Heroic Chat with Dr. Dan Siegel: Going From “Me” and “We” to “Mwe”

Hey Heroes. Today's episode features a mastery level chat with one of our friends and world class experts sharing how they show up as the best version of themselves. This heroic chat with Brian was recorded live in front of a virtual audience of heroic community members and coaches. To learn more about this series as well as how you can join Brian's daily live coaching sessions at 1:01pm Central Time. Plus get access to a ton more to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and express the best, most heroic version of yourself. Head to Heroic Us today and if you like this episode, please leave a positive review and hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's your host, Brian Johnson.

Heroes, it is 1:01pm plus a few Dan and I were hanging out with Nat behind the scenes. Time flies when you're having fun catching up with friends, but I am so excited today to be with dear friend. We met 20 years ago, which is hard to believe. Before we had Emerson, we were talking parenting, one of my absolute favorite human beings in the world, who also happens to be one of the world's leading mindfulness, neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiological experts. If you didn't invent that field, you're certainly leading. I think you may have actually completely pioneered that. Is that right, Dan?

With colleagues? Yeah, absolutely. It's a team effort.

It's a team effort. Humility is one of the qualities I most admire in Dan as well. But thrilled to be with you today and I am excited to chat about your heroic quest. We'll get into some of your wisdom and all of that goodness after you lead us with a simple grounding exercise, if you will. Sometimes I'm putting people on the spot, but I'm like, this is what Dan does to connect with you. And however you would like to help us connect to the best version of ourselves as we begin our discussion.

Sure. Well, that's a beautiful invitation. It's great to be here with your community, Brian, and great to see you. And thanks Nat for the backup. Yeah, so let's just take a moment if you can, you know, turn any devices that might distract you off if you can. And let's just sit or stand or walk in my case, you know, in your body that you're born into. And let's just feel the sensations of that body. And that might be the breeze on your skin. It might be the inside of your body with just feeling your heart beating, or your lungs beautifully breathing. As we go inward, we also realize we have thoughts and feelings and memories and just invite them in. You don't need to focus on one thing or the other. And we're not doing a training of attention exercise here. We're just opening our awareness to whatever is arising in this moment. And for this particular grounding practice, we're going to let the body be a beginning place, but come to realize it's not the end of who we are. We're really this emergent flowing aspect of energy. And heroic energy has this quality you can call integrative. It allows you to differentiate the inner aspect of where we are. So we're starting inside the body. But now see if you could just let that sensation and even the perspective that comes from the body or any kind of action that might come to work on behalf of the body, that agency which spells the word spa s p a way of thinking about the self. And let's let that self expand and see if you could just feel what it means for all of us right now in this community to be doing this grounding practice right now together. There's over a hundred of us in real time. And if you ever listen to the recording, there'll be many, many more. But imagine now there's a body of a hundred and more people now, individual bodies doing the same sensation, perspective and agency. Focus and just notice how you can feel that it isn't just your body that's in this, what you can call a relational field right now. There's a larger wholeness there that's, yes, interconnected. But even more than just, oh, there's a hundred other individuals, there's a kind of synergy, a process where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We're not just a hundred plus individuals. There's a relational field we're creating right now. And when we think about that, we can kind of imagine in our thoughts that, okay, I get it, we're all doing this together. But see if you can more than just think it, see if you can sense it. The s of spa just feel this relational feel that may begin to feel like it's not just, you know, a hundred other individuals, but there's a wholeness to this field. And see if you can take the perspective of what would happen if a hundred people working collaboratively together in their own individual, unique, differentiated ways. This integration is differentiation plus linkage. We're to go out into the world and try to bring agency that a as a collective from their individual gifts. For me, that's what heroism mean. So one simple way to remember this practice, we're Doing right now that will bring to a close in just a moment as a formal practice. But we can live it throughout our conversation. This con is with and verses to turn. This turning together of our attention. This coming together is both a me and our individual bodies. And we can really be grateful that we have these bodies. But we're also a collective a we. And the way you integrate those. One way to do that is with the simple word we. M w e honors our differentiated individuality while also embracing our relational connections as a we. But you don't lose the individuality in the linking. So we call that a mui. And we thanks you for being on this journey together in this grounding practice. But as we get ready to let our eyes come open if they're closed, and bring this formal practice to an end, for now, just realize everything that Brian and I are going to talk about can come from a place of me and we and mui. And when we live like that, there's an incredible hopefulness that arises in the collaborative creativity and courage that we as humans have. And we having this integrated identity can bring out into the world. So thank you.

Bless you. I can feel the power of your wisdom and of your love. And we were talking before about the sadness of what's going on in the world today, and I felt that arise for me as well. Just feeling the power of a community like ours and yours and all of those around the world coming together as a collective and that we essence. And then for you to connect it to what heroism means for you. I'd like to talk about that. I'd like to talk about what heroism means for you, especially in the context of the sadness and the. The pain that exists in the world today and what we as individuals and as a community and what we can do together in order to create that world that we aspire to see for ourselves, our families, our kids, their kids, etc.

Well, Brian, thank you so much and thanks everyone for the. The chat comments. Just being here, you know, Brian, I just want to honor you and your heroism, you know, for your really lifelong work to try to bring wisdom together from so many different places and, you know, this deep, heartfelt love you feel for life, for people, for, you know, what our potential is. And thank you so much for that, you know, heroism. And for me, that word heroic, you know, just is an invitation to say, you may be told certain things, but we need to question those things and have the courage, which to me is really the beginning of heroism, of, you know, what we can do. So, you know, I have a son, Alex Siegel, who's a musician, and one of his songs is called Good Leg. He just actually released two days ago on our. My Caroline, my anniversary, it was the 10th anniversary release, this old album he had called Royka. And one of the songs is Goodleg. But on the Goodleg song, there's this line that I just always think about every day. And it goes like this goes. There were too many. I had too many questions for all the answers I was told. And for me, a hero is someone who says, I've been given a lot of answers, and now I want to bring up the questions. And you come with humility, and you come with really engagement and openness to say, you know, here are some questions I have about. For example, you know, is the self a synonym for the individual? Which in modern culture, you're told all the time. You know, in social media, you see it all the time. And what we know from research is that if we really believe that statement self equals individual, all sorts of really bad things happen. I don't mean bad as I'm being judgmental. I mean, people get unhealthy, they get depressed, they get anxious, they get suicidal. There's a feeling of disconnection, there's alienation. We start treating each other with racism and social injustice. We start having polarization. We start destroying the natural world around us, and we forget that we are the natural world. So I'm not trying to be judgmental. I'm just trying to say, as you know, any one of us that are on here, or moss, you know, they're on here, you know, if we care for the world, then, you know, we need to question all the answers we are told, you know, and Brian, you knew Alex when he was little because we've known each other a long time. And when you realize, especially really young people, for your young kids, you know, younger than mine, you know, we got to go out in the world and question things. So our daughter Maddie, who, you know, too, you know, she's now getting her doctoral degree in environmental science and engineering, and she's out, you know, doing the big fight where, you know, you can say modern culture is taking us a certain path, even though to be aware of it's going in a wrong path takes a lot of emotional courage just to say, shouldn't I just get distracted, work really hard and then watch some movies on, you know, cable tele. That's cable television. What is it called, all these streaming services, you know, or should I during the day say, hey, I kind of feel like the world's going the wrong direction. To me, that's another example of heroism. Not just, you know, I don't want to say just, but, you know, making songs about it, but also getting people inspired, whether it's from your song or from your work. And I was teaching in Sweden recently, this incredible group called Inner Development Goals that I'm one of their scientific advisors and you can watch there the day long gathering we had. But to me, there were a lot of heroes there because people were willing to face the really painful realities, just talk about climate issues of planetary boundaries being crossed. And rather than just getting depressed and deflated and defeated and feeling helpless, instead we could really look for options that weren't initially accessible to consciousness, which is how you can define hope and to see ways to go together to make a difference. And in that gathering, you know what, what was beautiful about it was we had musicians, we had jugglers, we had artists of all sorts, we had poets, and we had serious science conversations. We had government officials from United nations and government officials from the United States, government officials from all over Europe, people from Asia, Africa, people from all over the place. But on a global level, what was so inspiring about that was we could say, you know something, it may be that if we go inward, we could have the courage to fight against what are very real implications, I think of the solo self. So anyway, those are just some initial thoughts about, you know, how we go from heroism. The event, Laura, was called Inner Development Goals. So inner and then development goals and what's cool about it and you know, the heroic journey can involve. This is what that group is doing and I'm their advisor. So I could say our group, but it's whatever, it's all of our group. You know, you can make your own hub, but join the global movement because we're working with the United nations to try to figure out why the 17 sustainability development goals from 2015 were not. Every year we do a report card from the United Nations. No, we're not achieving it. No, it's getting worse, getting worse, getting worse. And the interdevelopment goals is just three years old, but it just basically said, why aren't people listening to the United Nations? Here's what we need to do. We have the resources to do it. We have the skills to do it. If you look at your book, you know, Arete, you know, we, we actually have the knowledge on how to do it, what to do with the wisdom, but humanity's not doing it. So what's going on and you know, whether you look at all the wars going on on this planet or the way human beings treat each other on all sides, you know, we want to honor just the horrible tragedies that are going on now and ask the question, so how can we do this differently? So that to me, that's kind of what a heroic kind of means. And you know, our field of interpersonal neurobiologist tries to do it in our own, you know, our own kind of science. Nerdy way to say, here's some science that supports the important agency of making these heroic changes in the world.

Ah, so inspiring and so many things we can talk about there. The, you know, you know me all in. My joke is I'm like a neuron. I either fire or I don't. But all in on heroic. And then above it I have above the eye and the sea, I have hero. And then I see a world in which 51 of humanity is flourishing by 2051. Which was inspired by Martin Seligman's moonshot goal. He said in the year 2000 when they launched the positive psychology movement. But you know, kind of bringing arete back into the cultural vernacular. Virtue excellence, being your best self in service to something bigger than yourself. But then what it means etymologically. The ancient Greeks, when they came up with the word for hero. I'm just thinking about this while you were sharing what you were sharing. The word hero in ancient Greece didn't mean tough guy or killer or bad guy. It meant protector in a hero. Secret weapon before courage, they had love. It's about something bigger than themselves. So source of a hero's power is love. And of course, not necessarily of course, but I talk about it a lot that the word courage comes from the same word as the. As we use for heart.

Core.

Yeah, heart, you know. Yeah. Pumps blood to the arms and legs and organs. It's that love. It's that courage that vitalizes all the other virtues. But the centrality of muy in the heroic is really powerful for me as you describe that.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. You know, it reminds me of some of the research done on just kind of the folk view. Meaning what? What is common people, you know, not just academics. What is the general popular view of what it means to be wise? And it's exactly what you said, Brian, you know, that a wise person is some unsure who can remain with some kind of clarity in the face of challenge. Someone who's got that equanimity that even if they get intense emotions, they can come back to a balance and think clearly, even under stress. So that's one component, but the other component was always they realized that the meaning of life is being of service to people beyond just the that person living in your body. And notice I'm trying to avoid saying other because self is the other. So I, I, I urge us all to not say the phrase self and other. So you can say something like the wise individual in the popular view is someone who realizes it's not just about their individual self. It's about being of support to the well being of other individuals. You can say, and the larger good, the greater good, you know, and that is exactly what you're saying. From an interpersonal neurobiology point of view, we would see that wisdom as teaching this process of integration that when something is integrated it has two components, it's differentiated and linked. And when differentiation happens and then linkage is cultivated, the linkage doesn't destroy the differentiation. So it's not blending, you know, which can be like group think and you know, all sorts of things that become very destructive. Integration honors the gifts. Like Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her beautiful book, you know, Braiding Sweetgrass, she talks about the tribe that she's a member of, the Potawatomi. And they say it's the responsible of the individual to develop their particular differentiated gifts and give those individual gifts for the greater good. So that's a way of saying it's me and we, you know, and it's rare. I found it finally in the Potawatomi. I've been looking all over the planet for somebody who lives it and, and that was one example. So that was, they don't use the word we, but it was a kind of like the me. Individuality is a gift you give to the larger we, but you don't lose the individual gift as you're giving it. So, so that we would call integration. Now what's interesting from a broader perspective is that when a system is integrated, it flows in this harmony. When it's not integrated, it's like a river. One of the banks outside of the harmonious flow of integration is chaos. The other is the bank of rigidity. And what's absolutely fascinating, whether you're looking at the individual or looking at a family or looking at let's say a couple, a relationship of a couple, or you're looking at, let's say a classroom or a school or an organization like a company or an organization like a government or a nation or a culture or humanity on earth, when there's integration, there's health. When integration is impaired, you get chaos or rigidity. Just. I mean, if you just look at climate issues, you know, we're getting massive storms and look what just happened to Acapulco. Just one example. Many, many, many examples. A recent one, you know, or we're getting, you know, incredible droughts. That would be example of rigidity. And this, you know, going to chaos and rigidity is an outcome of impaired integration. You. In our own lives. I'm a psychiatrist. If you look at every psychiatric disorder, you know, and we have a comprehensive course where what I'm about to say in one sentence, we have 36 hours to explore. But, you know, when you look at every psychiatric disorder, there's impaired integration and its presentation, as is the whole profile of symptoms. They're all either chaos, rigidity, or both. And so as a psychiatrist, years and years ago, before you and I even first met, it was really striking to me that every one of the people that came to me for care had either chaos or rigidity. So I'd say to my supervisor, I said, what's this chaos and rigidity stuff? Everyone's coming with either chaos rigidity or both. They go, what are you talking about? I said, well, I don't know. I mean, it's just like a pattern I'm seeing. I haven't found one exception. Whether it's in the hospital or out in my office, they're either chaotic, like flooding thoughts, flooding emotions, flooding memories, flooding bodily sensations, or they're rigid, like they're depleted, they're shut down, they don't want to live, or they have some combination of the two, like hugely in flooding, you know, memories of trauma, for example, but then avoiding things that would ever evoke that. So kind of this really painful blend of the two. So that mental suffering was an example of chaos and rigidity. So I went for this. This search in this very room back in 1991 to try to say why was chaos and rigidity. What I was seeing was I, like, out of my mind. In fact, then I thought, hold on a second. What is the mind? And then I realized I had all my board certifications in psychiatry, right? The specialty of medicine that deals with the mind. No one ever told me what the mind was. And then I thought, this is not so. And then I was asked to be the training director in a, you know, child and adolescent psychiatry program. And I said, well, how could I? I'm a. I'm a fake. I. I mean, I know I'm board certified, but. And I'M trained as a researcher, but no one ever told me, if this is psychiatry, the care iatry is the caretaker. Psyche is the mind, the soul, the spirit, you know, so if I'm going to teach the next generation, I better figure out what this mind thing is. And so that's when I brought together these 40 scientists that had my teachers, and now they were my colleagues because I was a young professor. And I just said, let's ask the question. What's the mind and what's its connection to the brain? And that's where all sorts of amazing things started happening because I brought kind of like what you do, Brian. I brought people from the different fields, like anthropology, sociology, linguistics, psychology and all its divisions. Biology, like neuroscience and genetics, Chemistry, physics and math. I had worked with those folks. I brought them all in. I said, okay, let's ask one question. What is the connection between the mind and the brain? And, you know, that's a long story I wrote up in a book called Mine. But to give you the punchline, no one could agree on the mind because no one had a definition of what mind was short of brain activity. Everyone knew what the brain was. Not exactly how it functions, of course, but they knew it's up there in your head. And so the group was going to disband. And the next week I had to bring them a definition, a working deficit of the mind. And then we went on to meet for four and a half years. So that's where things got really interesting. When you can get an anthropologist and sociologist and linguist person who never thinks about the brain, to spend four and a half years with brain scientists, geneticists, chemists, and us to be actually respectfully collaborating with this definition of mind that I offered them. And then that became the birth of the field of interpersonal neurobiology, basically.

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Beautiful. I remember going to a presentation you gave at wherever. That Skirball center, maybe.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

2005, maybe four. Attending those lectures you were giving in your office in Santa Monica and starting the presentation then with. All right, I'm trained in the mind, but what's the mind? Has anyone actually established that? I wonder.

What do you. Yeah, what do you remember about people raising and. Brian, someone's saying, raise up the volume on your microphone. But what, what, what, what do you remember people answering? You remember when I asked that?

That's funny. Nat. Is my volume not good today? Is it different than normal?

Yeah, it sounds low compared to dance.

Okay, give me a second. Just. Let's take a breath and enjoy connecting to we while I look at my preferences. Perhaps something got offset that I want to check briefly. Would you look at that? My microphone has been set to the wrong microphone. Thank you, whoever gave us the feedback. Is that better now? Is that better? Look at that. Look at. You know, moving from theory to practice to mastery is a lot better with friends, isn't it? The we is strong here, folks. Thank you. I literally. I don't know how many. I've already done four talks today, and no one told me. Actually, you know, this is funny. I remember you and Caroline have a. You have something in your tooth, honey.

Oh, yeah.

As a code word, like, come on, I got a big booger hanging out. Nobody's telling me. Thank you for letting me know that my volume was bad. So a few. A few things arose for me there. In the book, I feature you a number of times, and one of the things I bring up, there are two things I want to talk about in particular. One is name it to tame It. And I want to connect that to the emotions we're all feeling, looking at what's going on in the world right now as we create the agency and go out to do our best to serve profoundly. The other is your integration with the river. The way that I framed up that story, knowing it was from a broader context with the acronym faces, et cetera. But I focused on the fact that healthy, my kind of paraphrased version of your wisdom as I understood it and integrated it, was healthy. Human beings are psychologically flexible, much like a river that flows between the banks of structure and spontaneity. And you can flood either structure into rigidity or spontaneity into chaos. I have shared that if you are here, don't raise your hand, actually, but raise your hand visually. If you were here and have heard me say that at least once, raise your hand. You can even do it on. I mean, I have Dan, come back to that so many times in my own life with everyone here. So I love the way you frame that up. And then the integration is such a powerful theme that in my work, I've tried to capture the idea of the ego in a way that transcends and includes a lot of the discussions out there where a lot of people are talking about the undifferentiated self. The. The disintegrated. Richard Rohr talks about this. My. I love Richard Rohr. I was raised Catholic, and his idea of it's ego plus, not ego minus, having those strong structures of the, quote, little self that allows you to integrate and be woven into the fabric of humanity with that strong sense of self. And I love the way that you framed them. We. Of the differentiation and the integration. So anything you want to share on that? And then I want to move to the. The naming it, to taming it and how to deal with big emotions. And then there's so many things.

Yeah, I mean, with that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. You know, that moment in the meeting you came to at that Skirball center, you know, I ended up asking over a hundred thousand folks in the field of mental health, and then ultimately about 20,000, the field of education, and no one is told what the mind is. So the bottom line of that meeting with all those 40 scientists was if you made a very, you know, kind of consilient is the word EO Wilson uses for, you know, something that could find common ground across independent pursuits of. Of trying to understand reality. That's consilient. And he wrote a book by that name in 1998, E.O. wilson. So I didn't know that was the term we could use because we're talking about 1992, but it's a great term. And so this would. Was a conciliate effort, without using the term, to say, okay, if anthropologists are correct, the mind is relational in culture. If sociologists are right, the mind is emerging in groups. If a linguistic linguistics person is right, you know, we use language and that helps create the mind in many ways. Like Taylor Deschardin talked about, about the noosphere, this atmosphere of knowledge. And that's the mind is this relational field. He didn't use that term, but that's kind of what a noosphere is. And if the neuroscientists are right, you know, the mind is, we would say, in part, they might not say that, you know, related to brain activity. You know, how do you come to reconcile these seemingly conflictual views? So this is a long story that I'm only going to summarize in literally a sentence and just say that in the 80s, the mathematics of something called complex systems proved that there was something called emergence, where elements of this kind of system interact with each other. Like the wetness of water. Wetness isn't in any water molecule. It's in the collection of water molecules together. So in the togetherness of a complex system, you get an emergence of something. In this case, wetness. So the proposal that I made to this group was the mind might be considered. It was just a hypothesis, an emergent property of what? Of energy flow. And the skull nor the skin were boundaries that block that flow. And so an anthropologist could talk about energy flow in a culture, which she would say, yeah, that's exactly what I study. I don't talk about it that way. B, that's what I study. Sociologist studies how it's a relational field in groups. Linguistics shows how information in a certain pattern is a formation that symbolizes something. So we call it information or information. So that person was happy. And then the neuroscientist said, I'm happy too, because that's exactly what I study. Energy flow inside the brain, you know, and the physics person there, they were happy saying, everything is energy. So from physics and mathematics to sociology and anthropology, including neuroscience, genetics, the whole shebang, Everyone said, we don't have a definition of mind, but we're going to go with this, that it's an emergent property. And one of the properties that the mathematics folks had shown in the 80s. So now we're talking about 1992. They show there's something called self organization. And so what I said was, could one facet of the mind beyond its subjective experience and consciousness and information processing, but could a fourth facet of mind be this? The emergent self organizing, embodied and relational process that's regulating the flow of energy and information? 40 scientists in a room. If you can picture this, I'll never forget this moment the rest of my life. They voted one by one by one. 40 out of vote, 40 voted yes. No one had a prior definition of the mind shortage of brain activity. Everyone agreed, and we went on to meet for four and a half years. So when we get to name it, to tame it, what I want to say is, first of all, some people have asked me to modify that to name it to frame it, which I think is cool, because they said, if you've had a history of slavery, then taming doesn't feel so good. And so they asked me to come up with a different one that wasn't so triggering. And I said, I really respect that. So how about name it to frame it? Which actually is more useful in some ways, because you frame it, you understand it. So that's my new way of saying the same thing, name it to frame. And what it does is it comes from some neuroscience studies that shows, you know, if especially you look at the Brain systems, if the energy coming from the body and up through first the right side of the head, brain gets overactive in response to a stimulus. If you can name it with the left hemisphere, those two can work together. So one is not better than the other. They just do differentiated things. You want to integrate them doesn't mean make them blended. You know, integration is more like a fruit salad than a smoothie, you know, so you're not blending them together and mushing them all up. You're saying, hey, left, name it, let's frame it. So let's make sense of what's going on right now. If we talk about all the things happening, you know, people are not naming it to frame it. They're filled with all sorts of understandable emotions on, in the case of what's going on in the Middle east, of both sides of what's going on in Gaza, what's going on in Israel. And you're seeing friendships destroyed because people can't have conversations. Last night we had. Caroline and I had dinner with a dear friend where the initial conversation on the phone was very challenging, you know, and then we got through the intense reactions, then we got together for dinner and it was beautiful because people could just speak from the heart and say, I'm worried about this, I'm worried about that. And mostly people are just feeling so terrified that you can see so much destruction, you know, going on that is human created on both sides, you know, so now you say, well, where do we go? You know, I'm not a politician or historian expert, so I'm not going to give opinions on that. I'm just gonna say it's so sad. And we gotta name that sadness, name the grief. And as my dear friend and, you know, colleague Joanna Macy, she's 94 now, Joanna has been an activist for, you know, over 50 years. She would tell us that the first thing you always have to do is name it to be present with the grief of what's going on and then start thinking through how to collaborate to go forward. So, but that idea of name it to frame it comes from integration, you know, comes from this whole long line of interpersonal neurobiology reasoning that integration is health impaired. Integration goes to chaos or rigidity. And that's what we're seeing around this planet. People not living an integrated, I would say heroic life is an integrative life.

Which is so beautiful. And then we step outside of the, you know, politics of things and the institutional, you know, frameworks that, that are in place or could be improved upon. To the individual. And for us, it. For me, anyway, it always comes back to all right, so. And I love the integration. I love the name it to frame it.

That.

That is not only, you know, more sensitive and appropriate in that context. It's actually really beautifully empowering because now I framed it, and then we extend it to. All right, well, given the current reality, let's not argue with reality. We lose, but only every time. As great teachers say, let's embrace what is, embrace the pain of what is. But then look forward with that hope, with that agency, and ask, what do we want? How can we play our roles humbly yet heroically well? And again, there's so many different ways I can go. I didn't properly introduce you, so, team, I assume that you're sharing different things as we go, but Dr. Dan Siegel, if you're going to make sure everyone knows how to find Dan in all of his books, that would be wonderful. I want to highlight briefly, for some reason, I've done just one note so far, so I got to come back and do the other notes I read. Check out mindsight, which is a very approachable. Dan has light books and deep, like, Mind is just this. This mind. Right. Is the first in which you articulated it. I mean, the. Was it the pope who read that and invited.

Oh, the developing mind. Yeah, the developing mind. That's a graduate school textbook. Yeah.

Incredible tone. But I actually read Parenting from the Inside out, and we've. If you search Dan or Siegel, you'll see the references to his work, Psychological Flexibility, Name it to Tame it, and a number of other references in his book and other notes and some really inspiring quotes that we have. But I read Parenting from the Inside Out. Alexandra and I talked before we came on, and she's like, you're talking to Dan today. We're having some great challenges with Eleanor, our daughter, who is 6. We gotta ask about this and this. I'm like, it's a heroic chat. We'll talk a little parenting stuff. But I read Parenting from the Inside out before we had kids. And one of the stories in there that was most compelling for me is your story about the coherence of our narratives as it relates to the unhealthy or less than healthy attachment of our kids to their parental figures. I'm hoping you can share that, because that really impacted me as a younger man with more hair and less gray. Before we had kids, I'm like, that's it. And it remains the best parenting book I've ever read. Parenting from the Inside out and again. Dan has a number of other parenting books which would be rivaling for that. The Power of Showing Up. We have another that I absolutely loved. The Whole Brain Child is such a great book, but parenting from the inside out just has a really special place in my heart because I read it so long ago. Can you talk about the power of coherent narratives as it relates to our own psychological well being and integration and that, that we bring to our parenting?

Oh, yeah, absolutely, Brian. Well, thank you. I mean that, that was the thing that got me started when I was, you know, training to be a, a therapist back in 1984. It's a long time ago. I can't believe I'm going to say this. That's like almost 40 years ago. Which I, I don't even feel like I'm 40 years old. I feel like I'm 17. So I don't really understand what these numbers mean.

I'm going to tell you, it's a.

Little bit of existential disorientation to say that, you know, I went to my medical school reunion, my, you know, my 40th reunion recently and like everybody's retiring and I feel like I'm just getting started. So it's like they're going, retiring this, retiring that. And I go, what? I mean, I'm just like, what?

You know, Caroline and I are just.

Going, we're just right here, you know, so it's a funny thing. But anyway, so, yeah, so essentially when I heard that finding from the person that was gonna, would become my teacher, Mary Maine, she just passed away this year. So it's a sad, sad loss. You know, boy, life is so fragile. So Mary had pursued this, you know, question, like, what determines why some kids have secure attachment and other kids have various forms of what's called insecure attachment? I don't like to use the word insecure because it has a connotation of, oh, that person's insecure. But that's, that's not what it is. So I use the word non secure, so you'll hear me use that. Even though the researchers use insecure and it's out in the public vernacular, insecure, I just don't use it because someone with a non secure attachment did the best they could to adapt to a situation that wasn't optimal. And, and they are not in the general term insecure. They just figured out how to deal with the non, non secure situation they were given. So they're not, it's, it's a, it's a relational experience. So that's why you'll hear me say non secure just to explain that. So what she found was that parents who made sense of their life. And you can assess this in the instrument I was trained to give. So I'm a narrative researcher, the Adult Attachment Interview, the aai. So I'm trained in that. And Mary was my teacher and she's the one who created it. And, and, and what was amazing about it was if you had a really, really terrible childhood yourself in this body, your individual self, if that individual self went through the experiences that were terrifying, you know, like you were traumatized with abuse or neglect or just suboptimal, like you were neglected emotionally and it wasn't a very warm family or it was intermittent connection called ambivalent attachment. The emotional barrenness is called avoidant attachment. The terrifying one is called disorganized attachment. Those three ways that we know from research, people tend to fall disorganized, avoidant or ambivalent. If you're a kid with that kind of attachment. When we studied your parents, what was amazing was that you have a parent that likely had a certain what's called incoherent narrative and that comes out in various ways that match your form of non security. But if your parent had had a horrible set of experiences but took the time to basically name it, to frame it, to really explore their own history and say, oh my gosh, these were the really painful things that happened to me. I was really vulnerable as a little kid. This is the way I was hurt. This is the way my longings were never met. This is the way I wasn't safe, seen or soothed. Then I see how it affected me. You can grow through that non secure experience and you develop what's called earned, or I call it learned security. And the research terms earned security. The research is very clear. Your kid will have a secure attachment with you. So as a therapist I was like blown away. Seen, soothed, it should be saved. Thanks Brian. But, but it's seen safe and soothed and then you're secure. So the four S's that, that I summarize the whole field of attachment with, you know, I'm a strange thing because strange person because, you know, I'm a researcher in attachment. I'm a therapist, I'm an educator, I'm a dad, you know, and what I do is I try to summarize things so you have this really hardcore science summarized in accurate ways that are accessible. So that's what we do at the Mindsight Institute, basically, you know, and in this book, you're talking about parenting from the inside out. You know, my daughter was in preschool and I was writing this book, the Developing Mind, for graduate school, right? And she says, Mary Hartzell says, hey, why don't you teach my teachers this stuff and teach the parents? So I said, fine, that was great. I was a young, you know, therapist, whatever. I said, fine, let's do that. So I said. And then she heard me give the talks and she said, oh, this is kind of what I do. I don't know what you're talking about, about the brain, but it's kind of what I do too. Let's do a workshop together. So I said, that's fine. And Mary, unfortunately, this Mary Hartzell, she also died recently. All these Marys are dying. So Mary was a beautiful, beautiful collaborator in creating parenting from the inside out. She was a preschool director for like over 30 years. And so together, you know, we took her wisdom and her experience, the stuff I offered, interpersonal neurobiology, then took the Developing Mind and translated it for parents and parenting from the Inside Out. And every word of that book still stands to this day, even though we published it 20 years ago. I wouldn't change a word.

Wow.

You know, yeah.

Oh, it's so good and just beautiful to feel your humanity in general and for the Marys in particular, and that the coherence of your narrative and just how you framed it up. And then one of the stories you told in the book also changed my life again. This is before, years before we had Emerson. And then Eleanor, you told a story about being a dad in an instant in which you flipped your lid as you framed it up and how one can approach the inevitability of doing that as a parent. And I've shared this publicly a number of times too, where you teach us and I want to hear you explain it if you can, you know, in terms of repairing and all that, but the common humanity of it. Were you a man and a human being I admire so much, you know, a few years ahead of me on the journey, have been here and done that. But I have so much respect for you that you could share that. You had that experience made it okay for me, you know, as a dad to do my best, you know, and. But of course there are the moments in which 11 year old and a 6 year old, we're trying to raise iconoclasts here that are heroic and have strong opinions and whatnot. And when I flipped my lid, I've thought of you every single time. And I'm like, All right, this, you know, limbic system's taken over. Bring the prefrontal cortex back. Repair this relationship. But just your. Your sharing of that was so transformative for me, and I have shared that with everyone here so many times. It's another one of the things I feature in, in my book. But can you tell us the importance.

Of all of that? Well, I'll tell. I'll tell you a funny story. You know, my kids are almost 30 and 34, you know, so they're a little than your kids, you know, so when they were younger and, you know, I was writing Parenting from the Inside out with Mary Hartzell, but also then writing a book called Mindsight. You know, there was a story in Mindsight called the Crepes of the Crepes of Wrath where, you know, I went to a movie with Maddie. She was, I guess at the time, probably around, I don't know, eight, and Alex was 12. And he went to a movie with his friends, you know, a movie appropriate for his friend's age. And I went with Maddie anyway, picked him up at the end of the theater. We came out of our movie, and we were walking. I said, you guys hungry? And so Alex said, yeah. Maddie said, no. So we stopped by this crepe store, right, to get some crepes. And we get his nice crepe. And Maddie says, can I have a bite? And he goes, no. Dad asked you if you wanted one, and you said no. So no. And so he's eating, and she goes, can I have a little bite? He goes, I said, no. And I look at him with this kind of dad like, look, you know, like, why aren't you giving your sister a bite? So he goes, okay. And he cuts off that really crispy, burnt end that's tasteless. It gives her this, like, crunchy, tasteless piece of this crepe and none of the inside. And she goes, that's kind of small. And I said, maddie, I said, you know, would you like. You know, I'll get you your own crepe. We'll share it even. She goes, I'm not hungry. So she goes, I just want to try it. So I said, alex, why don't you give her a bigger piece? And he goes, you asked her? She said, no. And anyway, so I got so frustrated, I just picked. Picked her up, took her out of the crepe store. He finishes grape. He comes trotting after us. He goes, why? Why are you upset? You know, And I said, come on. And, you know, I was so mad. And I get in the car. And he was just learning guitar then. And who would have known he would become this, you know, full time musician? But anyway, so I give him my guitar when I was a kid, so. And Manny, that morning had gotten like, some vaccinations, and she brought him some special band aids, you know, they had cool colors on them. And he put them on his guitar case. And I knew all this from the morning before he went to the movies. So, you know, he says, why are you so mad? Why are you so mad? Well, you should have shared with your sister and know, why didn't you share with your sister? You know, I'm training you to be someone who shares, you know. And I started saying. And he goes, well, because I. I didn't want to share. And I said, well, wouldn't you. Wouldn't you share if it were your friends? What would you do? He goes, of course I would share, right? And. And then I went nuts. I just went nuts. I said, I'm taking my guitar back. And he goes, you can't take the guitar back. Anyway, we got to the house and Caroline intervened, fortunately, and we had a big family meeting. And, you know, in a family meeting, you know, you. You kind of reflect on whoever flipped their lid. In this case, it was me. And, you know, and so we. You. What you do in the repair process is you ask, you know, what was that like for you? You don't defend yourself. So he imitated me, like, perfectly, you know, like what I did and what. How nutty I sounded, you know, and. And then I went for this rollerblading time with Maddie because that was the thing she and I used to do. She said, what's going on with you? Why'd you do that? I said, well, what do you mean? He wouldn't give you the crave? She goes, I can take care of myself. What? I said, well, you know, my older brother, he never shared with me either. And I think I said, if I was ever a parent and I had two kids, I would protect the younger one because I was never protected, which is true. And then she goes, well, why don't you work that out on your own time? So that's what happened. Then years later, as I'm writing this up in the scrapes of breath chapters, to share with people. What? That it's okay. The idea isn't to be perfect as a parent. The idea is to be present and to realize when we flipped our lids and make a repair. So anyway, so I show it to the kids who are old enough to read It. And they read it and they go. I said, so is it accurate? They said, yeah, it's totally accurate. I said, okay, good. They go, but what's wrong with you that you show the world what a jerk you can be? I said, that's exactly what I want to do. Because anyone can become a jerk, even if you write books about this, you know, so that. That. So that was the, you know, my feeling was. And is, we're all human, you know, and. And since we live in a body which has these proclivities and histories, you want to know your history really well, name it. To frame it so you can, you know. This next book I'm finishing up, which I've been working on for five years with a bunch of colleagues, is to look at the deeper circuits in the brain, even deeper than attachment, that seem to divide us up into different temperaments and how temperament then interfaces with your attachment experiences to kind of dig a deeper groove into some of these patterns. So that's. Maybe we can have a talk, you know, another time about that. But. So they're. They're fascinating subtleties to how you can name it based on even a deeper understanding. And. But the idea of repair that you bring up is exactly the case that we want to really realize we're human, you know, and part of having inner compassion. What the research would maybe call, quote, self compassion, but I think it should be changed to inner compassion, because self is up much bigger than just your individual body. This inner compassion is to realize, okay, I'm human, and how do I make a repair beautiful.

And I appreciate, again, your permission to be human. And I didn't remember all the details of the story, so I very much appreciate it.

I hope it was okay sharing all. I don't know if you want to know.

Are you kidding me? No, I didn't remember all of them, but I share a similar story where Emerson. We're out for the day. We're driving home 45 minutes, right? You know, 30 minutes in, they're just. They've lost it. I lose it, and I do my thing. Come on, be quiet. And then they forget about it two seconds later, you know, and we're driving home, and we get close. We were out in the country now, right? And we've got a mailbox that's about a mile from our house. Emerson will come up to the front, sit in my seat, and kind of steer the way home with my guidance. It's one of the things we do. Eleanor rolls down the window. She puts her head back the Wind's blowing it back. It's the cutest thing in the world. It's just awesome. It's like, hey, Daddy, can I drive home? And I'm like, think about it. My whole thing is, flip the switch, live with Arete, be your best self. When there's a gap, it's when you suffer. I'm like. He had called me a jerky face about. I don't like being called a jerky face buddy. No. And the entire night's affected. It took me until the following morning to repair it with him. And for me, it's been a beautiful opportunity to do the things that my dad just didn't have the skills to do, to say, in that moment, I had a choice and I could have done this. I chose to do that, and look what happened, and I apologize. And. But you gave me that gift. And it's something that is. It's one of the most powerful, transformative aspects of who I am as a human being and allowing myself to be human and then to do my best and to inevitably fall short of those standards, yet do my best to then repair it. So bless you. There's so much more we could talk about, and I want to come back and talk more, but in the last few minutes, one of the things we like to talk about is our energy, our work, and our love. So Freud, of course, said that a good life comes down to your work and love. Essentially, I say yes, and if your energy could use some work because of poor lifestyle choices, then you're gonna have a hard time showing up in either your work or love. I see you on a treadmill right now, making sure you get movement in, but I'd like to do a speed round, if you will, in the last few minutes of what are some of the most transformative personal practices you engage in to show up with such sustainable energy. You're incredibly productive and inspiring, and then, you know, as connected as you are, et cetera. But perhaps you can share a highlight of what you have found to be transformative that you think we may find informative for us in energy, work, and love that's really helped you.

Absolutely. It would definitely be something called the Wheel of Awareness, which you're all welcome to come to my website for free. You just go to Dr. Dan Siegel.com go to the wheel, and do it. We've had a lot, a lot, a lot of people doing it, and for me, I do it every day. And just to say it really briefly differentiates and links consciousness, so it integrates consciousness. It Differentiates the knowing in the hub from the knowns on the rim and systematically links it all with a spoke. And one of the things in particular to your question, Brian, is you can bend the spoke around in part of the practice and you access pure awareness in the hub. Now I've written an entire book called Aware and there's a kind of a workbook from that called Becoming Aware so you can learn to do it. We have a workshop you can do in the Redwoods if you feel like doing that too. That's recorded. But I say all that because that hub is pure awareness. And I've done this now with over 50,000 people in person before COVID 19 pandemic. And one of the most common phrases people say is that impure awareness is love connection and this sense of joy. And when you map that out in a science view, which you'll see in these various books, including the last book I did called Intra Connected, which is about this larger view of self, it basically takes that hub of the wheel that you can practice accessing every day and, and it's like a portal through which integration arises. So like, you know, I've got three book projects now and I'm finishing up this five year project with four other authors and we've been working on for 20 years. And you know, so when I get to it, I, I go to the hub, I let my fingers be placed on the keyboard and then I let, I let the writing come from the hub, which we call in the mechanism point of view, the plane of possibility. And so in that way I kind of learn a way of living where I'm not making integration happen. I'm kind of letting stuff get out of the way that allows integration to naturally rise. So as the book, when the writing is flowing in the way, I think that's the writing that's more relational really connecting with the reader. It's coming from the hub. And yeah, I've got four other co authors and I've got all sorts of things I'm, you know, science and long term practices and all this stuff I'm thinking about. But ultimately it's got to be writing from the hub or it. For me the writing doesn't, doesn't stand. It is definitely like flow and even, even more than just me losing myself in the flow. It's like, it's like letting. It's almost like letting. How can I describe this without sounding weird? It's almost like letting, like feeling into a relational field that needs something to be expressed. And I don't really feel like this body is expressing it. It comes from a source exactly. Like a resource, like coming again and again. So in terms of the practice issue, the wheel of awareness, by allowing you to distinguish the hub from the rim and turning that spoke around for me and these tens of thousands of people do it. Doing that practice is completely transformative. It's changed my life for sure. And you can do. You know, it just takes two dozen minutes a day. You just do it and it will become a resource for you too.

Oh, that's beautiful. So team, please make sure that link is in the chat. I'm sure it already is beautiful. The wheel of awareness. I'm thinking of the ultimate purpose of living with Arete. From, you know, the ancient perspective was to experience eudaimonia, the summum good that you know, the summum bonum that the greatest good of life, to have a good soul. You daimon. So this is what I felt in you describing that, that the hub practice is a means through which we can connect to that daimon, that spirit, which of course is a conduit to whatever that power is. That's the source of all that is connected to everything. And this is, this is our work, you know, so we've trained 10,000 coaches in our. It's this connect version of yourself through the wheel of awareness, through basic fundamentals too. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing your attention. All things are for one end, which is to connect to that best self and let it do the work. Right. Let it be present in everything that we do.

Exactly. So when you say best self, if you read interconnected.

Yeah, I need to quit using.

No, no, no, no, no. You can leave it. You can leave it like that because here's, here's just the asterisk under self. So people know because you can use the word bestsell. For me, if you read the book Interconnected, it was like, do we just say self as the individual or can we actually let humanity do what Joanna Macy says? Enter a great turning. So let's take your heroic, beautiful, beautiful community and say, yeah, let's use the word best self. But realize that word self means spa sensation, perspective and agency. And we have an identity lens that you have an inner self, you have a relational self for those immediately with you. You have a whole nature self that your best self is all those selves. And sure, they can be differentiated. So you want to exercise your body, you want to feed the body, sleep the body. So let's not get rid of the inner self, the me to make it really simple, let's just say connections to people besides the one in your body and to all of nature. Let's just call that we. So now, whether you think about Ubuntu, you know we are, you know I am, because we are, or you think about the Potawatomi, you know, this has been indigenous teachings for thousands of years. This is contemplative teachings from all over the world from thousands of years. So this is not something new really. It's just science adding a little bit. But now we need to wake up as a modern humanity and say, they were right. Indigenous teachings are right. Contemplative teachers are right. Here's a science saying, hey, they're right. They've been saying this for thousands of years. So it's not like, oh, this is new. This is more like this is newly urgent, you know, and as many leaders are saying, when it's urgent, we need to slow down. And in the slowing down, we need to say if our best self is what we're aiming for, which is fine. That phrase, if we then say, well, let's talk about what self is. It's spa, sensation, perspective, agency. We have an identity lens. So let's realize we have an inner self. We have an interself, put them together, let's call it the intra connected self.

I love it. And then the way you helped us frame up the heroic self, which is by definition connected to something bigger than ourselves and the beautiful coherence. And then it's. It's ancient wisdom, modern science. And what I again admire with what you've done and that I aspire to do, is practical tools. Here's what you do with the universality of the truth in all these contemplative and indigenous wisdom traditions and the modern science. And this is how you act. We practice it today to be that change you want to see?

Oh, absolutely. And Brian, listen, here's the thing. I'm not trying to push this. Not my place, but at the Esalen Institute last year, we're doing it again this coming June. We have an interconnectivity and spirit festival with the Esalen tribe that were thought to have been wiped out in the 1700s, right. But they stayed in the mountains. So the Esalen Institute, which is this founding place, you know, for, you know, new human things from the 60s, for the first time last year, we brought together the Esalen tribe for an entire week. And we're doing it again. And it's a festival of joyous celebration. We do five rhythms, dancing, we do deep dives, into the wheel of awareness. We live from this plane of possibility. It's a heroic journey. So if some subset of your community wants to come it. And if you've never been to Esalen, oh, my Lord, you know, come join us, because indigenous teachings know this. And so what Little Bear, who's the chief of the. The tribe, who. Who's, you know, are collaborated with us, what we do is the Esalen traditions from thousands of years are taught then to all of us to take out into the world to live this indigenous wisdom. And then we bring contemplative practices in there. We teach a little science, and we dance and have joy and join with each other as a mute.

It's so good. And then again, you got your integration. It's differentiated. Each has its own respective, you know, perspective. Yeah, it's integrated and just. I mean, it's such a cool demonstration of everything we're talking about. We. I'm so excited to be able to spend time together, and time flies when you're having fun with friends. I'm gonna make it out to LA sometime soon. I can't wait to go on another one of our walks.

Oh, let's do it.

I love you. I appreciate you and Caroline, and you've had such a profound impact on me, and I want to say it again. It's not just your work. It's who you are. You're one of the most beautiful, humble, wise human beings that I know. And I just. You're.

You're.

You're a wonderful human being. So bless you. I love you. I appreciate you, and I aspire to embody a lot of the qualities that you have.

So as Caroline Welch, my wonderful partner, would say right back at you, you know, I love you too, Brian, and thanks for your beautiful visions and joining and to the community, thank you for. For being you. And we can do this. And let's go do it.

We can. Day one, all in. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you for taking so much time with us today.

You too. Thanks, brother Brian.

All right, brother Dan. See you.

See ya.

What a blessing. My goodness. He's a good one, isn't he? Jeez. All right. That is how it is done. Bless Dan. Bless you all, and bless mus. I love his playful acronyms and how to bring it all together. I didn't say hi, so let me do that to you with you. Anthony, great to see you. Stuart, Gary, Timmy, D. Mike, Aki, Josh, Kimmy. Look at you all in your arete shirts and heroic shirts, too. Dan, Alexandra, Ryan, Robin Kelly, Chris Verena, Sarah, David Barnabas getting our workout in together. Murillo, Kira, Jim B. Coach Lanny, bless you and your loss. Alexander, we're talking about you and sending tons of love to you. Appreciate you very much and sending love and prayers and yes Sarah, great to see you. Adam, great to see you and your heroes. Sarah Part two with an H. Great to see you Lou, Paul et al. Wonderful to be here with you. Truly. What a what a joy and a sacred time with Dan. I'm so happy we covered those themes, the Name it to frame it, the pain in our current world, how to deal with it, reframing what it means to be heroic and aligning it with what we do. His guided meditation was beautiful. Check out the Wheel of Awareness if you haven't and let us bookend it with another quick connection to our best, most heroic selves that transcends and includes our individuation and our integration. And then we will connect with one another. But do whatever you do to connect. As we recommit to living with wisdom, discipline, love, courage, gratitude, hope, curiosity and zest as we play our roles humbly yet heroically well to help create that world in which 51% of humanity is flourishing by the year 2051, starting with us. Bless you all. We'll see you tomorrow. Looking forward, Nat.

Hey hero. We hope you enjoyed this heroic chat to learn more about this series as well as how you can join Brian's daily live coaching sessions at 1:01pm Central Time. Plus get access to a ton more to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and express the best, most heroic version of yourself. Head to Heroic Us today and if you liked this episode, please leave a positive review and hit the subscribe button on your platform of choice. Have a fantastic day.