I'm here with my good friend, Dr. Dan Siegel
who is sharing with us the incredible benefits
of his life-changing meditation practice.
Now first I wanna debunk this about meditation.
Yeah.
'Cause as soon as people hear that,
they think woo, religious, spiritual, all that.
That's not what you're talking about here.
No.
The meditation only means strengthening the mind.
It's a practice like if you go for a walk
and you strengthen your leg muscles
or you go to the gym and you work out your arms muscles.
Meditation's working out the muscle of the mind.
That's all it is.
And the wheel of awareness if actually a meditation practice
and the studies show it improves your immune system,
it allows you to actually reduce inflammation,
reduce stress, it improves the cardiovascular functioning,
and amazingly, this blew my mind,
it actually repairs the ends of your chromosomes.
And when I sent the book out to the person
who wrote a book with the Nobel Prize winning
Elizabeth Blackburn, in this area,
she said, Dan did it go to the printer yet?
I said, well not yet, why?
What did I leave out?
She goes, you need to say it slows the aging process.
We're talking about the wheel of awareness
and so here it is.
We have a wheel with a hub, which represents being aware,
and the rim, which represents
all the things you'll be aware of.
So here we have the first five senses on the first segment.
That would be sound, hearing, seeing,
smelling tasting, touching.
Right.
Then we move the spoke over in this practice.
Okay.
And then you're going to the next set
of focused attention training.
Now you're going inside the body
to the feeling for example your guts sensations.
Your respiratory system, your breathing.
Your heart.
And the studies are really clear.
When you learn to develop awareness of the body,
you get more intuition and amazingly, more wisdom.
So that's focused attention.
You then take a deep breath,
you move the spoke over one more time,
to the third segment of the rim.
And this is the segment that includes mental activities
like your emotions, your thoughts,
your memories, things like that.
And amazingly there you're developing what's called
open awareness, you're just open to what is.
And then you move the spoke one more time.
And this is where it's our relationships.
Like the relationship between you and me.
Or you and your family members.
Or you and people who you work with or your neighbors.
And developing this relational sense
expands the feeling of who you are.
So it gives you a wider sense of belonging and connection.
Alright, and so during a meditation session
you would do what?
You would work around this wheel?
You could, if you memorize this you could
just move the spoke yourself with your visual imagery,
or if you listen to it on my website
you can actually go and listen to the recording.
Either way it's the same thing.
What you're doing is distinguishing the hub of awareness
from the rim and then linking all these elements
of the rim to each other.
People are busy.
Yeah.
And they're gonna say that'd be great if I like had
a half a day to go do this.
But it doesn't take that.
We have a seven minute version you can do.
You might wanna try it out slowly and get used to doing it.
But even the image, Dr. Phil, of this.
We have a, people use this in kingergarten.
And I got a story of a boy named Billy,
where he's five and he had some trouble at another school,
beat up a kid, came to the new school,
and in this new school, the teacher teaches
all the kindergartner kids the drawing of the wheel.
And Billy comes to her the next day.
She writes me an email and she writes to me,
Billy says Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Smith,
you gotta give me a break.
I'm out on the yard, Joey took my blocks,
I'm about to punch him.
I'm lost on my rim, I gotta get back to my hub.
Yeah, and he's just five-years-old.
Five-years-old.
That's just as the idea.
So you can practice it everyday,
you do the seven minute practice.
But as you do, you actually distinguish this capacity
to have the freedom of the hub.
And that is a gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah, and that's, and this is something
everybody can do and you just,
you just need those few minutes to go sit down,
focus on yourself and do it.
And look, this is amazing.
I've read the book and I really recommend that you read it.
It's Aware, the Science and Practice of Presence.
So Dan, thank you for doing this.
And thank you joining us.
Dr. Phil, thank you.
(audience claps)
I wanna thank all of my guests today.
A special thanks to Dr. Dan Siegel
whose book is available now everywhere books are sold.
You can also go to DrDanSiegel.com to order a copy.
We'll see ya next time, thanks so much.