Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

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.

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

One of the most interesting ideas we discussed in our study group is that our resonance with others may actually precede our awareness of ourselves. Developmentally and evolutionarily, our modern self-awareness circuitry may be built upon the more ancient resonance circuits that root us in our social world.

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.

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

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

I’ve come to call this set of circuits—from mirror neurons to subcortical regions, back up to the middle prefrontal areas—the “resonance circuits.” This is the pathway that connects

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

This contagion can even make us interpret unrelated events with a particular bias—so that, for example, after we’ve been around someone who is depressed we interpret someone else’s seriousness as sadness.

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