Dr. Dan Siegel on The Wheel of Awareness Practice

In this episode of the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast, Sean Fargo speaks with Dr. Dan Siegel—Harvard-trained physician, psychiatrist, bestselling author, and pioneer in the field of interpersonal neurobiology.

Dan shares how his journey from medicine to psychiatry led him to redefine what we mean by “mind.” Together, Sean and Dan explore how mindfulness, relationships, and brain science intersect—and how integration is the foundation of well-being.

They also dive into Dan’s groundbreaking work, including the Wheel of Awareness meditation, and his newest book Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, which bridges neurobiology with the Enneagram to reveal how personality patterns shape our growth.

This conversation blends science, story, and heart—reminding us that true integration is made visible through kindness and compassion.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔ How Dan Siegel went from skeptic to leader in mindfulness research

✔ Why the mind is more than just what the brain does
✔ The four facets of the mind: subjective experience, consciousness, information processing, and self-organization

✔ Growth edges: how to move from personality patterns toward wholeness

Episode Chapters:

00:00 — Intro

02:18 — From Medicine to Mindfulness Research

07:05 — What Is the Mind, Really?

12:40 — Integration as the Basis of Well-Being

18:15 — The Wheel of Awareness Practice

32:08 — Personality, the Enneagram & Wholeness

💡 Learn more about Dr. Dan Siegel’s work:🔗 drdansiegel.com📘 Books: Personality & Whole Wellness Therapy, Wheel of Awareness

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Hello, welcome back to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. I'm Sean Fargo. Today I have the great pleasure of sitting down with someone who shaped the way that we understand the mind and ourselves. I met Dr. Dan Siegel about 14 years ago, maybe, at Srock Meditation Center. He spoke, I think, a few times while I was there about some of his new books and offerings and teachings around the mind, awareness, our relationships with others and with our kids. I found Dan to be one of those rare teachers who really is very grounded and also heartfelt. There's this integration of heart and spirit and groundedness that is very palpable and just in hearing him speak off the cuff and talking about neurobiology and the science. He's extremely smart. He has a very strong intellectual gift as well. He just blends deep focus, care for others, care for self in a way that I found very inspiring. Dan Siegel is a Harvard-trained physician who went on to complete postgraduate training in pediatrics and psychiatry at UCLA. He spent decades exploring how relationships and the brain interact in shaping who we are. Dr. Siegel's worn many hats over the years. Scientist, clinician, educator, storyteller, founder, author, dad. As a National Institute of Mental Health research fellow at UCLA, he examined how early attachment experiences influence our emotions and our behavior. He later co-founded UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center and serves as the founder and director of education at the MindSight Institute. Through these roles, he's helped bring mindfulness and interpersonal neurobiology into mainstream science, which my wife and I are very grateful for. He's also offered tools that anyone can use to understand their own mind and improve their relationships. You may know Dr. Siegel from his seminal book, The Developing Mind, or other best-selling titles like Mindsight, The Whole Brain Child, or Brainstorm. He has a new book out that I'm excited to talk about called Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, which sounds like it's a book about the wisdom of the Enneagram, the neurobiology of our personality patterns, and how we can use this ancient framework as a way for understanding ourselves and others through a compassionate lens. His book, The Mindful Brain, examines how mindful awareness can harness the social circuitry of our brains to promote well-being. And his more recent work, Aware, guides readers through the Wheel of Awareness practice, which I'm also interested in speaking with you about. I actually just completed a Wheel of Awareness meditation that you led about an hour ago and found it very, very helpful for awakening to my experience on many levels, and eight levels, I guess. All told uh his writings have been translated into more than 40 languages, which is a testament to the universal relevance of his work. Beyond his impressive resume, he's really able to translate complex science into accessible stories that touch the heart. He speaks about how true integration made visible is kindness and compassion. And that's something that I think about when I think about you, Dan, is how you have this emphasis on full integration, which I think is missing in certain circles. And I think it's just a really helpful reminder to emphasize full integration and like understanding what integration means. And I love how your emphasis is that true integration is visible through kindness and compassion and not just, say, an intellectual ability to describe things or understand things, but really live it through the heart. In his concept of mindsight, he teaches us how to attend to the internal workings of our own mind so that we can move beyond reactive loops and become the author of our own story. The sense of agency, I think, is really helpful to be reminded of. I've personally been in Fermo's teachings. I know many of you have too. If you've never heard of Dr. Daniel Siegel, I hope that this conversation is revelatory. You can find him, drdansiegel.com. We'll have links in the show notes and in our emails and all the ways that we're reaching you through this podcast. Dr. Siegel, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I'm really thrilled to have you here.

SPEAKER_01: 5:16

Thanks, Sean. Thanks for having me. And feel free to call me Dan. It's fine with me if it's fine with you.

SPEAKER_00: 5:22

Yeah, that's fine. Thank you. That's my dad's name and my middle name.

SPEAKER_01: 5:26

And I'm happy to do that. That's not too many Dan's in one life.

SPEAKER_00: 5:30

Yeah, I'll try to keep it sorted. Dan, I'm curious. You've done so many things that we could talk about, but I'd I'd like to start by exploring a little bit about your introduction to mindfulness or meditation, how you found these practices, and if you had this curiosity about the mind as you were growing up, and what led you to become really interested in this?

SPEAKER_01: 5:57

Yeah. Well, the answer is kind of it's a funny answer. I didn't meditate until relatively recently. I I've been married for almost 40 years, and my wonderful partner and spouse, Caroline Welch, she was meditating from the moment we met, you know, she had moved to Japan after graduate school and learned to meditate in a Zen monastery. And when I met her in the early 80s, you know, she was meditating every day. And I just thought it was a kind of a funny thing. I didn't do it. And I just, once we got kind of in a committed relationship to each other, I thought, well, this is just what you do. You kind of people do unusual things and you just kind of adjust to however it is for the day. But as time went on, of course, mindfulness meditation became a focus of research and being trained as a scientist and also a physician. You didn't hear much about meditation back in the 80s or even really the 90s. But the research really began in earnest and was revealed in the 2000s. And I was asked to be on a kind of a panel with a fellow who was in a seminal position of bringing mindfulness into the public eye, a person named John Cabot Zinn. And this was in 2005. Now, at that time, I was starting to hear about mindfulness a lot and mindful meditation in particular, mindfulness meditation and mindful awareness practices. And before that, I had developed this kind of psychotherapy way of being, which asked, like, what is the mind and what is mental health and stuff like that. And part of that journey was to look deeply at mental life. And I had had this word, mind sight, that I had coined back in 1981, probably something like that, when I had dropped out of medical school and my professors didn't seem to see the mind. And that really distressed me enough to get me to stop. But then when I decided to go back, I realized the mind was very real. So I had this mind sight word and this mind sight approach to becoming a physician and then in pediatrics, noticing it made a difference in how families dealt with kids with illnesses. And then when I transferred to psychiatry in 84, which was exactly when I met Caroline, my soon-to-be wife, you know, I had been developing this kind of way of thinking and ultimately got trained in science of attachment, which looked at parent-child relationships and mindsight was key to understanding why some kids developed secure attachment and some didn't. And that was now we're talking about 1989. So this was a time, you know, when mindfulness as accepted practice of meditation in Western scientific terms was not around. Um John Kebat Zinn had started his clinic in 79, right when I had just about to drop out of school. So it could have been that I would have gone to study with him, but I had other things I was doing. And so so these are the years. So in terms of my history, I, you know, it wasn't until developing this thing called the wheel of awareness in the 90s that I started realizing that you could do these reflective practices to integrate consciousness. And I had been doing that for many years before I ultimately was on this panel with John Kabot Zinn. And even before that, met a fellow named Jack Cornfield, and he and I got to talking about mindfulness. And so I started learning it, learning about the whole Buddhist approach to meditation through Jack, actually initially, and then through John, and John invited John Cabot Zinn invited me to go to a week-long silent retreat, which was really my first training in meditation that I wrote about in a book called The Mindful Brain. So that's kind of the history. It's relatively recent, less than 20 years now, that I've been formally meditating on a regular basis.

SPEAKER_00: 10:05

Yeah, I didn't know that. That's really interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 10:08

So it's very funny because Caroline wrote this beautiful book called The Gift of Presence, Caroline Welcher's book. And so she's been meditating a long, long time, over 40, way over 40 years. And so even though people think of me and the family as like the mindfulness guy, she's really she's really the one with the experience. I mean, mine's 20 years, hers is you know, 40.

SPEAKER_00: 10:29

Double, yeah. Yeah. I'm curious what your take on what the mind is and how that's say evolved or developed over the years through your own meditation practice, as well as from your learnings from John and Jack. Yeah. If your understanding has changed over time.

SPEAKER_01: 10:49

Yeah. Well, the first thing to say is that the word mind is super interesting, isn't it? We we see it all the time in different things like mindfulness or like the mind sciences or mental health derivatives of the word mind. When I was in medical school and people and my teachers didn't seem to focus on the subjective experience of their patients, like the meaning of an illness in their life, like the feelings they were subjectively having, like the memories they had. All those ways we have an internal felt experience, which is what subjectivity means, were being ignored by these really smart professors. I was at a research medical school, and you know, it was kind of, well, I'll say it mind-boggling that the mind was absent. And it's ultimately when I dropped out, I just couldn't stop thinking about this question. Like, what was wrong in medicine? And over time, it's a long story, but the short conclusion of that long story is I came to realize that the mind was very real and really important, even if you just left the phrase subjective experience to a way of describing what the mind is. So I ultimately went from medical school to pediatrics to psychiatry. And even in psychiatry, the branch of medicine dealing with the mind, we didn't have any definition of the mind back in the 80s, short of what Hippocrates said 2,500 years earlier, which is that the mind is what the only what the brain does. So, you know, I love neuroscience. My neuroscience teacher, David Hubel, won the Nobel Prize when I was in school with him. And I thought neuroscience was the bomb, but it wasn't the end story of what the mind is. So, having a background in biology and trained in, you know, biochemistry and medicine, you know, I came to this mind field, you know, with a real curiosity about how did those life processes that we can study in the material of the body and the processes of the systems of the body, including the nervous system, how did that relate to our subjective experience? But then you can ask the question, well, how does someone even know they have a subjective experience? And then you get to consciousness. So consciousness can be simply defined as how you know what your subjective experience is. And that knowing we call being aware. So there's the knowns of the actual subjective experience, and there's the process of knowing it. So those are two facets of the mind that are descriptions. They're not definitions. And the third was information processing. So, you know, back in the 80s, I was kind of obsessed with information systems and, you know, why some people thought one way, why they thought another way, why they led to suffering. And I started noticing that everything was kind of either chaos or was rigidity in the different presentations patients would have, whatever their diagnosis might be. And so that led me on a search when I became a training director to try to define the mind because I had asked 40 scientists to come together to be in a group discussion about what was the connection between the mind and the brain. And no one could agree on the mind story, they could agree on the brain. And so I had to give the following definition beyond subjective experience, consciousness, is information processing, a fourth facet of the mind could be defined, and this comes from mathematics, as the embodied and relational, emergent, self-organizing process that is regulating the flow of energy and information. And so that located the mind both within the body, including its head brain, and within relationships. And it also pointed out that it could define the mind as the mathematically established property of complex systems, which is called emergence, so that subjective experience, consciousness, information processing could be emergent aspects of energy flow. But the fourth facet of mind could be defined in a way that you could then define mental health. So you can look at this process called, it's an emergent process called self-organization, look at its properties and amazingly predict, as we have in the last 33 years, you know, what future research on the mind would demonstrate. And also it's consistent with, or you can use the word concilient, meaning when independent pursuits of knowledge come to the same conclusions, indigenous teachings, contemplative teachings, scientific findings, findings from art, poetry, music, all these things kind of come together into one framework that uh we call interpersonal neurobiology, but it's not such a great name, but it was a name I gave to it a long time ago, so it stuck. And so, yeah, so you can define the mind in that way. The embodied in relational, self-organizing, emergent process that is regulating the flow of energy and information.

SPEAKER_00: 15:48

Thank you for sharing that. That's one of the more concise answers I've ever heard and descriptive.

SPEAKER_01: 15:54

Well, thanks. And it it it it offers a direct link to saying how do you optimize self-organization? And there's an answer. And then that question, how do you optimize self-organization, gives you actually a roadmap on how to promote mental well-being?

SPEAKER_00: 16:10

Yeah. So would this touch on the wheel of awareness as a method for cultivating awareness and cultivating the mind? Or is there something else that more say pertinent here?

SPEAKER_01: 16:25

No, well, this well, you know, what what happened in clinical practice back in, you know, the early 90s when this was all kind of starting to become kind of clear for me as a therapist, a young therapist, was, you know, I never, I never could kind of, I don't know, I don't know how to say this. I could never really feel into the different interventions I was taught: cognitive interventions, behavioral interventions, psychodynamic interventions, narrative interventions, EMDR, all the different things with letters to them. You know, as a therapist, I was learning all those things, but I said, where's the foundation that connects all these different modalities to each other? So I was really kind of frustrated, I gotta say, with our field. And when I became a training director, I thought, you know, for young trainees, maybe I could try to find some way of, you know, articulating a common ground across all these different modalities so that you could then instead of trying to offer yet another psychotherapeutic intervention, instead offer kind of a conceptual framework. So that was the birth of asking about concilience, asking where was the common ground across all these different approaches? And then going beyond psychotherapy to mental health, I'm trained as an attachment researcher, you know, to parent-child relationships, looking at organizational functioning. I'm trained as a consultant for that too. So, so what came up was basically saying the mind can be seen, as we're describing it, as this emergent property of energy flow. You could define a healthy mind as a mind that optimizes self-organization by basically cultivating both differentiation of elements of the system, meaning you allow them and encourage them to be their unique essences of difference. So differentiation means to help create differences that are fundamentally there and the essence of the parts. And then you would link those differentiated elements. So that definition, the linkage of differentiated parts, is how we define a word that came to be central to our understanding of health, which is integration. So two fundamental ideas came up. One was that integration was the basis of well-being, and that when that was blocked, you led to chaos or rigidity or both. And that explained the whole field of mental health, which was kind of really exciting back in the early 90s. And the other was, you know, whether you're looking at education, parenting, ultimately contemplative practices, self-discovery in the quotes, or psychotherapy, they all were involving awareness. So that experience of being conscious seemed to be necessary for intentional positive change. So when you put those two concilient ideas together, consciousness is needed for change, and integration is needed for health. And then you could ask the question, what if you integrated consciousness? That's where that comes from. So back in the 90s, I had a table that looks with a it has a central glass part, and then it has an outer wooden rim. And I would ask my clients, my patients, to get up out of their chair or off the couch, come around the table, and I would say to them, you know, let's integrate consciousness. And they would look at me, what are you talking about? And I said, Well, integration is the linkage of differentiated parts. So let's differentiate the different aspects of consciousness with the metaphor of this table. And one of my patients said, I don't like the word table. Let's call it a wheel. So I said, okay, let's call it a wheel. And there's a center, okay, if it's a wheel, there's a hub. And then there's an outer rim. And this thing that's holding up a table looks like a spoke. So the spoke would be a metaphor for attention. The center part was the metaphor for awareness, the knowing of consciousness. And the rim would represent all the knowns. And then we just moved metaphorically the where the location of that attentional spoke was to differentiate the different knowns from each other. And the whole act of moving them from the center hub of awareness was differentiating the knowing from the knowns. And amazingly, Sean, what was kind of a surprise, I was just kind of curious to see what would happen. People's anxiety would start to reduce. Mild to moderate depression would improve. I was helping people with trauma work with their traumatic experiences in a much more effective way. Sadly, two of my patients were dying of terminal illnesses and were in a panic about dying and leaving this incarnation. The wheel, I was kind of shocked, but it kind of dissolved their fear. And so that was just like amazing. So I had just been preparing and ultimately a few years later, I would start publishing, published this my first book. So people asked me to teach from the book, The Developing Mind. And I would teach my students who were therapists to do the wheel. And they found it helped themselves as individuals. They started teaching it to their clients, their patients. They started getting better in the same ways. So we're talking now about the late 90s, early 2000s. And so I was just kind of fascinated with the whole thing. And then, you know, I get this phone call saying, Do you want to be on this, you know, meeting with Houston Smith and Jack Cornfield to talk about spirituality and mental health? And I said, I don't know anything about spirituality. They go, Oh no, you should come. That's where I met Jack. And then after meeting Jack, I was asked to go to another event with the psychotherapy networker, Rich Simon, a wonderful person, asked me to be on a panel with John Cabot Zinn and Diane Ackerman, who became two close colleagues. And Diane, one of my closest friends. And so, you know, I would meet these people who I didn't know before. And, you know, this is the most hilarious thing. If you listen to the audio recording of this from 20 years ago, I'm on this panel with John and he goes, You don't know anything about meditation. I said, I know. I don't claim to. I said, but I'll tell you, I read your two papers and your two books to get ready because that's all that existed back then. I said, and listen, you know, your findings for mindfulness meditation look identical to my field's findings in attachment research. And I don't know exactly why, but you know, in the attachment research world, it looks like it involves integration in the brain. And I just wonder whether, you know, that will be the ultimate finding when you study the brain and the outcome of your mindfulness meditation. But I can tell you attachment is a relational experience of tuning in to the internal world of, you know, another person. And I just wonder if you're tuning in to the internal world of the inner self there. And so with these two ideas, integration is the basis of health and consciousness and needed for change, this wheel of awareness, it got to be called, was something that seemed to be useful. And as I, you know, was meeting Jack Cornfield and John Cabotzin, and finding that attachment research led to an insight about these integrative areas of the brain that allowed you to see inside the child's mind. And that the question was raised with John on this panel, which was hilarious. Might it be that you're using the same attunement to focus your attention on the internal world of the inner aspect of who you are? So that there's a kind of, you know, befriending yourself as you befriend your child, you know, as you tune in and connect and are open or compassionate and kind to the inner world of your child for secure attachment. Maybe you're developing a kind of secure attachment with your own inner aspect of who you are. So that became the big question. And, you know, John encouraged me to do my first meditation retreat, which I did with a hundred other scientists. And then I started teaching regularly with Jack Cornfield. And that was, you know, in 2022, well, 2005. So this is when everything started changing. And I entered the world of mindfulness meditation sort of through the back door because I wasn't really trained as a mindfulness meditator. I was just an attachment researcher with a fascination with psychotherapy and attachment that it just became a natural wedding of all these fields.

SPEAKER_00: 24:44

Yeah, it's really interesting to hear the how this all evolved. And it's yeah, beautiful to hear. I would love to go back and hear that recording with you and John and hear you in real time talk about how your work is complementary to each other and you know, yielding some of the same insights and also birthing new things to, you know, research and explore. Totally.

SPEAKER_01: 25:10

Well, it was March 2005, and in March 2025, 20 years later, John was given a lifetime achievement award at the same meeting, and I was giving a workshop there. And so we we had time to hang out. And I don't think we did anything on stage together, but we certainly had a great dinner together, just the two of us reflecting on these last 20 years of personal lives, our family lives, and you know, what's happened in the world and what's happening in the you know, world of mindfulness meditation work. And uh yeah, so it's an incredible journey that he's been on for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 25:46

Yeah. Well, I mean, both of you have this scientific pedigree, you know, in this academic training, you know, at Harvard and University of Massachusetts Medical Center that got his PhD from MIT. There you go. Yeah. And so, you know, for our culture and our society, it's one thing if a former monk says something, it's another if there's, you know, a PhD or Harvard trained physician saying something that, you know, maybe very similar, but it it's received differently. And I'd love to, you know, just put it out there that if that could be a great documentary, like your March 2005 meeting of the minds and how that helped shape the future of mindfulness, along with your work with Jack and others.

SPEAKER_01: 26:32

Yeah, well, that that would be a fun documentary to watch. I I hope it'll be humorous. No, no, no path has a kind of direct line, and it's certainly been a wild journey. And I'll just make sure to honor when I I mentioned that meeting in 2005. And if you do listen to the tapes from then, John and I were on a panel with Diane Ackerman. That was the formal panel. But I had already taught that morning or the day before, perhaps, with a dear friend named John O'Donohue, who was an Irish Catholic Eastern poet. So the three of us, Diane and John Cabotzin and myself, invited John O'Donohue up on the stage. So you'll hear in that recording, I believe it was that panel, because we did a few panels. You'll hear the four of us up there. And we ultimately did a three-day workshop called Mind and Moment, where it was the two Johns and Diane and myself. And at the drdansiegel.com, I think you can get access to it. Maybe Mindsight Institute. I'm not sure where it's located. But anyway, it's a hilarious three-day gathering. And John, who very soon after that sadly passed away. So he's no longer with us, but he was at the height of his rogueness, just eloquence. And it's us, the four of us, besides that one little panel, teaching together. And it was, it's just uh I I've watched it since, and it's just a beautiful reminder. You have to listen carefully because John, John Kevin Zinn, had a hoarse voice. He had just done the MBSR mindfulness-based stress reduction course at Mount Madonna, and I was there as a student, just learning from him. And then he developed this hoarseness, and I had the rental car, and I he and I drove from the Santa Cruz Mountains up to San Francisco, where we did mind and moment. So I went from being his student to then being on the panel with him for those three days, where he has this hoarse voice. So you listen really closely. But I think in some ways people listened even more closely because he was whispering, you know, and it's a really it's a touching three-day thing. So that that's a fun if you want to just look at things like that.

SPEAKER_00: 28:37

Yeah, yeah. I think it'd be a great documentary. I do I remember this correctly that you've been known to from memory recite poems from John O'Donahue? Or am I?

SPEAKER_01: 28:50

You know, no, I I don't have a great memory for that for reciting memorized things. I did the first thing ever like uh a few months ago, but no, that wouldn't be me. It might be somebody else who who's memorized. I I can quote John's, you know, little phrases, but I have a hard time committing to memory long passages. Sure. Yeah, so that wouldn't be my my thing.

SPEAKER_00: 29:13

So, you know, I think John Cabotson teaches mindfulness trace mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR, and and he does recite poetry from memory, for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 29:25

In in a beautiful, beautiful way. John Cabotson.

SPEAKER_00: 29:27

Yeah, love that. Yeah, you know, and and I think he's heavily influenced from say the four foundations of mindfulness, of body, feeling tones, mental volition, and the dhammas, which I think there's some similarity with one of your parts of the wheel of awareness of interconnectedness. Yeah. But in terms of the wheel of awareness, you have the first five senses, the sixth sense of the interior of the body, the seventh sense of mentality. Activities, eight sense of interconnectedness. And I'm just kind of wondering if there's any connection here between the parts of the wheel of awareness, the four foundations of mindfulness, but also this say broader phrase that you've mentioned as a part of the mind, which is energy flow. Yeah. Like when I look at the wheel, and I know you said wheel because someone didn't like the word table. And so it's table of awareness. Yeah. But like I'm just thinking of energy flow and our awareness being able to go with the flow of energy in these different types of sensory stimuli occurring in real time, where you're flowing with the present moment, whether it's with us, you know, one of these eight senses, and whether your ability to flow with that energy is the mark of, say, a healthy mind, not feeling like there's a barrier to the present moment, and thus diverging into chaos or rigidity. And so I'm I'm just kind of curious if you could kind of riff off those.

SPEAKER_01: 31:14

Yeah. No, that's great. That's great. First of all, I want to just honor this word concilience that E.O. Wilson talks about, which means, you know, independent pursuits come to similar discoveries about the nature of reality. So the wheel of awareness, you know, was developed in the 90s by simply asking the question: where does energy flow? And how can we differentiate those locations? So the first segment of the wheel was when it's flowing from outside your skin-encased body. And we pick up that energy flow through the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the skin. And literally, if you just picture it like physically, like spatially, you've got all this stuff, whether it's photons coming in as light from outside the body, or you know, the movement of air molecules for sound, or chemicals, which is chemical energy coming into the nose or tongue for smell and taste, and then pressure on the skin. So I know it sounds simplistic, but I'm kind of a simplistic person. So the first is, you know, well, what if energy comes from outside the body? Then using the body as a reference point, you go, well, what if energy is flowing inside that skin and case body? And maybe, you know, being a physician and knowing a little bit about neurology and knowing that the registration of these sensory inputs as energy flow are quite distinct in the brain and the head when they come from outside the body through these senses versus when they come from the interior of the body. So we call that interoception. And in science, we name that the sixth sense. And that is related to proprioception, you know, the movement of the body. And this internal sense of the body is basically all energy flow. So then I just put that on a second segment of the rim, meaning, all right, outside the body, okay, inside the body. And then there was the whole bunch of stuff that's likely happening inside the skull in the brain. And, you know, we name these as emotions, which of course are related to bodily sensations, but they're much more intricate and complex and relate to memory and relationships and all sorts of meaningful-based things. So emotion is different from a body sensation, but it's connected to it. And then we have thoughts and memories and ideas and hopes and dreams and longings and desires and mental models and all this kind of stuff that you could just name mental activities. I mean, in the end, it's all mental activities, but just to put a common name to it. So if you put a location to that, you'd probably say it's the brain in the head. And I say it that way, meaning you have a brain around your heart and a brain around your intestine, too, that is a spider-like web of parallel distributed processing neurons in the intrinsic nervous system of the heart and in the extensive nervous system around the gut. So as Antonio Damasio says, you have three brains. So for our discussion, I'll just say the brain, because we usually mean the one in the head, but there are actually two earlier brains in other locations. But these mental activities are probably predominantly energy flow up inside your brain, in the head. So there's that. And then what happened to me as a attachment researcher, this is before I kind of got very focused on like where's the self and stuff like that, which we can talk about in a bit. But then I started realizing, you know, you go from outside the body to inside the body to okay up in the head. But there's also a kind of relational field that you're immersed in. So you're not just receiving it from outside the body, it's almost like the whole more whole way where you are immersed in energy flow. That's both you and the outside world. And those relationships, I don't, I didn't think of a better word to call them, but your relationships. So I call it a relational sense. And for fun, I just made it the eighth sense, where the mental life would be in the seventh sense. And so that was the fourth segment of the rim. But that would also be a kind of inner and outer relational energy flow thing of your connections. So we could call it interconnection, you know, with this relational world, you know, and you can feel into that, just like you feel any of these things. So yeah, so those that became the four segments of the rim. You know, I wasn't trained in Buddhist conceptualizations, but people have told me that it overlaps with the way the Buddhist framework works, which shouldn't surprise us if we're all looking at, you know, reality. Why wouldn't we come up with similar, you know, ways of dividing it up? So yeah, so I think it's consilient with it. As far as I'm not a Buddhist scholar by any means, but Jack Cornfield, who is, you know, he tells me, oh, this is consilient. And I've had an opportunity to teach with other scholars like His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and he also sees it as consilient. So, you know, I'm I'm happy. That's really exciting. But it was, it was, it was created independently from later on. I would learn about Buddhist ways of thinking about things.

SPEAKER_00: 36:19

Yeah, that's really neat. Thank you for sharing all that. So you have a relatively new book out called Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, in which you talk about the nine say types of the Enneagram and how there's, say, I don't know if consilience is the right word here, but there's some mapping of how our neurobiology may inform how the patterns are created. And can you talk a little bit about, say, the from a scientific perspective, like how you've uh how you view the Enneagram as being a system worth studying and how neurobiology maps onto our patterns?

SPEAKER_01: 37:05

Yeah. Yeah, that's great, Sean. Thank you. You know, it's funny having both the concepts being discussed here, but also kind of historical moments of them. So around the same time, I was meeting Jack Cornfield, and then after that, John Kabazin, and I'd already become dear friends with John O'Donohue. Around that same time, this is like the first five years of the new millennium, I got a call from David Daniels, who is one of the was, he passed away a few years ago, but he was one of the world's leading Enneagram teachers. So for those people who aren't familiar with it, you know, Enia means nine and gram means figure. And this nine-pointed figure has been studied for some people say thousands of years, some people say hundreds of years, certainly since the time of Gurdjieff. And then Ochazo, Oscar Ochazo and Claudio Naranjo in Chile developed based on that nine-pointed system, a system of personality that for sure is 50 years old, five, zero. So it's relatively new, but some people would say, oh, it's ancient and talked about forever. But the system of personality is certainly new. And David was a teacher of it. And, you know, he said, Look, you know, I've read Your Developing Mind, which is a book I wrote that published in 99, and this was now just a couple years later. He said, But you've left out temperament. And do you want to see a possible way of understanding how temperament persists into adulthood? And, you know, I'm always interested in learning new things. I had heard a little bit about the Enneagram, and I was very skeptical of its validity. He invited me to come as a scientist, as his guest. So I took the time off, a week to be in this retreat center, Val Rosa, near Stanford University, where David was a clinical professor of psychiatry. And, you know, I met his daughter, Denise Daniels, at our first meeting and then at this workshop. There was also Laura Baker, who, in addition to Denise, was trained in the and they got their PhDs studying the genetics of temperament and personality. And then I met another researcher, Jack Killen, who was there, who was a deputy director of the National Institute of Health. So these were kind of heavy-hitting scientists who were all fascinated with this, to me, what was like a dubious personality system. But I was kind of struck hanging out and living with everybody for a week, that there was really something there. And so the five of us, David, Denise, Laura, and Jack and myself, we would hang out and go, you know, it may not be what the Enneagram lore is saying this is all about, but maybe there is something that this is about and it's valid, but not for the reasons that it's happening. So we began a 20-year journey to try to, you know, see was there any concilient aspects of other branches of science. And, you know, in 2000, when was it? It must have been 10, we published our findings initially in a book I wrote called The Mindful Therapist, and Jack published a paper too. And then around 2017, Carol Dweck, who was a professor, is a professor at Stanford in psychology. She's usually known for the growth mindset work. She came up with a proposal that was virtually identical to ours, but she hadn't heard of ours and she didn't have anything to do with the Enneagram. She just did meta-analyses of studies, academic studies of personality. So that gave us the feeling like, wow, maybe, you know, we were analyzing 50,000 narratives of people who said they kind of lived in these different ways that fall into nine different groupings. We don't use the word type because we don't think there is such a thing as a personality type, but there's a personality pattern, which is a cluster of values. So, anyway, so we I called Carol Dweck up and I was super excited to find that she had nothing to do with the Enneagram or our work, which meant that she found it independently. So we could honestly say it was a concilient discovery of exactly the same framework in its core proposals. So that just pumped me up as an interpersonal neurobiology person to say this is not just a framework about the Enneagram, since Carol DeWett came up with the identical core aspects of it. It looks like it is a framework of human development. And so when we published the book recently, Personality and Wholeness and Therapy, it really was sure to give to the Enneagram world a possible developmental neuroscience view of the Enneagram. Absolutely. And my colleagues are deep in that world. I'm not really in that world much. I'm more in the world of mental health and education and parenting. And so for me, this is just a framework that kind of stands on its own. It was inspired initially by the Enneagram. But once Carol Dweck found her findings, it made me pretty excited with the idea that this was just a model of human personality that the Enneagram fits into. But we don't need to be still trying to prove the Enneagram or anything like that. It's just something coming from two different sources of research data: one narrative analysis of people in the Enneagram world, the other academic pursuits of the understanding of temperament and personality. So, and we can talk about its relationship to mindfulness, it is super fascinating because, in some ways, personality can be seen as a filter that keeps you away from presence. And so, as you work your way at what we call a growth edge to understand your particular temperament and how, because you have a body that gets activated, especially in response to challenges or threats, you have your own proclivities on how that happens, which I'm happy to describe in detail if you want, but certainly in the book we do. And then you have a particular growth journey that gets you to mindfulness more effectively, especially if you've experienced adversity. So Bessel Vanderkook or Dick Schwartz, for example, in the mental health world regarding trauma, are excited about this framework because it makes you realize there's not just one way a person approaches responds to trauma. There's probably nine different patterns of approaching trauma. And this gives you, for yourself as an individual, but also if you're working therapeutically, it gives you a way of understanding how to help people more efficiently and effectively.

SPEAKER_00: 43:12

Yeah, it's funny. I I went to see a counselor this morning to help me through some of my own challenges, mental health challenges. And when I got home, I was preparing to speak with you, and I saw that you had written this book related to personality patterns in the Enneagram. I'm like, oh yeah, I should revisit my Ennegram type, quote unquote type. And I'm a nine, or some people would say I do a nine as a part of reactive pattern. Yeah. And and it like paralleled everything that I had been working on with my counselor. Like it's like, wow, like I re every time I forget about the Enneagram, I'm humbled by revisiting it and realizing that the issues I have are often just kind of mapped out and spelled out for me.

SPEAKER_01: 43:58

Well, Sean, we can, if you're up for it, I can kind of give you a download of our model. And usually you have to do it nine times, you know, to describe. But since you've volunteered where the Enneagram brought you, we can see if the PDP patterns of developmental pathways is what that stands for. If we can see if the PDP framework fits with your own lived experience. If you want to, but I don't want to put you on a spot. I I love being on the spot. That's great. Okay. Thank you. Well, you're welcome. But so so, in brief, our model proposes this that we start out with an experience of wholeness. And this experience is either, you know, before the Big Bang and we were just all one potentiality. So if you want to go back billions of years, or if you want to go back just decades and go back to being in the womb, you know, there was a time we were at one with the womb. There was no separation, there was no need to do anything. There was simply being, which you can call effortless being. And this effortless being, people might describe as whole. We were whole. Then you're when you're born, no matter how fantastic your parents are, life is different, right? You gotta, as we say, work for a living in a do-or-die situation. If you don't do the breathing thing, you die. If you don't do the eating thing, you die. All these things are threats to your existence. And what we discovered was that in the brain, in the deepest parts of the brain, the brain stem, which forms before birth, you have temperament formed. That is the proclivities of the nervous system, the propensities that they have in terms of their intensity and their sensitivity, just as two examples, is very different. And so you can have even identical twins with two different temperaments. Now, depending on the configuration, and I'll describe the configuration for you in a moment, you know, your response to being out here and working for a living in this do or die situation will be very different. So it's easy to remember with the following acronyms. These are mnemonics to help you remember it. A B C Agency bonding certainty. Agency is the brainstem-based motivational drive for embodied empowerment to get your bodily needs met. And when it's frustrated, there's frustration and anger. When it's intense, it's fury. When it's satisfied, there's this feeling of completion. And all of these, you get a feeling of wholeness. For bonding, there's a drive for relational connection. And when that's not met, there's separation, distress, and sadness. And again, when it's met, you get this feeling of wholeness and connection. And for the C, the certainty is a drive for safety and predictability. And when that's not met, you get fear and anxiety. When it's extreme, terror, just like an extreme of sadness might be despair. Okay. So now you say, well, those are three, A, B, C, and the feeling when you have that certainty met is safety and again wholeness. So it's all a drive to wholeness, we think, across the lifespan. It never ends. And what we think personality is, which is defined as persistent patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior that exist across stages and situations of life. But it persists. It's not just a temporary state of being, it's a tendency of the way we act. We think you adapt to your own temperament and that becomes your personality. And, you know, this is why you have a whole book about this, but to say it in brief, you know, if your attachment is difficult, you're more likely to go to the lower level of functioning of a given personality pattern than if your attachment was secure, in which case you go to the strength space. But at any age, you can move your attachment from non-secure to secure, and you can move a low level of personality functioning, which is full of vulnerabilities and weaknesses, up to a strength space, which is how you have the gifts of that particular personality. So if we match the ABC with another thing we found in these 50,000 narratives, which is some people are inward in their energy, some people have their energy focused outward, and some people have kind of this toggling back between inner, outer, inner, outer, inner, outer. You can see these differences. So we saw this in the narrative, and it turns out Mary Helen Imordino Yang discovered these in 2011. She published it. People are inward, people are outward. Or as she even said to me in a lunch we once had it for her birthday, I was celebrating. She said, Yeah, and there's a toggling between the inner and the outer. And that's exactly what we found in the narrative. She found it in the brain. So those brain systems involved in that level of attention seem to be also brainstem mediated and seem to be present before birth. So what we're saying then is that temperament is what you've got independent of what your response is to your parents. And the level of the adaptation to your own temperament, whether it's low levels of what we call integration or high, will be shaped by your parenting environment, but not the particular pattern you're in. So let's do your pattern, just to give one example. If you are in the agency grouping and your attention is both inward and outward, your energy is going both outside your body and inside your body, and it's toggling back and forth, then that we name as agency dyadic, dyadic meaning inward and outward in your attention. And what we found is that the adaptive strategy there, you have three kinds you can choose from. One is you upregulate your motivational drive and the emotions associated with them. Another is you instead of experiencing expressing them and upregulating them, you're actually containing and channeling them as you downregulate them. And a third option for you in the research for this emotional regulation is to shift out of it altogether so that you are reframing it and redirecting it. So what we found is that for agency dyadic, which will correspond to the enneagram nine, the toggling experience of inward outward and inward outward, when there's a drive for embodied empowerment, leads to the adaptation of the shifting mode, where people in this pattern tend to have, when they're in the, especially the vulnerable side of it, they tend to have this drive to basically try to resolve conflicts, to try to have people harmonize what's going on in the outside world and to shift out of their own needs for getting their own empowered needs met, but also to make sure that they don't feel anger and they don't feel the frustration and instead are focused on just harmonizing everyone around them. And so the growth edge there is to get in touch with what your body's really feeling, to give yourself permission to actually own your own desires and needs, like where you want to go to dinner or what you want to do, and rather than be of service to everyone else because you're harmonizing all the conflicts that are going on and mediating all those disagreements to really try to take a stand on your own two feet. And that would be kind of the growth edge work. You know, one of my best friends from long ago is in this grouping, and it was super helpful when we went over this model for him to see why he was so busy making sure everyone else's needs were met way before his own. And so he was sacrificing standing up for himself and saying, This is what I need, instead of always just going along with the flow of everything. So that would be the agency dyadic that I would name as the harmonizing pattern. And I don't know how that sits with you, Sean.

SPEAKER_00: 51:42

Yeah, it's I feel that's very accurate for me. And I liked how you framed the work that, you know, people like me who do this pattern, that you know, there's these growth edges that we can work on. And I liked how you framed those growth edges.

SPEAKER_01: 52:00

Exactly. And it's a growth edge toward wholeness, which we're all on all our lives, we only do it in nine different ways, you know, and one is not better than the other. And every single one of these patterns has an incredible gift to give to the world. And in fact, as you move toward the higher functioning of your own pattern, you want to be able to access as best you can other patterns as well, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 52:23

Yeah. You know, a lot of people listening and watching right now are mindfulness teachers, coaches, therapists, counselors. And, you know, many of us want to bring mindfulness to our clients. And one of the beauties of this work that you're researching and sharing is that forgive me if I misspeak here, but you know, we all have different patterns, and there's, you know, nine here illustrated, and that we can learn what some of the patterns are from our clients or students, and we can meet them where they are and say more in a more accurate, compassionate way, where we're offering them, say, mindfulness practices that are tailored to their growth challenges. And so I I would invite people who are interested in not in say cookie-cutter mindfulness practices for everybody, but rather bringing relevant practices to individuals for healing and growth, and to use the Enneagram, to use Dan's book, Personality and Wholeness and Therapy, as possible resources to understand how we can meet our clients in a more personalized, relevant way to support their journey.

SPEAKER_01: 53:48

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you know what's exciting about it, whether you come from the Enneagram perspective, or if you're interested in like the brain or developmental neuroscience, or you're really interested in attachment, you know, and how that affects us, the PDP framework lets you bring all those together into one perspective. So it's been super exciting to think about growth edges like you're describing, and that they are specific to your temperament. And it also, you know, kind of like the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer that's often said called the Serenity Prayer. You know, it gives you the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, which probably is a lot of your temperament, which is deep in your brainstem. It gives you the courage to change the things you can. So you can totally change two things: your attachment stance from non-secure to secure, and the level of your personality development from low to high levels of functioning. And then it gives you the wisdom to know the difference. So some if people think, oh, I'm just gonna become a complete blank slate, and no, well, as long as you have a body, you're gonna have a temperament and you know it'll give you certain proclivities. What you want to do is transform that personality from a prison it may have become to a playground of possibility and connection.

SPEAKER_00: 55:08

Just drop the mic there. That's really well said. Thank you for sharing all that. Dan, thank you so much for your time today. On behalf of me and my wife, our community, thank you so much for all the work that you've done. I I see your prolific teachings and writings and and work as an extension of your compassion and care. I love how you have this, you know, curiosity for how humans have developed and how we can support each other to wholeness and really being able to distill all of this information in ways that are easy for us to understand and to practice. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you so much for your time, and thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01: 55:56

Sean, thank you for your work, and it's been an honor to be here with you. Thanks so much to everyone.