Counteracting Our Mind’s Deceptive Ways in Meditation

The Case For Careful Self-Monitoring

We constantly intend many things in life, but all too often what turns out does not correspond to what we intended. We then blame factors outside our control, rather than noticing that we undermine our own intentions. How so? A very simple mechanism plays a predominant role: We forget to self-monitor, assuming that once an intention has run out of the gate, the stars are properly aligned for all concerned neurofirings to shoot in the same direction as they do the intention’s bidding. This could not be more wrong! Just because we intend something, does not mean that our actions actually follow what we intend at all. There is a whole world between intention and execution, a chaotic sizzling of myriad contradictory neurofirings with their own agenda and unconscious intentions that undermine our original intentions. For survival purposes, the brain is infinitely creative in the construction of useful and not so useful illusions we fall prey to. These illusions are then embedded in seemingly seamless narratives that depict a distorted reality we believe in, not noticing the many inbuilt gaps we remain completely unaware of. In short, making sure that an intention comes to fruition as the corresponding intended action, is an art, the art of self-monitoring. Most meditation failures my students seek my help for have their roots in a lack of self-monitoring.

Here are two vignettes I recently encountered with my students:

Lydia, as I will call her, reported that she experienced anxiety, whenever she was paying attention to her breath, which is why she did not pursue this practice. She wondered how to deal with that. In my presence, I invited her to close her eyes and focus her attention on the somatic sensations accompanying the breathing in the belly. I then asked her, whether the focus of her attention is now on the sensations in the belly, and she confirmed it was. Next, I asked her to describe the sensations she was witnessing within the focus of her attention, and her response was ‘very strong heartbeat and thoughts about how unpleasant the meditation is’. Her anxiety, as seemingly predicted by her original complaint, was fairly high.

Peter, as I will call my second student, sent me an email with regards to a meditation he was supposed to practice, in which the focus of attention is also in the somatic sensations accompanying the breathing in the belly. He wrote: “The challenge I have by keeping the focus on the pelvis is boredom and restlessness.  Can I instead focus my attention on a candle to ward off boredom?”

Before you read on, take a break and reflect on these two vignettes. Ask yourself how you would help these two students, and where the problem might lie. Imagine being one of those students and what your problem might be.

In both cases, the mind is playing tricks on them, and they don’t notice it. Completely unaware, they either think seeing a reality they are actually not seeing, or blatantly disregard cardinal rules of mindfulness they are theoretically well aware of. The result is as Shakespeare would say ‘what you see is not what you see’, a sort of unconscious lying to oneself, which leads to believing the mind’s distorted constructions, not noticing that these beliefs are just constructions of the mind, and finally mistaking these beliefs for reality and truth. It is a good thing that these two students reached out to examine their challenge, because, without an experienced teacher, their meditation attempts would understandably falter and never lead anywhere.

Lydia’s predicament is that she thought her attention is in the somatic sensations in the belly, when in fact her response to my second question made it very clear that her attention was in the region of the heart and even far away from somatic sensations in cognitive stories about meditation, not in the somatic sensations of the belly. In other words, her attention was not endogenous, meaning intentionally aimed at a chosen focus, but exogenous, meaning captured by whatever her organism was preoccupied with. Since anxiety was one of her challenges, she unwittingly fed it by not noticing that she was maintaining the same dysregulated monkey mind that caused her anxiety and she struggled within her everyday life. The moment I helped her realize what was happening, and she really started to focus on the belly sensations, not only did it become clear that intentionally taking charge of one’s attention is hard work, but her anxiety temporarily lifted.

Peter is an experienced meditation student, and he is very familiar with one of the fundamental principles of mindfulness – that we turn towards pain and discomfort rather than avoid it. Somehow, in that situation, his mind did not make the connection and gave him the impression that it would be a good idea to find an easier focus of attention. First of all, since the candle has more appeal to his curiosity, by switching to the candle he would weaken endogenous attention in favor of the exogenous attention of the monkey mind. Second, his idea of ‘warding off’ would strengthen the repressive forces of the mind, which contribute to getting us in trouble in the first place. Third, he would dismiss boredom and restlessness as experiences and mental states not worthy of exploration, thus perpetuating the suffering caused by what is hidden behind these mental states. It is therefore of utmost importance he sticks with the original instructions and makes sure that he faces and works through whatever challenges arise, rather than avoid them.

In my experience, most students who give up on mindfulness meditation or cannot penetrate all the way ‘down’ to the transcendental dimension of existence and our Being, fail to do so, because they are not solid in their use of meditation tools, nor do they recognize the myriad ways our awe-inspiring human mind, embodied in the most complex object in the known universe, our brain, can so easily and massively fool us. Precision in our way of observing and mastery of our meditation tools are essential on our mindsight journey. The human capacity for self-deception is limitless, and if we are not steadily on the look-out for the next mind trap, and cultivate a healthy skepticism for anything we believe we see, we suffer, cause suffering for others and get hopelessly lost in the swamp of our own ignorance.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Transcendental Being

Let me preface this blog with a healthy dose of reservations and skepticism. This topic lends itself to idealizations and unrealistic fantasies of deliverance from suffering the human mind is all too ready to indulge in. Just because I write about an incredibly powerful aspect of consciousness, does not mean it is easily accessible or even desirable for everyone, nor that in writing about it I belong to an exclusive club of enlightened beings, for whom suffering, getting lost in their own mental distortions and screwing up in life is a thing of the past. Without exception, we are all in the same soup – terribly flawed creatures having to deal with the lifelong challenge of coming to terms with such a powerfully complex brain and incredibly vast mind full of conflicts and contradictions. Like Jack Kornfield’s choice of title for one of his books, after enlightenment comes the laundry. The notion of enlightenment is such a treacherously seductive one that causes much unhealthy wishful striving, that I even propose to abolish it. I much prefer the humbler notion of unendarkenment, which is so much more authentic and true to reality as it is, and more apt to keep our feet on the ground, instead of seducing us to lose our head in the clouds.

One Mindsight student wrote me an email before taking the course, asking whether I could tell her more about the course, such as goals/outcomes. It sounds reasonable that you take the course to increase your knowledge, meet certain goals that make taking it worth your money, and achieve certain positives outcomes for whatever ails you. Let’s remember, though, that what’s ‘reasonable’ falls under the purview of reason, and reason is the power of the mind to think, understand and form judgments by a process of logic.

This mind power stems from what we also call the problem-solving mind, which is only a fraction of the mind’s function and power. Yet, it is this fraction of the mind that for various reasons thoroughly explained here overpowers the whole mind as we unconsciously slide from childhood into adulthood. The majority of human beings never manage to realize this, let alone leave this prison that prevents access to much of what consciousness could offer. In other words, we live in a narrative bubble, a cultural envelope of societal norms we mistake for reality, not realizing that the consciousness that goes with it, is heavily truncated and limited by the blinders of logic. Don’t get me wrong, the ability to problem-solve in a logical way is of course a uniquely human asset of great importance for survival. To live life deeply with an appreciation of reality beyond logic and an ability to relieve one’s suffering on the deepest level possible, the problem-solving mind alone is woefully inadequate.

An elderly Zen master received the visit from a Western journalist, who wanted to know a whole lot of things about Zen. They sat at a table, where tea was ready to be served. As the journalist began talking and asking all these questions he had in his mind, the Zen master began pouring the journalist’s tea. When the cup was full, he didn’t stop pouring, and the tea spilled all over the journalist’s clothes. Needless to say, the journalist was rather startled and became upset and irritated, wondering whether maybe this Zen master was after all senile. He asked: “Why on earth did you do that?” To which the Zen master responded: “You see, your mind is like this cup of tea when it was full. There is no room to add more understanding of Zen. In order to understand Zen, you are going to have to empty your mind first, in order to become receptive to a new reality.”

Taking this Mindsight Intensive with the right attitude that will allow you to see realms of reality you had no prior access to, is understandably going to be difficult because it goes against all that is reasonable or sensible. Thus the first order of business to join the course is to throw the idea out the window that you are coming to learn new things and replace it with the idea that you are coming to unlearn everything. Your knowledge will be a hindrance and your capacity to unknow a boon.

Once you have really absorbed what that entails, you can take it further. I am sure you are coming with the hope that certain life issues will improve – throw that out the window. You may hope to decrease certain symptoms – out the window. You may hope to learn to be less stressed or feel better, to have better relationships, or to get closer to life’s meaning – all out the window. Now look out the window and watch the pile of old, well-worn, outdated garbage increase as you systematically relinquish every idea you may have with regards to how this course is going to enhance anything in your life, whether it is knowledge, wellbeing, happiness, wealth, health or anything else you can think of. In fact, here is a good start to the program: Expect nothing, hope for nothing, and prepare yourself to become increasingly empty-handed and lose everything, in order to gain everything. How to do that, has to be learned.

Now here is the paradox: Reacting to what I just said, your problem-solving, rational mind, I am pretty sure, may already have created in you an apprehensive mental state dominated by fear, gloom and aversion, causing you to doubt the wisdom to spend your money that way. Surprisingly, though, engaging in this project I just described creates a deep sense of relaxation, relief, liberation, spaciousness, new vigor and peacefulness. It may now sound like this whole idea of losing everything to gain everything is an elaborate sleight of logic to hide the fact, that we are still pursuing a gain of some sort, pretending not to. Not quite – a closer look at this process will reveal why.

I give you this: Accessing the transcendent is not for the birds, and indeed, we gain immensely from it. The question is how we get to gain everything, and what that ‘gaining everything’ really means. The way we are used to gain is by adding and improving through the problem-solving mind’s logic, which leads to material, psychological and practical gains. What we don’t notice as this gaining evolution unfolds, is that it does so within the narrow context of consciousness with blinders on, the rational, problem-solving mind. Many an ailment, struggle, stress, unhappiness and symptom is due to this narrowing of consciousness we ignore. Because the rational mind’s currency (the cognitive concept, thought, and narrative containing strings of concepts) pretty well matches many aspects of everyday reality (when I ask you to pass me the butter, my words have a pretty precise correspondence to the actual objects and actions I am referring to), we unconsciously come to believe that our concepts and narratives that are managed by the problem-solving mind are the reality we live in. We don’t notice at all that we actually live in a reality of our own construction that only vaguely and incompletely reveals full reality to us. We try to be fed by the menu while we confuse it for the meal, surprised we remain consistently hungry. We live a dream, not noticing that we do so, and are therefore unable to wake up from it.

To leave the dream for reality in its more complete nakedness and truth, adding more to the knowledge of the dream will only perpetuate the dream. To wake up from the dream, a fundamentally counter-intuitive action of consciousness is necessary: Getting to know the nature of the dream and getting out of our own way by letting go of every item, action and belief in the dream, allowing the dream to dissolve in a puff of smoke. This involves an orthogonal shift in consciousness that adds more dimensions to its field. As this happens, it is not uncommon to be temporarily overtaken by fear, because it is the embodied experience and realization of losing most of what we believed was true. The old perspective does not work anymore and the new perspective has not taken hold yet. Falling into nothingness, we have to trust that in this dark night of the soul something beyond whatever God we believed in, beyond gods, the imagination, words, space and time is there to safely carry us. And indeed there is. With the new perspective, we have vistas and choices not known before, as well as a new set of attributes with which we live our lives, such as flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy and stability. Greater peace and equanimity ensue.

Having explored how we counterintuitively come to gain everything by losing everything, let’s now look at what ‘gaining everything’ really means. It is easy to fall into the rational mind’s trap of seeing this gain as an addition, when in fact it is in this case a subtraction. A new vista opens itself up to our eyes, a vista that has always already been there, but hidden in plain sight behind the fog of a consciousness clouded by the distorted constructions of the conflicted problem-solving mind. Discovering that vista is the work of subtraction and fog dissolution, not adding more of what we were used to, but did not recognize as such – fog. The opening of such vistas is not something under our control, nor something we effect. It is something given to us as grace when we engage in the humble work of consciousness unendarkenment. Apart from ongoing, relentless purification of consciousness, we don’t ‘do’ these new vistas, but they get revealed to us. And when we have access to them, we see the exact same world we saw before, but from so many more perspectives, contexts and depths, that we are granted infinitely greater freedom of choice of actions that decrease our suffering and give our lives a profoundly new meaning beyond any words that could describe it. Like Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, often misinterpreted as taking a fancy rocket into the sky and a space far away into another galaxy, we die to the limited nightmare of an unexamined consciousness that distorts reality through conflicted constructions, wake up from it, and find ourselves ‘reborn’ into a radiant view of the same reality, offering possibilities beyond all our expectations. Liberated from the golden cage of familiarity, we now see the same world, but find ourselves being able to roam freely and easily over its full expanse with its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

Remember, this is always a work in progress with no endpoint, a purgatory of the mind, in which we can always notice improvement.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Transcendence is about the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of our truth.

I often use this word, which of course in strictly dictionary terms can mean many things, depending on context. You might be surprised to hear it from me, a psychiatrist with a solid footing in science, since from the sound of it, transcendence seems to denote an esoteric, far away place in some kind of spirit world you may or may not believe in. That is too vague a notion to be useful in our context of meditative explorations of the mind, which is why a clearer explanation is in order.

Our seemingly seamless experience of reality is a well-constructed illusion. For example, you see a seamless field of vision without dark spots in the middle of it with nothing there, and yet those dark spots very much exist. They are the blind spots resulting from the fact that where the optic nerve enters the retina, there are no light sensors. The brain skillfully compensates and creates the illusion of continuity, where there is none. This same principle applies to consciousness in general. In quite the same way, we don’t notice that our ‘perception’ of reality is far from an objective or ‘pure’ perception. Instead, it is a complex, often largely distorted construction, involving concepts, words and stories we create on the basis of information bits the brain has already unconsciously manipulated to suit the occasion, so to speak, and not the pursuit of truth and a clear vision of reality. We are not conscious of living in a narrative envelope that mediates a virtual experience of reality we mistake for direct experience of reality. In other words, we keep trying to feed on the menu and don’t realize we never have the meal in front of us.

We can call this situation tragic, because it causes untold human suffering. Subjectively so deeply ensnared in fictions of our own construction, the only reality left for us to orient ourselves by is the external, objective scientific one, against which everything gets measured. What objectively works becomes worthwhile and in fact the ultimate goal of human growth. We learn to function, perform, accumulate knowledge and measure outcomes. We measure success by accomplishments and possessions, and by how well we solve problems, fix things, improve our lives, develop and get somewhere, wherever that somewhere may be. We draft legislations that exclude all that is not evidence-based and measure psychological wellbeing by symptom scales, as if they were reflective of the person being measured. We value well-functioning adaptation to life, which includes professional and financial success, the picket fence fantasy of an accomplished life and a family life that allows its members to conform and survive, maybe even thrive.

This does not sound so bad, you may say, and I would not only agree, but even subscribe to its usefulness and importance for a well-lived life. What I described is a useful fiction indeed, that ensures our ability to survive, put in place what concrete aspects of life we need and pay our taxes on time. Most counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches to mental health, and most mindfulness meditation approaches used in Western societies, teach techniques that address this practical aspect of our human lives. But that is not the whole story. Many people who live these principles successfully, are in fact not satisfied with life at all, living with a nagging sense of something fundamental missing. In addition, the more arduously they try to improve this fiction, the clearer it becomes that nothing can fundamentally change. Stuck in a nightmare, one cannot improve one’s life experience by improving the nightmarish world.

The human being as experiencing subject (as opposed to constructed object) unwittingly retreats into the shadows of non-consciousness under the overwhelming power of the tyrannical narrative mind, which research shows seems to be in part mediated by the overwhelmingly controlling left brain. We can barely taste our meal, because we overwhelmingly see menus. You can imagine how this keeps us hungry and causes us to become dysfunctional, diseased and unhappy. The question becomes, ‘what would reality really be like, if we had access to our subjective experience of life outside the narrative envelope, if we had complete access to our full subjective experience beyond concepts and stories we construct for ourselves’? This question opens the door to a very different aspect of human existence, one that is much more difficult to access.

This process of liberating ourselves from the restrictive stories we envelop ourselves with, and through direct experience engaging in the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about.

In this other realm of human reality, the scales, values, calculations and therapeutic approaches to the mind described above are not applicable. We have to learn ways of extricating our consciousness from the restrictive narrative envelope we are so familiar with by learning how to relinquish all striving for improvement, and instead diligently practice the art of entering the non-verbal flow of our organism’s energy through direct experience. Rather than seek and add more to what we think we know, we need to learn the opposite – unknowing, undoing, unlearning, surrendering and getting out of our own way, in order to make room in our consciousness for a depth and contextual vastness of experience we cannot even fathom. Because the only way we know how to find meaning is through the stories we create, the moment we fall out of this narrative envelope, there is no meaning to be found in the familiar sense of the term we know. Instead, we discover a vast, wide open (energy?) field of consciousness, the direct experience of which is timeless, nameless and empty of any conceptual essence we were used to construct. Not being familiar with this aspect of human existence, we are often overcome with fear when we first encounter it, and cannot fathom the infinite and powerful healing potential it has, when we are able to consciously become transparent to it, and live by it as the ground of Being. Stuck in a nightmare, the only way to really heal is to wake up from it. When we wake up to our collective, transcendental truth, we experience life radically differently.

Although we live in the same world we did before, with the same car, same house, same profession, and the same people, the additional dimensions of consciousness we gained access to through practicing transparency to the transcendent, open a completely new vista onto the same landscape of human existence. It is like the ball moving through a two-dimensional world. If you were a flat, two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world with a two-dimensional consciousness, a ball moving through that world would appear to you as a process, not an object in motion. You would see a point growing into a line up to a maximum length, then shortening again until it becomes a point and disappears. The moment you developed a three-dimensional consciousness, you would realize that the moving phenomenon of a point becoming a line and then a point again is in fact a ball moving through space. Same world, different views with different possibilities. Consequently, the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about. With that comes a significant decrease in the amount of suffering we create.

The paradox is that transcendence is like being poor and sitting on a wooden box we don’t know is filled with gold. While desperately looking for gold elsewhere, we miss what is hidden in plain sight. Transcendence is about stepping outside of a self-imposed, constructed prison of our own making, realizing that the doors to freedom have always been open, but we just could not see it. This is why we sometimes talk of transcendence (= Latin ‘stepping beyond’) towards immanence (= Latin ‘dwelling inside’), whereby we have to effect a leap out of the box, so to speak, an orthogonal shift in consciousness, to discover what has always already been there, hidden in plain sight, unseen, unheard and therefore rendered powerless.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

The Mystery Of Transcendental Being

1984 has arrived. If you haven’t noticed, you are the frog about to be boiled to death as the water you are in has slowly and imperceptibly heated up over your lifetime.

After the horrors of the second world war, an unprecedented stretch of 50-60 years inspired Western countries to embrace the principles of liberal democracy. Prosperity ensued, and with increasing numbers of humans on this planet, we faced globalization. Liberal democratic values meant that we opened the door to multiculturalism like never before. There was a sense of importance about knowing the truth.

Unprecedented advances in science and technology amidst a population explosion with insatiable needs, have now seriously jeopardized our ecosystem. Greed has lead to economic polarizations with an erosion of the middle class, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. By opening our borders to other cultures and people in need, many have started to feel that their values and culture became compromised and watered down. With their cultural identity and economic stability threatened, many people lost faith in liberal democracy and are looking to strongmen to put the genie back in the bottle and deliver the good old times of strong national identity and economic prosperity. Meanwhile, strongmen are dictators with no regard for truth, freedom or people’s wellbeing, as they take control through ultra-nationalistic or ultra-collective agendas over what they perceive to be the chaos of democracy.

Strongmen heading up nationalistic political trends and their supporting crowds are now emerging everywhere, seriously jeopardizing liberal democracy and ushering in dangerous dictatorial tendencies. Trump has just publicly admitted that he has the right to interfere with the judiciary. Make no mistake, no country is immune to what happened in Nazi Germany, including the United States and Canada. Trump symbolizes everything that can be wrong in a society, and we should not forget that Trump can only occupy the post he does when a majority of citizens collude with what is emerging now as a collective psychological madness, which includes ‘pathological lying, habitual and institutionalized corruption, dishonesty, serial groping, casual racism, glorification of violence, winking to Nazis, laziness, impulsiveness, childish tantrums, bottomless ignorance, vanity, insecurity, vulnerability to flattery, bullying, crudity, indifference to suffering, incompetence, rabid narcissism, chaos in the White House, attacks on America’s allies and support for its foes, contempt for experts and for expertise, for truth and the press, for norms and conventions, for checks and balances, for limited government, for the very rule of law’ (adapted from Andrew Coine: The virus of Trumpism and his infectious moral failings – Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 8, 2020).

In China, technological surveillance has now reached Orwellian proportions, allowing the ruling few to monitor their citizens’ every move, and categorize them according to a scale that quantifies their devotion to party creed. Depending on the score, their freedom to move around, do business, prosper professionally and take advantage of life’s opportunities is strictly controlled, curtailed or enabled. All over the world, through technology our children have lost the skill of sitting still, reading extensively and reflecting on the complex narratives of human history, thereby discovering where truth and lie are. Nonsensical information bits that can be combined in any which way one wants are now the currency of our short attention spans and impoverished faculties of reflection. The narcissism of social media makes it now possible for everyone of us to become legends in our own minds, believe them and mistake them for reality or truth. People are losing their faculty to discern truth from lie. Even more worrisome is the trend to not even be concerned about or interested in truth – all that matters is to feel ‘I am right’.

And we are guilty of destabilizing our planetary ecosystem and raping our very mother earth, which sustains us.

In medicine, evidence-based science is forcing us to be treated like robots and machines, thereby robbing us of the huge potential for healing embedded in the vast complexity of our brains and minds. A shocking case in point: In the new insurance- and money-driven medical industry psychiatrists are not trained in psychotherapy anymore, and they are unable to see patients regularly and do psychotherapy with them. Psychiatrists are only there to consult and prescribe medications. Psychotherapy is relegated to professions that command lower fees and don’t even have the kind of extensive training psychiatrists used to have in the past. The mind, never mind our deep nature beyond mind, are not topics of conversation anymore. Human beings are encouraged to become robotic machines with disembodied beliefs if they so want, without having anywhere to turn to for wisdom. Our wise women and men are temporarily becoming extinct.

As mindfulness meditation made its way from Eastern cultures to the West, it got hijacked by the rational mind into a discipline to achieve gains of several sorts, from relaxation to stress reduction, better health, better professional productivity, symptom relief etc. In other words, in the West meditation became like medicine a tool to do good things for the bodies and minds we objectively have. What got lost is the fundamental principle of working with our subjective experience of being alive in all its forms, thus exploring and practicing how to gain access to the body and mind that we subjectively are. The physical body, which is amenable to scientific analysis and which we attempt to fix through medication, surgery and other interventions, is the body that we have. The somatic body that goes beyond the objectively quantifiable, and that we subjectively experience as who we are, I call the soma that we are. Karlfried Graf Duerckheim originally made that distinction by using two different words for ‘body’ available in the German language. He called the body that we have ‘der Koerper, den man hat’, and the soma that we are ‘der Leib, den man ist’.

The collective insanity I described has its roots in the human mind and how we use it. Mind-boggling scientific and technological advances, combined with lifestyles that have become increasingly remote from nature, rely on brains that have been trained to curtail their vast (right-brain) potential, and cultivate the narrow belief that nothing else but left-brain rationality, practicality, functionality and productivity matter. This alienation from dimensions of existence that are not rationally, verbally or otherwise graspable, results in clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress, which can only be addressed by re-connecting with the whole complexity our brains and minds have to offer, and not just a part of it. Ultimately, we are now challenged to reclaim our full potential as intelligent, sentient beings by imbuing science with sentience, remove the mist from mysticism, relinquish the tyranny of words and reconnect with the wholeness of full presence.

Originally, in Eastern cultures meditation was steeped in the exploration and knowledge of the soma that we are. This opened the door to vast possibilities of healing beyond the rational, scientifically known body that we have, by giving us access to the nameless, timeless and transcendental essence of Being. It is this dimension of Being and transcendence we will learn to reclaim and I will focus on in the upcoming winter/spring sessions of the Mindsight Intensive – not only because it involves teachings that are being lost, but also because lack of access to this dimension can cause seemingly intractable symptoms and suffering. These can be mitigated and much better managed, when we know how to access what lies beyond the rational, problem-solving mind and tap into the vast, open plane of infinite possibilities of energy flow. We have to learn to relate to nothingness and emptiness as the vast context of existence.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Your Mindfulness  Journey in a New Year – 2020

As we begin a new decade and continue on the mindful path, on behalf of the Mindfulness Centre team I wish everyone a wonderfully wholesome, healthy, successful and peaceful new year. As we leave 2019 behind, we also leave some times of difficulty and other times of excitement behind.

For me personally, as many of you know, I have been somewhat out of sight as I had my right hip replaced in the summertime and required time off to heal. Unfortunately, the complication of a torn muscle required me to undergo a second surgery in December 2019. It has been quite a painful and at times anxiety-provoking experience that has been and continues to be both physically and mentally challenging. This has lent itself to much mindful learning, but not much teaching, writing or blogging. Fate seems to call me to listening duty rather than teaching, which is why I had to postpone teaching the Mindsight Intensive. Before the end of June I hope to still be able to present a series of advanced, intensive mindsight sessions, which will undoubtedly be imbued with some new insights from my ordeal. I am in the process of formulating several topics that swirl in my mind. Out of sight, however, does not mean out of mind, and with the help of our wonderful, small, but mighty team I have continued to contribute to the shaping of our Centre, while the team members were keeping the ship afloat.

In fact, it has been quite a productive year as three new programs were introduced at The Centre in addition to our MBSR-X programs. These included the Mindful Self-Compassion Program led by Linda and Marlene, Mindfulness for Low Sexual Desire in Women led by Alexandra and Marlene, and Mindfulness and Art led by Maria. These programs were very well received. Depending on teacher availability they may be offered again this year.

Particularly exciting for me was the re-writing, revising and editing of the new Dynamic Mindfulness manual which accompanies the MBSR-X program. This also included the re-recording of guided meditations and teachings we use in the program. Many thanks to Dr. Linda Macdonald for walking this at times arduous, at times exhilarating, path of writing with me. The complementary synergy between us has allowed our Centre to flourish and grow, in addition to helping illuminate our personal growth edges as individuals.

We are most excited also to announce the arrival of Dr. Jackie Ang to our team. She has begun assessing for the MBSR-X programs and will be continuing to train with us. She is a most welcome addition to the team and we look forward to the new life she injects with her kind, receptive presence.

So, cheers to the new decade with its offerings of new frontiers of possibilities, as we allow our minds to open to their inherent spaciousness and fill us with creative ferment and musings. This continues to be the core principle of our modus operandi, to meet challenges of our work in creative ways, challenge or modify accepted theories on the basis of our own experiences and re-formulate our discoveries through improved frameworks of understanding.

It is with much gratitude that I am able to realize the vision for the Mindfulness Centre through the collaborative efforts and interchanges of the wonderful team at the Centre. Thank you Dr. Linda Macdonald, Marlene Van Esch, Alexandra Peterson, Maria Hernandez, Reena Mathur, Barbara Boodhan and Dr. Jackie Ang.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

A new year, brings new mindfulness programs for 2019

When we sing “auld lang syne, my dear” to bring in the New Year, we are essentially cheering to days gone by, which is why we sing the song to remember the good times. The song is a Scots-language poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to the tune of a traditional folk song – now world famous. A rhetorical question is asked at the beginning of the song: should old times be forgotten? The answer is that ‘a cup o’ kindness’ should be had, in order to look back on the past. For all of us here at the Mindfulness Centre in Oakville that sentiment seems really appropriate this year-end, as we look back on our work in 2019 and reflect on all that was accomplished by our staff, patients, and participants in order to improve what we do. We eagerly send out each newsletter throughout the year and we appreciate those of you who read and review the information we provide. It was a busy and active year: we increased both our staff and the number of programs and workshops we present. This year has just flown by and it is hard to believe that in just a few weeks we will be entering into a new year.

PSYCHOTHERAPY

In addition to Dr. Treyvaud’s longstanding psychotherapy practice, in 2019 we were pleased to formally announce that we now also offer psychotherapy with our two therapists Alexandra Peterson and Marlene Van Esch. People seek therapy for a wide variety of reasons, from coping with major life challenges or childhood trauma, to dealing with depression or anxiety or simply desiring personal growth and greater self-knowledge. Depending on the client’s needs and personal goals for therapy, client and therapist may work together for as few as two to three sessions or as long as several years.

Our psychotherapist’s unique approach:
• Incorporates mindfulness and the latest research from Interpersonal Neurobiology into the psychotherapeutic process,
• Dives deeply into how the mind interacts with the brain and how disorder and rigidity can be transformed by rewiring the brain into integration and harmony,
• Facilitates the use of empathy and insight to foster a deeper understanding of self and others within relationships, and
• Promotes the development of a coherent life narrative that facilitates a shift towards health and wellbeing.

NEW PROGRAMS LAUNCHED

We successfully launched two new programs in 2019!
Mindfulness Through Art: This six-week (18 hour) program is led by Maria Teresa Hernandez. Participants are immersed in artistic expression as a way of exploring the foundations of mindfulness, including aspects of Interpersonal Neurobiology. Open to all from beginners to experienced artists, participants experience the benefits of mindfulness by cultivating creativity and art-making. The first offering of this program was well received and we look forward to offering it again in 2020.
Mindfulness-Based Treatment for Low Sexual Desire: This eight-week (18 hour) program for women is taught by Alexandra Peterson and Marlene Van Esch. It is an evidence-based, mindfulness therapy group for treatment of low sexual desire in women. Participants are encouraged to reconnect and engage with their sexuality while learning a variety of mindfulness exercises that cultivate present-moment awareness.

A FEW FUN FACTS

The numbers below illustrate how valued and sought after our services are, as we constantly strive for excellence in providing the most current and up-to-date information and transformative techniques possible.

In our programs, groups and workshops we welcomed 398 participants. Barb, one of our administrative assistants, made us aware that our doors opened 5,368 times as patients and participants attended our programs and groups. Assessments and individual patient appointments saw our doors opening another 633 times. Luckily, our hinges are still intact!

We are pleased to announce that another doctor will be joining our team in 2020, and we will formally introduce her in our newsletter and on the website in the New Year.

We wish all of our newsletter readers all the best of the holidays and a happy new year – and don’t forget the “auld lang syne, my dear” to bring in the New Year! Our team looks forward with optimism and confidence to serve our patients, participants, and the community in 2020.

Best Regards,
Your Mindfulness Centre team (in alphabetical order):
Barbara Boodhan, Dr. Linda Macdonald,
Reena Mathur, Alexandra Peterson,
Dr. Stephane Treyvaud, Marlene Van Esch

How to choose a workshop or program for your mindfulness journey »