EP 174: Resilience and Interconnectedness | Dan Siegel MD

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Ball. And today I'm really happy to be presenting an episode with Dr. Dan Siegel, longtime colleague with whom I passed. Had many fascinating conversations. And in this conversation, we talk about resilience in a relational context and how integration is essential to experiencing wholeness of interconnectedness and intraconnectedness. Really talking about how as the brain develops and even in our own individual personal development in our lifetime, the brain circuitry, the neural architecture of the brain is. Is becoming more differentiated, more complex in order to deal with more complex problems. And with healthy brain development and good work of integration, it's also becoming more connected and like more parts, more. More different, more differentiated parts in the brain. And they're also communicating very efficiently and effectively. So you get this highly integrated brain, and thus you get these flow states, this experience of flow, and this is within and between. I love Dr. Siegel's definition of mind, and it really isn't a standard, accepted scientific definition of mind. It can be kind of obscure what we even mean by mind. And he proposes this definition that it is a flow of energy and information within. In other words, within ourselves and between, in the social field, the relational field with others. So it's always fascinating to. To have a conversation with Dr. Dan Siegel. So please join us.

Mal. I'm really thrilled to be here today with Dr. Dan Siegel. How are you, Dan?

Hey, Fleet. I'm doing really well. Great to be with you again.

It's great to be with you again. And we're here on day two of the Global Resilience Summit, where we're focused on relational resilience and healing trauma. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I'm going to share your bio with our audience. Most of them are probably very familiar with you, but just in case, so. Dr. Siegel is the clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co director of the Mindful Awareness Research center at ucla. He is also the Executive Director of the mindsight Institute, which focuses on the development of mindsight, teaches insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families and communities. His five New York Times bestsellers are Aware the Science of Practice of Science and Practice of Presence, Mind A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, Brainstorm, the Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, and two books With Tina Payne Bryson, the whole brain child and no drama discipline. Dr. Siegel also serves as a founding editor for the Norton Professional series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, which contains over 75 textbooks. For more information about his educational programs and resources, visit drdanziegel.com and mindsightinstitute.com so again, welcome Dr. Siegel, and we'll jump right in.

I'll call you, Dan Fleet.

Or I'll call you. Yeah, I will. Professor PAUL we have. Okay, yeah, no, it's. We have the kind of an ongoing conversation here from summit to summit, and a lot of us has been during several years of this pandemic. So we are focused on overall with the summit, Dan, on how to cultivate the individual, collective, systemic resilience. We need to really face the daunting challenges we're facing today, which seem to get ever more complex and daunting. And today we're focused on relational resilience and healing trauma. And I really love to talk about that with you in terms of your work with interpersonal neurobiology and really your profound understanding of what we're talking about when we're talking about mind. And, you know, I've been reading your book, the Developing Mind for the last couple of months now.

Awesome, the third edition.

Yeah, it's quite a tour de force. And it's so fascinating. And to really understand that mind, as you describe it, as an emergent process, a self organizing emergent process, you know, going to chaos theory and some other things that we understand how.

Emergent processes come out of some kind of chaotic field through self organizing principles, and really understand that mind as an emergent property of a relational field. There is the embodied brain, you know, the brain inside our skull. But when we think of really our consciousness, our mind or our self or who we are, our life, we're really talking about something that's much larger than that. So I wonder if you could start there in terms of your understanding of mind and then we can move into there to really talk about what would resilience be then from. In a relational context.

Yeah. Well, thank you. Yes. So certainly the mind for 2500 years, you know, in modern medicine, you know, since the time of Hippocrates, has been thought of as something roughly equivalent to the brain's activity, you know, and in modern psychology, that tends to be the ensconced world view of what mind is. So certainly we want to think about the fully embodied mind as being something beyond the skull, and.

Part of its experience is encased inside the skin, encased body. But then we're saying that it's also relational. And when, when you say the same thing, mind is both embodied, relational. One way to understand what seems like a, an impossibility, how could something be both inside and outside at the same time, is to look at energy and information flow, that it's not restricted by the skull or the skin. And so it's happening now between you and me and everyone listening right now to us. And when you look at that system of energy and information flow, it has the features of what's called the complex system. And complex systems in our universe have something called emergent properties. So that's 30 years ago where the proposal comes from the thinking that the mind, just like wetness, emerges from the interaction of the elements of water molecules. A single water molecule isn't wet, but many water molecules together create the emergent property of wetness. The proposal is the mind may be an emergent property of both fully embodied and fully relational energy and information flow. And there's a lot, you know, in the developing mind about the science of that or any of these other books. But from your question about resilience, when you follow that line of reasoning, the idea is that the self organizing aspect of this emergent property tells us that when you differentiate and link, you create the most resilient or coherent unfolding of this complex system. So differentiation, linkage, we're going to name that integration. So for us, a resilient mind is a mind that's cultivating differentiation and linkage. What we're going to name as integration within, between and among. And we see the wholeness of that, not just interconnected, but intraconnected, there's a wholeness of which we are a fundamental part.

And so with that integration within and without, with others and among that references what you call that kind of coherent flow or coherence in terms of the flow of energy and information. And that references what you've also described as the window of tolerance and that kind of river of coherence. And when we get outside of that, we get into either rigidity or chaos.

And so understanding that in terms of resilience, it would seem that if we want to think in terms of having strategies for both individuals, relational and collective resilience, it would be how do we navigate the shores of that stream to stay within that integration and increase the integration and not fall into or get pushed into rigidity or chaos.

Yeah, exactly. I think all the different challenges we face today.

The war going on between Russia and Ukraine, the experience of a viral pandemic, Social injustice and racism, even the climate crisis. All of these can be understood as, in many ways, constructions of the mind. Even the viral pandemic, how we deal with it or don't deal with it collectively. So then understanding the mind is really important. There's a couple of initiatives that are happening now about how to work with the United nations sustainability goals, and how do we face the climate crisis. And looking at the mind to develop not just individual resilience, not even just family resilience or resilience in communities, but global resilience, how do we understand all living beings on the planet as part of a complex system? So the human mind plays an important role because I think it excessively differentiates itself and doesn't link. So it's impairing integration because it's not balancing those two. And so we have a modern view of the solo self. Like the self is just in the body. This self is here, yourself is there, and we're separate. And I just got to get as many toys during the life of this body as possible. And that's what the game is all about. Well, you know, that game is basically played itself out that if we keep on living with that modern, let's just call it what it is, a lie of the self being separate. You know, we're going to basically cook this planet, ending biodiversity, ending the capacity to sustain life in a regenerative way. So, you know, these are all painful things to think about. You know, Joanna Macy is a beautiful writer who for decades has been talking about the idea of active hope. It's not a passive kind of false optimism. It's like, how do we actively mourn what we've lost in terms of biodiversity? But then instead of putting our heads in the sand or just trying to distract ourselves by getting drunk or something, how do we actually stay wide awake? How do we work together? How do we have fun doing it? How do we bring love to the journey, but then work hard to really correct these huge constructions of the mind of racism and social injustice, the climate crisis, just being two.

And that's, I think, where a summit on resilience can directly help us to say it's more than just resilience for your individual self, the me. It's resilience for the collective we. But don't give up the me. So we like to say the integrated self experience would be me plus we is mui. You know, that's kind of the fun term for how we can go forward.

Well, certainly Joanna Macy's really important work, the Council of All beings work. She encourages us to grieve the catastrophic species loss that's been going on for a long time. And now in terms of what's happening with, you know, that any while this fact of hope and any real transformation is on the other side of embracing what is and being willing to feel the loss, feel the sadness. And so that makes me think of. You've also talked about emotion as being part of at least one manifestation of that self organizing principle.

Yeah.

And so how does that. Because as we think about, you know, how can we participate in we. How can we participate in creating collective resilience? There is some individual work we need to do to be able to participate at that level, our own relationship with our own emotional experience, for example, and in order to be able to enter into the relational field in a way that we can participate in increasing the level of integration collectively. So. So could you talk about emotion as part of that self organizing principle of mind in the field?

Yeah, I mean, you know, emotion is fascinating in, in actually, the first thing I ever wrote, believe it or not, was the textbook the Developing Mind. I think I'd written a chapter for a psychiatry textbook and maybe one article, but the first significant, you know, big thing I wrote was the Developing Mind. And so one of the chapters was about emotions. So I said, okay, I'll just review what the various emotion scientists say emotion is. And they couldn't agree with each other. And so I read all the different things I could find. And yet I found a commonality that they didn't indicate that actually brought them together as, you know, conflictual as they were, these approaches. And it's going to sound strangely, but that commonality actually was the process of integration that whether you were a brain scientist studying emotion in the brain, or you're into the body, studying the effect of the body up into the brain, or you're studying relationships, like a romantic relationship and emotions, or studying a family and emotions or whatever it was. It was always about aspects of whatever level of the system you're talking about being differentiated and then linked. And no one was really naming it, like let's balance these two for healthy emotional life. But it seemed like an emotion was a shift in integration. So thinking of emotion that way, I know it's weird, you know, but it means that emotion is everywhere happening because we're always in this moving down the river and it's shifting in its flow. When we shift down in integration, we can become chaotic or rigid going to the banks of that river. But when we have these expansive Emotions like awe or like gratitude or like compassion, joy, love, all these ways we actually are increasing in integration and feel the harmony of that. So it became, I know it was weird and so I had to take a deep breath and say, I'm not going to be like a popular kid in school, you know, talking like this. But it just seemed true to, to think of emotion as a shift in integration. And then when you thought of it that way, then emotional well being was integrative well being and emotional closeness was integrating closeness in a relationship, say where you're differentiating, linking, or you go into a classroom and you say, wow, this classroom feels emotionally vibrant. Well what does that mean? Like emotions are like scintillating? No, it means it's integrative. The teacher is honoring differences and kids feel trust and belonging to. That's an emotionally vibrant classroom. So so far.

Reimagining emotion as a shift in integration has allowed a window into what resilience is. So when we say, oh, let's have personal, individual emotional resilience, that is right on. And the way to think about it is let's have personal individual integration, right? And let's then bring that from the inside where we have to begin so we don't burn out to then collective integration. Now what's that integration made visible. Like what we say at the institute here is kindness and compassion. So then you go, oh, wow. So integration can actually have a relational side to it. And the answer is yes, that's absolutely right.

There's a lot of neuroscientific evidence for the integrating impact of positive emotions and the connection with well being and so forth. But what about the difficult emotions? What we're experiencing around climate change is anxiety and fear or what we're experiencing around what's going on around the world with all the geopolitical conflict and the ongoing war, wars and refugee crises and now the latest one here in Europe, or what's going on with our still struggle to get beyond racism, all these things, when what comes up is sadness or fear or disappointment or anxiety, how do we work with that? And is there a way to work with these more challenging emotions in an integrated way or one that leads to further integration?

Absolutely, yeah. And I'm putting myself on mute because I've got a rescue puppy whose brother just came for a visit and they love each other. They're nine month old puppies, but he's twice as big as she is, so she's trying to hold her own. I can hear her shouting with joy. So let's Talk about that. You know, she can be resilient with her brother, right, Even though he's like now £55 and she's barely £30.

And so she's going to have an emotional experience now that her brother's arrived. Let's talk about when an experience, say, is not emotional. If I get up, you know, to pay my bill at a restaurant and it was a fine meal, the act of paying for the bill, you know, unless it's like a huge bill, it's not a particularly emotional experience. It's not shifting my state of integration. Taking out my credit card, I'm paying for the, the, the food and I go on my way. But if something happens, like a news report is on about all the people being killed in the world, let's say in the Ukraine, or people suffering in Russia who don't want the battle going on in Ukraine, or people dying of COVID at that moment, that information makes me feel really sad, maybe angry, maybe fearful. So if we talk about those three states, anger, fear and sadness, such as, say, the first thing we can say about them is, when I was going to pay my bill, I was feeling neutral. So there wasn't a shift in integration. I hear the news of one of these reports, and now there's a downshift in integration. So a downshift in integration. The first thing to just say about it is it feels bad. Let's just say, like what a kid says. How do you feel? I feel bad. Okay, so it's, it's emotional because it's a shift in integration. Why is it a shift? There's too much differentiation going on. People are killing each other without compassionately linking to each other. There's no kindness and compassion in what I'm hearing and that I can feel inside my body because I'm resonating with what I'm hearing going on in the world. So it's emotional for that reason. Now it's a downshift, which means I'm more likely as integration gets less and less. Yes, it's an emotional experience because integration shifting, but I'm more likely to go to chaos or rigidity when there isn't a balance of differentiation and linkage. So anger can come up and I become less integrated, more prone to being, you know, chaotically angry or just. I'm going to go like this. And so I'm rigid now or I'm chaotic with anger, sadness. We could do the same thing and fear the same thing. So just using those three states as an example, you know, with with joy, with awe, with gratitude. I'm very unlikely to become chaotic and. Or rigid because, yeah, I'm in an elevated state of integration. And so I'm able to really feel this flourishing. I feel a widening of my sense of self. I feel an opening and a resonance with the world. And so I feel kind of this joy and gratitude that's just flowing from me. And it's not an uncomfortable state unless there's something that happened in my childhood that says, dan, you should never be happy. You should never be joyful. Once you are aware of your joy, it's going to be taken away, you know, so, you know, like, I'm familiar with myself, but that a lot of patients I work with are familiar with. Not allowing yourself to feel it. That's a whole nother issue. But in terms of just your question about how do we deal with the sadness in the world, you know, I think what Joanna Beautif. Joanna Macy beautifully tells us is we must begin with the mourning, with the feeling, the grief about what used to be. Someone gave me a statistic. I don't know exactly how they measured this, but that since 1970.

Over 2/3 of the species that existed then no longer exist. And I went tide pooling just last week, you know, where at the shore the tide is going out, you go see the animals. I used to do that as a kid here in Southern California, you know, and I'm sure here in these unceded lands of the Chumash and the Tongva, when those wonderful people who were the stewards of this land went tide pooling, they saw a richness like I saw when I was a kid. But since 1970, less and less and less species survive because human beings are excessively differentiating. Rather than trying to deny that, I have to feel what Glenn Albrecht calls, you know, Earth emotions. This solastalgia, this longing for a world that I know used to be here, but it's no longer here. It's not even like worry about the climate catastrophe. It's accepting the reality of the climate catastrophe so we can actually get our acts together and do something to make it less catastrophic. Right? So. So if we're hiding our heads in the sand about that, if we're not aware of that, because we don't want to feel uncomfortable with the sadness and the fear and the anger and feeling the mourning, because we're avoiding that because just too painful, as Joanna says in the work that reconnects, you know, you have to begin with where we're actually at, so we feel that shift down in integration, then we can rise up and then move forward in a resilient way. So that's, I think, why the morning is so important.

So that as painful as is, I know a part of me would love just to live in a fantasy land and think it was back when I was 5 years old and no one was really worried about this stuff, you know, except for nuclear war, which now may be upon us. So, you know, there are things that were happening then, but the climate was not so much in front of us like it is in this very moment.

Yeah, it's amazing what's happened in our lifetimes, and I think we have to grapple with that. I grew up as a kid hiding under the, you know, going under the school desk with the nuclear, you know, the Cuban Missile crisis and all that. And. And. And even though I've always been concerned about the environment and there, you know, there was this. But, no, you never would have thought in our lifetime we'd be talking about an existential threat, threat to life on this planet. And. And then here we are with extreme risk of. Of nuclear confrontations again.

So, yeah, I mean. And Fleet, I'll ask you a very personal question, because I know I grapple with this. You know, I. I myself wake up in the morning in this body, and, you know, and I feel. You know, I get ready to do my wheel of awareness meditation, do my integrated movements and all sorts of stuff just to get the day set, but there's always this underlying feeling like, what is happening on the planet, you know, and what's happening now with Ukraine and what's happening, you know, and it's. It's not easy to stay in a energized, upbeat stance that I think we need that to have resilience like that. And so what I do for myself. And I want to ask what you do, what I do for myself is let myself feel the helplessness and the hopelessness. Rather than fighting it, I kind of let it be there so I can see it as just one of the states this body can. Can be aware of. And then I say, okay, I'm. I'm not trying to forget that, but a part of me would like to forget it. A part of me wakes up and says, stop feeling that way. You're just being a neurotic person. And then I go, no, no, no, you're not being neurotic. You're actually being awake to the reality of what's happening on the planet. So don't deny the emotional experience, meaning the shift in integration that comes when you love the world so much, but you see so much suffering. So as the Dalai Lama says, you know, we can't let ourselves lose touch with joy and humor or the suffering will have won. And at the same time we can feel the suffering and kind of hold them both. And that's a real challenge, I think, for us as humans.

Yeah, I think it's a great human challenge. And you're pointing to two kind of parallel intertwined streams of my own personal work. My first spiritual teacher used expressions like the genuine heart of sadness, tender hearted sadness. And he talked about what he felt like was the signal that we can kind of zoom in on. A signal that's going to be the most authentic, usually is joy and sadness together. There's always this quality of longing in there, and nothing wrong with joy, but there's always permeated with some kind of longing. Because anytime that we get very caught up in our own feeling, in some ways we're separating out. And then when you want to then reintegrate, reconnect, there's a longing to be able to share that experience or you feel the aloneness of having that experience. So there's always this sadness and joy mixed together. And he also talked about how transformation was on the other side of hopelessness. In other words, getting beyond hope and fear. So somehow a portal to.

Really accommodating reality, to living an awake life in, you know, in reality was somehow being willing to experience hopelessness and move through hopelessness rather than trying to protect oneself and just going through these cycles of hope and fear all the time. But will, you know, so it's that quality of letting go into that and, and, you know, my own personal life, I have this part of me that's doing everything I can to be high performing and, and keep myself resilient and, you know, be able to perform at a high level with my work. And I have two and a half hours of foundational work every morning, similar to things you're doing. And. And then I have the other side, which is living in. In that reality of the truth of suffering and of what's really going on in our world and living with the sadness and the longing and the loss. So I think they're very much. I don't think they're unreconcilable. I think they're just.

Two places where we live.

Well, that's very helpful. One of the things.

That inspires Fleet is if we see joy and sorrow as holding a place in us, it's almost if we then bring the lens of emotion as a shift in integration. It's like our job is to be in awareness and be aware that sometimes integration goes down. Don't get lost on chaos or rigidity, you know, which would be the despair or the fury that don't lead to positive, you know, behaviors outwardly or even internally. But instead you can have, instead of fear you can have the anger, and instead of despair, you can have the sense of loss. But that those can actually stimulate positive action in the world. I think that's the notion of active hope. And then, then the idea is, you know, cultivating this awareness that can hold it all. You know, I think that's one ingredient. Maybe there are many, many more, but that's one starting place anyway. For what, for me, what resilience means.

Absolutely. And I think there's a risk that, that actions, when we move into actions, actions that come out of not having done that work or not being willing to be there, and actions that kind of come out of hope and fear and, you know, are often accidents that just keep the cycle of.

A lack of integration going on because they're not grounded in that reality and thus they're not grounded in the heart. They tend to come more from the head.

And I appreciate you call that the head rather than the mind.

A number of people have been asking me to review some publications they're about to submit and they keep on comparing body to mind. And since I see the body, the mind is fully embodied, I, I think what are they contrasting? So if they go the body to the head, that makes sense, you know, especially when you think about the intellect and, you know, information processing being kind of a head thing, but your feelings in your heart and your feelings in your intestines, that's part of your mind. So, you know, I think we have to be careful because even like, let's say a beautiful term like mindfulness, if you think that that's just about your intellectual thinking, because using the word mind there, then I think it doesn't invite you to explore that. It's also intuition from the heart and the gut, you know, and so I'm so glad you said body and head. You rarely see people talk like that.

Yeah, it absolutely sets up my next question because.

And it's come out of reading your wonderful book here, I think conventional science has always kind of tended to be a bit reductionistic and using mechanical models to kind of try to make sense of things. So early models of the brain were based on mechanical looking diagrams. And even back in Paul McClain's view of the triome brain eventually thought they were three separate brains. And we know the brain is one holistic, very complex enterprise. And. But we still had these ideas of these areas that do this and do that. And often it happened because somebody had an injury or that part of their brain was cut out or something, so. Oh, that must. And, you know, there certainly is some of that. But in reading your book and you're talking about not even, you know, seeing the brain as this complex set of, like, electrical circuits that's still somewhat mechanical, like the motherboard on a computer, that is much more a living system, even within the brain. And then you have, you know, the neural networks and the gods and the heart. And then you have the relational field that we're in that this is a complex living system. And you talked about, if I remember correctly, it's like when we think of what's going on with changes in feeling and mood or even thought or experiences within what we call mind are more like these waves moving through that living system. Exactly. And you know, as opposed to like communication going here to that node and here and then connects here and then does that. This kind of. It's more like this wave. And maybe a better representation of the mind than some big electric circuit board would be. Like when we look up at the sky and see all kinds of weather patterns forming, or we look into the ocean, we see the waves and the eddies and these kind of, you know, the fractals with, you know, in mathematics and so forth, a better understanding. And I think that expanded understanding of the mind can only help us become more resilient because.

We'Re somehow tuning into this living system that we're part of instead of coming back and experiencing ourselves as one piece of some kind of very mechanical thing. I'm here and there and how do I connect?

Yeah, I totally agree.

I. I think because we live in a body and the body has certain features of being like an entity. A thing like this body is different from your body and we're separate. You know, in physics terms, we would, you know, say this is a part of what's called classical physics or Newtonian macro state large object physics. And these objects have the quality of being like nouns, like entities. Yet when you look at the fundamental elements of energy, even though mass, what. Where our bodies are made of is energy, condensed energy, E energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. So it's very, very dense energy. Mass is. But when you look at just pure elements of energy, like a photon or an electron. These are so small, they're called microstates. And the microstate world, called the quantum realm. There are no nouns. There are only verbs. And so when we talk about waves of electrical flow, you know, I mean, this is a. A somewhat different analogy. But if you think about the ocean, you know, when you look way out with your eyes and you see, you know, a wave coming toward you, I mean, one thing is just. You're getting photons. But just leaving that aside, you know, the. The thing that's moving toward you, you might say, is wa. Water molecules, right? This water molecule is 100 yards, 50 yards, 25 yards, 10 yards. Now, those same water molecules have come all the way over to you and are crashing your feet. And you would think that, and you would be wrong, because what's happening is energy from wind is pushing on the water, and it's the energy that's being transferred across the matter.

And.

And so what is actually hitting at your feet is the energy that you saw 100 yards out. Not the molecules. Certainly they go up and down, but what actually came this way toward you is the energy. So that's, I think, a good analogy. When you think about waves. Waves are the motion of energy. And that's a whole nother story that we. I think we did get into it before about energy being a movement from possibility to. To probability, to actuality. And in this actualization, we have things like thoughts and emotions and memories. But when you come down to this open, spacious plane of possibility, I think the more we tap into that, what I think is the source of consciousness, the more resilience we can build because we're tapping into, you know, what physicists call the formless source of all form. But I. I think it's actually where the portal through which integration arises. So when you learn to live from that plane of possibility, which for me, you get to through this wheel of awareness. Practice. But there's probably hundreds of ways of doing it. But the metaphor of the wheel is that the hub is pure awareness, the rim of the things you're aware of. So each morning when I do the practice and learn to distinguish hub from rim, and then even sometimes to really just, you know, immerse myself in that hub. And that's a metaphor. The practice, I think, is allowing me to immerse myself in this plane of possibility. And it's through that portal that integration arises.

And would it be safe to say that we can recognize integration.

Within ourselves with others in a. In a larger collective setting as some kind of flow Some kind of coherence.

Yeah, coherence.

What's that?

As opposed to chaos or rigidity? We recognize we're interacting with others. And when you see what we're doing is it's kind of creating resistance and rigidity. Or we see, you know, people are getting upset, up regulated, or we adjust this way or we adjust that way, and suddenly there's a kind of flow happening again. So we're, you know, resilience is a skill, maybe is about how do we keep finding our way into some kind of flow within ourselves and with others.

Yeah, that's beautiful. I think that's exactly right. And I think that coherence also, when people can really dip into it, is filled with love.

You know, and. And that's, you know, where you just kind of are humbled by.

You know, being an expression of what feels like the fabric of the universe. Is this. This open awareness, this sense of being connected, this intra connectedness. Not even inter, where I'm connected to you, but intra meaning there's a wholeness to it all and. And love, you know, and. And I think for me, doing the Wheel of awareness and workshops with so many people and then doing it myself for so many years, I guess it's given me a kind of inner.

Something. I don't even know what the word is, an inner.

I don't even know what the word would be being or inner foundation or inner trust. A kind of faith, if you will. Not so much a belief as a knowing that if we can support one another in tapping into that source of love, then we will change the path we're on as a human family. And we'll come to realize that we're siblings not only in our personal families and even our human family, we are siblings in all of nature. And to take the rightful place as stewards of this wonderful planet, I think is the real resilience the world is asking us to find and to bring out in all of us.

Well, I think when you talk about love in that way, you know, when we talk about universal love or love in that way, or people that use, you know.

Think in terms of God and using that kind of language, that God is love, that I think what you're talking about is the organizing principle in the universe. That flow of integration is what we're talking about with love. Yeah.

I mean, you know, in this paradigm, that plane of possibilities, the formless source of all form, that's a physics term. But since I'm an acronym nut, I said, what's the acronym for that And I realized it's the generator of diversity, the God. So so far in all the different religious.

Leaders I've been able to present that to, no one has felt offended by it. But it is a bridge between science, classical science and indigenous teachings, contemplative practices and religious theistic religion as well. So it's an incredible time to actually, you know, say, how do we use all these perspectives to try to really advance well being in the world? Well being and resilience. So thank you for having me in this conversation, Fleet.

That integration of oneness and diversity, maybe that, is that, is that that harmonious integration of the oneness and the diversity?

Yeah. I mean, in this book, Interconnected, it's the foundation of why I wrote the book. And, and you know, hopefully people will experience the book as an invitation to see how that is in their own personal and relational lives. Yeah.

Well, I want to point people to your wheel of awareness practice. We'll put some links on there. I know they can find that at the Mindsight Institute or, or at Dr. Dan.

Yeah, it's a Dr. Dan, I think. Yeah. Drdansibo.com yeah, that could an incredibly valuable.

Approach to awareness practice and to tap into that place where we can have that experiential faith that knowing that kind of really changes everything. I think that you were pointing to, and I know we're at the end of our time today. Our topic today had to both to do with resilience, relational resilience, and then healing trauma. And I think everything we've been talking about, trauma undermines everything we've been talking about. Right. And trauma is going to tend you, to make you more prone to move into chaos or rigidity.

Yeah.

So everything we've been talking about could be seen as really, how do we heal trauma and then how do we deepen resilience so that we have greater access to that flow, that integration, and we can take that out from our individual to the relational in our personal and professional relations, out to the collective and group work. When you think of all the wonderful types of dialogue and circling work and group work, basically that's what they're doing. They're creating that sense of connectedness and flow with each other. And if we could extrapolate that out to the larger collective to face these really daunting challenges we have today, then I think that gives us some, if that hope at least gives us a direction.

I totally agree, Fleet. Yes. And that's. It's great to share this direction with you and with everyone here.

Well, thank you so much and thank you so much for being part of our summit.

Pleasure. Thank you, Fleet.

Be well.

He will.

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