EP 196: Daniel Siegal MD | Neuroplasticity: A Path to Healing and Happiness

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Hi.

Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast.

This is your host, Fleet Mall. In this episode, we welcome back Dr. Dan Siegel, the really legendary Dr. Dan Siegel, who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, the founding co director of its Mindful Awareness Research center, or Mark, and the executive director of the mindsight Institute. I can't think of anyone that can take us on a more illuminating journey of what mind is and how we can train our minds for greater resilience and greater happiness and well being. He's the primary driver of the emergence of a field called interdisciplinary neurobiology, which integrates many of the social sciences and hard sciences into.

One of the deepest windows into understanding human nature. The mind, the body, the heart, and really what it means to live a complete human life. And very specifically, in terms of the brain, how to really understand optimal brain functioning in terms of our brains becoming more and more complex to solve more and more complex problems, and so becoming very differentiated with many neural networks and then having really good linkage and really efficient communication between all these neural networks, which leads to what he calls integration and flow. And just a fascinating conversation as always with Dr. Dan Siegel, and I'm really.

Thrilled to be here today with my longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Dan Siegel. Welcome, Dan.

Thanks, Fleet. Great to be here with you.

It's great to be able to have another one of these fascinating conversations that we get to do for a number of these summits. You've been so gracious to be part part of a number of our summits. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Sounds wonderful.

All right, so Dan Siegel, M.D. is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co director of its Mindfulness Awareness Research Center. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an organization that focuses on the development of mindsight teaches insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families and communities. Dr. Siegel has published extensively for both professional and lay audiences. He is the founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, which contains over 80 published textbooks. He is a bestselling author of several books, including the Science and Practice of Presence, A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, the Developing Mind, and his latest book is intraconnected MWe, which is me plus we as the integration of self identity and belonging. Dr. Siegel lectures extensively and is a sought after speaker. And we'll talk more about how you can find out more about Dr. Dan's work at the end of our interview here. And I just wanted to reference a couple of your books. This one is certainly my bible or for.

Understanding the neurobiology of mind and the brain as well as this field of interpersonal neurobiology, which you've been one of the leading theorists and developers of. And so I really appreciate your work. I don't have your latest book yet Intraconnected, but I'm very familiar with the territory. We've talked about it quite a bit and I've looked forward to getting that book. So, Dan, this summit is.

Really about exploring.

The possibilities of rewiring the brain, approaches to rewiring the brain for or reshaping our neural architecture for healing traumas, attachment wounds or attachment issues, as well as for optimizing brain health. Optimizing health and well being, life, performance, longevity, happiness, things like that. And so I know when you speak about brain function, you speak about it in terms of.

Differentiation, connection, integration and flow. And so I wonder if you could talk about that and also how flow as being a sort of an optimal brain state is like a river flowing between these banks. On the one side, chaos, on the other side, rigidity. So I wonder if you could lay out that landscape for us.

Sure. Well, thanks, Fleet. You know, the idea of neuroplasticity, how the brain changes in response to experience, is so central to, you know, whether you're on a personal journey that's spiritual or psychological in growth, or you're a professional working, you know, as a teacher or a therapist or even a parent, helping children develop. It's all about how experience will be shaping the nervous system. Right. And so one could get very focused on the brain and the head and say it's all about the brain and the head. And for 2500 years, since the time of Hippocrates, people have said that, you know, that the experience of mind, your sorrows, your griefs, your joys. Hippocrates said in a book called on the Sacred Disease, he said, it's all coming from your head.

So I just want to begin by saying if we're interested in the mind, part of the mind is the brain and the head, but the whole body is involved in our mental experience of joys and sorrows. The subjective experiences we have goes under the word mind, and that's fully embodied, not just in the Head. So we want to be really thinking, in a sense, about the embodied brain, which we'll talk about. But the mind, our fundamentals, ways of feeling and thinking and behaving, is also relational. So you and I have a relationship with each other. So we get together, we greet each other, we talk about how we're doing. And anyone getting connected to you and to me in this conversation would be having energy and information flow shared, really. And we're thinking about people listening to us. So there's a relational field that you can start to talk about. So what that means is that the mind, which is a part of, you know, our relational lives, is not just in the body. So when that became clear to me, you know, over 30 years ago, in this very room, this is my home office where I've written every book I've ever written, you know, I was in this room thinking, what in the world could be both in the head and in the whole body, but also not just in this embodied something, but relational? And then on a walk at the beach, I realized that reality is really made of energy flow. So, for example, when you're looking at a wave far out, the wave comes toward you. And even though you think it's the water molecules, the matter that's coming toward you, it's actually the energy, the wave you see going up and down 100 yards away that's now crashing at your feet. It's not the same water molecules. It's the energy that was moving those water molecules. So then I realized that the system of mind might be some aspect of energy flow. And what would that aspect be? It would be some kind of flow that was fully embodied in addition to being in the head, and it would be fully relational. So a skull nor a skin would block its flow. Right. So the system then would have these qualities that, you know. This thinking was going on in the early 90s, and in the early 80s.

A branch of science called complexity science was emerging that said there was literally stuff that emerged from complex systems. And complex systems are basically elements that are together that have three features. They're capable of being chaotic, they're open influences from outside of the system. And they're what's called non linear, which means a small input can lead to a large and relatively difficult to predict result.

So then I thought, well, the mind, in fact, has those three characteristics. It's open, it's capable and chaotic, and it's nonlinear. So then if it's some aspect of a complex system, that means it could be an emergent property like the wetness of water is not in any water molecule. And here's which comes to your question now, when you start doing all that thinking, you start realizing that one of the emergent properties of a complex system is called self organization. And amazingly, in the mathematics of complex systems it says that there's kind of an optimal flow which has the qualities of harmony, basically, and it's bounded on one side by chaos, the other side by rigidity. And then I had an explanation from science, complexity science, that could help me understand why every patient I saw, in my view anyway, was coming with either chaos rigidity or both. And I didn't really buy into the diagnostic categories, but it seemed like this optimal self organization was somehow being impaired in their lives. So then the question naturally came up. What does the mathematics of complex systems say is how you optimize that flow of harmony which has the five qualities of being flexible, adaptive, coherent, meaning resilient over time, energized, like with vitality and stable. That spells the word faces if you rearrange it like that. And that faces flow to me was well being. Chaos and rigidity were signs of non well being. And the answer from complexity science is that you differentiate and you link. And it didn't have a name for that, so I named that integration. So that's the shortest summary you'll get of the field of interpersonal neurobiology, which basically says integration of energy flow that's fully embodied and fully relational is the source of well being. Blocked integration, meaning blocking, differentiation, blocking, linkage, or both leads to chaos or rigidity, and then the path of spiritual growth, of personal growth, of therapeutic growth, of helping a child in a family, of working as a teacher, whatever, is to promote a mind that is capable of monitoring itself and modifying itself in a way where the monitoring is stabilized so you can sense what's going on and the modifying allows you to cultivate integration.

So would you.

That makes sense. That's literally the shortest summary you will ever hear of the entire 30 year journey.

That was really. You can encapsulated this, this book down into a couple of minutes there. And you kind of already addressed our second question a bit too. But so would you say if there is this possibility of reshaping our neural architecture, reshaping the brain, which actually means physical biological change in the brain, increase in neurons and certain neural structured neurogenesis, rewiring new neural networks, strengthening of some neural networks, possibly weakening of others.

That this is a process that's actually.

In.

A sense driven by mind as opposed to kind of a mechanical process we do on the brain, but it's actually mind that reshapes the brain.

Yeah, so here's. That's so beautiful, Fleet. So here's a way to think about it. If the mind is an emergent property of energy flow, and it's in part, you know, allowing us to have subjective experience, it's allowing us to have awareness, it's allowing us to have information processing, which is basically an energy configuration with symbolic value. And the fourth facet of mind is that it's a self organizing process. As a self organizing process, it's a regulatory process. And any regulatory process, like regulating a bicycle, means you monitor something and you modify that thing. So I say all that because the monitoring aspect allows you to have awareness, that then in the modifying allows you to use something called attention. So attention is that process which directs energy flow. Now you've just put my attention and anyone listening to us on this question of what does the mind have to do with the brain, basically? And so I'm now drawing our attention based on how you're putting my attention relationally. So that attention is a relational experience. And now what happens is where attention goes neural firing flows and neural connection grows. So just to give you a teeny, emotional, personal experience, when I was training to be a therapist in the 1980s.

And as a psychiatrist, the big, you know, to do was there were people suffering. We found medications, you know, we were MDs, we were medical doctors. So we were experts in the body. The brain's activity was basically a synonym for the mind. So if someone's mind was disturbed, it was a brain problem. If it was a brain problem, it was based on neurotransmitters. It was neurotransmitters. You can make a prescription and you're a doctor, that's a good thing. So then you'd prescribe things and lo and behold, some people who could have been killing themselves or suffering greatly in other ways were helped. So medications were great, But I always had a feeling there was something missing from that equation. There was something more. That medications were, yes, important in certain cases, but in other cases, there was a relational process in the therapy that could also be healing. And so as the 80s went by, I just had this restless feeling. Now, part of that restless feeling was because when I was in medical school, the person who taught me neuroscience was David Hubel. And I, I learned from David in the late 70s and early 80s, in 1981, David Hubel won the Nobel prize for discovering how experience shapes the brain. Ian Torsten Wiesel got the prize for that. Now, as his student, I was going, that's, like, amazing. So I was raised as a neuroscience student knowing that in the case of David and Torsten's work, how you drive energy flow, in the case of light, was their study.

How you drive energy flow through the brain actually changes its structure. So there I was in 1980, 81, 82, learning this. Now we're talking about 84, 85, 86. And people are saying the brain is important. I go, yeah, it's important. They go, so give it a pill. I go, no, give it energy flow right now, how do you give it the brain energy flow? How you direct attention.

Determines neural firing. And then when neurons are fired in a certain way, as Eric Kandel would win the Nobel prize years later, a psychiatrist, he would show the mechanism was neural firing activates genes so they produce proteins, and they grow new synaptic connections or grow new neurons or stimulate myelin formation. We'd even learn later on that neural firing actually changes the epigenetic regulation of the very genetic structures that help the brain grow. So there's lots of ways. Those four ways. Epigenetic regulation changes myelin formation, helps neurons communicate more effectively and efficiently, creating new synaptic connections, and even sometimes especially in the hippocampus, growing new neurons. So we can have neuroplasticity very specifically activated by how attention drives energy through the brain itself. Now, what's doing that? The mind.

The mind is what determines where attention goes, including the relational mind. So then, you know, Now I'm in 83, 84, 85. I'm thinking, cool. I've learned neuroscience from David Hubel. I know that energy flow directs neural growth. What's all this story about pills being the only way to deal with a mind that's not functioning well, obviously, and that may involve the brain's dysfunction. So that's where I was, you know, when I was finishing my training, feeling very frustrated with the reductionistic view that pills were the only method. And that's where, you know, I decided ultimately to be a child psychiatrist, to look at early development, to learn developmental neuroscience, and then, you know, to become an attachment researcher studying how relationships shape ultimately, you know, the function of the mind, that that would be likely involving the brain's functioning. And then developing this field called interpersonal.

Neurobiology, before the development of our scientific understanding about everything you just talked about, about neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, and so forth, and that the brain is continually changing based on mind and what. What we expose it to in one level, it's a learning machine, at least you could look at. It's a little bit reductionistic. But so.

Before that the mind was probably thought of as kind of an entropic enterprise that eventually it's just going to diminish in its capacity. And.

We now know that it can grow and thrive and learn and change. And yet some of these conditions of. And you know, when you talked about that self organizing principle that comes from complexity theory and chaos theory, that can we have this emergent principle and you're talking about this optimal flow that we call mind in its optimal state kind of being that. And then there could be things that block in some way that optimal flow. And yet those things seem to sort of. So I'm wondering whether that optimal flow has its own qualities of homeostasis, something that would keep it in flow. But it seems like these conditions of chaos and rigidity also can have a. A momentum to them or a kind of homeostatic quality because people get stuck there and can be very difficult to shift. So I'm just kind of wondering if you could cover that landscape a little bit in terms of where it seemed like we would without any traumas or obstacles or problems. It seems like our natural state would move towards this flow. And as the brain is dealing with more and more complex problems, it, it would become more differentiated, more connected, and be able to optimize flow at greater levels of complexity. But when there's problems, then it gets blocked in a way you say. But those things seem to end up with their own self perpetuating momentum in a way. So I wonder if you could talk about that.

Yeah, it's a great question.

So let's begin with a couple of elements of your really beautiful way of describing this issue we should look at. One is that self organization is a natural emergent aspect of complex systems. You don't need like a conductor or a director or someone who's writing it all out. It's just inherent. And that's kind of counterintuitive. You know, why would a cloud have a natural self organization? There must be some larger deity or something making the clouds as beautiful as they are. And the mathematics of complex systems shows that there is no planner. Now you could say, isn't there a force in the universe? And in a sense there is a force and it's the force of self organization that comes from the probability equations, basically what's most likely to happen when you allow a complex system to do its natural thing. So in that sense There's a natural push for integration, for differentiating and linking. To optimize self organization, which is mathematical term, is to maximize complexity. That gets people nervous. So let's just say that maximal complexity is actually quite simple. It's when you differentiate and you link, when you have harmony, that's maximal complexity. So that's the first thing to say. The second to say is that in the nervous system that we have.

When this system is flowing, a complex system tends to move a little bit towards chaos and then back towards the faces. Flow of flexibility, adaptability, et cetera. And then it goes to rigidity. So it's always moving and changing and moving and changing, but it tends not to get stuck in either place unless there are some factors that block differentiation, linkage. So trauma, for example, in an individual's life can block linkage.

And so things become excessively differentiated without being linked. So integration is impaired. So if you look at post traumatic stress disorder, you can show basically that the brain has experienced this shock to the system of this innate capacity to grow in an integrated way when there's no trauma. But trauma introduces this blockage to linkage. You can see that in the corpus callosum. This is in developmental trauma, early trauma, the corpus callosum that links the differentiated left and right doesn't grow so well. The hippocampus that links differentiated memory systems to each other doesn't grow so well. The prefrontal cortex that links differentiated areas of the cortex, the subcortical areas, the body, the relational world, doesn't grow so well. And the connectome, which is the subtly differentiated areas, they're not so linked. So the interconnections of the connectome is the way you say it, are not so present in developmental trauma. So if you look at the work of Martin Teicher, you'll see all the research behind what I just summarized. But all of that to say is that integration is impaired with trauma. So now what happens is.

The brain grows in this non integrated way. And so then it is going to have a. Unfortunately, momentum. In physics, the word momentum means you set something in motion, it continues in that direction. So there's a kind of neuroplastic momentum. I just made up that term. But there's a momentum that keeps something going in a non integrated way because of the blockages, because of the trauma. So the individual experiencing that will feel lost in familiar places and they're stuck. So the intervention needs to find how the trauma has remained in the body and in relationships, both to continue to reinforce energy flow and the direction of attention in a way that's non integrative. And so when I think about a couple of sessions I've had in the last three, three weeks with people who've experienced some pretty severe trauma, these moments of our relationship allowing us to direct attention in. You know, I made up this term window of tolerance for how to be with, let's say, a certain affective state of helplessness or fear or fury. You know, so that in the relationship we can actually be present together with an emotional state that alone when they were children for sure, but even as adults, it just flips them into chaos. But now with me, they may be going towards chaos, but I'm there with them. So we've expanded the window of tolerance in the therapeutic relationship which allows that brain to finally be able to be with the helplessness, to let the implicit memories, that's a disconnected form of memory to be present there. The aspects of them, or in internal family systems work. You call it apart. We call them self states in interpersonal neurobiology. You know, you're going to allow them to be differentiated so you can actually be present with them. See how other states were there to protect the system from that helplessness and fear and the memories of actually what happened. And now within the widened window of tolerance in this relationship, this attachment relationship where now the person's experiencing, whoa. What I thought before was intolerable, I tolerated. And that moment we can reflect on that and say, yeah, look at how your brain is able to now be with something. And even in that meta communication about what's going on, the brain itself is focusing attention. That what I used to feel would throw me out of my window of tolerance. I'm okay with it. And that my. My research mentor in memory was a guy named Robert Bjork. B J O R K and Bob used to always have this thing. It was a beautiful statement. Memory retrieval can be a memory modifier. So that act of being able to retrieve within the window of tolerance starts changing everything. And the neuroplastic changes that we can imagine, you can't do the little teeny micro analysis of it. But the feeling you get after doing this for so many years, the feeling you get is that that firing pattern of helplessness and fear which was being warded off, right, it was being evaded because it was, it would make the person dysregulated. Now they can experience it. And in that process there's huge integration in the brain. And that's what things like mindfulness studies show. You know, when you're able to be mindful, you're actually creating a more integrated brain across all four areas we talked about. The corpus callosum grows with mindfulness, the hippocampus grows, prefrontal cortex grows, and the connectome becomes more interconnected.

I want to go, I mean, this is absolutely fascinating and I want to go even a little deeper with this perhaps really for our audience to really understand what we're talking about when we're talking about rewiring the brain and so forth in beneficial ways. So it sounds like what you're talking about in terms of this process of being able to work with traumatic memories, for example, traumatic experiences and your wonderful framework of the window of tolerance, which I was going to ask you about later. Anyway, it sounds like whether that's self directed work or in a therapeutic contents, there's a. What I'm hearing you say, the way that we then work with those maybe difficult emotions or difficult or at least perceived difficult past experiences and memories is sort of like an internalized version of the mammalian tendency to tend and befriend, to embrace. And that by doing that we're in a sense widening that window of tolerance. And the second part of the question is. So it sounds also from what you were saying earlier, that any skillful means we can use self directed or in a therapeutic context to find our way back into flow is going to help the brain in epigenetic waves and other ways repattern, reshape, heal.

Those areas that are kind of blocking flow so that, you know, we're able to kind of come back to that more innate self emergent property of flow. And because we're talking about this in terms of the window of tolerance, which is not just. It can be about being able to tolerate difficult emotions or difficult memories. You know, you have Csikszentmahaly's book on flow and people often talk about flow as a very optimal, almost blissful state, or at least a hyper aware state, or a place where we have these kind of extraordinary perception and so forth. But I think you could also talk about flow in terms of the ability to be with challenging experiences, the ability to be with grief without being thrown into chaos or rigidity, for example. So I wonder if there's a larger dimension of flow that we're talking about here. And this kind of gets into part of what this summit's about. On the one hand, healing underlying traumas, healing attachment wounds and so forth. And then optimizing the mind, the brain flow for extraordinary human performance, longevity or optimal health. And so Forth. So I wonder if you can explore that territory a little more.

Yeah, well, you brought up so many wonderful layers. Let me try to touch each one. So please remind me if I, if I miss one. Let's begin with.

How a relationship, let's say with a teacher or a parent or a therapist, how does that actually help move neuroplastic development forward? So Lev Vygotsky is a psychologist, you know, from the last century, who had this beautiful term called the zone of proximal development. And what it means is that on our own, we can do this much. But as kids or students or, you know, as a patient, client, you can do this much with your therapist or with your teacher or with your parent. So that's the zone right there. So a really wonderful parent, a wonderful teacher, wonderful therapist, intuitively knows that zone and can feel, okay, what can this patient, what can this client, what can this student, what can this child of mine do with me up here? And what can they do on their own? And I'm going to help ratchet them up. And so development is based on connecting in a relationship. That's a developmental relationship, let's call it that. You know, that tunes in right at the zone. So now I'm experiencing. I'm doing this thing on this, this jungle gym, or I'm out in the water learning to swim, or I'm trying a math problem, I'm playing chess, whatever it is, I'm in the zone with my developmental, you know, assistant, right? My teacher, my therapist, you know, and. And now when I practice on my own, I'm going to learn how to just move higher up in the zone, so the lower part gets higher. And now where my teacher works, the next time is up here. So that's the first thing to say. The second is. Jennifer Fried, F R E Y D decades ago, wrote this beautiful piece on.

When cognitive information, when. When knowledge is shared, there's something that shifts in the shareable symbolic energy flow is the way I would say it. There's something profound that happens. So in all those developmental relationships, the sharing is a profound shift in the cognition, the information itself. So we shouldn't underestimate what a relationship does, whether it's with a teacher or a parent or a therapist, that allows information processing to transform shareable representations is what Freid talks about. And it's just worth really noting her work because she also does work on betrayal, trauma. But there's something very profound. We can share things. So that's that first part. The second thing to say is in terms of your questions about flow. You know, I once had the wonderful privilege of having Mike Csikszentmihalyi on a stage. I used to run an annual conference with Sharon Salzberg. So of course, Csikszentmihalyi is like the world's expert on flow. States of 1 use of the word flow. And Sharon is one of the world's experts on mindfulness. And you know, people forever, when I just had gotten into the mindfulness world, would tell me, you know, Csikszentmihalyi's flow is the basis of mindfulness. And I would say, I don't think so. They're actually quite different because mindfulness has a kind of self awareness and an ethics to it that is a teeny bit removed from the thing itself. It doesn't make you dissociated, though. You can have a spiritual bypass and do that. But with mindfulness, there's this capacity to have this larger awareness that's in its pure form. And the emotion is not something you're in the flow with. You can invite it in, like the roomy poem the Guest House, and invite anything in, but you still are the guest house in. Csikszentmihalyi's notion is the guest house disappears and you are just the guest kind of thing. So I say to Csikszentmihalyi on the stage and to Sharon on the stage, Sharon Salzberg, let's have you two talk about this. Are they the same thing or not? So I didn't express an opinion one way or the other. I said, let's talk about it. And the conclusion that the two of them came to was they're absolutely not the same thing. That with mindfulness you can choose to go into flow.

But with flow, the way Mike Csikszentmihalyi has written about it, here's the issue. You need to be involved in an experience which is at the edge of your capacity, but not beyond your capacity. So it's challenging but not overwhelming. And you lose self consciousness. You become the chess game, you become the tennis game. So someone in flow, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's associated well being and it's great, it's all good. But it's not the same as mindfulness. Because if you're, let's say, a marksman and you're really angry at your neighbor and you want to shoot your neighbor's dog, you can absolutely be in the flow with your gun and shoot the dog and kill the dog, and there's nothing ethical about it. There was nothing self regulatory about it. There was nothing that said what's the greater good here? What's the compassionate way of being? I'm mad at my neighbor, I want to kill their dog, but I shouldn't be doing destructive things like that. That's wrong. So this is what they said on the stage. So it was clear that flow can be great, but it doesn't have any ethics to it. And it does have a self awareness that would get you to stop if you're really lost in the flow with your gun and it's a challenging thing to shoot that dog. That was the example that came up in the meeting and it was very clear that they're very different processes. Now you can mindfully say, I am now with the ethics involved here going to play a game of chess and I am going to beat my opponent and I'll get lost in all the moves and I'm going to really beat them and I'm getting in the competitive nature of my chess playing and the other person loses. Because you're good at chess and you got in the flow of chess. No one would say that was unethical. But you wouldn't use the word mindfulness necessarily there though you could be mindfully playing chess though if you were mindfully playing chess, you might say, you know, I beat this guy 10 times, I'm going to let him win this time. I don't care, whatever. So that might be a choice you would make if you were mindfully playing chess.

So yeah, Czech Samahalyi uses that kind of hyper focus flow. His, his and athletes experience it, rock climbers that really that. And in a conversation of some of conversation I had with John Verbick he said, well there's that flow. And then we might also talk about a more expansive kind of flow, a different kind of flow that's more expansive and perhaps does have more meta awareness and is not so hyper focused. And then when you talk about flow in terms of the optimal brain organization and integration. So I want and in fact that that could include embracing difficult experiences on the road back into more optimal flow. So I wonder how your use of the word flow and the way Csiksa Mohaly was using it as well as maybe the possibility of a more expansive state of flow. I don't want to get too lost in this, but I just want to because I think for this summit one of the things people are looking for are what are the. And I want to talk to you about practices like the wheel of awareness in a moment. But what are some of the tools and strategies for entering into states? Various states that might have healing properties and then might convert into traits which would be lasting in terms of optimal health and wellbeing and life performance and so forth. So I wonder if you might just touch in a little more on that, our understanding of what we're talking about when flow here or flow there.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, you know, one thing just to make sure to mention, there's a beautiful book based on what you just said called Altered Traits by Dan Goleman and Richie Davidson. You know, which basically the way I would summarize that book says that when you intentionally create a state and repeatedly do that, it activates neuroplastic changes in the practitioner's brain so that it becomes a trait. If it's in the area of three pillars of practice, which include training attention to be focused, training awareness to be open, and training intention to be kind. So kind intention, open awareness, and focused attention, then it creates integration in the nervous system. Those are the neuroplastic findings. And it improves your physiology by, you know, reducing stress hormone cortisol, improving immune function, optimizing cardiovascular functioning. You lower inflammation by altering epigenetic regulation, and you even take an enzyme telomerase and you bring it to optimal levels. So you're repairing and maintaining the ends of your chromosomes, so you actually slow the aging process. So all of that is with the three pillar practice. Now, that being said, you know, in terms of the use of the word flow, flow simply means in, in general terms, change. So when we talk about energy flow, if you're talking about our realm, that's called the Newtonian realm, across time, we have a variable of time, things change, we call that flow. So when I use the word energy and information flow there, I'm not using cheeks Semi High's very specific capital F flow. I'm using a lowercase f for flow, which just means change, right? So that relationships are sharing of energy and information flow. And the brain is really a transformer of energy and information flow. The mind is an emergent property of energy flow that creates information.

Cognition is information flow. So I'm using flow in all those ways. Now, if you're talking about the, you know, the river of integration that we've been talking about, where it literally, it can flow towards chaos as one bank or rigidity the other, but not get stuck in those banks. That's more using it as the word change, you know, flow being a synonym for change. So. So that's how I use flow. Now, if you're talking about a larger flow fleet in terms of, like.

What.

Is mindful awareness really involved? Why is that such an important way of being? I just spent a week with the Thich Nhat Hanh Plum village monastics, you know, doing all sorts of mindful experiences. For me, they were all integrative. They were all differentiating and linking and being very present in awareness, with walking, with eating, with talking, with being silent, with meditating, with being in the water, with being on the land, being in the forest. I mean, you know, listening deeply to other people's emotions.

All of it was this beautiful integrative process. So for me, when you talk about the larger flow, and we can talk about the wheel if you want in a moment, but you know, anything that promotes integration is going to promote, well, being. So a flow of the larger order. You're talking about, like, what's a healthy flow, Whether it's Csikzentmihalyi's version of flow, which can be integrative, when it's combined with the mindfulness flow, which is ethical and bring kindness, then it's a win, win situation. So it's not like you have to choose between those two things. You can have someone who uses their mindfulness and also is a police officer who's just carefully going to use the force they're trained to use. And they know not to get in the flow of the initial emotion that might arise and they pull the trigger instead. They're mindfully aware, oh, I have a feeling to pull this trigger, but does this person I'm confronting right now really need me to shoot them? No, they don't. And that's mindfulness. That doesn't fall under the word of flow. That's mindful awareness to ask that question. So that's more integrative where then the, the person being detained by the police doesn't get shot. And that's the kind of mindfulness we want to introduce, you know, in the world. So anyway, so we can talk about the wheel, because the wheel really gives you a kind of vocabulary, I think that maybe gets to this larger flow you're referring to.

Well, kind of as an entryway into that. I know I've read in your books, when you talk about.

In a therapeutic context, the role of a therapist, that ideally they're one way to think about them. And because of the phenomena of neuroplasticity, everything we've been talking about, they can be kind of a facilitating. They're like neural architects, but they're more facilitating that process of neural Architecture and as individuals we can somewhat become neural architects. We can become architects of our own brain, our whole nervous system, and thus our mind and our relationships and so forth. So we have a lot of agency there. And one of the things I remember you talking about in terms of the, the relationality of the therapeutic contest and how that could facilitate this reshaping of neural architecture for a client was that the therapist is providing that experience of feeling felt. You know, sometimes we just talk about being seen, being heard, but it was really this quality of being feeling felt, which seems to be a really precise way to describe the relationality of flow, that interpersonal flow and the active relational field, ideally in that way. So I wonder, you know, another term that we've used a bit in this summit is the idea of self directed neuroplasticity. And so, and we're in a. So we're talking about both things people can access in a therapeutic context, it could be very beneficial. But we're also talking about a lot of skills that people can do themselves kind of under the umbrella of like self directed neuroplasticity is one term that's been used. So maybe in that context, I wonder if you could talk about the wheel of awareness and how that is a practice that people can use to kind of facilitate everything. We've been talking about increasing the integration, you know, the differentiation, the linkage, the integration at levels in which we can, you know, optimize our lives because life isn't getting any easier, apparently, and it's getting ever more complex.

Right, right, totally. Well, I remember, you know, exactly the moment when one of my first long term patients, when I was asking her at the end of her therapy, she was going to another university to work. And I said, why did you get better? She said, well, never in my life before I've had the experience of feeling felt. And I know her name, I can't use it obviously because she's a patient, but she's the one who came up with that term. So I want to really honor her feeling felt. But, but it was a beautiful way for a patient to be able to say in reflecting on, you know, because I wasn't doing anything my supervisor was telling me to do, I was letting the patient teach me how to help her. And now she was putting words to it that feeling felt term. And the same thing is true with the wheel of awareness. You know, I felt like my patients were really showing this chaos and rigidity and I went just wild trying to figure out what could explain why I'm Seeing things as chaos and rigidity rather than the diagnostic categories they would come with. So then I remember moving to this new office.

And, you know, anyway, for various reasons, I wanted a table. When. When you walked into the office, you had the implicit experience that you'd see, like, the edge of this table, which was wood, but then the center would be glass. So I designed this table. And your eyes would then take you deep. And you would know that though you might come in from the street at the surface level, we're going to do some deep work in this office. So that's where I designed the table. We still have it to this day. But then once I was in this new office with this table that was to the side, and we would sit in, you know, a chair and another chair and a couch. I would bring my patients up from the couch or the chair over to this table and I would say, you know, there are two things that seem to be present in different realms. One is the idea that consciousness is needed for change. Like, kids need to be conscious when parents are telling them stuff. Teachers need to have kids conscious in therapy. Consciousness is really helpful. So that's one thing. The second broad generalization is integration seems to be the basis of health. So I said to my patients, let's integrate consciousness. And they would give me this weird eye and they go, what are you talking about? And they were used to me saying strange things. So I said, well, if integration is health and consciousness for change, what if you integrated consciousness? Let's put those two things together around this table. And let's use it as a visual metaphor for the ability to differentiate the knowing. Like if I say, hello, fleet, you have both the knowing. I said, hello, fleet, let's put that in the hub. But then the sound, hello, Fleet, let's put that on the rim. So then we could divide the rim up into four segments, basically all energy flow. And you'd take a singular spoke, which was like this thing holding up the table there, number of them, but we just choose one to visually, as a metaphor, imagine attention. And you direct attention from awareness to the rim, which represented things you're aware of, like hello, Fleet. And on the first segment, you'd have energy flow from outside the body in the form of sound. You know, air molecules moving, light, what you see, you know, smell and taste and touch, five senses. And then you move the spoke over know to each of those senses. Then you move the spoke to the second segment, which is energy flow from inside the body. So it's called interoception. So it's muscles, bones, genitals, organs, like intestines, lungs, heart.

Then you move the spoke over again. Now you're differentiating all those from each other and from the hub itself. Now you explore mental activities like emotions and memories and thoughts and beliefs and attitudes and intentions and desires, all that stuff. And then you do that in a kind of open way where you're just kind of open to whatever they are. You explore the nature of them. And they're probably coming from the head, brain, most likely influenced by the rest of the body and relationships, of course. But now what you do in an advanced step of. And this, a patient came up with this idea, bend the spoke around and like it right into the hub. So you put attention on awareness itself. And that is kind of mind blowing. Then you straighten the spoke out and you go to the fourth and final segment, which is the relational sense, the sense of connection to people you're with right now between me and you. Sense of connection to everybody listening, the sense of people in your family, your friends, your neighbors, your people you work with. And you just extend it out to people who live in your city, your state, your country, the whole planet. And then you go to all living beings. And then, you know, I was presenting this wheel of awareness practice to Richie Davidson's lab, and they said, why don't you put in loving kindness statements? I go, this is just based on science. There's no science on that. They go, we've done the first science study. And they showed it to me, and it was very integrative. So I said, okay, well, this is an integrated consciousness, so I'll put it in. So then you do these loving kindness statements of wishing all living beings yourself and even muy me plus we is mui the collective identity we have for, you know, wishing you happiness.

Health, safety, and flourishing. So you do that, and you get the muy in there at the end, which I was very happy about after being at Richie's lab. And then I did this with, you know, my patients were getting better. The colleagues, you know, other therapists were finding it helpful. Them, their clients were getting better, did in workshops. And I started as a scientist recording people's responses. So before the viral pandemic, I did it with 50,000 people in person. And that's not an exaggeration. My assistant actually counted up the number. And so we have all this data, and then I've written a number of books, Mind Aware and now interconnected, you know, with the implications of what this wheel of awareness practice means. It not only has the three pillars. You know, it teaches you to focus attention, open awareness, and build kind intention. So it's likely creating those physiological changes. But for me as a scientist, what's been really fascinating is try to understand what awareness itself, that hub is made of, and that we can talk about it if you want, but that has transformed everything. So as I was hearing Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching, or teach with Jack Kornfield or other contemplative practices, or learn indigenous teachings, I talk a lot about this in the interconnected book. You know, it's amazing that when you stay grounded in what you hear from people, in this case people doing the Wheel of Awareness, you can learn so much from people. So I feel just like a conduit that's just been absorbing the wisdom of other people and just trying to put some words to it. So that's the Wheel of Awareness and you can do it. From my website, we give it away for free, which makes our accountant think we're nuts. But if we charged just 10 cents, we'd be in a really good place. But anyway, so it's available to you at my website, drdansiegel.com so I was.

Doing my best to do the wheel of Awareness practice as you were describing it. It was quite interesting to do that.

And for a long time I felt when we're working with training the mind, embrace mindfulness practices and mindfulness awareness practices, you often begin with some kind of mindfulness, sometimes as distinguished from awareness. All these are used in different ways, but sometimes it's more of a one pointed attention and awareness can be a little more panoramic. And I always felt that.

One of the ways to activate our innate capacity for more panoramic awareness was the effort to kind of include two things at once or pay attention to two things at once. Now, cognitive scientists and maybe Therapadan scholars might argue that you're just constantly switching between, you know, you really can't pay attention to two things once. But nonetheless, it seems like the effort to include more than one thing. So these different spokes, to add one spoke, another spoke to include these things does some kind of entryway into our innate capacity for a different kind of mind state that it's a more broader awareness?

Yeah, well, that's interesting. You know, that's a very interesting question. I think in the practice we use one spoke and you're moving the singular spoke to different points on the rim. So there are many points on the rim.

You get a really enriched feeling when you can allow that spoke to be one pointed. Now the spoke can kind of broaden a little bit. So, like you can take in, you know, the smell of something and the taste of something, the sound of something. And you can certainly. Now we're going to get more into the hub notion, allow awareness to receive of the fullness in there. Right. So. So yes, I think you can, you can train your hub to be, to be much.

More receptive to just a singular thing. Absolutely. I think that's a, that's a trait you can develop. And even as people start doing the wheel, what many, many, many people describe is the hub is this deep source of joy, of feeling of connection, an expansion of the boundaries that you used to find yourself as a separate entity in a body. You start having this feeling of awe, this feeling of gratitude, compassion widens up. And people often describe the experience of love. You know, it's one of the most common words when people take the microphone and say, here's what I experienced when I bent that spoke around. Time disappears, you know, and there's this feeling that there's a connection to everyone and everything. Often that comes up. So that led to me looking at all the neuroscience I could find. Was there a correlation with these hub descriptions, which are first person data, that's the research data. And I couldn't really find anything. But when I went to physics and the physics of energy, everything changed. And it correlated beautifully not only with the experience of the people describing the experience in the hub of the wheel, but it correlated with indigenous teachings and contemplative teachings from thousands of years ago and from different realms. So we call that consilient. And. And it turns out that in physics, and I was so happy the month before Aware, which is the main book that explores this, the month before it came out on the COVID of Scientific American. So this is now July of 2018. The COVID story was, when does the Newtonian realm meet the quantum realm? And I'd written all about that in the book. And I thought, people think I've lost my mind. Because the one correlation in science that really fits entirely with the wheel data was the idea that there are these two realms that the rim represents the Newtonian or macro state realm, where things are more like noun, like entities that are separated in time and space. But when you get into the hub, you're more in the quantum realm, which this was the COVID story of this very conservative scientific public journal. You know, what you find is, in fact, there is no time variable. So when people say it's timeless, the quantum Realm is timeless when they talk about things just being connected. Well, the experience in the quantum realm are verbs, not nouns, not noun, like entities that are of separation, but verb like processes that are massively interwoven. So that correlates beautifully. And then you start realizing that the plane of possibility in this diagram we have that correlates with the hub is like the quantum vacuum. It's this generator of diversity. It's this, you know, in, in physics terms, this sounds like poetry, but it's from physics. Or this is a quote from Arthur Zajon. It is the sea of potential which is the formless source of all form. And that helps understand why so many people get in the Hub, say it was empty but full. And you go, well, say more about that. They go, I can't. I don't know what it means. It was empty, but it was full. And that's exactly the notion that it's full of potentiality but empty of form.

And as you said, the world's philosophical and contemplative and indigenous traditions have been pointing to this both experientially and philosophically for a long time. Thousands of years, Buddhist philosophy talk about form and formlessness is really at the heart of the understanding of the nature of reality. And so this has been absolutely fascinating. And there's one thing I would just like to elicit a comment from you because in this summit, well, first of all, sometimes it seems like mainstream science, more conventional mainstream science almost pretends that quantum physics is not there, even though it was began to be developed back in like the 20s or 30s, I think, if I'm not mistaken, of the last century and 100 years ago. So.

And in this summit there's a lot of talk about energy and energy psychology and bioenergetics and energetic medicine and different things. And. But I mean, I think all the people we have in this summit are, you know, relatively evidence based. It's not kind of, we're not talking like, I don't mean to demonize it, but the Secret, for example, or something like that. So we're talking about. And yet there's still the word energy for so many people. Seems to be this kind of woo woo concept. And I know that you, I think people, I listen to this conversation realize you're a pretty hardcore science guy. And so I wonder if you could just say something about energy and our use of that term energy.

Oh, thank you, Fleet. You know, and I tried to talk about this in a book called Mind, you know, because people would say, well, what's been the Experience where, you know, you pushed against the idea that mind was just brain activity and it was about energy flow and, you know, what was it like to actually offer, believe it or not, the first definition of the mind, not just a description. And then from that definition you could say what a healthy mind is, a mind that's cultivating integration. You know, so it's been quite a journey. And so that's what that book is. It just says, okay, people keep on asking, you know, what's it been like from the inside out? So here's an inside out description. But the questions in that book allow people to look at this issue that the word energy for certain academics gets them very agitated. Now, I removed a lot of the, I had, in the, in one of the versions I had a lot of stories and some of my friends said, you don't need all those negative stories. But I had a lot of people yelling at me and screaming at me, literally chasing me down hallways saying, stop talking about energy, stop talking about quantum physics, stop saying the mind is more than the brain and the head. You know, stop, stop, stop. And you know, so I took, I removed all, most of those stories, just left the general statement that just like you're asking about the word energy can be used in a non scientific way, just like the word quantum or quantum physics can be used in an extremely non scientific way. I went to a very big meeting where there were four other talks talking about quantum physics. I work with quantum physicists and so I was very excited that in the field of psychotherapy people were talking about it. The three other talks were so not based on science. They just used the word quantum to mean they wanted to give some kind of scientific feeling behind the opinions they had about things being different from what the mainstream was saying. And it was so sad because the audience members, not knowing what the science of quantum physics said, would hear these people just say, the quantum transformation, is this the quantum this is. And it was really woo, woo. It really was. And I was so embarrassed for our field that they were just soaking it in. And, and so it is true that the word energy can be used that way too. So, you know, as a scientist, trained as a scientist, you know, I think you can be true to the science but not constrained by the scientists. So I stuck with it. I said, you know, complexity science says there are emergent properties. Energy is the stuff of the universe. So to say we can't talk about energy doesn't make any scientific sense. Even though scientists are the ones yelling at me saying, don't talk about quantum physics. Don't talk about quantum physics and energy. So that's what we say in interpersonal neurobiology. We want to be completely consistent with the science but not constrained by the scientists. And so what you need to do then is know the science really well. So know when people push back. And in one case, although there are many cases like this, when we've been at a cocktail hour and one of those yelling scientists is having a little bit of wine, and I go up to him or her and say, can you tell me more about your things, about the energy? As one person once said, you know, my parents wanted to be. To be a medical doctor, but I became a psychologist, and I thought I was letting them down. And so then the Tao of physics came up, and I thought it was a misinterpretation of, you know, energy and physics and so all these things that use energy. You know, I want to be a hardcore, you know, psychological researcher. And so when you use word energy, it reminds me of disappointing my parents, you know, and he's kind of. He's a little tipsy. And I said, okay, okay, I. I get it. You're mad at me because you don't want to disappoint your parents. You know, I get it. But let's not. Let's not limit our field because you're working through some. Some issues about your mom, your dad. You know, I actually said that to him, and he started to cry, you know, so anyway, so, you know, when people get off their defensiveness, you actually can see something. But I still think there's. There's merit to the idea of just being very careful about anything we say, you know, and in. In all these books that, you know, I've edited or written, you know, I obsess about every word I use to make sure it's consistent with a grounding, even if there. I know there are certain scientists who are going to get upset and yell about things.

Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Dan, thank you so much as always. And I think you've just enriched the dialogue and this summit so much by our conversation today. So just thank you so much for your work and for being you. I just treasure our relationship and our ongoing dialogue.

I treasure our relationship, too, Fleet. It's great to be with you. And, you know, life is fragile, as we both know. So just taking a deep breath and just feeling the love and connection. And for everyone listening, you know, this world is waiting for us to bring really health and healing. So thank you so much, Fleet.

Thank you thank you. Be well.

You too.

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