Dr. Dan Siegel | The Wheel of Awareness & The Future of Healing

So your question, what's expanded consciousness? People can look at it in many ways and of course they've used that term for psychedelics, for shamanic practices, for spiritual traditions, for religious traditions. So it depends on what lens you want to use the phrase expanded consciousness. But broadly speaking, from our point of view in interpersonal neurobiology, it has to do with the knowing and the knowns. So you can take the awareness and open it wide so you're curious, open, accepting and loving of whatever arises and then the knowns that become available to you in that knowing of awareness. For us, it's a. We do a practice called the Wheel of awareness.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Maul and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find a life alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started.

Ready to bridge science and spirituality for deeper healing. This week we're diving into the plane of potentiality with Dr. Dan Siegel, a Harvard trained psychiatrist, best selling author and pioneer in the science of human connection, as well as a frequent guest on the Radical Responsibility podcast. We'll explore how practices like breath work, meditation and psychedelics can help shift us from dysregulated states to openness, integration and healing. Dr. Siegel also shares insights from his groundbreaking Wheel of Awareness practice and highlights the critical role of community in fostering lasting growth. Let's get started.

I'm very happy to be here today with my colleague, Dr. Dan Siegel. Welcome, Dan.

Thanks for having me back.

Oh, it's really wonderful. It's always an incredibly illuminating and enjoyable conversation to explore this territory with you. And I would actually encourage people to check out our conversation from the 2023 Expanded States Summit. You can figure out ways to access that. So I wonder if we could begin by you talking about your understanding of the term expanded states of consciousness, what that means to you, perhaps in the context of interpersonal neurobiology and your description of mind as a flow of energy and information within and. And then also as part of that, maybe for the purpose of our conversation today, if there's a way to distinguish between terms like mind, awareness and consciousness, which sometimes are used interchangeably or in overlapping ways. Anyway, so that's kind of a big question, I guess. But if you could just get us started with some Understanding of the landscape that we're going to be talking about.

Absolutely. Well, you know, to start with expanded consciousness. Expanded, of course, means something is going from a smaller state of being to expanded, larger, wider, more open state. And when you put the word expanded with consciousness, it's so important to do what you're doing, Fleet, which is say, what is consciousness itself? So in interpersonal neurobiology, we basically take many different ways of exploring reality and see if there's a consilient meaning, a common ground view. A consilience allows you to say, what do indigenous teachings teach? So here I'm speaking from the traditional lands of the Tongva and the Chumash in Southern California. I do work with the Esalen tribe in Northern California. And in June, we had, and we'll have again, a festival of the Esalen traditions and how they correlate with a view of our deep identity as a whole being in this festival of interconnectivity and spirit is what it's called. And there you see science meets spiritual practices. So that would be an example of consilience finding a common ground. So the word consciousness for us can be seen very simply, actually, as having two facets to it. It's the knowing of something, and not in an intellectual way, but just the awareness of something. So the knowing facet of consciousness would be awareness. But then consciousness also includes that which you are aware of, which can be simply called the known. K, N o W n. So they're the knowns. Like I say, hello, fleet, and there's the knowing. You're aware that I said, hello, fleet. So consciousness would be the broad term for the knowing. And the known awareness would be the knowing. The knowns could be anything from perceptions like hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, those basic sensations, Perception of the interior of the body called interoception or body sensations. It could include your thoughts, your feelings, your memories, your attitudes, your beliefs, even your identity. And it could include the perception of our deep web of connectivity. You could experience this as interconnected, like, you're there, I'm here, and we have a connection to each other. And you can also experience it as intra connected. There's a wholeness in Fleet and Dan's bodies being an expression of a larger whole, which is different from interconnected but related, of course, because you could say, I'm gonna alter my identity lens to say I'm a person in a Dan body. You could alter it and say, I'm a person at Fleet body. But we could widen that identity lens to say, wow, there is this emergence, kind of like the forest handle populace in Utah, where there's 48,000 seemingly separate quaking aspirin trunks. But when you measure the DNA, you find out it's the same tree. You look beneath the soil, about six inches, it's one root ball. So it's one of the oldest and largest living beings on earth, this pando populous grove of one tree. So from the outside things can look separate, but when you actually look in the essence, it's one thing, so that's intra connectivity. So consciousness could allow you, when it's expanded, to alter this lens of identity. And so your question, what's expanded consciousness? People can look at it in many ways and of course they've used that term for psychedelics, for shamanic practices, for spiritual traditions, for religious traditions. Even expanding consciousness as a form of adult development, you know, can be looked at in Kagan's view. So it depends on what lens you want to use the phrase expanded consciousness. But broadly speaking, from our point of view in interpersonal neurobiology, it has to do with the knowing and the knowns. So you can take the awareness and open it wide. So you're curious, open, accepting and loving of whatever arises and then the knowns that become available to you in that knowing of awareness. For us it's a. We do a practice called the wheel of awareness where we do this, I do this every day, expanding consciousness, where the knowing of awareness is in represented in a metaphor of the hub of a wheel. The knowns are on the rim and we take a singular spoke and move it around. And after doing this with many people, the experience they get has been compared to taking psychedelics. Even though it's just a 25 minute meditation, they get this expanded sense of reality, expanded sense of identity, expanded sense of consciousness. And there's this relief from all sorts of things, anxiety, mild to moderate depression, fear of death that comes with tapping into this pure awareness of the hub. So for me, the word expanded consciousness from these practices of the wheel that so many people have done seems to be related to the ability to access.

Pure awareness and how having access to that can support healing and improve neuroregulation, integration and so forth. But since today we're focused on the science of expanded states of consciousness and to some degree the science of consciousness altogether, I'd like to just have a follow up question here about consciousness. So in some ways we could say what we're talking about here are expanded states of awareness, the knowing, the use of consciousness, and in the study of consciousness and Conferences and disciplines around the study, that discipline, the study of science and consciousness. It seems like it can go across many fields and maybe there's opportunity for the consilience there, but it can border into metaphysics, it can be in philosophy, it can border on neuroscience, and there's this so called hard problem of consciousness and so forth. Sometimes we use to be conscious of, we use it as a verb. And here you're talking about the knowing and the known. So when you said the known, you were talking, it seemed like you were talking about like objects that arise in consciousness. But sometimes consciousness is used as a noun to refer to what you've called the plane of potentiality. People used to refer, you know, that from more eastern traditions or more idealist, less materialist view. Consciousness would be seen as primary before materiality arises. And so from that perspective, consciousness sometimes refers to the ultimate stuff of life. Even though it's not really stuff, maybe it's the ultimate non stuff of life. So sometimes the reason I'm asking is because sometimes when we talk about expanded states of consciousness, it feels like there's a trajectory towards coming in contact with or knowing or experiencing that greater dimension of that plane of potentiality or what, you know, people might reference as God or ultimate reality and so forth. And then people start having these experiences that are outlined, for example on the mystical experiences scale or questionnaire and so forth. So I just wanted to ask you a question about that maybe somewhat larger view of consciousness.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'll just give you a brief story related to that and then get into what is one way to think about the science of it. So I was asked by a pastor of a church to go on a trip on a bus with 50 religious leaders. And me, I don't have a religious background, so I was the odd person out on this bus of 50 passengers. And they were all religious leaders from every religion you could imagine. And we were taking this bus to Panda populace. And you know, when we got there, Ed Bacon, the pastor, he asked me to do the wheel of awareness with these 50 religious leaders and the forest grove, you know, protector, the steward, the forest ranger. And so we all did the practice. Many of the people of course were meditators because they were in various religious practices, but they did the wheel. The ranger had never meditated before. And when people went through this 25 minute practice of, you know, allowing the hub to become differentiated from the rim. And then even in the practice we did, we bent the spoke around so we focused attention straight into pure awareness. When people came out of the practice, they talked about feeling timeless and feeling at one, feeling God, feeling open, feeling expansive, feeling this love that they felt. The very common phrases that people, I've done this with 50,000 people in person, like in the forest. And these are the common words people often say. But the ranger had never heard those words and he had never done a meditation before. And he comes to the group after the meditation in the forest, and he says, that feeling in the hub is exactly why I'm spending my life here in Pando Populace. I want people to know that the reality of their awareness is that they are all connected to each other. Like all these trunks that seem like they're separate just beneath the surface. You realize there's one common root. And that's what I want humanity to realize. And that's why I'm here in the forest. And this meditation everyone should do when they come to the forest. So the religious leaders were like hearing this non meditator, non religious scientist speak with such in such poetic ways about his mission in life. And it was really very moving. And, you know, before that, you know, I had been asked to go to an immersion on spirituality and science with 150 physicists. And I had asked them to please tell me from a physics point of view what energy was. Because I had written years before that, you know, when you talk about like an object coming into mind or like, you know, a thought or whatever, what are those things? You know, for me, years ago, those questions could be best responded by finding the common ground, like across a memory or an emotion or a belief, an attitude, a longing, a thought, a sense of identity, a narrative, all that stuff. They were all about energy flow. So here I was for a week with 150 physicists, experts in energy, and I asked them, what's energy? I also asked them, what's time? Because we had the time and I had the energy to ask them these questions. And they said, energy is the movement from possibility to actuality. So I drew out this graph that you're referring to, where the bottom of the graph is where all possibilities sit. Physicists call that the quantum vacuum. Arthur Zajons, the emeritus quantum physics professor from Amherst, he calls it the sea of potential. On the graph, it's a plane in the shape. So I called the plane of possibility. But that graph is the generator of diversity. All the diverse actualities that could arise from potentiality are sitting there. So it's the G O D, the generator of diversity. Now, in physics terms, when I show this to the physicists, the Diagram. They said, oh, we don't have a picture of it, but that's what we mean. What they didn't have is these tens of thousands of people that have done the wheel. And it looks like the hub of that wheel, pure awareness. The descriptions. People have timelessness connected to everything and everyone. Open, spacious. We'll talk about love in a moment. Those look like they correlate with what the physicist said to me. So I'm not just making this up and say, oh, quantum this, quantum that. I'm talking about quantum. Quantum physicists speaking to me directly about their field. And what they said was, in the quantum realm, there is no variable of time but Newton 350 years ago. And like the quantum physicists, starting about a hundred years ago, Newton had developed all these equations for Newtonian views of reality, which are based on things being like noun, like entities that have a spatial separation, they have a temporal separation. They're separated across time and space in the Newtonian realm of macro states, like planets or moons or apples falling over a tree. So when someone once did the Wheel of Awareness in California, she had such a profound experience. She said when she heard this interpretation that the hub accesses the quantum realm, which is timeless and full of connectivity and potentiality. It's the God. She flew me to England and we went to Isaac Newton's house. You can watch a little documentary made of this we have on our website. And we did the Wheel of Awareness around the apple tree where Newton figured out gravity and Newtonian laws. He didn't call them that, but that's what we call them. Classical physics, macro state laws. So we did it. Everyone, you know, drops into this corner, quantum timeless realm. We're right by where Newton was born and where, when there was a plague, you know, he left university to come there and figure out all these laws in his spare time, you know. So we paid homage to Newton because he just didn't know what we now know from technological abilities, that there's two realms. Like, there's a land realm where you walk on land and you have your walking. But you could dive into a pond and swim in the water and no one freaks out that, oh, my God, there's the property of floating in water and there's a property of walking on land. We live in two realms. Underneath the quantum is there underneath even the Newtonian. But we see it more grossly in the Newtonian macro state world of things seeming like they're separate. And if you go to a traffic light, do stop your Newtonian car at the Intersection so you don't become one with everything. There are ways where we want to navigate this body we live in. What the wheel of awareness practice shows is that you can access without psychedelics, without long decades of meditative history with people who've never meditated before, like that forest ranger. You can have people access what's available to everyone all the time, which is this timeless space that people experience. We can talk about what's the science of why they say love. But from one framework you could say love, whatever that means for who was ever saying it. This linkage that people are kind of trying to articulate is the fabric of the universe. And I say it as a scientist, but when I say it to these religious leaders on that bus ride, or the different opportunities I've had, people not oriented in science, but of a religious background or doing psychedelics or doing psychedelic interventions for medical things. This framework seems to be consilient with indigenous practices, contemplative practices, medical research on psychedelic use for psychiatric disorders, basic issues about meditation and the way we use it in psychotherapy, personal growth, family functioning. It's remarkable it has tried to stay consilient. So it's not like one modality of doing something. It's kind of a way of understanding reality where everyone's invited with their disciplined ways of understanding. So energy flow is what I would say to you is the way to start sensing into the relationship between the knowing and the knowns. The knowing of awareness seems to be when energy is in this maximal uncertainty when we graph it out. But the knowns are various degrees. Like an attitude or belief would be a higher probability, but once you have a thought or a memory or a particular emotion, it would be an actuality. So we have this graph from near zero maximal uncertainty all the way up to a hundred percent. When I say hello Fleet, you know, I said that. So it's like a peak. And so you can graph out the mind as where you are on a probability distribution curve which includes awareness in the plane. So at the very bottom, maximal uncertainty and then a thought or a feeling, an attitude of belief, are various places along this spectrum.

Well, it's really interesting that.

And by the way, I'd like to let people know that they can go to the Mindsight Institute website and there's four versions of the wheel awareness practice right there, four guided practices of different lengths. So people can easily access that for free. So they'll precisely what you're describing. It's a wonderful methodology and does produce results. The first time you do it, of One kind or another. Anyway, you're going to have some kind of experience.

So and the just to say the meditation is on the website Dr. Dansegel.com because we offer in depth courses like on consciousness and change and those are on the Mindsight Institute. So the institute is like a school. And these offerings of like the wheel and other things are just on my personal.

Okay, great. Thank you for clarifying that. And I really encourage people to check those out and give them a try. And so it's kind of fascinating that. So as a life form, myself, Fleet or Dan, here we are doing this practice, a practice like the wheel of awareness. And we start to sort of have access to or be able to rest in that very formless realm of potentiality in the hub and that same plane of potentiality, source of diversity as you described it, that's what we're arising from as well. That's what our material worldworm is arising from. That's what we're arising from. That's what our mind is arising from the whole we're arising from that. And then looking back at the source through that which has arisen. So there's almost a circular thing here. And in some practices like the wheel and some of your formless meditation practices like Dzogena Mahamudra, there are practices of sort of, you know, being able to look at the source of mind, the source of awareness, the source of consciousness. Sometimes the images even begin of your. Your eyeball turning around, looking back that way, if that makes sense for anyone. But you know, so there's the idea that you can do that and that brings you into a kind of state of pure awareness. And that can become from even more sort of a completely non dual experience of pure awareness. But there's some level of that awareness or consciousness that you can't kind of get behind and look at. And so whether we want to call that source or you know, people have all these different names, we've been kind of talking around that. But that's just very interesting landscape to understand. But then from there I would like to talk about how having greater access to that, more contact with that can then support various forms of healing. But I don't know if you have anything more to say about this sense of it's this something that has arisen from that plane of potentiality or possibility is now looking back and experiencing that same same plane of possibility. And in there there can be this kind of non dual experience of pure awareness. But there's still something, maybe it's that if it's completely non. Dual. You're no. There's no longer anybody to get behind to look at it or get. Try to get behind it. You're just. Are that at some point.

Exactly. It's so beautiful what you're saying, Fleet. And I just want to pause and just soak in the beauty of what you're saying. Your view of it is so magnificent and gives us a window into, I think, how to come together as a human family, you know, because on so many levels. For example, we separate science from spirituality, which, as my dear friend John o' Donoghue used to say, is a division that never should have happened, a divorce that never should have been completed. And finding a way of mending that false division is essential for the future of not just humanity, but life on Earth. And then, you know, there's all these exciting things that come together with what you're saying where, whether you're talking about, you know, how indigenous teachings have been ignored for so long. And now we need to really listen to what our shared wisdom elders have been saying for so many thousands of years. And now we need to listen to what sometimes they're called our rooted messages. And there's a beautiful video called Rooted Messages that had wonderful documentary filmmakers in Holland made. I transcribed some of them for the interconnected book. But it's beautiful messages. And then independent of indigenous teaching, we have contemplative teaching from many different traditions that have also been having this, what the Garrison Institute, where I. I'm on the board, you know, we call, you know, the timeless wisdom that we need for timely action. And in many ways, the way you described it, Fleet, is so fantastic because the timeless wisdom is that. And to put it maybe too simplistically, but I think it's basically true. The intricate, wonderful human brain has a vulnerability to start reflecting on itself. So our species name is Homo sapiens. Sapiens sapiens is twice superiors to know. So we not only know, but we know. We know it's kind of a meta awareness. But that meta awareness has a vulnerability, and that is, we begin to see the body. Oh, this is me. This is the totality of my identity. And when I have an entity identity, oh, this body, this noun like thing is who I am. It's a setup for existential despair. This hedonic treadmill where I figure, oh, my God, this body's not going to last forever. I better get as many toys as I can. I better have as much hedonic pleasure, you know, exciting this, exciting that. And then no matter what I Do I can't get enough stuff and I can't stop the clock of time or this body. It's only about a century to live. Now, I know people are freeze drying themselves and trying to clone themselves and all sorts of things, but that's this desperate attempt to not realize this larger view which has to deal directly with the vulnerability of saying, who I am is just this body. Let's call that the solo self. So the timeless wisdom of indigenous teachings and contemplative teachings, in my view, is to say, humanity, be very careful, you have a vulnerability to have mistaken identity as a solo self, the self only defined by the body or bodies like yours. So when we look at energy from this plane of possibility moving into probabilities, up into actualities, those actualities come from these, what I call plateaus of belief that say I'm separate. And then you live an entire life from that plateau which is like a filter selecting which things can arise. And then you're busy with all these peaks. Let me get this, let me get that, let me get this, let me get that. Oh, I'm not happy, I better get more. And the greed and the dissatisfaction that emerge from that plateau of the mistaken identity of the solo self are not only creating individual despair and the loneliness we see, the polarization we see, the racism we see, but even climate destruction. Because if you realize the planet is our body, you wouldn't build factories that destroy your body if you knew it was your body. So when you're out in nature, when you do a meditation like the wheel of awareness or all the other meditations you can do, or the general finding when people groove with psychedelic use in these research studies, the general finding of what's the marker that's going to say this person is going to positively respond, which many do, to trauma, anxiety, mild to moderate depression, the panic of facing death, those are the main things that we are researching. It's always is the sense of self expanded from the private solo individual self to a larger expanded identity, which to me is what comes to mind when you talk about expanded consciousness. So the way it all fits together from this energy point of view is you've gone beneath the prison of a constructed plateau, constructed because the vulnerability of the human brain, constructed because modern culture keeps on giving you messages of that mistaken identity. You know, not in contemplative cultures, not in indigenous cultures. And they have their own issues. So I'm not like trying to idealize them, but that message of timeless wisdom is shared amongst all of them. But in modern culture, no, it's all about me, me, me, me, me, or the plural me, which is, you know, this me who are like me, you know, we in a negative kind of way. So I use the term we, meaning you want to be both a me and realize this larger relational connection with all humanity, not just people who look like you and all of nature, not just the human species. So, you know, when you look at, for example, the cutting edge research on psychedelics, when the researchers speak to me about it, I say, well, what's your mechanism of action? They go, oh, well, you know, we think it's this expanded identity. I said, okay, well why does that help? But we don't know why exactly. I said, well, here's maybe why. And I show them the graph of, you know, this plane of possibility and the plateaus. And I say very quickly, which is the amazing thing about these studies, 1, 2, 3 trials. And it seems to have a lasting effect when people are brought to the plane of possibility, which the psychedelics seem to do, instead of making the brain do stuff, it's almost like it relaxes the brains, what's called the default mode, which are these plateaus of a separate identity. And then what happens is people access that plane. When we do it in the wheel of awareness, practice without psychedelics, people say, oh my God, I'm stoned on psychedelics. But they didn't take anything. When we give them the mystical experiences scale informally, they get the same scores as if they were on psilocybin and they were running around this sense of, you know, amazement about life, this bliss, this joy, this gratitude. My cup says, you know, this incredible feeling like what a privilege to be alive. That's what people start to feel. Because when you tap into that plane of possibility, you dissolve away the illusions of separation that a Newtonian kind of separate identity gives you. And you say, sure, I have a body, I'm going to stop at a red light at an intersection. You don't get rid of the me, but you add the we, which is this deeply open, spacious, love filled gratitude, blissful, joyful place. Initially, for some people, they're scared of it because it's maximal uncertainty. But in every workshop I've done, I haven't had an exception so far. People were scared initially. When I work with them, they come to realize it was a plateau of fear. That told them uncertainty in my childhood was dangerous, so I can't go to pure awareness. And when they see the graph and I explain to them, totally understand why your childhood uncertainty was scary, I get it. When we look at the uncertainty of the plane of possibility, open awareness, we come to realize what the artist Rashid has written on the entryway to the Brooklyn Public Library that says, having discovered the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander. So in the workshops, people can let the terror go. And when they realize the freedom of wandering in life, not aimlessly, but openly with freedom and possibility, they realize freedom and possibility are the synonyms for uncertainty. So instead of being scary, which, of course, for many of us it was in childhood, we realized that's where the other options are sitting. And that's what humanity needs to embrace. The reason of humanity needs to expand consciousness. And I talked to my dear friend and mentor Joanna Macy, about this all the time. When Joanna talks about needing to have this great turning, which is going to require a quantum change in consciousness, what Joanna says about the interconnected book is that is the space of shifting identity from the separate solo self to realizing the intranected nature of who we are. Wow.

Beautifully laid out for us there. So I'd like to explore further, perhaps some of the mechanisms of healing, especially trauma, as you reference, especially serious traumas and childhood traumas and attachment wounds and so forth. The uncertainty could be very difficult initially to deal with of not knowing, of approaching the Hub. As well as another way to look at these experiences are. Maybe it's the intraconnectedness. The experience of interconnectedness and oneness provides a certain safety which we can then experience, you know, deep within our neural landscape. But even for some people who have experienced serious trauma, that safety itself can be triggering. Because if I allow myself to feel that safe now, I'm potentially vulnerable because I was violated another time when I was supposed to be safe or something. So that's just one landscape of deep traumas. But so, you know, also we know that people have expanded states of consciousness experiences which they describe, and they check all the boxes on the mystical experiences scale, and they can be quite profound, but they can lead to issues of inflation, of bypass, or they may just not really have much impact on how the person's showing up day to day. And it may have a lot of issues going on, their underlying traumas, addictions, shadow issues, all kinds of things going on, not having really worked through their sexual energy inappropriately and different things. And so. So what is it that can allow these experiences, or having access to the Hub and the wheel of awareness practice to drop in both on an individual level, so that there really can be a deep healing within our own neural landscape, where traumas are often Embedded, that's one question. And maybe then a follow up question will be to talk about that more in the relational field. How we can leverage greater potentiality for healing by, you know, in a communal sense of relationship. And you can't really completely separate the two, but maybe we could at least talk about our individ work for a moment and you know, what are the mechanisms that translate these expanded state experiences into actual actually healing trauma and leading to, you know, fully integrated realization or shifts in identity. So this more expanded identity to where we're maybe the we you're talking about, where that really becomes integrated and underlying traumas are, have been healed, locked on states of fear and survival that are embedded in the nervous system are relaxed and healed and we're really able to be in a fully integrated way. And we're not just sort of sitting on things we've repressed or bypassed and so forth.

Right, right. Yeah. Well, a couple things. Let me share with you a direct experience that happened just very recently within a workshop that I think will be a good example of someone working through something exactly like you're talking about. And also let me say that my next book is called Personality and Wholeness in Therapy. And in that book there's a deep dive into exactly what you're asking about. How does a therapeutic process toward healing relate to not only your attachment experiences, but your temperament? So we rarely talk about temperament and we certainly rarely talk about personality. We talk about personality disorder, but personality and how trauma impacts people very differently depending on their temperament. So in this book, which I've been working with four colleagues on for basically 20 years, and it's finally done, I'm literally doing the copy edits on it, so it'll be out very soon. You know, the response to your question would take us through kind of a deep dive through these different ways of understanding temperament. But I, rather than go into all those details, I'll just say that there are experiential things that happen which I'll talk about in this example of the person from the retreat. And there's also this overlay of temperament which is basically the innate propensities of a nervous system. Before, most certainly before it had the human being had a lot of experiences. Of course there are experiences in utero, but it's, let's say it's what we're born with, inborn. So that would be a fun, maybe next year we can have a whole thing on that because that's a whole hour unto itself to talk about it. But here, let me just Say that when we do the wheel of awareness and someone gets into a state of panic about the uncertainty of the has happened in this retreat. And this one person, he said, you know, I hate the wheel of awareness. It's terrifying to me. I tried to bend the spoke around, look in that hub. And it was a nightmare. I got a panic reaction. You know, he said this in front of the whole retreat group. Is it a hundred people? So I said, let's tell me what it feels like. And he said how terrifying it was. So I said, let me talk to you afterwards. Because I wanted to give him the confidentiality and privacy, explore it. So we got together afterwards, and it turned out that had been given up for adoption and spent the first year of his life in an orphanage and then was adopted. And he had never heard about the difference between implicit and explicit memory. He's in therapy, but his therapist, I guess, either wasn't familiar with it or didn't describe it to him, or he didn't remember it. I explained to him that, you know, we have these two layers of memory. Before 18 months of age, the region of the brain called the hippocampus has not developed enough, so it can't do the kind of integrated work it does to create what's called explicit memory, which is factual memory on the left hippocampal areas and autobiographical explicit memory on the right, which is the sense of self and time. So before 18 months and even in utero, what research suggests is that you are laying down only the deeper level of memory, which is called implicit memory. And that has bodily sensations, perceptions, emotions, behaviors, and all of that. These building blocks of implicit memory can be summarized as schema or mental models. And they determine something called priming, which is you're getting yourself ready for what's going to happen next. So the key thing about implicit memory is it doesn't need the hippocampus for encoding. It doesn't even need attention for encoding. It just gets the neural firing patterns activated at the time of an experience, strengthen the connections, and it's stored in implicit memory throughout the brain, not involving the hippocampus. Here's the key thing. Those stored representations, say for this young man, young boy, when he was in the orphanage, of terror that he's abandoned, that there's no one taken care of, it was a big orphanage without many caregivers, so that he would have a feeling of being forlorn, of uncertainty, being dangerous, that the innate needs we have as mammals have an attachment figure. Care for us was not fulfilled. So Uncertainty for that young child before he got adopted at one would have been filled with terror at uncertainty. When implicit memory is retrieved, when it's pure, it isn't tagged as I am remembering something. It just fills you with the here and now experience, as if it's happening like it happened back then. So I'm saying this to this retreat member and his eyes get really big, he leans forward, he goes, say that again. I said, it's very possible that when we did the wheel of awareness and the experience of uncertainty, when you got to that hub started to emerge, it would be directly triggering the association of uncertainty with what happened to you in that first year of your life, that you wouldn't have explicit memory about. You now know the fact you were in an orphanage, but you wouldn't have access. It would come back to you as a one year old or less than one being terrified. And now he starts to cry. And I'm just sitting there with him. I'm giving him the opportunity to have the adult awareness, the adult knowledge, the adult insight hold space, in part because we have a retreat full of people doing the wheel of awareness and this feeling of love in the room, and in part because I'm there with him and I'm a therapist. But all those factors are there and. But community healing is incredibly important. And so I said, let's just sit with that. And you can sense, I say to him, that you have an adult who actually can reach out to that implicit infant in you, that we all have that for you. Uncertainty was really dangerous. And now he's really crying. And I said, so just imagine how you can give space so that the hub is not where terror is. It's the memory of being that orphanage and that uncertainty equals terror. And he started to rework it. And I checked with him throughout the rest of the week. It was a completely different week for him. He could do the wheel practice. He could now start to use what's called focal attention on the terror, using his hippocampal activation. When he focuses attention on that, he could name it to frame it as, that's a terror of my implicit memory of being in an orphanage. And then he could begin to care for that implicit infant inside him and grow that infant up and let the infant know that the plane of possibility, which is, I think, the scientific way of understanding what that hub and the metaphor of the wheel practice is really about, that's where his other options are. And he was like floating with freedom. And it reminded me of what another retreat member once said, similar Things she did the wheel. She takes the microphone and she says, the wheel killed me. I'm dead, Esther. What? It felt like it'd be dead. And she said she was disconnected, numb. There was no hope. It was all over. She had a very similar kind of. Different kind of trauma, but similar kind of reaction to the hub of the wheel. I showed her the graph. This is all in front of 150 people. This is one of the workshops we did at Esalen. And in listening to other people, in being in that community, in the same session where she was freaking out at the end of the group discussion, I said, can we check back in with you before we take a break for dinner? She says, sure. She has this huge smile on her face. This is all within. This is in front of 150 people. I'm not, like, making this up. And I said, can you tell us how you're doing? She points to her face. She goes, the wheel of awareness took me to pieces. And she gets that big smile on her face again. She goes, and now I'm at peace. And this is why I happen to be in Costa Rica with two of the principal investigators of this study that either was published last week or going to be published next week. I don't know where it is on MDMA and the treatment of trauma having these incredible effects. So I Talked to both PIs, principal investigators of the study independently, like, what do you think is what's going on? And they said, somehow MDMA is giving people the space to let their emotions and their memories be there so they can work them. It doesn't do just, you know, magic. It just gives them the space to hold it. So there's this concept which I named years ago as the window of tolerance. What you could say from both retreat members at Esalen and this one we just did in Costa Rica, what you could say is opening awareness widens the window of tolerance so you can hold in awareness, in this case, the implicit memory of being in an orphanage. Hold an awareness so it doesn't just freak you out and you have to run from it, understandably, because it's terrifying. Now you've widened the window so you stay in a coherent space, an integrative space. But you don't run from the terror. You hold the terror there and it doesn't put you into chaos or rigidity so that widening the window is done. Maybe because of the understanding of implicit memory, maybe because of my presence, the community, all these things together, the community can now help this person integrate. So both PIs of this study said it isn't just take MDMA at a party and you're done. You've got to do the therapy. So it's MDMA assisted therapy to help you do the work you need to do. And that's where I think these agents help. They melt away these plateaus that are often prisons for us, widen the window of tolerance, let us hold these important emotions and memories, understand that some of them are implicit. Only when you then can hold them in awareness long enough, the hippocampus gets involved and allows these memories to be integrated, sometimes for the first time. And integrated literally means processing them into factual memory on the left hemisphere, autobiographical memory on the right. And then the next domain of integration that we work with, nine domains, the next domain is narrative, where you begin to tell the story of the child you, that was in an orphanage that used to be so terrified it couldn't do, couldn't let you do the wheel of awareness. And that's a historical fact that now has changed because you realize the terror is not about the hub. In fact, the hub is where freedom lies. The terror was about the orphanage, which was an actual terrifying experience for a baby to have no attachment figure. And then the person, the adult person, cares for the child and grows the.

Child and the possibility of a whole reparenting process. So, yeah, I mean, that's really beautifully described and on a number of different dimensions. I'm somewhat curious about the neurophysiological dimension of healing. And I realize there's a lot we just don't know, but a couple of examples. One, I have a couple of close friends who had really very early attachment. One was adopted, and I just don't think ever got real attachment or bonding with the adoptee parents. And another had, I think, you know, pretty deep wounding attachment issue wounding. And for both of them, when they would get triggered by certain things, it was just like the bottom fell out. It's like there was a trap door in her nervous system somewhere. And when that thing tripped, they just down the rabbit hole. And it was going to take a while to come back out of that rabbit hole. Minutes, hours, sometimes a day. And myself, you know, I grew up in a pretty good family, but we had alcoholism. And I had a mother who showed up either as my best friend and the most intelligent, artistic, incredible mother you could imagine, but when she drank became this really terrifying rage aholic. And when she wasn't going after my father, who was away on business, she would come after me. And so that was a real psychic splitting there and I arrived in adolescence with a big hole in my gut is the way I began to understand it. And early on in my meditation tr, there were times when I felt like I was on the edge of this abyss. And I was even, you know, guided by some instructors who weren't therapists. But, you know, they were kind of causing me to be a little more fearless about that or, you know, not. And I was just like, no, I can't. If I go down there, that's annihilation. Right is the way it felt to me at the time. And so for years I was doing a lot of deep spiritual work, a lot of meditation training, a lot of education, but I still had addiction stuff going on in this very compartmentalized life and child stuff. And when I finally landed in prison and and began to do 12 step work and initially in the 12 step of the AA programs, you know, having been a kind of recovering Catholic and Buddhist for many years, the God language was challenging for me. And I'm doing the inner acrobatics with that. And at some point, you know, this idea of a higher power, at some point I realized that hole in my gut was my higher. That's where I needed to go. And I realized I needed to go there. And that began a process. And that hole's not there anymore. After years of work, it's just absolutely not there anymore. And so it seems like there is. We could describe it on many levels, but there does seem to be a reweaving of attachment or a reparenting that does need to have a neural substrate in the body going on of some kind. I did your Wheel of Awareness, one of them, and I loved it because I had the impression to Wheel of awareness was more of a mind practice, but within it, you led this body scan and you went from the top all the way down, kind of somewhat exteriorly, but then you came back up. Really deep interior body scan, anteroceptive body scan, all the way up. So I love that the wheel of awareness practice was really grounded in the body and fully included in the body, because it seems like there's that kind of necessary level of healing. And then that may lead into what are the possibilities of healing that's facilitated in relationship and community by co regulation. I've always loved your expression as a therapist, what we can offer or a healer of any kind offer to someone. You know, we often talk about people's need to be seen, but also giving people the experience of feeling felt as your expression. And I've always loved that. So all those Things seem to be. I mean, it can change at the narrative level. And the narrative we have about our life can be transformative. But at some level, all that is doing some reweaving. I suspect at a neurobiological level that's healing or closing some of those trap doors and giving us deeper resilience and so on.

Absolutely. I think the reweaving can be simply summarized with the term integration. Suboptimal attachment experiences compromise how the different areas in the brain are linked. And even compromise how individuals can be differentiated and linked. So we'll define the word integration as the linkage of differentiated parts. Differentiated just means they're allowed to be different or special or, you know, individualized. Linkage means connecting them. And that can be functional and structural. When you look at the brain studies, let's say, of trauma in the form of abuse or neglect, the main impact of developmental trauma is to compromise integration in the brain. And you can see that in the corpus callosum that links to differentiate left and right, not growing well. The hippocampus that we're referring to, that takes differentiated memory systems and links them. That doesn't grow well. The prefrontal cortex that links higher areas to lower areas, to the body, to the social world doesn't grow well. And even something called the connectome, the word connect with O M E at the end, connectome, subtly differentiated areas and how they're linked. It doesn't become as interconnected. When you look at. What do you know, Mindfulness and compassion training practices do that train attention to be focused, awareness to be open, and intention to be kind, which all those are built into the wheel. When you look at other studies of those formal practices, I call it three pillar practice. Intention to be focused, awareness to be open, intention to be kind. The result for the brain is you get a more integrated brain that correlates directly with. In fact, I was just on a Mass General ran arounds and you know, Marty Teicher's at Harvard, where Mass General is, and Sarah Lazar is at Harvard. She just said this publicly. So I can say she did one of the first studies, preliminary findings, to take people who had been traumatized developmental trauma and do mind training practices to see if we can overcome the impaired integration with those practices that in the general population we know grow those integrative fibers in the exact same areas. Right. So those are the four ways the hippocampus grows, the corpus callosum grows, the prefrontal cortex grows, and the connectome becomes more interconnected or mindfulness practice in the general population. So Marty Teicher and Sarah Lazar did, as far as I know, the first study to take people with developmental trauma, teach them these practices and they're finding positive results. The brain continues that neuroplasticity. So I was so excited to hear this just yesterday morning, you know, and the reasoning behind it is well being comes from integration, whether it's relational integration, so that attachment relationships that are loving and supportive, or people differentiate, allowed respect, differences, and within that diversity there's unity because of the connection. So relational integration, the sharing of energy, information flow, it's differentiated and linked. That's what I mean by integrated. It grows the integrated fibers in the brain. And if you look at the Smith et al paper in 2015, the best predictor of well being across every measure they could find was how integrated your brain was. So all these findings I talk about in a graduate school textbook called the Developing Mind. You don't need to read it, but just know there's a huge amount of science that allows me to respond to your fleet and say healing in trauma is integrative.

This has been so illuminating, so helpful. And just maybe to summarize a little bit, it sounds like these expanded state experiences of all kinds, various sorts of.

Can allow us to sort of lessen our attachment to the various plateaus of limited identity that we tend to get stuck on and experience expanded senses of identity, more interconnected kinds of identity which increase interconnection, increase safety, and then through the process, in terms of healing trauma, this creates more of a safe space and a space in which that integration process can then happen. So the ideal interventions would be things that can facilitate and give people skills to be able to access, like your wheel of awareness practices, expanded states, even on their own, perhaps without a psychedelic medicine, not that the psychedelic medicine might not be a good place to start in therapy, but then the real key is the therapeutic work or the integration work or the personal integration work that over time increases that level of integration in the brain, which is the direct marker to well being and resilience and so forth.

Beautiful. Couldn't say it better. Exactly.

So may it be so. Well, thank you so much, Dan. Dr. Dan Siegel, author of so many best selling books on mind and awareness and everything we've been talking about. And I do encourage people, if they have any tendencies towards being a wonk in any of these areas, to read the Developing Mind. I consider it my bible and continue to read it. But thank you so much for being part of our and for the illuminating conversation. We had today.

Thank you, Philippe. Always a pleasure.

Absolutely. Be well. You too.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.

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