Show notes
If I were to ask you what are the qualities that you most want for your children, students, employees, or even for yourself so that you can reach those optimal levels of health, well-being and happiness, (no matter what part of the world you are listening from), the answer would probably sound something like this. “I want to them to develop a healthy mind, to pursue excellence, to have the skills needed to excel independently, to have compassion and empathy for others, to acquire the skills needed in this ever-changing world, or to adopt the mindset of lifelong learning that’s needed to thrive not just survive in this world” –something along those lines that focuses on developing the minds of our next generation with social and emotional skills.In order to bridge this gap between knowing and actually implementing these skills, we must first of all have a clear understanding of what they are. If social and emotional skills are skills that we could say are of the developed mind, and we are moving into cognitive skills of the brain, it leads us to question what is the difference between the mind and the brain before we continue further? Once we have a clear definition of each of these, it’s much easier to continue to develop and implement these strategies needed for improved results. Have you ever thought about what your mind is? What about your brain? And how are they different?Dr. Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, (who I’m so excited to share will be coming on the podcast later next month) has spent a considerable amount of time defining the mind.[i] He was shocked when he first started to study the mind and began surveying mental health professionals around the world who should know about the mind that “95% of them had never even been given a lecture on the mind, and probably couldn’t even tell you what the definition of the mind was”[ii] so he wondered how can we expect to develop it, without this understanding? He explores the concept of the mind in his book, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation[iii] where he proves that you can define what a healthy mind is, not just describe it. His book allows that Mindsight “is the potent skill that is the basis for both emotional and social intelligence.”[iv] He explains that psychology means the study of the mind and behavior and elaborates that “when a parent senses the inner mental life of their child, (their mind) their child does really well in life. This ability to see the mind actually changes the structure of their brain. It’s called neural integration.”[v] Siegel further explains that when we can adopt this practice of “seeing the inner-life” or the minds of our students, children, friends or family members, it makes a considerable difference in the results and well-being that they achieve. Even developing our own practice of being more mindfully present of our own inner mind can “change the ends of the chromosomes in your cells”[vi] proving that what you do with your mind, makes a difference for the health of your body and your relationships.Dan Siegel explains that a neuroscientist would define the mind “as the activity of the brain”[vii] but he could not settle on this definition as a therapist since this would mean our brain would control everything that we do. He came up with a definition in the mid-1990s that made the most sense to him and his colleagues and it was that the mind “is an embodied and relational process—since it’s in the body and it’s in our relationships with one another—that regulates the flow of energy and information.”[viii] This definition really got me thinking. I probably listened to it for a good week.It got me thinking about the flow of energy and information and how it comes into our body through our senses, and what we do with this information to cause the results in our life. One of my fi