Parenting Skills: All You Need to Help Families Today Parenting with the Brain in Mind Dan Siegel

PSYCHOTHERAPY NETWORKER

Dan Siegel

00:10RICH SIMON Welcome, everyone. Welcome to this Networker webcast series on parenting in the 21st century and helping parents meet the child-rearing in today's world. My name's Rich Simon. I'm the editor of Psychotherapy Networker, and I'm your host for this series. So, today we're going to turn our attention to a theme that has entered into most arenas of therapeutic practice, the relevance of our understanding of brain science to parenting today, and who better to be our guide and to explore this topic than someone's who's really been as instrumental as anyone in bringing the understanding of the brain into clinical practice. Here he is, the one, the only, Dan Siegel. Hey Dan, how are you?

00:55DAN SIEGEL Hey, I'm fine Rich. How are you doing?

01:00RICH SIMON Okay. So let's, um, let's get right into it. So we . . . Thera- . . . Families have been coming into therapists for decades and decades. We have this enormous literature on child development on all the different challenges of child-rearing. What is it that brain science adds to our practical understanding of how we as therapists, can be helpful to families in meeting the various challenges that they're facing?

01:30DAN SIEGEL Well, that's a great question. You know, there's a lot to put together in the field of science. Generally, that informs us clinicians on how to actually translate science into practice. One of those sciences, as you point out, is brain science. Uh, the field of neuroscience is a division of biology, and within this biological definition, uh, we have an incredibly exciting set of findings, uh, that allows us to look deeply into how, for example, experience shapes the circuits in the brain, how the circuits in the brain, in turn, influence our mental processes and how, um, you can understand the interface of the brain and relationships as being the source of the human mind, so, as we've talked about before, in the field I work in, called interpersonal neurobiology, we combine not only the biological sciences but all the sciences, from mathematics to physics to, uh, sociology and anthropology and everything in between to try to create, uh, a scientific foundation for the field of mental health, and one of the applications of that is for parenting, and so that's what we can talk about, is how to, how does this scientific view inform deeply what professionals can do to support parents helping children thrive.

02:55RICH SIMON Okay, so let's focus on this. So, this audience and this series, we're very much devoted to issues of therapeutic practice, so the practical applications of our, of science, of the, the craft of psychotherapy, so i-, it seems in, uh, your, uh, new book, which I will, as uh, will point out to people, is a lovely new contribution to the literature, The Whole Brain Child. You and your co-author have uh, laid out some uh, very practical strategies for helping parents deal with some of their classic issues of childhood, so it seems, as part of it, at the most practical level, there's a kind of um, uh, what may, at first, sound like a somewhat abstract notion that really seems central to the book and to the, to the practice that comes out of it, which is this idea of integration that i-, issues of, of behavior difficulties, of uh, of relationship difficulties and family conflicts and the various challenges of uh, dealing with kids. In your, in the book, you're discussing them in terms of this issue of integration and, uh, helping kids more effectively integrate their, the way their brains function, so, uh, why is integration . . . How . . . What's the practical significance of this idea, this rather lofty or somewhat abstract sounding term integration in a, uh, that's going to be, that's going to be helpful to therapists and to parents?

04:35DAN SIEGEL Right, well, you know, uh, Tina Bryson, uh, my colleague, who wrote the book with me, and I, um, have actually had an interesting, uh, background that um, I think can inform this question. Tina was a student in social work who heard me give a lecture on the importance of therapists understanding the brain, and she was a student then and had an infant at home, and over the course of the last 11 years, she's been studying with me and, and then working with me in the Mindsight Institute and we decided to write the book together because her three boys, now one entering adolescence, um, you know, have been raised through this central principle of integration, and The Developing Mind, the first edition that came out in '99 and the second edition coming out just a few months ago, um, The Developing Mind actually explores how the nature of the relationship we have with another person, whether it's between a parent and a child, or a therapist and a client or patient, how does that relationship shape the growth of the brain of the other person, of the students if it's a teacher, of a client if it's a therapist, of a child if it's a parent or a teacher. Um, now the, the really exciting thing about it is when you do that careful review of all these disciplines of science that we do in interpersonal neurobiology, you come up with the proposal, and it is kind of a over-arching theme that health emerges from a process called integration, so integration is the linkage of differentiated parts, so, like, between me and you right now, Rich, I need to honor the differences between me and you to promote differentiation, but then I need to cultivate linkage through compassionate communication, and this integrative communication that is honoring differences, promoting linkages, can be seen as the source of a health relationship that you and I have, um, between us and, and that we're demonstrating, you know, in this collaborative, what's called contingent communication, right here in this moment. When children are fortunate enough, and about two thirds are in the (inaudible ) population, when they're fortunate enough to have parents who can offer them that kind of integrative communication, research and attachment, which doesn't use the concept of integration, but as an attachment researcher, I've kind of translated attachment findings through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology and I see that attachment research basically is showing that when relations, if they're integrative in the communication patterns that parents offer, number one: they come from parents who have made sense of their own lives, and that's explored in The Developing Mind and then translated to parents in Parenting From The Inside Out, which I wrote with Mary Hartzell, how your own self-understanding is the best predictor of how a child will be attached to you, as a parent, so that's a starting price, but the next place, after making sense of your own life, which you can do in the inside out book, is you say, "Well, then how do I help promote integration in my child?" Well, you can demonstrate, through very practical strategies, how understanding, for example, how the left and right brain are differentiated and then linked can help you as a parent when you understand the different phases of development these two hemispheres go through, knowing this can teach you very practical strategies on linking left and right, (crosstalk)and you realize the higher parts of the nervous system, for the cortex, for example, are differentiated from the lower, limbic, and brain stem and even somatic or bodily areas - this is a vertical distribution - you can learn techniques as a parent very readily once you get the concept of integration, to promote differentiation and then linkage, and (crosstalk)so what Tina and I did was just basically make these ideas of the developing mind and the book called Mindsight, which shows how to do this in clinical settings, how do you actually do this at home, uh, and we wanted people to learn that, and so what's so exciting is that these practical strategies are informed by science - they come from the whole bedrock of interpersonal neurobiology - and the book has, uh, been just taken up by lots and lots of parenting groups (crosstalk)because the strategies, they tell us, are just so practical and parents see the positive effects immediately, (crosstalk)and so that's, that's the idea of the book.

09:15 RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay. (crosstalk)Okay. (crosstalk)Yeah. (crosstalk)Okay, so . . . Okay, so let's do that. Let's, let's move at that very practical level and maybe just . . . Uh, we will . . . There's uh . . . Let's, let's go through uh, uh, some of these examples; let's highlight the kinds of common issues that you're addressing - child-rearing issues, difficulties that kids experience in growing up, and then some of these practical, um, uh, strategies that, that you, you and your uh, your co-author have, have developed. So, so you started a moment ago . . . You're mentioning this, um, this, this, the integrating left and right. So, what, where's a, what's a kind of thing that comes up? What's kind of a problem that comes up in families, comes up for kids, which im-, uh, uh, which is the result of left and right not being, of the left and right part of the child's brain not being terribly well integrated, and uh, describe some of the strategies that (crosstalk)uh, uh, your book presents.

10:10DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)Sure. Absolutely. Well, because you and I are doing this conversation primarily for professionals, let me give just a couple of caveats about this particular form of integration . . .

10:25RICH SIMON Okay.

DAN SIEGEL . . . um, so that on a scientific and a professional level, we're all understanding um, uh, kind of the, the um, factual basis of what I'm about to say . . .

10:35RICH SIMON Okay.

DAN SIEGEL . . . um, because, you know, half the time I'm working as a scientist in academic areas and,  yet, you know, when I write books for the general public, like a parenting book, it's got to be translated, still (crosstalk)accurate, but much more accessible and, in a sense, um, made more concrete so . . . But as professionals, we do bridge these two fields, so (crosstalk)let me just . . .

11:00RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Yeah. (crosstalk)(inaudible ) Okay.

11:01DAN SIEGEL One: um, the pattern of communication that parents offer, and we've described this with lots of stories in the book, is going to stimulate the neuronal activation and growth of areas of the brain, and this comes from a part of a new science called neuroplasticity, where we can learn, as therapists, and also we can teach parents, that the kind of relationship you have with another person will drive energy and information flow through that person's nervous system; that's the process called attention, and when you do this, you're actually SNAGing the brain - SNAG is stimulating neuronal activation and growth, S N A G; stimulate, neuronal, activation, growth. So the book is basically taking the findings in neuroplasticity and allowing parents to become neuro sculptors, who, instead of just being willing to do stuff, they're actually informed by the field of neuroplasticity. That's the first thing to say.

12:00RICH SIMON And they're all, they're already doing that, they're already neuro sculptors, but now you're trying to make them more aware and intentional neuro sculptors.

12:10 DAN SIEGEL Awakened neuro sculptors, exactly.

RICH SIMON Right, very good. (crosstalk)Okay.

DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)The second point is just for everyone to understand that you know, in interpersonal neurobiology, we say that integration is the foundation of health; we say that things like attention regulation, emotion regulation, and uh, affect regulation, self-regulation, all those forms of regulation that you want kids to develop, we believe they come from a process of integration in the brain, and integration in the brain is not only genetically influenced - so genes are very important and temperament and all that, very important - but in addition to genes, we also have experience, and then, it took 20 years to say this sentence, but it's worth just laying it out, you know, and, and the uh, the, the sentence goes like this: integrative communication stimulates neuronal activation and growth of integrative fibers in the brain. Now, this is kind of a wild proposal, but when I was reviewing the second edition of The Developing Mind, which was updating The Developing Mind, I had 15 interns working with them, and I told them, "Prove this book is wrong. Prove the ideas of interpersonal neurobiology are wrong." Repeatedly, over and over and over again, they found supportive evidence - it doesn't prove - but it's supportive evidence that, in fact, this statement is true. When we have relationships where we honor differences and promote linkages - that's an integrative pattern of communication, that's a foundation of an integrative relationship - it's actually going to create the conditions that get integrative fibers in the brain itself - integrative fibers are fibers that connect widely separated areas to each other - it's going to get them, actually, to stimulate their firing in the fire up and neurons (inaudible). They're going to strengthen the integrative aspects of the nervous system that links, for example, left and right or up and down and all sorts of other domains, so for you, as a professional, and Rich, for us to make sure we're clear about this, you know, these are proposals that have a huge amount of science supporting them, and we've been able to predict, um, you know, with these proposals, what future research ultimately did show, for example, in people who don't have integrative communication, like in abuse and neglect, it's the integrative fibers in the brain that either are stunted in their growth or they're actually damaged, and what are those fibers? The fibers that link the left and right sides of the brain to each other. The hippocampus that links widely distributed areas of memory and implicit memory to each other to form explicit memory, or the pre-frontal region of the brain that links all these areas, including input inputs from other people's nervous systems, if you will. A huge amount of integration in these three areas, the corpus callosum, linking left and right; the hippocampus, linking widely distributed widely distributed cortical and non-cortical areas to each other, as well as the pre-frontal region, which links the whole thing together as a whole (crosstalk)so, when you look at it this way, just so we're prepared to dive into this.

15:20 RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay. Good.

DAN SIEGEL . . . this is - and the reason why the, the publisher really wanted us to use the word revolutionary on the cover, uh, you know, I don't know if you want to call it revolutionary, but it is new. You won't see this anywhere else. This isn't, like, packaging old stuff in new - is that right? - in a new bottle or (crosstalk)(inaudible ) . . .

15:41RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Old wine . . . New bottle; (crosstalk)old wine.

DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)A new package for (crosstalk)old stuff. This is like a brand approach, but it comes from 20 years of diving into the world of scientific literature, coming up with the field of interpersonal neurobiology and then bringing that into practical application . . .

15:55RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay, okay. Okay.

16:00DAN SIEGEL . . . and the last thing I'll say before we go into this left-right integration thing is that if you hang around with neuroscientists in the last, let's say, five years, you'll find that it is politically incorrect to spend much time talking about the difference between the left and right side of the brain, in particular, the cortex, so when you take a look at a book, for example, called, uh, The Master and His Emissary, by Ian McGilchrist, you'll see a review of this very serious issue, which is that modern neuroscience is discouraging an examination of the differences between the left and right hemisphere, and so what I'm about to say about what parents can do, which has been so useful, is actually, if you say it to a bunch of neuroscientists, they'll roll their eyes and tell you you're a quack or tell you you're, you don't know what you're talking about, but if you read Ian's book, you'll see he spends the first 25 pages talking about why neuroscientists are being so conservative and actually, um, reluctant to talk about this, and he spends the next 600 pages reviewing the actual science and culture implications of the difference between the left and right hemisphere, so if you want, if you have any doubts about what I'm about to say, just take a look at Ian McGilchrist's book, The Master and His Emissary, which, which reviews all the science of left and right, and you'll see, in fact, that we have about maybe over 200,000,000 years, way over 200,000,000 years' history where the nervous system has been extremely asymmetric - different functions, different processes - on left and right. We may have misinterpreted them in the 60s, so people are gun-shy about popularizing this, but if you look at the functions very carefully - and I was writing the book with Tina, The Whole Brain Child, at exactly the same time I was writing The Developing Mind and The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, so I was having these 15 interns keep me completely immersed as we were diving into the literature, so these statements have a huge amount of science behind them, but they're translated so parents (crosstalk)can, uh, use it readily.

18:10 RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay. All right. So if there are any neuroscientists who are watching this, you've given us a frame, you've made your disclaimer, uh, and nicely done, sir. Okay, so, um, this, given this framework of um, this is a complex science in a state of evolution and we, we have . . . Researchers have their issues and their, and their concerns. From the viewpoint of practice and the viewpoint of therapists who work with kids, work with families, let's look at the concrete implications of these different aspects of integration and other aspects of brain science. So how does this show up, this question, this fundamental issue, integrating left and white, right brain and great developmental challenges of, of, of uh, of all of our lives. How does this . . . What are the kinds of um, when that integration isn't proceeding so smoothly, what are the kinds of things that parents are dealing with at home and what are the things that therapists, how can therapists help them to deal with some of those challenging kinds of situations?

19:25DAN SIEGEL Right, so in terms of translating integration for practical use for parents, uh, the first thing you, you speak to parents about is that any time when integration is being challenged, when you're either not differentiating areas - let's say the nervous system or in a relationship - or not linking them or some combination of those two - that's how you challenge or block integration - then the person or the family, the system we're talking about - the relationship or the internal life of a child or the adult - is going to experience chaos or rigidity, and so the first thing you teach is, you know, like, if a child is exploding in emotions and can't find a way to communicate what they're feeling, and their body is, uh, impulsively doing all sorts of things that, potentially, are destructive to property or person or themselves, um, you know, this is an example of chaotic uh, um, state the child is now entering, which could be any of the number of forms of integration we talk about. That's an example of a chaotic state. Uh, a rigid state might be where a kid just withdraws and doesn't want to interact with anyone, so isolates themselves or is repeatedly, um, engaging in a certain behavior over and over and over again without variation. These are, these are examples of rigidity.

20:50RICH SIMON Okay.

DAN SIEGEL So, so the first thing you say is when there's rigidity or chaos, um, it's a sign, in that moment, that it doesn't mean there's something wrong with the child, it just means that the state that's being created, uh, is not integrated, and so the amazing thing about this approach is that it's so practical that parents . . . I mean, the feedback we've gotten through the e-mails is amazing, because they say, "Look, once I have that very simple frame . . . You know, I'm a tired, exhausted parent. I've got a two year old at home, a three year old at home, four year old - whatever - I'm exhausted, but I have this frame. If there's chaos or rigidity . . . That's all I can remember: two things, and I know I gotta remember one thing: integration. Now, once I say integration, I gotta say, well, okay, first I have to honor differences - that's the differentiation part - and then promote linkages.", so we only talk about, really, five aspects of integration, so it's, that's in the whole book. So, for the first one, let's talk about left and right integration.

21:45RICH SIMON Okay.

DAN SIEGEL What we say is that the right hemisphere of the mammalian nervous system, and in particular, let's talk about humans, um, is very much, this right side of the brain is very much connected to the limbic area below the brain stem below that, and then the input from the entire interior of the body - the heart, the lungs, the intestines, the bones, the muscles - these signals actually pass up a layer of the spinal cord called lamina-I - it's the first layer of the spinal cord - also through the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, they come up and deposit themselves primarily in the right. Now, emotion, flood of feelings that we call emotion, is in both sides of the brain, for sure, so both sides of the brain have emotion, but the right hemisphere is much more directly impacted by areas below the cortex. The sub-cortical input, especially from the body, impacts the right hemisphere in a very dominant way because the leading theories of emotion say that emotion is the way input from the body affects the functioning of, let's say, the, the brain itself, but especially the cortex, through the brain stem and limbic area, okay, so the sub-cortical inputs, including the body first impact the right hemisphere. You know, we wrestled about this. It's fair to say the right is, in quotes, more emotional or it's the emotional one or however you wanna say it, but the left is a little more disciplined in its receiving of the input from these lower structures, so, for a young child, the corpus callosum, the bands of neural tissue that connect the right to the left hemisphere, are not very well developed yet. In addition, the right hemisphere is dominant in its activity and its growth in the first two to three years of life. Now, when you combine the finding that the right hemisphere is, generally - and this is accurate, but we have to clarify what it means - non-verbal, meaning it doesn't have the linear, linguistic, um, literal definitions of words that the left specializes in that will develop - you know, after the first birthday, it'll start receiving those and making sense and by the second birthday they start having a huge vocabulary; third birthday, start telling narratives of all sorts. The right hemisphere, in contrast, doesn't have that use of language. It can have a few words; it has the intonation that's in spoken language; it can actually pick up the context of the meanings of metaphors, for example. The left doesn't do all that stuff. But the things that parents can really lock onto are the ideas that the non-verbal signals of eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, your posture, your gestures, the timing - you point to your watch - and intensity - seven signals: eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, posture, gestures, timing, and intensity of response. These are the ways that the right hemisphere perceives what's going on in other people. It then signals out to other people to say, "Hey, this is what I'm feeling!" without words, right? Now, when a parent knows this and realizes the first year to two are dominant in right hemisphere functioning, a very left brain-dominant culture that we grow up in in schools and, and work that we do is super linguistic, linear, left hemisphere, logical, list-making . . . You know, all this kind of stuff. What happens then is that the left brain approach to a right hemisphere expression is what happens. There will be profound frustration in everyone in the interaction. So the first thing we say is about connect first. When a person is storming with this feelings of the body and they're flooding the representations of the right hemisphere . . . Can be all sorts of non-verbal expressions - eye expressions, facial expressions, tones of voice, postures . . . All sorts of things are happening. If you just come out and "That's not the right thing to do!", you're not connecting, so the (crosstalk)first thing we say is connect before you redirect.

26:30RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Yeah. Redirect? Okay.

DAN SIEGEL So the left is important, but the connecting means to go, "Ah", or if a kid is really scared, to go, "Ooh, that's" - you know, you can even use words - "That's scary." You don't say, "There's no reason for you to be frightened right now because that's really just a clown and a (crosstalk)clown is a character in a movie that's coming out suddenly and intending to surprise you so that movie makes more money at the box office and maybe you'll buy more . . .", you know? That's a bunch of left hemisphere accurate statements . . .

27:00RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Yeah. Yeah.

DAN SIEGEL . . . but the child's inner experience at that moment is fear of the clown, so you connect with their fear. Now, once a child's right hemisphere experiences attunement by your right hemisphere, as their parent, the whole system comes down. It's what Ed Tronick, a wonderful research, calls dyadic states of consciousness. It's a form of integration. You can't use your left hemisphere to grock, to get, to attune to another person's right hemisphere, and this is true not just with parent and child relations, it's true with everybody, so you gotta teach yourself as a parent that don't just use your logical, really fast, literal, left brain that knows how to go to court. You don't want just the letter of the law . . .

27:50RICH SIMON Right.

DAN SIEGEL . . . you want the spirit of the law; you don't just want the text, you want the context, so this is what the right hemisphere, in its often quiet and more subtle ways, needs to be given the permission. It needs to be differentiated in yourself to then reach out and connect with a child. Now, once that happens and a child starts to lower their chaos or come out of their rigidity cuz they don't feel alone anymore and their fear is gone, you, then, can add - this is the re-direct part - something like, "You know, this was scary to see the clown coming out in this movie, and I'm gonna hold you right now so you're . . ." - and you can even hold them before you're saying that stuff - " . . . and then later we'll talk about, you know, what movies are and how clowns, you know, are scary. They can be really scary and what that meant for you." And so later on - and this becomes more a part of memory and narrative integration - but later on you will tell the story using left brain language to say, in a linear fashion, often described in a logical way, you know, that this was a fear that came over you when the clown came out and, in many ways, because auto biorep for memory is dominant in the right hemisphere, but the drive to tell a story actually emanates, I believe, from the left, you get bilateral integration with narrative processes, so . . .

29:10RICH SIMON A-, and you have this, this term, uh, and, and part of the way you make these tools so handy are these very catchy, um, tags that you've applied, so this connect and redirect, in some ways, is the fundamental strategy that you use and this, your lovely phrase about the need of the chiant, child to feel felt.

29:30DAN SIEGEL To feel felt . . .

29:35RICH SIMON To feel connection is about . . . Which is, as we've uh, explored in other conversations, is really central (crosstalk)to the work.

29:40DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)Central, and that's a right to right brain thing, and we have this other thing called "name it to tame it" where, literally, here at UCLA, you know, and the researchers have done studies to show that, you know, that when you actually name an emotion you're seeing, which is also the emotion you're feeling, it actually calms the whole system by linking left and right, up and down and all sorts of ways it's integrated, so the other thing we say beside connect to redirect is name it to tame it, you know? And, and so these (crosstalk)(inaudible ) . . .

30:13RICH SIMON (crosstalk)So stay with that for a moment then, that name it to tame it. So what might be a situation with a, a parent and a child that a therapist might be dealing with where you're helping the parent to learn how to name it to tame it in order to help the (crosstalk)child.

30:25DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)Right, so let's, then, we'll stick with the clown example. You know, (crosstalk)the . . . If a child is scared, so a parent hugs the child and then the parent might say, "Wow. That was scary." Now, at that moment, the parent is modeling for the child that you're gonna have your body tense up and your heart pound, you're sweating . . . These interior signals of the body are brought up to the right hemisphere where you develop what's called interoception, which is perception of the interior, interoception. Now, at that moment, interoceptive processes, which come up through the right anterior insula are a part of the mechanism that's gonna allow you to regulate your emotions, and the insula feeds right into the limbic area as well as up, you know, it's a part of the ventrilateral pre-frontal cortex, which is basically all a part of how you regulate emotion. When you name it with the left brain you can show, as been shown here, that you actually send an, um, inhibitory fibers are being activated, inhibitory peptides, which are now gonna calm the amygdala and save all the fear and literally, naming it activates all the, the circuitry of calming, a system that has been like that, it calms it down, so when you name something with your left you calm it in your right, and that's been show through, through published studies, so what we wanna do is just make that known to parents, and, and what other studies show - and this is where you combine all the different sciences - is parents who have a talk in their relationships about the nature of emotion have children who can monitor their emotions, mention them, you know, and, as Fred Rogers used to say, manage them. Mentionable and manageable is what Fred Rogers used to say, and that's exactly what emotional intelligence that Dan Goleman talks about, it's what social intelligence is all about. Uh, it's, it's basically this ability to see the mind - what I all mindsight - and you're teaching parents how to teach mindsight skills, but you're not just about seeing the mind. It's about integrating relationships and the brain, so regulation emerges from disintegration. That's the whole key. You wanna have kids not just eat a fish. You want to teach them how to fish - that whole biblical story.

32:50RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay. And, and what's . . . And in the book, the thing that's, that's striking again and again, you're turning situations where the initial response might be to set a limit, for a parent to discipline a child and try to control their behavior, and, in various ways, to use this connection and then using language, the parent's ability to help the child use this capacity for language, to begin to make this link between the unruliness of the uh, excitation of the moment and this emerging ability, putting things into words that has, as you're describing this, this inherently common effect on the kid and then limits and the kinds of things that most of us may have experienced growing up with our own parents, or perhaps we're still doing with our own kids, becomes irrelevant.

33:40DAN SIEGEL Absolutely, and, and this is the beautiful thing where the relationships parents have with their children, um, can provide the kinds of communication patterns - that's what a relationship is based on - that, I believe, and this is, this is the proposal, and, you know, just read The Developing Mind second edition to see the evidence supporting it, not proving it, but supporting it, and a lot of predictions came true that we made a head of time, so this is part of what we do in science, is you make hypotheses, your throw 'em out there and see if they can predict future studies, and so this is why I really, really excited, even more excited than before that the proposals have been supported by, uh, by empirical data. Empirical data say this: that patterns of communication shape the regulatory capacity of a child, the way a child becomes resilient . . .

34:30RICH SIMON Yeah, yeah.

DAN SIEGEL . . . is based on the capacity for self-regulation, which emerges from, literally, the growth of integrative fibers in the brain, and so integrative patterns of communication are all you have to teach. Now, we're taking it a bit into the detail for parents so we can say, "Well, how do I make integrative communication?" We say, "Hey, don't just use your left, because your left hemisphere is not going to connect with your kid's right, (crosstalk)and so I'm gonna teach you," you say, as a therapist working with a parent or as a book trying to speak to a parent directly, "this is how you communicate right to right hemisphere for your child. You need to differentiate that for yourself . . ."

35:10RICH SIMON Yeah, yeah.

DAN SIEGEL And, you know, then what we do in the book is we have these things called whole brain kids, whole brain meaning integrated parenting. Whole brain kids are, are . . . You know, there are a bunch of cartoons and all sorts of fun drawings and things like that (crosstalk)in the book, but one of the sections in each of the chapters is a set of cartoons that parents can read to kids directly to teach them about their own brain and the importance of linking the separate parts together, and so there's a lot of fun stuff about that (crosstalk)(inaudible ) and, and other (crosstalk)forms of (crosstalk)integration.

35:40RICH SIMON (crosstalk)That's right. (crosstalk)Yeah. (crosstalk)Okay. (crosstalk)So, so in . . . Here's what I'd like us to do, cuz there's so many um, really useful, uh, practical strategies that you guys have offering and let's see how, how many of these we can get through that take these, what seems like these very impressive and, and uh, somewhat arcane brain processes and then you're translating them into very practical strategies, so let, let me just jump ahead a little bit here and, and . . . Cuz I found, one of the things that I found was particularly interesting was this idea of integrating memory and the role that implicit memories that the child may not be able to articulate verbally play in situations, potentially disciplinary situations, struggles with kids, and you guys, uh, are, have these different strategies about replaying memories and remembering to remember are two of them, so talk to us - let's, let's focus, for the moment, and we'll move on to some of these others, let's focus, for the moment, on this idea of memories, implicit memories, and helping parents understand the role of implicit memories, and then, uh, moving on from that into these uh, specific strategies you've developed.

36:50DAN SIEGEL Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, this, uh, principle of integration, you know, is highlighted left and right, it's up and down, and then, and then we go to memory integration, you know, which is basically teaching parents about the, the fact that there are, at least, two layers of memory, if you're wanna think about it that way, so there's kind of a . . . And this is . . . You know, it isn't always described this way. Different, different writers write about it and scientists write about it, particularly, but, for practical application, I find this is useful way of presenting it (crosstalk)to parents and to patients and clients. It goes like this: the, um, the first layer to be, literally, laid down from experience, uh, can be thought of as implicit memory, and this is where you're seeing something and you'll lay down a visual representation of it, so perceptual memory - what you hear, what you see, what you touch . . . Things like that. Um, then there's the emotion that's associated with that perception, so emotional memory. Um, then there's what your body sensation is like. Is your heart pounding or are your muscles tight? This kind of thing, so even bodily sensation, but that's not as studied as the other two. And there's a fourth, um, uh, pathway of implicit memory, if you will, which is your behaviors, what's sometimes called procedural memory or proceed, which will have motor action, motor memory, plans of action that can get incorporated, like learning to eat with a fork or ride a bicycle, something like that.

38:25RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay. Brushing your teeth, yeah.

DAN SIEGEL And brushing your teeth. Now these four kinds of implicit memory, um, are also matched by summations of those implicit forms in something called mental models or what other people call schema or schemata, you know, that's a summation of all the perceptions you've ever had of a dog, right? So you've had a generalization of a dog in your mind that's, that's a men, mental model as a form of implicit memory, and the other thing is you have is something called priming, which it gets you ready for an experience, so if you hear something barking, you know, you'll get ready to see a dog with a tail, wagging, if you've had good experience with dogs. If you've been bitten by a dog, of course, you'll get primed to be frightened, maybe have the perception of a growling dog, you may feel pain in a hand where, maybe, you were once bitten, and you'll get the procedural implicit memory activator of getting ready to be activated to prime you to run like crazy and that will reflect that you have a mental model of dog as being dangerous, so, within this framework then, these six elements, priming - getting you ready, mental model summation and these four things of procedural and motor memory, um, emotional memory, bodily memory, and perceptional memory. The key thing for parents to know about is that these aspects of implicit memory, when they are retrieved, are not tagged, necessarily, that something from the past is influencing me right now.

40:00RICH SIMON Yeah.

40:00DAN SIEGEL This is the key thing, and parents, unfortunately, never know about that unless they're therapists that I've been teaching or something like that, but, (crosstalk)in general, parents don't know about this, so when they learn that, they go, "Wow, you mean even I can affected by something from the past I don't know is coming from the past?" I say, "Absolutely," so this is not the same as unconscious memory. Implicit memory is always influencing our conscious experience. It's just not tagged with somebody saying, "Hey, this is coming from the past." Now, explicit memory is a, is another layer.

40:35RICH SIMON (crosstalk)That's right. So, so let me just pause for a second. So give us . . . So what might be a situation with a child where the child is misbehaving, uh, challenging the parent in some way, and the, the, the parent, the, the, the different way a parent who understands that as an expression of implicit memory, uh, behaves as opposed to uh, a parent who's thinking, "Oh, my, my child is misbehaving. I need, need to do something."

41:00DAN SIEGEL Oh, okay, sure. Well, the first thing to say, from a developmental point of view is that we all have implicit memory throughout our lives and it's uniquely, that is, it's a solely there, not the other form, uh, up 'til 18 months of age - some people say it's three years - but anyways, from these young years, it's only implicit memories. Then, starting at around a year and a half or three, depending on the research you're looking at, you then develop the, the hippocampus develops you, develops this other form of memory, um, and then there's a period from three to five or seven where you can have these explicit factual memories or autobiographical memories that are available, but for some reason, from seven on, you can't get access to even those explicit memories. It's a fascinating thing called childhood amnesia - we don't have to go into right now, but . . .

41:45RICH SIMON Okay.

DAN SIEGEL . . . but the bottom line is, um, before the age of, let's say, a year and a half, things can happen to us that can only, only be embedded into implicit memory, so if I've had um, let's say, uh, a child who, um, got frightened in a pool because we were in a pool and his face went underwater, um, and now, you know, he's in the bathtub and he won't put his face underwater or he's afraid of washing his hair cuz the water's going over his face, um, I can at least understand - and I'll talk about what to do about it in a moment - um, that that experience he had when he was one, now that he's three or four, can absolutely be influencing him, but he's just scared of water in his face, and he has no idea way, right? So he, so his fear of water on his face can get him to not go to swimming pools, it can get him to not want to go to summer camp when he's seven, um, it can get him to not want to be you know, learning to snorkel when he's 15, it can get him to be a 25 year old who just refuses, uh, to go underwater, or he may have dreams of being underwater or drowning or he may approach his, um, going uh, in a new job where he's overwhelmed at work and say, "I feel like I'm an underwater," you know, or something like this. All these are the ways, whatever age, implicit memory can intrude on our present moment consciousness. It's not unconscious memory. You just don't know that at one someone shoved us under the water in a pool by accident, or whatever, you know? So the amazing thing is that when you understand integration and understand the differentiation of implicit and explicit memory, you can, knowing the signs, that the hippocampus, which weaves implicit puzzle pieces together into its more elaborate forms of autobiographical memory, the self, the (inaudible) point in time and factual memory. Those are interesting contrasts, but, but, using consciousness, a parent can approach, let's say, a child at five or four who is so scared of having shampoo come in their eyes and water come in their eyes when they're rinsing their hair. They can say this, they can say: "You know, I want to tell you a story about a time when you were one and you were in my arms . . .

44:20RICH SIMON Yeah.

DAN SIEGEL . . . and, you know, somebody came by by accident knocked us both over and we both went underwater. I knew how to swim and I knew I could get up, but you were just a baby in my arms and you got so scared when you went underwater that, when you came out, you had this look of terror on your eyes and I hugged you. I hugged you and I took you out of the pool and I dried you off, but you were scared, and ever since that time what I've noticed is you've always been frightened to go in the pool, and then once we started, you know, washing your hair in the sud, in the bathtub - whatever we did - you know, I noticed you really got scared when water got in your face, so one thing I want to tell you about is that really scary thing that happened when you were one you may not be able to remember . . ." - and you're thinking "explicitly remember" - you know, "but it can make you feel scared now of something that actually isn't something you don't need to be scared of," and usually when you've really gotten the issue kids' eyes go like this, like that, because the truth is your friend when it comes to trauma, (crosstalk)you know, you know, you don't say that to them, but that's what we should know about, and so now the kid might often say, "Tell me the story of the pool." You say the story again. Now, they, now, they may not ever be able to explicitly remember what happened, but now in the co- construction of the narrative with you as a three year old, four year old, five year old, 15 year old, whatever they are, now what's happening is they're creating representations that are drawing on the implicit processes in their own brain. You're placing this into consciousness, and, particularly, they're aware of it in their own interior world, and it's a shared dyadic that is paired in consciousness with you, and that's what wonderful relation is all about, shared consciousness, that expands what's called the complexity of the representation, and that's the science of it, but at that moment then the child's no longer alone with their fear as a one year old. They're now a five year old with a mom or dad who loves them who's saying, "Look, here's the larger context," the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere get involved, the implicit elements, the feeling frightened thing underwater are being raised and now a different context within the narrative, which is a linear telling of a sequence of events that talks about not only the events that happened but the mental experience beneath the behaviors of fear and then you're even bringing that narrative to the present time and saying, "So, naturally, you were so scared of water in your face. The fear has held onto you. And then, when you're feeling like water's going to come on your face when you're rinsing the shampoo, you freak out . . ." - that's the chaos, right? You freak out or you rigidly won't go to summer camp cuz they're gonna make me swim in the pool, but now you're basically freeing this child. Now, you can learn lessons from somatic-based therapies and have your kid be aware of their body; you can learn lessons from EMDR or have a kid just, you know, do this butterfly tap on their shoulders or tap on their uh, on their knees, um, which is very helpful to do while you're telling the story, just have them do bilateral stuff, like, there are theories about why it works, but in my experience it really does help, and now when they'e doing this they're literally activating left, right, left, right, left, right, and just like in a dream you have the eyes moving left, right, left, right, left, right, I believe very deeply that even just narratives without this bilateral stuff (crosstalk)(inaudible ) bilateral stuff, narratives are, themselves, integrated. They're interpersonally integrated. A child doesn't feel alone anymore; they feel felt. They're hemispherically integrated, they're memory integrated, they're up and down integrated, they're, they're the reason so much of what we do as human beings for so many hours of our lives, sleeping or awake, are narrative based. Narratives are the ultimate integrative process . . .

48:25RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Yeah. (crosstalk)Yeah. Yeah.

DAN SIEGEL . . . and so, in this thing, you're seeing, basically, all the different layers of integration come into play, but a parent who understands how implicit memories gone forward doesn't just say, "Hey, get over it. There's no reason to be afraid of shampoo. Just get over it!" That doesn't do much. That's not (crosstalk)connecting and redirecting, so this is an example of (crosstalk) how this keep understanding by a parent really empowers them to bring integration, literally, neural integration, into their child's nervous system, because they're inspiring them to rewire their brains through this knowledge they have and these techniques they have.

49:05RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Yeah, connect and redirect, yep. (crosstalk)Okay. A-, and you're, and taking something that may seem implicit memory, a, a somewhat, for many people, esoteric concept, making it, not only making them understand it, but how do you translate in this very immediate way that even a small child, can communicate with a small child. Now there's a . . . So, so the . . . And then, from there, you move on from the, from this aspect of, of memory and implicit memory to talking about what is, uh, kind of a cardinal concept (inaudible ) kind of synth organizing concept, this notion of mindsight, and, again, using it in a way that is very practical, not in the least bit arcane, so tell us a little bit about mindsight and how, in the practical applications uh, of mindsight, how a parent might help a distressed child by using this concept of mindsight.

50:00DAN SIEGEL Absolutely. So mindsight is a term, uh, that uh, for me, uh, uh, saved my life, you know, a long time ago when I dropped out of medical school and came back and, and to say that some of my professors would be able to see the mind of their patients, and I should use them as role models, and some of my professors couldn't. (crosstalk)So it came from 1981, you know, was a kind of a life-saving life preserver, uh, that I used to, I think, carry around my heart, um, and then when I went into pediatrics and I saw that some parents saw the mind beneath the behavior of children and some didn't, and saw that the ones that did actually, as families in a pediatric setting, seemed to function, uh, much better at a much higher level, and then when I entered psychiatry it became a concept that was central to everything I did as a filter through understanding the different approaches to psychotherapy I was taught, and then as a, and then as a researcher in, in attachment after I'd been trained as a child psychiatrist, um, mindsight was really uh, what I was looking for in, for example, of the adult attachment interview findings and in the way parents interact with their children so that at, at it's essence, what mindsight is, is the ability to see the mind, mindsight, means to see the subjective experience, and, often, that's within awareness, um, of another person and of the self, and mindsight has grown to be more than just, you know, insight and empathy, it's also the capacity not only to see this energy and information flow within your embodied brain, if you will, and also your relationships, but also to move that flow toward integration, so mindsight is both the perceptual ability where you monitor what's going on and you modify what's going on toward integration, so when we say we're gonna teach a mindsight skill, it's to teach the ability to perceive the subjective inner nature of one's own life and other people's lives within relationships, and also empathically, but also to move that flow toward linking differentiated parts, towards integration. So that's what it means to teach a mindsight skill. Now, one basic way we do that is we, we literally teach kids in this book, and teach parents how to teach their kids, about the Wheel of Awareness.

52:15RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Right. Yeah.

DAN SIEGEL We say, "Look, you know, one part of the mind is subjective experience and we come to know subjective experience through, through something called awareness," so that uh, in the Wheel of Awareness, we have this practice - uh, you can do it from my website and we have a parent to do that, but in the book we actually teach them how to teach kids, where you have a central hub, um, you know, is this place of um . . . And I should . . . Maybe I should show you. You know, the origin of the Wheel of Awareness is this table that's, that I, I designed in 19 - I don't know when it was; it must've been 1998 - and I can . . . Should I show you the table? Can I turn this camera (crosstalk)around?

52:50RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Let's, well, let's, let's, let's see how we do it. We're, we're . . .

52:55DAN SIEGEL Let me just try it. (crosstalk)(inaudible )

52:58RICH SIMON (crosstalk)We're (crosstalk)moving towards more visual effects here.

DAN SIEGEL Let me see if I can do it (crosstalk)for you.

53:00RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay.

DAN SIEGEL Here we go. I gotta be able to see this.

RICH SIMON Mm-kay.

53:05DAN SIEGEL Uh, there it is.

RICH SIMON Okay.

DAN SIEGEL I'm not good at angling this. (crosstalk)There we go.

53:10 RICH SIMON (crosstalk)We got a table. We're seeing a (crosstalk)round table with some chairs.

DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)(inaudible ) glare. (crosstalk)There's a uh, is a glass center to the table, so (crosstalk)imagine, you know, imagine this uh, um, this process of um, standing around that table with parents who I was teaching and with, with patients, um, and in this, uh, in this, um . . . On the table you have an outer rim and you have an inner hub, and the hub represents the experience of awareness and the, um, rim represents what you can know in awareness, so awareness is composed of the knowing - that's the hub - and the known, which is on the rim. Now, when you, when you allow people to learn about the Wheel of Awareness, what you're doing is you're literally integrating consciousness. You're differentiating the knowing from the known and giving people the experience of just the sense of knowing and this image of the hub is just a metaphor, an image of the hub, and then, on the rim, you actually have that which is known, so, for example, if a child is really agitated, "I'm so mad at my friend! She didn't come over my house!", um, you know, "I don't care if she had the flu! She's my best friend!" But now what's gonna happen is when she goes over Sarah's house, she's gonna become Sarah's best friend and "I'm gonna lose her as my friend!" and, and so you're, chaotically, you're watching your daughter chaotically get lost in the emotion of a feeling of loss and betrayal. Now, when you've taught them the Wheel of Awareness practice - maybe not in that very moment, but you've prepared them with integrative stuff - what happens they can feel spaciousness of the hub, they can see that, yes, they feel really angry at their friend Sarah, they feel really upset and sad that she didn't come to the birthday party. They feel really, really confused and lost and anxious, but then there's a bunch of other feelings they can bring up from memory. They see on the rim there's also a feeling of loving her and of really wanting her to be their friend and, and maybe an excitement that they'll make new friends. There are all the . . . So the rim becomes rather something that you're lost on, you know? I would take people around the stable and say, "Look, you have other feelings too. You're not just this one feeling." So an example of mindsight would be where you're teaching to integrate this process of awareness and, amazingly, this skill that you teach is a gift that keeps on giving because what happens is when they develop this ability to differentiate the hub from the rim and different elements of the rim from each other, they basically develop resilience, they develop the capacity to sense an impulse and not act on it when it's not appropriate; they develop the ability to have a wide spectrum of emotions they can feel for a given situation so that they're not consumed by one, possibly destructive, emotional state, and they get the clarity of this hub which gives them this thing called response flexibility, this overall capacity to sit within awareness and make all sorts of choices available to them. You can see the difference in kids who have this capacity or not and you can know in research studies that, when people have this mindsight ability, this ability to see the inner nature of our mental lives with clarity for an inner world and compassion for the world of other people, those are folks that do well in life. They have social and emotional intelligence; they basically are resilient and they thrive, so, I mean, this is, you know, what we really wanna teach our kids when we say we wanna provide parents the opportunity to give them experiences where they're showing them how to integrate their lives. This is the basis for kids thriving. This is the idea where we go beyond just surviving, which is important, but also thriving.

57:25RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Okay. (crosstalk)Okay. So just, just as with, as we were talking a moment ago about implicit memory that, uh, the child, all of us, have implicit memories where - but particularly with, with uh, small children, it's as if they're in a sea, an eternal presence, they can't orient themselves, they don't have a map, a distinction of past and present. It's all happening, it's all coming at them. So, similarly, with your, this Wheel of Awareness, you're trying to help, and I uh, and you, and you're doing this with kids who are not coming to Dan Siegel workshops, uh, and getting CE credits, but we're, you're doing this with very young children and giving them uh, an image of how they can begin to, to develop a different kind of map of their inner life.

58:10DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)No. Absolutely, and, (crosstalk)you know, we've had, you know, people say, "Oh," you know, "Dan, it's just your, your belief in this that you're, you're hypnotizing people," and I say look, you know, "This being used in schools where I never show up at the school. Teachers learn this, maybe from me, you know, but they, they learn it, they apply it in the classroom and even kindergarteners are are learning this, um, and it works. It's not just hypnosis - it's not just hypnosis - it's not hypnosis. This is, I believe, you know, literally giving a skill . . .

58:40RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Yeah. Skills.

DAN SIEGEL . . . of perceptual clarity to stabilize how you see the energy information flow that is the foundation of the mind in the body and in relationships, and then you're saying, "Hey, integration is health and well-being, so it, why not integrate consciousness," you know? Every form of psychotherapy uses awareness as a tool, and I think awakened parenting is really all about using awareness to promote integration.

59:10RICH SIMON And so the . . . Yes, so there's a kind of awareness training, certainly for the parent, but, uh, really - and here's the, the uh, the other piece of it that seems quite distinct - here's an awareness training for children that can s-, be done quite young, so in, we, we have about, oh, five minutes or so. Let, let's get to one more piece of what you're developing and this, this um, what you talk about as this me and we, this development of it's one thing to have, uh, mindsight, uh, from one's child's inner experience, but how you help children develop this, uh, at this more varied, very gated conception of relationship of uh, of both a men and a we in a relationship, so (crosstalk)talk to us about that and, and how you do that.

01:00:00DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)Absolutely. Right, so, just very briefly, you know, for the, for the professionals, um, you know, I think one of the, uh, the serious, uh, aspects of the way culture has been shaping, uh, family life and that family life, in turn, is shaping the brain and the brain and the family life together, relationships and the brain together have been shaping the mental experience is to create a sense of self that is separate from other people, separate from, uh, the larger society, separate from the planet, and it, anyways, a lot of the difficulties we see with people feeling very lonely, u, and very, uh, feeling there's meaning is missing in their life and also the implications for the planet as a whole come from this culturally, um, cultivated view of the self as completely separated; that is, to say it in a very crude kind of way, that the self is defined by the skin. So I believe that this issue is of huge, huge import for the survival of our species and um, so in, in, in various projects that I'm, I do, you know, it's about, okay, well, how do we actually get cultural messages out to inform families, to inform therapists, to inform teachers, to inform people in organizations that, in fact, you don't have to give up a sense of an embodies self while you're also embracing a sense of self that's, uh, really, a, a um, it's uh, a plural verb, if you will, that your self actually can have what's called empathic joy; you can take joy in other people's successes, and you can actually feel connected to other people as a larger whole. Um, I think the brain is completely cap-, not only capable of it, I think it evolved to do that, um, and so this isn't like constraining the brain. It's actually liberating the brain from integrating this way, so what we do in the, um, in the book, is we talk about this process from me to we, and I know grammatically it should be from me to us or I to we, but it doesn't rhyme, so from me to we is the fun way to remember it, and that there's this spectrum, you know, and that we have these fun things that we talk about, about, you know, increasing the family fun factor, and we talk about, you know, really getting involved in activities where you actually enjoy each other and support each other's success and really, uh, can lose yourself in a group activity, or maybe it's better to say find yourself in a group activity, and the other thing is the (crosstalk)idea . . .

01:02:45RICH SIMON (crosstalk)Yeah. Important distinction there, yeah.

DAN SIEGEL Yeah. The other idea is that connecting through conflict. You know, this is the idea that even when there's moments of tension between you as a parent and your child, if you really see those moments of conflict as opportunities to take a step back a bit and then realize this is actually a chance to connect in a deeper way and then to promote integration in a deeper way within yourself and within your child. You won't see parenting as what a lot of parents see it as, as a burden. You'll see incredible opportunity. Challenging? Yes, but it doesn't have to be a burden. It can actually be this wonderful privilege where you're actually bringing these deep layers of connection into the world. Now, when children experience you approaching conflict like that and they realize they can express themselves - "I want it this way! I want it that way!" - and you really come at it with them and you show them the pathway, which we show in the book, towards an integrated solution, then what happens is the we becomes how this whole problem was solved. It wasn't the parent mandating this and the child accepting that and "It's me vs. you!" The we is what creates a solution to the pro-, the, quote, problem, and I believe this is true not just in, you know, the day to day experience of being a parent. When you look at just what our planet needs, we desperately need a way where the next generation is gonna approach this planet differently than our generation when this is our home. This is the home for all of us here, all living beings on the planet now, and the generations to come, and if we can do this right, as this generation, and bring up the next generation to realize, you know, the thing to do is to find meaning and connection in your sense of a belongingness to a larger whole. Take care of your body, for sure; enjoy your body, for sure, but if we can get the self to expand and identify as a we, I think there's really hope to turn the pathway that human beings have created on this planet around and to make this world a fantastic place for all living beings to live, and so this whole brain child approach is really, like, for a whole brain world.

01:05:15RICH SIMON And we'll, we'll start with the families to begin with, (crosstalk)so what a, what a great note to, to end on. Um, so, uh, let's take a moment now, uh, and to uh . . . If people want to find out more about your work, find all, more about The Whole- Brain Child, other resources, training resources and opportunities that they uh, might have with you, how do they do that?

01:05:40DAN SIEGEL (crosstalk)Absolutely. Sure. Well, Tina Bryson and I wrote the book and there's a whole-brain child, uh, website you can go to and you can go to, uh, Tina's website for all sorts of parenting things and my private website, you know, drdansiegel.com. If you wanna do the Wheel of Awareness practice you could, uh, download it from that website. There's also ways of joining us online; we have online training programs that, uh, teach interpersonal neurobiology at the mindsight institute home for interpersonal neurobiology and so we're happy to invite everyone to join the community, the mindsight community, to explore the ways to apply these really exciting ideas out at all levels of our life in the world.

01:06:25RICH SIMON Great, and, and a great lead-in to our invitation to people to comment on this session on the comment board, extend the conversation that you have been trying to start not only through this webcast series but in uh, all these different activities that people can find out on the website about rising to the challenge of a world where we're increasingly seem cut off, where there isn't a sense of a kind of a, of a collective consciousness, so um, so if folks have comments about this, uh, and our collective consciousness here of having participated and uh, listening to this conversation to extend the conversation, please do that. Your thoughts, what stood out for you, what you learned, uh, ideas you have about it and questions that you may have . . . Uh, Dan has agreed to come up and check out the comment boards and if, if and when he is so moved, perhaps respond to some of them. In any case, let's make sure the conversation continues. Dan, my friend, thank you . . .

01:07:25DAN SIEGEL Thanks Rich.

RICH SIMON . . . so much. Uh, the, the world seems like a much bigger and richer place having, as always, having had this conversation with you.

01:07:35DAN SIEGEL Beautiful; I feel that way being with you too, Rich.

RICH SIMON Take care. Goodbye to you, for now, and uh, so long for this afternoon from this Networker webcast. Bye-bye.

01:07:45DAN SIEGEL Bye-bye.

01:07:50[sil.]

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