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On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a chat with Dr. Stphane Treyvaud about his upcoming lecture series at Creating Space Yoga. Dr. Treyvaud is an Oakville-based psychiatrist who treats adults in a private practice, but also runs a Stress Reduction Clinic that teaches Mindfulness Meditation to reduce stress, manage chronic pain, and help prevent disease. He gave a series of well-attended lectures last year at CSY and has returned to do another four lectures this term on other aspects of the practice of meditation.

Dr. Treyvaud was born and raised in Switzerland, but came to Canada in 1983 to finish his psychiatric training at the University of Toronto. He had an interest in studying a more integrated type of psychiatric medicine, one which encompassed both mind and body, and U of Ts program was broad and interesting. In 1986, he began a 2-year fellowship in child psychiatry at U of T, and then went into private practice in 1988. Dr. Treyvaud is multilingual and speaks French, Italian, German and English, and has also studied Latin and ancient Greek quite extensively.

CS: Can you speak a little bit about the first lecture (Sat Oct 1), which explores the idea of wisdom and ways we can see ourselves truthfully.

ST: This is a complex issue we are unavoidably biased by our conditioning (cultural, personal historical, genetic). We are always seeing things subjectively. However, there are some universals, things that are universally human we all have a brain and a body with the same basic structures there are some universal ways that we meet life that were going to share. There are some universal truths that we know from experience, and if we heed them, life is going to be worthwhile, meaningful; if we dont, life is going to be full of misery and suffering. When I talk about seeing things the way they really are it is the ability to see the way things are distorted by our conditioning, to see through that; and to be able to share with each other the universal truths that make life worthwhile. Here is a simple example: If I scare you, you will not be relaxed, the whole body and mind goes to tension. (When) your whole body is in tension, you will start to distort things that is a truth that is universal all over the world, for you here in Canada, for a pygmy in the jungle etc. so that is a universal truth if we want to see things in a clear way, we must be relaxed, must not be afraid. We need to be able to relinquish the defensiveness that prevents us from penetrating reality in a deep way so thats an example of how we learn to actually see what is universally human.

CS: How will these lectures be different from the series you did in the Spring?

ST: (Laughs) Sometimes I tell my long term meditation students that really, Im always talking about the same thing, but using different ways of saying it in order to keep them coming ..people have a big laugh. There are some very simple principles (in studying mindfulness meditation), and its always about the same thing, however its so simple we dont see it, we forget it. We get lost in our complicatedness. But yes, it will be different.

There is (an Indian parable about) an elephant of truth. You have several blind men who come to this elephant and each man describes the elephant of truth. One man touches the trunk and says, oh, the truth is like a long snake. Another blind man gets to the ear of the elephant, and he says, no, no, no, the truth is like a cabbage, and the other blind man ends up getting to the tail of the elephant, and he says no, no, no, the truth is like a brush. So the trick is to learn the kind of mindful awareness that allows us to see beyond our limitations, to perceive the whole elephant of truth. When I give lectures, its always about the elephant of truth, but we get at it from different points of view, and each point of view highlights a different principle that can get in the way of us seeing it.

CS: Do people need any background in meditation to come to the lectures?

ST: No, no, no, they dont need any background at all. Thats what these public lectures are all about Im not assuming they are committed to meditation they might be simply curious, and many people may have never done it (meditation) they are just curious about it and want to see what this is all about. Those who want to pursue it will take the courses I run. I see this (lectures at CSY) as a way to raise awareness in the general public so people may feel invited to realize that deepening ones awareness is a healing thing, a good thing in life, and they may be inspired to take steps to pursue that more. So thats how I view my audience.

Its not only the content of what I teach, not just about giving information, like a math class. Its also the fact that I am embodying that attitude people will have an experience of themselves with a teacher (who embodies mindfulness). I touch people not just with the content, the words, but all the non-verbal aspects of embodying mindfulness and the way that that energy manifests itself as living truth.

CS: What is the format of these lectures? Will it be the same as in previous lectures with a short meditation/relaxation at the beginning, a lecture, and then a question period?

ST: Yes. I was thinking of doing it similarly, perhaps with less demarcation. Perhaps with a little meditation practice after a certain amount of lecture, I havent nailed it down yet.

CS: I really love the part where people ask you questions. They have such interesting questions; at the last lectures, you could tell that the people with questions had been through something and they were trying to deal with it, and they were putting something out to you. And I think you do very well with the one-on-one. I feel like youre inspired by the questions, so theres this lovely energy around that interaction. I think you like it.

ST: Yes, yes, its my preferred part. Because thats the part where I feel I really teach, where I really can help people move. Its when they ask the question. I help them, even more so in my meditation courses but still, (its through the questions) that I feel I can really help.

CS: You really welcome questions.

ST: Yes.

CS: May I ask you about your meditation practice? How did you come to it, and how often you meditate, etc.?

ST: Yes, of course. Students ask me about this often, motivated by a view of the teacher as a special person who has it all figured out, so they can figure out how to get to that point but I tend to start with the statement: My journey is exactly like yours, there is no shred of difference. Yes, Ive had my unique story of how I got to it, but everybody does. The years and years of struggle, not practicing, falling off the wagon, coming back to it, getting into defenses, throwing it all out, coming back to it, back and forth, and finally one day coming back to it and it really sticks. Thats my story like everybody elses story. Thats the foundation.

Theres my particular story of how I got to discover that. I was almost a professional violin player when I was young. At one point I wasnt sure whether I was going to have a career in music or medicine. I was playing very intensely and very well, giving concerts etc.. By the time I was 16, I had developed a strong stage fright. Before one of the concerts I was supposed to give, several weeks before, I had a rehearsal and it was absolutely catastrophic. So my violin teacher at the time, she said, okay, I want you to start to do certain things she put me on what was for me a completely incomprehensible program of doing nothing else but like this with my violin [he demonstrates by dramatically drawing an imaginary violin bow down on an exhalation with a loud haaaaa). I did that for two hours a day! And I was only allowed to do that not allowed to play the piece. I had no idea what she was doing.

She would check up on me twice a week. And when it came close to the concert I would do it for her, and she would say, No, no, no youre not centered, let go. Dont do anything, let IT happen. Centre yourself in your pelvis. And slowly I started to discover that notion of non-doing. Of centering down in the heart, into the earth. A few days before the concert, after not having played that piece at all for weeks, we had a rehearsal, and she said, just play it. And it went absolutely brilliantly. I knew the piece already. It was about allowing the wisdom of my body to take over.

After the concert, she said Id like you to meet somebody.it was Karlfried Graf Durckheim, the first westerner who brought Zen to the west. He was a Zen master in the Black Forest, not far from where I lived, and during all the many years I worked with my violin teacher, I did not know that she had been his student for decades! thats how I got to meet Karlfried Graf Durckheim, and when I was 17, I began my training in Zen meditation. I trained with him and then I got busy and I got caught up in the monkey mind (busyness and distraction) and then I lost it and I came back and I lost it and I came back and over time, slowly, as I went through life, shit happens and all these kind of things, you struggle and come back and eventually came the moment when that kind of work became a way of life. Thats how it works.

Cheryl Smith: Do you find that people are increasingly interested in Mindfulness Meditation? It seems to come up all the time in news articles, etc. these days.

Stephane Treyvaud: Yes, its certainly an emerging awareness. The thing about it is that like anything else that becomes an emerging awareness, you have a lot of relatively superficial enthusiasm that accompanies it. I see that a lot of people do a lot of talk about it, but when it comes to actually developing the staying power, to actually engaging in the process that changes the neuro-circuitry of the brain, the number of (those) people who pursue it to those depths quickly shrinks. So thats the part that needs to be worked on. Everyone wants liberation from suffering and everyone wants to feel good, but everyone wants to feel good the easy way. And the thing is that there is no easy way of engaging in that because there are no shortcuts. Thats the atmosphere that I find. But the simple fact that awareness of mindfulness spreads is very important and the fact that theres a lot of interest and (people) come to lectures and think about it and talk about is all good. I dont know how much it will be translated into actual long-term rewiring, because thats the hard part.

CS: I see that the upcoming lectures at CSY studio are all around relationships. Can you talk about your thinking as you were developing these talks?

ST: There is really a fascinating finding in neurobiology and that is that the same circuitry that is responsible for our ability to connect with each other is also responsible for allowing us to connect with ourselves. So at the core of mindfulness training, at the core of meditation training, is (the possibility) of developing a deeper relationship to oneself. You can see, given what I just said about the neuro-circuitry, people sometimes ask, yes but isnt that (just) selfish navel gazing, sitting there paying attention to yourself, taking all this time every day, an hour a day of practice. Isnt that a selfish navel gazing? Well its actually the opposite. What youre actually doing is developing and engaging this circuitry, called the resonance circuitry of the brain, that deepens ones ability not only to relate to oneself, but to another person. This is why at the core of mindfulness is kindness, love and attunement. So thats why I decided to do these lectures, where we are going to focus on this particular aspect of mindfulness, which is a different one than the focus we had in the spring and the fall. There are a lot of interesting things to say about it, so its worth a little series on this topic.

CS: I was intrigued by this last one on the story of your life and the importance of narrative. We do like to have things explained to us through narrative, and we can remember things through narrative as well. Did you want to talk a little bit more about narrative and storytelling? Is it an interest of yours or is it strictly that you like to hear peoples stories?

ST: The move towards health and wellbeing happens when (we) move towards integration, and integration is a process whereby the parts of an organism differentiate from each other and then link. In order to move towards integration as human beings, we have to move towards a wholeness in all aspects of who we are. These aspects can be summarized in nine domains of integration, which correspond to nine major neuro-circuitries of the brain. One of them is called autobiographical integration; (this is) the way that we create our stories out of the non-verbal experiences of life. Because we are storytelling animals, there is no escaping that. The problem is that in that process of developing stories about our lives from the non-verbal experience of living, a lot can go wrong. A lot can go wrong depending on various factors, including what happened to us in childhood and how different parts of the brain (are connected) to each other, such as left and right brain, or the cortex to the rest of the body. What was discovered clinically is that there are different ways that people talk. You can actually sense, by listening to a person, whether that person has shut down this storytelling ability, whether that storytelling ability is so overwhelmed that they cant make sense of whats coming from inside, or whether they are well integrated and able to make sense of whats going on.

So all you need to do is sit down with a person, ( and) you ask personal questions like, why are you here? Whats going on in your life? And then they tell you, this and this and this, Im not happy about this and then you ask, tell me a bit about your Dad, and Mom, etc.. The way they tell the story tells you whether there are issues in the storytelling capacity, from which you can then come to conclusions with regards to the original childhood challenges that shaped them. So thats what this is all about.

CS: Can you give me an example. If you had a patient in front of you and they are describing their parents. What are some of the things you would notice in the way they would tell their story?

ST: To give you a simple example, I would ask you, what kind of a person was your father when you were a child? And your answer might be, Oh he was great.

I would ask, Can you tell me a bit more?

Oh, he was fine.

What kind of a relationship did you have? What do you mean when you say he was great?

He was fine. He was a Dad like all the others. I have no complaints.

I would continue by asking, Okay and how about your Mother?

Oh she was great.

And what made your mother great?

Well, she cooked and cleaned and took care of us.

And what kind of a relationship did you have with your mother.

Oh, a good one.

What do you notice about this persons answers and what consequences can you draw?

CS: Well, its not very detailed or observant or nuanced.

ST: Yes its very truncated, its very schematic. In fact its deeply distorted because no narrative like that can be true because theres no such thing as, my mother was great. People are complicated and complex. So that points to a certain problem with the way that this storytelling neuro-circuitry was affected and shut down, and with a deep lack of access to this persons inner world.

CS: And was that because the person was overwhelmed or bullied? They werent allowed to have thoughts other than those thoughts?

ST: There are several possibilities here. One possibility is that the parents were very avoidant, either withdrawn and absent or (created an environment where) nothing of emotional significance was ever talked about. That would usually be the case. When people have had the opposite, very traumatic parents who were very aggressive, usually the picture is different, the dialogue is different.

CS: Maybe these types of parents are themselves damaged, having experienced the same type of relationship with their own parents .

ST: Yes, of course, its a chain of events passed on from generation to generation which is why the work we are doing is so important because we have an opportunity to interrupt that chain of events for our children.

CS: On another topic entirely, do you find it interesting how popular TV reality shows are today? Were watching relationships being played out on these shows, and they seem pretty fake, but they still have an enormous audience. Why do we like to watch this when weve got our own lives to lead? Are we looking for guidance or role models? Or do we like to feel superior to these people who are often unwittingly humiliating themselves? Or have we always been watching human relationships in the theatre and on TV dramas and this is just the latest incarnation.

ST: Its an interesting question. The immediate thought that comes to mind is voyeurism, that we love to peek into the secrets of others because we are unable to access our own secrets. I dont know why reality shows would be more appealing than a theatre piece with actors, because of course every time you go to a theatre, every time you go to a performance, in a sense, you live through the story and actors, you live a piece of human life, it is very cathartic, it teaches us something. Maybe reality shows are so popular because they give us the illusion of bringing us even closer to ourselves because its in reality its actually happening, its not just play. That aspect may actually be the consequence of a numbing effect in society. I believe that we live in a society that has been profoundly numbed with regards to the earth and the body. Everything has to be bigger, louder, wilder, faster, more intense, more violent, because the decibel and intensity (level) of fifty years ago just doesnt do it anymore. We are so numbed, because we live more and more in disembodied lives. So maybe thats a part of an evolution of why these reality shows are exploding.

CS: Can you tell me a little bit about the format of the Mindfulness lectures, and who you see them being for?

ST: Im aiming it at human beings (laughs). Im just talking about one tiny little aspect of the work that we do, mindfulness and the importance of it, and the connection to the larger social and political processes, so whoever is interested in it

CS: So people who are meditators, non-meditators .?

ST: Anybody will find something interesting here. People will be exposed to looking at the importance of our relatedness and of our inter-connectedness on all scales, from the very personal to the socio-political and ecological. Thats what will be talked about, so anybody who has an interest in that is invited, which should be the whole of humanity!! (laughs) The structure of the lectures is similar to last term again, I will talk and there will be an opportunity to ask questions, as usual. I will also, at the beginning, introduce the sessions with a little meditation practice. In fact, Im thinking that this time, because of the topic, the first session I will introduce with a practice where people will interact.

CS: There may be people who will read this interview on the website, but they will not be able to attend the lectures. Do you want to give some practical advice on how to start a meditation practice, or just one very practical piece of advice on starting a meditation practice.

ST: The first thing that I would recommend to anyone who wants to start a meditation practice is to find a good teacher. Its so essential because we are so complex, and the way our mind works and our body works and our attention when you do it on your own, youll be very likely to very quickly get into a snag. You dont even notice that youre in a snag; all you know is that the thought comes up, oh this isnt helpful, this isnt for me. And you move on (quit meditation). So find a good teacher, thats kind of fundamental. The second thing that Ive come to after many, many years of experience is I absolutely stress and begin with connecting with the body. Thats what I call the somatic practices, learning to pay attention to the body, which of course includes the breath because the breath occurs in the body. How to do that I cant explain. Thats more complex. But bring your attention into your body and explore the connection with the body. Thats just the absolute foundation. From there everything else arises and moves.

The Mindfulness Lecture in Numbers…

9 Seasons

22 Lectures
44 Hours
800+ Participants

It is hard to believe that we just completed our 3rd year of the Mindfulness Lectures. While the numbers are impressive, what they don’t reveal is the blended magic that has come from combining the Creating Space Yoga community with the Mindfulness Centre community. The product has been an incredible network of like-minded individuals which has created a curious, supportive and growing community.

I always walk away impressed by the diversity and intelligence of the group of people that participate each month. I feel very grateful and very proud of the slow growth of these lectures and the quality of information and discussion that is shared.

A big thanks to Dr. Treyvaud for leading us down this insightful path and an enormous thanks to all of the participants who join us each month. Only through a strong and active community are we able to continue to bring you these lectures. We thank you for supporting us. We enjoy spending the time with you.

Earlier this month we sent a survey out to those individuals who attended the lectures this year. The response was great and the feedback so valuable. It was so insightful that I wanted to share some of it with you.

Have a wonderful summer. We are excited for the upcoming fall lecture dates!

Robyn Bowman

People are used to looking for reality in their thinking instead of where it really is, the moment-by-moment flow of energy. Reality is the way things are, and the way things are gets befogged by the tyranny of our thoughts, which seek certainty and familiarity in the reality of uncertainty.

Reality is to spirituality what gravity is to Newtonian physics. You can try to refuse gravity if you like and next thing you know is that you still fall on your nose when you trip. You can equally try to reject reality if you like, and next thing you know is that everything is still exactly the way it is after you have tried to manipulate everything.

Conclusion: Truth is what keeps hitting you over the head after you have tried hard to deny or get rid of it.

Copyright 2012 by Dr. Stphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Everything is what we find when through meditation we find our way through the complex maze of impermanence and its manifestations. Everything is the entirety of all existing things and phenomena you can put into linguistic and mathematical words. ‘Everything’ can be conceptually grasped, explained and described through human language, including mathematical language. It includes energy and stuff, all things and objects in our lives, on our planet and in all possible universes, all energy movements, our own body, and every aspect of subjective experience, meaning thoughts, feelings, dreams, fantasies, memories, physical sensations and more.

There likely is a public and relatively objective world out there independent from the way we perceive it, even though we can only perceive it through our sense experiences. Of course, everything is interdependent from everything else, but within that acknowledged context there is also a world out there (the same world as the one in here) that unfolds independently from our perception of it. In meditation practice we learn to tune into our internal world of subjective experiences and explore how through it we relate to both ourselves and this independent external world. What interests us most is how we process sensory input into awareness that moves us towards action, and how we process action into awareness that affects sensory input this is how we construct our reality. To gain insight into this process of reality construction and its many distortions we routinely succumb to, and to modify our approach to life towards fewer distortions is the core work of meditation in its everything-oriented, manifestation-oriented form.

Under this category I will write about how we investigate the world of everything both through objective scientific investigation and subjective experiential inquiry. Given our focus on mindfulness meditation and mindsight, subjective inquiry will of course be at the centre of our work. In other words, under this heading I will write about how through attentional and awareness training we use our mind to explore the way we construct both a subjective and objective view of the world we are a part of. I will also explore the nature of these phenomena as they reveal themselves to the mindful eye. You will read about meditation techniques, ways of overcoming the inevitable hurdles we encounter on the mindful path and all kinds of details about the experiences which present themselves to the meditative attitude.

Dr. Stphane Treyvaud

When we talk about nothing, non-sense is our friend; let me tell you why:

There are two nothings: One is graspable, the other is not. One is relative, the other absolute. Lets begin with the relative, graspable one.

You can think of nothing as one notion nothing in which case it is something: the absence of things, the absence of existence, or simply absence. In meditation practice the subjective experience of absence is very interesting, because it can reveal itself to be multi-layered. The sense of absence can be the consequence of numbing, repressing or dissociating, in which case a new presence emerges the moment those dissociative mechanisms are undone. It can also arise because our senses cannot reach what exists; presence here can only be known indirectly through cognition. As one notion then, nothing is something manifest as absence, a something that exists with an apparent essence. This manner in which nothing manifests is relative and belongs to the everything-oriented meditative approach discussed in About Everything.

You can also think of nothing as two notions no-thing. Here it gets a bit more complex, because thinking about it is futile. Every thought is something, and something cannot think about anything that is not a thing. Existence is about things, so that every-thing exists; all things exist and have an essence. There are no things that dont exist. In contrast, no-thing transcends the inevitable conceptual duality of existence and non-existence. It transcends concepts, period! No-thing is unthinkable, not an experience, not a thing, not an absence, not an existence, and not a non-existence. It has no essence. It is an absolute. Dont try to understand it. It cannot meaningfully be talked about, named or conceptualized. It is the nameless non-existing existence. When I say it is., and then add such paradoxical gobbledygook as non-existing existence, dont feel stupid and dont think I am that smart either (if I were, I would rather invite you to a cup of tea than sit here writing myself into knots)! I say it is, knowing very well that I cannot say what it is but I can know it (‘knowing’ in a whole-organism integrated sense, not an intellectual sense); and with this paradox (non-existing existence) I am not trying to sound particularly smart, but in fact am desperately trying not to come across as too inconsistent by wanting to put into words what is wordless. How can I convey to you this knowable unspeakable in a text? It is a losing battle, unless..I become a poet, in which case you might not even recognize that what I put into a poem is about what I want to express..would it ultimately matter?

Richard Feynman, a famous physicist, came to work one day and caught his colleagues attention by telling them You have no idea what happened to me this morning! Everybody looked at him with suspense, and he said: Absolutely nothing! When a Zen master was in his last hours of physical existence, obviously in pain, all his friends and family gathered around him. They were surprised at how engaged and interested he was with everybody and how little attention he drew to himself. They asked him, how do you do that, being in so much pain, about to die and yet completely immersed in us without what seems to be a shred of concern for yourself? His answer: But nothing is happening!

Feynman and the Zen master came from very different traditions and may have meant quite different things. To me they touch each other across disciplines like the touching hands in Michelangelos Creation of Adam. When you look closely into the nature of all phenomena we explore in About Everything, you quickly realize how ephemeral everything is. Nothing in the world of everything is stable, permanent, certain, predictable, eternal, immortal or fixed. Everything is movement coming and going. Nothing is graspable or should I say, no-thing is ungraspable? When with awareness we deeply penetrate everything and try to find the essence of everything, we find no essence. All essence is moving, changing and dissolving into timelessness and spacelessness.

Conversely, no-thing is unstable, too! From it varieties of form and a trajectory of each form’s unfolding always emerge.Physicists like to talk about an unstable nothingness full of creative potential giving birth to space and energy (dark energy?), space and energy giving birth to things (galaxies and dark matter) and time. They come to these insights through mathematics and physical observations. Here I come from the point of view of subjective experience. Without your consent you have come into being as the human form that you are with the attributes that you have – that is the form; and you come and go along a trajectory of unfolding that is specifically yours – that is the river. Where do you arise from and where do you unfold to – if not the mystery of no-thing?

So this is the great discovery that all ways lead to Rome. Follow everything, and you will discover nothing; follow no-thing, and you will discover everything. Buddhism came up with a notion for this paradox emptiness. That notion does not clarify anything, of course, but at least, we can understand each other and know what we mean. We know that nothingness is not emptiness that nothingness is something, while emptiness is beyond words, unnameable. The coin of emptiness simply has two sides, nothingness and everything. The coin of emptiness teaches us that nothing has an essence, and that the absence of an essence is everything. As Ramana Maharshi said: ‘The world is illusory; Brahman alone is real; Brahman is the world’.

Ramana Maharshi used to invite: Let what comes come, let what goes go, and see what remains! What remains is timeless, spaceless and wordless. Timelessness feels eternal, spacelessness feels infinite and wordlessness feels wise. The only human force capable of eternity, infinity and wisdom is love but what is love, if not the nameless unnameable …?

I am writing here about what is not graspable, unnameable and nameless. Why would I do that? Because inevitably this is the primordial reality we discover on the journey of mindfulness meditation. This is not a matter of choice or opinion, nor a matter of argument. It is an existential matter with the ring of truth. You cant help finding the Alps when you drive south from Basel to Milan so you also cant help waking up to the nameless when you begin to pay close attention to your life. At first blush, when novices read about this, they often find it heavy and abstract nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing more direct and real than the nameless. Practice attending with diligence, precision and dedication, and you will discover the nameless in your flesh and blood.

Together we can deal with the paradox of writing about the nameless in two ways: Likely the best way is for me to shut up and for you to close the browser, leave with nothing and not come back to my writing until about a week (or a year, ten years?) from now. In the meantime, have tea with me, settle into nothing, become comfortable (or uncomfortable, if you so will) with it, surrender to its disconcerting influence and see where it takes you first when you follow nothing, then when you follow no-thing. When you come back this writing (if ever!), or if you cheated and continued to read because your compulsive curiosity took you over, we must together agree that writing about the nameless can only be pure foolishness. I must admit my impotence in such an absurd task, and you must relinquish the compulsion to know. Since for the sake of my students I obviously insist on making a fool of myself, I will humbly try to do it in as least conspicuous and distorted way as possible. In short, I will try to make as harmless a fool of myself as possible. Can you take it?

Dr. Stphane Treyvaud