The Adult Chair Podcast: Becoming "Aware" With Dr. Dan Siegel

Dr. Dan Siegel joins me to talk about his new book Aware, and the work he’s been doing that can radically accelerate our journey toward learning to live in the present moment. This is an amazing partner to all the work each and every one of you are doing to learn to live in your Adult Chair — I know you’re simply going to love this.

Transcript

Hello,

Everybody,

And welcome to the Adult Chair on RashPixel FM.

I am Michelle Schelfont,

And I'm thrilled to announce today,

You guys,

We have Dr.

Dan Siegel on the Adult Chair podcast.

I could not be more excited about this interview.

Today we're going to be talking about his new book called Aware,

And basically it's a new approach to meditation.

This book and the concepts and case studies and ideas in this book are phenomenal.

He's going to talk to us today about the Wheel of Awareness that he created,

And it is a way to help us to get further in the present moment.

Hello,

It's going to be the greatest show.

This is how we get in the Adult Chair,

And the Wheel of Awareness is just absolutely genius.

I'm so excited today to have him on.

But first,

You can find out more about this show at TheAdultChair.

Com.

You can subscribe for free by signing up for our mailing list or find us anywhere podcasts are served with a quick search for The Adult Chair.

You can join the conversation on Facebook or Instagram and make sure to request to get into the Adult Chair private closed group.

On Facebook,

As you know,

This is my favorite,

Favorite closed group because this is a space where we learn how do you live in this Adult Chair,

The healthiest version of yourself,

The part of us that needs to learn how to live in the moment to raise awareness,

Where we find that peace,

Where we find the joy.

This is the Adult Chair closed group.

It's a beautiful space where people are vulnerable and you get amazing,

Amazing support.

So come join us there.

All right,

Let's get right into this.

Dr.

Dan Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA.

He's also the executive director of Mindsight Institute.

Dr.

Siegel has published extensively for both the professional and lay audiences.

He has four New York Times bestsellers and also serves as the founding editor for the Norton Professional Series on interpersonal neurobiology,

Which contains over 50 textbooks.

We are thrilled to have Dr.

Dan Siegel today on the Adult Chair.

Welcome Dr.

Siegel.

A pleasure to be here with you.

I had the pleasure of reading your book and I loved it.

Would you be willing to share with our audience a little bit about how you got here?

What is your background all about?

Because I love your background.

Sure.

It's quite extensive.

Yeah.

Well,

I mean,

I wrote a lot about this in a book called Mind because I was trying to make sense of what the background was myself.

You know,

Basically,

You know,

I'm a person and I'm a husband and a father and a son and a brother and a friend.

And you know,

Professionally,

I've been on the journey that ultimately led me to be mostly these days an educator in all sorts of fields that relate to our well-being and who we are on the planet.

And that journey to be an educator,

You know,

Was preceded by,

You know,

Becoming a psychiatrist and before that,

Having initial training and research of attachment,

You know,

Working,

Studying parent-child relationships and before that becoming a board certified chaplainant lesson and adult psychiatrist and then before that in the initial year of training in pediatrics after medical school.

And then before that,

I was a biochemistry major in college.

And all of that journey basically led me to really be fascinated with who are we,

You know,

And what is the mind and what is consciousness and how is it that to grow and change whether that's happening in a relationship with another person or therapy or school or,

You know,

At home,

You know,

We need consciousness.

And then why is this process called integration,

Which is the differentiation of things allowing them to be different,

But then linking them together.

That's what integration is,

The linking of differentiated parts.

Why is that the fundamental basis of well-being?

And what would happen then if you could integrate consciousness?

So that's the short answer to a shorter question,

But that's my background.

I love it.

Yeah,

I love it.

I want to bring up a question for you because I've heard what you've said about this,

But I want you to share this if you wouldn't mind.

What is the difference between the mind,

The brain and consciousness?

Well,

This is a great question.

Let's start with the brain.

You know,

The brain is an organ in your head.

You actually have three brains,

But when we usually use quote the brain as a term,

We mean organ in your head,

Which has a bunch of cells called neurons and their supportive cells called glial cells.

And there's a lot of them over,

You know,

A hundred billion and they have an average of 10,

000 connections.

So there's trillions and trillions of connections called synaptic connections in the brain,

In the head.

And this brain is in service of the whole body,

You know,

So you're having the body,

Of course,

Lots of organs and lots of systems in the brain that function in a way that's very complex.

And the brain and the head helps organize all that,

Including what goes on in the brain around your heart and the brain around your intestines.

So that's the brain story.

What's really happening in the brain is electrochemical and now we know mechanical energy flow is happening.

So it's basically energy flow.

And so what happened to me years ago in the beginning of the decade of the brain,

Early nineties was to ask the question,

What is the connection of the mind to the brain?

And you know,

Since the time of the pocrates,

It was said that the mind,

Your joys and sorrows and things like that is simply just brain activity.

And that's what a lot of scientists say.

But I don't think that's the whole story.

And a lot of what I've written about for the last 25 years,

You know,

Is to try to look at the mind as having four facets that show that it's not a synonym for brain activity.

And one is subjective experience.

So you have a felt texture of life that can't be reduced just to brain activity,

Even if it's totally dependent on the brain in the head.

But it turns out it's probably at least in your whole body.

So that's the first facet of four of the mind,

Subjective experience.

How do you know you're having a feeling of being alive?

Well,

That's called consciousness,

This amazing subjective sense of being aware of knowing.

So that's a second facet of mind that just can't be reduced to brain activity,

Even if it's completely dependent on it.

And it's probably dependent on a lot more than just what happens in your head.

But anyway,

That's awareness.

And consciousness would include both the experience of awareness and what you're aware of.

That's the distinction between the word consciousness and awareness.

This includes the whole thing.

Then you have a third facet of mind,

Which is called information processing.

And this is sometimes called cognition,

And it happens outside of consciousness,

Including consciousness also.

So you can't make it the same as consciousness.

And information processing doesn't just happen in your head,

It happens throughout your whole body.

But it doesn't just happen inside you,

It happens like in your phone and in your computer,

In the books you read.

So you have extended cognition as well as embedded in our culture and our relationships with each other.

So that's information processing.

And then a fourth facet of mind really helps us go beyond these descriptions into a very helpful definition.

And that is seeing the mind in the following way,

That the system of mind is energy flow,

That this flow is not constricted by just being inside the skull.

It happens in the whole body,

But the skin does not constrain it either.

So energy flow is happening both within you,

Within the head and within the whole body,

As well as between you and using quotes,

Your body and the world around you,

The world of other people and the world of nature,

The planet.

So this relational aspect of mind is an inter aspect of mind that's about energy flow that happens between your body and the world around you and this energy flow within you.

So when you see it that way,

The system of mind is a long story,

But the shortest version I can say is that it's a complex system,

The system of mind and complex systems in our reality have been proven by mathematics to have what are called self organizing emergent properties.

And what the proposal I'll offer you here is that this fourth facet of mind is the embodied and relational emergent self organizing process that regulates the flow of energy and information.

And in looking at it this way,

You get this wonderful opportunity to say,

How do I optimize this embodied relational self organizing process to create harmony?

Because when I don't do that,

I go to chaos or rigidity.

But when I do optimize it,

I get this flexible and adaptive harmonious flow that we could say is the definition we're offering of well being.

So if you were to break it down into more of like a spiritual,

I guess,

Approach,

I might call it,

Is there some aspect of God or soul or spirit in consciousness?

Well you know,

We recently had a celebration of the life of John O'Donoghue,

And higher than you pronounce John O'Donoghue.

John was a dear friend and a former Irish Catholic priest.

He was a mystic,

A philosopher and a poet.

And he and I were writing a book on the soul and science.

And this two day event we had in the west of Ireland was all about your question.

And what I can tell you is that being offered that deep scientific view you just heard was a gateway to seeing the link between science and spirituality and mysticism.

I wish I was there.

That would have been my kind of weekend.

Well,

If you go to John O'Donoghue's website soon,

I think that video will be available.

Oh,

That'd be great.

Okay.

What I'll just say here,

You know,

Is absolutely there's a deep link to the experience of soul and spirit and connection.

And for me,

As a scientist and educator,

You always want to start with the science.

Right.

And then you can bridge from that really,

Really rigorous,

Solid,

Empirically established foundation into less empirically studied areas,

Like the notion of spirituality,

For example.

And what was really fascinating about that in Ireland was to realize that I could be as scientific as I pleased.

I was,

You know,

One of the speakers there over this two day period.

And everyone was on board with going deeply into its connection to mysticism,

To the soul,

To spirit,

To religion.

There were priests in the room.

There was a quantum physicist from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

You know,

We were all kind of enjoying the idea that the split between science and spirituality no longer needs to exist.

So if you want,

Michelle,

I can get into this.

I am so excited about it.

You may need to say to me,

Dan,

You know,

Curb your judgment.

Because I think we're at this incredible moment in our journey to actually dissolve the false divide between science and spirituality.

Well,

I know,

I feel like I could talk to you about this for like 20 hours.

We could go into a long conversation about this.

I don't want to get too far away from your book,

Though.

And maybe it's part of the maybe we integrated.

It's totally what the book is all about.

You know,

Yeah,

Because you had I love the book because it's it's it there's such great case studies.

But what I loved about it is that we,

You know,

We hear all the time about the importance of meditation and mindfulness,

Awareness,

Becoming the observer,

All of everyone is talking about this right now.

But what I loved about your book was that you explain the how and the why.

Again,

You had the science behind it.

The case study.

I loved it.

So why don't we jump into that?

Because I have a feeling we're going to probably touch on consciousness,

Spirituality,

It's going to blend,

You know,

It's going to blend as we go on.

So you talk to us about this book.

So why this book,

You know,

Where did your inspiration come from to write this book?

Well,

The inspiration came from experiences I had with people.

Initially it was with my patients in my private office.

Then it was with my students who were therapists who used this practice called the wheel of awareness with themselves and then with their clients and then with the workshops I did with now a lot of people,

But initially systematically studying 10,

000 people who were in workshops with me and recording their results and then trying to take those results of the 10,

000 study and combine that with a scientific view of energy to then see what might be the origin of consciousness.

And that's why I wrote the book aware because there's very practical outcomes of that journey.

And this is what I described at the link bridging science and spirituality for John O'Donoghue in this deep kind of way.

And I can try to summarize it for you,

Michelle,

If you want or I could just walk you step by step through where the ideas came from.

You tell me what's best for you.

Yeah,

No,

I like that idea.

And I really want to make sure that you touch on the wheel of awareness and really break that down.

I would love to give the people that listen to this show an idea of how can they use it?

How do they use it?

What does that even mean?

How can they use it?

How can they apply it into their own lives?

Well,

The wheel is a very simple practice that anyone can apply in their own lives.

And it has the research proven three pillars,

It turns out,

That science has shown can help improve your well-being in the following ways.

So I'll tell you what the practice is,

But just to give you a teaser on what research suggests when you do this as a regular practice,

Here's what you get.

Number one,

You'll grow the integrative fibers of the brain.

That means the differentiated areas will become linked together,

Which makes your brain more resilient essentially.

So that's number one.

Number two is you will actually reduce the stress hormone reactivity of your body,

Reducing cortisol stress hormone.

Number three,

You'll improve cardiovascular factors like heart rate variability and blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Number four is you'll improve your immune system.

Number five is you'll reduce inflammation by changing the molecules that control genetic expression that regulates the inflammatory response.

And number six is you'll actually optimize the level of an enzyme called telomerase that repairs the ends of the chromosomes called the telomeres.

So it keeps your cells healthy.

And as the researcher who,

Alyssa Epple,

Along with her colleague Elizabeth Blackburn,

The Nobel Prize winner who discovered the system,

Wrote in their beautiful book,

The Telomere Effect,

And Alyssa made sure I put this in the aware book.

It actually slows aging.

So all those things are the research established things that come when you develop presence,

This mental presence that I'll describe to you right now,

Which comes with developing these three pillars built into the wheel practice.

So here's how it goes.

The origin of this wheel of awareness is quite simple.

I had been working for years on a fundamental process of well-being that looks like it's this process called integration.

So integration is linking different parts.

So that's step one.

Step two was I noticed that in every process of change,

Like in schools or at home with your child or in the process of psychotherapy or self-reflection,

Any process of intentional change seemed to require consciousness.

So with my patients,

I had this weird idea of what would happen if you integrated consciousness.

So there's a table in my office which has a central glass hub,

If you will,

Like a wheel and an outer wooden rim.

And I would say to my patients,

Let's integrate consciousness and see if we can cultivate change towards health by differentiating the knowns on the rim and the knowing in the hub.

And they go,

What are you talking about?

And I would say,

Well,

Think of it this way.

There was this thing that holds up the table,

It looks like a spoke.

I said,

Imagine you're resting in this fundamental distinction of consciousness being the knowing in the hub.

And let's put the knowns on the rim.

So a known would be like,

Michelle,

If I said to you,

Hello,

Did you know I said hello?

Yes.

So you have two things going on there.

You have the knowing,

Which is in the hub,

And you have the known,

Which is the word hello,

And we're going to put that on the rim.

And that would be a sound in this case,

Because we're speaking through our hearing system now.

And that would be hearing.

You have sight and smell and taste and touch.

So let's put the first five senses of the outside world,

Energy flow patterns basically are the knowns.

Then we move to the second segment of the rim.

That would be the internal sensations of the body,

Like the feelings of the muscles and bones or your organs,

Like your intestines or your heart.

And you go through this extensive review of those internal knowns.

You then move the spoke over to the third segment,

Which is the knowns of mental activities like feelings and thoughts and memories and ideas and hopes and dreams and longings,

Things like that.

And then you move the spoke over to the fourth and final segment,

Which is your sense of relatedness to other people and the planet.

So this way of differentiating the knowns on the rim from the knowing in the hub is the essence of the practice.

And what it does is it expands your capacity to hold in awareness,

The hub,

Whatever might come in from the rim.

And this capacity turned out,

As I saw with my patients,

Then with my students who are in the wheel of practice,

Then with their clients,

Then with the 10,

000 person study,

Is incredibly empowering.

And then research later on would come out to show that in the wheel of practice,

The three pillars of research established steps you need to take to develop these positive changes are focusing attention.

You do that in the first two segments.

Opening awareness,

You do that in the third segment.

And cultivating kind intention,

What some people call compassion.

On the fourth segment,

And you even get a bonus thing where in an advanced step,

You bend the spoke around and explore the nature of the hub itself to experience being aware of awareness.

And this also liberates this deep sense of joy,

Of sanctuary,

Of tranquility that is a real resource for people to have access to.

What did you find as far as what did people start experiencing,

Let's say with things like anxiety,

Depression,

PTSD,

Even irritable,

What did you find started happening with some of these people?

Yeah,

What happened was,

If you think about it this way,

Something like anxiety or frightening memories or even mild to moderate depression,

If you think about those as kind of points on the rim that bring all sorts of discomfort to your life,

You know,

In different kinds of ways,

Then when people cultivated access to the hub and the ability to distinguish the hub from the rim,

Then that sanctuary of clarity and joy and really for many people is a sense of love,

Deep gratitude for some it was God.

So this relates to your spirituality notion.

You know,

They started tapping into this liberation from what before had felt like a prison.

They were now realizing that the liberation from that prison was actually something that they could cultivate within themselves.

And we can talk about the science of that,

Which I do in the book,

But here just to stay at the level of the metaphor,

You know,

The metaphor of the wheel is so powerful,

Even this young five-year-old I talk about in the book,

Billy,

You know,

When he was taught the wheel of awareness just as a drawing,

He was able to say to his teacher after he arrived at this new school,

He was kicked out of an old school for beating someone up,

You know,

And he had had a lot of difficulty at home.

And,

You know,

When the teacher,

Mr.

Smith,

Taught him the wheel,

Billy came to her after a recess one day on the yard and said,

You know,

Mrs.

Smith,

Mrs.

Smith,

You need to give me a break.

I'm lost on my rim.

I'm about to hit Joey.

He took my block.

He took my block.

I got to get back to the hub.

And the hub is the source of pausing and choosing a different pathway.

And ultimately that's what Billy was able to create because he had this wheel of awareness drawing and of course the support and connection of his teacher who could guide him toward these new options.

That was one of my other questions for you that I'd love for you to talk about is teaching this to kids because our kids need this.

They really need this.

Oh,

Yes.

Yeah.

Like what would be,

What's the earliest age would you say a child could learn this and really apply it?

You know,

We've seen in schools we work in,

You know,

That kindergarten kids,

Five-year-olds can absolutely use it.

I haven't seen any systematic way that it's been used for kids in preschool,

But it'd be worth a try.

But certainly as young as five,

We've shown that it's,

As you can see in Billy's case,

It's actually quite accessible.

So with kids with maybe even ADHD,

Things like this,

You're finding great results with it?

Well,

You know,

We haven't done a controlled systematic study of kids with ADHD in this setting.

At the research center,

We did other kinds of practices with kids,

Older kids,

Adolescents with attention deficit and saw some improvements,

But that's a different set of studies.

I just feel like the wheel is really empowering.

And just like with that child that is there saying,

Oh my gosh,

I have to make another choice.

Like it's just,

It's empowering for kids and adults.

So to teach this to kids,

I mean,

Gosh,

We need this in all schools.

Free school needs this.

It's easy to teach and it's what's cool about it.

The mind is hard to see.

I call it mind sight,

You know,

You can see the mind,

But it's not usually something you see with your eyes,

But to have a drawing where you can kind of simply draw this out for even a five year old to get is fantastic.

You know,

In the book,

You know,

What I do is I say,

Well,

What exactly is energy flow?

If the mind,

Including,

You know,

Consciousness,

For example,

Is an emergent property of energy,

What is actually energy?

So you get into this really fun and I think useful discussion where in brief,

The physicists who study energy,

Quantum physicists say energy is the movement from possibility to actuality.

And in a very gradual way in the book,

Using my daughter's wonderful drawings,

Maddy Siegel's drawings to illustrate this,

You know,

I walk the reader through what that physics view of energy really means,

The movement from possibility to actuality.

And for example,

At the event for John O'Donoghue,

You know,

We gradually walk through this so everybody could be on the same page about it.

Now in this brief setting here of a podcast,

It's hard to go through that gradual introduction,

But let me just say that when you do read the book and you've read it,

So you know,

You can actually see how if you map it out on a graph,

Possibility could be seen as the bottom of a vertical distribution curve.

So it's where there's openness at the bottom of the graph.

And then if there's the top of the graph would be 100 percent like when I say the word ocean,

You know,

I've committed to a word I'm saying and it's an actuality.

But before I say a word,

I'm resting in this openness of possibility.

And that way you see that energy is this movement from what we call a plane of possibility at the bottom all the way up to a peak of certainty.

And in between those two are what we would call plateaus of enhanced probability.

Like if I say,

You know,

Only words related to water,

You know,

Let's say there's 200 words like that,

It would be one out of 200.

If I say left or right,

It would be one out of two,

Because you don't know if I'm going to say left or right.

Those would be high plateaus.

But if I drop all the way down the plane,

It would be where it would be all of the possible words you and I could share.

Let's say there's a million of them.

So you know,

You don't know which word.

So that open plane of possibility would be where all possible things rest before they become actual.

Now when you think about it that way,

And you look at a 10,

000 person study,

I think what we may be on the verge of really understanding,

And this is why I'm so excited about the aware book because it slowly articulates this,

Is a peak may be a thought.

Just beneath the peak may be thinking.

An emotion may be a peak,

Just beneath the peak may be emoting.

A memory may be a peak,

Just beneath the peak may be remembering.

And if you go beneath that to a plateau,

You would be at like an intention or a mood or an attitude or a state of mind.

And then if you look at the 10,

000 person study and drop all the way down to that plane of possibility,

It matches with exactly what people describe when they rest in the hub,

When they bend that spoke around and just explore the hub itself.

And they describe expansiveness of openness.

They describe joy,

God,

Love,

This sense of deep peace,

Tranquility.

Now these states,

I think,

Mean that the hub may correlate as a metaphor with the mechanism of energy being in the plane of possibility.

And that you can talk about for hours as you're suggesting.

And when you dive into the spirituality of that and the deep psychological implications of that,

Here's what it means.

For Billy,

The five-year-old,

It means that when he was taught the wheel of awareness and just as a drawing could drop into his hub,

That hub is not only the pause that allows you to be aware for whatever reason we don't know,

But it's also literally the source of other options.

So he's not only being aware,

He's resting in an energy state from which other choices exist.

They just haven't been actualized yet.

That's number one.

Isn't that amazing?

It is,

Because you know what is coming to my mind is I would think a child would not be able to do this yet because there's not that prefrontal cortex yet.

I mean,

That's not fully online.

So how does a kid have the ability to pause,

Make another choice,

That executive functioning isn't online yet?

So I'm kind of amazed.

And I think you're right.

There is,

It's an energy that they're stepping into.

It's something else.

That's right.

It's something else.

I think the mind is broader than the brain.

I do too,

100%.

Right.

And this is the thing about it for an individual point of view,

You drop into presence and these other options arise and the natural move would be for kindness and compassion.

But the other thing is that your plane of possibility and my plane of possibility are basically the same because infinity is infinity.

I was just going to say that it's the same.

It's always the same.

And so the client is in our open hub,

Right?

That's where we have it,

But we're differentiated along the rim in these peaks and plateaus.

You're giving me goosebumps head to toe.

I'm realizing this.

I'm like,

It's all the same.

When all of these case studies that you were,

Or I think you said clients that you were working with,

Were having that same experience of peace,

Of God,

Of joy,

It's all the same.

It's all the same.

It's like Pierre-Hilard de Hardin said,

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

We're spiritual beings having a human experience.

So spiritual for some people means connection and meaning.

And what's so amazing about this moment,

Just in our podcast here,

Is that what you realize is that when we talk about cultivating consciousness,

I think what we're talking about is accessing the ability to drop into the plane of possibility,

Which has features of our deep interconnectedness,

Number one,

Where we all share the same plane.

But number two,

When you look at the science of energy,

There's reason to believe that the usual,

What are called Newtonian classical physics rules of large bodies,

Large objects like these bodies we live in,

That those Newtonian rules of certainty and something called an arrow of time actually don't exist at what's called the microstate level.

And that's a quantum level.

And in the book,

I really step by step walk the reader through this so that you can realize that some states of being aware are arrow free.

They don't have a feeling of a directionality of time.

And they feel,

As many people describe it,

Timeless,

Like eternity.

Whereas when you're up on the rim,

You're more in these macrostate arrow of time dependent,

Changing things that are more like Newtonian in our way of living.

So you have these two aspects of being alive that this framework helps us understand.

Do you think it has something to do with letting go of the ego and stepping away from that part of us in order to access that state of peace of God,

Of love,

Of joy?

Totally.

The rim points,

That's from the wheel point of view,

Or from a plane of possibility point of view,

Your plateaus and peaks,

They're learned ways of seeing the self as separate.

Yes.

Now,

One word you can use for that is ego.

I was going to say that's ego.

Yeah,

It's separate.

You know,

From a brain point of view,

People talk about the default mode network,

You know,

When it embeds this autographable sense of self.

What we want to do on the planet is offer each other,

Or what I say is mui-ch other,

Because we're both a me and a we,

We want to offer mui-ch other this capacity to realize the self is not separate,

That there's no reason to define the self,

Certainly by the skull nor the skin,

Because energy and information flow are not limited by skull or skin.

And then we can use awareness to come out of what you're calling ego,

What you would call a separate self view,

These rim points,

If you want to use the wheel metaphor,

Or if you're doing the three P graph,

These plateaus and peaks that tell you I'm separate,

I'm separate,

I'm separate.

And I believe that because everything in the outside world has been telling me that,

But I feel like this isn't really true.

And then to drop out of that,

And instead,

Drop into the plane,

Which is the hub,

And realize how deeply interconnected we all are.

Love that.

I like that we.

That's great.

Because it's a simple word.

But you'd be amazed,

For example,

When you teach this to kids or to,

You know,

Adolescents in high school,

You know,

And say,

Look,

You've been told a kind of lie that who you are is your skin encased envelope of a body,

Where actually you're much broader than your brain and bigger than your body.

And this means you don't ignore your body.

You should sleep your body well,

Feed your body well,

You know,

Treat your body really with a lot of respect,

Enjoy your body.

All these things are the me of the wax of your candle,

If you will,

But you are more than the wax.

You are the light beyond the wax alone.

And that is our we connection with each other.

So the way you integrate a self is you don't get rid of the body experience or the me.

You say you are that and you are also your relationships with other people on the planet.

And that's what we mean by the term we.

It's an integrated identity.

So true.

And we get so bought into the identity of the body and who we are and what we look like and what we have and all of this.

And we forget who we really are.

And that ego,

You know,

And I just had the unfortunate experience of my aunt just passed away in June and I was there at her death.

And it was so it was fascinating as someone I was very close to.

But it was fascinating to me.

You know,

She was so alive,

You know,

The last week it was a sudden illness.

She had cancer.

She just found out.

So it's very,

Very,

Very quick.

And she could speak.

She was in no pain.

But boom,

Six days after I'd gotten there to be with her,

She passed.

So we watched her and had a great time with her for that week.

But when she passed,

It was amazing to know that that consciousness,

That's what I would call her soul,

Something that our liveness is gone.

And it really is a garage for the soul,

This physical body.

And it just dawned on me in that moment again.

And I remembered this is not who we are.

What's on the outside and what we have and that spark of light that was within her is gone.

It was gone.

And then to hold that body after she was gone,

I was like,

Wow,

It's like,

Why do we give so much attention to the body,

To the outside,

You know,

As human beings?

And it's we're all caught up in that ego.

Well,

You know,

Yeah,

And an additional way to look at it that just builds on the powerful things you're saying and my condolences with your.

Thank you.

And I don't know what your aunt would have thought about this.

But another way to also think about it is we live in kind of these two levels of reality.

One is this level called Newtonian,

Which is large objects,

Macrostates,

You know,

Large molecules into bodies,

Into airplanes,

Into the planet.

And these are these are governed by a certain set of rules that Sir Isaac Newton figured out three hundred fifty years ago.

So we live in a body and you come to believe that that is the only reality.

But it turned out and now we've known for about 100 years that microstates like the condition of an electron or a photon,

Pure energy actually is not governed by Newtonian rules.

It's governed by instead of certainties,

Probabilities with all sorts of other elements.

For example,

The idea there is no era of time at the quantum level or that space.

Does not impair the relationality of what are called entangled or coupled energy patterns.

So that's now been proven.

It's called entanglement or non locality.

That experience of quantum levels of reality you can get when you do the wheel of awareness practice and drop into the hub.

And so when you say,

Well,

Dissolve your ego,

What I would say is that it gives you direct access to an absolutely true aspect of reality that is the quantum level of reality in which we come to really appreciate the deep interconnections among many things.

We come to realize the timelessness of things and you come to realize the relativity of the skin encased body as a source of identity.

So you say,

Wow,

I'm actually much more than this body.

I'm my relationships with other people.

And you can feel that with your relationship with your aunt.

So the mind is both quantum in this interconnected aspect,

But it's also Newtonian.

So you have this embodied aspect of it and you have kind of both that you live and it can be very confusing sometimes.

And one woman in a workshop,

We were doing the wheel of awareness and we were discussing this quantum and Newtonian level of things.

She had me go to Sir Isaac Newton's house and do the wheel of awareness practice around the apple tree where he figured out gravity.

Wow.

Yeah,

It was amazing.

Amazing.

Yeah,

It is.

Like I'm pitching myself like what's going on?

But that was amazing.

And another woman in a workshop started crying.

She said,

All my life,

You know,

I thought I was crazy because I couldn't understand what was going on.

I had these two levels of reality,

But you've now helped me see.

She's crying,

You know,

That I'm actually saying.

And that's what's been so empowering about this wheel joining together with everybody.

Because when you do the wheel of awareness practice,

It's a very simple practice.

You can do it every day.

I do it every day.

And that's a daily practice you do by differentiating these elements on the rim and bending the spoke around and basically clarifying the distinction of the hub from the rim.

When you learn the 3P graph,

You understand you're tapping into the plane of possibility and you're acknowledging these plateaus and peaks exist.

And when you get in a car,

You've got to get ready to drive your car and press on the brakes.

When you see a red light,

That's all plateau and peak stuff.

That's fine.

So we're not favoring the plane or the hub over the plateaus and peaks that is the rim.

You're really saying an integrated life has all of them.

But many of us get lost on the rim.

We get lost in these plateaus and peaks that we've been taught and so become imprisoned by them.

And we don't have the sanctuary of the tranquility,

The clarity,

The God,

The love,

The sense of interconnection that the plane of possibility is a window into.

So window its presence from which this integration can naturally arise.

When people start to practice this,

How long does it take for them to actually start seeing results?

I do three day workshops where people start seeing changes in their sense of things and this everyone's difference or everyone has a different way of describing that during that three day immersion.

So I can tell you this literally with thousands and thousands of people,

I mean,

10,

000 systematically.

But now way over that,

You know,

People feel it readily.

Now,

You know,

You want to sustain this integrated state.

And so like for me,

I love doing the wheel every day.

I mean,

I look forward to it every day.

It's different and you know,

But it's very it's very enlivening.

And so but you see practices,

You see it having an effect pretty much right away.

And the research is really clear.

They've done studies of people who do an immersion in doesn't have to be the wheel practice,

But you know,

In a practice that might have focused attention or open awareness or kind attention,

One of the three pillars.

And you see changes even after a day of practice changes in the brain,

You know,

Because there's a fundamental principle where attention goes,

Neuro firing flows and neural connection grows.

So when you're doing this in an integrated way,

You're creating more integration in the brain.

And this happens relatively rapidly.

Now,

Just like brushing your teeth,

You don't just brush your teeth one day and say,

Oh,

I brushed my teeth today and now my teeth are clean.

I don't ever have to brush again.

So you saw an effect right away.

Right.

Why don't you brush every day?

Three times a day.

Yeah,

I think it's similar to that.

It's like,

You know,

Come on,

This is a form of mental hygiene.

It's like you have dental hair.

So don't think that because you got an immediate effect that that means you just do it one time.

And the good news is,

I mean,

Here's the thing about the were book.

You know,

This is something you're empowered to do.

You don't have to buy a gadget.

You don't have to plug it in.

You don't have to,

You know,

Update anything.

You learn this practice and you cultivate it in an empowering way for yourself.

And it's a gift that keeps on giving because it allows you to not only cultivate all these aspects of well-being,

But it allows you to be present for life.

And that's basically where resilience comes from.

And,

You know,

This is why I'm so excited about,

You know,

You having me on.

And I'm so excited about seeing how people can simply soak in the practice,

Understand the science,

See how to actually in a practical way apply it in their lives.

And then,

You know,

It keeps on building on itself.

So I'm really grateful that we can have this conversation.

I am too.

And this,

The model that I have called the adult chair,

This fits perfectly into it.

And for everyone that listens to my show,

If you want to learn how to sit in your adult chair,

You need to buy this book and practice the wheel of awareness.

This is key.

I really feel that.

Because again,

It's simple.

And people ask me all the time,

You know,

I teach meditation classes.

I do all of these different classes,

And I try to simplify things for people.

People,

They want it broken down.

And people like things to happen quickly.

So when I hear you say,

Even in a day,

People will start noticing change within,

Beautiful.

This is exactly what I'm looking for.

So thank you.

And I'm so grateful again to have you on and not only for what you're doing,

But I think about I put you in the category of Bruce Lipton and Deepak Chopra because you guys are taking science and breaking it down and bridging it with spirituality and really breaking down these concepts and making them easy for all of us to better understand and not only understand,

But believe in and understand the importance of presence and awareness.

So thank you.

I'm just grateful for that as well.

My pleasure.

Thank you so much.

It's been an honor.

Yeah.

So tell us,

Please,

Tell us what your website is.

You have any upcoming workshops?

What do you have coming up?

So people can,

Of course,

Well,

Let's talk first of all,

The book aware,

It drops the 21st of August.

Yes.

So it's called aware.

Yes.

The science and practice of presence.

Pre-order now.

You can pre-order right away.

You can do it.

I saw it's on audible already and it's anywhere.

You can get this book.

So do this now.

But what is coming up right now that people can sign up for if they want to learn how to do this or anything that you're doing?

Yeah,

Well,

There's a couple of things.

You know,

There's a week long program at Esalen in Big Sur where there's still some openings in the first.

I'll be there for two weeks.

But in the first week,

There's openings.

So you can come to Esalen.

That's a fabulous place.

We've never been there.

Oh,

I've heard all about it.

It's on my bucket list.

Check it out,

Michelle.

So there's that.

There are a number of different events up in Northern California and Southern California.

There's a Facebook live event.

If you go to our website,

You'll find all these resources.

There's some things in New York in October.

So if you go to drdansigel.

Com,

Drdansigel.

Com,

Go to the events section,

You'll find all this stuff.

If you preorder the book,

You'll find a bunch of fun resources you can get related to the book.

There's all sorts of courses you can take with the book with us,

With Sounds True and other groups,

All sorts of ways of diving deeply into this material and making it your own.

I think I just saw you on Sounds True on Instagram the other day.

Is it already popping up?

I swear I saw that.

Very well,

Maybe.

Yeah,

I think it is.

Yeah,

I think it is.

That would be a great one to do online.

So okay.

Well,

Again,

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Dr.

Dan Siegel,

This was an honor and we really appreciate your time and all of your wisdom with us today.

Again,

Everybody,

Aware of the science and practice of presence.

It is a must,

Must read.

So thanks again.

Thank you.

Today's podcast is sponsored by Audible.

Get your free audiobook download and 30-day free trial at www.

Audibletrial.

Com forward slash the adult chair.

And today's book that I am recommending is,

Of course,

Dr.

Dan Siegel's book.

This is called Aware,

The Science and Practice of Presence.

This is an amazing book.

I've had the pleasure of reading it already.

It does come out August 21st,

2018,

And you can pre-order it now.

It is amazing.

And you will be able to now master this wheel of awareness that honestly will put you deeper into the adult chair.

This is a must,

Must,

Must listen to book.

So again,

For listeners of the adult chair,

You can get this book for free.

So download again,

Audibletrial.

Com forward slash the adult chair and you can get your free 30-day trial.

Thank you to everyone that has subscribed to the show.

And I'm Michelle Shelfant and I will see you right here next time seated firmly right in the adult chair.

Reviews

I really loved how deep this was. It gave me a new perspective about things. My initial reaction was this is way over my head, but then I challenged myself to listen deeper, with my intuition, and it really helped me to view some things about myself in a beautiful new light!

Wonderful thank you 🙏

Wondrous. In every sense of the word! 🙏

Thank you Michelle for such an awesome podcast. I am so excited to get the book!!!

I always look forward to listening to The Adult Chair. Your efforts are so much appreciated xx

Definitely going to listen to the book soon! Thank you

Thank you I will definitely purchase Aware.

Fabulous talk Michelle!! I will be listening to this one again and buying the book!!
Thank you for having such a warm and insightful guest on.
🐾🌸🙏🏼🌟🌻💐🙏🏽💕🌷✨💖🌺💫