Marc and Dr. Dan Siegel discuss the deep inner work of awareness, the power of belonging, the illusion of the self, and processes for shifting from me to “we.” Dan shares a meditation practice that he calls the “Wheel of Awareness.”

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Daniel Siegel, MD, is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the Founding Co-director of its Mindful Awareness Research Center. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an organization that focuses on the development of mindsight, teaches insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families and communities.

He is a bestselling author of several books, including Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, and The Developing Mind.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to ZenBones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why ZenBones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting. Now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership. In this episode with psychiatrist, writer, and mindfulness teacher, Dan Siegel, we talk about interconnection and the deep inner work and the work of the heart, as well as the intellect. We touch on identity and belonging, and the wheel of awareness. Lots of great material. Let’s dive in.

I’m here today with Dr. Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist, and author, and clinical professor, and also a buddy of mine. Dan and I have actually even taught a workshop together. I’ve brought Dan in for various things. Anyhow, I’m super excited to be here with Dan. Dan, good morning. Welcome.

[00:01:16] Dan Siegel: Thanks for having me, Marc. I’m very excited to be here with you, an old buddy and colleague, and glad we could have a conversation this morning.

[00:01:23] Marc: Me too. Whenever I’ve brought Dan in to do things and in my co-teaching, Dan’s intellect is dazzling. People just start having, I could feel, I won’t edit myself, people have orgasms with the level of excitement that you bring and your ability to present really complex ideas and make them accessible. I really appreciate that as well. I find I’m always feeling your heart in a way even more than your intellect. I think that’s where I want to start now, is by asking you what’s in your heart these days, Dan?

[00:02:04] Dan: Well, that’s such a beautiful invitation, Marc. Thank you. My head, where you’re talking about the intellect, wants to just make one statement first and just to support, because I’m trained as a scientist. There’s certainly a poetic way of you asking, what’s in your heart, and that’s beautiful. I’m going to respond from that way in honor of that poetic notion of heart. There’s some new views that people like Antonio Damasio beautifully expressed, that we have centers of information processing which are parallel distributed networks of neurons and other kinds of tissue that are able to literally learn and adapt and experience things.

One is in the head, and we call it the brain, because it has language, but it looks like there are two other brains that preceded the head brain, and that’s the heart brain, and the intestinal brain, which you could just call the gut. For any scientists listening, I just want to make a plea that if you don’t like poetry, that’s fine, everyone can have their preferences, but I think poets were on to something way before the scientists knew it.

That is, that we have these bodily centers of intelligence, if you will, or processing information, and so Marc, you’re asking me in a way, instead of going to your head, Dan, which you use the term intellect, which is totally appropriate from a science point of view, reasoning, and data and all these, “objective things” go to your subjective sense, in the heart. Now, you didn’t tell me to go to my gut, what’s your gut telling you, which we can talk about too.

When I let my head have its words and language and stuff, and then I say, “Okay, Marc is asking about the heart, go there.” It’s a lot of both sadness and a lot of love about our connections with one another. All the incredible violence that’s going on with racism, continuing to go on in our country, the United States, is so profoundly painful. Just to honor that with a white skin I have, the white skin you have, living in a white dominant society like the United States.

Even if our ancestors came over relatively recently, the colonial history of the United States and for anyone who’s not used to thinking about that, they may say, “I don’t want to listen to these two people talking about it.” It’s really important from a scientific point of view to acknowledge what some people call the positionality or context. My heart really aches for the incredible violence going on to people who don’t have white-colored skin who aren’t in the dominant social group. The heart is really all about our relationality, so that’s one place, there’s a lot of pain.

I’m doing a work through an organization, I work for the Garrison Institute, where we’re really trying to work on issues about the art and science, if you will, of social justice, looking at racism and the idea of that social construction of division we call race that’s powerfully talked about by Isabel Wilkerson in her book Cast, that we need to all be responsible. All of us, people of white skin, people non-white skin or the non-dominant groups for that.

That’s part of where my heart is, but filled with love because I work with people of color and together we find a way to have this what we call we community, where we realize each of us has our individual experience in the skin case bodies we’re in and whether we feel included or not, we can find a way, we in this group, to have the individuality as me and we. Part of it is there.

Another part of the work I’ve been doing in my heart is about our relationship with nature. I’m filled with a lot of sadness and pain and what I think the eco philosopher in Australia, Glenn Albrecht calls earth emotions. I’m doing work with Joanna Macy who lives up near you who’s now 93. She’s a visionary about how to take the heart feeling of grief and Albrecht calls it, solastalgia, this longing for a biodiversity that we used to have.

Since you and I were kids, we’re about the same age, we’ve lost two thirds of the biodiversity on the planet. People know that in their bones, that’s getting to the gut feeling, but in the heart there’s an ache. What Joanna Macy has beautifully talked about in her book, Active Hope and other books that I absolutely highly recommend is that if we don’t begin with the grief of the heart, then our heads will get burnt out because they’re going to try to avoid that painful feeling that Albrecht calls earth emotions.

Part of it is to open up to the joy of the wonder of nature, that my dear friend Diane Ackerman writes about in her book, The Human Age, the Anthropocene. In this human age, we have been affecting earth in a negative way but the good news is, if we look at the mechanisms, which I do in this next book I’ve written, IntraConnected, if we look at the mechanisms beneath racism and beneath environmental destruction and other pandemics, if you will, even the way we’ve handled COVID, you can actually identify, and this is really where my heart is that, a feeling of misplaced construction of the self.

This is more like a gut feeling in me, but my gut tells me that our survival, this is what a gut feeling is about not just that relationality, but about empowerment and agency in righting wrongs. This gut feeling is we can do this, we can do this if we identify this, isolated self that is probably at the heart of all these problems.

My heart is filled with both pain and also incredible optimism that when you look at the creative power of the human mind, if it just realizes its mistaken identity as a self being separate, since it’s the human mind that caused it, the great news is, and now here’s my head talking a little more, is that these painful feelings we feel in our heart or I feel now anyway, and the gut oomph that we feel, instead of, and Joanna and I were talking about this the other day, instead of seeing these as all threats to survival, and we get all agitated and terrified and we want to fight or flee or freeze up or faint, all these Fs of reactivity we burn out, instead, we can become like dancers, where we consider these challenges as dance partners.

Every morning when a part of me is feeling overwhelmed and potentially going down the burnout road, I realize that we can be a dance partner with challenge. My heart is actually filled with hope and all sorts of incredibly opening feelings that together if everyday, like the conversation you and I are having now, every day if we just awaken ourselves, we can take this as your beautiful podcast title is, we take contemplative wisdom. We combine it with modern science, it’s just catching up with what indigenous knowledge has told us and contemplative knowledge has told us, it’s catching up to idea of busting out this view of a separate self, I think humanity can turn it around.

I’m extremely hopeful. I feel grateful to be here with you. I feel a sense of awe of what the possibilities are and compassion for not ignoring the pain of social injustice and environmental destruction, but acknowledging it, moving with it and through it to identify what’s going on and trying to change it. That’s my gut center, my heart center, my head center all trying to respond but you just wanted heart, so I got those others in there.

[00:10:36] Marc: No, that’s great. There’s so many ways to go there. Curious as to your thoughts on this. I think this comes from a talk I heard by my good friend Norman Fisher, who you’ve met, a Zen teacher. He was surmising that part of the root problem is that in western culture starts with the idea that everything by default is great, and that it’s only because we’ve done wrong things and made bad choices that we fall into this realm of fear or sin or less than is this embedded in how western cultures look at self and identity.

Whereas Buddhism and a lot of eastern thought starts with pain and suffering as the default, and that our task in life is to learn how to transform pain and suffering into joy and possibility and a more peaceful, more whole way of looking. I thought that was really a profound sense of some insight into the sense of self and identity and trauma. There’s a different relationship of trauma.

In any case, I think what you’re talking about, the pain of racism, the pain of what we’re doing to the planet, to nature and how to feel it, how to let it in. I have Joanna Macy’s book, Active Hope on my kitchen table right now.

[00:12:14] Dan: Yes. Beautiful. She just came out amazing with the second edition of it as a 93 year old. She with her co-author in the second edition, which is a beautiful edition. I want to come to the thing you’re raising though about what Norman Fisher is suggesting is the difference. I’m not enough of a scholar to confirm or push against that, but just to go with his invitation to look at that difference.

One thing that I try to talk about in looking at the self is in fact that we have two origins of wholeness, if you will. One is the most immediate one, which is that we grew up in a womb and as the fetus grows in the womb, you don’t have to breathe, you don’t have to eat, you don’t have to protect yourself, you don’t have to seek comfort or connection. You are enclosed. Literally, you’re at one with the womb. You’re in this uterus environment and one with the uterus.

Now, those obviously are parallel to the statements that people say, aren’t we one with the world or one with the universe. In some ways, I think because the nervous system remembers things, it has something called implicit memory, it can remember the feeling of something, even if it can’t label it with, “Oh, I remember when I was this age, such and such happened as an event,” that’s more like what’s called explicit memory.

It looks like implicit memory is formed in at least the last two months of our time in the womb. One origin I think of a feeling of wholeness is in fact the experience we all have going through, and in a sense that’s original wholeness or goodness, if you want to use Norman Fisher’s term. That would lean us in the direction that we start there.

The other thing is just from a physics point of view, and I talk about this in IntraConnected that if you look at the deep study of energy then in looking at physics, quantum physics in particular, one way of understanding what physicists have discovered, and this was the cover story of Scientific-American, a very conservative public science translation journal in July of 2018. This was, I know this month because the month before a book I wrote called Aware came out where I was saying that what ultimately came out in Scientific-American was that the physicists have shown there are two realms we live in.

There’s a Newtonian realm that Sir Isaac Newton figured out where things are large objects, like molecules or like your body or my body or a bicycle or a planet, and these clusters of large things are called macrostates, and they have certain properties for reasons we don’t need to get into.

When you look at the mathematics of the Newtonian principles of physics, which are true, they involve things being like entities, like a planet or your body or bicycle, they’re like noun-like things, entities, that have the qualities of spatial separation and separation across something that we’ve named as time, which in physics terms is really called an arrow of time, which is a directionality of change because of something called the second law of thermodynamics. We don’t need to get into it, but the bottom line is that era of time only exists in the Newtonian realm.

In a practice I do every morning, I did it just before we got on here called the wheel of awareness. You go around the rim of all the things you’d be aware of, but then you bend the spoke of attention that you’ve been moving around into the hub itself.

What people have described, and you and I did this together in a workshop, is they describe a timeless state where everything is connected and it’s filled with love and open awareness, and you can remember all that with the acronym COAL — connected, open awareness and love, and this is with 50,000 people before the pandemic, I did this in person.

You could say, “Well, what’s going on?” It looks like in contrast to Newtonian realm, the physicists have told us there’s a quantum realm where there’s a space called the quantum vacuum that the Quantum Physicist Emeritus Professor Arthur Zions likes to call the sea of potential. It’s as Arthur says, the formless source of all form. In some ways, if you think about the Big Bang, reality began with everything being won, then from this potentiality of energy emerged stuff that became entities of space and time separation.

The quantum realm has these qualities and ways we don’t need to talk about here, but that have the reality that spatial separation isn’t what it is in the Newtonian world. In fact, in some ways it’s meaningless, and certainly time does not exist. What I would say about what Norman Fisher says is whether it’s being at one with the womb or tapping it to pure consciousness that you could do with meditation, I do it every morning with the wheels hub.

If you look at all the research now in psychedelics, my way of understanding it is that it’s basically dropping the brain out of its commitment to being in a body and having a Newtonian perspective on things and accesses this more connected timeless space, which you can do every morning without psychedelics. When Dacher Keltner, Professor at Berkeley gave the mystical experiences scale to people doing the wheel of awareness, they got the same scores. They were good as if they were on psilocybin.

It was a fascinating moment to realize you have the capacity to drop your mind out of, I think the origin of the separate self is we only live in the Newtonian realm, and instead we can access this more wide open realm that contemplative practices, they don’t talk like that, but they do talk about the relative versus the universal. Indigenous teachings have taught about this for also thousands of years independently from contemplative practices.

Basically what they’re saying is that when you think the self, and I’ll translate this from an intraconnected point of view, when you think the self is separate, you’re getting lost in the view that only the Newtonian reality is what exists. I feel, and with my colleagues and students, we take the scientific perspective that you can use consciousness to go beneath these illusions of separation and start to feel literally in your heart, in your gut, and then with your head’s perceptual shift, you can realize the intraconnected nature, not even interconnected where there’s one thing here connected to another thing there.

I was in a forest once on a retreat three days alone, but it was not alone. It was actually all one and I couldn’t find the word. People were asking me to describe it. I said, “It’s not really interconnected because that word means I’m here and the trees were there.” It was more like a wholeness. It was intraconnected. I went home to type the notes out on the experience and the word processor kept on switching it back to interconnected. I came to discover that intraconnected, a wholeness within the entire system is not a word.

I said, “Okay, is there any word anywhere like that,” and people don’t have words for that. I said, “Okay, we need sometimes a word to communicate with each other and get it like that, so mwe which I’d been using already became the way of experiencing you’re both within the body and you’re the wholeness of your relationships and when you combine the two, you’re an intraconnected identity.

[00:20:50] Marc: Yes, and in the language of Zen, the core practice is how to be fully in the relative world, and at the same time how to be fully in the absolute world, which you’re describing. I was just reading a passage from Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, where he describes that somehow it’s transcending the self, transcending birth and death, and that we have to completely live in the– it’s through the world of birth and death.

I’m also noticing my day job, I describe myself as a stealth Zen teacher working in the business world. These concepts actually matter in how people show up running companies, how people show up in all our relationships, whether it’s with our partners, our children, our parents. There’s something qualitatively different and there’s the intellectual part of it, which I think is important, but then there’s the sense of how to embody these concepts, practices.

[00:21:58] Dan: Yes, exactly in IntraConnected, at the end, there’s two appendices and both are experiential practices that allow you to experience it. One is this wheel of awareness, and I was teaching in a parliament where they’re having a lot of conflicts in the government, and we did the wheel. One of the parliamentarians comes to me during the break, he goes, “I didn’t want to share during the sharing time.”

I said, “Yes, I noticed that.” He goes, “Do you want to know why?” I said, “Yes.” He goes, “You know that part when you bend the spoke right into the hub,” and I said, “Yes, I know that part.” He goes, and now he gets really quiet, his eyes get filled up with tears and he goes, “Never before in my life have I experienced such a feeling of being connected to everyone and everything. It was so filled with love,” and now he’s crying.

There’s this silence between the two of us and I gently said to him, “So you didn’t want to share that?” He goes, “Oh, no.” He goes, “If I mentioned love to them,” he points to his parliamentarian colleagues, he goes, “They would think I was weak,” so there’s this silence. I said, “Can I ask you a question?” He goes, “Yes.” I said, “When you’re making federal policy, when you’re setting up national law, are you leaving love out of the reasoning?”

His eyes get really, really big. He starts wagging his finger at me and he runs over and just talk to his colleagues. I don’t know what they said, it was their private conversation, but it’s exactly you’re saying, Marc, is that if people have a view like it’s all a dog eat dog world, and we got to really just beat the others, however you experience that, companies, governments, neighbors, it’s the opposite of love and it’s the opposite of the connection and the open awareness, so it’s so interesting.

I’ve never had anyone complain that you can walk on the land and you can jump into a swimming pool or a lake and swim, but the properties of water and the properties of walking in the air as you walk on the land, they’re very different from each other and no one gets agitated. The reason, and I know it’s a head thing, so you may push back a little bit about this. I completely agree with you. People need to experience it. The benefit of also having the head join in what the heart and gut know is true is then we get all three centers of intelligence working together.

What I say to people is do the practice, feel it, experience it, then let your gut lead you that way. I’m going to give you some indigenous teachings, some contemplative teachings and scientific teachings that all are saying the same thing. There are two realms and you don’t get upset about water and air, so let’s just name it. Now I got to say, I taught this once at a big mindfulness/meditation conference, and some of the other teachers got really agitated and talked to me and said, “Don’t talk about this. You don’t know for sure that consciousness emerges from the quantum vacuum.”

I said, “I never said I knew for sure. I just said, here’s what quantum science says. Here’s what surveys of whoever decided to talk of 50,000 people all over this planet have said, the only thing in science I can find that at least correlates with it is the quantum view of the quantum vacuum in the quantum realm. I’m not saying it’s true, but let’s consider it as a possibility.” They go, “Well, just because it’s possible doesn’t make it true.” I said, “I never said it was true, but consider it.”

When people get that view and do a practice like the wheel or whatever practice in Zen, you can do it “Thích Nhất Hạnh” in the IntraConnected book, because I think these teachings of the universal realm, I think indigenous teachings of the wholeness of everything and humanity’s place in nature are very conciliant, that is they go together, even though they came from independent sources, they are so conciliant with not what we find in brain science, except to say the brain can get open or closed, fine.

When it gets open I think it comes to be like an antenna for the reality that there is a quantum realm, and the fun thing is once you see this and once I teach this to people, what used to freak them out and get them confused what to do with it, now they go, “Oh, I see.” If the mind is an emergent property of energy, which is what I think it is, then you realize energy flow, first of all, is not limited to your head. It goes throughout your whole body, like you’re asking, it go to the heart, and it’s not limited by the skin.

It’s in our relationality to other people, people who look like us, people who don’t look like us, all of humanity and all of nature, and then when you take it one step further, you go, “What is energy?” It’s the movement, as quantum physicists tell us, from possibility to actuality, then you realize when you get to that origin of possibility, for some people it freaks them out.

They want to be certain, certain, certain, and possibility is maximal uncertainty, but then as they do these practices, they realize, “Wow, actually uncertainty has a synonym. It’s not only possibility, it’s freedom.” That’s where when people start to, as you were suggesting, feel it and not just have these ideas but actually feel it and throughout IntraConnected, what I try to do is say to the reader, I’m going to take you on a journey. We have a bunch of stories across the lifespan, but please do a practice like these integrated movements we have in the appendix or the wheel or whatever is your practice so you can experience these two realms and come with me on a journey through stories across literally before you were even conceived, all the way across the life and in terms of dealing with death.

I know when my father died, he was a mechanical engineer, the ultimate Newtonian guy, and when he was getting right near death, this view of this open space of possibility really helped him in very rapid order go from being terrified to feeling at peace.

[00:28:23] Marc: Thank you for sharing that story. Right at the beginning though, and you’ve used the, you used the term freaking out, people freak out about this stuff, but we’re very sensitive creatures. I’ve noticed that it takes a certain level of security. How do we feel secure enough to be uncertain, to enter the realm that it takes– it’s a bit paradoxical, but maybe obvious about that we all need to find our own sense, and maybe this is where the both, I think the three realms of practice that you’re talking about, there’s the intellectual realm and maybe more spiritual realm, the head, the heart, and the body all need to align.

[00:29:14] Dan: I’ll tell you two people who come to mind in workshops, both had a really terrifying experience doing the wheel practice. They got into the hub and as one person said, it killed her, another person said it totally got her disrupted, and then with each of them, when they learned about this head based intellectual view that the hub of the wheel drops you into the quantum realm where your old view from the Newtonian realm of the rim was where you can I get a certain identity. I’m Marc, I’m Dan and whoever they were, they’re both very high powered people.

One was running a company, the other was running a meditation center but had never done a meditation so deep, she said, it was a research center. For both of them, what was amazing is one said when she saw this graph we have that shows you how the wheel allows you to drop energy into its origins.

Instead of being lost in what we call these plateaus of filters that have certain peaks of identity, for example, I’m Marc, I’m Dan, all these noun-like ways we construct certainty in our lives because it’s freaky, it’s panicky, you want to be certain to be safe. One of them said– she was smiling and there was a group of 150 people in the workshop. We were about to close for dinner. I said, “Do you want to share where you’re at now that you’ve seen this diagram?” She says, “Just look at my face.” We go, “Okay, and do you want to add more than this beautiful smile?” She said, “Yes.”

She goes, “The wheel brought me to pieces. I totally fell apart, but now I’m at peace.” For the rest of the week of the workshop, it was the first day of a week-long workshop, her best friends were with her. I kept on checking with her and her friends. She was at peace because we cling to these constructed ideas of separation and who we think we are as nouns, but when you drop into the hub and you start to feel comfortable with it instead of panicky as this person who ran the research center said, “Once I sat down with her and I said, here’s what energy flow looks like across these probability patterns and when you get into pure awareness, you’re dropping into this open field and it has different qualities that if you’ve survived certain difficult things,” which she had survived in her childhood, “You’re going to really want to know certainty and in her case, an academic and researching and all this stuff.” When you drop into openness, it’s like, you are just the universe.

I say just in quotes. Once she saw that, you should have seen her face go from this panic-stricken, “What happened to me? I’m a researcher in this area. I know all this stuff. How did this happen to me? Why am I falling apart?” She just melted. She goes, “Oh wow” like that. I said, “Yes.” She’s written to me since this was years ago. It stays with her because once you realize the spaciousness, like this morning when I got into the hub, and it’s this [wind noises] all over like water flow of potentiality flowing instead of being freaky it’s just a pleasure.

When you feel the love, and this is the weird thing, Marc. I’ve done this with so many people, those three things, it’s a tapestry of the universe. It’s this open awareness, this connection, and love are three threads of a singular tapestry of what the universe is made of. We get this privilege in these years we get to live in these Newtonian bodies to actually dip into that. For both these people, I can just say what used to be a freak out now became freedom.

[00:33:08] Marc: I’m often quoting a couple of lines from a poem by Tony Hoagland where he says, “Do you remember that time and light are kinds of love, and love is no less practical than a coffee grinder or a safe spare tire.” I think, Dan, we’re going to have to think this is the end of part one of this conversation. We could go on and on. I’m remembering that seeing you speaking at a conference, this was many years ago in Washington DC. I usually have this rule that no one should speak for more than 20 minutes, but you are the exception to that.

[00:34:05] Dan: Don’t tell my wife. [laughs]

[00:34:08] Marc: I think in that conference I felt like I didn’t want you to stop speaking. In some way, it’s hard for me to bring this conversation to a close.

[00:34:18] Dan: Yes, because it’s a conversation, turning the verse con with. We turn with each other. My deepest hope is that this conversation, this turning together that you and I are having, everyone listening, all of us in humanity have this opportunity to converse, to turn together. If we identify the empowering ways we can, it’s going to be a win-win situation if we realize basically the error of identifying the self in the body in a Newtonian way and open ourselves up to a life of joy and gratitude and really awe. I’m very grateful for you, Marc, for really initiating this conversation and to be continued

[00:35:05] Marc: Conversing and conspiring, breathing together. I wonde, are you up for doing a short, just literally maybe a three minutes, just some practice or any closing words or anything you’d like to, just to end our…

[00:35:21] Dan: If you go to my website, drdansiegel.com and do the wheel you’d really take about 20 minutes to do it and get the fullness of the experience. I appreciate you asking me to do just three minutes. You really can’t get into this spaciousness, but I can just do a brief reflective space, if you, we can do that. Just let your body get comfortable lying down or sitting up or standing, wherever you are, walking.

Let yourself experience this. Let yourself take your hand and put your thumb in front of your eyes. This is going to be an exercise of perception, and notice how you can look at your thumb. The words I’m saying you can look at your thumb, that’s fine. You have a body and most of us have a thumb and we can look at it with the eyes. If you are not able to see, then just try to feel your thumb with your hands if you’re blind, and that’s fine, just notice and focus attention on that thumb.

Now let that attention go beyond the thumb. If you can see, let your eyes take in what’s beyond your thumb. It might be the room you’re in. It might be a forest you’re walking in. If you’re at the beach, it might be the ocean. If you can’t see, just try to feel beyond the thumb to the space surrounding that body you were born into. In a spatial way, in these bodies we’re in, in this simple exercise, you are adjusting a lens, a lens of perception, whether it’s with your fingers, if you’re blind or if you can see with your eyes.

Just like we have a perceptual lens that can look at the thumb and look beyond the thumb, you have a lens of identity that can focus on the skin and case body that you were born into. If you’re hearing me and making sense of these words, you do have a body, that we know for sure, and that body is real. It lives in a Newtonian realm of an object that’s larger than an electron, so it’s an accumulation of large things, we call them macrostate, and it has dimensions that we’re really familiar with.

Time, we run out of time. We have a clock to measure time. Space, we know the size and weight of the body, this volume to this entity. When you look beyond just the Newtonian body you’re in, just like you could do with your perception beyond the thumb, you come to realize that the subjective sensation, the perspective, the point of view, the agency being center of action, those S-P-A, the SPA if you will, of self doesn’t have to be constrained and limited to the skin and case body.

You have an identity lens that allows you to see beyond the body and to see the sense of the world that’s not only “around you” but that is you. You can take the perspective of the whole, the intraconnected whole, not just interconnected where you’re there and things are there and where everything’s connected. That’s beautiful. Beyond that, there’s a way in which we live within systems and your body is a node of the system, but who you are is the whole system of energy flow, living matter, the whole of the universe.

When you do this, you may have a feeling of, “Whoa, and I’m the whole thing. I’m intraconnected to everything.” It has a feeling of deep peace and connection after you get over the initial, “Oh my God, where did I go?” “Where’s the I?” That’s where we have this fun word in mwe, where you say yes, the inner eye, the inner body, that thumb, that’s your thumb is a me. It’s real and it’s really important. You are also your relationality, the we.

When we put those all together, your relationships with all of humanity and all of nature as the we, the me and the we is mwe, and mwe is an intraconnected identity that can help us as a humanity move forward in a positive generative direction. Mwe thanks you for being on this journey together, for noticing your identity lens, and stretching to include this broader view of who we are. Thank you.

[00:40:10] Marc: Thank you, Dan. Thank you for who you are and who mwe are, and for the good work that you continue to do in the world. Much appreciated.

[00:40:23] Dan: Beautiful. Thank you so much.

[00:40:30] Marc: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work, and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[00:40:55] [END OF AUDIO]