The Mindful Therapist Quotes

“Presence depends upon a sense of safety. The”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“attachment figure—someone who provides a safe haven where the other can be deeply seen and feel safe and secure. At other times we are the expert on the mind, and perhaps on the brain and relationships too, and on the notion of health and unhealth, ease and disease. Yet our patients are also experts in their own right, deeply knowledgeable in other domains. Our patients are certainly expert in being themselves.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“With an increased need to connect, missed moments of joining can quickly turn from misunderstandings to painful withdrawal into a shame state. While this is possible for anyone, those of us with difficult early histories filled with shame may be at highest risk of feeling the pain of missed connection and amplifying our reactions.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Beginning with a genuine sense of care and interest by the focus of the other’s careful attention, resonance extends this positive interaction into a fuller dimension of the other being changed because of who we are. This is how we feel “felt,” and this is how two individuals become a “we.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“When such resonance is enacted with positive regard, a deep feeling of coherence emerges with the subjective sensation of harmony. When”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Coupling the relaxation and sense of safety associated with that imagery with the sensations of the body can ground a person in the visceral reality of tranquility and clarity. It is this grounded place that can serve as a vital resource of safety and strength during the explorations ahead.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“The key to clinical attunement is to be willing to say “I don’t know” and “tell me more.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“To state this more succinctly, awareness of the body’s state influences how we organize our lives. Knowing your body strengthens your mind.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Attunement requires presence but is a process of focused attention and clear perception. We”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“noticing not just their words but also their nonverbal patterns of energy and information flow. These signals are the familiar primarily right-hemisphere sent and received elements of eye contact, facial expression, and tone of voice, posture, gesture, and the timing and intensity of response. The”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“On the subjective side of reality, resonance can be detected internally as we look to the other and recognize evidence that the other is changed because of our own internal world. We see a tear forming at the edge of the other’s eyes as we have just told a sad story. We”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“As we join in this moment in the physical realm—making appointments to be in the same space at a given interval of the clock—our nervous systems align their firing patterns as two sets of electrochemical entities phase shift”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“COAL is the essence of what it means to be in a mindful state. When we have a COAL state with ourselves, we can call this self-compassion, which certainly is a form of nonnarcissistic self-love. One way around the ethical issues about confusing professional feelings of concern and care with the personal forms of love would be to use the mindfulness term loving-kindness. The”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“When another person perceives our genuine curiosity, openness, and acceptance, there is a sense of professional caring, what we might be so bold as to call a “healing form of love.” It’s tricky, naturally, to risk confusing the romantic sense of “love” within the context of psychotherapy and this healing stance. But the feeling of compassionate concern, of genuine interest and engagement, of the mutual influence that each person has on the other (mutual,”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Attunement is the act of focusing on another person (or ourselves) to bring into our awareness the internal state of the other in interpersonal attunement (or the self, in intrapersonal attunement). Resonance”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Without such refined awareness on our part, we may project a feeling of impending chaos or rigidity onto our clients, inappropriately try to move them to their safe place in an attempt to keep them in the window, and directly give them the sense that they, too, are unable to tolerate whatever feeling or memory is emerging at the time. This”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“This is the way we stimulate neuronal activation and growth—how we SNAG the brain toward a more vertically integrated state as we connect body to cortex with interoception. The more we focus our attention toward bodily sensations within our subjective experience in awareness, the more we activate the physical correlate of insula activation and subsequent growth. As”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“The key to clinical attunement is to be willing to say “I don’t know” and “tell me more.” Your intention to help, a neural stance of positive regard likely involving the social engagement system and having a desire to connect and to assist, is woven together with an interest in supporting another with kindness and”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“prefrontally mediated, in which we attribute these shifts to what we’ve seen in the other person. Naturally, such a complex pathway can be bogged down by rigid valenced plateaus of probability, which skew accurate interpretations of the meaning of sensations.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“this posterior firing of maps of the body represents a primary cortical representation and may involve the parietal lobe—a region that may turn out to play an important role in self-awareness and a sense of identity (for further”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“If the sponge (mirror) neurons are our receiver, then our subcortical areas are the amplifier. These subcortical shifts are what changes in us when we attune to someone else.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“This is the way we can keep our selves well: with regular exercising of our attunement to ourselves through mindfulness practices.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Contraction is our concentration—the activation of the muscle of the mind’s attention—while relaxation is our becoming distracted as attention is deactivated. We activate intentionally, deactivate unintentionally—inadvertently, unavoidably and repeatedly—and then reactivate the directing of attention to refocus on our chosen subject of attention. See”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“focus of attention becomes distracted, when you notice you are no longer aware of the sensations of the breath, lovingly and gently bring your attention back to the breath (or body part or image). Getting distracted is just what our minds do. As we’ve seen, if you think of this mindfulness training as being similar to toning a muscle, we need to have both the contraction and the relaxation to achieve muscle growth.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Whatever the focus of attention, each of these mindful awareness practices involves an aiming of our awareness on two basic dimensions: Awareness of awareness and attention to intention. Such”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“sense of danger, we cannot activate what Porges calls the social engagement system. And we don’t access what I’ve called a self-engagement system either (see”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“simultaneously we need to get continual feedback about how our clinical evaluation and interventions are going and be open to letting go of considered specifics, of moving back from the peaks of activation and plateaus of probability into the plane of possibility. Such feedback is a key element of effective psychotherapy of all sorts (see”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“Sometimes we need to name it to tame it, to look head-on into the plateaus and peaks of life and loosen their rigid hold as we soften the peaks, broaden our plateaus and relax back into”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“open possibility (within the plane) to increased probability (in the plateau) to specific actuality (at the peak). As”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

“being present with others involves the experience of openness to whatever arises in reality. Presence means being open, now, to whatever is. We”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration