I am currently in the midst of reading Dan Siegel’s works. Anyone familiar with him? I saw a pretty popular thread on Jordan Peterson and it made me think to recommend Siegel. His background is in neuroscience and psychiatry. Originally, I got into his works because he has a few parenting (healthy development) books. They are some of the best parenting books I have read. It is written in layman’s terms but ties into some big ideas. Mindsight might be his most popular book. In it he discusses how when he was being trained as a doctor that there wasn’t any training in how to tune into a patient’s subjective state. Mindsight is your ability to understand your own mind (insight), another’s mind (empathy) and integration. Highly recommended.
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I had brain surgery a few years ago while concurrently reading Dan’s work. Interpersonal Neural Biology, Helped much and encouraged my trust in my own brain to heal. I was also a member of an Integral meetup group in Santa Monica with a Psychologist who was a student of Dan’s at UCLA. Awesome understanding!
Hey that’s awesome! Hopefully the surgery went well and everything is in tip top shape! Do you guys still meet (Integral)?
We have not had a meeting for several years, but met for an afternoon gathering at a restaurant in Santa Monica this last year. I live in the Antelope Valley now and have tried to get a group together and even gave a video presentation once, but was a bit over their heads to most. Interestingly, a fellow from India doing family business in the area started a meetup group at local Panera bread called “Spirituality & Practicality” … (suggestive of ‘Integral’). It has been fun, but not as geeky as I would like! 
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Here is an excerpt that I shared with my workplace. As Oprah would say, it was a “A-Ha” moment: … “what’s even more important than the specifics of what happened to us is how we’ve reflected on and made sense of our own childhood experiences. When we gain clear insight into our memories and how the past has influenced us in the present, we become free to construct a new future for ourselves and for how we parent our children. The research is clear: if we make sense of our lives, we free ourselves from the prison of the past and gain insight that helps us create the present and future we desire. But what does it mean, specifically, to make sense of our lives? Making sense of our lives is all about developing what’s called a “coherent narrative,” where we reflect on and gain insight into both the positive and negative aspects of our childhood family experiences, so we can understand how these experiences led us to become who we are as adults. We’re not running away from and dismissing the past, but neither are we consumed and preoccupied with it. Rather, we’re free to reflect on it and choose how we respond.” Dan Siegel, The Yes Brain.
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Amen to all that! Good and important work & approach. Thanks for the conversation and best in all your efforts. Cheers, Doug
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I’m all for keeping the conversation going. 
If I find anything new I’ll post it.
“…in addition to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of integration: temporal integration, connecting processes across time. This is fundamentally what stories do: they connect the self in the past, present and anticipated future. This mental time travel is a central feature of stories as they are found throughout the world.” -Parenting from the Inside Out
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