IntraConnected: Exploring Chaos and Rigidity in the Self with Dr. Dan Siegel

What do you generally recommend to people who want to experience greater integration and a healthier balance of chaos and rigidity?

I'm bringing this approach of integration to what we can do as a human species on the planet. We have excessively differentiated ourselves from nature. If we could get out of that excessive differentiation as a separate entity from all of nature, we would stop treating Earth like a trash can. We would start treating Earth like the living, breathing organism that it is. Look, there's some strange splinter in the soul of modern culture that's having humanity limp through the days and weeks that we're experiencing. And what that splinter may be is that we've taken a simple word, self, and we've equated it with the individual. If we say the self is only in your body, we're basically cooked. Because we are creating a lie that is not only wrong and misguided, but it might even be a lethal lie. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with best-selling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Alrighty, Dr. Dan Siegel, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio.

Rhian Dorris, it's great to be here with you.

It's really great have you here. And it's actually my first time interviewing you, even though I've known you since 2016 now for many years. And just an amazing mentor and teacher to me over the years now. So I'm really, really grateful for that. And I want to just start by telling a quick story, which was that I was going to do my thesis, which was on philosophy of mind in Trinity College Dublin, on the definition of mind. And I was going to use your definition of mind as a basis to do that. And at the time, my thesis advisor said it was too complex of a topic. And as our joke went, I ended up doing the thesis on the meaning of life instead. So there's still a lot of debate, yeah, about what the mind is. And you've defined the mind, Dan, as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information. And I remember when you hosted one of the International IPNB conferences in UCLA. Antonio Damasio was there, who's a very, very well-respected neuroscientist, and you asked him about your definition of mind. And, uh, yeah, he couldn't poke any holes in it as far as I remember. So could you describe to the audience what that definition of mind means?

Yeah, you know, it's so interesting because of course we all have minds, and there's so many fields that deal with the mind, like the field of mental health, or philosophy that has philosophy of mind, or psychology, the study of the mind, psychiatry, the caretaking of the mind. And yet, being exposed to each of those different areas, I was kind of shocked and actually a little embarrassed to find out that in none of those fields is the mind defined. It's actually described, of course, you know, your feelings and your thoughts and in a neuroscience way, you could say it's the same as brain activity. Mind is what brain does. Those, you know, descriptions really don't get at something that's much deeper than just brain activity. And so that sent me on a journey to try to figure out what we might offer as not just a description of the mind, but actually a definition. And I ended up getting deeply into not only neuroscience, but different fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics. And then looking at the mathematics of complex systems offered, ironically, 'cause it was math, something that lent itself to a deep view of what the mind might be defined as. So about 30 years ago, I offered a definition to a group of about 40 scientists who had gathered they could talk about what the brain was. Our topic was, what is the connection between the brain and the mind? And they could all share, okay, the brain's this organ in your head. But when it came to the mind, there was no definition. And there was just a lot of argument and disappointment and discouragement and distress and discord. So the group was gonna dissolve. And I said, give me one more chance. Please come back one more time. So they came back. And in the interim between those two meetings, I thought, well, if the mind is in fact within the head, and not a but, and it's also in the whole body, and it's also in our relationships with each other and with nature, what is the stuff of mind? Let's just begin with that. And then it seemed pretty clear that what is both within and between is energy flow. And then if you talk about the system, in which that energy flow is moving, that's changing, that's what flow means. You can have like sound and sight and those forms of energy and movement of air molecules is sound, photons is light. In the brain, it's electrochemical energy flow. Flow meaning just change. It became clear that it met criteria for what's called a complex system. And complex systems are systems that have emergent properties. That is, the interaction of the elements of the system gives rise to something larger than the elements themselves. Like a water molecule doesn't have the quality of wetness, but if you have a bunch of water molecules in your hand, then wetness emerges from the interaction of the water molecules. That's an example. One of the emergent properties of complex systems is called self-organization. So in addition to subjective experience, which is the felt texture of life, which might be an emergent property of energy flow, and consciousness, which allows you to know that flow, and even information processing, which allows us to speak to each other. Energy in a certain pattern that stands for something is a formation that we call information. The fourth facet of mind that is beyond those descriptions that are common Goes like this. The emergent property of a complex system called self-organization. And when I started reading the math books on that, it blew my mind because when you optimize self-organization, you basically create harmony with flexibility, adaptability. It has a coherence to it. It's energized and stable. But when you block that flow of harmony, You go to either chaos or rigidity. And suddenly all my training as a psychiatrist, as a mental health professional, became clear. Every patient I ever saw, I had noticed, had either chaos or rigidity or both. And then I realized, wow, health was like harmony, which maybe is coming from optimal self-organization, both within your body, including its brain, and in the relational world. So the definition that came up for the next week at the meeting was this: the mind, its fourth facet, could be defined this way: the embodied and relational emergent self-organizing process that's regulating the flow of energy and information. And when I offered it, I thought the scientists would say, that's kind of dumb. But the 40 scientists, 40 out of 40 said, "I don't think that way, but it's consistent with what I study and I'll go with it." And we met for 4 and a half years.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

They liked it that much.

They liked it. And we kept on returning to that definition. So an anthropologist, a sociologist, a linguist person, a psychotherapist, a brain scientist, a physicist in the room, everybody could agree with that definition. How to communicate across their different fields. And that became a moment of, you know, what E.O. Wilson might call consilience, where you found independent pursuits come to a common discovery.

Intersecting and overlapping in a sense. Interesting. Could you describe, Dan, what you mean by chaos and rigidity in the context of both the definition of mind and mental health for folks?

Well, the original source of those terms was, you know, from math. So, you know, rigidity would mean something unchanging. Right? Completely predictable. Chaos would basically mean random, unpredictable. Right? That's a rough sense of it. In terms of mental life, chaos would be you're flooded with memories of a trauma you haven't resolved. Emotions flood you so you can't function. You know, you start screaming at the top of your lungs because you feel like you're overwhelmed. Those are examples of chaos. Rigidity would be You know, putting all your things in a line, and if they're out of line, you just freak out. OCD. Yeah, aspects of OCD could be both rigidity and chaos. But that part of it, lining things up, you know, or needing things to be exactly like you think they should be, or, you know, having a way in which everything is predictable and there's no fluidity to it. So Interestingly, there's a way to understand how harmony is created, which goes kind of in a, like if it's a river, goes a little bit toward chaos, a little bit toward rigidity, a little bit towards chaos, a little bit toward rigidity. So there's a familiarity to it. So you're familiar, but then it releases from that predictability and becomes closer to random. And that excitement and that novelty then moves back towards familiar. So if you listen to really fabulous music, It has these two qualities of the familiar, which when it's rigid becomes stuck, but when it's something you know, it has a certain quality of being somewhat predictable. But then you move a little chaos where it's new, you don't know where it's going, but then it moves back to familiar. So that's the river. It's constantly going between these two banks of the river. So it's not like either of them are bad. We tap into a little bit each time. But ideally, you want to have this sense of harmony, literally, where, you know, when a choir is singing in harmony, and this is how you get to this flow, you differentiate and you link. And you can just name that in regular language, integration. That's how you create optimal self-organization. And that's what a healthy mind creates, integration within and between.

And is that done, is that referring to multiple things that can be either rigid or chaotic or harmonious, meaning emotions, feelings, and the correlated brain states and neurobiology as well, almost kind of mimics the pattern of chaos or rigidity.

Is it exactly— yeah, yeah, exactly.

First, the whole way down the chain, kind of. Yeah.

And this is what was shocking to me back then. This is now 1992, you know. It was like you could reinterpret the whole Bible of mental dysfunctions through this lens and make a prediction, which is what I wrote about back then, that integration would be seen as the base of wellbeing, maybe in general, but specifically for the mind. And later we discover that every time there's a disorder that then scientists try to study, there's impaired integration in the brain. And when there's been an intervention like mindfulness meditation, it produces more integration in the brain. And even in Smith and colleagues in 2015 published a paper showing every measure of well-being is basically predicted by how interconnected your connectome is, which is a scientific term for how integrated your brain is. So integration, at least in the brain, has been now shown to be the best predictor of well-being, and you can cultivate that through mindfulness practices. And every disorder of the mind, when it's been studied and the brain aspects of it are looked at, reveals impaired integration in the brain. So then therapeutic interventions can be seen as integrative interventions where you're promoting differentiation in certain realms of a person's life and linkage, whether that's inside their body, like the way they're aware of what's going on in their body, for example, or their relationships, like how they're really being open to connecting to another person with respect and kindness. Mm-hmm.

That makes sense. And I'm curious to actually ask you on this topic about flow and just your understanding of flow states, which is something we talk about a lot, because I mean, even the word flow brings up a sense of harmony, or it sounds like a harmonious state, even in terms of the word itself. And so I'm curious if you think when people are in a state of absorption or flow, is that a heightened level of integration that is occurring potentially even temporarily? And is that maybe why flow is correlated to well-being and happiness? So let's start there. And then I'd love to ask you about mindfulness as well and how mindful states relate to, to chaos, rigidity, and integration.

Yeah, it's a really, really great set of questions, Ryan. It's a really interesting question because My understanding of flow and my understanding of mindfulness is they're actually distinct. So that's an interesting difference because mindfulness is a profoundly integrative state. Now that doesn't mean that flow isn't also an integrative state. So I'll ask you questions about this too, but the idea of flow, like Mike Csikszentmihalyi, speaks about it. And we once had him at one of those conferences you're speaking about. Yeah, the Interpersonal Neurobiology Conference. I had him on stage with Sharon Salzberg, an expert in mindfulness. I said, okay, let's talk about, are these the same? And they came to realize they're not the same. So those are from the experts. From my point of view, you know, the way Csikszentmihalyi discusses flow, you are taking on an activity that is challenging you to a certain degree. It's not beyond your ability to do it, you know, where you're flooded with chaos, and it's not beneath what might be challenging to you where you'll be stuck in completely predictable states of rigidity. So in that sense, yes, it's getting into an optimal flow between the overwhelm of chaos and the shutting down of rigidity, and that's the harmony in the middle. So that would meet the criteria for an integrated flow. If you take apart the specifics that he talks about of losing a sense of self-consciousness, and if you're a chess player, becoming lost in the chess game, playing tennis with an opponent that is just at the right level for you to enter flow, you know, yes, you're gonna lose yourself in the game. I'm a dancer, you know, If I get in the dance, I become the music and I become my dance partner. It's exquisite. And in that sense, the sense of self expands and you become the dance or become the music, become the chess game, become the tennis racket. You know, I have a son, as you know, who's a musician, Alex Siegel. And you know, when he plays, you can see his sense of self expands. He's doing a whole live concert across the country now. You know, you can see it expands into the audience. So in that sense, yeah, flow would be an expansion of the self that allows the differentiation of what we might call self, which has these three qualities of sensation, perspective, and agency. It gets bigger.

Yeah.

So you're differentiating a self that's much larger now, but then you're linking even with these components. So It's different from mindfulness, but it sounds like it's— if this sounds— if this fits with your understanding, I would say yes, it's integrative. But what do you think? Meaning you're differentiating linking in, in broader ways?

Yeah, I would say so as well, that one of the elements is that action awareness merges, which very much so relates to what you're referring to, where the self is expanding and merging potentially with either the action that someone's doing or some facet of someone's experience, like maybe the audience like you're mentioning for Alex as a musician. So yeah, I think that, that makes, that makes sense. One thing that I find interesting with respect to flow is that someone who has very, very poor mental health can still get into flow and experience those sorts of characteristics of flow temporarily within the flow state itself, but then after the flow state, return to either a state of chaos or rigidity or you know, a lack of integration.

So, oh, interesting.

Yeah, the ability to access flow, um, is possible even if there's a low baseline level of mental health. And they've done research actually on dark flow that has shown that people who have the most severe addictions experience the most flow engaging in their addictions, which is an interesting one.

Wow.

And that's one of the places where mindfulness, you know, I think, differs heavily to flow, is that there's mindfulness inherently, um, has more of a dispositional and long-term sort of quality to it, I would imagine.

Yeah, this built into mindfulness is a sense of ethics. Yeah, you know, uh, not so much like rules about right and wrong, but an integrative experience of morality. You know, we like to say kindness and compassion are integration made visible. And in fact, this was the point that came up when Sharon Salzberg was discussing this very topic with Mike Csikszentmihalyi on stage. And my recollection of where they came to was someone could be a sniper and be very angry at their neighbor and choose to shoot them and kill them in a state of flow.

Right.

You know, but a mindfulness person wouldn't, ideally, you know, would never do that.

Right.

Right. Because they would realize that's not promoting more integration. That's not kindness and compassion is to shoot your neighbor because their dog went on your lawn or something. So it was very clear that they're just different things. And it's so interesting what you're saying about the studies of people who have mental unhealth also maybe even seeking flow as an addiction because that's where they get some kind of relief from their non-integrative states, they're still just doing it sort of as a side event or something, if I'm understanding you right.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that's a really interesting point about mindfulness. And I'm curious, is, you know, is it possible to have a high level of integration or a high level of mindfulness— and I know they're different things— and to not have any kind of internal ethic? And I actually remember, um, I believe at one of the, uh, the events that you host in, in Santa Monica, a woman was actually asking about either, I think I think it was a client of hers who had committed some just really horrific sexual abuse crimes. And she was mentioning that this client had done so even though there was a high level of integration. And you had said that, you know, I believe you had said something along the lines of that not being the case, most likely, that they probably weren't experiencing integration if they were also simultaneously doing these very, you know, not nice things. So I'm curious how those two fit together.

Well, yeah, I mean, there is a process of, something called dissociation, where, you know, you literally can segment states of mind, which are verb-like unfoldings that could, like, embed, for example, anger in them, or hold memories of trauma and feel betrayed within those states. So some people use the word facets or sides of ourselves or parts or aspects or something like that. But they're really verb-like unfoldings that if they're clustered off with what's called a dissociative barrier, then a person could be relatively fine and comport themselves in a respectful way and they're kind, and then something can happen and this other state of mind, this verb-like state emerges, and in that state, because of the dissociative barrier, Even if they've achieved integration in the bulk of the way they are, this leaves them very vulnerable to acting in a very kind of like a petri dish, a pure form of anger that when it comes out can be very destructive.

And that's it. So it's kind of segmented off from the core sense of self. Yeah, in a sense.

Exactly. And that's what makes, you know, when we talk about the journey of healing, that's what makes That journey is so important to really go exploring what are different layers inside of each of us, you know, that may be in need of care, you know.

Do you— I'm curious if, because there's a lot of talk these days about internal family systems and parts work, do you— does your model align with the idea of distinct parts or of the self, or do you think about it differently to the idea of, yeah, the parts sort of notion that the self has these different parts that are distinct.

Yeah, yeah, it's a really interesting question. And I've done a 2-day workshop with Dick Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems. And Dick sells a recording of that if you wanna see our model go together. And what I said in that public event, and Dick is a friend of mine, so I'm happy to say this here, but I've said it in front of him, with him, in front of his 200 students gathered there, is that my problem with nounifying the word part is that it can create unintentional solidification of what's actually a verb-like state. And the freedom to realize we have states that can be, warded off with these dissociative barriers. And those states then can come to believe that they're a noun-like part, right? And in that nounification is actually the problem. So we don't wanna create a therapeutic strategy which nounifies what are actually verbs. And I was with someone at a recent conference and they were upset that I wasn't all into part work and all this kind of stuff. We have 9 domains of integration that we work with in interpersonal neurobiology. One of them is called state integration, and it aligns with what Dick Schwartz talks about in Internal Family Systems, but it makes a really big deal of being sure that as you look at states, you honor their verb-like nature and be very careful of— the brain is basically an anticipation machine, and it wants to have some kind of what the artist Rashid and the entry to the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, you know, what she wrote about is, having discovered the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander. So my concern about natification is that when you develop an identity of certainty to try to get security, what you're doing is you're being like an entity, a noun-like entity, a thing. And then your narrative is, I'm a thing, I'm a part. And if you watch that 48-hour, that 2-day workshop, you'll see the participants in the audience scream, yell back at me, we are nouns, we are parts. I said, well, there's the problem right there. And even at this workshop I was teaching at where this woman was getting kind of upset that I wasn't all into noun-like part work, I said, you know, I've seen too many problems where when people nounify a verb-like state, that process actually creates its own unintentional negative effects because it just makes it like these are actually separate entities rather than verb-like functions that have a deep way we can be compassionate with those states. We can then fluidly allow them to connect with other states, that they're not like these separate entities. And as some people say, and I don't think Dick says this, but some of my understanding from his students, like this woman who's really mad at me, was that there was, in her view as his student, a need to keep the integrity of those states intact so that you didn't allow growth past this noun-like way of perceiving the state. So, I mean, listen, if it's working for them, yay, great. I've seen too many people in general, in various walks of life, nounify themselves to try to gain that certainty. And, you know, we have this practice called the Wheel of Awareness where you're able to really move with the fluidity of the verb-like nature of the mind, right? Because it's energy flow, it's not a noun-like thing, right?

It's not something concrete. Yeah, solid. So, so when you say nounify, do you mean kind of that these different parts of the self, the risk is that you can accidentally solidify them and view them almost as their own entities. And if those states are harmful or destructive, they kind of get almost stronger and more fragmented potentially by nounifying or solidifying them.

Exactly, that's exactly the risk. Now, if someone does whatever kind of therapy, I mean, there's— back in the day, there was something called ego state therapy. Which is very much aligned with IFS. And that was really great. And it's really great to differentiate and then link. So if it's done with this verb-like embrace that in fact, whether you think about the brain and everything in the brain is a verb or the mind, this embodied and relational flow, it's a verb-like unfolding. And then, yeah, you want to differentiate different states for sure. One of our domains is state integration. But you want to watch out for another domain, which is called narrative integration, where even in telling the story of who you are— and I don't know if Flow gets into this— but you want to embrace a kind of flexibility to that narrative. It's good we have narratives. So narrative is not the bad guy. But if our narratives nounify us and then imprison us in the stories we're telling about who we are, that's where nounification comes from. That actually becomes a kind of problem, not even a kind of problem, it becomes actually the problem that needs to be worked with. That's interesting.

So the self can actually potentially can become even more sort of fragmented and disconnected.

Yeah, exactly.

Rather than the opposite. And those states just being viewed as transient would be another way maybe of saying verb. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, one example, you know, there's a course we have at the Mindsight Institute on disorganized attachment and dissociation. And it was a former patient of mine when she heard I was doing the course, volunteered to come up and be interviewed. Now she's a therapist and she talks about having multiple personality disorder. Dissociative identity disorder is what it's called now. When she came, she absolutely had parts that you could interpret as nouns, you know, a little 4-year-old, a little 7-year-old, and they had names and they they survived by thinking they were nouns. Yeah. But the journey to healing is to actually let go of the noun-like separation and realize they were performing incredibly important functions for her survival in the face of incredible trauma. And then the journey of love and linking that is what the journey of therapy is, was to actually honor their perception that they're nouns and then relax that to realize life is an unfolding emergence as a verb. And then the freedom starts happening. That's interesting.

And what does that freedom feel like generally?

Well, if you get a chance to watch the course, she talks about what it goes, in her own experience, what it goes like. And basically, I think one way of summarizing it, when she saw herself as noun-like parts that were separated, when that first came out, It was like being in a prison, that the noun walls kept her repeating the same narrative divisions. But when she could open across all of these states, is what we call them, self-states, then soon the barriers were no longer needed because every state could feel every feeling. And then it's like, what? Wasn't there a time when there was a 3-year-old and there was a 4-year-old and there was a 7-year-old and a 15-year-old? I don't need them anymore because the functions within them—anger, sadness, sexuality, betrayal—all the things that get clustered off into noun-like defenses get opened up in the verb-like freedom. That's interesting.

That's—that is the process of integration. Exactly. In general, yeah. What do you generally recommend to, to people who want to, you know, heal trauma or various emotional wounds that they have, or maybe attachment styles that are, you know, destructive, so as to experience greater integration and a healthier balance of chaos and rigidity? What sort of modalities or therapies or practices, yeah, these days do you most tend to endorse?

Absolutely. Well, you know, interpersonal neurobiology, the term IPNB you mentioned earlier, it's not a form of therapy, right? But it's a common knowledge base and framework that informs every form of therapy. So an IP&B approach basically says what we've said, that the mind can be defined. And when you define the mind as we did, this self-organizing process, then we say what a healthy mind is. A healthy mind is a mind that cultivates integration within, within the body, including the head, and between, between yourself and other human beings. And all living beings with all of nature. So then what you do is you go on a journey in this approach to say, where is there chaos and rigidity? And then you say, if there is chaos and rigidity that's persisting, then there might be a blockage to integration. Now, what's integration? It's differentiating and linking. So then you say, well, where do I look? Well, we have 9 domains of integration, and I can mention them, but Anyway, there's 9, including the integration of consciousness, for example, or we mentioned narrative integration or state integration or interpersonal integration. And then what you do is you basically feel into where the chaos is, feel into where the rigidity is, then get a sense, is this a state integration issue? Is this a narrative integration issue? Is this a bilateral, meaning left and right integration issue? Are they not being differentiated and linked? And all of that is a verb-like emergence. Thank you.

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Toward Harmony by releasing the brain's tendency to nounify. And in that nounification, it's trying to achieve that flimsy fantasy of certainty. So, you know, so we approach, meaning at the Mindset Institute, we approach therapy as saying, if it's a strategy that promotes integration, you know, it's promoting well-being, fantastic. If it's not promoting integration or it's rigidifying people by differentiating too much and not linking across, the actual verb-like states, then we want to question that and really be careful for potential negative effects. Now, this can be for an individual, it can be for a couple, a family, it could be for a school classroom, a whole school, a company, an organization, it could be for a nation, it could be for the planet. So, you know, I'm doing work with, you know, something called the Inner Development Goals, a group in Sweden, and, you know, we're looking at ways to try to help humanity meet the United Nations' sustainability development goals. And I'm a scientific advisor for them, but basically I'm bringing this approach of integration to what we can do as a human species on the planet. We have excessively differentiated ourselves from nature. So in a way, we're nounifying, you know, oh, humans are better and we're entities that are better, rather than we are this verb-like flowing with all living beings. And if we could get out of that nounification, that excessive differentiation as a separate entity, a separate species from all of nature, we would stop treating Earth like a trash can. We would start treating Earth like the living, breathing organism that it is. So this is interpersonal neurobiology applied there. We would look at human minds and how they're, you know, in the book "Interconnected," you know what I do is I say, look, there's some strange splinter in the soul of modern culture that's having humanity limp through the days and weeks that we're experiencing. And what that splinter may be is that we've taken a simple word, self, and we've equated it with the individual. So if self is a center of experience, like the sensations you feel or the perspectives you have or the agency, what you do to make action in the world— SPA, that spells sensation, perspective, and agency. That's a simple way of going across a bunch of sciences of what do they mean by self. Well, you have a self in the body for sure, like a me. But if we, as we do in individualistic cultures like the United States, if we say the self is only in your body, self means the individual, they're synonyms, we're basically cooked because we are creating a lie that is not only wrong and misguided, but it might even be a lethal lie. So what my deepest hope is in this conversation you and I are having here is if people get into the flow of what we're saying and just feel it and sense into what does it mean to be born into a body living in a culture that tells you, oh, it's all about you and your body. That's it. You're Rune, you're Dan, whatever. You know, rather than you're a me, sure, but you're also a we. And, you know, we bring them together as mwii. And then you go, whoa, I don't have to give up my individuality to gain my relationality. And that's where the word "mwe" is so helpful. And the word "intraconnected" just came when I was with some systems scientists from MIT. We were doing work on what we call relational fields and we decided to go on a retreat. So we went to Colorado and part of the week-long retreat was to spend 3 days individually in the forest. And when we came out, everyone shared their experience. And of course, 3 days alone in a forest, you have a lot to say. So everyone was saying they were interconnected, interdependent, interwoven, all these inter words. And I was the last one in the circle to speak. And I said, well, you know, I try to be careful with my words and I resonate with what you're all saying, but I can't use the word inter because inter means between. And the experience of this body was I was the creek, I was the clouds, I was the stones, I was the trees, I was the body. It was like a wholeness, and there was a connectivity within the wholeness. So I guess I would call it a wholeness within. It was, and I said, interconnected. And everyone kind of shook their heads. And when I got back to the hotel later on and we got to the you know, computers, we could type notes. Every time I would type interconnected experience, it would make it interconnected because there was no word in English, right, for the connectivity of the whole. And I thought, oh my God, if we don't have a word, then how are we going to actually speak to each other about it? So that's where interconnected comes from. And we is just kind of the way you would make that really simple, like I am in this body. I don't have to get rid of that, right? I'm also in our relationship. So I've known you for many years now, Ryan. You know, when I think about the journey across time and space of the body called Ryan and the body called Dan, yeah, it's just a joy to be here. I mean, I'm filled with this incredible— I don't know if it's flow or just— I'm just filled with this incredible gratitude, this sense of awe, actually, when I remember the first time you reached out to me. And so it's like, whoa, you know, It was a real relational joining. And I remember one of the times you came and we spent a whole weekend together, there was another fellow, I believe, from Ireland too, right? Yeah. And you bonded with him. Yeah. And it was just like the whole thing was like magic happens when you let go of the noun-like entity separation and you look into someone's eyes and you feel the love and the searching and the yearning and the soul that's in there. And you go, whoa, and you go, yes. And that's how I felt when you said, can I come, you know, study with you? And I said, tell me about you. And you talk about you. And I go, yes, you know, that's it. And every time you ask me to do something, I go, yes, you know. But I appreciate that very much, Dad, as well.

It's been, it's been a hell of a journey. And, uh, yeah, yeah, no, that's really interesting, that breakdown of the word interconnected. And I wanted to actually ask you about that You know, the distinction— we distinguish, we distinguished the, the brain from the mind, and we're just starting to distinguish the body from the self there. Yeah, you know, the self— and a lot of people who listen to our work on flow have some context for the fact that the self is very fluid, and, you know, it can, it can kind of sort of disappear or expand entirely in a state like flow or a deep meditative state. Stephen Cutler, my partner, actually wrote a really interesting article about the microbiome and how that alters the self. And he kind of used that as a breakdown to show how fluid, you know, the self is and how distinct from the body it is. But, you know, how do you think about kind of the self, its limits, you know, what it even is? In Buddhism, obviously, they talk about the fact that the self is an illusion. That's, you know, easy to say, but for someone who is suffering tremendously with self-doubt or insecurity about themself or something like that, it doesn't necessarily help because even if it is an illusion, the illusion can be painful. So I'm curious, how do you kind of think about the self versus the body and versus some of those other domains?

Yeah, yeah, no, it's a really interesting question. Of course, when we're talking about something like the self, and we're using words to name something like that, it's important just to take a step back like we're doing and saying, well, what do we actually mean? So, you know, like in my field of attachment research, we study something called self-regulation, and we study something called self-awareness and self-understanding, you know. And even in the field of mental health, there was self-actualization. In contemplative worlds, sometimes they talk about self-realization. And then, as you point out, especially in Buddhist teaching, the idea that self is an illusion. So this is really interesting that you have these words in various branches of psychology and anthropology. You study the construction of self. So we have what's called an individualistic cultural stance. Which is self is the individual. And then you have collectivistic experiences of self-construction where self is embedded in relationships and doesn't really emphasize the individual. You know, to find a balance between the individual body and the relational world, connections to other human beings, ones you know, ones that are similar to you, ones that you don't know. So all of the human family, and then to all living beings, you know, it's different levels of relationality. When you start looking at it that way, you could say, well, come on now, let's just make self be a word that means the individual. So when you say self-compassion, for example, you mean I'm having compassion for the individual that is speaking, me. You know, now my problem with those uses of the term self is that if we name the self, let's just use a different kind of phrase, as a center of experience, then in flow states, the center has been massively expanded. And part of the draw of flow, like every night, you know, my son's a musician, but I have one of his guitars sitting around and I don't really play guitar. But I was reading books during the pandemic, and I couldn't sleep because I'd think about what the books were saying. So I picked up one of his guitars, and I just— because no one's listening, I just had this freedom and all this— like, I would dissolve into the strings, and I would dissolve into the sounds. And it was just so wonderful. I don't know how long it takes, maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes. This piece will come out of the fingers, and I'm just with it, listening to it, like, almost like I'm turning on a CD I wanna listen to and it's coming from my fingers. And then the song comes to a dénouement, it reaches its peak, and then it comes to a resolution, then bam, the last set of notes are there and it feels like, ah, now I can sleep and I sleep really deeply. So where's myself in that experience? When I'm brushing my teeth, yeah, I have teeth in this body, I wanna brush them, I wanna keep my teeth. Fine. Then I go into the bedroom, I get the guitar, and now there's the guitar, there are the strings, there's the sound, there's the room. Where's my center of experience? Well, it's expanded. So you could say, well, a center of experience is where energy is flowing. So in this case, vibrating strings, the wood, the room, the air molecules, this body, the ears, the experience in the brain, in the head, the whole body feeling it, space, time. It's all happening within a larger thing than just the skin-encased body. So then you would say, well, Dan, when you play music at night before you go to bed, you let yourself expand. Self expand, because self is a center of experience. So then once I started reflecting on that, I realized it's probably worth the debate in our culture, modern culture, to say if self is the center of experience, energy flow, basically center of energy flow that has a feeling to it called subjective sense, it has a perspective to it, a P, and it has agency, you act on behalf of it, then we can have like an identity lens where you can teach young people, kids in preschool, kids in you know, primary school, kids in middle school, high school, college, all of us, to realize you have an identity lens. And maybe that's what flow is, where you say, sometimes I'm in this body. Great, that's a me. And sometimes I'm in a relationship between this body, Dan, and a body called Ryan. Great, that's here. Then there's the relationships with anyone who's listening to us. And then I can expand to all human beings, then all living beings. So we have a practice called the Wheel of Awareness, where you kind of learn to adjust this relational identity lens to be in the body and then be beyond the body. And if we did that, I think then the word self, if we define as a center of experience, and if we define experience as energy flow, then you really can escape the noun-like prison of saying the self is just the body, or the self is just the individual, which is a very noun-like set of things to say. Instead of saying self is the center of experience and it's a flowing of energy, and that energy flow I can focus on with an identity lens, and my sense of belonging massively expands from just being in the skin encased body.

It's really interesting. Yeah. And I know in Interconnected you talk about this at the societal level, like you just mentioned. I'm curious what the sweet spot is between a healthily differentiated sense of self and a healthily connected or interconnected self. Um, actually, funnily enough, a friend of mine was describing a documentary that they watched on North Korea actually last night, and they were talking about the fact that there's no word for I, which I thought was a really interesting extreme example of, you know, lack of healthy kind of differentiation, or, or, um, yeah, maybe a lack of healthy selfhood. So yeah, how do you think about what the, what the right balance is there?

Yeah, exactly. So at the extreme, with no differentiation of the individual, you have extreme collectivism, which has its own serious problems that get us into chaos or rigidity. And at the other extreme, modern culture exemplified most severely in the United States, you have incredible individualism, uh, to the point where we're seeing chaos and rigidity in different forms. But, you know, for example, the proneness to addiction, the increase in anxiety, depression, suicide— yeah, I think those are due to individualistic views where there is no linkage within the we. So the we word basically takes the concept of the integration, saying one needs to differentiate and link. You don't have to choose between the two. So with "mwe," you get both the "me" inside the body and the "we" in the relationships with people on the planet. And then what you get in the intra-connected word is to realize there is a wholeness to the whole thing where you are both an individual within the body, a relational self within your connections with people and nature, And you get this opportunity to have integration. So, you know, the closest I can find of that is in Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, "Braiding Sweetgrass." She talks about the indigenous group that she is a member of, the Potawatomi Nation. And she has this beautiful passage, which I put in "Interconnected," where she says something to the effect of, in her community, people are really encouraged, in fact, have the responsibility to develop their individual gifts. Their individuality is honored. And those individual gifts, as they're cultivated, are then given for the greater good of the community as a whole. It was such a beautiful articulation of what Mui is trying to capture, that you don't give up the me, to gain a we. And even, you know, my conversations with close friends and colleagues who are Buddhist scholars, you know, the Buddhist perspective that some people take on— not everyone— that the self is an illusion really is saying that the individual self that is not within relationship to other selves, that's an illusion, that you're always within a relational context. Now, that's a conservative way of interpreting it. The extreme is there is no self and narratives about the self should be discarded. And I've heard people say that too. But in a less strict way, you know, and I quote Thich Nhat Hanh about this, there's a relativistic aspect of reality, which includes the fact that you have a body and you have a self that lives in the body, and a universal aspect to reality, which is this larger relational field which in many ways, if you look at energy from a physics point of view as the movement from possibility to actuality, you know, which I do in the various books, then you start seeing, oh, here is a possible scientific understanding of what contemplative practice means when they talk about the universal versus the relative. Because, you know, the month before my book on consciousness called Aware came out, I was really nervous because I got deeply into this Quantum View of the Origin of Consciousness. But the month before, July 19, 2018, the COVID story of Scientific American was, "When Does the Newtonian Realm Meet the Quantum Realm?" And what physics has established is that large objects like these bodies we live in, or planets, moons, or apples, you know, that Newton studied, you know, these large condensations of energy called mass. Those are macrostates. They have certain properties, including, you know, what we call the arrow of time, a directionality of change. And in that realm, there are noun-like entities. Your body's there, my body's here, an apple is on the tree, a planet is in space. Those are entities. Fair enough. But when you start studying small things like an electron, or a photon, units of energy called quanta. These are what are called probability fields. There are no nouns in the quantum realm. There are only verb-like unfoldings, and everything is massively connected, and there is no time variable in quantum equations. There's no time. It's timeless. There's no directionality of change. So what's really cool, like if you do the Wheel of Awareness practice, In the hub of that wheel, I think what you're doing is you're dropping into the quantum realm where you experience the massive connectivity, the intra-connectivity of everything, and there's no time, it's timeless. But then when you go back on the rim of this practice of the wheel, then you're in the fact that you're in a body, there are other bodies, you gotta press on the brakes at a red light so you don't become one with everything, you know, at the intersection, you know, and you realize, whoa, I'm living in two realms. And that's the truth for people who cultivate maybe even the timelessness of flow. Yeah, you're tapping into, I think, the way consciousness, awareness, pure awareness accesses this timeless state of the quantum position of energy, basically.

Would I be right in saying, just to describe the wheel of awareness to people, that in the hub of the wheel there is, you know, the witness of the— let's just call it sense data— that is on the spoke, which may be, you know, sensation in the body, it may be breath, it may be a sense of connectedness to others. Is that— are those the two elements of, of the wheel?

Yeah, very close. So there are three. There's— so, so what you're describing, spoke, I would put as the rim, but the spoke would be a singular spoke brings attention to the rim, and the rim would be just like you're saying. So yeah, You could be aware of the breath, for example, or the sound of our voices, or what you see. That would be in the first segment. Then the interior of the body would be the second segment, the sensations of the body. It's the energy flow, basically, inside the body. Probably the energy flow in the head is what we call emotions and memories and thoughts and stuff like that. And then there's a relational sense even. And then part of the practice is you bend that spoke of attention around into the hub itself. And that's where time disappears for many people. They experience sometimes God, sometimes this sense of joy, this sense of love, being home, being safe, being connected to everyone and everything. These are phrases that people use. And I've done this now literally with— this is not an exaggeration, my assistant counted— 50,000 people in person did the Wheel of Awareness. And then for those that, you know, responded to, like, what was that like for you? And shared, these are some of the words that come up. So, you know, what's interesting about it is I'd love to know your experience of flow because, you know, someone has measured what's called heart rate variability coherence in the hub, and it was the highest they had ever seen. And you do get this in the hub as a pure awareness. You know, I do this practice every morning, and it sets my day in such a positive way because with the visual, the visual image, I know if I need to go to the hub, I can get there if I need to, if something's going on. If I need to basically live from what we call the plane of possibility, which is the mechanism I think that explains that metaphor of the wheel, you're able to, you know, really dance with energy flow patterns where awareness itself brings you in the quantum realm, which becomes a very practical thing. And when people live from that plane of possibility, that which is equivalent to the hub, when people learn to live from it, it isn't that they have to live in it in a constant state, "Oh my God, I want to just bliss out in the hub." No, it's you learn to let life happen with basically the life force of love that begins to arise in that. And it's really this linkage that I would imagine— I don't know if people describe it, but do people describe that in flow?

Yeah, well, that, that element for sure. The— well, it's an interesting one. I mean, one of the big differences in the literature between mindfulness and flow is that the heightened awareness that you have of the different elements that are on the rim when you're in the hub actually decreases in flow, and you're sort of merged with of those elements that are on the rim in flow. So that's one of the differences, that you're more aware with mindful states and less aware with flow states.

Oh, interesting. Which is an interesting one. Well, now let me ask you, can I ask a question about that? You know, 'cause you mentioned the word witness in your original description. And I wouldn't use the word witness 'cause the witness for me is a point on the rim. Like I am Dan now witnessing my words coming out of my mouth speaking to Ryan right now. I wouldn't call that awareness. I would say that's like a— I call it OWN. I'm owning it, that's the O. I'm witnessing it and I'm narrating it, even in my mind. But if I get in the flow, which I was before I started doing this, you know, then I'm in pure knowing. So I would use the word knowing instead of witnessing. Interesting. Because witnessing as a witnesser— now you could say, well, knowing as a knower, but Being a knower is like the witness, but the knowing is just an experience. So I wonder if a flow state allows the knowing to then merge with the rim, like if I'm playing tennis or making love or if I'm dancing, then I am super aware that I'm dancing, But I don't have a witness from that third segment of the room going, "Dan is dancing now. Look at him move his left foot." Now, interestingly, 'cause I was on a ballroom dance team, if my teacher said, "Dan, you didn't do that move well. I want you to do X, Y, and Z," my witness would come in and go, "Oh, please the teacher, please the teacher." And the flow was gone. And I was too left feet. I could not do it. But if there was no teacher and I just was with my partner, and we were dancing to the music, it would absolutely be awareness without a witness. Does that— how does that resonate with that?

Actually, it's really interesting. I just got back from a, um, from a 7-day silence and meditation retreat, and one of the things I was asking the teacher is, how do I get behind the witness? Because I was kind of— I was getting stuck as the witness and not able to witness the witness. And what you're referring to is that, yeah, the witness is another, um, you know, sort of sensory input that you can actually be present to in the same way that the breath is, or in the same way that interoception is, and that there is something that is even able to witness the witness. And maybe that's what is more present in flow. Yeah. Um, so that—

yeah, well, that's super interesting. I would love to see if you, if you take up the wheel and do it on a regular basis. I mean, call me because What people do describe is there is a shift from many, many people, I think, who start like a mindfulness practice, start equating being a witness with just being the experience of knowing. And then there comes a time in the wheel practice when you realize, whoa, my witness disappeared. And what some people have said when they get to that moment, they go, I'm completely freaked out, what just happened? And that was a person who ran a meditation center who had been just using the witness as a synonym for awareness, which it isn't. And another person had this great phrase. She said, oh my God, the wheel of awareness pulled me to pieces, broke me into pieces. And then there was this pause. This big smile comes on her face. She goes, but now I'm at peace. Because when you let your narrating, owning, witnessing observer go and just drop into the knowing of pure awareness, which the wheel allows you to do pretty readily because you literally have it as a little circle there, you go, I want to get in the hub. Like she said, there's this peace that's there. I mean, yeah. So there's all sorts of examples I could give, but the words that people use are like love, joy, you know, home. It's just beautiful. There's a—

I also just want to mention to everyone listening as well, there's a really great 25-minute recording of the Wheel of Awareness on YouTube. And I actually often, yeah, encourage people to use it as a way of starting to meditate.

And you can go to our website. Absolutely. You can go to our website and there are different— there's like a beginner's and intermediate and advanced. So I would go to the website and use those ones for sure. It's at drdansiegel.com. Yeah. You know, for free. You just do it. Yeah.

Really great starting point. And make it really through a beautiful way to apply all of your work as well in a practical way as well. So yeah, that— I want to say thanks so much just for joining us on Flow Research Collective Radio and having the chat. I hope hopefully we'll do this again. I was just mentioning that we're going to be building a studio in Venice, so hopefully we'll have you into the fresh studio once it's built.

I'd be happy to go, and I'm so happy to share the flow with you today. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, that was really great. And I want to encourage everyone to grab a copy or a few copies of your new book, "Interconnected." We'll make sure to put a link to that book in the show notes as well. And I know everyone will really enjoy reading it. And it's a great way to go deeper into the topics that we touched on as well today. Oh, beautiful.

Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much, Todd. Thank you. Thank you.

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