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…

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.”

“Our first five senses allow us to perceive the outside world—to hear a bird’s song or a snake’s warning rattle, to make our way down a busy street or smell the warming earth of spring. What has been called our sixth sense allows us to perceive our internal bodily states—the quickly beating heart that signals fear or excitement, the sensation of butterflies in our stomach, the pain that demands our attention. Mindsight, our ability to look within and perceive the mind, to reflect on our experience, is every bit as essential to our well-being. Mindsight is our seventh sense.”

“Everything that follows rests on three fundamental principles. The first is that mindsight can be cultivated through very practical steps… Second, when 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…

The third principle is at the heart of my work as a psychotherapist, educator, and scientist. Well-being 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.”

“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.”

“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…

I like to imagine the FACES flow as a river. The central channel of the river is the ever-changing flow of integration and harmony. One boundary of this flow is chaos. The other boundary is rigidity. These are the two banks of the river of integration.”

“How we focus our attention is the key to promoting integrative changes in the brain. With the integration of consciousness, we actually build the skills to stabilize attention so that we can harness the power of awareness to create choice and change. This is why the integration of consciousness is the foundation for the other domains. Creating what I’ll call a “hub of awareness” enables us to acknowledge troubling states without being taken over by them, and to see things as they are, rather than being constrained by our expectations of how they should be.”

“In summary, here is what modern clinical research, 2,500 years of contemplative practice, recent neuroscience investigations, and my own experience all suggest: Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention. As researchers have defined it, mindfulness requires paying attention to the present moment from a stance that is nonjudgmental and nonreactive. It teaches self-observation; practitioners are able to describe with words the internal seascapes of the mind. At the heart of this process, I believe, is a form of internal “tuning in” to oneself that enables people to become “their own best friend.” And just as our attunement to our children promotes a healthy, secure attachment, tuning in to the self also promotes a foundation for resilience and flexibility.”

“I reminded him that with regular exercise, a good diet, and sleep, he could set the foundation for promoting neuroplasticity. Jonathan and I made a verbal agreement that he would follow this “prescription” for health. It’s amazing how often these basics of brain health are ignored. Exercise is an underrated treatment—and now we know that aerobics not only releases the endorphins that can combat a down mood but also promotes the growth of the brain. Eating regularly and well, balancing the various food groups, and avoiding excess sugar and stimulants can help to reduce mood swings. And sleep, though in short supply and difficult at times to initiate for Jonathan, is a healer that can be approached in a systematic way. Sleep hygiene includes setting up a calming routine before bed. Minimizing caffeine or other stimulants once evening approaches, if not before; shutting off digital stimulation an hour or two before sleeping; and quiet activities such as taking a bath, listening to soothing music, or reading a book can all help the body as well as the mind to settle. With these brain hygiene basics in our contract, we could move into our specific efforts to promote integration.”

“The renowned psychologist William James once said, “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. . . . An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” Though James also said, “It is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about,” we actually do know how to refocus a wandering attention again and again—to use mindfulness practice to educate the mind itself.”

“I drew a picture of the brain and told Stuart about the left and right sides. Our goal, I said, was to help him develop a more balanced whole brain—to add new right-hemisphere abilities and reinforce his already well-developed left side. Then I introduced one of my acronyms, SNAG, for Stimulate Neuronal Activation and Growth. I said we could SNAG his brain to create and strengthen neural connections. Wherever neural firing occurs, existing neurons can make new or enhanced synaptic connections through the process called synaptogenesis. New neurons can be stimulated to develop, as well—a process called neurogenesis. I also explained how the myelin can thicken, which increases the electrical conduction among interconnected neurons. And, as I’d told Jonathan, among the keys to neuronal growth are novelty, attention, and aerobic exercise. Stuart liked the SNAG acronym, and I was happy his left mode seemed to appreciate the wordplay.

Short of using an electrical probe, how can we strategically target a particular portion of the brain? The answer is attention.”

“A cascade of positive effects seems to emerge spontaneously when integration has been initiated. It’s like the old physics idea of pushing a ball up a hill to get it rolling down the other side. It takes considerable effort and deliberate attention to move beyond the initial engrained, nonintegrated state—to push the ball up the hill. This is the intentional work of change. But ultimately the emerging mind takes its natural course towards integration, and the ball flows effortlessly down into the valley of coherence. Integration is the mind’s natural state.”