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The Science of Self and Identity: Exploring IntraConnected with Dr. Dan Siegel
226 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of The Therapy4Dads Podcast, we are joined by the renowned Dr. Dan Siegel as he discusses his book "IntraConnected." We delve into the profound concepts of intraconnection and self-identity with Dr. Siegel, exploring the impact of these ideas on parenting, relationships, and global well-being. We discuss the practical applications of understanding the self as more than just an individual body and how this perspective can shape our interactions with others and the world around us. Dr. Siegel also shares insights on the transformative "Wheel of Awareness" practice, shedding light on its potential to foster well-being and resilience. For a fresh perspective on connection, identity, and mental health, tune in to this enlightening episode.
🔑 Key Takeaways from the Episode:
1. The Self: Dr. Siegel discusses the concept of self in terms of individual body, relationships with others, and the interconnectedness with nature. Exploring these interconnected layers of identity can lead to more fulfilling and meaningful connections in our lives.
2. The Wheel of Awareness Practice: Dr. Siegel introduces this practical daily practice, aimed at training attention, awareness, and intention. The practice has shown to have medical benefits by reducing inflammation and optimizing the repair of chromosomes, improving the physiology and resilience of the mind.
3. The Path Forward: Dr. Siegel emphasizes the need for a collective shift in our understanding of the self to promote compassionate connections, not just with others but also with nature. By recognizing and addressing the mistaken identity of the self as the individual body, we can strive for a healthier, happier, and more unified world.
Listen to the full episode for a deep dive into these transformative concepts and get ready to embrace a new perspective on interconnectedness and well-being!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the Therapy for Dads podcast. I'm very, very excited and humbled to share this episode with you. I had the honor and pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Dan Siegel. If you don't know who he is, just go ahead and Google him, but I'll share a little bit about him with you right now.
Meet Dr. Dan Siegel
00:00:15
Speaker
He's the clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. He's a well-known author, speaker, and expert in the field of interpersonal neurobiology. He has made significant contributions to the understanding of the brain and its impact
00:00:29
Speaker
on mental health, relationships, and our well-being. His work often focuses on the integration of various disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, and mindfulness.
Exploring Intra Connection
00:00:40
Speaker
He has written numerous bestseller books, including The Developing Mind,
00:00:45
Speaker
mind site and the whole brainchild which are all widely regarded for their accessible explanations of complex scientific concepts and making applicable and practical to our everyday life. And the conversation we have today is about his book Intra Connection which came out
00:01:06
Speaker
end of 2022, and so we sit down and talk about that. He shares his ideas, why he wrote it, his thoughts about it, his heart for it. It was very insightful, and I'm very, again, very grateful for him sitting down and talking to me. If you're watching this on YouTube after listening to it, drop a comment. I'd love to hear your thoughts back and feedback. Please do. If you're listening to this on the audio, whether it's Spotify or Apple or Google, share it with someone who you know. Send me an email. Drop me a comment.
00:01:34
Speaker
I'll rate the show. Um, so yeah, without further ado, let's just jump into the interview.
Podcast Focus and Listener Engagement
00:01:41
Speaker
This is a therapy for dads podcast. I am your host. My name is Travis. I'm a therapist, a dad, a husband here at therapy for dads. We provide content around the integration of holistic mental health, well-researched evidence-based education and parenthood. Welcome.
00:02:00
Speaker
So thank you so much, Dr.
Interconnectedness and Identity
00:02:02
Speaker
Siegel, for being on the podcast. And today's topic, for those that don't know, first, Dr. Dan Siegel recently wrote this book. Well, last year it came out, the book Interconnected, which is kind of the topic of today. And so where we're going today to give a rough roadmap is a little bit of why Dr. Siegel kind of penned this book.
00:02:22
Speaker
and then looking at some practical applications on building on this topic and idea of interconnection and the Mui, which he'll talk about here. But welcome to the show, Dr. Siegel. And can you tell us a bit your thoughts and rationale as to why the world needed this book?
00:02:37
Speaker
Yeah, well, thanks, Travis. And, you know, sometimes when people have me write the name in the bottom of the screen, I put ABCD, which stands for a body called Dan, you know, and partly I write that just to remind myself that
00:02:55
Speaker
that word self is not just the individual body that I was born into, but it's connected to you, Travis, as a person, you know, and I know you have kids at home. And so, you know, this way that we see what is the self is not just like an interesting exercise and let's look at a word and what does it mean. But for the future of your children, a minor, now adults, but I think the future of the planet depends on how we define that word.
00:03:23
Speaker
So when this started becoming clear years ago, I thought, OK, well, I've written a couple of books for parents and for therapists and stuff. And I said, you know, what about the larger community of humans and how in modern culture we define the self as the same
Self-Concept and Relationships
00:03:38
Speaker
as the individual? So in this conversation, I hope you'll call me Dan, not, you know, not Dr. Seiko, but also, you know, we're all in this together. It's a journey where at home, like raising kids or
00:03:52
Speaker
if you're a teacher teaching kids or if we're just walking down the street, how we come to experience self. And I'll define that when you look at all the sciences of self as simply, as you know from the book, these three letters, S-P-A, spa, where you have a sensation of being a center of energy flow, how it feels.
00:04:13
Speaker
subjective feeling of it. The P is of spas, the perspective, the point of view, and the A is agency. So when I was looking at all, you know, I always, I'm a scientist, I was, as well as a therapist, so I was going to say, well, what is the science of self? And even though they don't say those three things directly or say, this is what it all comes down to, that's what sort of jumped out at me when I was reading all these paper after paper after paper.
Societal Impact of Individualism
00:04:36
Speaker
It's like,
00:04:36
Speaker
Oh my God, this is too complicated. But then it was super simple and I'm an acronym nut anyway. So anyway, if we raise kids like your three that you have at home to realize that, yes, you have a body and that's the individual you, but you also have relationships with your dad and your mom, your other relatives, friends, people you know, that's cool. That's important. Interpersonal relationships. Then you have relationships with all people in your neighborhood, in your community.
00:05:05
Speaker
Okay, that gets it a little bit bigger. And then you realize, wait, I have relationships with all of my fellow humans and this whole huge human family. Yes. And those are all the interconnections. But then you realize you're also connected within all of nature, that that's your sensation perspective and agency. Imagine a world where this wonderful species we have, humans,
00:05:28
Speaker
which definitely has our downsides. But the upside is we can be really collaborative, creative, connecting. We can really be caring. It's an awesome species and it's also awful. It's both. So what we want to do is try to promote the awesome part of it.
00:05:45
Speaker
and try to minimize the awful part of it. And I think the awful part of it is we have a case of mistaken identity. We've confused self as a synonym for individual. And when I was starting to write this book, it was like,
00:06:02
Speaker
I literally had a kind of a senior guy say to me, this is really a dumb thing you're doing because self is the individual. I said, well, I don't know. I mean, if self is the center of where you put your energy and how you try to protect the self and self organize and, you know, things that are self driven and all this kind of stuff. If it's just the individual, we're cooked. It explains so many of the pandemics we have, you know, the problem with the climate crisis, polarization.
00:06:31
Speaker
you know, racism and social injustice, on and on. I think they're all related to confusing self as individual to think they're synonyms. So that's why I wrote the book.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, and reading through it, you know, I listened to another, I think a book club thing you did with, I think a French woman, blanking on her name, but... Yeah, Karine Hamel, yeah. There you go. And I watched it on LinkedIn, and kind of hearing your talk with that group, and, you know, this notion that you were even told that it won't do well.
Mental Health and Isolation
00:07:01
Speaker
You know, the book is, why write this? Like you said, it's a dumb idea. But reading it, you know, coming from a therapeutic perspective and therapy and trauma perspective and working with trauma and attachment. And to me, of course, in my brain, I'm like, this is making sense because this is what I study professionally.
00:07:19
Speaker
But then also personally, as a husband, as a father, as a friend, I think a theme that you had time and time again is how this notion in our, you know, obviously, generally speaking, our Western culture has really isolated the individual. And so I see that 95% of the time of people coming into my clinical practices, that is a big reason why they're there. And then it manifests in these, you know, quote unquote, disorders or, you know, ways of, I think, I would say maybe about survival, depression, anxiety, PTS,
00:07:47
Speaker
These are the disorders that are labeled as disorders, but I think their way of surviving isolation and pain and hurt and you link that a lot with the attachment science too. I think there's a theme there into this notion that we're wired to connect and be in relationships and we get our perspectives within our family unit and then kind of these outsourcing these kind of circles that expand our cultures and how depending on our initial mapping,
00:08:09
Speaker
can really, in a way, be a driving force to how we identify ourself, whether it's differentiated or if we kind of completely disconnected from other beings, so to speak. And I think a lot of times I see in my practice is a lot of disconnection, a lot of isolation, a lot of overly viewed on the self as this body, as the person's body, and then all those perspectives.
00:08:34
Speaker
Exactly. I think it's beautifully said Travis and you know the the travesty I'm sure that gets used with you. That was a nickname in elementary school. People aren't thinking like you as Travis where you know it's almost like
00:08:49
Speaker
You know, like there was this theater near me and they were showing stop making sense by the talking heads and the talking heads were showing up in person. So it was a long line and I wish I would have been able to get in, but I couldn't. Anyway, but even in that song, you know, we try to make sense of the world we're in. And just like a fish swimming in an aquarium where the water is not something the fish really is aware of, they're just in it and they try to adapt as best they can.
00:09:14
Speaker
you know, we're trying to make sense of this world of, you know, basically individualism, which has this unfortunate outcome of greed, of lack of compassion, of isolation and all these pandemics which happen.
Identity and Societal Issues
00:09:29
Speaker
So that just to give you a simple example, if someone says, you're not like me, well, then I'm going to ignore you or I'll hit you or I'll kill you. You know, if you're not like me, I don't like you. It's that kind of weird use of the word like, or if I'm building a factory,
00:09:43
Speaker
If I can make a lot of money building something, why would I care that I'm polluting the planet? Because it's just a trash can this planet we're living in. I just want to have a big bank account. So you may say, oh, come on. That doesn't really happen. It does.
00:09:58
Speaker
It does because I don't want to say we're just human. But when we believe certain things, we live a life based on those beliefs. And I do feel like the stop making sense idea is that when we say, OK, I just want to fit into modern society and I just want to be happy, which is totally understandable.
00:10:16
Speaker
And part of the privilege of being a therapist that you're beautifully describing and that I experienced too as a therapist is in the quiet solitude of that isolated place. You then come to connect with somebody and you go, I don't know how to explain this, but something's not quite right.
00:10:34
Speaker
something's really off. So in interconnected, what I try to do is say, you know, there are a lot of people talking about something's not quite right. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is like, you know, when I say in the book, the splinter in the soul of humanity is the human brain's
00:10:51
Speaker
vulnerability to equate self, this center of subjectivity, perspective and agency, what you act on behalf of with the individual body. And literally when people would say, don't write the book, it's just so obvious self is the individual, I go, well, you know, if we're using that term self to mean, what do we stand up for? I stand up for myself, you know, or is even a plural self, people like me, you know, people on my team, that kind of thing. Well,
00:11:17
Speaker
we're going to really be in trouble. So when I think about your three kids, or I think about my adult children, and I think, what can we in the field of mental health offer? You know, this week is Climate Week in New York. You can see all the protests. And I'm doing some work in Sweden, you know, something called the Inner Development Goals, where I'll be speaking to people from the United Nations, just like are happening now in the Climate Week. And every year when the report comes out from the United Nations,
00:11:43
Speaker
even though they have these things called the sustainability development goals. So they said, you know, eight years ago, this is what we need to do. And actually, it's doable. We know what to do. And it's doable. Here it is. Here's the outline, you know, SDGs, sustainability development goals every year. No, not happening. No progress. No progress. No progress. So finally, the protests in New York are all about
00:12:09
Speaker
We've had enough. What's going on? So this group in Sweden said, well, maybe the reason it's not happening is because people aren't looking inside of the mind. So they called me to help with a project that was already existing, you know, to be an adviser. And now I'm going to do a bunch of workshops for them over in Sweden. But it's an international meeting where this conversation about what the self is that I talk about an interconnected, it's not just like, oh, isn't this kind of intellectually interesting?
00:12:36
Speaker
It could be that the splinter in the soul of human beings is this self equals individual mistaken identity. So if we as mental health professionals can help people, people meaning parents, teachers, people running factories, companies, governments, all of us in whatever ways we can do it with what's called pervasive leadership, you'll find a way to make this happen. But if we can identify the splinter, it's almost like we're limping through life.
Global Perspectives on Mental Health
00:13:06
Speaker
as a human family. Let's remove the splinter. Let's name it so we can frame it and do something about it. So that was the whole idea of the book. And people sometimes say, if you want to write a popular book, just write a book about what people already know. So they basically read it to confirm their own knowledge base. And I think, what a waste of trees.
00:13:27
Speaker
You know, so so yeah, Intriconnected is a counterculture book saying it's what most people don't know, but they feel deep, deep inside. Yes. But don't know it. And that's, you know, hard to convey. That's why I try to use a lot of examples of how to make your identity lens be able to be
00:13:48
Speaker
adjustable so you can actually experience, you know, what it feels like to say, Oh, I'm not just this body. And that's the joke of ABCD. So when I get on a call, an internet call, I say, it's a body called Dan, the self is now between Travis and this body called Dan, and the self exists in all our connections with nature.
00:14:08
Speaker
And that's the intra term is it's not just even inter where you're there, I'm here. There's a wholeness that we need to act on behalf of to have agency for and that you can learn to have the perspective of the whole system and the feeling for it. So, you know, I'm super excited about how the mental health world can be deeply useful on a global scale.
00:14:32
Speaker
And how do you see that being, I mean, what's one hope or one way you see it being useful on a global scale with a mental health profession? If we can help with our expertise in the mind, say, the mind constructs identity. It's not just a given. And the mind being in part an aspect of brain function, but it's much more than that. It's the full body and it's also relational. But if we begin with the brain, we say, look, the brain has a vulnerability.
00:15:02
Speaker
It constructs its view of reality, and then it reinforces that belief. Modern culture, maybe beginning in the West with the European colonialization, absolutely could be, but let's just take a deep breath and say it's spread all around the planet now. It's not just from European-derived people, but that view became dominant in modern times. It is a dominant view.
00:15:25
Speaker
so in the ways that are negatively impacting the world, so that we say, okay, well, the modern mind has constructed what the human brain is vulnerable to do, mistake its identity for just its body. In indigenous cultures, that's not what's taught. What's taught is that you are a part of this much larger whole, not only the system of people who live in your community, but all of nature, and then not just all of nature right now,
00:15:53
Speaker
seven generations before you and seven generations after. And the way to lead a meaningful life is to be a good ancestor, you know? That's like a whole different way of living than the way to live a meaningful life is make a lot of money. You know, get your big house. You know, it's like a whole
00:16:09
Speaker
whole different mentality. And contemplative teachings, also for thousands of years independently, have been teaching the same thing. So my hope is that with the mental health world and the science in this field I work in, interpersonal neurobiology, the book was just saying, look, here's a topic that's hard to talk about because it's so precious. Who am I? My identity, where do I belong? And it may be that the mistaken view of what the self is is actually making people sick.
00:16:38
Speaker
I would agree completely with that statement, seeing it in my clinical practice all the time. This view of how they see themselves, shame, this negative self-prescription and self-criticism, and often stemming from relationships, attachment figures or deficits, things that they don't have or didn't have.
00:16:56
Speaker
big T little T traumas or somewhere in between or the combination of all those or other relationships at school and they come into my office and they come in with this depressive presentation or panic presentation or something else that has been termed in the book that we use the DSM which
00:17:13
Speaker
That's a whole other topic of conversation, which I'm sure you would talk about long about. And this is a way of understanding what they're struggling with, but really
Therapeutic Challenges in Self-Perception
00:17:21
Speaker
it is. It's an isolation. There's disconnection. And a lot of fear, I think, of what this is really pushing toward is not just an interconnection between even us, like you and me, but in the grand scheme of reality, of nature, of the earth, of different social groups and cultural groups that were... At the end of the book, you're talking about how, at the end of the day, we're all human, right?
00:17:41
Speaker
Which is, I know is that we all understand that concept, but how often we get away from that concept quickly and miss them in the news, political discourse, all these things we see, how quickly we get removed. And I think it's stuck in the fear and isolation of being harmed and the threat. And so we get stuck in that, you know, that kind of reciprocal nature of how we define our self, our tribe, and how we can get stuck in this kind of,
00:18:05
Speaker
hamster wheel of self-reinforcing or like you said the self-fulfilling prophecy and then we act in such a way that creates that disconnected reality which is so sad and even you know if I go on the individual level you see that people are afraid of being seen let's say they're afraid they'll be rejected or I'm not enough and so they act in such a way with relationships that either self-sabotage or they push people away or even in the depressive they don't they don't move toward people and so in a way they then interpret that as well they didn't like me or I'm not enough because
00:18:35
Speaker
i went to this party or i wanted to say something and they did reject me or they didn't engage me or they had this facial expression so we then tell ourselves that story of well this is what it must mean i must be this thing now some people have real experiences where they are told explicitly this these these terms like you're not enough or you know
00:18:54
Speaker
horrible things that they're taught or they're said to. So in some sense, there is a very true reality and putting in quotes of that interpretation because it's very explicit, right? And I'm sure you've worked with a lot of individuals as well that have been told very explicit things that were quite damaging, especially at a young age. And so I think my question now is if you've been told this from an early age, like from your caregiver, from parents who have raised you that you're not enough or that you're worthless or
00:19:22
Speaker
whether that's an implied message or explicit message, how do we then begin to break? What are some practical ways we can break from that perspective, that story, that narrative? Because I think in a way we get stuck in survival mechanisms to defend against that and adaptive responses that maybe aren't always effective and healthy, but it's trying to survive from these messages
00:19:44
Speaker
and then if i tell someone because in the your chapter on choosing it's like we have a choice to choose our reality choose our lens choose our you know all these different ideas of where we have a conscious choice but when i'm working with someone is really stuck in that state of kind of shame and negative messages
00:19:59
Speaker
They don't have that, I don't think, capacity yet to see that there's a conscious choice that they can choose because I think they're still stuck in the fear. Well, if I choose this, then my fear, whatever that might be, is most likely to manifest. So how do we practically begin to break free from that with this concept of interconnection?
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, you know, that's a great question,
Stages of Self-Awareness
00:20:19
Speaker
Travis. And I think what I tried to do in the book by looking across the whole human lifespan is to look for exactly what you're asking about. The windows of opportunity to understand how we develop so that you can see how does the confusion happen of
00:20:36
Speaker
the center of experience, which is the self only being your body. So you'll see in the book, you know, all these stages. What I would say is this, when we literally name the word self, and like I did this with this international group the other day,
00:20:53
Speaker
They said, what's the one question you want to start your time with? I said, OK, what is yourself? What is that? So then we did it. Then we did this practice called The Wheel of Awareness, which you can do from my website, drdansiegel.com, or read the book Aware or Becoming Aware. And those books guide you through this practice, which I did on this long webinar kind of thing we had.
00:21:15
Speaker
When you watch people talk in the chat about what they experienced as self after the practice, even though it was just a 25-minute practice, it was profound because basically everyone has this, let's just name it, an identity lens. And in modern culture, just like think about having a camera, it's just tightly focused in on your body.
00:21:37
Speaker
So what happens in the wheel of awareness practice is you're able to start with the body. So this is not about going from me to we, for example. That's not what it's about. It's about this fun word, me plus we, is muy. So what you experience is, OK, I do have a body. There's these interior sensations of the body. There's the way the body picks up energy from outside of itself. We call that the five senses, right? Hearing, seeing, and that kind of thing.
00:22:03
Speaker
the failings inside the body, then your thoughts and feelings. So I think it's important in general, but especially in modern culture, not to say there is no self or that there is no individual or that, you know, you know, your self is an illusion. There are some programs that say that, and I just don't agree. As an attachment trained person, you know, when a person develops a coherent sense of an individual self, let's use that modifier.
00:22:30
Speaker
then they're able to actually move into relationships with more mutual ways of having rewarding connections because their individual self has been well-developed. Now in the interpersonal world, that inter aspect of self, that can be also helped in therapy or in schools or wherever where you say, you are your relationships, not just your body. So you literally can say that in schools. You are
00:22:56
Speaker
your relationships as well as your body. So you don't get rid of the body. Then people start saying, whoa, I'm people. I know my family, my friends, kids in my school, you know, people on my team.
00:23:08
Speaker
Oh, people in my neighborhood. And you start expanding this lens and you go, wow, that feels so meaningful.
Understanding Self and Nature
00:23:14
Speaker
And you go, and guess what? It doesn't, they feel meaningful. You know, as our surgeon general says, it is the most meaningful thing in life is really interpersonal relationships. But then you take it one step further and you say, yes, you're your body. Yes, you're your interpersonal relationships, but you are also not only related to other people, you are related to all of nature.
00:23:34
Speaker
And it's not like it's you and nature, the inter aspect of between. You are nature and then you go, whoa, and then you open that lens way wide and you go, I am the trees. Yes, I am the creek. Yes, I am the ocean. Yes. And the ocean is boiling in temperature and the air is, oh my God, we, we have to do this together. And that's where you see, you know,
00:24:00
Speaker
where the interventions can happen. Because when people start feeling these three layers of identity, the individual as inner, the relational as the inner, and the whole system that you are all of nature as the intra, those three layers are what you can sense, perceive with, and act on behalf of with your identity lens. And then when people are given this skill, let's say at home with your kids, you could do it.
00:24:25
Speaker
You can do it in schools. You can do it in companies. You can do it in governments. So you can do it with the United Nations, which I'm going to do in a couple of weeks. So, you know, so so the idea I know it sounds goofy, but it's pretty simple. We've got a splinter and we're limping. Let's take a pause. Say, whoops, we got a splinter. The splinter was a mistaken identity of self equals individual. That's a big problem. It's a fixable problem.
00:24:54
Speaker
And it's going to be a win-win-win situation. Win for our individual lives because you're going to feel the meaning of expanding the self. Win-win. The second win is our relational worlds will get much better when we're acting in this compassionate way. The third win is all of nature is like waiting for us to wake up from the lie of the separate self.
00:25:14
Speaker
And I see that, you know, I think practically when I work with even couples and couples therapy, you know, often when they're stuck, they're acting more of that kind of one, that first dimension of the individual self. Yeah.
Impact of Individualized Views on Relationships
00:25:25
Speaker
And they're more disconnected. They're not even, they don't have that interwell. So it's more about that individualized splinter self. And it's me versus her or me versus him, right? And like, well, they're wrong. I'm right. I'm hurting, right? It becomes that divisiveness.
00:25:39
Speaker
you see it in every other aspect too and how that how that concept you're those three layers really make sense in all avenues and relationships and families and schools and businesses and it you know it's it's it's well done and as a closeout i know you got to run and i appreciate your time
00:25:55
Speaker
Could you just run through, I know in the book you'd point a lot to, and it's on your website, I'm gonna link this in the description, write your website for this practice, but can you just do a quick run through of the different senses of the wheel of awareness because you mentioned that a lot of this is kind of a daily practice to kind of help essentially work on those three layers of
Wheel of Awareness Practice
00:26:14
Speaker
connection. That's exactly what it does Travis, absolutely. Yeah, well the wheel is in the appendix of the book and additionally is integrative movement practices.
00:26:23
Speaker
And the reason I put it there was because you really want people to have both a conceptual understanding, like the word self is more than the individual, but you want them to feel it, an experiential understanding too. So the wheel is basically just the image of a wheel with a hub being the awareness of consciousness, the knowing.
00:26:40
Speaker
And then if I say, hello, Travis, everyone can hear that. That would be a point on the rim, the sound. So you're hearing the sound. But the knowing of it, we put in the hub, the sound itself we put on the rim. So the rim has four segments. You've got the first segment is energy flow from outside the body, those first four senses. Second segment, which you then move a spoke of attention over.
00:27:01
Speaker
The second segment is the interior of the body, the sensations. You then move the spoke over to the third segment, which is mental activity, probably brain in the head activity, feelings, thoughts, feelings as an emotions, thoughts, memories, beliefs, attitudes, stuff like that.
00:27:16
Speaker
And then in an advanced practice, you actually bend the spoke around or just leave the spoke in the hub, and you experience pure awareness in the hub itself, like being aware of awareness, which is amazing. I do this every morning, and it's like a kick every time you get to do this. It's just incredible. And then the fourth segment is your relational sense, the sense of connection to people you know, to all of humanity, to all of nature.
00:27:39
Speaker
you're doing three things. You're training attention to be focused, you're training awareness to be open, and you're training intention to be kind. And when you do those three pillars, research on other practices show you improve the physiology of your body so you're healthier because you're reducing inflammation, you're optimizing an enzyme called telomerase that's
00:27:59
Speaker
and maintains the ends of your chromosomes and other things too. So it's medically very healthy for you. And you're actually changing the structure and function of your brain in a way that's called more integrative. And studies have shown that the more integrated your brain is, the more resilient your mind is and the healthier and happier you are. So this is a practice that has all three pillars built into one. They're usually in separate practices, those ones that are researched.
00:28:23
Speaker
And it's something you can do every day and just come to my website and dive in. And, you know, what's beautiful about it is it has built into it this sense of muy, which is how you end the whole wheel practice. Yeah. And what I love too is that you have with this wheel awareness practice, just those that are listening or watching Dan. Um, thank you.
00:28:42
Speaker
has had 50,000 plus participants in studying this practice. That have done it in person, that's right. So there's a lot of, this isn't just something that Dan pull out of thin air and said, hey, do this practice. Like he's a clinic, he's a researcher, he's a scientist, and he'd done this with 50,000 plus in-person practices prior to the pandemic. And so there's a lot here to this. And I love that it's practical of how do we, because again, how do we take this idea, these ideas?
00:29:10
Speaker
and put it on the ground level of actually doing the work. And I think one practice is that world awareness practice. As we close, what should we be looking out for you next? I heard you're working on a new project. Yeah, well, we can do this. So the first thing to say is you listening to Travis and to this body called Dan, you know, together we can make this happen. I mean, I'm working on all sorts of projects, another book and all sorts of things, but this would be a great one to start with is interconnected. Thank you so much for having me, Travis.
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah, thank you, Dan. You have an excellent day. Thanks for joining and listening today. Please leave a comment and review the show. Dads are tough, but not tough enough to do this fatherhood thing alone.