>> I want to welcome you to this closing keynote for our first Radical Compassion Symposium

at Naropa University and especially welcome people who are watching online.

Thanks to our partnership with Yoga Journal, a new relationship for Naropa.

I want to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Carin Gorrell and the publisher, Jeff Tkach,

who came together with us just a few weeks ago and actually allowed us

to livestream some of our symposium.

Tonight's closing keynote, Dr. Dan Siegel would be up in a moment and be fully

and completely introduced by one of our faculty members who I will introduce in a moment.

This is the end, last night, the end is actually tomorrow afternoon for all of you here

in a very Naropa style, will actually end with a Naropa like process, little less, blah, blah,

blah and a little more interpersonal relating

which I think is very good the way we began is kind of the way will end.

And I think that's an important part of how we bookend this conference and so I'd encourage all

of you that have the opportunity to come and join us tomorrow

at noon for the closing ceremony.

So, I'd like to introduce to you our Dean of Graduate Education, faculty member,

Christine Caldwell who teaches in our Somatic Psychology Department

and will introduce Dr. Siegel to you all and I hope you enjoy the evening.

[ Applause ]

[ Silence ]

>> Good evening.

I'm going to read because otherwise I just won't get it all in.

So, it's really an honor and a trill

to be introducing Dr. Dan Siegel to Naropa's extended community.

Many different cultures and traditions are currently contributing to our understanding

of present moment focus and the power of leading a self-reflective and contemplative life,

but perhaps more than any other, Dan Siegel is creating multiple networks for us

that link theory to practice, east to west, empiricism to the experience,

brain to behavior, and mind to heart.

By calling, he is a psychiatrist, teacher, therapist, writer, and researcher

and he is helping us to gracefully dance

between research labs meditation cushions, playgrounds, and family dinners.

His accomplishments are many but I would like to briefly highlight two areas of his work

that have been game changers, particularly in the field of psychotherapy and well-being

and that he will talk with us about that tonight.

As we know modern western psychotherapy was founded on the assumption that insight leads

to healing Freud called it the talking cure.

The idea was that if we deeply examine what we thought and understood the way

that early experience shaped us, we would be free to change.

While this view has always had some merit, contemplative teachers

and practitioners have always known that there was something more.

Wisdom traditions, many of which lie in the east have known for centuries that how we think,

how we relate to and engage with our direct present moment experience using disciplined,

high quality attention can be much more central to well-being

than understanding who did what to whom and why.

Dan Siegel has created the language system that helps us to understand

that both scientifically and experientially.

One of the central terms in his new language system is called Mindsight,

defined us more than understanding and more than mindfulness.

It involves how we focus our awareness on ourselves

and on the internal world of someone else.

And then use this focus in the service of therapeutic change that can heal communities

and families, as well as individuals.

The second concept is Neural Integration.

Here we see the bridge that he and others have built between neuroscience

of the developing brain relationships and present moment awareness.

In this concept, we understand that the brain develops first in distinct sections

but then the important work begins when these sections wire together, interconnect,

and integrate their information and actions.

With this wiring together of various brain areas complex,

healthy and relational behavior becomes possible.

And possibly if we remember the story that Joanna Macy told us yesterday

about the activist protecting trees in the Australian rain forest,

this neural interconnection may enable us to realize

that we are also connected to others apart of all life.

The really interesting issue is that attention is a primary director

of the neural growth needed for creating this integrated neural circuits.

First the attention and care given to us by others and then the patterns

of attention we subsequently develop that direct our adult behavior.

Dan has been at the forefront of articulating and extending this concept

so that we can understand the neurological processes of attention

that underlies states of radical compassion.

These ideas and others he has pioneered, articulated in his speeches and writings

in a really clear and warm and accessible way shifted the emphasis of psychotherapy

so that it now includes an examination not so much of what one thinks,

but of how what one is feeling and doing right now and how that present-centered experience

when guided with consciousness and compassion, can deeply heal us.

The application of these ideas into parenting and family life would allow us

to take neuroscience and contemplative practices not only into our hearts and minds but also

into our homes and into our interactions with our partners, our children, and our communities.

Dr. Siegel is currently clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine

and co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center.

He has written such best-selling books as "The Developing Mind," "The Mindful Brain,"

"The Mindful Therapist," "The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology", "Mindsight",

"Parenting From the Inside Out", "The Whole Brain Child", and "Brainstorm".

Dr. Siegel has lectured for the King of Thailand, Pope John Paul II,

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Google University, London's Royal Society of Arts,

and TEDx and now he can add Naropa to that August list.

[ Cheers & Applause ]

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Dan Siegel.

[ Cheers & Applause ]

[ Silence ]

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you so much.

It's a real honor to be here with you.

I'd like to thank Naropa University for hosting this incredible birthday party in general

and the honor I have of participating with you.

And Yoga Journal Life for streaming this out to the world and making that happen

and all the people who've supported the work that you're doing here.

We get the joy of spending almost two hours together.

Really diving deeply into issues related to internal practice

and our interpersonal relationships and our relationship with the planet.

And so what we're going to do in this time is begin with the inner world and so in thinking

about how we would spend our time together, I felt it would be really important

to actually start with a practice.

So you've heard the world I live in which comes from both academics and from clinical practice.

It's a field called the interpersonal neurobiology,

which combines all the different disciplines of science together into one framework

and we're going to talk a lot about that as we go.

But let's begin first with an exploration that comes from this field

of interpersonal neurobiology and the central idea of integration.

So, instead of giving you kind of the-- all the science behind it and the clinical implications

of it before we do it, let's just dive in and do it.

So when I ask you to do since probably most of you are very familiar

with contemplative practice because it's the center of Naropa University's early origins

and certainly it gives us time to say,

well what is this inner world of our mental life really like?

Let's dive in and explore it.

So what I ask you to do is just put your stuff down.

Let's make sure all our phones are off and even turn them off from vibrate if you can and as,

you know, get yourself ready, so sitting up straight like any reflective practice.

This one is called the wheel of awareness practice and what it entails is an exploration

of different aspects of our inner and interpersonal lives.

And to begin with, just to give a little framework to the focus of attention

which we'll be really playing with and exploring in just a moment, before we close our eyes,

get ready for an inner practice, we do bless you.

In fact, let's have a bless you, for everyone who's going to sneeze for this evening.

There you go so feel free to sneeze.

So, let's just have with your eyes open, let your visual attention come to the middle

of the room around here and if you're out in the online world, just let your focus come

within the screen to where you imagine in the middle of the world -- room would be.

And then send your visual attention back to the far wall here.

And now, let your attention come back to the middle of the room

and then bring your visual attention to about book reading distance as if you had a book

or magazine in your hands and just notice how you can determine where attention goes.

And just like the common practice of focusing on the breath,

let's just now let our attention find the breath and just do a short bit

of breath awareness practice, the basic mindfulness practice

of strengthening our attention, sometimes called the Shamatha

but it's really a universal practice not just in Buddhist practice to focus on the breath.

And let's sense the breath wherever you feel it most naturally, whether it's the air coming in

and out of your nostrils or your chest rising and falling or the abdomen moving out and in.

Just let your attention ride the wave of the breath, even the whole body just breathing.

Let's spend the moment now just ride in the wave of the breath in and out.

[ Pause ]

And just sensing the breath can bring us to a deep place beneath the surface

of all the chatter of our thoughts, and memories, and images, and feelings

and for people who feel safe in the water, this can be a useful analogy

to going beneath the surface of the ocean.

We're deep beneath the surface, it's calm and clear.

And from this deep place of tranquility and clarity, it's possible to just look upward

at the surface and notice whatever conditions are there.

It might be flat.

It might be rough waves.

It could even be a full storm and no matter what those conditions are,

deep beneath the surface, remains calm and clear.

And so, we know from all sorts of studies that simply focusing

on the breath can bring a deep sense of clarity and strength as it stabilizes our minds,

and we'll talk a lot about that later on, but for this practice we'll let the breath go

and I'd like to introduce to you to a practice if you've never done it before that we do

at the Mindsight Institute called the wheel of awareness.

And the idea that is simply this, if you can imagine in your mind's eye

if your eyes are closed or if you want to open them and look at me I'll show you with my body,

if you can imagine a large wheel with an outer rim

and a smaller inner hub that's also a circle.

We'll be talking about this visual image and if you're like me, it maybe hard for you to evoke,

actually seeing the image and that's fine as long as you have the sense of the idea

of a wheel with an outer rim and inner hub and imagine that there's a single spoke

that can be moved around from the hub to various places on the rim.

So what I'd like you to imagine is this,

is that the hub represents the experience within consciousness of knowing.

It's basically the most direct way.

The simplest way of defining what consciousness or awareness is, it's a sense of knowing.

And within consciousness, we not only have the knowing which is represented in the hub,

we have the known which could include for example,

what you see with your eyes or what you hear with your ears.

And the known, which will go through as a review includes what's on the rim,

so the rim represents anything that we can know about like what we see or hear.

The hub represents the experience of knowing and the way we connect knowing

to the known is with the spoke of attention.

So the spoke is the way we direct attention and we'll systematically move the spoke

around the rim, which if you can picture it like a pizza,

we can divide that whole wheel of awareness into four segments.

The first segment we'll review includes our first five senses of sight,

hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

We'll then move the spoke over to the next segment of the four and this is the segment

of the rim representing our internal bodily sense

which in science we actually call this sixth sense.

It's called interoception.

We'll explore that and then we're going to actually move the spoke

around to the third segment of four in the rim.

This third segment allows us to explore mental life or feelings, thoughts, memories, hopes,

dreams, attitudes, intentions, longings.

All of that mental life is represented here on this third segment of the rim.

And then as we go around, we'll do some other things including exploring the fourth aspect

of the rim, which is our sense of relationships to people