1. Mindsight by Daniel Siegel M.D.
Jennifer Oldford
Turk Mac Donald

2. Agenda 1. Mindsight 2. Neuroscience 3. Integration
Definition
Video
The 7th Sense
Defining a healthy mind activity
2. Neuroscience
Structure and function
The Hand Model of the Brain (video)
Neuroplasticity
Connections to mindsight
3. Integration
River of Integration
Ridigity/Chaos/Both Activity.
8 Domains of Integration
Right Brain/Left Brain Activity
4. Cultivating Mindsight
Triangle of well-being
Attentive communication, attunement, resonance
Communication activities
Additional references and resources.
Note: Blending the What?, So What? and the Now What?.

3. 1. Mindsight DEFINING THE MIND:
Task: Take a moment and jot down three terms or phrases that would describe the mind.
Be prepared to share.

4. 1. Mindsight Siegel’s definition:
The human mind is a relational and embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.

5. 1. Mindsight human capacity to perceive the mind of self and others
powerful lens through which we can understand our inner lives with more clarity, integrate the brain, and enhance our relationships with others
helps us get ourselves off of the autopilot of ingrained behaviors and habitual responses
Video Link (10 Minutes)
coined by Dr. Dan Siegel
focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds
lets us “name and tame” the emotions we are experiencing, rather than being overwhelmed by them

6. 1. Mindsight The 7 Senses: 1-5 = Ability to perceive the outside world
Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, Touch
6 = Ability us to perceive our internal states
Rapid beating heart, butterflies in our stomach, pain from injury
7 = Ability to perceive our mind
See and shape the inner workings of our mind, reflect on experience
WHAT IS MINDSIGHT?
“Mindsight is a kind of focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own
minds. It helps us to be aware of our mental processes without being swept away by them,
enables us to get ourselves off the autopilot of ingrained behaviors and habitual responses, and
moves us beyond the reactive emotional loops we all have a tendency to get trapped in. It lets us
“name and tame” the emotions we are experiencing, rather than being overwhelmed by them.” (Introduction XII)

7. 1. Mindsight
Now What?
1. If this is something that helps, what is keeping us from it?
“You can also think of mindsight as a very special lens that gives us the capacity to perceive the
mind with greater clarity than ever before... And it allows us to reshape and redirect our inner
experiences so that we have more freedom of choice in our everyday actions, more power to
create the future, to become the author of our own story. Another way to put it is that mindsight
is the basic skill that underlies everything we mean when we speak of having social and
emotional intelligence.” (Introduction XII)
Implications:
Foundational plank on which to build
Can drive social and emotional learning
Can be developed to change our response to certain stimulus
Everyone has it
Freedom, choice, health, wellness, hope for a better future

8. 2. Neuroscience
Brainstem: ancient brain. Regulates basic processes, states of arousal, fight-flight-freeze.
Limbic System: emotions, evaluation of good vs bad, forming relationships and emotional attachment, memory
Cerebral cortex: think, imagine, combine facts and experiences, create
When we are in survival mode it makes it quite challenging, if not impossible, to be open and receptive to others. Part of mind-sight is to reduce reactivity when it is not actually necessary.
Limbic: hypothalamus, pituatary gland, send and receive hormones. Traumatic experiences can sensitize the limbic reactivity and cause cortisol spikes.
Limbic: amygdala: fear response, instantaneous survival response. Emotional states can be created without consciousness and may act without awareness… can save our lives or cause us to do things we later regret.
Hippocampus is the master puzzle-piece assembler. Linking separated regions of the brain to convert moment to moment experiences into memories. Weaves together emotional and perceptual memory into factual and autobiographical recollections.
Frontal lobe: associated with most complex thinking and planning. Form neural representations –” maps” of various aspects of our world – create images in our minds.
Pre-frontal cortex- makes respresentations of present, past, plan for future. And images of the mind itself. Make me-maps, and you-maps, and we-maps. You-maps permit empathy.
9 prefrontal functions:
Bodily regulation
Attuned communication
Emotional balance
Response flexibility
Fear modulation
Empathy
Insight
Moral awareness
Intuition
Prefrontal cortex: create representations of time, self, moral judgements, and our “mindsight maps”

9. 2. Neuroscience
Parts of the Brain Hand Model (Video):

10. 2. Neuroscience Mindfulness and Brain function:
Neuroplasticity: capacity to create new neural connections and new neurons in response to experience
Synaptogenesis: strengthening and creation of new synaptic connections.
Focused awareness enables us to:
voluntarily change a firing pattern that was laid down involuntarily.
create neural firing patterns that permit previously separated areas to become linked and integrated
The brain becomes more interconnected and the mind becomes more adaptive
When neurons fire together the genes in their nuclei become activated and express themselves. Gene expression means that certain proteins are produced. The proteins enable the synaptic linkages to be constructed or strengthened. Experience also stimulates the production of the myelin sheath around axons resulting in increased conduction speed. Experience can also stimulate neural stem cells to become new neurons (neurogenesis).
Epigenesis: if early experiences are positive chemical controls over genes in specific areas can alter regulation of our nervous system to reinforce the quality of emotional resilience. If early experiences are negative alternations in the control of genes influence stress response may diminish resilence.
It is never too late to stimulate the growth of neural fibers that enable mindsight to florish.
how we learn from experience.
Repetition
Emotional arousal
Novelty
Careful focus of attention

11. Guest speaker Jennifer Sims
2. Neuroscience
Course connection:
Guest speaker Jennifer Sims
Response flexibility: harnesses the power of the prefrontal region to put a temporal space between input and action.

12. 2. Neuroscience Blind-contour drawing Right brain/left-brain activity
Edwards, B. (1999). The new drawing on the right side of the brain. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam

13. 2. Neuroscience
Now What? 2.
a)How do we use an understanding of the functioning of the brain to improve our teaching and interactions with students and colleagues?
b) How do we get “teaching with the brain in mind” to become a part of B.Ed. training?

14. 3. Integration
a process by which separate elements are linked together as a working whole.
integration enables us to be flexible and free
the lack of such connections promotes a life that is either rigid or chaotic
COMPLEXITY CHOIR?
“Integration enables us to be flexible and free; the lack of such connections promotes a life that is either rigid or chaotic, stuck and dull on the one hand or explosive and unpredictable on the other. With the connecting freedom of integration comes a sense of vitality and the ease of well-being. Without integration we can become imprisoned in behavioral ruts—anxiety and depression, greed, obsession, and addiction.
By acquiring mindsight skills, we can alter the way the mind functions and move our lives toward integration, away from these extremes of chaos and rigidity. With mindsight we are able to focus our mind in ways that literally integrate the brain and move it toward resilience and health.” (Introduction XV)
The secret to a balanced life is integration. We want to find the integrated fluidity that exists between rigidity and chaos. A balance life is like a river flowing between two river banks. One is rigidity and the other is chaos. A healthy amount of structure (but not too much which leads to rigidity) plus a healthy amount of spontaneity (but, again, not too much which leads to chaos).

15. 3. Integration
River of Integration: the mindful balance between structure and spontaneity
“For example, we keep on doing the same thing over and over again, like becoming rigid. Or we may find that there are patterns in our lives where life has become chaotic. We have outbursts of emotion, or impulsive behaviours.
These two banks, if you will, outside of a river, of rigidity on the one hand, and chaos on the other, help us know when something is missing. And that something is called integration. And when we’re integrated, when we link different parts of our internal world and our relationships, we’re in the flow of a river that has the sense of harmony, it’s flexible, it’s adaptive, it has a coherence to it that holds together, and that’s energized and stable.” (Internet interview

16. 3. Integration Eight Domains of Integration:
Integration of Consciousness: build skills to stabilize attention. Harness the power of attention to create choice and change.
Horizontal Integration: balance the two sides to increase creativity, richness and complexity of thought.
Vertical Integration: bringing bodily sensations into awareness.
Memory Integration: making implicit memories explicit.
Narrative Integration: making sense of our lives by creating stories that weave together narrator function with autobiographical memory storage.
State Integration: embracing our many self-states as healthy dimensions of ourselves.
Interpersonal Integration: connecting in relationships while retaining our own sense of identity and freedom.
Temporal Integration: finding comfort in the face of uncertainty, impermanence, and mortality.
, The secret to a balanced life is integration. We want to find the integrated fluidity that exists between rigidity and chaos. A balance life is like a river flowing between two river banks. One is rigidity and the other is chaos. A healthy amount of structure (but not too much which leads to rigidity) plus a healthy amount of spontaneity (but, again, not too much which leads to chaos).

17. 3. Integration
Rigidity/ Chaos/ Both activity
DSM - Diagnosis

18. 3. Integration Course connection: Yoga practice
Integration of Consciousness and Vertical Integration
“Now the qualities of an integrated flow spelled a universally memorable word: FACES, for Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. We can say that any healthy complex system has a FACES flow. In other words, when the self-organizational movement of the system is maximizing complexity, it attains a harmonious flow that is at once flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable.” (p.71)
FACES stands for Flexible + Adaptive + Coherent + Energized + Stable.
FACES are channels in a river that flow between the riverbanks of chaos and rigidity.
Big Idea: The river of integration has two banks—rigidity on one side; chaos on the other. We want to create a healthy amount structure + spontaneity in our lives.

19. 3. Integration
Now What?
3. How do invite our staff to recognize Mindsight in their own life? And use it to improve Interpersonal Integration?

20. 4. Cultivating Mindsight
the triangle of well-being

21. 4. Cultivating Mindsight
Attunement and attachment
Parent-child
Other relationships
“The best predictor of a child's security of attachment is not what happened to his parents as children, but rather how his parents made sense of those childhood experiences.”
~ Dan Siegel from Mindsight

22. 4. Cultivating Mindsight
Activities for you and your students:
Non-verbal communication game of copying someone else’s facial expression and guessing the emotion.
Non-verbal communication game of watching TV with the sound off and letting your brain ‘fill-in the blank.’
Journaling about your day in pictures/smells/sounds to help activate the senses
Journaling emotions
Finding words to depict our internal world
Making ‘mindmaps’ of how we see ourselves and our relations with others.
Tensing and releasing certain muscle groups to become aware of them
Having someone say ‘no’ in a harsh tone and then a nice ‘yes’ several times and discussing how it feels when both words are said to you.

23. 4. Cultivating Mindsight
Focused Awareness:
The Wheel of Awareness
Video Link on the ‘Wheel’ Enjoy at your leisure

24. 4. Cultivating Mindsight
OTHER ACTIVITIES TO TRY:
Body Scan
Stay With That- a practice of noticing and naming your feelings without judgment
Focusing on the breath
Walking Meditation
SIFT- process of deliberately accessing your Sensations, Feelings, and Thoughts

25. 4. Cultivating Mindsight
Course connection:
Purser (2014), Ergas (2013 & 2015), Hyland (2015)
Mindfulness vs Mindsight:
Neuroscience separated from religious practice
When we carry out a mindfulness practice of focused awareness, we develop mindsight.

26. 4. Cultivating Mindsight
Now What?
4. How do we maintain the separation between providing therapy and providing support & connectivity?
5. If there are other ways to stimulate neural growth, why should we focus on mindsight?

27. BIG AHA! Why is mindsight important to teachers?
Teaching is about relationships and interactions
Being aware of our own awareness gives us response flexibility
By modeling attentive communication and attunement we assist students in their brain development
Integration increases rate, strength, and adaptability of neural functioning
WELL-BEING
# 5 IMPROVING OUR WELLNESS
“Everything that follows rests on three fundamental principles.”
“Mindsight can be cultivated through very practical steps.
As we develop the skill of mindsight, we actually change the physical structure of the brain. How we focus our attention shapes the structure of the brain.
Wellbeing emerges when we create connections in our lives—when we learn to use mindsight to help the brain achieve and maintain integration, a process by which separate elements are linked together into a working whole.”(Introduction XV)

28. Re-cap Agenda 1. Mindsight 2. Neuroscience 3. Integration
Defining the mind activity
Definition
Video
The 7th Sense
2. Neuroscience
Structure and function
The Hand Model of the Brain (video)
Neuroplasticity
Connections to mindsight
3. Integration
River of Integration
Ridigity/Chaos/Both Activity.
8 Domains of Integration
Right Brain/Left Brain Activity
4. Cultivating Mindsight
Triangle of well-being
Attentive communication, attunement, resonance
Communication activities
Additional references and resources.
Note: Blending the What?, So What? and the Now What?.

29. Other Works by Daniel Siegel:
Siegel, D. & Fosha, D. (2009). The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice. New York, New York: WW Norton & Company,
Siegel, D. (2010). The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration. New York, New York: WW Norton & Company.
Siegel, D. (2010). Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York, New York: Bantam.
Siegel, D. & Bryson, T. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive. New York, New York: Delacorte Press.
Siegel, D. (2012). The Developing Mind, Second Edition: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York, New York: Guilford Press.
Siegel, D. (2012). Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology: An Integrative Handbook of the Mind. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Siegel, D. (2013). Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. New Tork, New York: Penguin Putnam.
Siegel, D., & Hartzel, M. (2004). Parenting From the Inside Out: How A Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. New York, New York: Tarcher.
Siegel, D., & Bryson, T. (2014). No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind. New York, New York: Bantam.
Siegel, D. (2007). The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being. New York, New York: WW Norton.
Siegel, D. (1999). The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience. New York, New York: Guilford Press.
Siegel, D., Hartzel, M. (2003). Parenting from the Inside Out. New York, New York: Tarcher.

30. The Whole Brain Child

31. 9 Mindfulness Books to Start With
Davidson, R., Begley, S. (2012). The Emotional Life of Your Brain. London, England: Penguin Books.
Hanh, T. N. (2015). Silence the Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise. New York, New York; Harper Collins Publishers,
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Where Ever You Go There You Are. New York, New York: Hyperion Books.
Langer, E. (2009). Counter Clockwise Mindful health and the Power of Possibility. New York, New York: Random House Inc.
Langer, E. (2014). Mindfulness 25th Anniversary Edition. Boston, Massachusetts: De Capo Press.
Langer, E. (1997). The Power of Mindful Living. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books.
Neff, K. (2011). Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind. New York, New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Siegel, D. (2011). Mindsight the New Science of Personal Transformation. New York, New York: Random House Inc.
Williams, M., & Penman, D. (2011). Mindfulness an Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. New York, New York: Rodale,
Try this read a book a month and keep an ideas diary and belong to an ideas gaggle until it becomes a skein.