Hello and welcome to the Somatic Approaches in Therapy Summit. My name is Dr. Clarissa Cigrand. I'm an assistant professor at Naropa University and I'll be your host for this session today with Dr. Dan Siegel to explore integration in somatic therapy. Dr. Dan Siegel is the founder and director of education of the Mindsight Institute and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. An award-winning educator, Dan is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and over 15 other books, which have been translated into over 40 languages. As a founding editor of the Norton Professional Series of Interpersonal Neurobiology, IPNB, Dan has overseen the publication of 100 books in the transdisciplinary IPNV framework, which focuses on the mind and mental health. Thank you for being with us, Dan. Clarissa, it's great to be here with you. Thank you. Yeah, so for our first question, I've had something that's been formulating in my mind and really excited to explore this with you. And so just setting an initial frame of this, we're really focusing on somatic approaches in therapy for this summit. And there's such a need to bring greater awareness of the soma in therapy. So it's so wonderful that we're doing this summit and we know that when we're doing somatic approaches, we do tend to emphasize these bottom-up processes of noticing our senses, noticing our somatic signals and what they might mean. And we also place a lot of emphasis with really kind of, even kind of prioritizing this kind of right brain specialization way of relating to others. And I know in your book, The Mindful Therapist, you talk about how the right brain, how the body has oftentimes not really been given as much attention as it's needed in our collective, as well as in a therapeutic space. And so we really want to emphasize that in this work, but I've noticed in my own history as an educator that at times we can begin to overly favor the body at times and perhaps kind of dismiss these top-down processes or even allow for greater states of integration. And so with that, I was curious if you could open up this interview by just naming from your own experience, why is the body important to psychotherapy and why is integrating the body and mind also important in psychotherapy? Oh, those are such great questions, Clarissa. I think it's great just to start with the fact that, you know, you and I are speaking to each other with language from an individual identity in your body and an individual identify in my body. And so what we can say about that simple formulation is you've got a body and you have the way we connect with each other, in this case, with language. That language has content to it. So like you say, let's talk about somatic therapies. You could have said, let's talk about soccer or something. And so the language is a symbolic meaning that is basically an energy pattern where soccer is different from somatic. Right. And so we want to acknowledge that energy flow is really what is in common between what happens inside of us in our bodies and what happens between us in our communication and relationships. So when you start thinking that way, then you go, well, what does energy have to do with therapy? You know, what is, what, why, why do we talk about that? And what you come to is a fascinating thing to say that the human mind is not just a synonym for brain activity. It includes brain activity, but includes the whole of the body, everything happening inside the skin encased body, which is basically energy flow. But the mind is also broader, not just in the brain, it's bigger than the body. It includes the body yes, and all the energy flow inside the body it's also the betweenness, the inter-aspect of energy flow, what happens between your body and my body. So when you think of it that way, then you go, okay, well, if we're really talking about therapy of the mind, sometimes called psychotherapy, then a psychotherapist really should be able to track where the energy is flowing and know a lot about its locations and its processes in those different locations. So, we can study what happens in the betweenness of the mind that we call, you know, relationships. And we can studywhat happens inside the skin encased body, which is somatic. So the reason somatic is so important is because it's half of the story of where the human mind is, what the human mind is, how the human mind functions, what involves thriving as a human mind versus what involves, you know, suffering. And so the body is an important part of that story. Now you bring up a really important point, which is we can get so excited about any particular area. So if you're a somatic therapist, you may not want to know about narrative therapy and think stories are not important, but they're incredibly important. They're how we make sense of life with language and also how we share how we've made sense of life, not only with our inner experience, but with other people. So knowing about narrative and how it's a part of our relational worlds is important. So we don't wanna play favorites just to one location of energy flow versus another. The mind is both within and between. And it has all these wonderful ways it manifests itself that we can talk about. But that's why somatics is so important. And that's way for me, I was trained in a number of uh, therapeutic modalities that were really a lot of talking and really never looked at the body. So when somatic approaches became more prominent after I was done with my training, but was a training director and then just out being an educator, I was so excited to see the systematic study of the body and how being aware of the body could be so liberating through people's suffering. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing all of that, Dan. And I was just picking up on some integration as you were speaking primarily with, you know, integrating the soma, this kind of somatic awareness that's incredibly important when we're also constructing a narrative of our lives. And so you speak to in your book, The Mindful Therapist, this idea called narrative integration and how that involves this idea of kind of making sense of our history. And I know that at times when we're doing more somatic-based work, we might have memories pop up, we might have kind of have impressions that don't even really have a sense of words attached to them. They might feel non-verbal in some kind of way. And so, could you share more what you mean about narrative integration and why is it important to make sense of our history? Well, thank you Clarissa and you know narrative integration is one of nine domains of integration in this broad field, interpersonal neurobiology, that I work in. So just to back up for one second, the initial proposal back from 1992 was that the mind could be seen, as we've been talking about, as both embodied and relational. And then once that notion was being considered, that the mind was more than just brain activity inside your skull, then the question was, what was the mind made of? So then the possibility emerged that maybe it was made of energy flow because that's what happens inside your body, including its brain, and that's what happens in your relationship. So that was a common ground. So then the thought was, what aspect of energy could the mind actually be? And then luckily this was happening in the early 90s. In the 1980s, a bunch of scientists had gotten together, mathematicians, physicists, and people interested in systems to study something called complex systems. And that's a whole long story, but the bottom line of those studies was that there was a process that was named as emergence. So emergence would be an example like the wetness of water. If a bunch of water in your hand is a system of water, The basic element is H2O, you know, the molecule hydrogen and in two parts to one part of oxygen, H2O. And no single water molecule has the property of wetness, but if you get a bunch of water molecules interacting with each other, wetness emerges from the interaction. So it's kind of like a synergy that Buckminster Fuller talked about in the 70s. There's something greater than just simply the sum of the parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So what I thought was maybe the mind was an emergent property of energy. And so then that meant that our subjective experience could arise from energy flow. It meant that consciousness might be somehow emergent from energy flow, certainly information processing. You know, if I go blah, blah, it's pure energy, but if I say good morning, it's a symbolic formation of energy and energy in a formation that symbolizes something we simply call information. So then the deep dive into reading the mathematics of complex systems show that they have a certain kind of emergent property that is called self-organization. And self- organization allows a complex system to optimize its unfolding with five characteristics that if you rename them and rearrange them, spells the word FACES. So it's flexible, meaning it can bend, not break. Adaptive, meaning, meaning it effectively adjusts to what's going on. Coherent, basically meaning resilient over time. Energized, meaning has a sense of vitality and energy to it. And stable, meaning its reliable, not that it's rigid. So this FACES flow, flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable was a mathematical set of properties of a ideally optimizing complex system that was self-organizing in a way that allowed this face to flow to unfold. So then I asked the question to mathematicians, how do you optimize self- organization? And they said, oh, that's pretty straightforward. You differentiate the elements of the system, you allow them to be different or unique or specialized, and then you link them, you connect them, you hook them up. So the linkage of differentiated parts of a complex system is how we're gonna define integration, that word. And very specifically, it involves these two sides to it. It's differentiation on the one hand, linkage on the other. And that's what creates optimal self-organization. Now that all has been said, integration becomes so important because it's the basis of health. When you talk about the mind, the mind that creates integration within the body and between the body and other bodies or all nature, we call that relational integration. So as I was doing work as a therapist, there were like nine different ways you could work with a client to promote integration. One of them was to be very in touch with the body, and I call that vertical integration. Another was narrative integration, which was how you make sense of your life through telling your life story to your inner life, but also maybe to another person. And in that way, what you do is you develop literally an integration across a number of neural networks is in the making sense process. So making sense, makes sense to do because it's integrative and that's why it leads to a reduction in suffering. Suffering, by the way, can be seen as almost like a river of integration where you tend to go to one bank of chaos or one bank or rigidity and all of the psychiatric disorders can be reimagined as impairments to integration where you move either to chaos, rigidity or both, and I made up that term river of integration. In a slice of time, I made up the term window of tolerance to indicate that integrated state of FACES flow in the middle of the window that tends to go to chaos or rigidity when you're outside of the window. And it's not exactly the same as hyperarousal or hypoarousal, overlaps a bit, but it's really more about when you are in chaos or when you in rigidity. Thank you. That was a long answer to a short question. Thank you for the distillation. So going with talking about the window of tolerance, and I know you mentioned vertical integration, which is like primarily how we're inviting our clients to access, yes, that interoceptive capacity and kind of bring that into the field of awareness so that we can work with it intelligently and kind make sense of it. I know that you mentioned in your book how fundamental it is that we are in a state of resonance with our clients and that we're supporting our clients to widen that window so that even states that previously were distressing and could put them into that chaos or rigidity are now able to be worked with and maybe even encoded if we're working with memory. And so yeah, could you help us understand how do we continue to lean into resonance and widen our windows for ourselves and our clients? Yeah. Well, the window of tolerance is a metaphor, of course, you know, there's no window somewhere, but the visual metaphor is that there's this integrative space that optimal functioning happens. And if that gets restricted and the window gets narrowed, then let's say, let's see the emotion of fear. In my particular personality pattern, which we can talk about later, fear is the core emotion, what Jaak Pankgepp calls it, a primal emotion that I get most activated with. And so I can, if I'm in a certain state of mind, I can have a very narrow window for things that might feel frightening to me. And then I can become either very rigid and withdrawn and pull back. Or I can become very chaotic and just get really frightened and agitated and talking really fast, stuff like that. But for me the emotion of anger, I have a super wide window probably because there was a lot of anger going on in my family and you know, I just got used to it and I and I learned how to deal with it. Or maybe it's just because that's not my sense of temperament area. But either way, I have a very wide window for that. So there can be a lot of anger in a group therapy session, a family session or my own family or whatever. And I'm just like, stay, you know, very much in the window. Now I can get very activated. So this is why it's not the same as hyperarousal. I can be very hyperactivated, but I'm still very functional and flexible. I'm flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable. And I am very activated and there's a lot anger going on. But if fear is the thing, I have a very narrow window. So if you were my therapist, the way to make a window wider is to work on any of the nine domains of integration. So for example, if you're going to work in the vertical domain for somatic approach, you would have me be aware of what's going on in my body. So my higher cortex is now, is where the word vertical comes from, is focusing attention into awareness called focal attention on the beating of my heart, the trembling of my hands, the tightness in my belly, the feeling of tightness of my throat, and as you let me just be with those sensations, then I'm able to literally widen the window because I'm not trying to actually get frightened of my fear. I can just be with it, and when we talk about the integration of consciousness, which is one of the nine domains, I'm be able to hold an awareness like the, the poem by Rumi, The Guest House. You know, I'm able to welcome anything in. So rather than becoming reactive to my own reactivity, I now have spaciousness in awareness to just let it be there. And you've helped me do that by somatic awareness where I say, go with that. My heart is beating fast, ah. And it is one of the most rewarding things, especially for new therapists, but even to this day, to have someone who's really struggling with an emotion that's throwing them into chaos or rigidity, and you just say, let's actually, instead of talking about the emotion, let's just be with your body right now. And let's just feel with your own body. And I have an acronym called SIFT, S-I-F-T, where S is the sensations of the body, S, before you get to Images or Ideas or anything, and F is the feelings of emotions, and T is the thoughts. So you help someone sift through things always beginning with the sensations in the body. Yeah, thank you. And we'd love to keep exploring that SIFT acronym of yours. And I was hearing in what you were sharing too, and I know that you speak to this in the integration of consciousness that we want to differentiate between this knower or this observing self and the contents of observation. And so many times when we're perhaps feeling some overwhelm or we're in that chaos or rigidity state, we're not really kind of differentiated from those states. We feel like we are them. And so could you continue to support our understanding? If I was a therapist and I was working with a client tomorrow and I had a client who had a hard time uncoupling, how might I support that differentiation for them so that they can move into greater states of integration? Yeah. Well, what I do with almost all of my clients is I have them learn this very simple, but profound practice called the wheel of awareness, which is just another visual metaphor for how to picture consciousness itself. So in the hub of the wheel is the knowing of awareness and on the rim are the knowns, anything that can be known. So I would say then, it takes the observing self and almost lets the self go and becomes more like just the knowing of of sensing. So it's a little bit different from observing where there is a sense of someone who is observing and then what you do is you allow yourself to see that there are lots of things on the rim and you systematically move a singular spoke of attention around to detect where the different items are on the rim. So the first segment is the energy coming from outside the body through hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. Then you go to the second segment, which is the interior of the body for interoception, our sixth sense. So the sensations of the muscles and bones and all the organs and genitals. And then you go to the third segment, systematically doing this, where you are allowing yourself to experience the contents of the mind itself, like images and memories and thoughts and beliefs and hopes and dreams and stuff like that. And then in an advanced step, you actually bend the spoke around into the hub itself. and explore pure awareness. And then you, for the final fourth segment, you go to our relational sense, I call it the eighth sense. Anyway, when people do this, they develop this capacity, it's certainly to build on what you're saying about an observer, but even more than that, you begin to embrace the capacity of awareness itself just to be distinguished from that which you're aware of without an actual person who's awareness-ing, if you will. So the wheel of awareness helps you to integrate consciousness, so it's the way to develop that domain of integration by differentiating all the knowns from each other on the rim and differentiating the knowing from the knowns through the whole practice. And then one of the fun advantages of it is you get to experience what pure awareness feels like. Yeah, and I will say I tried out the wheel of awareness for the first time this morning and just such a compelling practice, Dan, it was quite profound, really. Could you share what it was like for you? Yeah. So. There's really so much to say about it. But as you said, with the wheel of awareness, we begin with the breath. We move into the senses, sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. We move in to the interoceptive experience of the body. We go into the experience of the mind, whether it's images, whether it is thoughts, any other kind of, you know, mental phenomena that we can experience. And then we kind of move into that kind of greater sense of collective self. And then, yeah, of course, as you said, we go back into the hub of awareness where I know you've shared, this is when we're in that kind of open plane of possibility. Yeah, it has just really powerful, powerful implications for our ability to experience ourselves in the world and know ourselves in deeper ways. And so I found that when I was just going through that practice, it helped me feel like not only a kind of cohesive sense of being a human and what it means to be human, but also just this kind of greater sense of identity. And I know that in the wheel of awareness, you also will add in, you know, like a compassion practice of like kind of extending kindness to ourselves and the greater collective. And so it just, yeah, in essence, like it was just like a powerfully integrative practice. And I felt both in greater touch with myself as like a unique being but also in greater touch of myself as this kind of greater sense of we that I know you talk about. Oh, that's so beautiful. What a beautiful, beautiful reflection. Thank you, Clarissa. That's really very moving. Thank you. Yeah, and, you know, I just think it really speaks to the power of the work that you're doing. And I know that the work you're doing, it kind of expands beyond the therapy realm, of course, but we're also kind of focusing on that for this summit. And so, you know, moving into the wheel of awareness and some of the implications that it can for us as clinicians, I'd love to just circle back to, yeah, like what the wheel of awareness can offer us as clinicians and just widening our capacity to really be with suffering with our clients. And so, is there anything else that you care to speak to with that prompt? Yeah, I mean, thank you for sharing those reflections on your experience. I think for every therapist, making sure we know our inner lives and have a direct way of supporting the way we can cultivate that FACES flow of resilience is really important. I think a lot of us as therapists may be vulnerable to just saying, oh, I don't have time to take care of this inner self that I have. So the wheel is really a powerful thing you can do every day, there's a number of things that are amazing about it, but it includes the five research proven foundations of physiological improvement. So when research on other practices look at people that train their attention to be focused, their awareness to be open, and their intention to be kind, they have improvements in their immune function. Reductions in their stress hormone cortisol, improvement in their heart function, they actually alter the epigenetic, these molecules on top of genes, epigenetic, regulators of inflammation to reduce inflammation, and they even optimize an enzyme called telomerase that repairs and maintains the ends of the chromosomes. And all that combined, you know, helps slow the aging process. And in addition to those five physiological things that these three pillars of mind practice just do, it also integrates the brain and an integrated brain is the base of resilient mind. So literally you take differentiated areas and link them with more robustness in ways that research has demonstrated with these three pillar practices. Fortunately, the wheel has all three in one practice, they're often in separate practices. So that's just a cool thing. And in addition to all that, I've done this now with 65,000 people in person. You know, different settings over the years. And when I ask people to give their reflections, especially about bending the spoke around when they get into pure awareness, what people will say is it becomes this experience of timelessness, of a sense of being connected to everyone and everything. And words that are often used are love and joy. And so, I myself, when I do the practice every day, get glimpses of that sometimes, sometimes full on, you know, immersions in it, but what happens is you come to live with that throughout the rest of the day. So it's not just this 25 minute practice you're doing, but you basically get access to the hub would be the metaphor, and then there's a whole science, I think, behind what the hub is actually coming from, which we can get into if you want, but It really builds on the science of energy in a really exciting way so that when you tap into that, you tap in to the love that connects us all. Yeah, thank you so much for that. And I'll just echo, yeah, the ability to tap into love is I can't think of a more enduring resource for us to develop as clinicians and can really help mitigate some of the burnout and empathy fatigue that we might find ourselves experiencing. And so yeah, going with that idea and really kind of helping to support us as clinicians to stay really vital in our work, but also supporting us to really help support our clients into maybe moving into some of the different kind of areas in the hub, and I think specifically with some somatic approaches. Is there anything that you care to share about how these qualities of the mind, of developing, and I know that you talk about in Triception, you mentioned these qualities of observing, of openness and objectivity. How is developing these qualities of the mind really helping us to support the ability to be with our body? Yeah, I mean, that's such a great question, Clarissa. Thank you. So if you think about the mind as energy flow and think about how you can perceive the mind, almost like you can see it with your eyes. Years ago, when I was, I actually had dropped out of medical school because I didn't like how uncompassionate, if that's a word, and unempathic my professors were, so I didn't wanna stay in the field. But ultimately when I came back, I needed a word to protect me from this lack of, but I didn't know what to call it. So I made up this word mindsight, you know. So when people have insight into their own inner workings, that would be one application of mindsight. When people can see the inner experience, not just the behaviors, but the inner life, the inner subjective life of another person, to see their mind, that's the empathy aspect ofmind sight. And when you integrate all that, you're really creating compassion and kindness. So, mindsight has those three things. But if you think about it, almost like a lens through which you see the world, there are human beings who have feelings, they have thoughts, but they have not developed mindsight very much. So they have the feelings and thoughts, but they just act on automatic pilot. And so whether they're a friend of yours or a client of yours, or they're in your family or in your company or in your country or wherever they are. There are people who are people but they just haven't developed the mindsight ability. So they're challenged with insight, they're challenge with empathy. They may have lots of feelings of caring and drive to do stuff but they don't have this mindsight ability. So then you can say, well, is it developable? Can you develop this thing? And the answer is yes. And I wrote a book called Mindsight about how to do that but the way to think about it from a metaphor is, if it's a lens on a camera, you need to make that camera stabilized, so as it's trying to perceive energy flow, basically, it does it with, um, stability. So therefore you can see with more detail, depth, um and focus, right? So imagine if we went to the park and we're trying to, you know, videotape a hummingbird we see in the trees. and the camera's going like this, and then we come back to edit the film to share the excitement of the hummingbird. Well, it'd be a mess, right? So that's kind of when people's mind sight lenses are foggy like that or blurry, it's cause they haven't stabilized it. So then the question is, what do you stabilize it with? And this may be too literal, but if you picture a tripod with three legs to it, they all kind of work together, but they're very different. It's the three you mentioned. And it's openness. observation, objectivity. So the way you stabilize your mindsight lens to see clearly, with depth and detail, so it's in focus and you can do something with it, we can edit it and share the excitement of it with other people, is you build openness, which basically is saying, like the Rumi poem, The Guest House, bring it on. Anything that's here, I'm not gonna try to push it away. I'm not gonna try and cling onto it. You know, a very contemplative notion that's about just accepting this is what it is, that's the idea of the openness. You welcome anything in. Then observation is that you recognize that there is a human being, like you pointed out earlier, that is doing the observing. And if you're in a body it's hard to get around that but you can try to make your observing capacity as neutral as possible and welcoming as possible as kind as possible for sure but you do have this history of a body you're in. So, in a somatic way, there is a somatic observer even if consciousness itself is beyond the body, which I think it is, you still have a body that through which almost like an antenna, it's kind of coming through you. And then, so that's the observation part. The objectivity is really about what we learn in the wheel of awareness, that there objects within awareness that we don't have to be swept up by. So, whether it's fear, in my case, that would be my growth edge area, or anger, or sadness, or these core emotions, or memories you have. If I work with a patient, one of my former patients had a dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, and a disorganized attachment history, and she ended up curing it. I mean, she got over it through therapy and became a therapist, so she might even be in this seminar, in this summit, and she wrote a beautiful book called A Brilliant Adaptation by Sally Maslansky. It'll be out in January, 2026. But you'll see there where this ability to have objectivity, even about her memories of trauma, helped her have this narrative integration, not just memory integration, which is where you take the piece of memory and move them from just implicit, alone where they flood you with flashbacks to explicit, that's memory integration, but the narrative integration is making sense of it. And then in her case with dissociative identity disorder, she had to really work on something that in, this is among the nine, called state integration and realize that these bodies we're in could get into these different states which are verb-like clusters of neural firing patterns. And she could understand how these different states helped her survive horrible abuse. So in the book what you see is the way she went from being this fragmented individual to a coherently integrated individual, which she is to this day. Thank you. Yeah, and such a compelling story that I think balances so many of those areas of integration that you were just naming. And so, you know, I will just speak to my lived experience of your work, Dan. I absolutely adore it. Every time I read it, I'm learning something new. It's an incredible system and it's taken me some time to really get into your work to the point where it becomes integrated, that it's in the memory bank, I can recall it. And one of the goals of this summit is, how do we help clinicians, you know, take something from this talk today and begin to put it into their practice? And I think we've shared a lot that is gonna be some really great work to sit with, to move into. And so I'm curious, just as we begin to kind of draw this talk to a close, what would you think are some next steps for therapists that are new to your work or new to the idea of this integration and the wheel of awareness? What could be some next step for them to begin to integrate that into their work? Yeah, well, thank you, Clarissa. This has been really deeply meaningful to connect with you around these ideas and these applications. If you, as a therapist, go inside, even just right now. Ask yourself the question, you know, in this calling that you've found to be a therapist, what draws you forward in your work, your life's work? And if these things that Clarissa and I have been bringing up today strike some kind of chord in your body, and you can feel a kind of energy there, maybe it's related to developing your own resilience, or maybe it's related to the idea of integration, or maybe it's related to what happened to me was this moment I kind of woke up after my training was completed and I was actually asked to be the training director for people working with kids and adolescents. And I realized as I thought about becoming the training director, that no one ever told me what the mind was. And no one even said in my training, you know, what a healthy mind was. I mean, how could you say what a healthy mind was if you didn't say what the mind itself was? So that started me on a journey many years ago, 33 years ago, over 33 years go, you know to see, could we as a field of mental health actually define what the mind was, not just describe its contents, but actually define what it is, which I think we can. And you've heard a little bit about that today. And then we could say, what an unhealthy mind, that is mindful of suffering, was one that wasn't able to create integration and then find the blockages to integration along these nine domains so that kind of like a highly focused work, you can now see whatever strategies, whatever intervention, whatever schools of therapy you've learned, what interpersonal neurobiology and the nine domains of integration do is they prepare your mind to be ready for any kind of things that arise. Because now you have a definition of the mind, you have the definition of a healthy mind, and you have this process of integration across these nine domains, so that whatever school of thought or accreditation you might be seeking for a different form of therapy, you would have a foundation in interpersonal neurobiology that informs every form of therapy. So If that's of interest to you. Now, some people, it's not. They just want to know, tell me what to do. Don't tell me how things work. But if you're interested in how things work and want to be prepared in that broad way and then pursue any kind of specific strategies, interpersonal neurobiology might have a lot to offer. And certainly you'll find a community at the Mindsight Institute where we have all our courses you know, of like-minded people who really want to, not only work on their own inner world as therapists, but helping their clients in more effective ways and going out in the world working, you know with schools, working with communities, working with organizations, working in government. We have people working at the United Nations. We have working in, you now, climate justice and all sorts of ways where this material is all about well-being, starting inside with the human mind and then going to the relational aspect of the human mind and seeing how our relationships with our whole human family and with all of nature. So if any of that is of interest to you, come join us and there's a lot of fun collaboration and questions to pursue together. Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much for that, Dan. And the word that just kept coming to me when you're sharing this is transformation. And this kind of work that you're talking about, it really invites us to kind of transform ourselves from the inside out so that we can support others in that work of transformation. And again, as someone who has really kind of taken your work to heart and put it into practice, I think there's one area that we maybe haven't covered quite as much yet that would love to explore with you, and that's interpersonal integration. And I know that you've discussed and kind of shared this idea of the importance of joining together with a client where we become this kind of functional we. And you've also extended this idea of this functional we to also include this idea of intraconnected that I know you discuss in your latest book, and the idea of "mwe" where we're really kind of beginning to expand this notion of self, that we are more than just our body, that the sense of self expands beyond it. And so just as we draw this talk to a close, do you have any final thoughts that you care to share on interpersonal integration, why it matters, and how we can begin to really re-envision the work of psychotherapy with that in mind. Yeah, no, I think in the book IntraConnected and this last book, Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, you'll find deep dives into this question, Clarissa, which is so important. You know, the word self is an interesting word. It is not just the individual. Self can be thought of as a center of experience and that center can be inside the body for sure, but it can also be in our relationships with other people and with the planet. So when we realize the self is not just the individual body, then the word mwe naturally comes up because you are a me in a body and you are we in all of our relationships with people and with nature. And so mwe thanks you for being on this journey to bring health and healing into the world. And Clarissa, I want to help you. Clarissa I want thank you for helping us through this fun conversation, guiding us toward this view of what mwe can do in the world together. Thank you. Mwe thanks you as well, Dan. Mwe so happy to be here. Thank you.