We're Out of Time - Dr. Daniel Siegel: Mental Health, Connection & AI | Guest Co-Host Patricia Freebery, LMFT

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

On this episode of We're Out of Time, host Richard Taite and guest co-host Patricia Freebery, LMFT, Executive Clinical of Carrara Treatment Wellness & Spa, sits down with renowned psychiatrist, bestselling author, and interpersonal neurobiology pioneer Dr. Daniel Siegel for a wide-ranging conversation on human connection, consciousness, relationships, and the future of mental health. Drawing from decades of research, Dr. Siegel discusses how modern culture, social media, and emerging technologies are shaping the way people connect with themselves and one another. He explores the role of awareness, integration, and relationships in overall well-being, while sharing insights from neuroscience, psychology, and human development.The conversation also examines the rise of artificial intelligence and the growing trend of young people forming relationships with AI companions. Dr. Siegel offers his perspective on how technology may influence human connection, emotional development, and social interaction in the years ahead. In one of the episode's most memorable moments, Dr. Siegel reflects on a near-fatal accident in his youth that temporarily altered his sense of identity and ultimately influenced his lifelong exploration of consciousness, awareness, and the mind. From neuroscience and relationships to AI, identity, and the nature of human connection, this conversation offers a fascinating look at some of the most important questions shaping modern life.

We've gone down a pathway of mistaken identity that happened starting 2,500 years ago with Apocrates, the father of modern medicine, who said, our mental lives are only up in our heads. That was wrong. It's much bigger than the individual brain. And, you know, I've gotten a lot of pushback, but, you know, it's just more emotional than anything else, but it's not academic, really. If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call one call placement. That's 8888-8-8-3-1-1581.

And if we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. Please, we're out of time. One-call placement is affiliated with Carrera Treatment, Wellness, and Spa, and One Method Treatment Centers. Today is a very special episode because we're joined by Dr. Daniel Siegel, one of the world. the world's leading experts on the brain, relationships, trauma, and human development, and who I believe is the world's greatest living psychiatrist. Dr. Siegel is a psychiatrist, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine,

bestselling author of numerous books, including Mindsight and the Whole Brain Child, and the founder of interpersonal neurobiology, a groundbreaking framework, that has transformed how clinicians, educators, and mental health professionals understand healing, attachment, and human connection. At Carrera Treatment, many of the principles that guide our work align closely with Dr. Siegel's teachings, which makes this conversation especially meaningful to me. And so today, co-hosting with me is Patricia Freeberry, the executive clinical director at Carrara Treatment. Patricia has spent more than two decades helping individuals and families recover from

trauma, addiction, and emotional suffering. She's widely regarded as one of the most respected clinical leaders in the addiction treatment field. And not only brings a unique perspective to today's discussion, she also happens to be the best clinician I've ever met. Dr. Siegel, it is truly an honor to have you with us. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much.

Doctor, I'm going to jump right in, okay? Sure. You've spent decades studying the mind, relationships, trauma, and healing. When you look at where people are struggling today, what concerns you most? You know, what concerns me most is that our modern culture has given us a message that who you are at your core is your, your individual identity. You know, Richard, you're Richard, Patricia, you're Patricia, I'm Dan, and we're in these separate bodies.

And that's where we have our subjective experience, our perspective, what we act on behalf of agency. And if you put all those together, it's the acronym SPA, the spa of who we are. And I think that that message, while you may say, of course, who you are, your identity is the individual. That's who you are. But if the self is actually this spa of experience, we are missing out on the relational aspect of who we actually are. And that relational aspect has a feeling to it, a subjective experience, a perspective.

And even when you act on behalf of something. So I think that's actually one of the biggest traumas is the unrecognized lie that your full identity is your individuality. And when we try to live through that, people are not only disconnected and alone, they find it hard to find joy and happiness and a feeling of belonging. It's just so true. I know that you have done a lot of, in your earlier years, anthropological work with studying some ancient wisdom teachings. And I've had the privilege to work with some cultures in South America and Africa and the Native American tradition. What reminds me is their phrase, Mitaquia, Oia, San. we are all related.

And in the Mayan culture also, I just love a phrase, one guy will be at one side of the forest yelling out, in la quay, and the other guy will yell, Al-A-King, I am you, you are another me. And at the core, as you talk about how the integration is just embedded in these indigenous cultures. How have we lost that in ours? You know, I think there was a time not so long ago,

a few hundred years ago, when people started thinking in these kind of reducing kinds of ways, it certainly happened in science, but it also happened in modern culture where we could say, who you are is just this bodily skin-en-case vessel, and you need to live life according to that master belief that you are your body. Instead of, as you beautifully just said, and this wisdom traditions of indigenous cultures and also deep contemplative practices when you do deep meditation inward, you realize, whoa, inward is just part of a much larger story. And indigenous cultures from all over the world have been teaching this for thousands of years. And modern culture has just forgotten that truth. Well, I'd just like to expand for one moment and just, you know,

even just speaking most recently in our own traumatic culture since, say, the COVID days up till now, how we became even more compartmentalized on our machines of learning, so to speak, the computers, the phones. And the implication that that may have, not only for parenting the lack of attumment with our children, as we're now interfacing with phones instead of our children's mirror neurons, what's happening and what are some of the implications for that? Yeah, well, even before we get to the question of artificial intelligence, just the way COVID affected us by separating us, I think you can see the huge stress that that created, that we realized it's much better together, even though we may have taken that for granted initially. And then, you know, social media, ironically, has become one of the most antisocial things that exist because people project.

onto the images, an imagined happiness and joy and how you're doing, that especially for young people who are raised this way, they see these images and they say, ah, I'm not feeling that kind of joy. My life is full of hardships. I mean, I have joy, but I also have the pain and, you know, and social media is like curating false images of manufactured images. purity of joy, you know, which is not the way we live. So people start feeling inadequate. They feel like they're being left out. They feel like they're missing something and they're not achieving the kind of joy that they could use. So, you know, I think this is a moment with COVID, with social media, and now even with artificial intelligence, there's a moment for our human

family to be realizing what are the essential needs we have for well-being? And you can call that mental health. And in my work, I've tried to point out that the mental of the word mental health is a mind that is fully embodied, not just in our heads. And it is fully relational, not just in our skin and case bodies. So when I say mental health, it's the same as relational health. it's the same as emotional health you know they go together because the mind isn't either inside of us or in our relationships it's both you know and then once you realize that you can understand how you can weave together beautiful wisdom from indigenous teachings that you're talking about patricia and also you know looking at the deep science of like how the brain functions and things like that so

you know, I think this is a moment where while we understand really can get agitated, because it's what's called VUCA, it's volatile, meaning it's changing fast, it's uncertain, meaning you wake up in the morning, you really don't know how the day is going to turn out. Complex, meaning it has this quality of what's called non-linearity, which means a small input at one point can lead to a huge and essentially understanding, unpredictable outcome. And A, ambiguous, means even if you knew all the facts, you just don't know what it all means. You know, what does it mean? We know everything. Okay. So now what? So that's VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguus. And it makes us feel agitated because we want some kind of

certainty about something, you know. And so for a young person, especially these VUCA times are hard, for parents or teacher, for anyone who's just trying to take care of young people, it's really painful because you want to provide, you know, the most nurturing, safe, predictable kind of experience for youth. And these times really don't allow it. When you add artificial intelligence to that, you know, we have this very powerful moment where we need to see these, I think, as challenges that are also appropriate. opportunities to remind ourselves what really matters.

But with artificial intelligence, you know, kids are developing relationships with these agents, these artificial intelligence agents that are asymmetric in that the artificial intelligence agent doesn't have its own needs. So kids are preferring to have a relationship with their AI agent rather than another human being who has their own needs. And so, and they're not available to. 24-7. So, wow, I think, what do I choose? Oh, yeah, my agent's always there for me and doesn't,

doesn't demand anything from me. So, you know, kids are going to get used to that kind of relationality, which is different from social media. So artificial intelligence is presenting a whole new world of challenge for keeping relationships front and center for our well-being. It's a bit horrifying, actually. the prospect of it, because the word uncertainty, I think we're all grappling with these increasingly uncertain times. And really, for the parents to create, maintain their own secure sense of self, create their own coherent narrative, so to be the firewall, so to speak, between their own issues resolved or unresolved and not passing it on as a legacy to our

children increasingly difficult in these very vulgar times, uncertain times to maintain that. And what are the implications for even trying to attain that brain wave state of an integrated brain considering the body politic these days? Yeah, you know, I do think there's a way out, you know, and I do think that there is a way, and I don't want to be just like an optimist, but, I mean, I think this is realistic optimism. You know, I think we've been going on a path before social media, before the pandemic, before artificial intelligence that was in the wrong direction. And so I actually see these challenges as a wake-up call to really identify what really matters. So one thing that really matters is an internal sense of integration that you're pointing out, this way of being in touch with the inner world, which has been kind of leaving us in modern culture.

and at the same time, be aware of the importance of compassionate, connecting relationships. So, you know, I mean, those two things, the inner and the relational, then can guide us to how we use this artificial intelligence, how we use this moment of social media, challenging us in so many ways, to have people go inward. And in the inward journey, what's been fascinating for me as a scientist and a therapist is there is a way of bringing resilience through this integrative practice where you basically take consciousness and you pull it into two parts. The knowing of consciousness, like if I say hello, and the knowns of consciousness like the word hello. So when you can distinguish the knowing, which is something called awareness from the knowns, magic starts to happen inside the individual. And when they come from that, I call it a hub of a wheel. So the knowing is the hub and the outside rim or the knowns. When you learn to cultivate this distinction between the knowing and the known, when you bring that open, spacious knowing to your relational connections to people and to nature,

even in the face of artificial intelligence and even in the face of all the difficulties we're having with social media, you know, it gives you a kind of internal compass that I think is going to have us go in the right direction. And so I'm actually very hopeful that these challenges can be seen as opportunities for growth of our human family rather than, oh my God, this is a disaster and it's all terrible. Well, of course, potentially it could become that. But we can actually see it as, okay, you know, what's the dance we do today of this challenge rather than, oh, my God, there's a threat. And my whole system is on threat mode. You can actually take the stance. I'm turning this state.

I'm into a challenge mindset rather than a threat mindset. And that's all the difference. Challenging us to become the fullest version of our humanity, perhaps returning to our creativity, our genuine selves, instead of trying to be a facsimile of the intelligence of what we call AI. I like to say, OI, organic intelligence, instead of just incorporating AI. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think there's a real intelligence to the looking at integration as the fundamental source of well-being. And it's quite simple. It's like differentiating and linking. and in the linking of these differentiated aspects of the system,

like me walking on this walking desk, my left and right leg are differentiated from each other, but I can walk in a balanced way because they are linking, and as they link, they don't lose their essence of a different left and right leg. So it's not the same as homogenous or blending. Integration is this fascinating way

where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So other words, people have used Buckminster Fuller used the word synergy. And so you get the synergy that arises, like the wetness of water, emerges from the interaction of the elements of the water. It's not in any single water molecule. And in that way, we come back to where we started, you know, that individuality gets rid of the relationality. And once you're lost in individuality, you lose the emergence. You lose that synergy. you lose the integration because you're excessively differentiating without linking.

And that ultimately leads to chaos and rigidity. So it's a simple formula. Without integration, you tend to, like almost like a river, you tend to go either bank of chaos or the bank of rigidity. And that's where we're seeing in our culture now, the human, arch human family culture is chaos and rigidity. You're saying it even on the planet in terms of ecosystems. and that comes when a system, the complex system that we live in, is not allowing differentiation and linkage. It's amazingly that simple, you know, and yeah, I mean, even like today, right before I came on, I had to have, you know, I grew up here in Southern California, so I have all sorts of sun things. So I had to have one surgically removed.

So I have a big bandage on my head. And I said, oh, my God, what am I going to do? You know, I'm going to be on camera. and it'll totally distract the viewer to look at this bandage on my head. It's fine. It's not malignant or anything. It's just had to be removed. And so I said, I'm going to wear my father-in-law who passed away recently.

I'm going to wear his hat. And so it will honor Neil, my father-in-law, while also not distracting you as a viewer to keep on looking at this bandage, which is what you expect to see on somebody's head. You know, so we do that because I'm thinking about the experience of the viewer. you know i don't particularly want to wear a nice hat on a warm day but i'm doing it thank you for that and we love it that's how that's how we do you know that's how we do life we we integrate in these ways and you can't predict when you're going to need surgery or whatever you're going to do and you just you go with it you know my my audience would have just thought it was a keeper oh there you go

it could be a Kippa. A Kippa would be in the back, which is not where the bandages, so that wouldn't work. All right, let me ask you a quick question. Yeah. You just mentioned an integrated brain as one of the strongest predictors of well-being.

Yes. What does that actually look like in everyday life? Well, it looks like a number of things. It looks like the ability to be aware of your inner state and be able to calm it down and regulate it. So even if a challenge comes in, someone upsets you on traffic or someone says something terribly

in an elevator or whatever, you can react, but then you come back to baseline. So some people call that equanimity. It's kind of a chievy equilibrium without thinking you have to act like a robot. You're not like an automaton. You can have human reactions,

but then you come back to baseline. So that's equanimity. It's not like living like. like you're numb, you know. So that's one thing. Another thing is the ability to be aware of what's happening in your body and to be able to feel it fully. So you can feel bodily sensations, you can feel emotions.

And this inner awareness called introception, you know, is a direct pathway to empathy and compassion and even inner regulation. So that's really cool. An integrated brain also means you can tune into other people, so you can feel their feelings without becoming them. So this is where integration is not the same as mirroring. You can feel the pain of someone who's just gone through, you know, like a neighbor of mine is going through some terrible medical issues.

And I can be with her husband. I can be with her. I can feel their pain. But it's not going to help them for me to become them. You know, I can stay with their pain or other things that are going on close people in my life, you know, right literally in these last few days. It's been like the medical nightmare week. But, you know, you just stay with you. So this is what today is bringing. So an integrated brain allows you to do that, you know. It also allows you to have,

you know, what's called auto-noetic awareness, which auto just means inner. And noetic means knowing. You can go back to your past and make sense of the past and have a coherent narrative of who you are. And it also allows morality and it allows access to intuition. So that's just among many functions that when we say an integrated brain, it's literally, you look at the structures in the brain and how they're differentiating linked. And then you look at the functions of the human being with that integrated brain. And a study in 2015 by Smith and colleagues showed that the best predictor of every measure of well-being was how integrated your brain is

by looking at something called the connectome. And we have techniques. Like on my website, we have people do the wheel of awareness, which does three things. It strengthens attention. It opens awareness, and it builds kindness,

kind intention. And other studies have shown when you do those three pillars, those three things, strengthening attention, opening awareness, and building kindness, you integrate the brain.

Dina, I want to tell you something. It just came up for me. completely separate and apart. We have run our center on your work since the day we opened. Really? Oh, yeah. Are you kidding?

Even the last center we had when Patricia was the clinical director. She runs it based on your work. And that's why I wanted her to be on this podcast today. and first of all, she's forgotten more than I'll ever know. So there's that. But I just wanted she's forgotten more than you ever know or she remembers more than you've forgotten. Listen, both. Either way is good for me.

Oh, one more thing. One more thing before we go. I don't know if you remember this. My son, it was either for my son or daughter's birth, either you or you, or you. You're the president of your company, a woman, a CEO, I think, sent me one of your books. And in the inside, you inscribed congratulations on my son being born. Oh, wow. It was the nicest.

It was so considerate. It was beyond. And I wanted to thank you for that. Thank you. It was me. My pleasure, and Madam Caroline Welch, my wonderful CEO and life partner. partner, and that's beautiful. I'm glad we sent. Okay. It was Caroline Welch.

Yeah, there you go. She's just through the door here. I'll tell her. That's great, Richard. Thank you. That's very sweet. That's so cool. Well, Richard's so right. We have incorporated so much of your work or attempted to in our work with addiction and people struggling with centering and getting back to their authentic selves. If we're trying to do anything, it's this, is to have and teach others to have a felt experience of you feeling me. Just really helping to connect again, you know, to quote Bruce Alexander, Dr. Bruce Alexander, the opposite of addiction is connection and the connection is everything. And it's, you know, obviously embedded in your work, the integration with I-Val.

And so we're really at the forefront, the very forefront, the very very, very first thing we do with our clients is welcome, you know, let's help you feel safe, secure, let's get you reconnected with yourself, and that comes through the connection with others. But I, you know, I think a lot about, you know, addiction, of course, being symptomatic of what's happening in culture generally. I often look at them as the canaries. People struggling, they're the canary in the mind. They're just coming back, giving the temperature and the reading of what's happening globally, what's happening with, you know, culturally. What are the consequences of this separation? You alluded to earlier, but I look at it as we're now almost, what, 8 billion plus

bodies and souls on planet Earth. If we're having a siloed experience in our nervous system, what, I'm so happy to hear how optimistic you are about that with some tools and ways through that. But in the short term, what do we do? What do we do? What do we? do to help people to get out of that siloed experience. And then if you would talk also about what you call the plane of possibility, which I find so beautifully poetic. Yeah. Well, those are two very related aspects of your question.

I mean, one is the fascinating finding that I think has been taught in indigenous cultures for of thousands of years. So it's not new and contemplative cultures that look inward with prayer or meditation have also uncovered this reality, which is that while we may think who we are is these bodies that are doing the meditating or praying, that in fact who we are, if you just put that in quotes, is much bigger than the body, certainly much broader than the brain. So, you know, know, I think the thing that connects the plaintiff possibility, which I'll describe in a moment, to this question of, you know, where do we go from here, bringing people some kind of sense of an inner compass that will help guide them in these VUCA times and bring a feeling

of well-being and belonging that you are doing in your centers. The connection, I mean, this is going to sound strange. And when the path, way toward this was coming up, I never knew where it would lead and never, I never would have thought it would have led to where it ultimately led. But, you know, originally I was just trying to, I was a young academic and I was just trying to have a bunch of my old teachers and their teachers. And I brought 40 scientists basically together from my research straining years, together in a room. And I said, you know, what's the connection between the mind and the brain? And everyone could say something about the brain, but no one had a definition of the mind. And so

back then, 1992, you know, I was kind of struck by that because I was just a young professor. And I figured somebody from psychiatry or psychology or all these different fields that had something would say what their definition of mind was and no one had it. So they, were really getting kind of upset with each other because they were trying to describe what their life's work was about studying the mind, but we're kind of, I think, shocked to realize no one said what the mind actually is. So I asked them to come back one more week. And in doing that, I had to spend that week just like mad trying to figure out, what am I going to say to these 40 teachers of mine now, colleagues of mine, about why we should meet.

to discuss what's relationship with the brain. On the one hand, this organ in the head and its connections with the body, and this thing called the mind, are they just the same? Is it true what Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, that the mind is just what the brain and the head does? Well, that didn't seem like a big enough story to answer lots of questions about our mental lives. So ultimately, it's a long story, but the short version is, when an anthropologist talks about the mind,

she's talking about something happening in a culture. When a sociologist talks about mental experience, they're talking about what happens in a group. You know, when a psychologist who studies, let's say, emotion or memory or something, is talking about mental processes, they're talking about something happening inside of the skull. And certainly a neuroscientist,

when they're studying mental life as it relates to the brain, they're studying something happening inside of the body, you know, inside of this skull-en-case brain with a major focus. So the question is what links those different perspectives? So if you take the point of view, which is what I did back then, that they're all correct, what would be the common ground? Let's just assume these devoted, smart, caring people who couldn't communicate with each other, really upset with each other,

what if they were actually talking about the same thing, but they didn't know it? And so I went for this long, long walk on the beach, and I looked out at the water and the waves were coming in to the shore. And I thought, well, this is really interesting because, you know, waves are a form of energy. And if I look at the swelling ocean, you know, 100 yards out, and I believe that the, that wave is now 50 yards out, 20 yards out, 10 yards out, 5, and now crashing on my feet. And I believed that the water I saw rising and falling out there is now crashing at my feet. It would be totally understandable that I would believe that. And I'd be completely wrong.

So then I thought, well, what if these scientists are like very understandably seeing this concrete nature of stuff? But they're missing the deeper reality, which is that it's energy that is really what I'm seeing 100 yards out. And that's the same energy crashing that's being translated through the movement of molecules. But it's not the same molecule. It's not the same water. If you put dye way out there, the die would not be coming 100 yards to get to me. It would just be the energy.

So I said, okay, well, then what is this energy business? So that just started a whole journey to say, and I started reading strangely that week, math books on what are called complex systems. It's a long story, but the bottom line is in 1980s, mathematicians had determined that something called a complex system, which has certain characteristics, but water would be an example of it. Clouds would be another example. They have something called the emergent properties. And some scientists felt very uneasy with the word emergence. They even called it emergence smirgence. I heard one person a very bright, wonderful writer say the other day,

emergence is just like waving your hand and it's what was the insulting term he used. It's some insulting term. I can't even remember that what it was because I was so sad that a smart person like him would be so short-sighted. You know, if you were looking for wetness and you were a classic, journalist in this guy's case or scientists who reduces things to basic elements you'd say well water is wet water is made of h2l molecules so i'm going to find the the wetness in this h2 o molecule now i've isolated it here i have this single h2 molecule oh i can't find it must be in the hydrogen the h no i guess it's in the oxygen the oh no it disappeared water doesn't exist it would say something like that and the sad thing would be

is that scientist who's reducing things to their fundamental elements would miss the fact that it's the relationality, the interaction of the elements, the water molecules, and in the interaction is arising, emerging in a synergetic way, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Witness. And then you say the witness is in the relationality of the water molecules to each other, and you'd be absolutely right,

and you'd be talking about emergence. That's all emergence is. So someone who says emergence schmergence has no idea about, as Buckminster Fuller said, the nature of the synergy of reality where it's the relationality of stuff that gives rise to something that allows the whole to be greater than the sum of its part. That being said, what I said to the group the next week was that the mind could be an emergent property of energy flow and that in a culture you study energy flow within a community of people, within sociology you study in a group,

and within neuroscience, what we do, because I'm trained in neuroscience, you know, is we study energy flow inside the brain. My teacher of neuroscience, David Hubel, won the Nobel Prize for discovering in 1981, as the prize was awarded, he discovered with Torsten Weasel, you know, that the way energy streams through the nervous system changes the structure of the brain itself. So it was natural for me,

given my training with David Hubell, to say energy flow is what the brain is about. It's how the brain grows. Anyway, but if you're an anthropologist and I've been trained in anthropology, also, you know, you study how energy is being shared in what's called communication patterns

that have symbolic value, right? And so, anyway, I went back to the group and said, what if the mind is an emergent property of energy and one of those particular properties is called self-organization. So basically the bottom line of all that is the mind could be defined as an emergent self-organizing aspect of energy flow that is both embodied and relational. One of those is self-organizing and that means it's regulating its own becoming and that set up a whole framework called interpersonal neurobiology. The group went on to meet for four and a half

years. And since then, because that was over a third of a century ago, there has not been another definition of the mind offered anywhere, as far as I can tell. And that definition has predicted all sorts of future research from other people. So it wasn't like proving its own, trying to prove its own validity. And we would just say it's been supported by a ton of research. And so that definition has been really powerful because what that means in terms of your question, Patricia, is that we're at a place now if that definition is correct. And, you know, I think it might be. You know, that's just my personality, there's always doubt everything,

but I think it could be. And if it is correct, then what that means is that we've gone down a pathway of mistaken identity that happened starting 2,500 years ago with Apocrates, the father of modern medicine, who said, our mental lives are only up in our heads. that was wrong. It's a much bigger story. And indigenous cultures and contemplative teachings have been teaching.

It's much bigger than the individual brain. And, you know, I've gotten a lot of pushback, but, you know, it's just more emotional than anything else because it's not academic, really. You know, the mind is broader than the brain and bigger than the body. And we've been living as if it's just enclosed in the individual. And that's, I think, why we've gotten to so much trouble. What will the neighbors think?

I know. The neighbors on that side would get very agitated, but the neighbors on those side would totally agree with me. So we have both kinds of neighbors. With these neighbors, we're thinking of taking down the fence. With those neighbors, they're like doubling that's height. Good fences make good neighbors. Yeah. Well, that very beautiful explanation, just it always harker.

me back to some of the work again with I was told the most beautiful line by a medicine elder once and he said you Westerners have such a rudimentary sense of magic and what he meant by that was for that old adage of you know the butterfly flap in China might cause a tsunami here in the West and he was saying we understand how that's all we understand the domino effects how every action is related to ritual to relationship, to people, to events. We understand what you look at as the invisible elements in between, but we see the relationship between all things. We don't just go from the butterfly flap to the tsunami. And again, it just harkens back just to the relational piece. Also, there's a wonderful quote that I love by the great Rudolph Steiner talking about, the place of the individual.

The healthy social life is found. the mirror of each human soul, the whole community finds its reflection. And when in the community, the virtue of each one is living. It seems so invocative of your work. Yeah, that's beautiful. No, that's exactly, I'd love to get that quote from you. I've never heard that before. It's much like Robin Wall Kimmer's description of her people, the Potawatomi, in the book Braiding Sweetgrass, where she says, you know, every individual has the response. responsibility to cultivate their individual gifts and individuality, that differentiation, that allowing themselves to be different is all differentiation means. You know, they then give the gifts back to the

community so they become woven into the whole. So it's not about homogeneity. You know, it's not like a smoothie. It's more like a fruit salad. You know, that we we have a responsibility for it. You know, what are you born into? I mean, there's this whole thing about temperament and it's pushed towards personality, but we have different temperaments and different skill sets and different things we do or don't do. You know, my daughter just absolutely loves science. So in a week, she's going to get her doctorate degree in environmental science. Our son equally good at science and our daughter's fantastic at art, but our son just decided he loves music. It's just who he is. So he's a full-time musician, Alex Siegel. They both could have gone either way.

way, you know, but they follow their particular passionate gift and it's just beautiful to see. You know, so all of my books are illustrated by my daughter, even though she's a scientist, who's now going to be the other Dr. Siegel and the family. You know, and our son does music that we play on our, you know, our presentations. We stream as music, but it's beautiful. And that's their individual gifts that now they give back to the community. Now I remember there was a woman by the name. It was, we went ahead and we applied to seven preschools.

And there was a preschool on Fourth in Wilshire that you wrote a book with a woman who ran that school. Mary Hartzell, yeah. Lovely. The best woman alive. Amen. And the only school we didn't get accepted to. Same with us. Same with me.

You didn't get accepted either. When we're trying to get our son, it's a school. we applied there, no way. I don't feel bad. I even said, hey, I could give talks in child development. They go, you think that's going to get you in? I said it can't hurt.

No. But our daughter got in only because our two neighbors, one that's the one that one's higher fences, the other doesn't live there anymore that were very close to, but they were the heads of the PTA of the school. So for our second child, our daughter, she got in.

You're telling me the horrible neighbors got your kid into preschool? I don't know if they're got them in or we just use their name. Ah, there it is. Back in those days, when I do the math, back in those days, I think the relationship was better. I love that you started and we asked you where we're at and what are the problems. You mentioned identity.

You have a great story that I love if you would indulge us to mention your story of falling off the horse and what happened to your identity. Yeah, I mean, that's a story. I never thought would be a story. I would, first of all, ever have any reason to tell, nor would really want to tell. But I'll just tell the story about the story, because that's probably the most useful way of hearing it. You know, I was doing this writing about attachment. I had written the book with Mary Hartzell,

parenting from the inside out about the importance of inner awareness. I'd written a textbook for graduate school called The Developing Mind. Anyway, for some reason I got invited to do a talk at a conference on like mindfulness, spirituality, and religion, which I didn't know any thing about any of those three things. So the guy who invited me, I didn't really understand why we decided to have lunch together. And it was going to be him and a fellow named Houston Smith, who was like the world's leading scholar of religion and some other folks who, you know, you know, we're writing about mindfulness. So the conference organizers that fellow named Jack Cornfield.

So Jack, who I didn't know, you know, takes me to lunch and we go to lunch and he says, well, how do you know about mindfulness? I said, I don't. And I don't even know why you're asking me to be at this conference. He goes, oh, because I read some of your stuff, I think you know.

I think you know. I said, no, I don't know. He goes, you know. I said, I don't know. And he goes, you know. I can tell you know. How do you know? And I say, well, I don't know why I'm going to tell you this,

but let me tell you a story about what happened to me just before I turned 20. So this would have been, you know, 30 years later. So I was in my 50s. I said, just before I turned 20, I was, you know, I was studying anthropology in college. And my professor invited me to go work for the World Health Organization in Mexico. And I was studying Kunderos, you know, folk healers. and I was given the assignment to go up from Veracru, in the state of Veracruz,

riding, ride a horse up the mountains to the state of Oaxaca and meet with the queen of the mushrooms. Now, I had a relative who was an active addict at the time, so I just had an aversion to ever using any substances that altered your mind. So it wasn't something I was personally familiar with, but I was culturally fascinated with. Anyway, so we were living in this little town, Calapadillas, and we were headed up on these horses up to go over the mountain range from Veracruz to Oaxaca. And then at a full gallop, and I love riding.

I'm a good writer, but I had forgotten something to do, which I'll tell you in a moment. So we're picking up since being we started galloping on these young Mexican horses. We were, you know, right in the middle of Mexico. and on a full gallop, my young horse, you know, had inflated his belly. And so at a full gallop, as he's really breathing more, the cinch gets loose. And so the whole saddle turns to the horse's belly. And he's now going faster and faster because my feet are hooked into the stirrups. And I'm being dragged.

So my whole face got destroyed. and they thought I was dead. And, you know, I'm moaning. So then they thought I broke my neck. Well, I didn't break my neck. And obviously I'm not dead. But I destroyed my face, broke my nose, lost all my teeth. And, but the biggest thing I lost was my identity.

So I had no idea who I was. I had no words. And they carried me back to the clinic, which I had been studying. I was comparing Western doctors to folk healers to the conraderos. And, you know, I had probably about 24 hours having no identity. So I'm telling Jack this story. And we had to both go off to do what we were doing. He calls me up and he says, I can't stop thinking about what you said to me.

I said, what? He goes, the horse accident. And I said, well, what about it? He goes, do you understand people will meditate for like a decade or more to try to get what you got by accident. So I literally said, no, I said, why would someone to break their face meditating? He goes, not break their face, lose their identity. And I said, why would they even want to lose their identity? I said, I don't understand. And he starts to explain to me the whole Buddhist idea that individual identity is like a prison and you try to get rid of it, whatever like this.

And as he's talking, I'm just feeling more and more at home. We just met that day for lunch. And I just said, I don't know why I'm feeling this way, but I'm starting to feel so at home with you. And he takes a deep breath and he goes, welcome to the family. And, you know, he's become my best buddy. And, you know, we've been teaching together now since, that's like about 25 years ago.

And, you know, it changed my life, not only my friendship with him, but at teaching together because I'm not trained in any contemplative practice, but Jack is, Jack Cornfield. And so we teach together. And I just teach from this interpersonal neurobiology space. He's a deep scholar of Buddhism. you know, and as well as a psychologist.

And so we just have so much fun to see the conciliant common ground between what he's learned in his own years as a deep person. He's one of the main people brought, you know, mindfulness to the West. He's actually John Kavitzen's first teacher, you know, in this area, or one of the teachers, the John Lvah Zen teacher. So anyway, so it's been fascinating. So that, you know, that experience, as I've referred, reflecting on it since speaking to it with Jack, you know, help me try to look at the neural correlates of identity and why, you know, a kid who's almost 20 getting on a horse, this terrible accident happens, his head is banged for like 100 yards, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, on gravel, you know, would temporarily just dismantle certain areas of the brain, including, an area called the default mode network.

And, you know, and so what we'd learn later on, this was now whatever, when that, well, when that happened, it was like 1977. But, you know, later years, decades later, we'd learn this area of the brain gives you this sense of an individual identity. So in this book called Intrachconnected, what I ultimately did was took the horse accident and said, like, what in the world happened there? Like, what is identity that if you knock your head around for 100 yards, you know, you will lose it. And then when you're McCarvers, it comes back. But even after it came back, and this is what I said to Jack, it had this lightness of experience, almost like Milan Kundera's, you know, title of that book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And I never took it really very seriously. So when people would call out my name, hey, Dan, inside of me, I'd be like laughing my head off.

because I knew that that's, of course, this convention we have, call me Dan, whatever, and his body's called Dan. But it was such a superficial way of saying, you know, who we are. There's something so much deeper than just the individual identity were assigned. Yeah. Is that the story you were thinking? That's the story. That's so beautiful.

Thank you. It's very good. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Had he not gotten the beautiful. relationship with his best friend because of that. That's the worst story I've ever heard.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing. You know, I don't know how Jack knew to ask. And, you know, I didn't, that was, you know, opening up something I never really talked to anyone about. I always thought it was just some thing that happens and thank God I'm alive. Or maybe it was an existential issue. And certainly those things could be true to. But yeah, it worked out okay.

The powerful gift of an identity crisis. It's maybe I love that you referenced the unbearable lightness of being. So short of having such a cataclysmic accident such as that, how can someone, if you have a practical tip, if you will, how does someone in our modern world attain that state? How do we access that unbearable lightness of being? and in everyday life, like, what would you prescribe to someone? What I found in my own life, too, because, you know, the accident was a long time ago,

what I found is that this wheel of awareness practice that I do every morning, I do it like religiously every day, when my colleagues, my patients, my students, when they do the wheel regularly, what happens when you distinguish pure awareness from the thing you're aware of so in metaphoric terms we have this idea of a wheel and in the wheel there's the center the hub and then there's the rim and then you have a singular spoke which is a metaphor for how you direct attention from the awareness in the hub the knowing to the knowns on the rim and there's four segments of the rim they're all energy flow but the The first segment represents energy from outside the body.

You pick it up with your eyes, your ears, your nose, your tongue, and your skin, you know, for smell, taste, and touch, etc. You then go inward on the second segment to the energy flow that's inside the body. And you experience that systematically. And I walk you through this all from my website. You can do it. And then you go to the third segment, which is mental activities like emotions and memories and thoughts and attitudes along these beliefs, desires, dreams, that kind of thing. Those are probably head brain neural firing patterns that that's where the energy is coming from. If you want to locate it. And then you move the focus of attention

outward again to the relational fields, just like Faraday, Michael Faraday in the 1800s, said, hey, I think there's these things called electromagnetic fields and people thought he was insane. Now like all of our electronics are based on electromagnetic fields that you can't see with your eyes. So I used to teach with a dear friend named John O'Donohue, who I met just a little bit before I met Jack. And, you know, John was an Irish Catholic priest, a former priest. He was a poet, a philosopher, and an Irish mystic. And when we would teach together, I would say, you know, you're calling our students mystics. What do you mean by mystic? He would say it's somebody who believes in the reality of the invisible. So I said, well, if you're going to be a real scientist, and John wasn't trained in science, but we were used to call me as twin.

You know, we're like these twins, because we were talking about the same thing just from different angles. You know, if you're going to be a true scientist, I said to John, you know, you have to realize that the bandwidth of visible light is very restricted and that most of what is real is not visible to the eye. It doesn't mean that everything you conjure up is true,

you know, so everything I think of is right. No, but it does mean that there is a reality, reality to the invisible. So we all need to be mystics in that sense. Anyway, that's to be a true scientist. So we used to love teaching together because we'd find this common ground of, you know, his background of philosophy and mysticism and Catholicism and, you know, poetry and all that stuff. Anyway, so what, what that brings up is this way where you can distinguish pure awareness from the thing you're aware of, And so as Faraday found, these electromagnetic fields, which is not in the visible eye, are real.

And we have all these electronics. So I think there's something called what some colleagues and I are calling a relational field. And I think you can feel into it. You enter a room. You can kind of feel what's happening in the relational field. So this fourth segment of the rim is feeling into that, even imagining it is a good place to start. So that's your relationship with the people on the planet. So what happens in a little bit of an advanced practice,

you could do this through a book Aware or its companion workbook called Becoming Aware, you aim that spoke of attention straight into the hub itself. And then what happened is people start experiencing pure awareness. And it's that pure awareness that was probably exactly what I was experiencing after my horse accident. So there's no words, this just knowing, and it has, like this morning, I'm like giggling, and it has this joy, this feeling of connection, timelessness, love. For some people, they experience God, because it is the generator of diversity. And this thing you're talking about, the plane of possibility was just, you know, I happen to be working with some physicists, 150 physicists, actually.

and trying to piece together the physics view of energy with the data I was getting from giving the wheel of awareness. Now I've given it to about 77,000 people in person. We've had millions of people stream it from our website. And when people get into the hub, they experience timelessness and they experience that there are no separate entities. And when you look at the physics, quantum physics, It says that physics view of energy is the movement from possibility to actuality.

You can graph it out. It took 100 pages to describe it in a book called or where, but I'll just summarize it here, that there is this finding in quantum physics that there basically are two realms. There's a large object world that Newton talked about. So macro refers to large. So let's call this the macro state realm. sometimes called the Newtonian realm. And it has certain equations, and there are noun-like entities, you know, like planets and moons

and apples falling from trees and, you know, and then a hundred, that was 350 years ago, Newton figured this out. And then a hundred years ago, you know, we started the field of quantum physics because we could study things smaller than an atom. So small is micro. So these are microstates. And this realm has just different properties that, determine how its processes unfold. And in the quantum realm, you don't have any noun-like entities.

They're just verb-like processes. And there is no variable of time. It's literally, literally timeless. So when you map out the wheel, it looks like when you're in the hub, you're swimming in the sea of potential or this was called the quantum vacuum. You're in the quantum realm and you feel this incredible sense of joy and you when you hear this over and over and over and over again, you hear people say not only it's connection and timelessness, they say what they experience in that hub is love. It's as if love is the word we use for something that's the fabric of the universe. And if you want to just get really reductionist and say, what does that really mean from a science point of view?

It's probably the word we use for linking. Like, I love my dog who's right here. We are incredibly linked. She's a rescue puppy. I got her during COVID. She and are like, you know, this with each other. I love my wife, you know. I can feel love for you guys.

We can be linked to each other. So it's not just romantic, erotic love. this feeling of unbelievable joy that we're all connected. And that's the love I think people describe when they get in the hub of this wheel. So what I say is don't go riding on a horse and get almost dead. You don't need to do that. But you can access this other realm. You can get swimming lessons to access this other world you can swim.

And I do it every morning. And I'm telling you, when I do it, it's just like reminding me that, Love is the fabric of the universe and that this day that I have the privilege to live in this body with, you know, is just to bring more love into it or bring more integration into the world. And we like to say integration made visible. It's kindness and compassion. Yeah. That's why we call our place a love call. Now I remember, now I remember where I got it.

I got it from you. 15, 16 years ago, I forgot. where I got it. That's why we call our place a love call. That's beautiful. Thank you for creating such a practical and yet metaphysical and loving tool as the awareness. It's an amazing tool to use. And I just want to thank you so much and say, aho, metakwios. We are all related. Aho.

Yeah, we like to say we are all related, saying there's a meaning in the body and a we in our relationality. And so we are very grateful to be here. Likewise. All right. Switching gears here to apply this to addiction. From a nervous system standpoint, what does someone in active addiction actually need that treatment often does not provide? Yeah, I think they actively need a way of experiencing that hub. and so it's a resource, you know, having addicts in my family, I can just tell you,

their way out was to realize that it's not about them as an individual having to be perfect or take care of everything, but rather tapping into this resource that is the hub that can give you endless amounts of energy and be a source of hope and connection. So I think that's often, I think what people describe when they do go into recovery in a really powerful deep way, they do have this call for love that you're talking about and realize that's the essence of what life is about. That's exactly right. Can someone truly recover without healthy connection and relationships around them? Well, that's a great question.

You never want to be absolute about anything, but the data would suggest, you know, we're very social creatures, and even just one connection with someone, even a sponsor, can make a big difference. You know, there may be certain people with certain temperaments that really like to do it on their own, and then maybe internal work getting access to the hub

might be enough. I don't know. But the data would suggest, you know, it's really about relationships. It doesn't mean you have to go live in a commune, but it means you have to have some kind of connection in the world that links you to things. I mean, for those of you who are into television or whatever streaming shows, and I'm not going to give this away, but I just this morning finished the last episode of the second season of the

pit and I'll just say it is exactly what we're talking about. You blew it for everybody, doctor. Everybody's pissed. Nobody wants, nobody wants to watch a show anymore. I'll just say, that's actually a good invitation to watch it if you haven't watched it. But it's, you got to be, you got to be ready for unbelievably graphic, physical things that they show all the time. 40 years into studying the mind and human connection, what are you still figuring out? Hmm. You know, I'm really fascinated with this new thing that I've been working on for 20 years, which is with some colleagues, how temperament persists across the lifespan. So we're born into these bodies with deep brain structures, specifically in the brain stem, you know, that have certain propensities called temperament. And I'm just really fascinated with how it seems to play.

play out in nine different pathways. So that's my newest thing. It's, I spent 20 years working with these colleagues and now as the remaining clinician of the group, seeing how to apply it for people's personal growth in clinical situations, but also just in life in general. That's kind of what I'm up to these days. And it's, I don't know if I'm supposed to say this,

but it is so fun and so effective, to have people discover these different pathways. So that's been kind of a deepening of an understanding of how the mind develops. That was very salacious, doctor. I don't even think we can run that. Okay. Well, just a follow up to that, it's always, I love the mystery of that. And I'm so interested to learn more of these pathways because I'm wondering you can have three or four members of the

same family, supposedly being raised by the same two parents, same parenting style, and yet what explains the propensity for one to veer off into addiction as a coping mechanism, as a strategy, and others not? Is it temperament? What are those factors? Exactly. Those are some of the questions we can try to answer with future research. In terms of the immediate application for an individual, I think discovering how your personality, which is defined as particular patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior that persist across states and situations and stages of life. It could be that that has a lot to do with why. Some people find certain environments really, really challenging and hard to deal with.

And they go to what's called the lower side of their particular personality pattern, whereas other people with a different configuration of their temperament actually have a different way their personality is arising. And in that particular situation, they aren't as affected by it. So, you know, that can explain, I think, part of it for sure. You know, it's been really interesting to see there's also, we're not getting into this details, but when you get into the details, I just finished one clinical book and now I'm just finishing a book for the public on this topic. But it's really interesting when you get to the details.

And I'll say this because it isn't that my colleagues and I invented this system. This is what nature invented. People have been thinking about it through various lenses. A colleague of mine, Carol Dweck, discovered aspects of it by looking what are called the Big Five. Systems of looking at personality and the Enneagram would be a more popular view of it. But this developmental neuroscience view that we call patterns of developmental pathways, it's been really interesting to see how nature, and this is probably the evolutionarily beneficial aspect of it,

created these nine ways of being human, that each have a real big gift to give to the community. Each of these nine pathways is super helpful for how we work together. But if you happen to have challenges like you're talking about, there are also vulnerabilities that take you to the weakness side of that same pattern. So part of the challenge is to bring this low level functioning to the higher level, even though you're staying in the same personality.

And the other is to figure out something which never got into the clinical book, but now that I've been doing a lot of workshops on this, it seems to be true. A number of people are coming up with their family was so challenging that they actually, adopted a personality as if they had a temperament which they didn't have. And they're like swimming upstream. And then we do the workshop and they have this kind of huge aha moment. And they realize their true temperament was something else. And now through the process of the workshop or in therapy,

you know, they can then liberate themselves from the adaptive, protective override to actually find their true authentic person. coming from their true authentic temperament, which is probably not something you really ever changed. So that's been super fun to help guide people to this awareness that, you know, they can really grow. And, you know, you may not be able to change your temperament, but you can change the level of development of your personality and certainly move from a protective one that's not even your personality to your true, you know, baseline of where you can live. So that's been, I mean,

it's been so interesting. And, you know, these workshops, some of them are online, some are in person. But, you know, when you just, I don't know, it's when you just feel people's discovery, it empowers them to, in a way, have a relationship with their brainstem that shifts what they do with their emotions, their thoughts, and their behavior. So it shifts how they can be imprisoned by their personality, where the personality becomes more like a playground. And then they learn how to relate to other people in a very different way. So it's been really rewarding.

And then just to shed some light on what nature created has just been very deeply satisfying. Such an unburdening of the false self. I mean, even as I listened to you, I was getting relief. It's because I'm such a fan of humans and how much coping we do, we do and all the strategies to get through. But you're providing such pragmatic tools and guidance. We can do another talk if you want when that time, when the book comes out. But it's been so interesting just to, you know, these are some very deep neurological mechanisms we're talking about. And people really get it.

So, you know, you can say it's not rocket science. but it is brain science, you know. And so because of neuroplasticity, what's really cool about that is people could use their understanding to actually free themselves up like you're saying. And it's just so, it's so beautiful. I mean, some of the most touching emails I've ever gotten have been from people who do these workshops,

and they find a new way of being in the world. So listen, thank you so much for joining us. today. This was a huge honor. I'm just so grateful to you. It took us a year. It took us a year. But you're a busy man and we are so grateful that you came here today. Is there anything you want to say before you go or is there anything we didn't touch on? No, thank you. This has been really fun for me too. So an absolute pleasure. Thank you both. Thank you. There it is. All right, everyone. See you next Tuesday. We're out of time. Please subscribe

on YouTube, click the thumbs up, and leave a comment. Please subscribe on Apple Podcast and Spotify, and leave a rating and a review, and share the We're Out of Time podcast with others you know who will get value out of it. See you next Tuesday.