Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

Within each of us is an inherent drive toward health—a push toward integration. But life happens, and we may sometimes find that integration is blocked. This blockage can come from impairments to linkage, as in unresolved trauma. Blockage can also arise from impairments to differentiation, whether as a fallout from childhood neglect or as a result

The puzzle pieces of implicit memory are later assembled into explicit memories—the factual and autobiographical information of which we are aware. The more we can shine the light of mindsight on the free-floating puzzle pieces of the past—the implicit memories—and allow them to become explicit, the more we can free ourselves to live fully in the p

Bringing our sensations into awareness enables intuition to blossom and sometimes can offer lifesaving information.

The right side develops early and is the realm of imagery, holistic thinking, nonverbal language, autobiographical memory, and a host of other processes. Our left brain develops later in life and is responsible for logic, spoken and written language, linearity, lists, and literal thinking. If the linkage between the sides is blocked, one side may d

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.

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.

As the singers settle into their seats again, I sum up the point of the exercise: It is the middle way between chaos and rigidity—the flow of independent voices linked together in harmony—that maximizes both complexity and vitality. This is the essence of integration.

Positive psychology has offered an important corrective to the disease model by identifying the characteristics of happy people, such as gratitude, compassion, open-mindedness, and curiosity, but

We come to know our own minds through our interactions with others. Our mirror neuron perceptions, and the resonance they create, act quickly and often outside of awareness.