Mindsight Quotes

“Writing in a journal activates the narrator function of our minds. Studies have suggested that simply writing down our account of a challenging experience can lower physiological reactivity and increase our sense of well-being, even if we never show what we’ve written to anyone else.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Inviting our thoughts and feelings into awareness allows us to learn from them rather than be driven by them.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Our state of mind can turn even neutral comments into fighting words, distorting what we hear to fit what we fear.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Loss of someone we love cannot be adequately expressed with words. Grappling with loss, struggling with disconnection and despair, fills us with a sense of anguish and actual pain. Indeed, the parts of our brain that process physical pain overlap with the neural centers that record social ruptures and rejection. Loss rips us apart.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“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.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“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.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“reflection requires an attunement to the self that is supportive and kind, not a judgmental stance of interrogation and derogation. Reflection is a compassionate state of mind.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“One of the key practical lessons of modern neuroscience is that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain’s firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“If you have a fight with yourself, who can win?”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“What was your childhood like? What was your relationship like with each parent—and were there other people with whom you were close as a child? Whom were you closest to and why? I’d ask you to give me several words that described your early relationship with each parent or caregiver, and then I’d ask for a few memories that illustrated each of those words. The questions go on: What was it like when you were separated, upset, threatened, or fearful? Did you experience loss as a child—and if so, what was that like for you and for your family? How did your relationships change over time? Why do you think your care-givers behaved as they did? When you think back on all these questions, how do you think your earliest experiences have impacted your development as an adult? And if you have children I’d ask you these questions: How do you think these experiences have affected your parenting? What do you wish for your child in the future? And finally, when your child is twenty-five, what do you hope he or she will say are the most important things he or she learned from you?”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“The human mind is a relational and embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“mental activity such as directing attention, actually shape the structure of the brain?” As we’ve seen, experience means neural firing. When neurons fire together, the genes in their nuclei—their master control centers—become activated and “express” themselves. Gene expression means that certain proteins are produced. These proteins then enable the synaptic linkages to be constructed anew or to be strengthened. Experience also stimulates the production of myelin, the fatty sheath around axons, resulting in as much as a hundredfold increase in the speed of conduction down the neuron’s length. And as we now know, experience can also stimulate neural stem cells to differentiate into wholly new neurons in the brain. This neurogenesis, along with synapse formation and myelin growth, can take place in response to experience throughout our lives. As discussed before, the capacity of the brain to change is called neuroplasticity We are now discovering how the careful focus of attention amplifies neuroplasticity by stimulating the release of neurochemicals that enhance the structural growth of synaptic linkages among the activated neurons.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Simply put, reactivity cuts off seeing clearly.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Trying to change how we actually feel by ordering ourselves to do so is a strategy that goes nowhere, fast.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Grief allows you to let go of something you’ve lost only when you begin to accept what you now have in its place.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“State integration involves linkage in at least three different dimensions of our lives. The first level of integration is between our different states—the “inter” dimension. We must accept our multiplicity, the fact that we can show up quite differently in our athletic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual—or many other—states. A heterogeneous collection of states is completely normal in us humans. The key to well-being is collaboration across states, not some rigidly homogeneous unity. The notion that we can have a single, totally consistent way of being is both idealistic and unhealthy.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Physically and genetically, our brains may not have evolved much in the last forty thousand years—but our minds have. A baby born today would be much the same as a baby born tens of thousands of years ago. But if we were able to compare the intricate neural structure of an adult brain in today’s modern society with that of an adult brain from forty thousand years ago, we’d find huge differences.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“When we spend money on others, for example, we feel more content than when we spend money on ourselves. This is a kind of well-being rooted in meaning, connection, and equanimity—called eudaimonia by the ancient Greeks and in modern times perhaps called “inner” or “true” happiness.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“If, for example, your parent had a rough childhood and was unable to make sense of what happened, he or she would be likely to pass on that harshness to you—and you, in turn, would be at risk for passing it along to your children. Yet parents who had a tough time in childhood but did make sense of those experiences were found to have children who were securely attached to them. They had stopped handing down the family legacy of nonsecure attachment.”
― Daniel Siegel, Mindsight: Transform Your Brain with the New Science of Kindness

“Attachment patterns are one of the few dimensions of human life that appear to be largely independent of genetic influence. We can see this quite directly”
― Daniel Siegel, Mindsight: Transform Your Brain with the New Science of Kindness

“If the leaders of a culture are themselves devoid of mindsight, then the young, emerging minds of that culture will be living in a world in which the blind are leading the blind.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Consider the difference between saying “I am sad” and “I feel sad.” Similar as those two statements may seem, there is actually a profound difference between them. “I am sad” is a kind of self-definition, and a very limiting one. “I feel sad” suggests the ability to recognize and acknowledge a feeling, without being consumed by it. The focusing skills that are part of mindsight make it possible to see what is inside, to accept it, and in the accepting to let it go, and, finally, to transform it.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Sometimes we move toward the bank of rigidity—we feel stuck. Other days we lean toward chaos—life feels unpredictable and out of control. But in general, when we are well and at ease, we move along this winding path of harmony, the integrated flow of a flexible system. We sense the familiar but are not trapped by it. We live at the threshold of the unknown and have the courage to move into new and uncharted waters. This is living a life as it unfolds, moment by moment, in a flowing journey between rigidity and chaos.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“But when we integrate those embedded experiences into our present consciousness and recognize them as implicit memories—not valid intuitions or reasoned decisions—then we begin to offer ourselves the means to become awakened and active authors of our own life story.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“As I’ve mentioned, research has revealed that people with dismissing narratives show physiological signs that their subcortical limbic and brainstem areas still register the importance of relationships. It’s simply that the higher cortical areas, where consciousness is created, shut out this awareness in order to survive barren times. The key would be to align myself with these deeper subterranean circuits and bolster Denise’s ability to integrate them into her life.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight

“People exposed to emotional abuse as children have been found to be at higher risk of developing medical illnesses later in life,”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight

“Serenity, courage, and wisdom are at the heart of temporal integration.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

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― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Mental activity stimulates brain firing as much as brain firing creates mental activity.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Prior learning sends related information down from the top layers of our six-neuron-deep column to shape our perception of what we are seeing or hearing or touching or smelling or tasting. There is no "immaculate perception"; perception is virtually always a blend of what we are sensing now and what we've learned previously.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation