Dr. Dan Siegel

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr

Dan Siegel. He's a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed his postgraduate medical education at u c l A. He is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the U c l A School of Medicine and executive director of the mind Site Institute, an educational center devoted to promoting insight, compassion, and empathy and individuals, families, institutions and communities. His books include Mind Site, The Developing Mind, and Parenting

from the Inside Out. He has been invited to lecture for the King of Thailand, Pope John Paul the Second, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Google University, and ted X. His latest book is called Mind, a Journey to the Heart of Being Human. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed dot net slash Support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to

five of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you Feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. Hi Dan, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, Thanks for having me. I'm

happy to have you on. You've written a number of books over the years about the mind, and you've written in a more I don't love the word, but it's the first one coming to mind right now, a more holistic sense of what the mind is than what we tend to hear, the very reductive sense of the mind just being the brain. And so we'll get into all that in just a couple of minutes, but let's start we always do with the parable, where there's a grandfather

who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well. Eric, first of all, that's such a beautiful parable. Thank you for sharing that.

And you know, for me, the power of the parable from the perspective of my personal life and also professionally what I've been doing is the idea that you have these two states you can get into one you might call a receptive state where you're really promoting something called integration, and that is kind of what leads to this idea of joy and peace, law of hope, humility, kindness, empathy, compassion, truth, all those things are a part of an integrated life.

There's also a way you can become reactive instead of receptive, where you actually become unintegrated. Integration is differentiation and then the linkage of those differentiated parts. And you know, when we're threatened, for example, we enter this reactive state of anger, jealousy, greed, all these ways we're can have hatred and things shutting

us down. And so for me, the parable parallels the idea that we have the integrated state of receptive harmony and the non integrated state, which brings us to either chaos or rigiditys wolves that he calls the bad wolf. I would call it the non integrated state. And when the and father beautifully responds, the one you feed is the one that, as the boy asked, wins to me. That's exactly what we've learned from science that where attention goes,

neural firing flows and neural connection grows. So feeding the wolf in many ways, is how you put attention to either non integrated states or integrated states, how you reinforce them in your life, meaning in your relationships and in your brain. Because the mind is not just brain activity. It's fully embodied and it's fully relational as we can talk about. But it's this mind as a self organizing

emergent process of both embodied and relational energy flow. That for me is a way of seeing the mind and understanding what a healthy mind is, as a healthy mind is a mind that optimizes self organization by actually promoting integration. So that's where you see the whole framework there at one perspective. So let's break that down a little bit. There tends to be a lot of reductive science today that posits that the mind, or consciousness or anything is

simply just the brain. The mind is what the brain does. I think you say as they put it, So help me understand your perspective that says the mind is more than just the brain itself. Yes, well, Eric, you're absolutely right. You know, since the time of Hippocrates years ago, where he said in a book called on the Sacred Disease that the mind is only and I emphasize the word only from the activity up in the head of the brain.

Reaffirmed by a fellow named William James, who is a physician who's thought of as the grandfather of modern psychology the principles of psychology. He said, yeah, that's basically the truth for me as a scientist and clinician, as a father, as a husband, as a person on the planet, it just felt like the word mind, which refers first of all to our subjective experience, is different from brain firing. So people saying that their synonyms mind is what brain

does just didn't quite make scientific sense. So that we need to realize subjective experience is something that's quite real, and it's just not the same as brain firing. Even if it ends up that it's completely dependent on it, it's not the same as it. So that's the first thing. Consciousness, for example, while it may have neural correlates, is just not the same as brain firing. And we even have

information processing that's beneath conscious awareness. So those things, information processing, consciousness, and subjective textures of the life, subjective experience, those are what we mean by mind, and they're not just the same as brain firing. Now there's a fourth facet of mind, which takes us beyond these descriptions into the world of

a definition. And it's hard to just grasp it because it's really you know, looking at mind as something that is both shared by us, like right now between you and me, Eric and anyone listening to us, but also happening within the body. And if you think about this, you know, what is the essence of some system, a singular system that could exist both within your body, including its brain, as well as in your relationships with other people and even your connection with the planet, your connection

with nature. Well, that relational and that embodied process can be seen as energy and information flow that is not constrained by the skull nor constrained by the skin. So then you see the singular system is energy and information flow manifesting itself, for example, in the brain as electrochemical energy flow. In the body, there's all sorts of ways energy flows, and in our relationships like right now, it's auditory,

it's the movement of air molecules. And if we were together in person aric, it would be seeing each other with photons. So to be really clear, this process of energy and information flow is not some you know, Lucy Goosey idea. It is grounded in science, and it's just not the usual way scientists think about things, but it's

completely scientific. And when you take it to the next step and say, Okay, what does the mind have to do with that system of energy and information flow that's both within you and between you, it's a long story, but the version of the story goes like this. The system has the mathematical features of a complex system. It's open, chaos, capable of nonlinear and we'll just put that aside to say that the science of math tells us that a system with these qualities is a complex system, and it

has emergent properties. One of them that arises from the interaction of the elements in the system, in this case energy and information flow, is called self organization. And so the proposal I made back in ninety two was that

the mind might be beyond subjective experience. Consciousness, information processing may be related to it, maybe not, but just to put those aside for now, this fourth facet of mind could be defined as a self organizing, emergent and relational process that is regulating the flow of energy and information both within you and between you and the world, and with that definition, you can then say what a healthy mind is because you can ask the question, what is

optimal self organization made from? And the answer for math is you differentiate and you link. When you don't do that, you get chaos and rigidity. That's your so called bad wolf. And when you do differentiate and link, you get the harmony of integration, which has flexibility, adaptability, the math quality of coherence, which means resilience over time. It's energized, and

it's stable. And if you're an acronym nut like me that skills the word faces flexible, adaptive, coherent, energize, the stable. That's the joy, the love, the kindness, the humility, the sense of vitality in life. That's the good wolf. You said a lot there, and I want to try and see if I can summarize it just a little bit

for the listeners. And this will probably be some oversimplification, but I think you're saying that when we think of the mind and everything that happens in the realm of the mind, that thinking that it's just the brain is

leaving out a lot of important pieces of information. Obviously the brain is very important, but you're suggesting that it's a system that has the brain as part of it, as well as our embodied experience, and as well as the relation that we have two things outside of it is the information that's coming in and out, and that as a whole thing is a system. And that system mirrors what we know about complex systems, that it fits

all the definitions of that. And one of the features of a complex system is that it has a tendency to have a self organizing principle, that it is able to of itself, um, refine itself, and make itself better. Is that a reasonably short summary. That's a beautiful summary.

And you know, for people listening, that last part you said is exactly the part that I think it's people a little uh feeling uncomfortable because it's very counterintuitive that something could be arising from something and then going back and regulating the very stuff from which it arises, so then therefore its own arising is shaped by what it just regulated. So it feels like that's bizarre and paradoxical

and shouldn't exist. But in the study of complex systems, what we find in the universe we live in is that they have this self organizing emergent property that while it's counterintuitive, it's present all around us. And so let's look at an unhealthy mind. An unhealthy mind tends towards one of two extremes. It either is too rigid or it is too chaotic um and it can actually be

both of those things. And you talk about going through uh the D s M and looking and seeing that all of the i'll call them the mental illnesses that we describe fall into those two categories in one sense or another. That's right. You use a great analogy of a river, right, one bank is chaos, one bank is rigidity, and then in the middle is the river, which I

think is integration. Correct. Can you give me a couple of examples of a chaotic mindset a rigid mindset, and then let's talk a little bit about what integration is and how we as humans can make it so that

it can be more of a common feature for us. Well, you know, it's helpful to realize some ways in which our minds may have challenges to the natural innate drive toward integration, because if it is the self organizing, emergent property of our lives as a part of a complex system, it's a natural part of what the mind is in a sense there to do. So we can have two broad ways to think about it. One is you've just had the process of growing in your life with inherent things.

Perhaps you're literally inherited or perhaps exposure to toxins earlier in life or infections, something that has affected your life and impaired the capacity to create integration. An example might be people with the condition called schizophrenia, or people with a condition called autism, or people with bipolar disorder manic

depressive illness. Now let's look at just bipolar sort as an example, the experience of mania, of the example of racing thoughts and behaviors that are not in one's control. That would be chaos for that same individual in a depressed state, the shutting down of feelings and the closing down of their sense of life, vitality to be rigided.

That is not from what parents have done. It's innate condition and we can actually show, as in with every study of the brain of people with different psychiatric conditions, impaired integration in the brain, as there is in bipolo disorder, schizophrenia, and autism. If you move then to the next large grouping,

which is conditions that have been caused by experience. Examples of trauma, let's take a look at post traumatic stress disorder as related to developmental experiences of severe abuse or neglect. What those do is they also impair the growth of integrated regions of the brain and eric if you want to talk about them, we can. But basically you can look at the brain and see how the differentiated areas are linked or not and whether they're differentiated or not.

And what trauma in the form of abuse or neglect does is it blocks the growth of integration in the brain and the symptoms that is what you experience in your life. To be example, intrusive memories. You can have this flooding of emotions, you can have this sense where your thoughts are out of control as a part of post traumatic states. That's chaos. Or you can have the rigidity of feeling numbs your body or disconnected from other people.

Those would be examples are rigidity. So a given individual, just like you're pointing out, can have both chaos and rigidity in their life. Hey, everybody, a couple of quick announcements. You may have noticed that we are re releasing a bunch of episodes between Christmas and New year's sort of as a holiday gift and as a preparation for the

new year as people start thinking about behavior change. In addition to that, we are starting something new right after the first of the year called the one You Feed Group Transformation Program. And this is going to be sort of like group coaching. There'll be ten people, it's a hundred dollars a person, and we will meet throughout the month and focus on how you can make lasting change in your behavior, how you can take those things you want to change and actually change them and keep them

changed throughout the year. So if you're interested, send an email to Eric at one you feed dot net let me know. We'll get you signed up again the first ten people, and then we'll close it off. And finally, we appreciate all the support from the people who have been making donations. Very kind, very helpful. If you're interested in supporting the show, we can certainly use your help when you feed dot net slash support. So happy holidays, whether you love them or hate them, I hope you're

getting through them. Okay, And now back to the interview with Dr Dan Siegel. When you're talking about integration on a certain level, you are being very literal about the different parts of the brain and their ability to communicate with each other in an integrated fashion. So we're talking physical here also, yes, So let's start with the brain and we can talk about relationships. There's a new word that's been used called the connect tone c O N

N E C T connect and then own oamy. The connect home studies are basically looking at how the differentiated areas meaning different or specialized areas of the brain are then linked to each other. So it's a way of actually looking at integration structurally and functionally in the brain. And what the connectome studies show is that when they

love this is October two thou fifteen. If you want to look at the study, when they look at every measure of well being they can look for in a person's live the one neural state that predicts it is how interconnected the connect on is. That is how integrated the brain is, how you're linking the differential areas together

is the best predictor of well being. And then if you look at the other side in terms of the brain, every study that's ever been done to date of someone with a psychiatric condition, whether it's caused by experience, like abuse and neglect or just inherent you just got it, not by experience. It has shown impaired integration of the brain.

So we now have this incredible set of empirical findings, your research studies that show well being is connected to integration of the brain and impaired well being is associated

with impaired integration. And then when you go to the relationship side, you can look at for example, when in a relationship, like let's say between you and me right now, when we honor differences, really respect differences, maybe even through I have on the differences, that's differentiation, But then we compassionately, respectfully communicate with each other as a linkage, then our friendship would be thriving. And if if there was a

parent child relationship, that describes what's called secure attachment. And the amazing thing is for attachment studies when relationships obviously it's a functional kind of integration, honoring differences, promoting linkages through communication patterns, sharing a energy and information flow. When you have a developmental relationship that's integrated, it promotes the growth of integration in the brain. And here's the startling finding.

Every form of regulation depends on brain integration. So when you regulate your mood and emotion, when you regulate attention, thought and memory, when you regulate behavior, relationships, and morality. Each of those forms of regulation depend on integration the brain. So we've just said is amazingly relational integration stimulates the growth of brain integration, which is the basis of healthy regulation.

So one way to work to integrate the parts of the brain that you're saying is by our relations with other people. If those relationships show the signs of integration, then our brain is going to change along those lines, or I'm gonna say our mind is going to change along those lines and and become more integrated. What are other ways to promote integration in the brain beyond having

integrated relationships? I wrote a book called mind Site, which kind of goes through nine domains of integration with lots of examples of how to do this. And one way to think about it is simply this um. If you're talking about let's say, relationship integration, we're talking about how to make sure people are seeing that their mind is seen beneath their behavior, that there's respect to what that person's personal meaning is in life, and that communication is

linking them to each other in the brain. The way you think about it is this, For example, you have a higher part of the brain and a lower part of the brain, and there are people who are entering lots of chaotic and rigid ways of being because they

disconnected these two differentiated areas of the nervous system. And you can actually do what's called inter receptive practice where you have them perceived that's the septive part, the interior, that's the interro part, and U c l A. Studies have been shown, for example, that when you do this, you actually develop the strength of an area called the insula, which connects the lower parts of the brain and infect

the whole body to the higher cortex. And when you do that, you have more self awareness, more emotion regulation, and even more empathy, and that promote being. So as one example, you can show you can link the left and right as differentiated areas of the brain and link them together. There's memory integration. You can show that people

with trauma have impaired integration memory. You can even demonstrate the basic way you do that, because that's the question you're asking me, is quite simply like this attention is that process which directs energy and information flow that's just what attention is. Now, where attention goes neural firing flows

in the brain. So if you know what the chaos and rigidity are due to, like up and down is not working, left and right, memory issues, all sorts of things, you actually can, in a very skillful way, direct attention to areas let's say that are underdifferentiated, like the left hemisphere of the right hemisphere, or access to let's say, the sensations of the body. And where a she goes neural firing flows. And here's the secret. When neurons are

firing repeatedly, they activate genes in the associated neurons. The activation of genes leads to the growth of connections. Neurons that fire together wire together exactly. So attention these neural firing neural firing leads to neural rewiring. That is where attention goes neural firing flows and neural connection goes. You want to get those neurons firing simultaneously so they wire

together exactly. And so mind Site helped me understand is it different from or is it just an interpretation that you have on the concept of mindfulness in general? I'd say, more specifically, like a Hastina type mindfulness where you're actually

looking at the various um parts of consciousness. The word mind site is a term I made up when I dropped out of medical school because my professors were not respecting or even recognizing the internal mental experience, the feelings, the thoughts, the meanings of what was going on in their patients. And it was so upsetting for me that I basically dropped out of school. And when I was away, I realized that we have two kinds of sight, two

kinds of perceptual abilities. We can see the physical world, and my professors were brilliant doing that. They were very famous and powerful researchers. They were great at physical site, but they were kind of clueless when he came to seeing the mind. You know, they were clueless when it

came to seeing the mind. So that made me, when I decided to go back to school, make up this word mind sit back in the late seventies early eighties, and when I came back to school, it was a very helpful notion that we can see the mind or not. So years later when I became an attachment researcher and a therapist that I heard about this story called mindfulness, which you know, there isn't a fixed definition of mindful awareness, but generally what people mean is being aware of the

present moment without being swept up by judgment. Right, So mind site is not quite the same as mindfulness, but there you know, first of all, mindfulness as a practice is found in every culture. It's been around for thousands of years. You can now study it um. Mind site is just the idea that we have insight into the mind and we have empathy for other people's minds. And now it includes a third aspect, which is integration that

is honorary differences and promoting linkages. So there are different constructs. In a way, mind site would include mindfulness but not be limited to it. And it's been exciting to become a part of, you know, the whole mindfulness community and the research that goes on on that. And you know, when I work in our UM you know center, we have a center you see, like called the Mindful Awareness Research Center. You know, the mind ste ideas were useful

at doing practices there. But you know, you could have mindfulness fully there without any kind of influence by mindset, and mindset does not be mindfulness at all as a construct. So mindfulness is a tool in creating what you're calling mindset, or it's one of the tools that could be used

for that. If you look at every brain study of mindfulness, what they show with mindful awareness training is it leads to a more integrated brain that we didn't know, you know, before about ten years ago, but now we're learning that. So it's you know, the mind ste frame of inside empathy and you know, integration embraces the idea that mindful awareness is a wonderful tool to increase well being. So

what are some other practices that people could do? So we've got relationship, we've talked about mindfulness, or we'll just I'll call it meditation in this case, or a type of meditation. What are other tools? I know you've got what you call the Wheel of Awareness, and I've just completed a study of ten thousand individuals who have done the wheel, and I put the results in this book called mind a Journey the Heart of Being Human. And what's been so exciting about that is if you take

the concept that change seems to involve consciousness. So if you're a parent wanting your child to change, your teacher in school, or a therapist. You know, all those different approaches to helping people develop and grow well involve consciousness. If you take that finding and combine it with our proposal that integration, differentiating linking is the basis of health.

What I did back in the nineties was saying, what would happen if you integrated consciousness And there's a table here in the office where you could put in the center of tables like a hub of a wheel, the knowing of consciousness, sense of receptive awareness, and distinguish that to differentiate that from the gnomes. And let's put them on a rim. And then there are these things holding up the table to look like spokes, So would say

that spoke as attention. And then with my patients, I would have them do this practice where we walk around the table and distinguish the knowing from the gnome and then linked them to each other systematically, and they started reducing their symptoms of trauma or anxiety or mild to moderate depression. So that was really interesting to me. So then I started teaching to my students and they said

they were getting good results. So then I started to start decided to do workshops in this, and people had these profound experiences. So it became not just a way of integrating consciousness, but actually illuminating the nature of consciousness and the very nature of the mind. So we can talk about that if you want. But it's a very

simple practice. People can do it from our website. UM, go to the resources tab and you know, it's a very profound experience to hear the universality of it of people around the plan how they respond to it out on your website, and I'll have this in the show notes. There are guided meditations or guided practices that you do to walk through it. The model is sort of hard to interpret just from hearing it. You're basically starting and

correct me where I get this wrong. But you're looking at first, you're touching in with all of your senses, what of each of my senses perceiving? And then you're moving into you know, your thoughts and your feelings. What are the thoughts and feelings that are happening in the mind, And then you move into the overall sense of having a body as a whole and what's happening as a whole,

and then where does it go from there? That's as much as I remember you good memory are right, So you start with the outside of the world with the five senses, then you go to what's called the sixth sense, the interior of the body. Then you go to the mental activities, as you say in this third setting of the room, and then the fourth is your relational sense, your sense of connections to things outside of the body.

And then in a more advanced form, you actually bend the spoke of attention around and you explore the nature of pure awareness. And it's been just absolutely amazing to hear the universal experience that when people do have an opening of that how they share it. They actually talk about this sense of joy, of love, of energy, this sense of eternity illuminating, this sense that they're connected everything

of God, this wholeness. You know, in many ways, it has this quality that if you want to get into it, we can talk about what energy may actually be. So when we say the mind is an emergent property of energy, there's some really profound notions, and I know it's hard to talk about in a short time, but there's some profound notions about what the origin of consciousness itself might be. If you want to get into the the notion of energy.

But it's been something that you know, people have been experiencing. And also I presented it to scientists and quantum physics who are extremely excited about it and it may help us understand kind of the relationship between thoughts and feelings and memories and beliefs and then consciousness itself. Well, that's just too much of a teaser to just leave on the table. I'll have people calling me insistent to know what it is. So let's go ahead, and you know,

try and do it relatively quickly. But I think definitely we want to talk through that. So first of all, Eric, you and I should put on our seatbelts. Um. You know, if I hadn't done this with ten thousand people and recorded the results and found the universality of it, I would think it was just some peculiarity of you know, people from this place or that place. But it's everywhere,

and it doesn't matter a person's meditation history. They could be, you know, never meditated or had therapy before, they could be running a monastery in Korea. You know, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's absolutely amazing. So here's the basic idea. I'll try to say in a condensed way, but I understand. You know, this is a new way for us all

to think. And that's why I wrote the book Mind so that people could go through it really gently, through direct experience and questions, because it is a new way to embrace what our mind is, what our self is, what our relationships are, and what reality is all about.

So here we go. If you say, well, the mind is more than the brain, but it includes the brain, And then you come to the statement, well, the mind might be an emergent property of energy flow sometimes that symbolic value of energy, so we call it information flow means change. But then you ask the question, well, alright, fine, what is energy? So when I've asked physicist this, this is what they say. Energy is the movement from possibility

to actuality through a series of probabilities. So the way they describe it is there's a sea of potential, that's the possibility part. And what arises from the sea of potential are particular subsets of those potentialities, possibilities that will

call as you rise up. If you can imagine a diagram of a plane of possibility, imagine that you've now moved up to a plateau of increased probability to give you a specific example, if I say to you, Eric, I'm going to say a word, and let's say there are a billion words I might say, So the sea of potential is the billion words. Then for you to guess it, it's one out of a billion. So the probability that you're going to guess it is near zero.

It's very low certainty, right, So it's near zero. That's see. If what's that I guessed a tree? Good, You've got it. I've seen, I've seen to talk exactly. So when I say tree, right, that's now gone beyond just a plateau up to a peak of certainty. That's a hud. Certain you said tree, I was gonna say tree beautiful. Now let's say I decide him to say all plants, and let's say there are maybe ten thousand plants. I know there are more, but let's just make it ten thousand.

So the plateau of all plants is a much higher probability one out of ten thousand than one out of billion. Right, So it's a plateau, and from that plateau will arise all these peaks of all the plants I could set all right, So basically what we've just said is the thought of tree and the statement of trees a peak the state of mind. I'm only going to say, plants to Eric will be a plateau, and the pool from which all things could arise is the plane of possibility.

And if you had to map this out on a graph, would be the near zero place of certainty. Amazingly is open possibility. And the higher you get in a in a plateau, the higher certainty it is. But the more restricted you are until you're finally below these peaks for thinking, and then you get a thought for remembering, you get a memory for emoting, you get an emotion. Okay, so

that's the friend. Now here's the amazing thing. When I've done the wheel of awareness practice now and recorded the results, when people bend the spoke around and explore deep awareness, that is receptive awareness, the source of knowing, the hub they describe openness, boundarylessness, eternity, the infinite God, this joy, this incredible sense of peace, this openness, this quality basically

that correlates with the claim of possibility. And so what looks like might be the case underscore might thousand times this could be completely wrong, but it's consistent with the with the observable data, and it's not said in quantum physics, but it's consistent with quantum physicists. My colleagues tell me.

What we're saying then, is that consciousness itself, the knowing of consciousness, receptive awareness maybe arising when energy is in the plane of possibility, and that when you have a mood or intention or a belief or aspiration, it's a plateau where the energy is moved up from that plane. It is now in a plateau state, and then when it moves upward, you've got cognitive processes like emoting and

thinking and remembering that our subpeak values. And then when you hit a peak you arrived at like a memory, an emotion, a thought, and then you see this continuity between cognition that's uh there as peaks all the way down into consciousness itself, and then you start understanding, for example, when people get trapped in certain plateaus with only limited numbers of peaks that can arise from that, like if I'm depressed and all I think is I'm no good,

I don't shouldn't live, and other ways in which we get restricted, and so practices which give you access to the plate of possibility free you up because it looks like the plane of possibility is the portal that allows integration to naturally unfold. It might be speechless for the first time in a hundred and fifty episodes because I don't quite know how to respond to that, but I find it a fascinating theory. Well, people do the wheel

and the experience. It's like, yeah, well you get theory and then you get the experience and then you go whoa, Like that's just like yeah, and I'm not actually the experience. I don't. I don't doubt in any way, shape or form. I've known too many people and read too many different things about a mystical, you know, non dual type experience headed in that direction myself at points that I believe

the experience a true thing. What it is is the your way of describing it is the is the fascinating part to me, Well, what's so exciting about hearing that from you, Eric? Is first of all the profound way where all of us need to say, Okay, we have our subjective experience of what we go through in life, and we can understand that that's fantastic. And then for me, as you know, scientists and clinician and just person on

the planet. You know, I've been just driven to try to say, well, can we bring the fields of like science and clinical practice and you know, meditation practice and spirituality in general, can we bring them together? And what is so thrilling about this is, you know, what's possible here?

And this is why I try to describe this in the Mind Book really slowly, because it can make even the writer's speech to those I and said, you know, you go whoa because if this is true, it fits with a lot of the wisdom traditions, it fits with the meditation traditions. It actually gives a sort of guideline for what therapists might do. It helps parents understand it, and just for an every day life kind of thing.

For example, for me, what it helps me with in my own life is how I approach you know, when relatives got Niller died or you know, like my dad died four years ago. Was very helpful to really understand that and my feelings about that for my own life and death. It's changed my relationship to death really and what it's given me is this feeling. Because it's my regular practice. I do the wheel awareness, you know, pretty

much every day and what's so empowering about it? I mean, it's different every day, But what's so empowering about it is will you kind of develop the capacity to drop into that plane of possibility, that is, to go of the metaphor hub and not be lost on the rim. From a point of view of the plane, it's so filled with joy and so filled with love. You just this feeling of you know, falling in love with people

and things. It's just this, it's wild. And of course sometimes you get lost in the plateaus and peaks and gave reactions to things and in other words, you're You're just a human. But it gives you this strength of resilience to access this plane of possibility that becomes woven into your daily life. It's it's very exciting, wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up the conversation. There's certainly a lot there. The book Mind

I read, and it's a great journey. As you said, you kind of walk people through this stuff, uh, step by step, really inter weaving it very closely with your own personal story and how your own knowledge of the

mind and yourself has grown over the years. So, like said, I'll have links to all that stuff in the show notes fantastic, Eric, And you know the thing that's so excited about this conversation when you're here is as we move forward on this planet, I think the more we can talk about this, you know, the more we can feed the integrated wolf. And in some ways, you know, your plane and my plane and everyone listening is plane are really the same plane. That is infinity is infinity.

And so the place we really find each other is not in our differentiated plateaus and peach which are great. That's where we have our differences, and we need to really love those differences, but we also have to find our connections. So the more we can understand, wow, the mind really is the source of love and the source

of connection. I think that's how we're going to open ourselves up to really collaborating with each other and having a more integrated way of living in our interconnected world. I hope. So we sure could use it. Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Thanks for the work that you're doing. Yeah, thank you, Okay, bye. You can learn more about this podcast and Dr Dan Siegel at one you feed dot net slash Daniel. If

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