[SPEAKER_02]: therapy chat podcast episode four ninety six. [SPEAKER_02]: This is the therapy chat podcast with Laura Regan LCSWC. [SPEAKER_02]: The information shared in this podcast is not a substitute for seeking help from a licensed mental health professional. [SPEAKER_02]: And now, here's your host Laura Regan LCSWC. [SPEAKER_00]: Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Laura Reagan, and this week, I'm bringing you an interview with Dr. Dan Siegel.
[SPEAKER_00]: We talked about grief, connection, presence, the quantum realm, and integration from a biological standpoint. [SPEAKER_00]: This was a beautiful conversation we had met.
[SPEAKER_00]: in person just the week before this interview not for the first time but we had both been attending while he was speaking and I was attending the talk in Baltimore and so we referenced that in our conversation which was really all about how we're all interconnected finding hope in scary times through connection and [SPEAKER_00]: grief as a portal we both talked about losing one of our parents over the last year as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, settle in for a beautiful and hopefully inspiring conversation with Dr. Dan Siegel. [SPEAKER_00]: Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Laura Reagan, and today I'm so happy to be virtually sitting again with Dr. Dan Siegel. [SPEAKER_00]: Dan, thank you so much for coming back to Therapy Chat today. [SPEAKER_03]: Laura, thanks for having me back. [SPEAKER_00]: That's my great honor. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm super excited to be talking with you today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just at an event that you were speaking at last week, and we got to chat a little bit there, but what you spoke about was even more
[SPEAKER_00]: rich and beautiful than the teachings that I've heard from you for so many years and I'm just really it was very inspiring and I'm really eager to I'm getting emotional, but I'm eager to get more into talking about your new book and some of these other topics that we we're talking about at the event last week before we get into it though. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a we what you're feeling. [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I mean, it's be present forever so rising.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, well, it was just very inspiring to, you know, in this time that's very stressful to put it mildly, just to have like a bigger perspective about I'm laughing at myself trying to talk through my tears as my throat's like constricting. [SPEAKER_00]: to have like a wider perspective about the hope of our human connection. [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, just I think I needed, obviously, that inspiration.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was expecting to sit here and cry, but thanks for sitting with me. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: No, I mean, I think we're all connected through being present with whatever comes up. [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, as we go through this time together, we may deepen our understanding of things. [SPEAKER_03]: And so I feel really honored that you could just be present with the tears that are coming. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's so much happening. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm here in a center where we're working on people who are trying to bring more compassion into the world. [SPEAKER_03]: more healing and it's a time of transition of some people I think have been very important in that area passing from this life onward and yeah, so there's so much to so much going on so I'm gonna let you guide us as so much we can get into yeah
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so you just kind of mentioned something that came up at the event when we were... Turns out that Joanna Macy is still alive and is passing. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think some people may have thought her passing had already completed, but she's in the middle of it. [SPEAKER_03]: So after we were together in Baltimore, [SPEAKER_03]: I actually changed my flight and flew out to be with Joanna on that next day.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, so much of the what we were gathered around the song by Bob Sima, I actually sang it for Joanna's kids and her. [SPEAKER_03]: or grandkids were there and other people in the family and you know that song was so powerful about transitions like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So every day I'm checking on the my phone just to see where she's at she's still with us but she's nearing near in the end and there's a caring bridge for anyone who wants to check in on on [SPEAKER_03]: status.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, Joanna was, for those who don't know, is an incredible figure in our world of someone who talked about the work that we connect and the importance of sitting with our feelings, our grief in particular about the way the world is, climate change specifically, and then moving through the grief to be able to be present for each other.
[SPEAKER_03]: Never think we have to do anything alone, but rather [SPEAKER_03]: be together in this journey and she always talked about a quantum change in consciousness which has so many elements to it but one of the elements is to awaken to kind of a stake in identity of separation. [SPEAKER_03]: that is really keep putting us into really dire streets on earth these days.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm here now in Costa Rica working exactly on that and you know part of me wanting to stay in California to be near Joanna but I know she would want me to have come here. [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm here with her in my heart.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: that's so beautiful and it's really heartwarming to know that you were able to go and see her because you know you got news you thought you wouldn't be able to see her again living and on earth and the fact that you were able to go and see her is so beautiful but also the singing you know that was such a that's such a soulful gift
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I, you know, people were asking me what I was doing at Baltimore, and you know, I told them that the Bob Simon's concert and that I gave a little talk beforehand and all that stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: And they heard that I sang the song with the songwriter, you know, and they said, well, you sing it for us. [SPEAKER_03]: And, and that's setting, you know, it was so beautiful to have a song about the meaning of life and how to get to the end.
[SPEAKER_03]: and have a smile on your face when it's this moment, when your heart is full, and your hands are empty, and anyway, so it was very fitting. [SPEAKER_03]: And for any of us who may have had a number of people close to me die in the last, you know. [SPEAKER_03]: six months, my included my mom.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I feel tender about, I mean, this whole fragility of our life and, you know, we have a lot to do in these lives and one of them is to honor these moments of transition and [SPEAKER_03]: And we can love each other and realize it doesn't last forever. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's a very profound moment for Joanna's family and for those of us who know her and also just for the general in the world, but everything going on in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's personal stuff, it's planetary stuff, and they're not separate. [SPEAKER_03]: I think that's the work to try to be present for it all. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, that was, that was so present for me in Baltimore when we were hearing from you what you shared with so deep and rich and the musical performance was beautiful, Bob's lyrics and and message are just really powerful. [SPEAKER_00]: I lost my dad in November last year.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was at the networker in March and heard you speak about your mom's passing and just that was very moving for me, you know, knowing you're in that space, like losing a parent. [SPEAKER_00]: It's just a grief itself, but the end of your parent's life is just a very specific [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, experience. [SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, the people who gave rise to us have now given rise to the end of their body form anyway.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm really open to how life persists after the body has done. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's just an interesting and important question. [SPEAKER_03]: How we sit with that. [SPEAKER_03]: But even if you just stay with the stories that we carry forward from our parents and others and [SPEAKER_03]: Joanna is exactly my mom's age. [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they had for a taste just six weeks apart.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, having this deep relationship, of course, of my mom, but also with Joanna, was, you know, interesting to be in my sixties and have relationships with people in their mid nineties, you know. [SPEAKER_03]: But in a sense, life is timeless. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I mean, when you have a true connection with a parent or a deep friend, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: It is kind of timeless. [SPEAKER_03]: And that gets into the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I talked a bit a little bit. [SPEAKER_03]: I think in Baltimore, but you know, sometimes hard to grasp that, you know, we have these two realms that physics is demonstrated. [SPEAKER_03]: We live in and one is time bound and it's large objects and things tend to fall apart. [SPEAKER_03]: And this Newtonian or large object world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the body doesn't last forever being a large object, but [SPEAKER_03]: There is a realm of small things, smaller than an atom that has different properties. [SPEAKER_03]: Just like walking in water, swimming in water is different from walking on land. [SPEAKER_03]: Those are different properties. [SPEAKER_03]: We have different properties in these two realms.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm really open to [SPEAKER_03]: As a scientist, you'll just think here deeply in an open way about what is the way the energy flow that is our lived experience, how does energy flow which is in the micro quantum realm? [SPEAKER_03]: How does it have elements that are transcending the noun like bodies in the Newtonian realm? [SPEAKER_03]: So since my mom died in January, [SPEAKER_03]: I feel I communicate with her. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm totally open to that's fabricated by my brain.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm fine with that. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm also open to the possibility. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if it's true or not. [SPEAKER_03]: That there is some timeless essence of us going to my mom that stay in a realm that if we open to it, and I do the wheel of awareness every day and access this hub of the wheel, which I think is the quantum realm. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, then it's like a portal that you start receiving stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: And again, I'm a hundred percent fine.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was just my brain that internalized my beautiful wonderful fantastic mom. [SPEAKER_03]: And she talks to me, you know, not I don't hear her actual voice, but I hear her words as a sense of her. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you have that with your dad. [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't have it with my dad when you died at all. [SPEAKER_03]: But I had a different relationship with him.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's about twelve over twelve years ago, but with my mom I had been having it and it's really a joy because when my dad died, none of that kind of stuff I had heard about happening with people close to you. [SPEAKER_03]: But it's happening with my mom. [SPEAKER_03]: It still happens every day. [SPEAKER_03]: So I feel really open to whatever it might be. [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm curious, but I don't really have to have a definitive answer about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I loved that you said that. [SPEAKER_00]: I loved that you talked.
[SPEAKER_00]: I loved it what you just said and also that you spoke about the quantum realm and you know something I've sort of heard about and I can sense about and you know there's our intuition and there's our nervous system responses that are not conscious and [SPEAKER_00]: You know, even like this might sound very elementary, but why were we once in the womb living in a fluid, you know, like a water creature, and then we come out and we can breathe there, like, is anybody eating bads weird?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, I mean, [SPEAKER_00]: Some of these things that we just sort of go, well, that's just how it is. [SPEAKER_00]: But if maybe five hundred years ago when they didn't know what was going on inside or whatever however long ago, it would be totally crazy to suggest that we could change from a being that's living in a [SPEAKER_00]: water environment to not water, but you know, fluid to to one that can breathe air and doesn't live can't breathe in water, you know?
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly. [SPEAKER_03]: Well, exactly. [SPEAKER_03]: And you know, I did this last book I wrote with my wonderful colleagues, David Daniels and Denise Daniels, who were a baker and Jack Killing called personality and a wholeness and therapy. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, we came to a proposal that we thought there it is. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a gutter.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you just like that, you know, we propose that this state of effortless being in the womb gets embedded in a layer of memory called implicit memory and that, you know, we have a memory of feeling, if you just want to use the word whole, feeling whole and not having to do anything and just no separation and nothing to do, just being that for this being.
[SPEAKER_03]: And once you're out of the womb, I mean, it's do or die, you know, it's working for a living state of having a mixture of bodies needs your med, your relational connections keep you safe, you know, that you can have some kind of certainty in the world. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's been fascinating, even here at this meeting, you know, to see the relevance of that personality model.
[SPEAKER_03]: for people trying to make the world a better place, not just therapists or patients or whatever clients. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's been really interesting. [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought there'd be a big pushback on, you know, looking at the effort this being of that floating moment you're talking about, Laura.
[SPEAKER_03]: And instead, for the most part, people are really excited about it and go, wow, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like personality can be seen as a filter that your particular temperament has set up for you on this lifelong journey to try to get and you can either say two wholeness or you can say get back to wholeness if you believe in the womb story, the being at one with the womb.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so it's an exciting moment because [SPEAKER_03]: That project that over that book, you held up took us twenty years to put that together. [SPEAKER_03]: And I was always questioning whether it was worth the effort of the time or it was incredibly difficult to write a book with four people, especially when one was not even in this bodily form you had passed David. [SPEAKER_03]: And you know, so to hear people's finding it useful, I'm always going, oh really?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's useful in the way, oh yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: So we had a late night session with a couple of people here in the in the retreat center and you know it just came out well maybe you should teach him this so I did and they just their eyes were like bugging out of their mind their heads like oh my god this flames my entire life [SPEAKER_03]: So it's fun.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's a lesson in if you try to stick close to truth and don't just cave into public opinion or public pressure or what is the dogma of the day and try to stick foundation in this conciliance, different things like indigenous teachings or contemplative teachings or [SPEAKER_03]: science teachings, whatever trip, if you find a common ground, we call that conciliant.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the simple mission is see if you can discover or uncover or illuminate truth that you're not creating. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, so people say, oh my God, this model is so elegant. [SPEAKER_03]: Congratulations. [SPEAKER_03]: I said, no, I didn't create the model nature created the model. [SPEAKER_03]: I just, you know, was really determined with my colleagues to see if we could uncover the layers that are blocking us from seeing that model.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the model is really beautiful. [SPEAKER_03]: It's really elegant. [SPEAKER_03]: And I didn't create it. [SPEAKER_03]: I just, you know, maybe wrote a book about it, but it's nature that we're congratulating because it's a really beautiful model. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I really would love for you to explain more about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to say something about that conciliance, this idea of being able to connect with your mom and talk with your mom, not in a way, like as if she's sitting here and body with you. [SPEAKER_00]: Being just open-minded to, well, how is this really happening? [SPEAKER_00]: I know it's happening, but what is making this happen? [SPEAKER_00]: And then you hear so many people who have experiences like that when someone they were really close and connected with passes.
[SPEAKER_00]: people call it, you know, the veil fins and, you know, the, the other world in this world, there's, you know, more access, maybe when we're in grief, I've been thinking of grief as a portal, so I need to use that word portal. [SPEAKER_00]: There are other ways that I think are kind of coming together synthesizing maybe slowly in our mental health field of getting to some kind of truth that doesn't necessarily fit into certain box
[SPEAKER_00]: like people are arriving at the same conclusions or having the same kinds of experiences through many different methods, whether it's psychedelics or semantics or brainspiting or EMDR or some of the other ways that people are just, you know, oh, I had this moment where I felt like it's all going to be okay and we're all connected and we're all being held by something greater.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you could call it just a spiritual experience, but it's when you're having those moments, it's like, oh, I see now this is way bigger than I my little brain could have thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: My question is, so to me, you know, not being a scientist like you, my conclusion is [SPEAKER_00]: If a lot of different people are having the same experience in many different ways, then it just, for my belief system, it begins to feel just like, well, that's, they're something to this, you know, it's not, it's not, I'm not making it up or I'm not telling someone it might be like this. [SPEAKER_00]: They're having that experience and where is that coming from?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not creating it even in therapy. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well, exactly. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think people in therapy sometimes reveal experiences that for me, we can say, oh, they're filled with the unknown, and it's absolutely beautiful to hold the mystery.
[SPEAKER_03]: And at the same time, the science aspect of me is really excited that when you look at what the Nobel Prize was given for in twenty twenty two in physics, and you think of the mind as [SPEAKER_03]: In mathematics, what we call an emergent property. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's a math term. [SPEAKER_03]: So you build a math and physics. [SPEAKER_03]: And then you say, OK, from a chemistry point of view, you've got a body full of molecules and a biology point of view.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've got this system full of organs and all that stuff that's called your body that you actually can take all those layers of science, math, physics, chemistry, biology. [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, I'm trained as a researcher in psychology. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm an attachment researcher. [SPEAKER_03]: So, but I'm also those other things as a, you know, biology is my background, but also as a physician.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I brought that kind of science trans-discipline, you know, honoring the state of mind to my training as a psychology researcher. [SPEAKER_03]: you know, and then as a psychotherapist, you know, working in our field of healing and growth of the human mind, you know, maybe because I was trained at all those different scientific areas. [SPEAKER_03]: The decade of the brain in the nineteen nineties when the statement was made, mind is only what brain does.
[SPEAKER_03]: I knew being a physician that it's what apocrates had said, twenty five hundred years ago, [SPEAKER_03]: in a book about epilepsy, you know, and he made that statement and it sort of stayed with modern medicine. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's partly true, but the word to look at is only the mind is only what the brain does. [SPEAKER_03]: So by asking the question, well, what if that is wrong?
[SPEAKER_03]: What if the way modern medicine and modern neuroscience has been pitching mind is what brain does only underscore the word only? [SPEAKER_03]: What if it includes the brain and the brain's activity? [SPEAKER_03]: but it's something bigger than the brain, broader than that brain activity, and even bigger than the body. [SPEAKER_03]: So then you would have to look at the embodied approach to our work as psychotherapists, which is so important, somatic approaches.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then you would look at the relational world that we live in as something that could be somehow related to the embodied aspect, including what happens inside the skull and the whole nervous system. [SPEAKER_03]: So that's where it became kind of exciting to propose based on mathematics that there's something called an emergent property. [SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of like Buckminster Fuller in the seventies talking about synergy.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a beautiful article called synergetics by him, which really inspired me. [SPEAKER_03]: But it basically said, look, when we think in systems terms, synergies where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that's the idea of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in the eighties, mathematicians got together and studied the activity of what are called complex systems, which are collections of stuff could be air molecules and water molecules for a cloud, for example, and that collection of stuff is gold system. [SPEAKER_03]: And if the system has three properties of being open to influences outside of itself, outside of the cloud, like [SPEAKER_03]: sunlight or hitting a mountain or geese flying into it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are not a part of the cloud, but they can influence it. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's an open system. [SPEAKER_03]: A system is cable being chaotic, which means roughly random. [SPEAKER_03]: You could have a random distribution of those water molecules and air molecules, but they're not. [SPEAKER_03]: But they could be. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's chaos capable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, you know, what's called non-linear, which means small inputs like a flock of geese really lead to very difficult if not even impossible to predict outcomes. [SPEAKER_03]: So a small little input leaves to relatively large result. [SPEAKER_03]: That's hard to predict if not. [SPEAKER_03]: My name being possible to predict. [SPEAKER_03]: That's called non-linear. [SPEAKER_03]: So if you're a non-linear cast cable open system, you call the complex system away.
[SPEAKER_03]: Has been demonstrated in the eighties was that complex systems have a synergy, they don't use a synergy, but they have emergence. [SPEAKER_03]: There's something that emerges from the interaction of the water molecules. [SPEAKER_03]: Example would be witness. [SPEAKER_03]: Witness is not in any single water molecule. [SPEAKER_03]: But if you get a bunch of them in your hand, your hand is wet.
[SPEAKER_03]: So wetness would be just a way to illustrate what we mean by an emergent property. [SPEAKER_03]: Wetness is an emergent property of collections of H to a water market. [SPEAKER_03]: So that thing said, in the nineties, drawing on the mathematics complex systems, I just thought maybe, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: the mind was an emerging property of something that could be both inside you and between you and other people or you in nature.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's something that made scientific sense was energy. [SPEAKER_03]: Energy flows through the body. [SPEAKER_03]: The nervous system is based on electrochemical energy transformation, the way you and I are communicating to each other and it is through soundways which is energy in kinetic motion of [SPEAKER_03]: air molecules called sound, and we see each other in this setting because we have a video you're watching borer and me, you know, that's photons, that's energy.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, energy is not limited by skull or scan, so all that is like the background of our field, interpersonal neurobiology, just to say, you know, there's an inter, there's a relational field. [SPEAKER_03]: that as a kid to, you know, a fairity talked about in the eighteen hundreds that people thought he was nuts because you couldn't see it with your eyes, but all of our electronics are based on his nutty idea, you know, that there are these fields.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I have some colleagues of mine at MIT, Peter Sange, Metzable, and sometimes out our sharmic is in the conversation. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, we talk about relational fields. [SPEAKER_03]: We don't know exactly how to measure them, but you can feel them. [SPEAKER_03]: I think. [SPEAKER_03]: You can walk in a classroom, you can feel a generative field or a degenerative field. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's myself is now my opinion.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's integration when you're honoring differences in promoting languages, we call that integration. [SPEAKER_03]: When integration is there, the relational field is integrative. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what makes a generative field. [SPEAKER_03]: And then you see all these beautiful things like harmony arise, flexible adaptable, this things coherent, energized stable.
[SPEAKER_03]: All that being said, I think like for Joanna Macyne, [SPEAKER_03]: She may not have used the term integrative, but when she talked about a quantum social change or no quantum change of consciousness, Karen O'Brien talks about quantum social change. [SPEAKER_03]: She and I were just teaching Norway.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in way those two, I wish I could've gotten them together when Joanna was able to do that because the quantum social change that Karen O'Brien talks about in a book called You Matter More Than You Think. [SPEAKER_03]: is essentially these things, as you mentioned, are portals that allow integration to arise.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we can really try to understand the science of it, but the reality of it is, I think healing and psychotherapy is creating a relational field that's generated because you as a therapist are honoring the difference between what your life history was, what you expect, what you think, what you feel, your memories, and what your client is also experiencing in those same realms.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's the differentiation, differentiation just means allowing and supporting and honoring and flourishing with differences. [SPEAKER_03]: And linkages. [SPEAKER_03]: And we're in the linkages, you don't lose the differentiation. [SPEAKER_03]: So as I always say, it's more like a fruit salad than a smoothie. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, you're not grinding everything up and making you much. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: integrations what we do and it's the base of healing and healthy growth and you know one day I think someone will be able to study relational fields and I think when therapy works you know and in Bob Simon song he talks about how do you count an uncountable sum and I think there's an uncountable sum when a generative field is having someone heal and therapy and I know we want to have you know what are they called the evidence based this and that you know therapy but the
[SPEAKER_03]: The work that you really see John Norcross talks about this beautifully, the deep work of therapy are the uncountable sums of how we generate in our own unique combination of our collaboration on the journey of healing with our clients, a relational field that's generative. [SPEAKER_03]: And that can't be.
[SPEAKER_03]: count it and you can't just do it in a manuals learning how to be present and you know facilities and we have nine domains of integration you can learn we do this in our mindset institute program but you can learn how to feel into the blockages the integration and you learn which of nine domains might be blocked
[SPEAKER_03]: and then like a laser beam, you then work on the blockage, you release the blockage, and then what is so exciting is that the natural healing process is in the client. [SPEAKER_03]: So you're just helping them get the blockage out of the way and letting integration naturally arise. [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yes. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like that's how it is physically. [SPEAKER_00]: There's so many things that it's already in here, but what is blocking it?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you were thinking of physically like I'm thinking because I go to PT and I have like a [SPEAKER_00]: pain here. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, and the physical therapist is getting the block out of the way so that the movement can be how it's supposed to be. [SPEAKER_00]: And then my body just knows what to do once the thing is out of the way. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like now move, you know, my body just knows how it's intended to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's like, [SPEAKER_00]: So different from the evidence-based practice kind of paradigm, the more, you know, top down paradigm of measuring, measuring, measuring, and sort of what you were saying before about the two realms. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's one that's very measurable. [SPEAKER_00]: The song that you love is called the measure, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: The other word is the measure of a life. [SPEAKER_03]: Well done. [SPEAKER_03]: So it starts.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly. [SPEAKER_03]: And I highly recommend you check out Bob Sima, SIMA, his website, or however you get music. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, because that song, his many, many, many wonderful songs. [SPEAKER_03]: And we heard them that night at the concert. [SPEAKER_03]: And that song in particular for our discussion here has so many elements that, you know, I spent a kind of an hour and a half [SPEAKER_03]: decoding his song and Bob is so happy and excited about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've been in continual texting with each other since then. [SPEAKER_03]: And because we never texted with each other before. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's really fun. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll link to his website and just again, there's something about that. [SPEAKER_00]: Like you were talking and you are a scholar.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're so well respected and brilliant and and the musical performance is a different kind of brilliance that [SPEAKER_00]: There's an alchemy that was happening between Bob and Shannon when they were singing and the harmony that Shannon brought in, the way that it changed the sound of the tune and your singing brought a different aspect to the three voices together and the guitar.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like all of that just felt so powerfully symbolic of everything about life and death, our connection are like, what are we doing here? [SPEAKER_00]: Why do we exist? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, what are we trying to do? [SPEAKER_00]: We're not just here to go shopping, you know? [SPEAKER_03]: That is a great phrase Laura. [SPEAKER_03]: That's a great phrase. [SPEAKER_03]: We're not just here to go shopping.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but it is kind of like that's what we're usually focusing on is just like getting our needs met going places doing things just being productive. [SPEAKER_03]: But you know, that phrase you just said is so illuminating of the fundamental problem. [SPEAKER_03]: And I'll say things from a mental health and medical health point of view.
[SPEAKER_03]: that if you get a message in society that you are not sufficient and you are not enough, then you get this antsy feeling that, oh, I better do something to be enough. [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I think the message is have more stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: I better go shopping, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Well, then there's this endless loop. [SPEAKER_03]: Some people have named it the hedonic treadmill. [SPEAKER_03]: But it's even, I mean, hedonic maybe is an okay word, you know, get pleasure.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's maybe deeper than pleasure than the sense I, for me to feel sufficient to fill an empty hole, people call it the hungry ghost in certain contemplative traditions. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, you know, because it's alive at message, first of all, you are sufficient. [SPEAKER_03]: So the message is alive and it creates this thing in my field, it's called epistemic trust violation.
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, violation of epistemic trust with epistemic means how we know we know and if someone tells you hey or you're in sufficient because if you don't have enough stuff or you you look this way or that way or you're acting this way or this is how your life is you know then you know you're going to have a feeling of insufficiency but the fundamental epistemic violation is you would told a lie so if you don't question these
[SPEAKER_03]: in the narrative world they're called master narratives. [SPEAKER_03]: We don't question the master narrative of our culture. [SPEAKER_03]: And in the individualistic culture, you're not enough. [SPEAKER_03]: And why is that a message that is important for some people to convey? [SPEAKER_03]: Well, because then you'll go shopping. [SPEAKER_03]: And then if you get in a position to be selling the stuff that people are buying, well, you're going to have more stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's that simple. [SPEAKER_03]: And then we get screwed up, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Literally. [SPEAKER_03]: And then we use up all the stuff on the planet. [SPEAKER_03]: And we're busy consuming this incredibly wonderful planet. [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, Joanna used to say, you know, she was madly in love. [SPEAKER_03]: She even said to me other day when I was with you know, madly in love with this world, you know. [SPEAKER_03]: And this is a magnificent place.
[SPEAKER_03]: Only if we treat it like a commodity or something we buy when we go shopping. [SPEAKER_03]: That's a problem. [SPEAKER_03]: So your statement is fun and funny and is actually profoundly illuminating of all the layers. [SPEAKER_03]: that one word people use is the poly crisis.
[SPEAKER_03]: And some of my colleagues have renamed that as the poly opportunity, meaning like while we have racism and we have war and we have climate destruction and we have all these ways where we're having crises for sure. [SPEAKER_03]: What if we reframe it instead of those threatening ways we put in a challenge mindset, which is to say, [SPEAKER_03]: They're these wonderful opportunities.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, whether it's Karen O'Brien's fantastic work, and I heard you put her website up too. [SPEAKER_03]: I will. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, or you look at, and there's a, I can't remember exactly the name of her website. [SPEAKER_03]: But her Joanna Macy's work that reconnects, you know, the common ground for those two beautiful beautiful teachers, you know, is really looking and deep change. [SPEAKER_03]: deep change.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the poly opportunity frame that Angela Costons, Sarah King and others have used that beautiful way of framing it makes it upbeat. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, let's take your phrase, you're not just here to go shopping. [SPEAKER_03]: So we could then attack shopping or we could say, let's not, we're not just here. [SPEAKER_03]: Well, then what are we here for? [SPEAKER_03]: And that's where Bob's I'm a song is so cool. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, we're here to get love.
[SPEAKER_03]: give love, feel love, see love, be love, believe in love. [SPEAKER_03]: And then, you know, for me as a scientist, having done sixty-five thousand wheel of awareness practices and people getting to pure awareness in the hub and the most common term they say when they get there is love. [SPEAKER_03]: We just did it here, do it again. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, people had that experience and you know, it's almost like love is the fundamental thread of the fabric of the universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yet we're away from it. [SPEAKER_03]: So scar that Lewis, I met her at a recent energy conference and she's the mom of Jesse Lewis who sadly was murdered in the elementary school, killings. [SPEAKER_03]: And he actually, as a five year old, saved a bunch of kids lives and he himself, unfortunately, was. [SPEAKER_03]: killed. [SPEAKER_03]: So she started a program that controls who like to called choose love, choose love.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, we talked about this thing that Jesse wrote the morning he went to school that day. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, was, you know, I'll probably get all the names wrong, but she hasn't on her website. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like, nurture, loving compassion, something like that. [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe three other words, but those are the fundamental feeling of it. [SPEAKER_03]: So I met and I have them exactly right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So she had an event just the other way online, and I, you know, was able to be one of the speakers in such an honor, because love is the fabric of the universe. [SPEAKER_03]: And love comes from that plane of possibility, which I think is what the hub of the wheel is a metaphor for. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's the portal allows integration to arise. [SPEAKER_03]: So in our institute, we always say, integration made visible is compassionate kindness.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's basically what you feel when you express love. [SPEAKER_03]: That's what you show kindness and compassion.
[SPEAKER_03]: So what I said in that meeting, and I want to just emphasize for us here, [SPEAKER_03]: When we can get the blockages out of the way, Scarlet Lewis's wonderful movement, shoes love, is it's a movement of, you know, this is the kind of movement where whether you're looking at what's happening in different countries around the world, all around the world, the United States, but not just the United States. [SPEAKER_03]: It's all of the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have an effort to not respect differences, whether it's religious, racial, gender issues, [SPEAKER_03]: you know, integration requires that we realize there's unity in diversity. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's a health issue. [SPEAKER_03]: It's not a political issue. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a health issue.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I was honored that after me was Vivek Murphy, the former surgery general wrote a whole book on the epidemiology, the finding we have a epidemic of loneliness, Maria Shriver was on there, it does beautiful work, you know, in this area. [SPEAKER_03]: So this being real is being open to, you know, integration, which is basically love how we, how we [SPEAKER_03]: experience love.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I say all that because our field in mental health or whether it's during the education side of it or working in schools or working with coaches or wherever you're working as a mental health advocate, this idea of choosing love that Scarlet Lewis's program talks about. [SPEAKER_03]: Involves as Karen O'Brien would say this quantum social change for you to remember that you matter more than you think and that book of that name by her is exquisite.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in the work to reconnect is, you know, Joanna Macy's way of saying, look, we need to reconnect our own inner experience of grief. [SPEAKER_03]: And to me, that's really letting go of blockages to then realizing we can go forward.
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of the last conversations through Anna and I, you've always recorded our conversations together, so as she's passing, I'm listening to all the recordings we made, our private conversations and it's, I went to bed, you know, listening to it and it was hilarious because she's very much alive in these obviously in these recordings. [SPEAKER_03]: So we were, we both loved dancing and I used to be into dance a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we talked about how to take the challenges we're facing this poly opportunity situation and see them not as threats but as dance partners. [SPEAKER_03]: and she's laughing and laughing and saying that's so great, you know, what's the music of the day? [SPEAKER_03]: And I said, yeah, you know, you wake up in the morning and you say, bring it on, you know, how do we dance to this challenge?
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think there's incredible, incredible moment where we can actually allow that to happen. [SPEAKER_00]: So moving everything you're speaking about. [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like, you know, our shared humanity, our common humanity is like one of the aspects of compassion and self compassion. [SPEAKER_00]: are this lie about that we aren't worthy unless we are a something, whatever, is us losing connection with our own humanity.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like, and you know, so I love, I'm gonna have to, I have heard about Joanna Macy's work through Francis Wellers, both the wild edge of sorrow, but, and then when you named her, I was like, I gotta, [SPEAKER_00]: I kind of look more at her stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: It sounds so hope inspiring. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Like that's a good book of hers to start with. [SPEAKER_03]: She has a second edition of Active Hope. [SPEAKER_03]: She wrote with a colleague.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Stephanie, whose last name I can ever pronounce was actually there with me. [SPEAKER_03]: And her house who edited a book called, I think it's called, a wild love of the world. [SPEAKER_03]: which is both Joanna putting little vignettes, but also her students over the last, you know, fifty years. [SPEAKER_03]: Putting in stories about her. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a very comprehensive summary of her work.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's a good one to really explore and join a road a bunch of other books to. [SPEAKER_03]: World itself, world is lover has another great one. [SPEAKER_03]: This computer is actually sitting on her book called Widening Circles that I'm reading. [SPEAKER_03]: It's her autobi, it's her memoir, you know. [SPEAKER_03]: And look, we're in this together, isn't the thing. [SPEAKER_03]: We're in this together. [SPEAKER_03]: So we are sufficient, and we need each other.
[SPEAKER_03]: And needing each other doesn't mean we're insufficient. [SPEAKER_03]: It just means we're relational beings. [SPEAKER_03]: And we become who we are in our connections. [SPEAKER_03]: That's the work to reconnect. [SPEAKER_03]: The quantum social change that Karen O'Brien is beautifully writing about is basically saying, [SPEAKER_03]: you're not in this alone.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the whole nature of a quantum view versus the Newtonian view is that we are verb-like processes that are massively connected with one another. [SPEAKER_03]: The Newtonian mental view of life is we are now like entities that are separate from one another. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a time space, right? [SPEAKER_03]: dimensions which don't have the same meaning in the quantum realm.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, all these things kind of are coming together with indigenous teachings, contemplative teachings. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's not like it's new. [SPEAKER_03]: This is thousands of years old on one level.
[SPEAKER_03]: But for those that's growing up in modern, individualistic cultures, [SPEAKER_03]: These calls from Carolina Brian and Joanna Maysee, they're really calls to wake up to indigenous teachings, to contemplative wisdom and to say, okay, you know, if we want to be only scientific about it, which we don't have to be, but if we wanted to be, now there's a science that goes along with these ancient teachings, these wisdom teachings. [SPEAKER_03]: And so it's an incredibly exciting moment.
[SPEAKER_03]: Joanna used to always say, for her body was done. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'd go to dinner with her and say, hey, you're doing with a new UN report. [SPEAKER_03]: She goes, you know, it's really hard. [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm grieving the fact that our human family is not doing it. [SPEAKER_03]: But I'm so excited to be alive. [SPEAKER_03]: There's so much to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's so much work for us to do, you know, and it really always gave me inspiration to hang with her because [SPEAKER_03]: You know, what else is there to do, but give it a big try as my daughter tells me, you know, to be really passionate about the purpose and the direction, but not obsessed about the specific outcome.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we're going to do this together, do it with fun and humor or do it together and know the direction is an integrative direction, become generative, not degenerative. [SPEAKER_03]: to become inclusive, not exclusive, to be allowing differentiated voices and bringing them all to the table, bringing them to the guiding forces that are directing us, not just saying, okay, let them have this land over there or whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, there's wonder of richness in our diversity. [SPEAKER_03]: And so I understand some people are traumatized and want just things to be exactly like they are or whatever. [SPEAKER_03]: And we gotta help them heal. [SPEAKER_03]: and realize that the truths that love is an integrative emergence of all of us honoring our differences. [SPEAKER_03]: That's health. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's a health statement and making not a political statement.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is, I'm saying it as a scientist, as a physician, as a psychotherapist. [SPEAKER_03]: integration honors differences in promote legages and it's a medical statement. [SPEAKER_03]: And so when we see the chaos and rigidity that arise when we don't promote integration, you can feel the suffering of that emerges all over the place. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's when integration is not being honored. [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, we have a kind of a clear path.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an integrative path if we're going to be healers and health promoters and advocates for the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel sure that that is the way forward because it's about, you know, how do we, where do we go from here, not looking back and saying, well, not that, you know, there isn't a lot of value in understanding how we got here, but, you know, now what, not just trying to contract and do things the same way that, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I know we got to stop soon in Newtonian time, but it was for the extended time.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you feel into, we do this in the, all the interpersonal neuroblogy stuff, but if you feel where there's chaos or where there's rigidity, whether it's in a classroom or a company or a country or a planet, you know integration is being impaired. [SPEAKER_03]: Our job can be integrationists. [SPEAKER_03]: Even if it's in the small thing of your own internal mind, do the work. [SPEAKER_03]: There are nine domains of integration you can work on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it's just within your family. [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it's just within the community. [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it's just within your state. [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it's just within your country. [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it's just within the planet and just our human family. [SPEAKER_03]: Whatever the chest is, don't worry about it. [SPEAKER_03]: You start making little changes. [SPEAKER_03]: This is the idea of quantum social change. [SPEAKER_03]: There are going to be ripple effects.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even if you don't want to do the quantum stuff, you know, Christachus and Fowler wrote this incredible book all connected. [SPEAKER_03]: You start bringing integration into whatever is the just world you bring justice, which is integration made visible too. [SPEAKER_03]: You bring that into the world. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's it. [SPEAKER_03]: And then that's the work we do. [SPEAKER_03]: However, it is in your personality to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: We do that and we're not helpless, you know, when you feel helpless, get helpful and there's a lot for us to do and it's a beautiful thing and do it with joy, do it with a smile in your face because we can do this together or I like to say, you know, not just we need, we MWE can do this together. [SPEAKER_00]: I love that you brought me into it also at the event when we were going to take a photo with Lauren going in UNI.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, you saw Sabrina, Dr. Sabrina and Jai there too. [SPEAKER_00]: I said, I said, we're going to do a selfie. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I guess it's me. [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to do a selfie. [SPEAKER_00]: I love it. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: So, Dr. Dan Siegel, thank you so so much for sharing your wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that a lot of what we spoke about is in this book, although we didn't go into how the Annie Graham and these theories of personality fit together specifically. [SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of woven into everything we talked about so people can. [SPEAKER_00]: get this book and learn about those connections. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you want to say anything else about that before we end.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think there are nine pathways revolvable to burning out these challenging times. [SPEAKER_03]: And there are nine pathways to really reigniting our passion.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the thing I'm really proud about that book is we really took a conciliant approach, try to look at different disciplines and I don't understand how temperament ultimately we use what we adapt to to be the foundation of personality and then our attachment can either make it a low level of function or high level of function. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's all in the book, but it relates to everything we've been talking about today in the deepest kind of very specific application.
[SPEAKER_03]: So take a look at the book and we can talk about that more another time. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, I would love that. [SPEAKER_00]: And thank you again so much for spending time with me today. [SPEAKER_00]: I feel once again inspired and I'll be thinking about this for weeks. [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm grateful. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm grateful that you are with me now, but I'm also just really grateful for what you're doing in the world. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to start crying again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I also want to just I want to say this out loud here and have you hear it and have our audience here. [SPEAKER_00]: Your humility is just so unusual to be someone who's so highly accomplished and yet so not in a fake way. [SPEAKER_00]: You're just you are so down to earth and it's a beautiful model for not only all of us, but and men, you know, it's just it's really [SPEAKER_00]: I really value and appreciate you for who you are as I understand.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, thank you, Laura. [SPEAKER_03]: That means it tremendous amount to me and thank you for being who you are and it's an honor to be here with you. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you. [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, so I'll be sure to put your mindset Institute website and all of the great, beautiful inspirational resources that you mentioned in our show notes. [SPEAKER_00]: So everyone who's listening can check those out too.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just going to say one more time that I'm sending you a lot of compassion as you are weathering your friends transition right now. [SPEAKER_00]: and your process in life so. [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much. [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks Laura, but I don't want her to be here with you. [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for listening to Therapy Chat with your host, Laura Reagan, LCSWC. [SPEAKER_02]: For more information, please visit Therapy Chat podcast.com.