gets triggered by stress, she recognizes the early signs, knows what to do and is always able to process it quickly without developing debilitating symptoms. So far, after being off her medication for 2 years, she continues to do well without it.

I would like to close with a word of caution. For various complex reasons this path does not work for all. Sometimes it is obvious from the start that this is not the right path to take. Sometimes one has to try first before finding out whether it works, and sometimes one can be pretty confident that it will work. It all depends on the circumstance of the person involved. One size never fits all. Through this article I wanted to give a glimpse into the laboratory of our psyche when this path is the right one to take.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

I recently asked one of my students how her practice was going. She was cursing me, she said. Her practice had gone so well before, but since she dug deeper into her life through psychotherapy, it had become so uncomfortable that she wished she could just go back to the innocent state she was in before she started all this. I quipped that the innocent state must have really worked well for her, given that it lead her to seek help. She laughed. So now her practice had dwindled, and instead she had taken to consuming boxes of cereal by the truck loads. I hoped it was at least whole grain cereal!

This is a common challenge. Meditation practice changes constantly, moving through easy and difficult periods all the time as we work our way through deeper and deeper layers of illusions and ignorance. What to do when the going gets tough? Her sense was strong that she ‘needed a break’ from practice because it was so challenging. The question is what this ‘needing a break’ really means and how to handle it.

For the untrained monkey mind ‘needing a break’ means metaphorically having started the ascent of a mountain, finding it too hard and simply abandon the mountain, or having termites in the basement, having started to deal with them, but finding it too challenging and slamming the door to the basement shut. That is not helpful. All boxes of cereal will do is make you fat! Not only are they not good for you, but they don’t solve the ongoing issue that plagues your life.

‘Needing a break’ can be interpreted much more skillfully. You are working with the window of tolerance of energy flow. What does that mean? Our organism is energy flow, and the brain regulates that energy flow so that the organism stays healthy and survives. This regulation occurs within a spectrum of energy flow patterns, from the chaotic on one end of the spectrum to the rigid on the other end. In between is the harmonious flow, which corresponds to health. When we fall into chaos (anxiety for example) or rigidity (depression for example), the brain tries to bring us back to harmony and health by mobilizing certain mechanisms.

In meditation, we engage the MPC (medial prefrontal cortex) to regulate energy flow in a new and more efficient way, which corresponds metaphorically to how a sailor navigates the ocean with all his instruments and experienced skill. We learn not to start a mountain climb unprepared, but have all the tools we need with us in our backpack. Depending on the nature of the energy flow for the meditator or the quality of the weather for the sailor, that navigation can become really difficult. There comes a point, where the meditator faces such strong headwinds in the energy flow that it becomes difficult to be in one’s own skin. This is the work we do with the window of tolerance for stress. The borders of the window is where the regulation of energy flow becomes difficult and borders on either chaos or rigidity. When the energy flow is so unruly as to trespass the borders, we are not in control anymore; chaos or rigidity have taken over and the fight/flight system is in full swing. We become reactive instead of responsive. In that reactive state we don’t handle stress constructively anymore and our meditation becomes unproductive.

Depending on the combination of lived history and innate temperament, we all have different sizes of windows of tolerance for the variations in energy flow. But we all have windows with borders, and at some point we need to know how to skillfully handle the instances when the energy flow threatens to trespass the borders. That is the moment when we may feel we ‘need a break’.

Rather than give up, we have to realize that working with the window and its borders is part of meditation. The single most frequent mistake meditators do is to not emphasize the attitude of COAL (curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) enough, without which the window tends to become significantly more restricted. COAL widens our window and allows us to continue our investigation of experience phenomena, even when it becomes difficult. Part of COAL however is also knowing when to back off, not giving up in a state of flight, but continuing the process of meeting our experience with curiosity and steadfastness. This new kind of ‘taking a break’ looks very differently from the ‘giving up/flight’ type. Rather than giving up, we take charge in a new way.

We won’t flee to the cereal box, but we will judiciously chose an activity that is wholesome, will allow us to continue our observations and at the same time also fall back into the window of tolerance. If you are in sitting meditation, this might include switching to walking meditation, or doing a few stretches, maybe a soothing bath or a drink of water, all activities done with judicious discernment and awareness, until we are back within the borders of the window and the brain feels safe, at which point we immediately get back to sitting meditation. Knowing how to constructively work with the window of tolerance is an art and a crucial part of a successful practice, because we cannot deeply observe and investigate our nature with a brain in panic. The brain needs to feel safe.

Safe does not mean easy – the practice can feel very challenging. Safe means not overwhelming, within the window of tolerance of today. As long as you feel you are in charge accompanied with a sense of mastery, no matter how difficult your experience is, your meditation practice is effective and you are rewiring your brain furiously. The moment you feel out of control in a fight/flight or even freeze state, Your practice is counterproductive, you only reinforce miswirings and you are wasting your time at best, if not hurting yourself. With time and practice, during which we cultivate our work at the edge of the window, the window expands and we become increasingly resilient. We then don’t need the cereal box anymore to find a sense of having a break.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Let’s be clear about the difference between a hallucination and an illusion. A hallucination is a perception of something that does not exist. If I sit in my Oakville office and see a gorilla sitting across from me, it is a hallucination, because there is no gorilla. My brain made the gorilla up. We can experience hallucinations in all sense modalities, touch, sight, sound, smell and taste, giving rise to tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory and gustatory hallucinations (some are more common than others). By contrast, an illusion is the distorted perception of something that exists and is already there. For example, a straight stick with one end at the bottom of an aquarium diagonally sticking out above the water. Because of the water’s refraction of light the stick will seem like it is broken, even though it is not. Or imagine walking in the dark out in nature and suddenly you jump thinking that you saw a snake, when it is just a branch lying on the ground. Unless we suffer from a mental illness, take mind-altering drugs or experience any other unusual mental state, hallucinations are relatively rare. They won’t concern us here. Illusions however are common. In fact so common that we don’t realize how much of reality as we see it, is illusory. The brain creates many illusions we are utterly unaware of and that can only be discovered through special tests. When spiritual traditions such as the Vedanta mean that the physical world is illusory, they don’t mean it does not exist, but that the way we see it is so distorted as to cause suffering.

Once upon a time, a father of three sons died. In his will he left the following instruction as to how to divide his 17 elephants among his three sons: The eldest son was to receive half of the elephants, the middle son one third, and the youngest son one ninth. Upon reading the will, the three brothers became understandably upset, because in order to divide the elephants that way, the would have had to cut some elephants in half. They did not know how to solve the problem, when one of the king’s ministers happened to ride to town on his elephant and hear about their conundrum. He sought them out and gave them his elephant. With deep gratitude the three brothers proceeded to divide the elephants. The first brother took half of 18, thus 9 elephants. The second brother took a third of 18, thus 6 elephants (that’s 15 so far). The third brother took a ninth of 18, thus 2 elephants, bringing the total to 17. The 18th elephant became redundant and the minister took his elephant back and rode away.

This story is a metaphor for the useful illusion, a process so fundamental on our journey of mindfulness that it lies at the core of wisdom. The useful illusion is the distorted, yet helpful way we perceive reality. As we meditate and learn to look deeply into all elements of experience, we differentiate between perceptions of the world, sensations of the body, and cognitions (thoughts) of the mind. We realize how impermanent they all are, and how the structures we believe to be so solid are in fact nothing but energy flow in space. We look for mountains, but end up seeing perceptual energy flow coming and going. We look for a body, but we end up finding sensory energy flow temporarily organized in a certain way. We look for a mind, but we end up finding cognitive information flow arising and dissolving every split second in front of our observing awareness. We look for a self that endures, but all we end up finding is the non-self elements of perceptual, sensory and cognitive energy flow coalescing and dissolving every moment. By the end of it all, through precise and deep observation we realize that we are left empty-handed. Instead of finding wonderful things, we find energy flow, but even that dissolves upon closer observation into nothing at first. If we don’t stop there, but continue to investigate nothing, we realize that nothing is still something, the thing called nothing, which like all things we thought existed, turns out to be no thing. We have a word for this no-thingness: Emptiness.

Emptiness is reality and awareness itself. It cannot be described or captured in words. It cannot be intellectually or conceptually understood. It is the nameless, timeless and spaceless reality that stares us all in the eyes when we learn how to look. It is therefore not somewhere else or only accessible at another time. Since it transcends both space and time, and we have not been trained to see it, it is hidden in plain view – right here, right now. It is the most fundamental aspect of reality there is; in fact, what I should more accurately say is that it is reality itself – unadorned, direct, immediate, inescapable. Our ancestors discovered that, only when we discover this fundamental truth in the form of direct experience, not just conceptually, our suffering stops.

To come back to the elephants, the beauty of our human condition is that the scaffolding of illusions with which we see the world as we leave our childhood behind, enter adulthood and pay our taxes, is exactly like the 18th elephant – a useful scaffolding affording us the precious opportunity of liberation from the scaffolding itself. Without the bodymind and its illusions about life, we could not solve the challenge of liberation from suffering, the same way the three brothers could not solve the problem of their father’s will without the 18th elephant. But once we see through the nature of illusions and the distorted ways we see our bodymind and the world, the radiant reality of emptiness emerges from the clouds of ignorance, the same way the solution to the puzzle the three brothers were struggling with elegantly emerges with the ephemeral appearing and disappearing of the 18th elephant.

The nice thing is that we don’t need to worry, struggle or go through hoops. All we need to do is embrace our embodied existence fully for the length of our bodies’ existence, pay our taxes, have kids, buy a home, find fulfilling work – and then examine the illusions of this existence deeply. Like Sirens these illusions beckon us to come and explore their indecent nakedness hidden behind their clothing of diverse appearances and distortions. As we engage, they retreat like mirages, shy to reveal their naked essence to the inquiring eye. Once these retreating nudes have nowhere else to retreat to, like mirages, their nakedness reveals itself to be exactly also their insubstantiality, the oasis of emptiness that delights with its refreshing treasures of awareness itself. Then, like the airplane piercing through the cloud blanket into the space above, where the blue sky timelessly reigns, liberation into the timeless truth of the nameless, of God, always present, always available, just not seen, automatically ensues as we systematically shed our multiple layers of ignorance. We don’t have to learn anything new – we only have to unlearn the old learned distortions that cloud our view.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Dynamic Mindfulness is a term I coined for a systematic meditation technique I developed in the course of honing an integrated view of human nature encompassing both traditional descriptions of human subjective experience based on thousands of years of collective human experience and the newest insights gained into the way our embodied brain functions. The uniqueness of this approach lies in the fact that each step taken during meditation, which can be defined as a way of using one’s mind to rewire the brain through attentional and awareness training, correlates rather specifically with what we nowadays know about the brain and its workings. In memorizing the different steps of this technique we simultaneously tour the functional anatomy of the brain, giving our meditation practice a particularly tangible and embodied sense of reality.

At first blush the term ‘Dynamic Mindfulness’ may seem like a tautology, since mindfulness is naturally dynamic. A closer look at the way we experience life makes it clear though that juxtaposing these two notions of ‘mindfulness’ and ‘dynamic’ is not as redundant as it seems. All you need to do is a quick experiment looking out the window onto a country landscape for example and notice what you see. Your thoughts will abound with nouns such as trees, grass, a field, a mountain, a river, a horse, a house etc. The reality that all these nouns are in fact verbs, processes unfolding before your eyes, escapes us for the most part, even though intellectually we can all agree that it is the case. Experientially we do not pay attention to the dynamic nature of reality, focusing instead on its static appearance. We then live our lives accordingly, out of touch with the dynamic nature of reality, manipulating objects instead. We live as if we were part of a large canvas of objects interacting with each other, out of touch with and unaware of the fact that every object, including ourselves, are processes unfolding in the first place. This leads to such phenomena as ‘bringing my sore knee with a torn meniscus to the doctor to be fixed’, thus leaving myself out of the equation of the healing process, oblivious to the fact that I, my knee, my relationship to my knee and the whole organism the knee is part of are all intertwined dynamic processes involved in both the reason for the torn knee and its healing. Such an approach to the living organism that we are is limiting and therefore causing unnecessary suffering.

Why do we objectify reality into a collection of interacting nouns and forget the deep dynamic nature of reality as verb? The reason has to do with three mechanisms by which we forget the deep dynamic nature of reality. They relate to the nature of beliefs, the relationship between the left and the right brain, and psychological development through childhood.

1. The first mechanism by which we forget the deep dynamic nature of reality pertains to how the brain processes beliefs in its main sensory areas, the very same areas where we perceive pain. As surprising as this might seem, belief centers are not located in the flexible intellectual thought-based areas of the frontal cortex. Instead, they are located in the sensory areas that we rely so heavily on to keep us safe. It is through our perception of pain sensation, touch, pressure, position, motion, vibration, temperature, sight, sound, smell and taste that we test reality and decide how to change and adapt for survival. Our beliefs, deeply embedded and embodied in these brain areas that define our concrete reality, define who we are in a very fixed and defined way, and are therefore not easily amenable to exploration and questioning.
2. As for the second mechanism, the problem-solving left brain is for most of us unfortunately not properly integrated into right-brain functioning and therefore quite literally a lose tyrant without checks and balances controlling our lives. Its mode of functioning is to parse reality into bits without noticing context, and then crystallize these bits as conceptual things or objects in our awareness. In addition, contrary to the way the right brain presents reality to our awareness in the form of direct experience, the left brain gone rogue only represents it to us conceptually. Locked into such a controlled, objectifying construction of reality as a virtual world of interacting things or objects, we are incapable of seeing the deeper truth, namely the fact that the perception of things as objects is but a rough, imprecise, disembodied and limited view of reality (although under certain circumstances useful in its own right) that misses the deeper truth of reality as a limitless dynamic field. This comes with a hefty price, the price of a very bad habit, the habit of unnecessary, optional suffering.
3. The third mechanism is deeply embedded in our childhood development. As we grow from a young child into preadolescence and adolescence, our capacity for abstraction evolves. Young children are not capable of complex abstract reasoning (thought differentiation). Their world is concrete, and their not yet very evolved reasoning capacities not very differentiated from fantasy (Piaget: concrete operational stage). This is the reason why there is no logical conflict in their minds when they envision Santa Claus fly on a sleigh and descend through the chimney to bring gifts. As we grow older our capacity for abstraction and differentiation of complex thought processes increases, and what seemed conflict-free and logical in the past suddenly poses serious logical problems. In other words, our ability to differentiate complex mind processes from one another and realize different facets of consciousness changes and grows as we age. For different complex reasons I cannot possibly elaborate on here, many people remain stuck in preadolescent ways of thought processing and remain incapable of sophisticated reasoning. The result is an overly concrete, rigid, dissociated view of the world full of conflicting parts, coupled with an unawareness of inconsistencies. Its hallmark is belief and dogma. An example of that is the creationist belief in how the physical universe came into being, which is essentially a version of the Santa Claus story. I am not saying that the physical universe cannot possibly have come into existence through an act of divine creation. I am simply identifying creationism as a rigid dogmatic structure, when it manifests socially in the form of schools that forbid the study of evolution in their curriculum, thus expressing more the anxieties of their proponents than anything worthwhile about truth or reality.

Dynamic Mindfulness investigates these mechanisms that distort our sense of reality. It is the experiential realization that

1. All objects of observation are energy and information flow (EIF),
2. No object of observation can ever be seen in isolation from all other objects of observation (interbeing),
3. Every object of observation is both caused by a multitude of other objects of observation and causes a multitude of other objects of observation (this is, because that is; this is not, because that is not),
4. There is a relationship between the objects of observation, the known, and the subject that observes, awareness or the knowing,
5. Every observed object is automatically modified by the awareness brought to the object,
6. Awareness and its objects is the dualistic aspect of awareness, and
7. Awareness itself encompasses both the knowing and the known and is non-dualistic.

In Dynamic Mindfulness we base our work on a 5-dimensional view of reality as we explore the 5 aspects of human experience in an integrated fashion:

1. Physical dimension: The brain, the body and behavior as they are objectively observable and measurable through science.
2. Somatic dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as body through physical sensations and emotions.
3. Psychological dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as psyche through emotions, thoughts and narratives in relation to day-to-day living.
4. Existential dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as sense of an independent and embodied self and human organism (or bodymind) in relation to its own finite existence within the boundaries of time and space.
5. Spiritual dimension: The mind as it is subjectively and transcendentally experienced as dissolution of an independent sense of self in relation to the nameless, timeless and spaceless essence of reality called transcendence.

Because we express these different aspects of experience through action, one form being language, different facets of consciousness in different experience modes will be expressed in different language modes. In Dynamic Mindfulness we need to familiarize ourselves with these language modes, learning how to use and interpret them. The four language modes allowing us to access different facets of consciousness and different experience modes are:

1. Unstructured everyday language: It re-presents and expresses a running commentary on life experience. The criterion of truth is unexamined subjective experience.
2. Left-brain descriptive language: It re-presents external reality as being separate from the speaking subject, and gives us objective knowledge into the physical world. The criterion of truth is out there in the physical world – if it corresponds to something physical and concrete in the world, it must be true. The speaking subject is minimally involved. It emphasizes aboutness. Examples are history, biography and science.
3. Left-brain conceptual or dialectic language: It re-presents internal reality as being separate from the speaking subject, but less separate than in description, and gives us knowledge into the psychological world. The criterion of truth is in its internal consistency or coherence – if it sounds logical and well thought out, it must be true. The speaking subject is more intensely involved. It emphasizes aboutness. Examples are psychology, meditation, philosophy.
4. Right-brain metaphorical language: It presents the whole (internal and external) reality as lived by the speaking subject (no subject-object separation) and gives us knowledge about how to live. The criterion of truth is in its efficacy when lived and compelling sense of wisdom. The speaking subject and the objective world he/she lives in manifest as a whole in the here and now. It emphasizes direct experience and wholeness. Examples are myths and metaphors, sacred stories.

The challenge is to become aware which aspect of experience is being accessed with what language mode. They all express different facets of consciousness that give us clues about the nature of reality. No level of experience is better or worthier of inquiry than any other. They all need to be investigated in an integrated fashion. When we master that, we are not in danger of confusing facets of consciousness, language modes and levels of experience, and we will gain the freedom to access reality in its complex entirety without dissociating any part of it. We will get a glimpse of the whole elephant.

Dynamic mindfulness gives us a systematic and clear roadmap to explore awareness, which we define as the subjective experience of consciousness. Awareness entails four aspects we learn to become familiar with:

1. The objects of awareness (i.e. the content of awareness, the known, experience phenomena),
2. The subject of awareness (i.e. the witness, the knowing),
3. The dynamic process by which the subject and its objects are related, and
4. The quality of the whole awareness experience.

Dynamic Mindfulness highlights the way awareness is an EIF (energy and information flow) tracker and modifier, tracking everything it modifies, and modifying everything it tracks. Why? Because where awareness goes, neurons fire, and where they fire, they rewire. Result? Awareness differentiates details of what seems uniform, thus dissolving rigidity, and creatively links disparate parts that seem unrelated, thus ordering chaos.

In Dynamic Mindfulness we use a very specific set of practices and tools that first close all the doors of avoidance the organism is conditioned and used to mobilize, then lead us through the processes of differentiation and linkage to integration. We explore in a sequential and systematic way first the objects of awareness, and once we are solidly anchored in the world of phenomena, we then move on to the much more difficult topic of the subject of awareness. We proceed by first grounding ourselves in the world of objects of our experience through stable concentration as the core tool for differentiation, spacious equanimity (COAL – curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) as the core tool for linkage, strong somatic awareness without which no liberation from identification is possible, and clear view of the different categories of experience. In a later stage, we then move on to explore the witness, the subject of our experience, including the relationship between the objects of awareness and awareness itself, until we ultimately discover the non-dual foundations of reality and Being.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Nothing satisfies me more than to discover the world in a grain of sand. A few moments of lived life can reveal the fundamental laws underlying our embodied awareness. Looking at the small and seemingly insignificant has the advantage of being available any time and everywhere. It also requires that we slow down to see it, and by using words we can free its treasures from the grip of irrelevance. In my newsletters and blogs, what I prefer and most of the time endeavor to write about is just that.

The grain of sand is this present moment, and this present moment is Grand Central Station, the nodal point where all the energies of reality converge in the complex human experience of being alive. Our evolutionary and cultural conditioning, our conditioned patterns of behavior, movement, thought and feeling, our memories and anticipations, and the novel experiences we never encountered before, all converge in this nodal point of a multidimensional continuum called reality.

Reflecting on the present moment, which extends to a few seconds of lived life, is like unpacking a symphony, listening to its interpretation by the orchestra of our organism, and realizing by the end of it that one has penetrated reality, truth and time to its timeless essence.

To describe these moments adequately words need to meet the expectations of eloquent discourse. They should delightfully embody the liberating lightness of being, and be free to imperfectly hint at the unspeakable truth of stillness and silence. They can truly be what they are supposed to be, signifiers suspended between what they signify and the consciousness they both structure and express in space and time.

Do you hope to glance at this newsletter between two other urgent emails in the long list of things you have to get done today? If that is the case, don’t hesitate to unsuscribe, because I do not write for you. No, sorry I am wrong – I do write for you, but for the authentic you who is perhaps buried under the rubble of the hectic shell of you skidding through time on the surface of life. I write for the you who yearns to hear the faint whispers of the soul, and that you, the ‘real you’ you may barely know, demands that you slow down, that you treat language mindfully with the respect it deserves. For language is your soul’s translator who shapes your consciousness in such as a way as to become intelligible to others as you express yourself.

I like to believe that my words are not facile infomercials for the addicted monkey mind, but that they invite you to slow down, and according to your needs, to give each sentence the contemplative space it deserves. I hope you take the time for reflection, the time to mindfully engage in the movement of grabbing a dictionary if necessary and look up a word you may not be familiar with. I am not trying to be cryptic and complicated for the hell of it. On the contrary, I am trying to be as precise as reality can bare, as evocative as language allows and as simple as the complexity of the bodymind demands. But I am also trying to do justice to the complexity of truth.

Sami languages of Norway, Finland and Sweden have as many as 300 words for snow. If you don’t need to penetrate the depths of truth you don’t need a sophisticated language. Short soundbites sounding like horses slurping water are enough to grunt something irrelevant to your neighbour. But short soundbites do not capture the finesses of what human consciousness is capable of expressing. To know snow in all its complexity you need apparently 300 words, and to express the magical details of truth that are encapsulated in the flow of a present moment, you need not only many words, but also creative and novel ways of stringing them together.

Mindfulness has to extend to our capacity to formulate what often seems unspeakable, and to express what’s nameless through the power of metaphor. Our use of language reaches its full potential when we mindfully give it the time it deserves to evoke in us through the power of reflection an appreciation of the full complexity of reality and truth. Then, reading becomes a meditation in its own right with the power to reveal to us the great mystery of Being.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.