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294memories are shared in this way, when there becomes room to feelthe sensations fully and then to have the reflective experience thatthis knowledge can be borne, that it can be tolerated, then thenature of the memories can actually transform.As we'll see morein the upcoming section on memory integration, such an interper sonal sharing can widen the "window of tolerance" for knowingabout painful past events. This expansion is an enhancement ofself-regulation, the capacity to bear witness to one's own pain andremain present as that implicit recollection is integrated into abroader sense of the person's life. The key is for me as a therapistto remain fully present for whatever arises-not passing jud gment,being right there, in the moment, following the shifts and stabiliz ing of different states, welcoming all into the therapy experience.With such a mindful approach, Mary seemed to change as wedirected attention, together, on the various ways she had come toadapt to her hostile family environment. As she went ahead in herown therapy she found that direct teaching about mindfulness washelpful in her daily life. I taught her the meditation that I offeredin the last chapter, and she found the hub to be a useful visualmetaphor for being able to know about elements of the past asactivities of her mind, not the totality of who she is. In many ways,this mindful discernment feels like the cornerstone of therapy, notjust for Mar y and other patients, but for us, as therapists, as well.We sense our patients' pain, but we do not have to become thatpain. Having that modulating capacity to be open but not to "be come" our patients is a fine line between being empathic, and de veloping secondar y, or vicar ious, traumatization. Perhaps it is atheoretical set of "supervisory mirror neurons," broadly hypothe sized by Iacoboni as a possible component of -our prefrontal abili ties that enable us to resonate but not "become" another, that webuild as therapists and that in general enable us as people to bepresent but not to get lost in others' exper ience (Iacoboni &Siegel, 2006). Mindfulness as a therapist, being attuned internally

295so that we can know the distinctions between resonance and em pathy, versus flooding and over identification, seems an essentialstep in our w01J.Integration of consciousness can be promoted by both direct andindirect means, as we have discussed. Our open presence as thera pists alone is an invitation to have people experience more aspectsof the rim of their mind.As we feel the mindful spaciousness toembrace whatever arises in the :field of awareness, patients willsense an opening space, an encircling embrace, that can containwhat before was unbearable knowledge, emotion, or memory. Aswe share attention, we initiate attunement. In this way, sharing at tention with others is the beginning of a resonant state with twopeople. As we "share" attention with ourselves, as we develop thespaciousness of the hub of the mind to attend to our intentions,we align our reflecting and experiencing selves.Direct applications also are helpful and include all of the mind ful awareness practices that help focus attention on intention. Be ginning with awareness of the breath, it is amazing how takingpause to reflect inward can initia e an opening of the hub that feelsnatural and yet profoundly moving. Returning awareness gentlyto the breath when attention has wandered strengthens the huband initiates the reflexive capacity to become aware of awareness.With practice, sometimes for just ro minutes a day, patients seemto develop a self-observational ability that then prepares them forthe next step of opening their minds to enhanced receptivity.In a session, receptive awareness can be catalyzed by simply sug gesting that the patient become aware of not just the breath, butof whatever enters the field of awareness. As the patient noticeswhatever arises as it arises, he or she will be reinforcing the self observational skills that can decouple automaticity-a vital "Yoda"skill in promoting the next layers of integration.As Mary progressed in her therapy, she came to a resolution ofthe conflicts across her many states of adaptation to the severe

296trauma. She read an entry in her journal to me that expressedthe ways in which mindfulness brought a sense of clarity to herhealing:From the hub of my mind, I can view all the chaos, fear, terror,threats, brushes with death, wishes, and plans for death, pain, mindbinds, all-mind knowing; all-mind not knowing, all-body know ing, all-body not knowing, states of adaptation that now residehappily and benignly on the rim . over there on the rim, I canview and know the states, but in the hub, I am not those states, Iam only the knowledge of those states-how they came to be,how they saved me, and how they have now evolved into a storyabout what happened to me, about how crazy and disturbed myfamily was, and about how I survived it and am profoundly able tobe present as I move forward in full awareness of and liberationfrom the prison that was my childhood . all those many yearsago .finally making sense of it all.Integration of consciousness permits us to find peace withinthe chaos as we develop the hub of our mind. In that spaciousplace of reflection, healing can begin as we come to deeply sensethe fullness of our lives, from the past, in the present moment,which free us in the future. Such healing will be illustrated inmany of the stories that follow.The other domains of integration are listed on the followingpages in a sequence, because this is a linear and logical format, butthey might be better explored as a circle, with each of the follow ing seven perhaps encircling the integration of consciousness. Theninth and last domain-transpirational integration-may indeedsometimes emerge following the integration of the first eight(Figure r4.r).Verlicaf.Ynle yralionSandra, a 67-year-old grandmother of five, feared going to thecardiologist, saying "Something is wrong with my heart and I

297Interpersonal· ationalFigure 14.1 Domains of integration.don't want to find out." During her fourth visit with me, Sandrahad a panic attack when it came time for her to focus on her chestduring a: body scan, which we were doing as an introduction to adirect application of mindful practice in therapy. As she focusedher mind on her chest, it was natural to think that she, might fearlosing her cherished relationships with her family. But what wasultimately revealed in therapy was the unresolved loss of her fa ther when she was a young child, something she had never thoughtabout, no narrative, "making-sense" process had occurred, no shar ing of the loss with her brothers or sister, or her mother. Insteadshe had" cut herself off from the neck down" in order not to feel.In reality, we came to understand, she was terrified of becomingaware of her broken heart.Staying with sensations enables the wisdom of the body to gainaccess to the mind. Vertical integration is one domain in which wecan begin the important process of disentangling our unresolvedlosses and cohesive adaptive states that have cut us off, literally,

298from the vitality of being fully immersed in our senses. Creatingcoherence in our lives and making sense of our life story involvegaining access to the full spectrum of senses from our body.Vertical integration is the way in which distributed circuitsare brought into connection functionally wit1: each other, fromhead to toe. Here we are focusing on h w input from the bodyis brought up ,through the spinal cord and bloodstream into thebrainstem, limbic areas, and cortex to form a vertically integratedcircuit. You may wonder what this means or why this is necessary,given that the body is already "connected" to the brain. But it ispossible to have neural activations outside of our comcious aware ness. Bringing somatic input into the focus of our attention changeswhat we can do with this infor mation: Consciousness permitschoice and change.A range of studies suggest that our bodily state directly shapes ouraffects which all interact to influence our reasoning and decision making. Having averse reactions to our own bodily inputs-or try ing to avoid awareness of them-.-leads to a restricted access ofthe hub to any points on the rim. In this situation, we cannot bemindful because our receptivity is hampered and we become in flexible. In such a nonintegrated state, the individual is susceptibleto patterns of rigidity or outbursts of chaos, far from the FACESflow of well-being. In Sandra's case, she had developed a cohesiveadaptation that shut off her bodily sensations and kept her rigidlyconfined to a life without much deep sense of meaning. Her panicattacks illustrated how this overly controlled cohesive state wasprone to a rupture into chaos in the form of panic.In psychotherapy, vertical integration can be the focus during asession by beginning with awareness of the body in which you sug gest to your patient that he or she just notice the sensations thatemerge.A totai body scan would involve moving progressively from. toe to head, enabling the feelings to fill the patient's awareness, andkeeping the hub's spoke on the sixth sense area of the rim. Just

299sensing, "staying with" the sensations in awareness, "going withthat" when a feeling arises, are all reflective pauses that help themind focus on vertical integration. Notice that ''just sensing" is dis tinct from ''just noticing," as they likely involve the two differingstreams of awareness: sensing and observing. In full·integration, weencourage all of the streams of awareness to be brought into bal ance. In restrictive adaptations, sensing may be warded off and adisconnected form of obser vation may become, at best, a way aperson is ;iware of the body: noticing it, but not directly sensing it.As we've seen in Figures 4.3 and 6.r, the spoke that connects toan element of the rim, such as a point on the sixth sense of thebody, can be viewed as involving any or all of the four streams thatenable the "data" from the rim to enter the hub's awareness. Eachof the streams is important, each having its role to play in mindfulawareness. For Sandra, feeling the direct sensations was not possibleat first without a terrifying reaction. We therefore focused first onthe concept of the importanc of the body in our discussions. Next,we gently moved into helping her with the ability to observe thebody from a more distant perspective, such as noting the state ofthe whole body rather than directly feeling the sensations of herchest. Knowing is a stream that sometimes cannot be directly ad dressed with words, emerging more as an insight, coming perhapsas a shift in perspective or a deep, almost ineffable sense of clarity.In Sandra's case, it wasn't until we began with the stream of sensa tion, first on her feet and ankles, and then on her breathing, thatshe was ready to focus on her heart.We have the ability to shift our awareness, to prevent the large-scale assemblies of incoming primary data from creating aware ness of sensation. Vertical integration is the intentional focus ofattention on bodily sensations. Does that sound too strategic to beincluded within the framework of mindfulness? My sense withintherapy is that to dissolve top-down enslavements, like Sandra'savoidance of awareness of her body, we need to be mindful of the

300brain's automatic push to not attend to some aspect of the rim.Here we see that "stay with that" helps our patients, and ourselves,move against those secondary forces that keep us from attuning toourselves. If we don't feel comfortable using the term mindfulnesswith strategic "snagging" like this, we might be better served byemphasizing reflection,with its tripartite omponents of receptiv ity, self-observation, and reflexivity.With reflection, Sandra was soon examining her autobiograph ical history and finding a slow emergence of aspects of her father'sdeath, and his life, that she had never known in this open, integra. tive way. At one point in the work she said that she was ready to"go back to my heart" nd we attempted the full body scan again.At this point she could move her awareness to her chest without apanic reaction, though she had an outburst of tears and sadness.Images of her father emerged, and she was able to talk about hergrief, and her longings for him. Her broken heart was what shehad feared, and now she was able to face it directly in our workwith her loss, together.Our secondary adaptations can lock us in unresolved states oftrauma or loss, feelings of anxiety, avoidance, and numbing. Withvertical integration we reflect on bodily sensations and stay withthem to enable their natural dynamic movement in the mind totake its course. This is the often astonishing aspect of this reflec tion: When we pause and stay within awareness of bodily sensation,the integration of a reflective mind seems to take care of itself.Jlorizonlaf.»ifeyralionA 50-year-old attorney came to me at th,e request of his wifewho thought he must have some form of" disorder of empathy."When Bill and Anne arrived together, she said that she was at theend of her rope. He responded that he didn't "know the ropes" shewas talking about. Only Bill laughed. It became clear that Bill re vealed insensitivity to Anne's feelings in their couples' sessions. But

301even more, Bill seemed to be unaware of even his own emotionallife. In many ways, Bill's awareness seemed quite limited to the worldof the physical and lacked an awareness of the subjective world ofthe mind that was the province of the right mode of awareness.Our two hemispheres cannot speak to one another easily. The"L's" of the left-linear, logical, linguistic, literal thinking-cannottake in or connect directly to the holistic, imagery-based, nonver bal, emotional/social processing of the right. If people are not ina state of hemisphere attunement, it's easy to feel bereft, as Annehad been feeling for years. Humor is wonderful, but only whenpeople can join, not feel excluded. What people don't realize isthat our attachment history can create modes of adaptation; dis cussed in Chapter 9, which can be seen to prevent bilateral inte gration and leave one hemisphere dominant over the other. In thiscase, each of them seemed to be leaning to one side, only theirlopsided styles did not match.The work with Anne and Bill required that they each examinetheir own history and, in particular, try to understand how theiradaptations had locked them into impaired horizontal integrationwithin their own minds. Bill's "growth edge;' the place for him tofocus his work in therapy, was to become more aware of the non verbal, whole-body, emotional textures of the elements of theright mode on his r im of awareness.Anne's challenge was to findwords to help describe and label her own internal world so thatshe could achieve more equanimity. This was clearly ; strategic."snagging" of each of their brains within the context of the pro motion of mindful awareness.'Anne and Bill each benefited from being taught basic reflectiveskills. My hope was that by developing the integrative middle pre.:frontal fibers, they would both find a way to expand their windowof tolerance for feelings and reactions that before were automati cally closed off. This was an expansion of the hub's capacity to bereceptive to whatever arose on the rim. I spent time focusing with

302Anne and Bill such that he became more aware of his imagery andsensory world, and she learned to distance herself enough to gaindiscernment over her reactions that in the past just swept her up.,.into their compelling 'intensity.As Anne and Bill achieved new levels of reflective awareness,they could stay presei.1t with each other to e able to say what theyreally experienced in that moment. The feeling of relief with thatinterpersonal attunement was palpable in the room. The naturalunfolding seemed to involve, at first, an internal attunement withmindful practice and the readiness to attempt to try, again, to con nect. Fortunately in this case, they were able to approach eachother with kindness because they could see the deep commitmenteach had to do the inner work and make the interpersonal repair.The example of Bill an Anne illustr tes that there are manywindows of opportunity through which to enter a system. Withthis initial work to help them relate to each other, we needed todive deeply into the nature of the adaptations that had formedtheir personal identities. This unraveling of emotion, memory,narrative themes, and restricted ways of bei.ng enabled each ofthem to see that they were survivors seeking connection. Luckilythey have found each other, now, in the authentic reception thatthey had longed for their whole lives.In Bill's history, a cold and distant pair of parents created anemotionally isolated childhood. With the adaptations to that fanlil ial culture in which the mind was absent, Bill learned to see thingsthrough the lens of the left mode of processing. For Bill, the ab sence of emotional communication in his family deprived his righthemisphere from interactive nutrients and moved his developmenttoward the left: logical and linear thinking bereft of a sense of hisown internal world. As Decety and Chaminade (2003) affirm:Our ability to represent one's own thoughts and represent another'sthoughts are intimately tied together and have similar originswithin the brain.Thus it makes sense that self-awareness, em-

303pathy, identification with others, and, more generally, intersubjec tive processes, are largely dependent upon the right hemisphereresources, which are the first to develop. (p. 591)The therapeutic goal for Bill was to have him integ:pte his dom inant left mode with hi relatively underdeveloped right mode ofbeing. Exercises. focusing\on the nonverbal world, opening the hubof his mind to the previously inaccessible senses of his body, hismind, and his relationships, opened the door to a new form of :free dom to experience his inner world, and to connect to Anne.,Horizontal integration includes the linkages of the two sides ofthe nervous system and connecting circuits at similar vertical levels of organization within the same hemisphere. In the bilateraldimension of this domain, for example, we link the logical, lin guistic, linear, and literal output of the left side with the visuospa tial imagery, nonverbal, holistic, emotional/visceral representationsof the right. What emerges with this horizontal form of integra tion is a new way of knowing, a bilateral consciousness. Horizon tal integration enables us to broaden our sense of ourselves, as of ten distinct layers of processing of perception and thought, feelingand action, are brought into alignment.Within the hub of the mi

G ap ier Yourfeen THE MINDFUL BRAIN IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: :P.romoHny Xeuraf leyralion As we discussed briefly in the Preface, interpersonal neurobiol ogy is a