The Brain, the Mind and Relationships: Why Presence and Mindfulness Benefit All Three

How presence and mindfulness support the brain, the mind and our relationships.

Dan Siegel is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist and writer. His internationally celebrated bestseller The Developing Mind has been adopted by educational programs worldwide. He is also the author of the much-recommended The Mindful Brain and co-wrote the outstanding parenting guide Parenting from the Inside Out.

So what was this distinguished neuroscientist doing up a tree in a Melbourne park? Naturally, he was addressing hundreds of people — mostly health professionals — on his favourite topic, Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB). The hotel we had been in caught fire, 1500 people were evacuated, and Dan climbed a huge Moreton Bay fig to make the best of the situation.

IPNB is the label Dan uses to unite a broad range of factors relating to relationships and biological systems. He connects them through what he calls concilliance — the ability to find the common ground across a wide variety of different disciplines.

This echoes the traditional tale of the blind people asked to examine an elephant and report back. One insists he found a leg, another a tail, then a big stomach and even a trunk. Each is right, yet none has the whole story. Concilliance means gathering all the pieces into a unifying framework or paradigm — seeing the whole elephant rather than only its separate parts.

The same principle applies directly to holistic or Integrative Medicine, which seeks to consider the health, healing and wellbeing of a person’s body, emotions, mind and spirit, and which operates as a co-operative, interdisciplinary field.

Dan Siegel devoted many years to applying these principles to the study of attachment and resilience in children. His research shows that relationships are the strongest predictor of how children will turn out. And where developmental trauma impairs a child’s growth, relationships carry more weight than physical circumstances.

Dan the scientist said that relationships involve a shared flow of energy and information. (There is a sentence worth pondering! Truly. Sit down and dwell on it — it says a great deal.)

He then put a question to the audience, most of them mental health professionals. Like more than 90,000 others he has asked, 95% of our audience admitted that across all their training — as psychiatrists, counsellors, psychologists, nurses and so on — they had never had a single lecture on “the mind.” They had studied it for years, yet no one had even defined it for them. So what is it?

In 1992, Dan started a four-and-a-half-year discussion group with 40 scientists from many disciplines. Their aim? To define the mind. Nearly 20 years on, Dan still treats his definition as a work in progress. Yet after all the people he has asked over the years, no one has bettered this:

THE MIND IS DEFINED AS an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information.

By this definition, the mind is a verb, not a noun. (Ponder that one.) And like most neuroscientists today, Dan firmly holds that the mind is not confined to the brain but involves the whole body.

He then explained that, broadly speaking, the mind moves through three states: Chaos, Integration and Rigidity. In his rather logical view, mental health means a mind that is integrated. Integration sits at the heart of health. Whatever helps you feel or act in a more integrated way is good for you — it is healing.

What happens when integration is impaired? There lies the chance to heal the chaos or the rigidity by drawing on the brain, the mind and relationships.

Dan outlined the principles of neuroplasticity — that exciting new field of neuroscience showing how our brain alters its structure and function according to how we use it. The key point? Neurones that fire together, wire together. The more we practise something, the more it builds our “mind’s muscles” and the better we get at it next time.

In the mind, integration is best supported by focusing our attention. More precisely, recent research suggests mindfulness leads to integration better than most approaches.

So for a parent, teacher, therapist, friend or lover, the most useful thing you can do in this sense is to give your full attention. Attention is the mechanism that drives the flow of energy carrying information through the neurones, stimulating activity and growth — and in doing so, leading to integration.

In this context, attention is another word for presence, and presence encourages integration. So how do you develop presence? Mindfulness is one dependable way of becoming more present with yourself — and with that comes a greater chance of being more present with others.

Practising mindfulness may well be a way to integrate the functions of the brain and the mind while also enriching relationships.

RESOURCES:

1. Dan Siegel’s excellent website:  www.drdansiegel.com
   
2. The Miracle of Mindfulness: Thich Nhat Hanh.  Practical, profound yet accessible guide to mindfulness practice.
   
3. Wherever You Go, There You Are (link to Borders online store): Jon Kabat-Zinn. One of Jon’s excellent books on mindfulness.
   
4. Meditation - An In-Depth Guide: Ian Gawler and Paul Bedson - our guide to Mindfulness Based Stillness Meditation. Has accompanying CDs to support your practice.
   
5. Residential and non-residential mindfulness and meditation programs : The Gawler Foundation: www.gawler.org

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Meditation — how much is enough? Plus what meditation I did during my recovery, what I do now, and what experience suggests is recommended for others at different stages of life.