Examining ordinary waking consciousness

The content of this article is taught in a practical and experiential manner in next year’s 2022 Mindsight Intensive. Details of the curriculum can be found here.

The movie Escape Plan with Stallone and Schwarzenegger depicts an archetype we have to wrestle with when we want to examine ordinary waking consciousness. Stallone is a top-secret agent specializing in breaking out of prisons to reveal weaknesses in the prisons’ security. A government official sends him to the most modern and advanced prison that exists, an escape from which is supposedly impossible. He cannot see how he gets there. The official does not know Stallone and the prison staff does not know he is not a criminal. In other words, as far as he is concerned he can not be rescued should he fail to escape. His escape is brutal and he gets almost killed in the process. Of course, he prevails in the end, and what he discovers as he manages to break out of the ‘building’, is that the prison is inside a gigantic ship cruising the oceans – a totally different vista than what he would have expected.

Ordinary waking consciousness is quite similar to that prison, metaphorically a dream or sometimes a nightmare we cannot wake up from. Through the course of childhood, we are so deeply trained to live by it that our brain becomes wired to construct that form of awareness. It is so familiar that we cannot imagine, let alone experience the world in any other way than mediated by the characteristics of that form of awareness. Every time we wake up from sleep, and even in dreams, there it is, offering the world to us without our awareness of its biases and limitations. It is like water to fish – a seemingly transparent medium allowing us to know and experience life and the world without our slightest awareness of its hidden workings and limitations, without leaving much room to develop an inkling that life could also be possible in air.

Almost everything we experience is mediated by ordinary waking consciousness and dream consciousness. Whether awake or dreaming, we find ourselves within the most automatic of the three awareness modes we call the field of consciousness. By implication, whatever we try to change or improve in our lives, remains within the boundaries of this same field of consciousness. As I mentioned above, the field of consciousness can metaphorically be likened to a dream, from which we never wake up. When we try to find solutions to our problems, it occurs from within the limitations of the ‘dream of consciousness’. Granted, this field of consciousness has great power of discovery and is capable of opening up the external physical world for us in astonishing ways. New insights into the nature of the mind within this field have vastly improved our ability to alleviate psychological suffering. In psychotherapy, learning to tap into resources that contribute to the creation of safety as a precondition for healing is a fundamental principle of emotional growth. Nevertheless, no matter how clever we may be in creatively mobilizing available resources, they remain resources that are structured and determined by the laws that rule the field of everyday waking consciousness. Our solutions remain penned in by the field’s limitations as they draw on its elements to create new solutions, and we don’t ‘wake up from the dream’. If ‘waking up from the dream of consciousness‘ was a vertical movement of transformation, then finding solutions within it is more of a horizontal movement of translation. One may be satisfied with translation inside the field of consciousness, but for some, it is not enough, because no matter how many solutions one finds within the dream of consciousness, this field remains somewhat of an unsatisfactory nightmare from which one deeply desires to wake up. For many people, it is not enough to fix their daily problems while being left with intractable existential yearnings for which no effective solution can be found within this field.

Like the prison in Escape Plan, our human field of consciousness is remarkably ‘airtight’ and seemingly inescapable. True, many of us are intuitively called to something beyond this field, but we tend to ignore, misinterpret, or not recognize the invitations from beyond, even when they are in plain sight. We always fall back into the field’s orbit to find solutions. Let me caution you right now that the ‘beyond’ I am talking about is not to be understood in spatial terms, but more the way ordinary waking consciousness is beyond a dream, winning the one hundred-meter sprint at the Olympics is beyond my capabilities, or the calculations leading to the discovery of the Higgs boson are beyond my understanding.

There is a reason why this field of consciousness has such a tenacious grip on us. In fact, it is quite limited in its capacity to open the world to us, yet we are quite unaware of those limitations. Here is why we are such willing prisoners of it: Our organism shuns unpredictability. To ensure survival, it has to be able to map reality, predict what can happen, plan how to best navigate the expected challenges ahead, and react to circumstances in the most adaptive way. To achieve such efficiency, information that is being taken in has to be paired down to the bare minimum necessary, then processed as simply and efficiently as possible, and finally automated as much as possible to ensure predictability. The brain operates as a kind of filter that admits only that measly trickle of information required for us to get through the day. In other words, in everyday consciousness, the brain functions in a very constrained way to ensure efficiency for survival and take in only as much information as is necessary to make educated guesses and accurate predictions. Openness is not the hallmark of ordinary everyday consciousness, which serves us a precooked menu of well-engrained and time-tested adaptations that ensure optimal survival, functioning, coping, and procreating. Elsewhere, I discussed how our organism that functions on such autopilot is called an algorithm. This field of consciousness can be seen as a controlled hallucination. We have to remember though that survival is not the same as thriving, and for many people, this menu of adaptations only works to a point. But even so, when in pain we look for quick relief, and much of human suffering cannot be relieved through quick solutions the like our field of consciousness is good at providing. We then have to take Stallone’s challenge upon ourselves, and as the movie can attest, this can be a hell of a difficult journey.

What is the hallmark of this field of consciousness? Our entire life experience, in other words, human existence itself is always seen from the perspective of a subject in the form of our sense of self, and this self apprehends the world, including itself, as a collection of objects, things, or entities that have some kind of more or less dense substance. This situation where a subject is always pitted against objects and vice versa is called duality. Within this field, duality is inescapable. It is always you, the subject who is living in a world of objects through life experiences. This duality is encapsulated in the word ‘consciousness’, which from the Latin ‘con’ = ‘with’ and ‘scire’ = ‘knowing’ literally means ‘knowing with’ – the subject only knows with the objects, and the objects only exist to an accompanying subject. This is to say that I define consciousness rather narrowly as the duality-based field of consciousness we spontaneously slide into over the course of a childhood during both dreaming and our waking lives. Furthermore, this field of consciousness is but one of three fields of awareness I will discuss below. This implies that awareness can take different forms depending on which field we operate in. As I will show, the verbal, duality-based awareness of the field of consciousness we are accustomed to is by no means the only type of awareness we can access. The other two awareness forms, as we will see, are trans-verbal, and to the extent, imagination is based on the field of consciousness, they are unimaginable, while still accessible through direct experience. Transcendence then means waking up from the ‘dream of consciousness’ into other fields of awareness I will discuss below.

The psychologically-based duality of the field of consciousness has the advantage of creating an objective vantage point (the self), from which the world (objects) can be examined in great depth, but it also has the disadvantage of creating an alienation from ourselves and the world through the effect this chasm between subject and object has on our experience of living. In other words, the inescapable duality of our field of consciousness reveals a mechanical universe without meaning, from which we find ourselves alienated, and to the extent, we search for and find meaning, the meaning we find is always limited or broken by the fundamental faultline duality creates. This very fact is a major source of human suffering that cannot be alleviated from within the field of consciousness.

The processes by which we construct our reality within the field of consciousness are very resourceful and creative. Earlier on I mentioned the quick solutions to pain. For eons, humans have used material resources to make life better and to gain a deeper understanding of existence – nothing wrong with that. Recognizing the limitations of everyday waking consciousness, different methods such as psychedelics, holotropic breathing, sensory deprivation, fasting, prayer, overwhelming experiences of awe, extreme sports, near-death experiences, meditation, creative expression, sex, and more have been used to look for what may be found ‘beyond’. The sought-after experiences are the dissolution of the ego or the sense of self, and the collapse of a distinction between subject and object resulting in a sense of merging into some larger totality. This is what mystical experiences are all about, and they are felt to be deeply calming, reassuring, and healing. The insights these experiences sponsor are felt to be objectively true in the sense of revealed truths rather than plain old duality-based insights.

Psychedelics are now in vogue, and historically they have sometimes been used as a doorway to transcendence, which is the reality that emerges when we can break through the boundaries of ordinary waking consciousness (the teachings of Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda for example). Two crucial points need to be made here: (1) All these pharmacological methods intended to cause transcendence beyond the field of consciousness remain within it as they only cause transitory mental states that leave no more than a memory of such states and do not per se evolve into lasting mental traits. Once the agent causing the shift is gone, the party is over and we are back inside the field of consciousness we probably have never left in the first place. This means that true waking up from the dream of consciousness has not happened. (2) In the literature on psychedelics (‘How To Change Your Mind’ by Michael Pollan), their effect is seen to be a regression to more primitive, undifferentiated modes of cognition we experienced in childhood, and by implication, the mystical experience of transcendence is seen as a process, by which these early childhood mind traits are being revived. I agree with the first part of the sentence, in that psychedelics may well reopen access to earlier traits of childhood consciousness. However, in my opinion, these substance-induced mental states have little in common with the mental traits of transcendence achieved through intense training, practice, and brain rewiring. ‘Enlightenment’, as transcendent insight into reality is often called, is a permanent trait that becomes the foundation of our view of reality and is not dependant on duality-based field-of-consciousness maneuvers or childhood states of psychological non-differentiation. Insofar as transitory psychedelic-induced pseudo-mystical states are revivals of undifferentiated childhood mind states and thus preverbal, and permanent real mystical traits of transcendent wisdom are expansions of awareness beyond the field of consciousness and trans-verbal, by confusing the two we fall prey to a pre/trans fallacy causing confusion.

So, where is the door to real transcendence, to waking up from the dream of consciousness altogether? Why would one even want to seek transcendence and embark on the crazy difficult project Stallone portrays in the movie? (I am not inferring that in the movie Stallone is on his way to enlightenment – he is just the symbolic hero of an archetypal story). The second question is easier to answer: Because as mentioned above, transcendence is the ultimate source of peace, serenity, wellbeing, and healing independent of circumstance. Putting it in terms of resource-based mindfulness, I am suggesting that transcendence is the ultimate resource for our human journey towards less existential suffering.

As for the first question, we have to turn to a place we never want to go – pain and suffering. Suffering is the springboard par excellence towards an awareness mode that reveals the underbelly of all existence and negates everything in the field of consciousness. Everything that exists, once upon a time did not exist and someday will not exist anymore in that particular form. Existence is thus inextricably connected to non-existence, and yet our field of consciousness only shows us existence. That is a problem causing suffering because our very lives unfold over an abyss of non-existence we cannot help being affected by one way or another. Furthermore, those moments and times in our lives, when all sense of meaning slips away from us, only to be replaced by absurdity and meaninglessness when our sense of belonging collapses and gives way to a deep and dark sense of loneliness and forsakenness, when our sense of purpose dissolves into thin air and we are left with feeling rudderless and lost, and when we are faced with our own demise and death, all those moments are particularly powerful energy vortexes that beckon to move towards the radical shift into a new awareness dimension. These are moments that challenge the boundary of the field of consciousness and cause suffering if we do not know how to break free from the limitations of this field. Contemplating or meditating on the disappearance of phenomena such as breathing, thoughts and our mortality are gates towards transcendence.

From the two-dimensionality of the field of consciousness, we then find ourselves in the three-dimensionality of what Keiji Nishitani calls the field of nihility (from Latin ‘nihil’ = ‘nothing’) or of relative nothingness. We realize that all that exists, all that is has its origin and grounding in non-existence. This first step of awakening to a contextually larger form of awareness into the first dimension that transcends the field of consciousness is neither pre- nor non-verbal, but trans-verbal. Both pre- and non-verbal experiences are apprehended by the field of consciousness. In the field of nihility, our customary tools of thinking and cognitive representations can’t be applied anymore, and everything that exists, including all objects and the subject that experiences them all, is seen in a different light. Without being able to go into the nuances of different stages within nihility, although not yet completely overcome, the duality of the field of consciousness is seen as illusory. That in itself is freeing, providing a sense of a big weight being taken off one’s shoulders. Also, without the self-centered prehension of reality in the field of consciousness, our view of reality opens to vast hitherto unexplored spaces filling a much larger context, within which we find an expanded identity that includes the whole universe.

Settling in the field of nihility provides an intimacy of experience of everything that is unimaginable within the field of consciousness. Of course, this has to be learned and practiced. Being so used to experiencing life in terms of things that exist, starting to allow nothingness to be revealed in our awareness may seem weird, if not impossible. It requires an emphasis on aspects of meditation that are less prominent when we remain busily trying to change things within the field of consciousness. These include a more intense concentration on the non-verbal aspect of experience, which we call the conduit in contrast to the constructor of stories we concoct in every moment. In addition, we emphasize an orientation of awareness towards the void that embraces impermanence. After that comes the embodiment of an oh-so unfamiliar and therefore difficult attitude of surrendering to that void, allowing it to impact us in its mysterious ways it is impossible to make sense of. That will challenge our capacity to trust the unknown, often initially accompanied by fear. We allow everything to be just as it is with an emphasis on developing familiarity with the void – the ultimate getting out of our own way. Paradoxically, when faced with nihility life becomes immeasurably more vibrant. When we can rest in nothing, there is space for everything.

Let’s not forget that these painful experiences I just described as gates towards liberation are often misunderstood and misinterpreted by professionals working within the field of consciousness as symptomatic of a disease in need of correction within the field of consciousness, as opposed to an invitation to transform towards transcendence. Suicidal thoughts, for example, can be information from the awareness field of nihility beckoning us to allow for the separate ego to die and the illusion of duality to be let go, in order to create space for the larger contextual awareness of nihility. This would however only apply to someone capable of holding the thought of suicide in awareness as transformative energy, not to someone intent on taking it literally within the field of consciousness and acting it out physically by destroying their embodied existence.

However, moving into the field of nihility would be metaphorically like discovering for the first time the backside of the moon, or realizing that we have spent a lifetime staring at the head of a coin, never realizing that there is a tail. When we allow nihility to fully reveal itself, we can now at least see both sides of the coin, even though we are not yet able to see the coin as a whole. In other words, a subtle duality still persists. Overcoming that last vestige of duality constitutes the second step towards awakening from the nightmare of ordinary waking consciousness. Metaphorically it is the step of being able to see the coin as a whole with both its inextricably linked sides. This is a further awakening from the field of nihility into the clarity of the third awareness form, the field of emptiness (absolute nothingness) or sunyata in Japanese Zen. Verbal expressions about this field are unavoidably paradoxical. This level of awareness is called the field of emptiness because, in contrast to nihility, which is death and the negation or annihilation of everything, emptiness is life, the affirmation of everything through the nullification of any shred of attachment to anything. It is the ultimate getting out of one’s own way to allow for Reality to unfold and manifest without resistance. While relative nothingness or nihility is still an awareness field with a subtle duality, an object or a thing called nothingness as the ground of consciousness, emptiness is the realization of ‘no-thingness’. That means that there is no essence to anything that exists, and there is nothing that can be grasped and held on to, except for illusions. There is no duality left. To use another metaphor for those looking at this from the field of consciousness, the wave that is unaware of the ocean, believing it is an independent phenomenon unrelated to the ocean, and an individual entity that is subject to being born and die, is the field of consciousness. The field of nihility would be the wave realizing that it is transient, and not a separate entity unrelated to the ocean. Emptiness then would be the wave’s realization that moving ocean water is all there is, and that this is at the same time everything.

There is a further step to be taken to fully fulfill our human potential. Jack Kornfield evokes what this step is all about in his book title: ‘After the ecstasy, the laundry‘. In Zen, they say that before enlightenment you sleep and carry water, and after enlightenment, you sleep and carry water (implying that the second ‘sleep and carry water’ is very different from the first). Once emptiness is realized, even emptiness has to empty itself, the same way the German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart pointed out how even God has to empty him/herself to be fully revealed through humans. In other words, there are no laurels to rest in, no goal to be achieved (since a goal would be an object of the field of consciousness), and nowhere to feel you have arrived. The next step is to bring this realization into everyday life and allow it to inspire anyone willing to receive, including yourself. We could call this the awareness field of return. This is likely the 360-degree return T.S. Eliot also talks about in his last of the four quartets, ‘Little Gidding‘:

….. We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

‘Wherever you go, there you are!’ (Jon Kabat-Zinn), but at the end of this journey, finding yourself at the beginning again, everything looks luminous, inspired, and imbued by a lightness of Being that was unknown before. That is the act of agape love, without which humanity will not survive. Having come full circle, this quote from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj may now make sense to you: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing, love tells me I am everything, and between the two my life flows.”

The journey through these four levels of awareness, consciousness, nihility, emptiness, and return, is arduous, difficult, at times even potentially dangerous, and requires a great deal of curiosity, rigor, tenacity, patience, strength, courage, and humor. It is not for the faint-hearted, nor for those expecting quick fixes. It is not glamourous either. From our field of consciousness perspective, we tend to idealize the archetypal hero successfully returning from the adventure of having slain the dragon, but as every soldier returning from the trenches of the first world war or Vietnam will tell you, the path towards heroism is brutal and scar-by-scar transformative. Not that awakening to the full context of awareness is necessarily heroic, but it is to my mind the most compelling journey anyone could ever embark on.

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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Around 1991 I took a trip to Bombay, Bangalore, and Uti in India. My mission was to have a closer look at Sai Baba, an Indian guru considered a holy man, said to be capable of performing miracles. Apart from his alleged ability to cause paralyzed people to walk again, his signature routine miracle was the materialization of ash called ‘vibuti’.One ‘paralyzed’ woman appeared once a week on his ‘show’ as she would be wheeled in a wheelchair onto the stage and after a few of Sai Baba’s hand gestures, she would ‘miraculously’ be able to walk. During my time there, I satisfied myself that he was a clever magician, who used his magic for the purpose of activating positive healing beliefs in his followers. In his research on the healing and toxic effects of positive and negative beliefs, also called the placebo and nocebo effects, Herbert Benson had long ago scientifically established what humans have intuitively known for thousands of years, namely, our psyche’s powerfully regulating effect on the organism’s energy flow. Beliefs can heal or break us.

Remembering my Sai Baba experience, I also remembered a part of me who at the time was secretly hoping to find evidence that the laws of physics are not always applicable. Many years and quite a few wrinkles later, I remember the power of the human imagination to want to transcend the shackles of physical embodiment by trying to find corners in the universe that suspend the laws of physics. The hope is that disembodied existence is free of pain, suffering, and death, and that we may be able to gain access to some mysterious corners of the universe where anything goes. Barring that possibility, what is left is the power of the imagination to disidentify us from the narrow self-definition as an individual sense of self imprisoned in a mortal body. For eons, humans have achieved that through art, religion, and meditation.

Coming back to magic, apart from being entertaining and delightful, I also have a curiosity and fascination about its deeper significance within the context of trying to elucidate consciousness and shed some light on what we are really doing in mindfulness meditation. Magic is powerfully awe-inspiring, and for a good reason. But to understand that reason we need a closer look at what it really is. I became particularly interested in the work of Penn and Teller, juggler and magician extraordinaire, and the whole body of knowledge around this art. Before I continue, let’s set the stage by taking a short break and watch this almost 4-minutes long video.

I suppose there are a few factors worth considering in trying to understand our fascination with magic. In magic, we watch something we know is impossible occur in front of our very own eyes. That in itself can inspire us to ponder the seemingly impossible in our lives as a way of broadening our horizons, examine our conditioned limitations, and fulfill our dreams. Magic activates our energetic potential in the form of beliefs that can challenge our narrowly constructed prisons about reality and inspire a transcendence of our limitations.

After a magic trick, we are left amazed, puzzled, curious, restless, almost like having a pebble in one’s shoe, wondering how what we saw is possible. The knowledge of impossibility is mixed with the experience of actual occurrence, and that tension between the two cannot be resolved unless one becomes a magician. Our minds can reach in different directions: As with Sai Baba, we may attribute to the person performing magic miraculous, superhuman, metaphysical, and transcendent powers, in which case we may also identify with the possibility of having such potential ourselves we could perhaps tap into. We may also marvel at the magician’s skill and simply enjoy the magic’s entertainment value.

Would miracles be as cool as we imagine? Somewhat, maybe, but not really as much as we may expect. Whenever people claim evidence of miracles, they occur like lottery wins – completely randomly without rhyme or reason. Besides, I have also never seen any credible reports of a reputable scientist’s presence, which could confirm or refute the miracle. Finally, when unexplainable things occur, and they do so routinely, we tend to loosely call them ‘miracles’, when in fact we are not able to grasp nature’s and the universe’s full potential. We tend to see the physical world as far too restricted in its enormous potential for creating the most amazing phenomena, and we also tend to misunderstand science as a knowledge discipline, when in fact it is a doubt and question discipline. Just because we cannot explain something does not mean it is potentially not explainable. Nature and the universe are simply so vastly more complex than we can ever imagine, that science can only grasp a sliver of its reality.

Just to make sure we understand each other: I assume that the laws of science constantly evolve with our growing knowledge, that they are inescapable, and that phenomena science cannot explain are either not yet explainable but eventually can be, or they are outside the method and purview of scientific inquiry altogether. For example, the meaning of Hamlet cannot be found through scientific means. By the same token, when events seem to defy the laws of physics, it is all too easy to dismiss them as miracles and thereby impeding our quest for truth.

Miracles can be defined as the unexplainable defiance of the laws of physics as we know them, and by assuming the notion of miracles as an explanation, one relegates the unknowable to the realm of the pseudo-knowable: “Oh I ‘understand’ now … it is a miracle!”, which means of course that one doesn’t understand anything more than before the miracle. One maintains the illusion of knowing while projecting it onto the screen of the unknowable, which gives only short-lived comfort and even mitigates the power of reality to generate states of deep insight and awe. At best, assuming supernatural powers from an external source can help us let go of narrow identification with a limited sense of self, open up and become receptive to unexpected influences that may be of benefit. Beyond that, by farming the magic of the unexplainable out into a miracle, we deprive reality of its real power to inspire, and ourselves of the opportunity to find truth, thereby allowing the unexplainable phenomenon to amount to no more than an unlikely moment of grace we have no control over anyway. To explain magic away as some kind of metaphysical occurrence is a form of intellectual laziness.

To my mind, the real power of magic is to be found in a very different movement of consciousness – in one’s grounding in the fact that it is skilled trickery. The implication is that our brains are skilled tricksters in the way they manage to fool us into believing what’s untrue and not seeing what’s true. We are so fascinated by magic because we know that what we see is impossible, and yet we experience it directly. In other words, we experience the impossible, which inspires our internal sense of empowerment. We know that the laws of physics are inviolable, yet at the same time, we are unable to see through the elaborate trickery, which in the end is always penetrable, predictable, learnable, and applicable.

The core idea here is that fascination with trickery, with how easily we can be so profoundly fooled, is in fact a fascination with our human nature and the nature of mind. Through magic we are directly confronted with how on a daily basis we unconsciously lie, cheat, swindle, deceive, distort, delude and create illusions – in short, magic forces us to examine our relationship to truth. More often than we usually suspect, our experience of mind is like the unexamined smoking routine Teller performs. Have you noticed how after having seen a magic trick, your mind keeps obsessing about how such trickery is possible? In other words, magic puts a pebble into our shoe of consciousness, making it impossible to ignore that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’, and we haven’t as yet been able to figure out what that is. It is crucial to avail ourselves of this impulse to investigate when we begin to realize how much of what we experience is magic performed by the brain and the mind.

Human nature at its very core is ‘the Denmark’ we are talking about. On a daily, moment-by-moment basis we willy-nilly create both illusions and delusions we are unaware of, and then, both fortunately and tragically act upon them. Such is the nature of human consciousness and the way our brain wires us. When we act on delusion, things don’t turn out that well. As I have written elsewhere, we are far less the authors of our lives than we imagine. To a large extent, by the time we believe we are making a decision to act, that decision was already unconsciously taken beforehand by our organism. This is in part good news and ensures survival as we don’t need to think about increasing our heart rate when we run, the fortunate aspect of algorithmic automaticity. The less fortunate aspect is the ‘magic’ by which our bodies experience some kind of pain and we then completely convince ourselves of an utterly deluded reality such as having cancer for example. The way we can spin the most incredible stories that have no base in reality, and then be completely convinced of their truthfulness, is ‘magic’ at its best. Getting to see through our mind’s trickeries is magical in the sense that it liberates us from many self-imposed prisons of our own construction.

Meditation may sound superficially simple, but like Penn and Teller’s video on the analysis of the smoking routine, so often what we see is not what we see. A closer look at the art of meditating or the ‘meditation routine’, if you so will, reveals complexity, skill, and wisdom not visible through cursory glances. True, honest mindfulness, the kind of dedicated, serious, and skilled examination of mind that reveals the ways we create our life’s reality, is like magic – an elaborate awareness skill that leads directly to the core of human existence in an unfathomable universe.

We will never suspect someone of lying if we didn’t know about our own capacity for lying. Mindfulness requires advanced skill training in catching our own lies, and when like a scent hound we ‘follow the money’ to the crime scene of delusion, things get messy as we enter the regions of doubt, ignorance, and unknowing.  Lying has no respect for any rules of honesty, decency, morality, and justice, neither does our brain in its function of ensuring survival at all cost. When it comes to debunking the way we routinely fool ourselves, we need to know how to meet our internal fooler. Fundamentally, to unfool our own fooler is impossible unless we know how we lie, cheat, and swindle. The last time I personally checked, for example, something like 90% of my thoughts was simply unsubstantiated, even wrong, if not blatantly and shamelessly distorting the truth. This may appear depressing at first, but I know that this is part of our human condition, and when we manage to separate the wheat from the chaff and actually see the 10% truth within us, we have likely touched the holy grail of a worthy human existence.

Mindfulness can then be seen as the very difficult art of learning to hold in our hearts and awareness the experience of what it is like to be cheated. The basic question of mindfulness is to ask ourselves how we know what we know, what is true? As we sit on our cushion, are we really meditating? Who is meditating? When we concentrate, are we really stabilizing attention? Are we really embodying kindness? Are we really settling in direct experience? Are we really working with awareness? Is what we do really what we intend to do? Are we really … ?

By exploring the mind through mindfulness as students of reality, we are like scientists: We stand at the boundary between the forest of what we know and the vast frontier of the unknown. At that boundary, we don’t know what is true, nor what question to ask. We are completely in the dark and cognizant of how easily we can be fooled. It is imperative that we do whatever it takes to not fool ourselves into thinking that something that is not true is, and something that is true isn’t. This means being keenly aware of how much of a trickster our mind is. The process of mindful inquiry is like a sloppy meandering full of wrong turns, doubts, mistakes, and dead ends. You never know which path is going to get you to the right place, and tolerating mistakes is a central tenet of creating safety on the uncertain journey into the unknown. This is called experimentation. No guru, teacher, textbook, or tradition can ever be the ultimate arbiter of whether you are on the right track or not – nature is. Nature is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner. If nature does not agree with you, you are wrong! In your inquiry, you have to make sure that your methods and tools allow nature to manifest in whatever way it can to give you the guidance to where the truth lays.

The magic of mindfulness teaches us about storytelling, assumptions, deceptions, constructions, the way we perceive the world, and truth – that is, if there is truth to be found at all! Once we reach the far shores of uncertainty and the unknowable, is there truth, or do we just find life manifesting itself?

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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Our organism is a structured and interactive collection of variously patterned energy flows, such as the individual cells and their interconnections, the hormonal and organ systems, and the different aspects of the mind including awareness, cognition/thoughts, emotions, and somatic sensations.

These energy flows are in a constant process of self-regulation for survival and thriving, which unfolds through self-monitoring and appraising how fluid and adaptive the different energy flows and their intricate interactions are at any one moment. Once a determination is made that these energies flow sub-optimally, the organism proceeds to modify them by creating, tapping into, and using resources in such a way as to achieve maximal integration towards health and wellbeing. Mindfulness meditation and psychotherapy are two ways of working with regulation and enhancing its successful unfolding. In psychotherapy, the therapist is a central resource the patient can lean on to learn to access her own internal resources. In mindfulness meditation, the meditator is alone without the benefit of another person’s support during formal practice, often left to discover his internal world as a collection of neighborhoods he would rather not have to visit alone. This can lead to an overwhelming struggle to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, for which simply following prescribed meditation instructions and techniques is no match. Conditioned and engrained energy flow patterns established during a lifetime of unconscious creation of suffering can interfere with the application of practice techniques and bring the meditator’s practice to a halt.

The question is: Why can mindfulness meditation become so unmanageable?

During the last one to two decades, interest in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) revealed that around 10% of the population experiences PTSD and 70% of adults have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives. In trying to elucidate the effects of trauma on the human brain and our psyche, it became clear that more people than previously believed are suffering from some degree of trauma. Patients with complex trauma (protracted childhood trauma through abuse that deeply affects the adult’s life) are often misdiagnosed with a bipolar affective or borderline personality disorder, and therefore doomed to receive inadequate treatment that does not address the core problem.

The word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek ‘wound’, and in this context refers to the psychological wound incurred through certain circumstances. Trauma is not just an event, although some events are potentially more traumatizing than others, but refers to the way an individual processed certain stressful life events in the past.
The extent to which an individual will become traumatized depends on two sets of interacting factors:
1. The objective characteristics of the event, and
2. The subjective characteristics that define the individual’s mental energy and efficiency.
Combined, these two factors give rise to a spectrum of trauma severities, whereby certain susceptible and fragile individuals will experience trauma under less severe circumstances, and strongly resilient individuals may not be traumatized having lived through more severe circumstances.

What does it mean to be traumatized? To try to put it simply, imagine the starlings’ murmuration – swarms of hundreds of birds dancing in perfect unison through the sky without a leader who coordinates the dance. In the same way, our organism, our brain, and our mind consist of an amalgamation of thousands of varying neurofiring and energy flow clusters that are patterned to interact collaboratively so as to provide us with a certain sense of cohesion, allowing us to live a more or less satisfying life.

Through their functional interconnectedness, these energy flow patterns are constantly self-regulating, and there is no lead energy flow, despite the fact that we like to think we are in control of our lives. Neuroception is the term coined by Steven Porges for the way neurocircuits self-regulate by distinguishing whether a situation is safe, threatening, or dangerous. This ongoing process of appraisal is how our autonomic nervous system evaluates information from our senses about our environment and the state of our body. The collection of thousands of parts our organism is made of interacts efficiently to solve conflicts that may arise and adapt to changes.

When the organism goes through experiences it interprets as traumatic, certain energy flow patterns cease to be well connected with the rest of the organism or even overwhelm the overall energy flow.

This puts us into a state of fear or anger, which combined with various degrees of mobilization or immobilization leads to various psychologically unsolvable situations. A historically recent scientific discovery has revolutionized our understanding of nervous system energy processing. Steven Porges’ polyvagal autonomic nervous system theory has immeasurably deepened our understanding of how human beings process their energy flow through the spectrum of safe, unsafe, and catastrophic experiences. Frank Corrigan‘s later expansion of our understanding of trauma processing and its treatment through Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) provides further tools I have integrated into my trauma-informed mindfulness meditation technique.

An example is the child of an abusive parent; the child needs her parent and the attachment system gets the child to seek proximity to the parent, while the parent’s abuse causes terrible fear and anger. As a consequence, the child experiences an unsolvable psychological situation of attachment with fear or anger and no way out. To survive, the organism uses its specialized and sophisticated, polyvagal defense strategies to isolate some of those overheated neurofiring patterns from the rest of the overall energy flow and put in place substitute mechanisms to hold the whole system together. This process of isolation can be mild in the form of compartmentalization or more severe in the form of dissociation.

Let’s take a fun detour: The nervous system, both somatic and autonomic, embryologically stems from the outer membrane enveloping the fertilized egg, which eventually becomes the skin. At some point in the evolution of the embryo, a part of that membrane begins to differentiate into nerve cells, which then migrate into the center of the fertilized egg, becoming the nervous system.

Remember that a membrane’s function is to regulate the traffic of substances across it between the outside world and the inside of the cell. It can thus be seen as a relationship organ, regulating the way the outside world and the inside milieu of the cell relate to each other. As it differentiates into the nervous system and migrates inward presumably becoming the ‘mem-brain’, it does not lose its relational function. The nerve cell is the only cell in the body that does not produce anything. Instead, it is an electrical and biochemical information conduit that passes information from one end of the nerve cell to the other, and then through synapses to other nerve cells. Like the membrane, its function is relatedness. This makes the brain the relationship organ par excellence.

Healthy brain and mind functioning thus depend on the establishment of as much connectivity between all its elements and parts as possible. Since the brain’s potential neurofiring patterns exceed the number of known particles in our universe, the potential to grow as human beings is limitless during our lifetime. Chronic interruptions of that connectivity through childhood trauma, for example, are what causes psychological and somatic symptoms, as well as trauma, with all the suffering we can create for ourselves. Logically then, the essence of psychological therapeutic interventions is about reestablishing connectivity by stopping the process of connectivity interruption.

Just because a cluster of neurofiring patterns has been sequestered away does not mean it ceases to be active.

On the contrary, like unprepared musicians in one part of an orchestra, these dissociated parts continue to actively disrupt the whole system; because they are not integrated into the whole, they produce various psychological and physical symptoms that can be conceptualized as frictions within the system, which are caused by the organism’s inability to coordinate its overall energy flow in a smooth fashion. In surveying the whole patient population I have treated over the past 40 years, I can say that most people experience at least some degree of such disintegration throughout their lifetime, and we can find a wide spectrum of severity of such dissociation.

In light of these relatively new discoveries, approaches to psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation have been developed that are sensitive to what we now know about trauma and our polyvagal processing, and are therefore referred to as trauma-sensitive approaches, such as the one I developed.

An important aspect of such approaches is called ‘resourcing’, which refers to how healing trauma requires that surging traumatic memories must be met within the safety of a strong and loving sense of self.

Without that, just applying meditation techniques will not provide the necessary safety for trauma memories to be relived and rewired in an integrating fashion. This is the reason why so many people fail at attempts to apply mindfulness in their lives. In order to heal traumas, we have to be able to draw on internalized loving, strong, courageous, benevolent, and wise energy flows, and to do that we need to be able to create, tap into and use resources that are available to us from deep within ourselves. In psychotherapy, we have a therapist who can provide these resources until we have been able to internalize them, but in formal mindfulness meditation practice, we are alone having to face ourselves, whoever we may be.

Resourcing has thus been recognized as crucial to psychological healing in general, not only for traumatized individuals.

However, this has not always been so, despite the fact that over two thousand years ago, so history scholars tell us, Buddha was exquisitely skilled at teaching everyone who wanted to meditate the exact meditation technique that was uniquely suitable for them.

When I was first introduced to Zen by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, who had already modified the original Zen instructions in a way that made them more accessible to Westerners, the original Zen instruction to meditation was short and not sweet, but brutal: ‘Just sit!’. No wonder Zen with its ‘just sit!’ invitation became somewhat of an exclusive club only a few people could stomach. For those with any degree of trauma, ‘just sitting’ most often would lead to retraumatizing experiences that would stall their progress in meditation and cause them to become psychologically more troubled than before.

With today’s knowledge about the brain and the mind, and in particular, about our polyvagal wiring, it is clear that for a successful journey in meditation, we need to know how to properly resource as a way of gaining the necessary strength needed to then roam our pained internal neighborhoods alone. I am therefore suggesting the term ‘Resource-Based Mindfulness Meditation‘ for an approach to mindfulness that embeds the necessary techniques of attention, awareness, and kindness within a solid cocoon of both internal and external resources we can draw upon any time to make sure our inner journey towards healing remains safe and productive.

The importance of accessing, creating, and knowing how to use resources when working with the mind is not just limited to trauma, but quite generally a central concern for anyone wanting to successfully work with the complexity of the human mind.

Plenty of scientific evidence for the importance of resourcing is now available, and we can now practice very specific exercises and mindfulness techniques that have been shown to have scientifically established targeted effects we can count on.

As far as mindfulness meditation is concerned, this requires a resource-informed, trauma-sensitive modification in our approach to meditation that honors each meditator’s unique mind configuration and conditioned hindrances for maximal results. ‘Resource-Based Mindfulness‘ introduces a new, modified approach to teaching and learning mindfulness requiring exposure to resources as an integral part of learning.

Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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The oceanographer Francois Serano recounts an experience with a young male sperm whale, who approached the researchers with curiosity and communicated the way sperm whales usually only communicate when they intimately interact among themselves. It was a highly unusual encounter, as if the whale wanted to tame the researchers and invite them to become part of their own. This meeting of two curiosities from vastly different worlds made him feel he was in harmony with the world. This curiosity about the radically other, that which is so profoundly different from me and by all accounts appears unrelatable, and the caring respect for each other across this large divide of different realities as we spend time in the presence of each other, creates peace, calm and harmony. This peace reveals itself to be communicative.

We have a habit of wanting to make the radically other our own, to assimilate it into our own reality, even devour it as a way of satisfying our thirst for knowledge, power, safety, and belonging. Case in point: Stuffed hunted wild animals as trophies at people’s homes, ethnic cleansing, and assimilation. We use our mind and the constructed sense of self to literally suck like a vacuum the radically other such as our body’s otherness into our familiar intellectual orbit, believing that we can understand its full complexity. Alternatively, we have to defend against other cultures, who with a similar mind like ours attempt to invade us. We have no clue how to really get to know the radically other by honoring the safe distance that invites the other to reveal itself.

In the presence of a wild animal, one cannot cheat, rationalize, defend or lie. Reality is inescapable and one is completely naked, forced to embrace vulnerability and simplicity in full presence. This also applies to being with and in our bodies. The body not only keeps the score, but has an existence, motives, drives, agendas, and energy flow all its own, belonging to a very different world from our world of thoughts.

When with an empty head and open ears we offer ourselves completely to nature, the other, and the body, and when we do that with mindful attention and respect, one then discovers an unexpected and infinite world we never imagined existed, which is the world we need to share with our children. This kind of curiosity for and openness to the radical other creates the real, deep sense of peace we crave.

We will never understand the radical other, the way we will never understand a whale or a whale us. What is essential though is the fact that there is intention on both parts to bridge the vast gap of different existential realities. We don’t need to fully understand the other to feel good; all we need is to want to understand the other across vast canyons of mystery. Given that we inter-are with everything, to live in peace and harmony with everything means finding the right distance that allows for the kind of presence that is the sum of freedom and togetherness. The space between me and the other is a matter of degrees of separation that ensure the thriving of curiosity as a way of safely reaching out without aggression or hesitation. In that sense, nature is inherently deeply social and teaches us how to live in peace by honoring uniqueness and variety.

Loaded with prejudice and preconceived ideas about the radically other, we become scared of otherness and difference. We then form opinions and engage in a distorted and dangerous chatter about that, which one has never mindfully reached out to, visited, explored, or invited for tea with an open heart. The result is war, ignorance, and self-imprisonment. We ought to become aware that we are inextricably connected to this world; and then, honoring that interconnectedness, that membership in a large web that has no weaver, makes us realize how serene we become, the way nature is an interwoven world that brings serenity. Segregation, isolation, and protective demarcation cause stress and tension, not peace. In reaching out with mindful curiosity, we always discover that the other is rich, and has marvelous stories to tell. Even if it is difficult or impossible to understand each other, it is the curious attempt at reaching out with kindness that counts. Whenever one goes to meet the radically other, other cultures, other species, other environments, our bodies, one can find that right distance that allows interacting and inter-being in peace. We then discover at the same time the unity of the world through that which we all fundamentally share when it comes to important questions, but also the diversity and the inequalities that are based on everyone’s uniqueness. We should never hierarchize these inequalities, attaching value judgments to them, but recognize them as what constitutes the world’s richness.

Let’s look at the jungle, a seemingly chaotic place of deadly competition, internal survival wars, and mutual interspecies aggression. We call that the law of the jungle. A closer look reveals a very different picture. When in the wild immediate survival needs are met, what’s left is free time to caress, to play, to explore, to just be there, wander around and cultivate the useless. The law of the jungle is about laziness, frugality, and cooperation, not striving, accumulation, and war. It is our minds that create this sense of time as a limited commodity, within which we feel constant pressure, the pressure to perform, to achieve, to distract, even to kill time and never waste it. We have a pathological and oppressive notion of time as something that can be wasted, killed, used or lost, as we go through life driven by the fear of never having accumulated enough. In the wilderness of nature and the healthy nature of our bodies, accumulation does not exist beyond what is necessary for survival, cooperation is the foundation for thriving, and laziness or leisure is the name of the game.

The jungle and the oceans are cauldrons of evolution, and competition is not the motor of evolution – cooperation and association are. Take corals: They are a combination of two small, seemingly insignificant, most simple organisms, and yet they have given rise to humungous structures that have profoundly changed the planet’s geography and given rise to many new and varied environments making an incredible diversification of life possible. The small has huge impacts that are only visible over time! Evolution gives rise to diversity, not privileged selections. What we are used to calling ‘natural selection’ is in fact natural diversification. Survival of the fittest and removal of the weak and dysfunctional is not the way nature works; these notions are human mind constructions about nature. On the contrary, what we thought was ‘natural selection’ and now understand to be natural diversification, is about the principle of encouragement of anything that has the ability to reproduce and survive, however imperfect, weak, or defective it may be. Evolution and its natural diversification are incredibly generous. As long as reproduction, creativity, and survival are possible, go ahead. Natural diversification supports the whole package, the unity of morphology, physiology, behavior, and where applicable social interactions, as long as the entity can reproduce itself. Nature is creative and tolerant; it is human beings that are selective, impoverishing, and intolerant. We reduce, nature multiplies. Our ideal is power, superman or superwoman, the hero, the strongman we elect into dictatorships. For nature, everyone is superman with its own uniqueness and assets, like the people of a democracy. Diversity in nature is beautiful, rich, and solid the way integration as linked differentiation manifests the FACES flow of energy, Flexibility, Adaptability, Coherence, Emergence, Stability, and health. The more we select by picking the good and discarding the weak, the bad, and the mistake, the more we reduce the potential for new creations.

Our world is now so small and we are so many that we cannot escape otherness anymore the way we could in the past with only a few human groupings on the planet. Isolationism profoundly goes against the laws of nature, which is the most creatively flexible, adaptive and stable phenomenon on this planet. Isolationism cannot lead to anything else than impoverished selection with catastrophic consequences from walls to bombs and wars as the symptom of our self-imprisonment.

The genius of nature is reproduction in the inexorable flow of change, and with such rich and enormously creative reproduction come little mistakes that sneak into the unfolding process, creating variety. The way the human mind creates by avoiding mistakes through repetition and reductive selection for a certain purpose, is antithetical to change, resilience and adaptability. The problem is that the purpose for which we select will inevitably change, and what has been selected for that purpose cannot adapt. To foster adaptability, we need errors and mistakes we can then nourish with a beginner’s mind instead of being so afraid of them, afraid of making them. Errors have no purpose and therefore tolerate any changing circumstance, thus always winning the survival game. When there is change, variety always provides at least one specimen able to do something new adapted to the demands of change. Variety always provides options to adapt. With monoculture, when there is a change, there is no variant to take over or compensate and adapt – it’s the end, meaning death and extinction. This is why in deep meditation we access the open plane of infinite possibilities, that vast, indescribable, and non-definable awareness itself as the source of everything that comes into being.

The current state of our planet causes many to give up, but giving up ignores the incredible creativity of nature that bursts open when we begin to simply protect it and not exploit it. Resignation and inaction are plainly inconceivable and morally irresponsible. The solution can only be found by humanity as a whole working together, with everyone involved.

The core learning points from all this for mindfulness practitioners consist of the following idea: To liberate ourselves from suffering, we need to liberate ourselves from the prison of stories and their associated emotions we incessantly and compulsively create in our minds. These stories are nothing more than the construction of an airtight virtual reality, in which we are the protagonists that act in the storied drama and continually try to make sense of our place in the scheme of the world. The body is the vehicle par excellence to extricate ourselves from our narrative bubble, and attention to the somatic sensations in the whole body, the breathing, and the experiences from the external five senses are paramount to teach us to disidentify from the stories we tell ourselves. However, the body and the external world are the radically other I was speaking about earlier, and it is very challenging for most to fully immerse ourselves into the experience of reaching out across a vast canyon of mystery to the radically other and unfamiliar the way the sperm whale did with the researcher and vice versa. It is this act of loving, well-meaning curiosity for and reaching out to what is entirely outside our familiar realm of comfort that lies at the core of healing and peace. The principles and laws of nature described above apply most definitely to our daily mindfulness practices, and in particular, the realization that nature entails not only the trees, rivers, forests, animals, and oceans in the external world, but also our very own embodied mind and body we inhabit day-in and day-out.

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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What the mindfulness journey is really about

Was it not for a recent dream one of my patients brought into a session, in which a two-faced person appeared, I would likely not have started this blog with Janus. Consciously, my patient knew nothing about this Roman god. I concluded, that the collective unconscious Carl Jung described is alive and well even in this technological day and age of science and computers, where studying Roman mythology is hardly the main menu in our school curriculums anymore. Come to think of it, that the collective unconscious has not lost its power is hardly surprising, given that the brain that inhabited our ancestor’s skulls 30,000 years ago, is anatomically and physiologically still the same brain as today – and as far as its wiring is concerned, in its fundamental functions it is still wired the same, just different in some of its higher cortical functions. Granted, some of the content in the collective unconscious has of course shifted with the cultural shifts of our civilization.

Was I an ancient Roman to pick a god for my role as meditation teacher and psychotherapist, it would be Janus. The two-faced deity is found in many cultures, all the way back to original Hinduism and Vedic times. Fast forward to today, the ‘god’ notion has morphed into the psychological notion of archetype through Jung’s work, a universal, collective and unconscious psychological force with cultural significance. Janus’ two faces look into the opposite directions of past and future while belonging to the same head that creates and contemplates reality. They are sometimes a feminine and masculine face. Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions responsible for change, transformation, motion, and time. He is the god of space, time, and creation, always present in the midst of transitions, with one eye towards what came before, and one towards what comes next. In our work with mindfulness, he may as well be the symbol of the present moment, which as I have explored in my previous blog, invites us into its inescapable orbit with the beckoning scriptural and mythological call ‘Once upon a time, ….’ or ‘In the beginning …’, both formulaic idioms that in today’s mindfulness parlance would translate into ‘Bring your attention to the present moment and begin to explore what you find.’ In the double role of Janus, I am also related to the name’s etymological roots in the Latin ‘ianua’, meaning ‘door’, suggesting that Janus is the ‘ianitor’, the doorkeeper of transitions. You see where I am going with this: Could it be that as a meditation teacher and psychotherapist I am the janitor, opening the doors to the place of work and education, and closing them after everyone has left in order to safeguard the sacred place of daily busyness and erudition, then going about my real business of cleaning it in the dark hours of the silent night when everyone has left it behind with unsolved messes the way we all leave behind our unconscious?

The champion of the present moment is mindfulness, defined as impartial present moment awareness with kind acceptance of what is. When I sit across a patient or a student, I sit there in humble awareness of my role as janitor and gardener, mindful of the present moment as I engage with an attitude of kind acceptance with this other human being, sharing and exploring our common humanity and the mutual dance of inquiry into what is. In this act, which is a profound act of love towards the other and myself, we are both not just aware of, but inescapably embedded in the present moment, always partially aware and mostly unknowingly unaware.

With our thoughts, we can create the temporary illusion of not being in the present moment and in far-out places and times of our imagination. That escape invariably fails as our neighbor in the theatre of life coughs and brings our attention away from the plot on the screen into directly lived reality. We inevitably wake up from the movies of our own creation to realize that we are tightly gripping the armrests of our theatre seat in the only reality we can fall back on, the stubborn reality of the inescapable truth of Now.

‘In the beginning’, meaning ‘in the present moment’, the two faces of Janus, past and future, are one as they only exist now. In this Now, there are no categories of energy flow except for those we create as maps to orient ourselves in the territory of Now. Our memories of yesterday occur now, our anticipations and plans for a future occur now, our history is completely enfolded into the layers of now, and above all, in this Now there is nothing but wholeness, even if that wholeness appears fragmented at times. Unless I dissociate or compartmentalize, I can only meet my fellow human beings and myself as whole organisms in the inescapable wholeness of now. Therefore, within the context of mindfulness, I personally cannot separate meditation from psychotherapy while looking my fellow human in the eye. For practical reasons I can separate the two in the way I introduce them to students and patients, but that is all. Sitting with a person who asks for help I am thus compelled to see wholeness in the process of transformation, not static ‘issues’ to be dealt with through compartmentalized techniques.

I am always at once a meditation teacher and psychotherapist, which gets reflected in the way I work. Showing my students how to access the mystery of Now always entails the realization that our memories and stories about our history are also revealed now. Even if the content of these memories and stories does not get extensively explored within the context of a meditation class, awareness and openness to its narrative power and degree of coherence are crucial in guiding students towards the knowledge that additional psychotherapy will be essential for their success on their journey towards health (see my blog on ‘The Dangers Of Improper Guidance By Meditation Teachers‘). Conversely, psychotherapeutic reflections on our stories, and how we create them, is frequently not enough to heal, because the patient needs training in here-and-now attentiveness in order to be able to see the inner world with greater precision, and therefore greater depth. This often requires mindfulness meditation training to complement the psychotherapeutic endeavor. In short, unless meditation includes awareness of its procedural limitations with regards to the stories we create, and psychotherapy fosters meditative attentiveness beyond the story content it explores, we tend to fall short on our life’s journey towards wisdom and health most of us so fervently desire. The reason lies in how we are wired with the complexity of nine domains of integration, all of which require our attention for our journey towards wholeness.

According to Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) we are wired with nine clusters of neurocircuitry responsible for nine functions of the mind that are essential for healthy living. Those are the domains of integration just mentioned. When these clusters function harmoniously, we say they are integrated, and that translates into health. When one or more of them do not function harmoniously and find themselves in states of chaos, rigidity, or both, we develop dis-ease and both physical and psychological diseases. In our role as healers, we cannot in good conscience ignore any of these domains, nor privilege one over any other. When we suffer, something is rotten in the united states of these nine domains, and we need the expertise that gives us full access to all necessary tools to address disharmonies. Mindfulness, with its combined tools of meditation and psychotherapy, provides what is necessary to address the whole human being.

Not all domains of integration are accessible through either one or the other of the two modalities, meditation or psychotherapy. Some require one, some the other, some both. At the core of both, however, is mindfulness, which could be characterized with one word as attentiveness. When we are attentive, impartiality, present-moment awareness, acceptance of what is, and kindness are all included. Sitting with another person or oneself, attentiveness is the Janus that regulates our way of flowing with our energy through time, space, life, and beyond. Yes, regulation of our energy flow is a profoundly important process and skill that has to be learned, by which we monitor how our energy flows, and then modify it to cultivate the harmony of integration necessary for good physical and mental health, resilience, vibrantly loving relationships, existential fulfillment, and spiritual awakening.

Everything is in the present moment like the ingredients of a minestrone, partly explicitly visible, partly implicitly hidden. The art is to make sense of it all and skillfully differentiate the wheat from the chaff so that the inherent power of regulation dispersed throughout our organism can be brought to bear by the loving act of getting out of our own way. As meditators, psychotherapists, and seekers, we are Michelangelos contemplating a raw piece of marble. The wrong question to ask is how to sculpt our vision through this piece of marble. It is not about what we can do to become better versions of who we know we already are. The better approach is to listen to the marble slab, and hear what sculpture it already holds hidden in the mystery of its density that begs to be liberated from the excess stone. Our journey is about peeling away unnecessary complications, scars, and distortions of a life lived for desperate survival. We have to learn to get out of our own way through the process of unlearning once useful patterns of survival we mobilized at an age we had but few resources, then replacing them with skills that enhance and foster the organism’s natural and spontaneous tendency towards the light of integration, health, and spiritual fulfillment.

What the mindfulness journey is really about is to find out how we can relinquish our ideas about who we think we already know we are supposed to be, so that who we really are can emerge in an unexpected and creative act of rebirth into a person we would have never imagined we could be.

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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Beginner’s mind is an attitude of openness

Beginner’s mind is a notion that originated in the Buddhist Zen tradition, referring to an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when examining one’s mind. Maintaining beginner’s mind is what’s most difficult in mindfulness because we are customarily imprisoned by our mind’s incessant chatter. We are deeply wired by evolution for this chatter, which has a very particular function. It is mediated by the brain’s default mode circuitry, a network of neurons devised by nature to use cognition and story-making to construct a sense of self from our body’s sensations, and project that sense of self into the past and future, so that we can remember and plan. In addition, this circuitry constantly scans for problems it then goes about trying to solve in conditioned ways, that are often rigid, chaotic, or otherwise distorted by having had to survive difficult past experiences. In short, this chatter is our brain’s built-in mechanism to construct a sense of self it then tries to guide through life by means of stories that are supposed to make sense. We live enveloped in a storied world of concepts and narratives that are supposed to reflect reality, when in fact they are just the maps of the territory, the menus of the meals of directly lived experience. What’s even more problematic is that these stories contain various and many distortions we don’t recognize as such.

This default mode circuitry is active when the brain is at rest, inactive when we are engaged in concentrating on a task. This is the reason why so many people cannot fall asleep at night. The moment they ‘relax’ to try and go to sleep, this chatter becomes active and keeps some of us awake by its ruminative ways of trying to solve imaginary problems it can never solve that way. In other words, we are locked in a world of constant chatter, whether task-oriented or for its own purpose of constructing and guiding a self as it lives and acts in the world. This chatter consists of information about lived experience, with all the distortions that story-making gives rise to. The direct experience of being alive through pre-conceptual awareness called beginner’s mind eludes us, causing substantial suffering.

Beginner’s mind is an attitude of openness to the present moment without preconceived knowledge and expectations. It is difficult to embody and requires training to develop. Imagining the curious mind attitude of young children, for whom everything is utterly novel, is the habitual metaphor used to describe it. We can however examine more closely what elements constitute beginner’s mind by exploring mindfulness and compassion.

In Mindful Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer differentiate mindfulness with its target on experience from compassion with its target on the experiencer. Mindfulness can be described as impartial present-moment awareness with kind acceptance of what we are aware of. It focuses on experience with the question ‘what am I experiencing right now?’, inviting us to directly experience our suffering with spacious, pre-conceptual awareness. Compassion, both towards others and oneself acknowledges the fundamental relational aspect of human experience and focuses on both experiencers, the self and the other. By asking the question ‘what do I/you need right now?’, compassion invites us to be kind to ourselves and others when we suffer. Mindfulness brings clarity of view on experience and reality; compassion brings the necessary sense of safety for the experiencers (both self and other) to be able to open up to and bear difficult experiences and develop clarity of view. The clarity of view of mindful awareness develops through attentional training, while the sense of safety in compassion comes from an empathically attuned relationship to others and oneself.

Mindfulness and compassion are mutually reinforcing in a dance of bidirectional correlation. They need each other. Without compassion, the observing experiencer feels unsafe, tenses up, and makes the mindful work on attentional stabilization to gain clarity over experience impossible. The experiencer becomes like a photographer on the back of a pick-up truck crossing a river bed, who tries to stabilize the camera. Instead of being in the service of gaining clarity, the attentional energy then gets detoured into problem-solving and goal achievement. Conversely, without mindfulness, experience and experiencer get confused and there is no clarity of experience to relate to, giving compassion no clear target to attune itself to. Instead of being directed towards the experiencer, it then gets used to change experience as resistance to pain.

Beginner’s mind is the amalgamation of clear differentiation from a mindfulness point of view, and radical acceptance from a compassion point of view. Through clear differentiation in mindfulness, we don’t satisfy ourselves with an approximate fuzzy view of experience, such as ‘my knee hurts and I fear that I am going to have an operation’. Instead, we cultivate intense curiosity about the details of experience on a direct, pre-conceptual level of awareness in the here and now, and never take anything we observe for granted as something we may delude ourselves to already know. As for radical acceptance, we drop the idea of progress and refine our intention to be compassionate for its own sake, not to feel better, but because we feel bad. We don’t practice compassion to be free from pain, but just because at times it is hard to be embodied and human. Curiosity for details of direct pre-conceptual experience in the here and now through mindfulness, combined with radical acceptance through compassion, together form the two fundamental aspects of beginner’s mind.

Beginner’s mind finds its expressions also in mythology and sacred texts as I wrote about elsewhere. You would unlikely use Bible style and say ‘In the beginning of my holidays it rained, but the weather turned nice later on’. Instead, you would most likely say ‘At the beginning of my holidays it rained, but the weather turned nice later on’. ‘At’ implies a point or period in time, before and after which other things happened. ‘In the beginning’ echoes ‘once upon a time’. There is a sense that what is about to be said is situated right inside at the core of something called the beginning, or ‘on top of’ and therefore outside time. The Book of J assumed to be the original poem from which later the Bible evolved, is rather explicit: ‘… from the day Yahweh made the earth and sky, a mist from within would rise to moisten the surface.’ Again, our attention is drawn to a ‘soothing mist within time’, the nature of which we need to understand. By stepping ‘inside’ the beginning, we step out of time, the same way we do so by stepping ‘on top of’ time. Both the inside and the outside of the beginning, expressed by the idioms ‘In the beginning …’ and ‘Once upon a time …’, are about timelessness, the soothing mist and mystery of human life as experienced through the direct means of pre-conceptual awareness in the here and now.

When the Bible begins in Genesis with ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, and in John’s Gospel with ‘In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God’, or when our favorite fairy tale begins with ‘Once upon a time there was a very kind princess …’, we are invited to hear something about timelessness, not a historical description within time. What follows these idioms is what happens now, in every moment of our lives, which has always happened and will continue to happen now for all eternity. It is therefore non-sensical to ask what was before the beginning or to think that the Bible is a historical account of what happened next. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’ means that God always creates the heavens and the earth right now and that the invitation is for us to go beyond the chatter of the default mode circuitry and drop into the direct, pre-conceptual awareness of Being as life’s deepest mystery, where we will discover ‘God’ creating everything that exists right now, and now, and now, moment by moment, out of the great nothingness of pure potential. The same applies to ‘Once upon a time there was a kind princess, who received a visit from the wicked witch’. The witch’s visit to the princess always occurs in the eternal Now, to be relived moment by moment again and again as a ritualistic mystery that reveals the secrets of our soul. To recognize that and be able to feel it as a lived experience in the eternal Now, is beginner’s mind.
To respond to the invitation to enter the world of beginner’s mind in a directly embodied fashion is not so easy. It may thus be appropriate to leave the last word to an age-old master of beginner’s mind:

In the pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally, you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
It can’t be gained by interfering.

Tao Te Ching #48, by Lao-Tzu

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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