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In last Thursday’s Mindsight Intensive course a student I will call Sarah shared with us her direct experience of the doors of avoidance I talked about within the context of Dynamic Mindfulness.

Movements of our limbs is one of those doors of avoidance. To create safety the brain uses physical movements of our arms and legs. You are certainly familiar with this phenomenon. Before your meeting with your disgruntled boss for example you see yourself fidgeting, nervously picking your fingers, rhythmically moving your foot back and forth in fast motion or frequently changing body position. Unconsciously engaging in these movements creates a superficial sense of internal pressure relief, but never addresses the cause of our restlessness. Were you in such circumstances making a point of relinquishing control of your limbs and keep them absolutely still, the finer internal energy flow of emotions and thought patterns would surface more clearly into your consciousness, and you would be much better able to explore how you create your internal hell, realize distortions you engage in and modify your outlook to your advantage.

Through experimentation Sarah was astonished to realize so viscerally how powerful movement can be in obscuring our view of our internal world. When in complete physical motionlessness of formal practice she deliberately moved just one finger, the spaciousness of awareness with its focused and stable attention got disrupted and her view of the internal energy flow became murky, like water becomes murky when the sediment that has settled at the bottom gets stirred up. This direct realization of the doors of avoidance I had been talking about was just the sideshow to the main story of this blog.

In describing her experience Sarah wanted to know what the scientific explanation of this phenomenon was, and that was what immediately piqued both my and her curiosity. The question was motivated by more than just intellectual curiosity. There was a sense that her subjective experience, as powerful and clear as it was, required scientific validation. Why was her experience not enough for her understanding of reality? Why did she need a scientific explanation to validate her experience? This profound question brought tears to her eyes, an expression of sadness that would take her some time to understand within the psychodynamic context of her childhood experiences. However, beyond the conditioning of her childhood there was an existential learning in store, and that was the radical primacy of subjective experience. Let me explain.

Carl Jung once talked to one of his students about a dream one of his patients had, which involved this patient walking on the moon. In telling this dream he spoke as if the patient had actually been walking on the moon, which struck his student as somewhat odd. The student asked somewhat perplexed: “But he was not really walking on the moon, only metaphorically so in the dream?” To which Jung answered: “No, no, he absolutely and really had been walking on the moon.” At that moment the student experienced an orthogonal shift, as John Kabat-Zinn would say, “… a transition from a two-dimensional ‘flatland’ into a third spacial dimension, at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two” (J. Kabat-Zinn, Coming to our senses, p. 350, Hyperion, 2005). This is the fundamental shift I invited my students to explore during our exploration of non-dual awareness, and which Sarah was about to experience in a direct embodied fashion. It was the shift into realizing the fundamental primacy of our inner world, from which all sense of meaning emerges.

The shift is radical, from a strongly conditioned conventional consensus reality that is ultimately incomplete and therefore a mere superficial appearance, to a spacious, unconditioned view of what is often referred to as ultimate reality, which is capable of recognizing conditioning as it arises. This absolute reality is awareness itself, more fundamental than conventional reality and every bit as real, the knowing capacity of mind itself beyond a knower and what is known. We tend to see ourselves as inhabitants of a world we are born into, and which we experience as conventional everyday reality of lived experience ‘out there’ created by the way our brain processes information from our external five senses. The deep conditioning at the root of this view creates a consensus trance we all share, akin to a dream world we don’t recognize as such. The orthogonal shift created through awareness feels like an awakening from this dream, more often than not experienced as nightmare, and we recognize how like fog the dream obscured our view of the horizon that opens up multiple degrees of freedom we did not know we had before. Suddenly we realize that seeing ourselves as inhabitants of a world we are born into is limited, and that in fact in every moment of our lives a world is born and vanishes in us, provided we allow ourselves to recognize our identity as the timeless Being that we are.

Sarah experienced this shift in slow motion as it unfolded in front of our very eyes. From seeing herself as arising and passing in a world, she shifted into seeing a world arising and passing in herself. The moment of her realization did not require scientific validation, as if science was more fundamental than our experience. Instead, accepting her experience as complete in itself opened the door for her to deeply honor awareness itself and its manyfold manifestations. At that moment, when she was able to let go of the conditioned need for a rational scientific explanation, she honored her deep, unique subjectivity without any attachment to what is supposed to be. She discovered the pleasure in living in a world that is either not supposed to be, or already there as it is, and that does not have to be anything. The healing effect of deeply listening to herself that way consisted of knowing that when we rest in awareness anything can happen, and we don’t have to make ourselves be like what other people want us to be or what is going to be accepted.

Consider this: When you touch the chair you are sitting on, you will never know the chair in itself. The closest you can come to knowing the chair is by way of translation, the very specific way your senses cause neurofiring patterns in your body and your brain. You can ultimately only know your own neurofiring patterns, not the chair itself, and if you had a very different brain, the chair would look and feel very differently, leading to very different conclusions about reality. When we honor that fact we realize the primacy of awareness, and our sense of Being profoundly expands in many new directions, providing untold degrees of freedom that reduce our conditioned and optional human suffering.

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

A psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher recently wrote me the following email: “I do have a question as my ‘mind’ struggles, and wants clarity about so many things! Maybe all things cannot be explained! As a therapist (teacher) and student of life, fear arises in me as I read the article on ‘Zen Lost in Translation‘. A fundamental aspiration, of ‘no harm’ or non-violence, for me only opens the experience of doubt, as I ‘do the best I can’; yet is this good enough, and when or how do we know if we are doing harm?”

This is a very important question for any teacher or psychotherapist. In my mind and experience, the answer is multilayered.

Since the human capacity for self-deception is limitless, we never know for sure how we are doing. This is the great doubt that is existentially unavoidable and very healthy to cultivate. It leaves us with the first task of not doing major harm for sure, and the second task of knowing that most of the time we are fostering healing. The two words ‘major’ and ‘most’ are important here, as there is no perfection. What follows should automatically prevent us from doing major harm, assuming an at least average intelligence and integrity. Now how about ‘tolerable harm’?

The fact that some time we make tolerable mistakes is unavoidable. This leads us to the next step, which is to make sure we recognize mistakes and when we have done harm as soon as possible. Given there is no perfection, making a mistake is in itself not a problem, as long as we know how to handle it. Part of competence is the ability to recognize mistakes fast and repair them. For repair it is very important to engage our clients, patients and students, because the capacity to repair is an integral part of healthy intimacy and health in general. This helps us recognize the psychological principle that perfection is a toxic ideal to be replaced by the search for what is optimal, because it is the optimal that has the greatest healing potential through the notion of being ‘good enough’. The best parent for example, is not the perfect one (God forbid we were raised by perfect parents – they keep generations of therapists in business!), but the ‘good enough’ one who has personal insight, is aware of his or her limitations, is capable of attunement, and is able to engage the child in repair.

Then, the idea of doing ‘the best you can’ is a tricky one. It is only valid if you have high standards and constantly hold your nose to the grindstone by having checks and balances in place. ‘Doing your best’ without checks and balances is not good enough. Guide posts in the work with clients are like the Scylla and Charybdis Odysseus sailed through: When our clients thrive we know we do good; when they don’t, they feel stuck, we feel stuck or we feel uncomfortable, then it’s time to question and dig deeper into what we are doing, reaching out to a teacher if necessary.

Next, learning and growing is a life sentence, which means that we never cease to expose ourselves to new learning, no matter how well things are going or how successful we feel. We do that by reading, taking courses, working with teachers, and take in new ideas and the most recent discoveries of our time.

Last but not least, when things are going brilliantly and the wind of success soothingly caresses the ravenous fibres of our ego, that’s when the alarm should sound: What am I overlooking? Where do I go from here? What’s next after this pleasant phase that will inevitably pass like everything else? Where is the next challenge lurking? How can I move beyond where I am?

Never smell the roses on the side of the path for too long – only long enough to revitalize and realize they all fade away. Then move on, move on, move on ……

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Recently a gentleman who had taken one of my workshops asked if he could come in to see me and discuss his meditation practice. I did not know anything personal about him at all. He explained that he had attended a Zen center to learn meditation, but that his practice was stalling and he was confused with regards to instructions that did not seem to work for him. During practice he struggled with strong feelings stemming from past life events and did not know what to do with them. He approached his Zen teacher who said “just forget the past and the future and stay in the present moment, because this is the only moment you ever have”. In addition, he was in a lot of physical pain and therefore tried to bring attention to his physical body sensations by systematically scanning his body from one end to the next, only to be told that “this is not meditation! – Empty your mind, and when thoughts occur, just send them away!” He noticed that these instructions did not work for him, and came to see me to explore why.

This is Zen lost in translation. His teacher seemed unable to be there where he was on his journey, and these instructions, assuming he heard them right, are based on faulty assumptions about the nature of the organism that we are and do nothing more than undermine the student’s progress. The consequence is that he was not getting anywhere. These situations arise from three aspects of the student-teacher relationship, either because the teacher is not skilled enough, the student distorts what the teacher says or a combination of both. As an example of how difficult it is for students sometimes to process instructions correctly, I routinely teach the technique of aiming and sustaining attention on a chosen focus. When students come back a week later and discuss their home practice, they very often talk about how they were practicing thinking about the chosen focus. ‘Bringing attention to’ and ‘thinking about’ something are two entirely different actions, the latter being counterproductive and leading to failure. So let’s unpack the two main mistakes inherent in the instructions my lady heard, two problems I indeed encounter quite frequently.

The idea of forgetting about the past and the future and staying in the present moment is an absurdity that is based in a lack of knowledge about what the present moment is. It is not an infinitely small point in time and reality, separate from a past or future supposed to be ‘somewhere else’ and ‘not real’. The present moment is the reality within which we are fully embedded, while the past and future are fully embodied representations of reality created by the embodied mind. These past and future representations of reality are deeply real as they are embodied in our neurocircuits and cells. The present moment is at first a rich fabric of directly experienced energy flow lasting about one to two seconds, containing three major experience components, (1) the experience of how we have been conditioned by the past and the way that conditioning manifests in the present, (2) the experience of how we anticipate a future on the basis of our past conditioning and the way that anticipation and conditioning manifest in the present, and (3) the fresh and novel experiences arising in the present that are neither conditioned by the past nor anticipated as a future. In other words, to mine the depth of the present moment means to clearly see how the past is alive in the form of memories and gets reenacted through conditionings in the present, how the future becomes alive in the form of anticipations based on past conditionings in the present, how novelty arises in the present, and how all of these elements interact.

Such is the way humans are wired, and letting go of the past or the future means to discover both as they manifest in the present, see how they interfere with the free flow of energy by having coalesced in rigidity or dissolved into chaos, and undo those knots of chaos and rigidity. Only when we understand this can our practice take off and soar like an eagle in the sky. The moment we realize that the present moment entails all past, novelty and future as we directly experience it from moment to moment, we discover the timelessness of awareness within the present moment. Our view of the present moment then shifts through a succession of deeper insights, starting from a philosophical left-brain assumption that it is a dimensionless point in time excluding past and future, to the embodied realization that it is a short time span of richly embodied experiences involving past, present novelty and future, to the final realization of it being a timeless space alltogether outside time, where notions of past, present and future simply entirely dissolve.

Now to the notion that paying attention to the body is not meditation. The problem here is a category mistake, or a teacher’s unconscious identification with a tradition and confusing the generic elements of meditation with tradition. Let’s go back to basics. Meditation is a two-tiered process, in which we first actively and effortfully learn to aim and sustain attention on a chosen focus (concentration) with an attitude of curiosity, openness and acceptance (equanimity), and later discover how we end up able to receptively and effortlessly dwell in awareness itself. In brain terms, we learn to bring the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) on line as the master integrator of the brain and the body.

Now here is the rub: The organism that we are has at least 9 different clusters of neurocircuitry, all of which need to become integrated or harmonized in order for us to experience liberation from suffering. Forget one and you will never find the kind of peace and serenity that is independent of circumstance. In addition, we are hierarchically wired (see ‘The sixtine brain‘ in this website): Cognition (thoughts) is dependent on the body, but the body is not dependent on cognition, even though both influence each other. This means that the body is primary and fundamental, and if you permit me to use this downtrodden term ‘enlightenment’ so many people use without having the foggiest knowledge of it, enlightenment is impossible to discover without going through the body and penetrating its unfathomable depths.

Discussing the 9 domains of integration I mentioned above is beyond the scope of this short essay, but be it said that in meditation we have to learn to clearly differentiate all the different categories of experience, mainly perceptions of the external world, physical sensations in the body, emotions, thoughts and awareness itself. In addition, a thorough exploration of the nature of our body and its physical sensations is essential.

In essence then, meditation means learning a few tools with which we observe the nature of or own experience and diligently applying these tools with great precision to our journey of exploration. The instruction to ‘just quiet your mind’ is plain nonsense as you can discover within a nanosecond of trying to do just that. The same with ‘sending thoughts away’. In the same way you most certainly will start thinking of a pink elephant if I instruct you not to think of a pink elephant, your mind will become more crowded and thoughts more insistent than ever if I instruct you to quiet your mind or send thoughts away.

To discover and learn the right tools for meditation requires the help of an experienced teacher who has clarity of view as direct experience, and is not caught in left brain rationalizations, dogma or blind tradition. It also requires an apprenticeship in hearing and listening on the part of the student, because a lot of the time what we think we hear or do is not at all what was said or what we actually do. Meditation includes addressing the totality of the organism that we are with the proper tools, including our mysterious body, our busy mind, the stories we weave about our lives and awareness itself. The gentleman in question who came to see me did not get anywhere, because his teacher did not know him well and failed to see that he had an alcohol addiction that needed attention first; he was also in great emotional pain because of traumata he went through that required attention to his life stories, and he had several physical conditions with chronic pain for which he needed guidance on how to address his body. When people come to me to explore meditation, I am therefore always in the habit of asking them what drives them to want to meditate. Upon closer inquiry the full catastrophe of our human lives reveals itself, and as a teacher it is important to know how to navigate these complexities and provide the student with proper guidance, which entails a multifaceted approach to suffering.

Life is complex, human beings are complex, reality is complex, and there is no way simplistic cookie cutter views of human nature and equally simplistic instructions will lead us anywhere but to more suffering.

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

From a former student I recently received the following question by email:

“In the MBSR program I heard people ask how they can love what happened to them when they bring attention to the unpleasant and painful sensations surrounding a traumatic event? How can they love the pain in the body? The steps one is supposed to take are to follow the sensations, note, open, soften, allow, accept, and then love. I personally direct love and compassion to myself, even with this experience of pain, but not the pain itself.”

“How can I love pain, tragedy and all the awful things that occur in the world?” This is a frequent question that puzzles novice meditators.

The sun does not discriminate where it shines. It shines as strongly on ISIS death camps as it does on Buddhist monasteries. Such is awareness and love. It is indeed about loving the pain as fully and completely as we love our children. The left brain problem-solving mind cannot comprehend that and seeks ways of avoiding this truth such as ‘I cannot love my pain, but I can love myself’. The mind seeks pleasure, not truth, and therefore is conditional in its love. In the literature this is often referred to as ‘eros’ love, as opposed to ‘agape’ love, which is not the same. The spiritual agape love we are talking about in mindfulness is indeed impossible to imagine, hard to embody and very misunderstood. The reason lies in the dual stance of the problem-solving mind, which can only think in terms of opposites, good and bad. From this limited perspective, one loves what’s good and hates what’s bad. But when this conceptually limited view is transcended and replaced by a non-dualistic view based in awareness, the love we discover can love Hitler AND go destroy him to protect life, humanity, decency and ultimately him from himself. Heinous acts come from pain and ignorance (or the breakdown of the social engagement system blocking access to the medial prefrontal cortex – MPC), pain comes from chaos and rigidity – it all requires the embrace of awareness to heal and integrate. That awareness is love.

More specifically, when unpleasant experiences arise within us, whether they be cognitive, emotional or physical in nature, the steps are to bring curiosity to the experiences, openness to whatever is present and acceptance to what is present whether we like it or not. This attitude of curiosity, openness and acceptance is tantamount to love. In other words, by approaching experience in this way, it is an act of love and self care, in and of itself. It is not that we need to manufacture anything else, least of all some feeling of love the way we remember loving our children on a good day. So when we say we ‘send love to the sensations inside ourselves’, we simply approach them with curiosity, openness and acceptance, which feels very spacious, aware and loving. It is not that we ‘love’ from where the pain originated (for example a past trauma), because that hurting part of ourselves is incapable of that kind of presence and love. Rather, we learn to be with what is present now, including this pain, by sitting firmly in the seat of awareness in the MPC. This then means we actually do develop a loving attitude to whatever pain is present, meaning that we are curious, open, accepting and therefore present, aware and loving. With this attitude, pain and tragedy become our teachers, unimaginable sources of useful information and wisdom.

“What is the difference between loving pain in this spiritual way and masochism?” you may ask. The latter belongs to the dualistic world of the problem-solving mind, which seeks pleasure in all possible ways. In masochism, excessive pain is sought out and pervertly woven into the mechanisms with which we seek pleasure. The pain does not get transformed, but used. More of it is sought out all the time, since the pursuit of pleasure is an addiction without limits, eternally feeding the hope for deliverance from suffering that never comes. Agape on the other hand does not seek pain, but embraces the inevitable pain that is always already there as part of the human condition. It does not chase after pain, but is a particular way of relating to it that does not engage it in any positive or negative way. It simply shines the light of insight onto it, making it of course the work of awareness. Everything awareness holds in its embrace gets transformed, not used. Since awareness dances to the tune of curiosity, openness and acceptance, all transformation that occurs through its embrace moves towards greater integration and harmony, which manifests as abiding peace independent of circumstance and love. The pain energy turns into fuel for insight, transformation and wisdom.

So yes, until we deeply love everything, including pain and all the unsavory aspects of existence, we haven’t experienced mindfulness to its fullest. This is one of the messages in Christ’s crucifixion – the ability to be fully present and awake, flexible and free in the face of life’s hardships and our existential challenges. It is hard to take at first, yet so simple: curiosity, openness, acceptance ….

What better way to close this blog with Rumi’s poem THE GUEST HOUSE, commenting exactly on this subject:

This being human is a guest-house
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Say I Am You, poems of Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, Maypop 1994

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

A student recently made an astonishing discovery. It was not astonishing by virtue of its monumentality, but by virtue of its subtlety. He had practiced mindfulness for several years by examining the different domains of experience in detail, such as physical sensations, emotions, thoughts and perceptions of the external world. Attention and equanimity were the main tools with which he explored. In this year’s course on non-duality, the focus has been more intensely on awareness itself than ever before. He struggled at first with this different emphasis, because he realized his intention to be mindful focused mainly on how he could focus attention. In comparison to attention, awareness seems so ephemeral and intangible.

It suddenly dawned on him that he had practiced concentration and differentiation of experience phenomena without really realizing to what extent awareness itself was available to him. Harnessing the power of attention had been his main focus, and awareness became unconsciously available to him ‘through the backdoor’ so to speak, but not directly and consciously. Awareness being unconscious may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is not, because like tunnel vision we may not have access to the internal reflexivity of awareness. Let me explain.

Awareness has what I would call an internal and external reflexivity. The internal reflexivity is the fact that awareness is aware of itself; external reflexivity means that awareness is aware of anything else.

Let’s begin with external reflexivity, since it is the more familiar and accessible of the two. Awareness being aware of anything else implies that awareness is aware of objects of awareness. Awareness, the subject, is aware of its objects. The knower is aware of the known. We become more closely acquainted with objects of awareness by momentarily focusing awareness on them. This focusing of awareness is how attention is defined. As we pay attention, a subject (me) pays attention to an object (say the chair). This stance is how we are used to facing the world we live in and is characterized by dualism (from Latin ‘duo’ meaning ‘two’), the dualism of a subject apprehending objects of experience. Thus the expression ‘awareness (subject) of whatever we are aware of (object)’. The metaphor of the mirror can be helpful here: The mirror reflects all the objects that happen to show up in front of it. The moment you (the subject) stand in front of a mirror (awareness), there suddenly appears a second you (the object) inside the mirror you now can see and know as an object. The moment an object enters the field of awareness, it becomes known as an object.

Internal reflexivity of awareness is a completely different kettle of fish. When we refer to awareness being aware of itself, it only superficially appears to be a relationship between two entities, awareness and awareness. The limitations of language and conceptual thinking do not afford us any other way of expressing an experiential fact that is difficult to capture in any other way. In truth, when we talk of awareness being aware of itself, we mean awareness being aware as itself. We mean an identity of awareness as awareness, not a relationship between two aspects of awareness. There is no duality of a subject called awareness being aware of an object called awareness. Instead, we denote a non-duality without a subject-object distinction, whereby awareness is inherently aware in a reflexive way both as itself (internal reflexivity) and of anything else (external reflexivity). For easier comprehension this internal reflexivity can be pictured imagining standing and taking a step towards yourself, or the sun illuminating itself. It is only possible by making an orthogonal shift into a new dimension, the dimension of being. The way to take a step towards yourself is to drop into the awareness of yourself as Being. The same applies to the sun, which is self-illuminating and unlike the moon does not require any other source for illumination. To come back to our mirror (awareness), it is self-reflexive in that the mirror can not mirror itself. It simply is itself, and as such inherently reflexive.

We can go through life never having conscious access to the internal reflexivity of awareness. You may wonder ‘so what’? The answer is as simple as it is profound. Without that access you will never know who you really are, and by not knowing that, you don’t know the instrument with which you live your life. You thus perpetuate a profound split in your being, which naturally comes with a lot of suffering and all its consequences.  We can go through life only partially aware, meaning that we are aware of all the ten thousand things of the world, of all the contents of awareness that are seen through the dual lens of the subject-object split, without knowing that we are aware, and thus not knowing who we are. Our habit of creating a split between the observer and the observed is so deeply ingrained that the moment we focus awareness in the form of attention, we focus on something, and awareness of awareness is lost and inaccessible. The unified field of awareness, its unity and self-reflexive nature beyond the dualistic subject-object split, remains for most people inaccessible to be realized, even though it is always there. The defining moment for my student was to realize that by focusing attention he could not only become aware of subjective experiences, but that he could also become aware of being aware.

Awareness is a bit like the light in the fridge. Whenever you open it, you are usually hungry and look for the objects inside the fridge. You do not notice that the only reason you can actually see what’s in the fridge is because the light is on. You notice even less that the light is on whenever you open the fridge, and when the fridge is closed you have no way of knowing whether the light is on or not. Whenever you ask yourself whether you are aware right now or not, the answer is always ‘yes’, the same way the light is always on when you open the fridge. If you do not ask the question, or you are not aware of being aware, you have no way of knowing whether you are aware or not, the same way you have no way of knowing whether the light is on when the fridge door is closed. Awareness is more than awareness of things, it is also awareness as Being. Without access to this fundamental aspect of awareness, we lose access to vast swaths of the infinite context within which we exist, of the infinite context we actually are.

Whatever we focus on becomes the object of our attention, and awareness itself, also referred to as awareness of awareness, can never be an object of attention, of its own focusing or knowing. It is always the subject that knows itself as subject, thus eluding us as long as we look for it the way we look for things. As strange as it might seem, we cannot pay attention to awareness; attention being the focusing of awareness, we can only pay attention as awareness. Whatever we pay attention to becomes an object of attention or awareness that can never be awareness itself. The astonishing part, therefore, is that we can be intensely steeped in using awareness through its focusing aspect of attention without realizing that awareness itself is directly available to us. The way it is directly available to us is a highly unfamiliar process this student only just discovered. It is not by focusing on it, but by realizing that we have all along already been it. This discovery made my student realize to what extent awareness is also the defining force for inner peace.

Awareness reveals context to us, the fact that we are intricately interwoven in a vast web of infinite causes and consequences beyond our wildest comprehension. Context gives us a sense of belonging that relaxes us and opens the door to discovering complexity. Complexity breeds humility, because we realize there is an intelligence at work in the universe far greater than what we can ever imagine. Humility leads to wise and skillful action, which in turn manifests as love.

The meaning of our lives may just simply be to seize the opportunity to use awareness as our guiding light. Life is our opportunity to bring awareness into motion, and not let it slumber in the darkness of unconsciousness. Awareness in motion is not about what be pay attention to, but what we discover we are all along. Not surprisingly, this turns out to be love.

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

What is this freedom from suffering everyone participating in diverse spiritual traditions talks about? Easily we end up imagining some disembodied state of purity that is unencumbered by the trials and tribulations of a solid body doomed to illness and decay. We may also silently hope for the disappearance of pain or equate freedom with the ability to get and do what we want. Nothing could be further from what freedom is all about as this old Asian story tells us.

A citizen goes to visit the king, who has a vast reputation for being wise, and asks: “Sire, does freedom in our lifetime exist?”
“Absolutely it does”, responds the king, immediately proceeding with the question: “How many legs do you have?”
Surprised by this question the citizen looks at himself, then answers: “Two, my Sire.”
The king: “Are you able to stand on one leg?”
“No problem”, says the citizen.
“So try and decide on which leg you want to stand”, invites the king.
The citizen reflects for a while, then lifts his left leg, remaining standing on only his right leg.
“Very good!” says the king, “now lift also your right leg!”
“I beg your pardon, Sire? That is impossible!”
To which the king responds: “You see, that is freedom! You are free, but only to take the first decision, none after that!”

Freedom is not liberation from reality. Quite on the contrary. It is liberation into reality, the ability to ‘be free and easy in the market place’ as they say in Zen, a sense of great flexibility in the face of life’s unpredictable waves of challenge. Freedom means that we have learned to get out of our own way, out of the way of how things are whether we like it or not, out of the way of how nature unfolds according to patterns all of its own beyond our comprehension. When we are free, we embrace the inevitable with ease and graciousness, and when we fail to be so gracious, we don’t become aggressive towards ourselves, but lovingly hold our limitations in the healing womb of awareness.

Freedom is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, because no stretch of the imagination can conceive what freedom is except for making it seem what it is not … easy. Freedom entails taking on the responsibility for the recreation of our lives in every moment we can remember to do so. Because no moment is free of defilements, every act of recreation is an act of purification. Freedom is the equanimity we find in the inevitable human condition of purgatory. Freedom requires suffering the way Nelson Mandela’s liberation required 27 years of imprisonment. The liberation from purgatory is not another place somewhere else such as we imagine paradise to be, but paradise is the full acceptance of purgatory, while hell is its stubborn rejection.

Only the infinite spaciousness of awareness, combined with a loving stance towards what is, can give us access to the deep peace that comes with realizing that hell and paradise are just the two masks of freedom.

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.