An integrated state of mindful awareness is crucial to achieving mental health. Daniel J. Siegel, an internationally recognized expert on mindfulness and therapy, reveals practical techniques that enable readers to harness their energies to promote healthy minds within themselves and their clients. He charts the nine integrative functions that emerge from the profoundly interconnecting circuits of the brain, including bodily regulation, attunement, emotional balance, response flexibility, fear extinction, insight, empathy, morality, and intuition.
A practical, direct-immersion, high-emotion, low-techno-speak book, The Mindful Therapist engages readers in a personal and professional journey into the ideas and process of mindful integration that lie at the heart of health and nurturing relationships. .
Más adelante describe el proceso y los elementos en juego del enfoque terapéutico, el cual es aplicable en cualquier corriente. Este trabajo es un arte sobre el si mismo, más que una técnica o un método. Es una filosofía y un proceso de vida. Excelente lectura que en sí misma es terapéutica.
With regard to other aspects of our daily task as therapists I do believe that Dr. Siegel has, once again, writen something easy and clear to be read, of great usefulness if we want to achieve the best of us during our work with clients and why not, out of the office too, a way of living.
Olaf Holm
He is possibly a little more cardigan wearing Californian hippie for my normal austere taste, but there is no doubt about the value of his work. He brings insight, and thankfully stops short of being 'new age'.
If you want to avoid Deepak Chopra or Eckart Tolle, want your non-fiction to be actual 'non-fiction', but do want to explore mindfulness, intuition, well-being and consciousness then you will be safely tethered to earth and science with Dan Siegal.
Lydda Pabon
Using a simple visual model of a plane on the x axis - or for the mathematically uncomfortable, let us say a suspended piece of wood, he shows how we can all move quickly from that plane of possibility up any one of many peaks to certainty of action, with a corresponding physical response below the plane (wood). When we reach the peak, we act in one specific way. If we move too quickly from plane to peak, we jump to conclusions, and are not open to other possibilities. Our capacity to see where our clients may be coming from may be blinded by our sitting on one summit far from their consciousness. He reminds us that there is no 'immaculate perception', that we all see things through our own lens of experience and training, but that we can by specific training develop our capacities to be more attuned and open to others' consciousness by better understanding and regulating ourselves.
He introduces a series of mindfulness exercises to be practices with the book, as he takes us through each aspect of development of mindsight - how we sense and shape energy and information flow in our lives, outlining each exercise, its relationship to a specific skill to be developed and the brain science which may underpin what is happening.
It is written clearly and the illustrations are good (I have the Kindle edition).
I will be reading and rereading this book. Buy it!
Mitch Abblett, Ph.D. -- Author of The Heat of the Moment in Treatment: Mindful Management of Difficult Clients
If you are a therapist and have not read this book, i highly recommend it. It does a great job of describing why psychotherapy works and what the therapist needs to do to get it to work.
If you are not a therapist it may be a little too much unless you have done a great deal of reading in this area.
Absolutelly recomended!!!
While this concept of "Theory of the Mind" or "Reflective function" has been around for years, Seigel does a great job of giving us practical tools to promote wellness and integration. I love this book.
Thank you, Dr. Siegel, for this wonderful and incredibly useful resource!
Dan Siegel is a remarkable teacher and this book is another in his series of books explaining interpersonal neurobiology. He is a gifted writer, often poetic in his explanations and descriptions of fundamental mental processes. He successfully addresses a multitude of crucial topics from exploring the experience of self, to what it means to be in resonance with another person or with oneself.
He introduces the reader to the latest brain science research, explores the nature of mind and neural integration in our brains and increases our depth of understanding of mindfulness and empathy. He opens up new ways of making sense of our inner world (the conscious and the unconscious) and he creates a framework to view what we may have seen and known previously but now with a new depth of knowledge he creates an entirely new level of understanding.
In previous work he had described a valuable human capability: "mindsight". He characterized it as "a type of focused attention that allows us to see the workings of our own minds and allows us to reshape our inner experience, to increase our freedom, as well as to be fully open to another person's inner experience". In this book he goes further in showing the components and workings of this ability and how to increase our capacity to use this in our clinical work and in our lives.
He wrote this book to be read as if the reader and he were having a conversation (and it is). I had to laugh when at one point he expanded a concept explaining how the mind and brain process memory and I was just going over and over this in my mind trying to grasp the full meaning of what he was explaining.
My response at such frustration is usually to close the book and look for something to eat. His next sentence in the book was: "Yes, this appears difficult and you probably want to close the book now.... but you can comprehend this with a little more effort". And it is well worth the effort.
This is part of his gift as a teacher; to know where a student (reader) may be, and to then engage them in a way that takes them to a deeper and more complex level of understanding. He is a unique writer in this respect and was once referred to as the Mr. Wizard of our generation. (Mr. Wizard had a TV show (a million years ago) and he introduced the science of everyday life with wonder and excitement. Dan Siegel does this.
I do not mean to suggest that this is a dry scientific text. On the contrary, this is a uniquely rich, exciting, practical and readable book. Because of his writing style, this quickly becomes a rewarding and exciting conversation with Dan Siegel. It will stretch ones thinking by introducing new areas of scientific research and new ways of seeing the complexity of how our mind works and how the brain is continually evolving.
He introduces new ways of understanding "mental illness" (actually any thinking that is either rigid or chaotic). And like a great teacher, he establishes the potential roots of these problems, and in stages, expands our knowledge to fully conceptualize a new view. He then suggests how to integrate all this information into the practice of psychotherapy in order to help another person develop more fully.
This is a book that should to be close at hand. Just as having a good friend or colleague available to take a walk with and discuss and explore new ideas with, this book serves the function of opening the reader's mind to see things in a new light.
It is like a fine soup chock full of exciting and interesting flavors and thoughts. Some concepts you may think you have tasted previously but in his recipe he takes them to new levels of understanding, nuance and integration creating a synergy of flavors for a hungry mind.
Each chapter has a section that focuses directly on the more scientific information (Brain Matters) and another section with actual exercises for the reader to do (Mindsight Skills). This approach is quite useful because the concepts presented can be understood on both the intellectual cognitive level and the experiential subjective level as the book is read. In addition these exercises can be practical tools that can be used with clients.
His description and useful visual models of the dimensions of human experience are illuminating. The relationship between the mind and actual changes in neuronal structure explain why old patterns of behavior have a high probability of occurring again and again unless real neuronal change occurs.
He explains clearly and beautifully how our thoughts (often mindless preconceptions) and automatic actions (impulses) continue to effect and reinforce our own brain structure. And he reminds us how unfortunately this inevitably effects the mind and the neuronal wiring of the person we are interacting with.
Throughout the book he explains and suggests the importance of continually improving ones "mindsight" and how to creatively and intentionally develop this in oneself. He illustrates how this will have a direct effect on what can occur in psychotherapy as well as any relationship.
And Dr Siegel, neuroscientist, uses the L word without shame. In fact Dr Siegel clearly describes the importance of "love" neurologically. He separates the various types of love and shows that on a fundamental level of our neurobiology, "love " and empathy help develop our minds which affects neuronal growth and therefore actually shape our brains and the brains of those we interact with.
This book is valuable for therapists and to everyone who wants to maximize their own knowledge of themselves and to learn how to recognize and develop "mindsight" within themselves. Dan Siegel introduces cutting edge brain science and mindfulness practices and integrates all this information making it understandable and useful in the real world of being with ourselves and interacting with others.
Laurence Drell, MD
Washington DC