Siegel Mindfulness

Reflections on The Mindful Brain
A Brief Overview Adapted from

The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being
(New York: WW Norton 2007)
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.
Welcome to a journey into the heart of our lives. Being mindfully aware, attending to the
richness of our experiences, creates scientifically recognized enhancements in our physiology,
our mental functions, and our interpersonal relationships. Being fully present in our awareness
opens our lives to new possibilities of well-being.
Almost all cultures have a form of practice to help develop awareness of the moment.
The major religions of the world utilize some form of focusing one’s attention, from meditation to
prayer, yoga to Tai’ chi. Each of these traditions may have its own particular approach, but they
share in common the power of intentionally focusing awareness in a way that transforms people’s
lives.
Why is this mindful awareness so universal an ideal goal across our human family? Can
we find a common thread that links these practices that might help us understand the power of
this way of being to enhance health, relationships, and well-being?
Mindfulness as an Attuned Relationship with Oneself

Although mindfulness is often seen as a form of attentional skill that focuses your mind on the
present, the approach of The Mindful Brain takes a deep look at this type of awareness through a
perhaps surprising perspective: seeing mindfulness as a form of healthy relationship with oneself.
In my own field of studying interpersonal relationships within families, we use the
concept of “attunement” to examine how one person, a parent for example, focuses attention on
the internal world of another, such as a child or a spouse. This focus on the mind of another
person harnesses neural circuitry that enables two people to “feel felt” by each other. This state is
crucial for people in relationships to feel vibrant and alive, to feel understood, and to feel at
peace. Research has shown that such attuned relationships promote resilience and longevity.
Our understanding of mindfulness can build on these studies of interpersonal attunement
and the self-regulatory functions of attention in suggesting a new approach: That mindful
awareness is a form of intra-personal attunement.
Being mindful is a way of becoming your own best friend.
We’ll explore how the process of attunement may lead the brain to grow in ways that
promote balanced self-regulation and a process called neural integration that enables flexibility
and self-understanding. This way of feeling felt, of feeling connected in the world, may help us
understand how becoming attuned to oneself may promote these physical and psychological
dimensions of well-being with mindful awareness.
Turning to the brain can help us see the commonality of mechanisms between these two
forms of internal and interpersonal attunement. By examining the neural dimension of
functioning and its possible correlation with mindful awareness, we may be able to expand our
understanding of why and how mindfulness creates the documented improvements in immune
function, inner sense of well-being, and our capacity for rewarding interpersonal relationships.
The Need
We are in desperate need for a new way of being – in our selves, in our schools, and in
our society. Our modern culture has evolved in recent times to create a troubled world with
individuals suffering from alienation, schools failing to inspire and to connect with children, a
modern society without a moral compass helping clarify how we can move forward in our global
community.
I have seen my own children grow in a world more and more distant from human
interactions that our brains have evolved to require – yet are not a part of our inherent educational
and social systems. The human connections that help shape our neural connections are sorely
missing in modern life.
We are not only losing our opportunities to attune to each other, but the hectic lives many
of us live leave little time for attuning to ourselves.
As a physician, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and educator, I’ve been saddened and
dismayed to find so absent from our work as clinicians a firm grounding in the healthy mind
itself. After asking over seventy four thousand mental health professionals face-to-face in lecture
halls around the world if they’d ever had a course on the mind, or on mental health, ninety-five
percent replied “no.” What then have we been practicing? Isn’t it time for us to become aware of
the mind itself, not just to highlight symptoms of illness?
Cultivating an experiential understanding of the mind is a direct focus of mindful
awareness: We come to not only know the mind, but to embrace our own inner world and the
mind of others with kindness and compassion. The human potential for compassion and
empathy is huge. Realizing that potential may be challenging in these troubled times, but perhaps
it may be as direct as attuning to ourselves, one mind, one relationship, one moment at a time.
Interpersonal Neurobiology
Understanding the deep nature of how our relationships help shape our lives and our
brains has been a passion driving my professional life. Over the last fifteen years I have been
involved in trying to create an interdisciplinary view of the mind and mental health (see Siegel,
1999, 2001, 2003, 2006). The perspective of “interpersonal neurobiology” embraces a wide array
of ways of knowing, from the broad spectrum of scientific disciplines to the expressive arts and
contemplative practice. Interpersonal neurobiology relies on a process of integrating knowledge
from a variety of disciplines to find the common features that are shared by these independent
fields of knowledge. Much like the old Indian fable of the blind men and the elephant, each
discipline examines a necessarily focused area of the elephant, of reality, in order to know that
dimension deeply and with detail. But to see the whole picture, to get a feeling for the whole
elephant, it is vital that we try to bring different fields together. While each blind man may not
agree with the perspective of the other, each has important contributions to creating a sense of the
whole.
And so we will be using this integrative approach to bring together various ways of
knowing to understand mindfulness in perhaps a broader way than any single perspective might
permit. At the foundation we will be trying to combine first person knowing with scientific
points of view. Beyond this important subjective/objective marriage, we’ll be combining insights
from the field of neuroscience with those of the fields of attachment research to consider how the
fundamental process of attunement might be at work in the brain in states of interpersonal
communication and the proposed form of intra-personal attunement of mindfulness.
Turning to the brain and attachment studies is not meant to favor these two fields over
any other. This will be a starting point in our journey. As you’ll see, a variety of fields will come
into play as we examine the research on memory, narrative, wisdom, emotion, perception,
attention, and learning along with explorations that go deeply into internal subjective experience.
Reflections on The Mindful Brain Copyright (C) 2007 Mind Your Brain, Inc. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. 2
An Invitation
Mindful awareness requires that we dive deeply into the inner nature of the mind, to
sense our experiences with a sometimes new set of lenses. Studying mindfulness as a useful and
fascinating human process enTails that we blend personal immersion and scientific thought.
I love science and am thrilled to learn from empirical explorations into the deep nature of
ourselves and our world. But I am also a clinician, steeped in the world of subjective experience.
Our internal world is real, though it may not be quantifiable in ways that science often requires
for careful analysis. In the end, our subjective lives are not reducible to our neural functioning.
This internal world, this subjective stuff of the mind, is at the heart of what enables us to sense
each other’s pain, to embrace each other at times of distress, to revel in each other’s joy, to create
meaning in the stories of our lives, to find connection in each other’s eyes.
My own personal and professional interest in mindfulness emerged recently in an
unexpected way. After writing a text exploring how the brain and relationships interact to shape
our development, I was invited to offer lectures at my daughter’s preschool about parenting and
the brain. After creating some workshops for parents, the preschool director, Mary Hartzell, and I
wrote a book in which we placed “mindfulness” as our first grounding principle. As educators
we knew that being aware, being mindful, was the essential state of mind of a parent (or teacher
or clinician) to promote well-being in children.
After our book was published, numerous people asked how we came to teach parents to
meditate. This was a great question since neither Mary nor I are trained to meditate nor did we
think that we were “teaching meditation” to parents. Mindfulness, in our view, was just the idea
of being aware, of being conscientious, with kindness and care. We didn’t actually teach parents
to meditate, but rather taught them how to be reflective and aware of their children, and
themselves, with curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love.
I am continually learning from my patients and from my students, whether they are
parents or pupils in high school, therapists or scientists. These questions about mindfulness and
parenting inspired me to delve into the existing research in the growing field of mindfulness-
based clinical interventions. What struck me in learning about this burgeoning work was that the
outcome measures for its clinical applications appeared to overlap with the outcome measures of
my own field of research in attachment: the study of the relationship between parents and
children.
This overlap of the ways in which well-being and resilience were promoted by secure
attachment and by mindful awareness practice was fascinating. This similarity also dovetailed
with the functions of a certain integrative region of the brain, the middle aspects of the prefrontal
cortex just behind the forehead. I became intrigued by this convergence and was eager to learn
more about the fascinating field of mindfulness.
With this exciting view of integrating ideas among the worlds of relationships, brain, and
mind, I dove into direct experience into the depths of the mind. I invite you to come along with
me as we explore the nature of mindful awareness that unfolded, moment by moment, in this
mind-opening journey of discovery.
A Mindful Awareness
Being aware of the fullness of our experience awakens us to the inner world of our mind and
immerses us completely in our lives. This is an exploration into how the way we pay attention in
the present moment can directly improve the functioning of our body and brain, our subjective
mental life with its feelings and thoughts, and our interpersonal relationships with each other.
The essential proposal is that this ancient and useful form of awareness harnesses the
social circuitry of the brain to enable us to develop an attuned relationship within our own mind.
To explore this idea, we can turn to the research on our social lives, examining the particular
regions of the brain, including the mirror neuron system, that enable attunement and permit us to
resonate with our own intentional states.
The term “mindful brain” is used in this approach to embrace the notion that our
awareness, our mindful “paying attention or taking care,” is intimately related to the dance
between our mind and our brain. Being “mindful” has a range of definitions, from the common
everyday notion of “bearing in mind or inclined to be aware” to the specific educational, clinical,
and scientific definitions of the term we’ll explore in the pages ahead. It is with this broad
general common-usage definition that I invite you to become aware of both the exciting new
science emerging about the more specific forms mindfulness and your own subjective experience
of the moment at the heart of your life.
Finding the Mind in Our Everyday Lives

Over the last twenty years there has been a growing attention to “mindfulness” in the
western world. This focus of attention has been on a number of dimensions of daily life, from
our personal lives to the experience of children in schools and patients in therapy. The busy lives
people lead in the technologically-driven culture that consumes our attention often produces a
multi-tasking frenzy of activity that leaves people constantly doing, with no space to breathe and
just “be.” The adaptations to such a way of life often leaves youth accustomed to high levels of
stimulus-bound attention, flitting from thing to thing, with little time for self-reflection or
interpersonal connection of the direct, face-to-face sort that the brain needs for proper
development.
Little in our hectic lives provides for attuning with each other.
In our personal lives, many of us have found this societal whirlwind deeply dissatisfying.
We can adjust, responding to the drive to do, but often we cannot thrive in such a frenetic world.
On this personal level people in modern cultures are often eager to learn about a new way of
being that can help them flourish.
Mindfulness in its most general conception offers a new way of being aware that can
serve as a gateway toward a more vital mode of being in the world: We become attuned to our
selves.
Mindfulness has been described for thousands of years. It is found in cultures in modern
and ancient times, in the West and in the East.
The mind is filled with beliefs, attitudes, and memories that create the influences that can
keep us from being mindful in this general way. Wars can be initiated and mass destruction and
genocide planned and executed by humans filled with top-down forces that keep them from
considering the whole of their actions on others. With such mindless behaviors, people are able
to destructively enact their impulses and ideas without consideration of the larger good.
Even in day-to-day life, small moments can be lived on automatic pilot and the
opportunity to relish in the amazing gift of life is lost. The general notion of mindfulness is a part
of our cultural vernacular, even if too rarely practiced in its generic meaning. Waking up in our
lives involves seeing the larger picture of our societal paths as well as addressing the small
moments of our precious lives.
Defining the Mind

Before we explore the various ways of thinking about mindfulness and focusing the mind
in the moment, we might want to ask the basic question: what is the mind?
I have found a useful definition of the mind, supported by a range of scientists from
various disciplines, to be “a process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”
Our human mind is both embodied and relational. Embodied means that the mind
involves a flow of energy and information that occurs within the body, including the distributed
nervous system we’ll refer to by using the simple term, “brain.” Relational signifies that
dimension of the mind involving the flow of energy and information that occurs between people.
Right now this flow from me as I type these words to you as you read them is shaping our minds
– yours, and mine. Even as I am imagining who you might be and what your response is, I am
changing the flow of energy and information in my brain and body as a whole. As you absorb
these words your mind is embodying this flow of energy and information as well.
Being Mindful
Mindfulness in its most general sense is about waking up from a life-on-automatic. With
mindful awareness the flow of energy and information that is our mind enters our conscious
attention and we can both appreciate its contents and also come to regulate its flow.
Mindful awareness, as we’ll see, actually involves more than just simply being aware: It
involves being aware of aspects of the mind itself. Instead of being on automatic and mindless,
mindfulness helps us awaken and with this reflection on the mind we make choice and change
possible.
How we focus attention helps directly shape the mind. When we develop a certain form
of attention to our here-and-now experiences and to the nature of our mind itself, we create a
special form of awareness called mindfulness.
Some Benefits
Studies have shown that specific applications of mindful awareness improve the capacity
to regulate emotion, to combat emotional dysfunction, to improve patterns of thinking, and to
reduce negative mindsets. Mindfulness can even treat and prevent depression, changing the
imbalance of circuits in the brain.
Research on some dimensions of mindful awareness practices reveals that the body’s
functioning is greatly enhanced: Healing, immune response, stress reactivity, and a general sense
of physical well-being are improved with mindfulness (Davidson et al, 2003). Our relationships
with others are also improved, as we see that the ability to perceive the non-verbal emotional
signals from others is enhanced and our ability to sense the internal worlds of others is augmented
(Ekman, 2006). In these ways we come to compassionately feel the feelings of others and to
empathize, to understand another’s points of view.
We can see the power of mindful awareness to achieve these many and diverse beneficial
changes in our lives when we consider that this form of awareness may directly shape the activity
and growth of parts of the brain responsible for our relationships, our emotional life, and our
physiological response to stress.
Mindful Awareness
Direct experiencing in the present moment has been described as a fundamental part of
Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and Taoist teaching for centuries (Goleman, 1988,
Armstrong, 1993). In these religious traditions, from mystical Christianity with centering prayer
(Keating, 2005; Fitzpatrick-Hopler, 2006) to Buddhist mindfulness meditation (Kornfield, 1993,
in press; Thich Nhat Hahn, 1991, Wallace, 2006), one sees the use of the idea of being aware of
the present moment in a different light from the cognitive aspect of mindfulness.
Many forms of prayer in different traditions require that the individual pause and
participate in an intentional process of connecting with a state of mind or entity outside the day-
to-day way of being. Prayer and religious affiliation in general have been demonstrated to be
associated with increased longevity and well-being (Pargament, 1997). The common overlap of
group belonging and prayer makes it hard to tease apart the internal from the interpersonal
process, but in fact we may find that this is just the point: pausing to become mindful may indeed
involve an internal sense of belonging.
In recent research, the clinical application of the practice of mindfulness meditation
derived from the Buddhist tradition has served as a focus of intensive study on the possible neural
correlates of mindful awareness. Here we see the use of the term “mindfulness” in a way that
numerous investigators have been trying to clearly define. (Bishop et al, 2004; Baer et al, 2006).
These studies across a range of clinical situations, from medically ill with chronic pain to
psychiatric populations with disturbances of mood or anxiety, have shown the effective
application of secular mindfulness meditation skills taught outside of any particular religious
practice or group membership. These studies have demonstrated positive effects on mind, body,
and relationships.
In many ways, scholars see the nearly 2,500-year-old practice of Buddhism as a form of
study of the nature of mind (Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson, 2006) rather than a theistic tradition. It
is possible to practice Buddhist-derived meditation, and ascribe to aspects of the psychological
view of the mind from this perspective, for example, and maintain one’s beliefs and membership
in other religious traditions. In contemplative mindful practice one focuses the mind in specific
ways to develop a more rigorous form of present-moment awareness that can directly alleviate
suffering in one’s life.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has devoted his professional life to bringing mindfulness into the
mainstream of modern medicine. In Kabat-Zinn’s view, “An operational working definition of
mindfulness is: the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present
moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.” (Kabat-Zinn,
2003, pages 145,146). This “nonjudgmental” view in many ways can be interpreted to mean
something like “not grasping on to judgments,” as the mind seems to continually come up with
reactions that assess and react. Being able to note those judgments and disengage from them may
be what non-judgmental feels like in practice. “On purpose” implies that this state is created with
intention to focus on the present moment. As the Inner Kids program for young children to learn
basic mindfulness skills states, mindfulness is “Being aware of what’s happening as it’s
happening.” (Kaiser-Greenland, 2006)
Kabat-Zinn goes on to note that the Buddhist origins of this view of mindfulness and the
natural laws of the mind reveal “a coherent phenomenological description of the nature of the
mind, emotion, and suffering and its potential release, based on highly refined practices aimed at
systematically training and cultivating various aspects of mind and heart via the faculty of
mindful attention (the words for mind and heart are the same in Asian languages; thus
‘mindfulness’ includes an affectionate, compassionate quality within the attending, a sense of
openhearted, friendly presence and interest). And mindfulness, it should also be noted, being
about attention, is also of necessity universal. There is nothing particularly Buddhist about it. We
are all mindful to one degree or another, moment by moment. It is an inherent human capacity.
The contribution of the Buddhist tradition has been in part to emphasize simple and effective
ways to cultivate and refine this capacity and bring it to all aspects of life.”
Modern applications of the general concept of mindfulness have built on both traditional
skills of meditation and have also developed unique nonmeditative approaches to this human
process of being mindful. A useful fundamental view is that mindfulness can be seen to consist
of the important dimensions of the self-regulation of attention and a certain orientation to
experience as Bishop and colleagues (2004) have proposed: (1) “the self-regulation of attention
so that it is maintained on immediate experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of
mental events in the present moment” and (2) “a particular orientation toward one’s experiences
in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and
acceptance.” In the Dialectical Behavior Therapy approach, mindfulness has been described as
“the intentional process of observing, describing, and participating in reality, nonjudgmentally, in
the moment, and with effectiveness” (Dimidjian & Linehan, 2003a, 2003b). These and other
authors acknowledge that mindfulness may also result in common outcomes, such as patience,
nonreactivity, self-compassion, and wisdom. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy,
mindfulness “can be understood as a collection of related processes that function to undermine
the dominance of verbal networks, especially involving temporal and evaluative relations. These
processes include acceptance, defusion, contact with the present moment, and the transcendent
sense of self. ” (Fletcher and Hayes, 2006).
A recent synthetic study of numerous existing questionnaires regarding mindfulness
(Baer et al 2006) reveals five factors that seemed to cluster from independently created surveys
were: 1) Nonreactivity to Inner Experience (e.g., I perceive my feelings and emotions without
having to react to them); 2) Observing/noticing/attending to sensations, perceptions, thoughts,
feelings (e.g., I remain present with sensations and feelings even when they are unpleasant or
painful); 3) Acting with awareness/(not on) automatic pilot/concentration/nondistraction (e.g., I
(do not) break or spill things because of carelessness, not paying attention, or thinking of
something else; 4) Describing/labeling with words (e.g., I can easily put my beliefs, opinions, and
expectations into words); 5) Nonjudgmental of experience (e.g., I (do not) tell myself I shouldn’t
be thinking the way I’m thinking).
All of these, except for observing, were found to be the most statistically useful and
reliable constructs in considering an operational definition of mindfulness. They seemed to
reveal four relatively independent facets of mindfulness. Observing was found present more
robustly in these subjects of college students whom meditated regularly. Observation was
considered a learnable skill. Future research needs to clarify it as an independent facet. For now
we will maintain observation in the five facets that Baer and colleagues delineated as we explore
the nature of mindfulness and the brain.
At this point in the scientific endeavor to operationalize a clear definition for mindful
awareness, the most parsimonious approach will be to build on the cumulative wisdom of the
breadth of practitioners and researchers in the field. This will be our framework for exploring the
ways in which this form of mindful awareness may involve the social neural circuitry of the brain
as mindfulness promotes a form of internal attunement.
Awareness of the Mind Itself

Ultimately the practices that develop mindful ways of being enable the individual to perceive the
deeper nature of how the mind functions. Though there are many ways to cultivate mindful
awareness, each of them develops an awareness of the faculties of the mind, such as how we
think, feel, and attend to stimuli. Mindfulness meditation, as one example, is thought to be
especially important for the training of attention and the letting go of a strict identification with
the activities of the mind as being the full identity of the individual.
Mindful awareness practices, or “MAPs” as we call them at the Mindful Awareness
Research Center at UCLA (MARC.UCLA.edu), can be found in a wide variety of human
activities. Historically, various practices have been developed for literally thousands of years in
the forms of mindfulness meditation, yoga, Tai’ chi chuan, and Qigong. In each of these
activities, the practitioner is focusing the mind in a very specific way on moment-to-moment
experience.
In almost all contemplative practices, for example, there is an initial use of the breath as a
focal point in which to center the mind’s attention. Because of this commonality of the breath
across cultural practices, we’ll be discussing the possible significance of breath-awareness for the
overall processes of the mindful brain. Mindful awareness is a human capacity not limited to one
religious or contemplative practice, but practiced by and available to the full spectrum of our
human family.
Mindfulness enables us to not only refine our awareness of the present moment, it opens
an important window of the mind to come to know itself.
Mindful awareness involves awareness of awareness.
This reflection on the nature of one’s own mental process is a form of “metacognition” in
which “meta” signifies something reflected onto itself: thinking about thinking in the broadest
sense. When we have “meta-awareness” this indicates “awareness of awareness.” Whether we
are engaging in yoga or centering prayer, sitting and sensing our breathing in the morning or
doing Tai chi at night, each MAP develops this capacity to be aware of awareness.
Awareness of awareness is one aspect of what we can consider a form of reflection. In
this way, mindful awareness involves reflection on the inner nature of life, on the events of the
mind that are emerging, moment by moment.
Life on Automatic Pilot: Mindlessness and Mindfulness

The difference between jogging “mindlessly” versus jogging “mindfully” is that in the
latter we are aware, each moment, of what we are doing as we are doing it. If we jog and
daydream about what we’ll be doing that night, or what happened yesterday, then we are not
engaged in mindful jogging. There is nothing “wrong” with daydreaming and letting the mind
wander: In fact, as we’ll see, mindful practice can actually intentionally focus awareness on
whatever arises, as it arises. If you intended to enable your mind to daydream and were aware of
your awareness of your imagination then that would be a mindful reverie, though perhaps not a
mindful jog as you were unaware of your feet and the path in front of you.
Notice here that we can often perform behaviors, such as jogging down a trail, and be lost
in thinking about something other than the physical activity we are doing. We have neural
circuits that carry out this “automatic behavior” all the time, enabling us to do several things at
once, like jog and daydream simultaneously. Yet fortunately we don’t usually trip and fall or
crash the car on the highway.
For some people, this “living on automatic” is a routine way of life. If our attention is on
something other than what we are doing for most of our lives we can come to feel empty and
numb. As automatic thinking dominates our subjective sense of the world, life becomes
repetitive and dull. Instead of experience having an emergent feeling of fresh discovery, as a
child sensing the world for the first time, we come to feel dead inside, “dead before we die.”
The question often asked is, can we learn to wake up and live fully?
Living on automatic also places us at risk of mindlessly reacting to situations without
reflecting on various options of response. The result can often be knee-jerk reactions that in turn
create similar mindless reflexes in others. A cascade of reinforcing mindlessness can create a
world of thoughtless interactions, cruelty, and destruction.
Being mindful opens the doors not only to being aware of the moment in a fuller way, but
by bringing the individual closer to a deep sense of their own inner world, it offers the
opportunity to enhance compassion and empathy. The misunderstood vision of mindfulness as
being “self-indulgent” is actually disproven by careful research that demonstrates that mindful
awareness skills actually enhance the capacity for caring relationships with others.
Mindfulness heightens the capacity to become filled by the senses of the moment and
attuned to our own state of being. As we also become aware of our awareness, we can sharpen
our focus on the present, enabling us to feel our feet as we travel the path of our lives. We
engage with ourselves and with others with more authentic connection, with more reflection and
consideration. Life becomes more enriched as we are aware of the extraordinary experience of
being, of being alive, of living in this moment.
COAL and Kind Awareness

In addition to this reflective awareness of awareness in the present moment, mindfulness
has the qualities that I describe with my patients with the acronym “COAL”: we approach our
here-and-now experience with curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love.
Imagine this situation. Let’s say you’ve stubbed your toe badly and feel the intensity of
the pain. Okay, you may say, I am “mindful” of that pain. Now if you say inside your head
“What an idiot I was for stubbing my toe!” you can be sure that the suffering you’ll experience
will be greater than the pain you have emanating from your toe. You are aware of the pain, but
are not filled with the COAL mind-et. In this case your brain actually creates more suffering by
amplifying the intensity of the pain and belittling you for having the accident. This is all the
difference between intensifying the distress versus coming to feel the pain without suffering.
Diane Ackerman told the story at our Mind and Moment gathering of poets, practitioners,
and psychotherapists about a time when she had an accident in Japan and nearly died. She had
been traversing down a cliff to study some rare birds on a small island and fell, breaking several
ribs and being barely able to breathe. Her description of the event (Ackerman et al, 2006) reveals
how she approached the moment-to-moment encounter with curiosity, openness, acceptance, and
love. This mind-set enabled her to learn from the event, to gather the internal strength she needed
to hold on, literally, and to not only survive in spite of the accident, but to thrive because of it.
This distinction between awareness with COAL and just paying attention with
preconceived ideas that imprison the mind (“I shouldn’t have hit my foot: I’m so clumsy” “Why
did I fall off this cliff? What is wrong with me!”) is the difference that makes all the difference.
This is the difference between being aware and being mindfully aware.
Cultivating mindful awareness requires that we become aware of awareness and that we
be able to notice when those “top-down” preconceptions of shoulds and oughts are choking us
from living mindfully, from being kind to ourselves. Top-down refers to the way that our
memories, beliefs, and emotions shape our “bottom-up” direct sensation of experience. Kindness
to ourselves is what gives us the strength and resolve to break out of that top-down prison and
approach life’s events, planned or unplanned, with curiosity, openness, acceptance and love.
But can we actually cultivate such love for ourselves? Research into mindful awareness
suggests that we can. Our approach to mindfulness as a form of relationship with oneself may
hold a clue as to how this is accomplished. With mindfulness seen as a form of intrapersonal
attunement, it may be possible to reveal the mechanisms by which we become our own best
friend through mindful practice. Would you treat your best friend with kindness or hostility?
Attunement is at the heart of caring relationships of all sorts: between parent and child, teacher
and student, therapist and patient/client, lovers, friends, and close professional colleagues.
With mindful awareness, we can propose, the mind enters a state of being in which one’s
here-and-now experiences are sensed directly, accepted for what they are, and acknowledged with
kindness and respect. This is the kind of interpersonal attunement that promotes love. And this
is, I believe, the intrapersonal attunement that helps us see how mindful awareness can promote
love for oneself.
Interpersonal relationships have been shown to promote emotional longevity, helping us
achieve states of well-being and medical health (Anderson and Anderson, 2003). I am proposing
here that mindful awareness is a form of self-relationship, an internal form of attunement, that
creates similar states of health. This may be the as yet unidentified mechanism by which
mindfulness promotes well-being.
Medical Applications
Sensing the profound importance of this power of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn began a
project nearly thirty years ago to apply these ancient ideas in a modern medical setting. What
began as an inspiration during a silent retreat led to Kabat-Zinn’s approaching the medical faculty
at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center where he taught. Could he take on the patients
whose situations could no longer be helped by conventional medical interventions? Could he add
anything at all to the recovery of those patients who were treated conventionally? Glad to have a
place where these individuals might find some relief, the medical faculty agreed and the
beginnings of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) clinic were initiated (Kabat-
Zinn, 1990, 1995).
The MBSR program brought the ancient practice of mindfulness to individuals with a
wide range of chronic medical conditions from chronic back pain to psoriasis. Kabat-Zinn and
colleagues, including his collaborator Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin in
Madison, were ultimately able to demonstrate that MBSR training could help reduce subjective
states of suffering and improve immune function, accelerate rates of healing, and nurture
interpersonal relationships and an overall sense of well-being (Davidson et al, 2003).
MBSR has now been adopted by hundreds of programs around the world. Research
(Grossman et al, 2004) has demonstrated that physiological, psychological, and interpersonal
improvements occur in a variety of patient populations. With these consistent findings being so
robust, and a rising interest in mindful awareness practices, it wasn’t surprising that my own field
of mental health would take note and integrate the essence of mindfulness as a basis for
approaching individuals with psychiatric disorders.
Discernment and Mental Health Implications

Mindfulness has influenced a wide range of approaches to psychotherapy with new
research revealing significant improvements in various disorders with reduction in symptoms and
prevention of relapse (Hayes, Strosahl, &Wilson, 1999; Linehan, 1993; Parks, Anderson, &
Marlatt, 2001 Marlatt & Gordon, 1985). Studies on depression (Mayberg, 2005) reveal that
mindfulness techniques can alleviate symptoms of depression and lead to improvements in brain
functioning that balance previously abnormal neural functioning. Mindfulness can also prevent
relapse in cases of chronic depression in Segal, Williams, and Teasdale mindfulness-based
cognitive therapy. (Segal, Williams, &Teasdale, 2002; Segal, Williams, Teasdale and Kabat-
Zinn, 2007). Similarly, mindfulness has been used as an essential part of the treatment of
borderline personality disorder in Marsha Linehan’s creative and effective Dialectical Behavior
Therapy (DBT) (Linehan, 1993). Relapse prevention in individuals with substance abuse is also a
part of the skills taught by Marlatt and colleagues (2001). The principles of mindfulness are also
inherent in the application of contemporary behavior analysis in Steven Hayes’ Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy (ACT) (Hayes, 2004). One of the first studies to demonstrate that
psychotherapy can alter the function of the brain utilized mindfulness principles in the treatment
of individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (Baxter et al, 1992). In the past five years,
several books (Hayes et al, 2004; Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002; Germer et al, 2005) have
been published that review the use of mindfulness and acceptance in the psychotherapy of a wide
range of conditions from which people suffer, from eating disorders to anxiety, posttraumatic
stress, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
The general idea of the clinical benefit of mindfulness is that the acceptance of one’s
situation can alleviate the internal battle that may emerge when expectations of how “life should
be” do not match how “life is.” Being mindful entails sensing what is—even sensing your
judgments—and noticing that these sensations, these images, feelings, and thoughts, come and
go. If you have a COAL stance, the rest takes care of itself.
There is no particular goal, no effort to “get rid” of something, just the intention to be—
and specifically, to experience being in the moment as one lets go of grasping on to judgments
and goals.
Emerging from this reflective COAL mindful way of being is a fundamental process
called “discernment” in which it becomes possible to be aware that your mind’s activities are not
the totality of who you are.
Discernment is a form of disidentification from the activity of your own mind: as you
SIFT through your mind (being aware of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts) you come to
see these activities of the mind as just waves on the surface of the mental sea. From this deeper
place within your mind, this internal space of mindful awareness, you can just notice the brain-
waves at the surface as they come and go. This capacity to disentangle oneself from the chatter
of the mind, to discern that these are “just activities of the mind,” is liberating—and for many,
revolutionary. At its essence, this discernment is how mindfulness may help alleviate suffering.
Discernment also gives us the wisdom to interact with each other with more
thoughtfulness and compassion. As we develop kindness toward ourselves, we can be kind to
others. By getting beneath our automatic mental habits, we are freed to engage with each other
with a deeper sense of connection and empathy.
The clinical mental health implications of mindfulness have been explored in great detail
in a number of texts and special journal editions that offer an excellent set of chapters and articles
discussing various research and practical applications for aspects of mindfulness in
psychotherapy. So this is not the goal here. Instead we’ll be exploring the possible underlying
neural mechanisms of mindful awareness that enable it to promote such a profoundly important
sense of relief from suffering in our daily lives and in clinical practice. These mechanisms, as
we’ve discussed, may be proposed to involve the social circuits of the brain that enable a sense of
love and concern to develop for oneself. This intrapersonal attunement may help us understand
the deeply transformative nature of mindfulness in our lives.
Why the Mindful Brain?

Why turn to the brain to explore mindfulness? By exploring potential mechanisms in the brain
that correlate with mindfulness, it becomes possible to see the connection between our common
everyday view of mindfulness and the clinical use of reflective mindful awareness in medical and
mental health practices. I propose that these sometimes-intermixed modern uses of the term
“mindfulness,” while quite distinct in practice, actually share common neural pathways.
Illuminating these neural mechanisms associated with cognitive and reflective mindfulness might
then assist us in expanding our scientific understanding further, opening the doors for asking
specific testable questions. Such neural insights may also shed light on how to design and
implement practical applications of mindfulness in ways we haven’t yet imagined. By revealing
the ways in which mindfulness harnesses our social neural circuitry, we may be able to extend
our understanding of its impact on physiological and psychological well-being.
Another important dimension of looking toward the mindful brain is that by
understanding the neural mechanisms beneath mindful awareness, we may be in a better position
to identify its universal human qualities and make it more accessible and acceptable to a broader
audience. We all share the brain in common. Can you imagine a world in which this health-
promoting, empathy-enhancing, executive-attention developing, self-compassion nurturing,
affordable, and adaptable mental practice was made available in everyone’s life?
We so need the wisdom of reflection in our individual and collective lives.
Mindfulness as a Relationship
But how, you might ask, could the private process of mindful awareness be considered a
social experience?
Long before we spent time cultivating our minds with reflection, we evolved as social
creatures. A great deal of the process of our brains at rest, in what is called a default mode,
appears to be neural circuitry correlated with understanding others (Gusnard and Raichle, 2001).
It is the social circuits of the brain that we first used to understand the mind, the feelings and
intentions and attitudes of others. When we view mindful awareness as a way of cultivating the
mind’s awareness of itself, it seems that it is likely harnessing aspects of the original neural
mechanisms for being aware of other minds. As we become aware of our intentions and our
attentional focus, we may be utilizing the very circuits of the brain that first created maps of the
intention and attention of others.
When we build into this view the COAL way in which we approach our own minds in
mindful awareness, it reminds me of my research days working in the field of attachment: COAL
is exactly what parents who provide secure attachment to their children have as a stance toward
their kids.
In this way, mindfulness can be seen as the development of a loving and attuned
relationship – with your self!
We can propose that the interpersonal attunement of secure attachment between parent
and child is paralleled by an intra-personal form of attunement in mindful awareness. Both forms
of attunement promote the capacity for intimate relationships, resilience and well-being. As
you’ll see, both forms of attunement may have similar integrative influences on the brain itself.
Mindfulness and Integration

Why would mindfulness and secure attachment have similar outcomes? This question drove me
to dive deeply into the nature of mindfulness to understand what they could share as common
mechanisms.
The outcome measures for studies of secure attachment, and the relationship between
child and parent, have markedly overlapping findings with those for mindful awareness practices.
I found, too, that many of the basic functions that emerged in these two seemingly different
entities were associated with a certain region of the brain, the middle areas of the prefrontal
cortex just behind the forehead. These functions include regulating your body, balancing your
emotions, attuning to others, modulating fear, responding flexibly, and exhibiting insight and
empathy. Two other functions of this prefrontal region—being in touch with intuition and
morality—had not been studied in attachment work but did seem to be an outcome of mindful
awareness practices. Recent unpublished findings (personal communication, Steele and Steele,
2008) reveal that morality in fact has been now associated with secure attachment in long-term
longitudinal studies.
The proposal that my colleagues and I had made earlier (Schore, 2003a and b, 1994;
Cozolino, 2002; Siegel, 1999, Siegel and Hartzell, 2003; Solomon and Siegel, 2003) was that the
relationships of secure attachment between parent and child, and the effective therapeutic
relationship between clinician and patient/client, each promoted the growth of the fibers in this
prefrontal area.
Prefrontal function is integrative. What this means is that the long lengths of the
prefrontal neurons reach out to distant and differentiated areas of the brain and body proper. This
linkage of differentiated elements is the literal definition of a fundamental process called
“integration.” For many reasons discussed elsewhere (Siegel, 1999, 2001, 2006), integration can
be seen as the underlying common mechanism beneath various pathways leading to well-being.
How does attunement promote integration?
When relationships between parent and child are “attuned,” a child is able to “feel felt”
by a caregiver and has a sense of stability in the present moment. During that here-and-now
interaction, the child feels good, connected, and loved. The child’s internal world is seen with
clarity by the parent, and the parent comes to resonate with the child’s state. This is attunement.
Over time, this attuned communication enables the child to develop the regulatory
circuits in the brain including the integrative prefrontal fibers that give them a source of resilience
as they grow. This resilience takes the forms of the capacity for self-regulation and engaging
with others in empathic relationships. Here we see that interpersonal attunement – the
fundamental characteristic of what is called a “secure attachment” leads to the empirically proven
outcome measures we described above.
This list of nine prefrontal functions also seemed to overlap with what I was coming to
learn about mindfulness practice. I presented this idea for the first time publicly to Jon Kabat-
Zinn on a discussion panel (Ackerman et al, 2005) with much trepidation and excitement. I was
not a meditator and knew no one in the mindfulness field. What if these ideas were a delusion, a
fantasized hope for similarity that was way off the mark? Could it be plausible that an
intrapersonal-form attunement of mindful awareness actually promoted the growth of these
integrative middle prefrontal regions? Could this be the shared mechanism underneath the
seemingly common outcome measures between mindfulness and secure attachment?
Fortunately, Jon Kabat-Zinn confirmed the accuracy of the observation of these as
outcome measures. He went on to extend the idea that this list is not just about research-verified
outcomes, but it is the process of mindful living itself. In fact, one can examine being mindful
through a step-by-step immersion in each of these nine functions (Siegel, 2008a and b).
In this exploration into the mind we examine what in the world mindful awareness,
secure attachment, and prefrontal brain function could have in common.
As we’ll see, much of the research on mindfulness meditation examines the attentional
processes that are thought to be involved in this training of awareness. But if we apply the
emerging findings of social neuroscience (Cozolino, 2006; Goleman, 2007) to a new
understanding of mindfulness as self-relational, could these existing neural studies perhaps be
seen in a new light? What would intrapersonal attunement correlate with on a scan? How would
we picture the neural associations with “being your own best friend”? What would learning to
befriend yourself feel like? And how could we approach helping others, and ourselves, in
perhaps slightly new ways if we conceived of mindfulness as a way of having an attuned
relationship – with your self?
“Brain” and “Mind”

Whenever you see me write about “the brain” please remember that I always mean “the brain as
an integrated part of the whole body.” This reality changes the way we think about the
relationship of “brain” to “mind.”
Because the mind itself is both embodied and relational, our brains actually can be
considered the social organ of the body: our minds connect with each other via neural circuitry in
our bodies that is hardwired to take in each others’ signals.
To examine the relationship of the mind, the regulation of patterns of the flow of energy
and information, to the brain, neural connections and their complex patterns of firing, we need to
be careful of certain preconceived ideas that might restrict our understanding and bias our
thinking. The timing and location of neural activation correlate with the timing and
characteristics of mental activity. If I show you a photograph and can monitor your brain’s
activity in a functional scanner, we’ll see activation (usually increased blood flow in a functional
MRI scan or electrical activity in an EEG) in the posterior part of your brain. The most accurate
thing we can then say is that occipital lobe firing correlates with visual perception.
Why not say the neural activity created the visual perception? If we make causal phrases
like this, the erroneous idea is reinforced that the mind is only created by the brain. But isn’t that
true? If we are cognitively mindful here, we need to be open to the truth that seeing the picture
actually created the neural firing. The directional arrow goes both ways: the mind can actually
use the brain to create itself.
Without cognitive mindfulness, we’d miss this bidirectional point. When we examine the
nature of our evolution as a species, for example, we find that in the last forty thousand years our
species has changed by way of cultural evolution. Culture is the way that meaning is transferred
among individuals and across generations with groups of people. How this energy and
information flow shifts its patterns across time is what cultural evolution involves. This reality of
how we’ve changed as a species involves not the genetically driven evolution of our brains, but
the mental evolution of how we collectively pass energy and information among each other
across generations. This is the evolution of the mind, not the brain.
In fact, one can see that for the mind (regulated patterns of energy and information flow)
to occur, it needs to harness the activity of the brain.
The mind uses the brain to create itself.
I know this may seem different from what you may have read from other views. But this
perspective actually is consistent with the scientific state of our understanding of how mind and
brain are related to each other. There is no need to try to simplify the dimension of one reality
into that of another. Mind is not “just” brain activity. Energy and information flow happens in a
brain within the body and it happens within relationships.
To visualize this perspective we can say that “the mind rides along the neural firing
patterns in the brain” and realize that this riding is a correlation with bidirectional causal
influences.
Relationships among people involve the flow of energy and information, and thus utilize
these riding patterns along neural firing as well. This interconnection among brain, mind, and
relationships will be a triangle of reality that we’ll be returning to again and again.
Here is an important point: relationships shape energy and information flow, as is
happening now through these words in your mind. But the brain’s activity also directly shapes
how energy and information flow is regulated. Right now your brain may be activating certain
firing patterns that distract you from paying attention to the reading. This would impair your
ability to be mindfully aware at this moment in time. A friend may come in to the room and also
distract you, shaping how energy and information flow, the focus of your attention, is occurring at
this moment.
In this way, we can imagine a “triangle of human experience” in which the three points
represent mind, brain, and relationships. None of these three are reducible to the others. In fact,
one can sense that the arrows of influence go in all directions—a tridirectional flow. The mind is
how we regulate energy and information flow. The brain embeds the pathways of energy and
information flow. And relationships are the way we share energy and information flow. This
triangle represents three aspects of the one reality of human experience. A healthy life entails a
coherent mind, integrated brain, and attuned relationships.
Attention to the present moment, one aspect of mindful awareness, can be directly shaped
by our ongoing communication with others, and from the activities in our own brains. Indeed, the
biggest challenges to being present are the patterns of activation in our brains we call “top-down”
influences that continually bombard us with neural firing and mental chatter, keeping us from
showing up in the moment. Mindful awareness is one way to promote a healthy triangle of our
human lives in mind, brain, and relationships. As we move forward in our journey we’ll explore
how we can be influenced by these neural patterns as the mind reaches toward being aware in the
moment.
Reflection and Mindfulness in Learning and Education

In addition to such personal and health advantages of mindfulness, the concept of “mindful
learning” has been proposed by Ellen Langer (1989, 1997, 2000) that has been shown to make
learning more effective, enjoyable, and stimulating. The essence of this approach is to offer
learning material in a conditional format rather than as absolute truths. The learner in this way is
required to keep an “open mind” about the contexts in which this new information may be useful.
Involving the learner in the active process of education also is created by having students
consider that their own attitude will shape the direction of the learning. In these ways, this form
of mindfulness can be seen to involve the learner’s active participation in the learning process
itself.
Noted educational maven Robert J. Sternberg considers this educational mindfulness
something akin to a cognitive style (2000). Research on mindful learning suggest that is consists
of openness to novelty; alertness to distinction; sensitivity to different contexts; implicit, if not
explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and orientation to the present. Taking these
dimensions of mindfulness into account within the educational setting may permit students to
deepen and broaden the nature of learning throughout their lifelong careers as learners.
Langer herself (1989) suggests that we be careful about seeing her educational concept
of mindfulness as having the same meaning as the historical and modern use of that term in
contemplative practices. For the time being, we can use the qualifier, “cognitive mindfulness” to
refer to Langer’s important conceptualizations regarding how the mind seems to disentangle itself
from categorizations and routinized ways of perceiving and thinking. Ultimately, this form of
mindfulness is considered “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the
present, noticing new things and sensitive to context.” Finding similarities and differences among
these two uses of the term “mindfulness” may help us elucidate the deeper nature of each.
Interestingly, research in both forms has revealed that they are independently associated with
positive outcomes in people’s lives, such as enhanced sense of pleasure and longevity.
The Fourth “R” of Education: Reflection and Mindsight

At the heart of mindfulness is the teachable capacity for reflection. This learnable skill is
just a breath away from being readily available as the “fourth ‘R’” of basic education to children
throughout their development. We once saw reading and writing and ‘rithmetic as luxuries for a
selective few, but now these are considered the basic three R’s of education. Wouldn’t it make
sense to teach children about the mind itself and make reflection become a fundamental part of
basic education?
Education holds a key component to a child’s development. The relationships that
teachers have with their students and the experiences they provide for them directly shape the
neural circuitry of the next generation. Teachers in this way can be seen as the neurosculptors of
our future.
When children leave home during infancy and the toddler years to enter day care, or as
three and four year olds to attend preschool, they begin a long journey of relationships with
teachers. These important connections can profoundly shape a child’s sense of self, belief in her
own talents, and willingness to try to succeed in the face of challenge. We are hopefully all
familiar with the important findings that the beliefs of the teacher in the child’s capacity to learn
will directly shape the realization of the child’s learning. Indeed, a child’s belief in his own
capacity to improve his intelligence with genuine effort can make all the difference in just settling
for mediocrity or pushing for excellence and achieving his potential (Dweck, 2006).
What would happen if the teacher was also aware of the scientific finding that how a
person reflects internally will shape how he treats both himself and others? If teachers became
aware that attuning to the self, of being mindful, can alter the brain’s ability to create flexibility
and self-observation, empathy and morality, wouldn’t it be worth the time to teach such reflective
skills first to teachers and then, in age-appropriate ways, to the students themselves?
We know how to teach reading. We have strategies for how to teach writing skills. We
actively engage in a progressive program to teach mathematics. Teachers have all of these skills
themselves as individuals; imparting them to students comes naturally. Each of these R’s focuses
the mind on the external world: Others’ thoughts in books, essays and reports often about what
we’ve seen on the outside, or conceptual ideas and skills about numerical procedures. These are
all important. But—as was the case in my own experience not only in primary and secondary
school, but in college and medical school as well—a focus on the self, and in particular on the
mind, is often absent from those thousands of hours we spend the classroom.
Of the many downsides of self-absenteeism, one is that we miss the opportunity to
develop mindsight, our capacity to perceive and understand the mind in ourselves, and in others.
Without this skill, our own internal life is a blur, and the mind of others often missing from our
sense of the world. This absence of a focus on mindsight in education is bolstered by technology
driven media that bombard children with stimuli devoid of elements that promote self-
understanding or compassion. Absent self, missing mind, empty empathy.
Do you think it could be possible to wake each other up to simply ask, “why not teach
ourselves about our own minds?” Reflection is the skill that embeds self-knowing and empathy in
the curriculum. Various lines of research suggest that training a child in social and emotional
skills promotes resilience and may harness the neural circuitry of executive function (Greenberg,
in press). Here we see the important overlap of social, emotional, cognitive, and attentional
mechanisms, each reinforcing the others. As we’ve seen, the prefrontal areas may mediate each
of these dimensions of our mental life.
In neural terms, the fourth “R” of reflection would essentially be an education that
develops the prefrontal cortex. This is our “cortex humanitas,” the neural hub of our humanity.
This would be a program of “no prefrontal cortex left behind” that aims to develop the essence of
our human nature, our compassion and empathy for each other, and ourselves. In addition to
reflection being a part of our prefrontal heritage, this integrative region also supports relationships
and resilience, perhaps giving us a fifth and sixth “R” of basic education. We have a fairly clear
idea about how to promote prefrontal growth when we consider the role of attunement in
neuroplasticity: Interpersonal attunement in adult-child relationships promotes the development
of prefrontal functions. The proposed internal attunement of mindful awareness harnesses these
same processes that emerge with prefrontal neural integration and promote a reflective mind, an
adaptive, resilient brain, and empathic relationships.
Ultimately these reflective skills harness our prefrontal capacity for executive attention,
prosocial behavior, empathy, and self-regulation. Reflection is at the heart of both social and
emotional intelligence, offering us the ability to be aware of our own internal states and those of
others so that we can engage in life in a more flexible and compassionate way. Programs that
cultivate social and emotional competence also promote academic success (see the latest results at
CASEL.org).
The overall insights from brain science suggest that how we focus our attention activates
certain neural circuits. With neural activation, the potential is created to enhance the connections
in those regions which can help transform a temporary state into a more long-term trait of that
individual. The experiences we provide as teachers—or as parents or therapists—focus students’
(children’s or patients’) attention, activate their brains, and create the possibility of harnessing
neural plasticity in those specific areas. Coupled with emotional engagement, a sense of novelty,
and optimal attentional arousal, teaching with reflection can utilize these prime conditions for
building new connections in the brain
Much of what may occur in families, classrooms, and within psychotherapy that
promotes mindfulness in the developing person (child, student, patient) has to do with the
presence of the parent /teacher/therapist. Presence is the state of mind that comes with all the
dimensions of reflection: This is the quality of our availability to receive whatever the other
brings to us, to sense our own participation in the interaction, and to be aware of our own
awareness. We are open to bear witness, to connect, to attune to our students’ internal states.
This is professional presence that entails us being personally present.
The attunement of the teacher with students creates the grounding for them to become
mindful: We see our selves in the eyes of the other, and when that reflection is attuned, we have
an authentic sense of ourselves. When the other has presence, when his or her reflective skills
permit mindful awareness, then in that moment we are seen with authenticity and directness.
When parents have reflective capacities that are able to provide that attunement within attachment
relationships that can promote such reflective ability to be nurtured in the child (Fonagy and
Target, 1997). Here we see the idea that internal reflection and attunement each contribute to a
secure attachment which in turn supports the development of these capacities for reflection and
attunement in the child.
And so before you as a teacher (or therapist in the role of teaching to alleviate suffering
in patients) ever “do” something, being present yourself is an important start. Once you
embrace the intention to be open and in the present, there are specific ways in which people of all
ages can be encouraged to reflect.
The overarching idea is that what teachers provide can directly develop life-enhancing
skills: Life can become more flexible, meaningful, and connecting. Children can develop
reflective capacities through skill training that have long-lasting impacts that promote well-being.
With reflection, students are offered a neural capacity to socially, emotionally, and academically
approach life with resilience. What a gift for healthy development.
Reflection in Clinical Practice: Being Present and

Cultivating the Hub of the Mind’s Wheel of Awareness
The implications of our journey into the mindful brain point to the importance of our own
reflective presence as professionals. Whether we are teachers or clinicians, the ways in which we
help others grow will be directly shaped by our own mindful presence. We can engage in
“mindful practice” (R. Epstein, 1999) in the medical professions to create in ourselves a state of
reflection and emotional availability that is at the heart of effective clinical work.
Mindful awareness can become a fundamental part of the mental health effort of
psychotherapy to improve people’s lives and reduce mental suffering in both direct and indirect
ways (Germer et al, 2005; M. Epstein, 1995). Some approaches use formal mindfulness
meditation techniques, such as MBSR (Kabat-Zinn, 1990) and MBCT (Sega, et al, 2002), while
others use applications of mindfulness skills such as ACT (Hayes, 2004) and DBT (Linehan,
1993). In these approaches the availability and empathy of the therapist that emerge with the
therapist’s own mindful presence may be a common source of healing in psychotherapy across
the various “schools” and specific orientations. These may be considered the indirect effects of a
mindful therapist on the patient’s experience. Such indirect impacts may be seen to emerge from
the empathic availability of the clinician to be mindfully present for whatever arises in the shared
attentional field of the therapy experience. But teaching mindfulness itself, within formal
meditation or other skill-building exercises, can offer patients useful capacities that can transform
their relationship with themselves, reduce suffering from symptoms, and create a new approach to
life itself.
Direct application of mindfulness skills teaches people how to become more reflective.
The overall idea of these approaches, as we’ve discussed, is that the various facets of mindful
awareness are cultivated. Such practices enable individuals to jettison judgment and develop
more flexible feelings as they come to approach what may previously have been mental events
they tried to avoid or to which they had intense aversive reactions. Becoming nonreactive, and
developing equanimity in the face of stressors, support the view of mindfulness directly shaping
the self-regulatory functions of the brain by promoting reflection of the mind.
Mindfulness is a teachable skill. In many ways this learning parallels the idea of
mindsight: our capacity to see the mind in ourselves, and in others. Developing the circuits of
mindsight, as with mindful awareness, can be done through reflective dialogues and skill
building.
Reflective dialogues are the ways in which we focus our mutual attention on the nature of
the mind itself within conversations with each other. As we use words to illuminate the mind, the
linguistic representations serve as a finger pointing to the important dimension of our internal
lives and develop our capacity for mindsight (Siegel, 1999, and Siegel, in press). Describing and
labeling these mental events with words is a facet of mindfulness that these reflective dialogues
can directly foster. Research has shown that the capacity to label seems to balance the arousal of
the right hemisphere with the activity of the left to create a more flexible integrated state.
As reflective dialogue becomes internalized the individual can develop a new source of
insight into her own mind. Life is transformed when mindsight is developed: Being able to “be”
with whatever arises is greatly helped by being able to “see” what it is that is arising as in fact a
transient activity of the mind itself, not some fixed entity that can take over the person’s life.
Sometimes words can be of great help in setting the stage for seeing this dynamic and non-verbal
world of the mind. These dialogues may be of central importance in helping children in families
and patients in therapy develop the reflective thinking needed to sense the mind itself. When
offered with mindful learning principles in mind—with the state of the learner, the conditional
nature of learning, and the sensitivity to contexts and distinctions as a part of the dialogue—then
reflective conversations can create new states of mindful awareness.
But words by themselves are often not enough. As they point a finger to the direction of
experience, the conceptually-based words should be supplemented by our other streams of
awareness: sensation, observation, and knowing.
Teaching of mindfulness involves developing the skill of direct sensory experience and
the observational focus on the non-verbal world. If we imagine four streams of awareness we can
sense how therapy may utilize mindful reflections. The stream of sensation becomes an important
grounding point in which to wake up the mind often drowning beneath the waves of anxiety or
depression, fear or numbing, that as “symptoms” have taken over the spacious state of mindful
awareness—what can be called the hub of the mind. If the mind’s awareness is metaphorically
seen as a wheel, then we can imagine the central hub being an open awareness capable of sensing
anything on the rim. Spokes from the central hub emanate outward to the rim which respresents
anything we might be aware of: the first five senses, the sixth sense of the body, the “seventh
sense” of the mind, and an eight sense of our relationship to others and the larger world in which
we live. Mindful awareness can be envisioned as a widening and strengthening of the hub of the
mind’s wheel of awareness. With mindful training, we come to sense that elements on the rim
are not the totality of who we are, but activities of the mind that come and go like ripples on the
surface of a pond.
We filter the experience of awareness through at least four streams of information flow:
The first is sensation. Learning to dive into sensation can be frightening, especially for those
who’ve experienced trauma and are avoiding being aware of the body. Here we see that the
balance of all of the streams in actual clinical practice becomes essential. Observation is crucial
to enable people to decouple automatic mental processes, such as flashbacks or intrusive
memories, as well as habits of mind such as derogatory internal voices or emotional reactivity.
Additionally, the conceptual understanding of the nature of these processes, and their neural
correlates, can help dis-engage the mind’s stormy activity. Within the non-verbal sharing,
interpersonally and internally, a deeper sense of a non-conceptual knowing about healing and
well-being often illuminate a sense of the innate drive toward a more integrated state of mental
health. These four streams can be recalled by the acronym, SOCK: sensation, observation,
concept, and knowing. The integration of these four can often be experienced as a sense of
direction, a “glimmer of hope,” or an image of healing. As these work together for the fullness of
experience, the non-conceptual knowings are often hard to articulate with words and sometimes
are felt as “insights” that emerge as shifts in perspective, a new frame of mind, rather than an
outright word-based thought that can be easily shared.
Psychotherapeutic approaches that utilize mindfulness offer well-developed non-verbal
exercises that enable the individual to dip into direct sensation beneath the veil of words that may
often conceal the mind’s pain. This sensory immersion enables the individual to disengage from
those bottom-up enslavements at the root of suffering. Using imagery and body observation,
intentional movement exercises, sensing emotion and enhancing awareness of the present
immersion in direct experience, these techniques help build the skills of mindfulness. For
example, in MBSR a focus on the sensations of eating a single raisin over many minutes
enhances the individual’s sensitivity to the sensory stream of awareness. Likewise, the body scan
enables the mind to open its receptivity to the subtle sensations from throughout the soma that are
so often excluded from our day to day living (see Kabat-Zinn, 1990).
The benefits of mindfulness may also be attained through the experience of mindful
awareness practices (MAPs) offered outside of therapy itself. MAPs include such practices as
mindfulness meditation (Kornfield, 1991, in press; Kabat-Zinn, 1990), yoga (Brown and Gerbarg,
2005a and 2005b), Qigong (Jones, 2001; and Chen, 2004) and Tai’ chi chuan (Wall, 2004; Irwin,
2005). These MAPs share a deep focus on one’s on intention and are coupled with the awareness
of awareness. For some patients, suggesting the enrollment in classes that teach these MAPs may
be an important adjunct to work in the therapeutic sessions.
I have also found that teaching people to focus on the wheel of awareness in their own
minds has been extremely useful. As briefly introduced above and to review here, in this model,
the rim represents all of the elements that may enter awareness, the hub represents the awareness
itself. On the rim are the domains of the first five senses that bring in data about the outside
world, a sixth sense of the body, a seventh sense of the mind’s thoughts, feelings, perceptions,
memories and beliefs, and perhaps an eighth sense of our relationships with others, and perhaps
the larger world. Developing mindful awareness and this conceptual framework of the metaphor
of the mind’s wheel of awareness can enable patients to develop their middle prefrontal regions
and insular cortex to promote the executive functions inherent in mindfulness. Mindfulness
training may involve the development of the ability to discern different modalities of awareness,
such as those of sensing, observing, conceiving, and non-conceptual knowing (Siegel, 2007).
Teasing apart the differentiated aspects of mental function, such as these forms of awareness, then
allows the individual to link them together in new combinations. This is the essence of
integration: the linkage of differentiated elements into a functional whole. Our integrative
prefrontal regions may play an important role in these executive functions and in mindfulness
itself. These very regions appear to grow with mindfulness practice, as supported by the work of
Lazar and colleagues (Lazar, et al., 2005). These skills help promote a sense of well-being and
improve interpersonal relationships and physiological health that come from the wisdom of these
ancient practices. Could you really ask for more?
Recall that the mind uses the brain to create itself, and so in certain situations we can ally
ourselves with the mind to create more integrated functioning in the neural system itself.
Disengaging automatic reactions makes a huge difference and is one example of this in which we
have bodily reactions that we come to feel enslaved by that in many cases we can actually
improve. For example, a number of individuals who come to therapy for anxiety breathe
primarily with their chests, something we do in a state of danger in preparing ourselves for flight
or fight responses. After being taught how to become aware of their body and to then breathe
with the abdomen, a basic technique of yoga, many individuals experience a great reduction in
their anxiety. There are many steps, for example, to the treatment of obsessions and mood
disturbances, that can specifically help disengage from the automatic reinforcements that
exacerbate an anxiety or dysphoria into a full-blown disorder. Ultimately when we teach
reflection, we are giving a lifelong gift of mindful self-regulation. “If you give a person a fish, she
eats one meal; if you teach her how to fish, she can eat for a lifetime.”
In addition to gaining some distance in learning about the brain’s role in a pattern of
mind, helping the individual to attain a state of reflective awareness is often essential. To achieve
this receptive, self-observant, and reflexive capacity, elements of the time-tested mindfulness
meditation can be extremely useful. Recall that the word “meditation” simply means the
cultivation of the mind, and so this is truly a skill-building exercise that helps develop a mental
ability. In this case, that ability is one of reflection.
Mindfulness meditation enhances the very circuits involved in insight and empathy.
There is something about the resonance in interpersonal attunement and in intrapersonal
attunement that seems to promote a deep sense of well-being. A young teenager in my practice
recently said to me in a session after he had been quite upset about something and then, after
feeling understood by me, he said “wow, I feel so much better now that I’ve told you about this–
how does this happen in the brain?” In many ways, internal attunement creates that deep sense of
feeling felt. With mindfulness, I believe, we come to feel felt in a genuine way by ourselves. This
is internal attunement.
What would happen if we promoted intrapersonal attunement, that luminous space of
possibility for resonating that then, as all the studies show and experience has demonstrated,
promotes interpersonal resonance and compassion with each other? What a different world we’d
have.
The challenge for us all is to see life as a verb, not a noun. We cannot hold on to the fluid
river of life, guarantee the certainty of facts, the universality of rules. As my dear friend and
colleague, the late John O’Donohue, loved to say in his partial poem, “Fluent”: I would love to
live as a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own becoming.” (O’Donohue, 2008). We need
to not only tolerate ambiguity, but learn to treasure its secrets, to flow with presence and
compassion. Being is a moving entity that never ceases to lead us down its winding path.
Embracing this dynamic nature of our transient lives liberates us from the prison of our efforts to
run from this reality. In mindful awareness, within the reflective hub of our minds, we can
welcome this truth into our hearts, and into our collective lives.
We can nurture in each other an access to a core self deeper than personal identity, that
core of being that we all share beneath the adaptations of everyday life and the constrictions of
habits of our personality. Perhaps gaining access to this deeper self is the common ground we
can share as we bring mindfulness to each other. At that mindful place, there may be a path
toward healing our global community one mind, one relationship, one moment at a time; since
kindness is to our relationships, on this precious and precarious planet, what breath is to life.
References
Ackerman, D., Kabat-Zinn, J., & Siegel, D.J. (March 2005). Presented at the panel discussion at the 28th Annual
Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, Washington D.C.. [Audio recordings]. (Available at
PsychotherpyNetworker.org).
Ackerman, D., Kabat-Zinn, J., O’Donohue, J. & Siegel, D.J (2006): Mind and Moment: Mindfulness,
Neuroscience, and the Poetry of Transformation in Everyday Life. DVD recordings, Mindsight Institute
(MindsightInstitute.com).
Anderson, N. B. (with Anderson, P. E.). (2003). Emotional longevity: What really determines how long you live.
New York: Viking.
Armstrong, K. (1993). History of God. New York: Ballantine Books
Baer, R. A., Smith, G. T., Hopkins, J., Krietemeyer, J., & Toney, L. (2006). Using self-report assessment methods to
explore facets of mindfulness. Assessment, 13(1), 27-45.
Baxter, L.R., Schwartz, J.M., Bergman, K.S., Szuba, M.P., Guze, B.H., Mazziotta, J.C., Alazraki, A., Selin, C.E.,
Ferng, H.K., Munford, P., et al. (1992) Caudate glucose metabolic rate changes with both drug and
behavior therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 49(9), 681-689.
Bishop, S. R., Lau, M., Shapiro, S., Carlson, L., Anderson, N. D., & Carmody, J. et al. (2004). Mindfulness: A
proposed operational definition. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11(3), 230-241.
Brown, R.P. & Gerbarg, P.L. (2005). Sudarshan Kriya Yogic Breathing in the Treatment of Stress, Anxiety, and
Depression: Part II—Clinical Applications and Guidelines. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary
Medicine, 11(4), 711-717.
Chen, KW (2004): An analytic review of studies on measuring effects of external Qi in China. Altern Ther Health
Med; 10 (4): 38-50.
Cozolino, L.J. (2002). The neuroscience of psychotherapy : building and rebuilding the human brain. New York:
Norton.
Cozolino, L.J. (2006). The neuroscience of human relationships: Attachment and the development of the social
brain. New York: WW Norton.
Davidson, R. J., Kabat-Zinn, J., Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S. F., Urbanowski, F.,
Harrington, A., Bonus, K., & Sheridan, J. F. (2003). Alterations in brain and immune function produced by
mindfulness meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine 65(4), 564-570.
Dimidjian, S., & Linehan, M. M. (2003a). Defining an agenda for future research on the clinical application of
mindfulness practice. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10(2), 166-171.
Dimidjian, S.D. & Linehan, M.M. (2003b). Mindful practice. In O’Donohue, W., Fisher, J., & Hayes, S. (Eds.),
Cognitive behavior therapy: Applying empirically supported techniques in your practice (pp. 229-237).
New York: Wiley.
Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
Epstein, M. (1995). Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. New York: Basic
Books.
Epstein, R. M. (1999). Mindful practice. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 282(9), 833-839.
Fitzpatrick-Hopler, G. (June 2006). Christian contemplative practice: Centering prayer. Presented at the Mind,
Life Summer Research Institute, Garrison, NY.
Fletcher, L. & Hayes, S.C. (2006). Relational Frame Theory, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and a
Functional Analytic Definition of Mindfulness. Journal of Rational Emotive and Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy
Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1997). Attachment and reflective function: Their role in self-organization. Development
and psychopathology, 9(4), 679-700.
Germer, C.K., Siegel, R.D., & Fulton, P.R. (Eds.). (2005). Mindfulness and psychotherapy. New York: Guilford
Press.
Goleman, D. (1988). The meditative mind: The varieties of meditative experience. Los Angeles: JP Tarcher.
Goleman, D. (2007). Social intelligence: The new science of human relationships. New York: Bantam Books.
Greenberg, M.T. (submitted). Promoting resilience in children and youth: Preventive interventions and their
interface and neuroscience. .
Greenberg, M.T., Weissberg, R.P., O’Brien, M.U., Zins, J.E., Fredericks, L, Resnick, H., & Elias, M.J. (2003).
Enhancing school-based prevention and youth development through coordinated social, emotional, and
academic learning. American Psychologist, 58(6/7), 466-474.
Grossman, P. (2007). Mindfulness practice: A unique clinical intervention for the behavioral sciences. In
Heidenreich, T & Michalak, J. (Eds.), Mindfulness and acceptance in psychotherapy. Tuebingen: DVTG
Press.
Grossman, P., Niemann, L., Schmidt, S., & Walach, H. (2004). Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health
benefits: A meta-analysis. Journal of psychosomatic research, 57(1), 35-43.
Gusnard, D.A. & Raichle, M.E. (2001). Searching for a baseline: Functional imaging and the resting human brain.
Nature Neuroscience, 2, 685-693.
Hayes, S. C. (2004). Acceptance and commitment therapy, relational frame theory, and the third wave of behavioral
and cognitive therapies. Behavior Therapy, 35(4), 639-665.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment therapy: An experiential
approach to behavior change. Guilford Press, New York, NY: US.
Hayes, S.C., Follette, V.M., & Linehan, M.M. (Eds.). (2004). Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the
Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition. New York: The Guilford Press.
Irwin, M. (2005). The impact of Tai Chi on elderly subjects. Presented at the Mindful Awareness Research Center,
University of California, Los Angeles.
Jones, B: (2001): Changes in cytokine production in healthy subjects practicing Guolin Qigong: a pilot study. BMC
Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 1, 1-8.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain,
and Illness, New York: Delacorte Press
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1995). Wherever You Go, There You Are, New York: Hyperion Press.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-based interventions in context: Past, present, and future. Clinical Psychology:
Science and Practice, 10(2), 144-156.
Kaiser-Greenland, S. (2006). Information from Inner Kids Organizational Website. www.innerkids.com
Keating, T. (2005). The orthodoxy of centering prayer. Presented at the 13th Annual Investigating the Mind: The
Science and Clinical Applications in Mediation Meeting, Washington D.C.
Kornfield, J. (1993). A path with heart. New York: Bantam Books.
Kornfield, J. (in press). The Wise Heart. New York: Bantam Books.
Langer, E. J. (2000). Mindful learning. Current directions in psychological science 9 (6), 220-223.
Langer, E.J. (1989). Mindfulness. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press.
Langer, E.J. (1997). The power of mindful learing. Cambridge: MA, De Capo Press.
Lazar, S.W., Kerr, C.E., Wasserman, R.H., Gray, J.R., Greve, D.N., Treadway, M.T., McGarvey, M., Quinn, B.T.,
Dusek, J.A., Benson, H., Rauch, S.L., Moore, C.I., Fischl, B. (2005). Meditation experience is associated
with increased cortical thickness. Neuroreport, 16(17), 1893-1897.
Linehan, M.M. (1993a). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford
Press
Linehan, M.M. (1993b). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford
Press.
Lutz, A., Dunne, J.D., Davidson, R.J. (2007). Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness. In Zelazo, P.D.,
Moscovitch, M., & Thompson, E. (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of consciousness. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
Marlatt, G. A., & Gordon J.R. (1985). Relapse prevention: Maintenance strategy in the treatment of addictive
behavior. New York: Guilford Press.
Mayberg, H. (2005). Paths to recovery: Neural substrates of cognitive mindfulness-based interventions for the
treatement of depression. Presented at the 13th Annual Investigating the Mind: The Science and Clinical
Applications in Mediation Meeting, Washington D.C.
O’Donohue, J (2008): To Bless the Space Between Us. New York: Random House.
Pargament, K.I., (1997): The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, research, and practice. New York:
Guilford Press.
Parks, G.A., Anderson, B.K., & Marlatt, G.A. (2001). Relapse prevention therapy. In N. Heather, T.J. Peters, & T.
Stackwell (Eds.), Interpersonal handbook of alcohol dependence and problems (pp. 575-592). New York:
John Wiley.
Schore, A.N. (1994) Affect regulation and the origin of the self. The neurobiology of emotional development. New
Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Schore A.N. (2003a). Affect dysregulation and the disorders of the self. New York: Guilford Press.
Schore, A.N. (2003b). Affect regulation and the repair of the self. New York: Guilford Press.
Segal, Z.V., Williams, J.M.G., & Teasdale, J.D. (2002). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new
approach to preventing relapse. New York: The Guilford Press.
Segal, Z.V., Williams, J.M.G., & Teasdale, J.D., Kabat-Zinn, J. (2007). The Mindful Way through Depression,
New York: The Guilford Press.
Siegel, D.J. (1999). The developing mind. New York: Guilford Press.
Siegel, D.J. (2001). Toward an interpersonal neurobiology of the developing mind: Attachment, “mindsight”, and
neural integration. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 67-94.
Siegel, D.J. (2003). An interpersonal neurobiology of psychotherapy: The developing mind and the resolution of
trauma. In Solomon, M. & Siegel, D.J. (Eds.), Healing Trauma (pp. 1-56). New York: WW Norton.
Siegel, D.J. & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the inside out: How a deeper self-understanding can help you
raise children who thrive. New York: Penguin Putnam.
Siegel, D.J. (2006). An interpersonal neurobiology approach to psychotherapy. Psychiatric Annals, 36(4), 248-256.
Siegel, D. J. (2007). The Mindful Brain: Reflection and attunement in the cultivation of well-being. New York:
WW Norton.
Siegel, D.J. (2007): Mindfulness training and neural integration. Journal of Social, Cognitive, and Affective
Neuroscience.(in press, pages and volume pending).
Siegel, D.J. (2008a). The Mindful Brain. A new audio program with Sounds True, Inc., Boulder CO:
SoundsTrue.com.
Siegel, D.J. (2008b): The Neurobiology of We. Audio program, Sounds True. Boulder CO: SoundsTrue.com.
Siegel, D.J. (in press). Mindsight: Our seventh sense. New York: Bantam.
Solomon, M.F. & Siegel, D.J. (Eds.). (2003). Healing trauma: Attachment, mind, body and brain. New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.
Sternberg, R. J. (2000). Images of mindfulness. Journal of Social Issues, 56(1), 11-26.
Thich Nhat Hanh. (1991). Peace is every step: The path of mindfulness in everyday life. New York: Bantam Books
Wall, R.B. (2005). Tai chi and minfulness-based stress reduction in a Boston public middle school. Journal of
Pediatric Health Care, 194, 230-237.
Wallace, B.A. (2006). The attention revolution: Unlocking the power of the focused mind. Boston: Wisdom
Publications.

Siegel Mindfulness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Siegel Mindfulness

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Siegel Mindfulness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Reflections on The Mindful Brain

A Brief Overview Adapted from

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

Mindfulness as an Attuned Relationship with Oneself

Finding the Mind in Our Everyday Lives

Defining the Mind

Awareness of the Mind Itself

Life on Automatic Pilot: Mindlessness and Mindfulness

COAL and Kind Awareness

Discernment and Mental Health Implications

Why the Mindful Brain?

Mindfulness and Integration

“Brain” and “Mind”

Reflection and Mindfulness in Learning and Education

The Fourth “R” of Education: Reflection and Mindsight

Reflection in Clinical Practice: Being Present and

You might also like