Beauty in Our Interconnectedness

Most of you know from our recent episodes Kellee and I are doing an IPNB course led by Dr. Siegel this semester. I’ve cozied up many evenings lately with my computer and tea during his lectures, and befriended the dictionary much more than I anticipated possible through his gracious offering of wisdom. A few new words have stayed with me lately, one of them being this idea of conduition. Our Mind as a conduit is an essential component of our being (or as my daughter says, “my Who-ness” ;). Dr. Siegel states, “being a conduit is like being in an experience, enabling the subjective energy flow before it is transformed into the symbolic form we call information.” In one of his lectures he explains conduition to being “one-with.”

I am one-with the mountains when I am hiking, just as I am one-with the wind and the marmots and the expansiveness of the sky. For me personally – one-with-ness is most easily sensed in nature. I can experience and feel into my environment and allow input to flow in and through me in these outdoor spaces. Feel-into, and without-words-be-with. This is typically a hard task for us left-brainer therapists!

The implications of conduition in the therapy space is still an idea I’m grappling with. How can I sense into, prior to making symbolic sense (what Dr. Siegel calls the ‘constructor’ part of mental activities) of it as data, my client? Certainly building our own neural integration is the most helpful task for the therapist. And yet someone will ask, where are my CEUs for this? 🙂

Mary Oliver captures the felt sense of experiencing with beautifully below:

“Poem of the One World”

This morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this

the one world

we all belong to

where everything

sooner or later

is a part of everything else

which though made me feel

for a little while

quite beautiful myself.

As I sit with the concept of conduition and one-with-ness in my own life, my jaw softens and I suddenly aware of my belly relaxing. What happens inside of you when you consider this other texture of reality? This truth that seems to have a particular aliveness to it – our interconnectedness.

*Blog on Constructor and Conduition:

https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/personal-self-construction/