The mind isn't just a physical thing in our head (aka our brain/nervous system); it's actually a dynamic process that exists within our body ("embodied") and between all beings and living things ("relational").

It organizes, guides & processes all the feelings, thoughts, and information/energy that moves through us and between us. A healthy mind is flexible and well-integrated, capable of maintaining coherence even in complexity and stress.

The mind is a "process" rather than a "thing," like your brain & nervous system. It's a dynamic, ongoing activity that organizes and regulates information, not a static object like your flesh & bones.

This discovery, championed by brilliant leaders, specifically Dan Siegel, emphasizes that the mind is constantly changing and adapting. It's not a noun but a verb—something we are always doing. Becoming. It's emergent.

For anyone who wants to rewire their nervous systems, help others do the same, and continue on the beautiful journey of integration, attunement and embodiment... grasping this is essential.

On our journey walking ourselves and each other home.

The Embodied Process

(your internal mind)

Siegel's presentation of the mind specifies an embodied process which is directly referring to your internal mind. This is the part of your mind that is physically located within your body, operating through your nervous system, brain, and other physiological processes.

Your internal mind regulates the flow of energy and information, as it does for us all.  It's about how we manage our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. For example, when you use a mindful breathing exercise to calm yourself down, that's the internal mind regulating itself.

The brain is a "thing." It's a physical organ made of neurons and blood vessels. However, the mind is the activity that arises from the brain's function, the process.

Think of it like a computer and its software. The computer is the hardware (the brain/body), but the software (the mind) is the active process of computing, storing information, and running programs. The mind is the "flow" of thoughts, emotions, memories, and consciousness, not the biological structure that produces them.

A key part of the mind's function as a process is regulation. It's constantly taking in sensory data, emotional signals, and social cues (energy and information) and trying to organize them to create a coherent experience of the world.

• Internal Regulation: This involves managing your own thoughts and emotions. A healthy mind can calmly process a stressful event without becoming overwhelmed, can modulate with others and attune without loosing individuation. A necessity for interdependence.

• External Regulation: This involves how we interact with others, and our responses (conscious & unconscious). Our mind helps us read social cues, feel others and discern needs and respond appropriately, allowing for smooth, reciprocal relationships where agreement is honored and our relating is beautiful & balanced, in it's clear giving and receiving.

When this process of regulation breaks down—due to attachment wounds, trauma, stress, chronic misattunement, or mental illness—the mind becomes dysregulated, leading to symptoms like anxiety, depression, addiction to power over others, or emotional & behavioral outbursts are just a few of the hallmark signals.

The mind isn't a fixed state; as a process it can be either healthy and flexible or rigid and chaotic. 

Think of it as a feedback loop.

It's the process by which we make sense of our experiences, both from within our bodies (our emotions and physical sensations) and from our interactions with others (our relationships).

Your ability to experience a coherent self is directly tied to how well your mind integrates these internal and external signals.

An elite mind is characterized by a flexible and adaptive integration of very complex different information flows, allowing for a balanced and resilient sense of self that can navigate the within & between nature of relating, and that is wired with the capacity for incredible care, compassion, love and intelligence.

That could look like staying individuated while you're growing deeply intimate and interdependent with someone (even as the bond intensifies) instead of loosing yourself in an adaptively programmed pattern of insecure attachment & misattunement, getting consumed by the other. People pleasing, attach cries, fawning, collapsing.

Optimally, the mind develops over childhood such that it functions well in its self-regulating role with the body. If attachment wounds, developmental wounds, PTSD or chronic misattunement, or other trauma occured (way over half of the population),

Then it's very likely self-regulatory capacity was damaged, identity fragmented and relational control strategies (to avoid abandonment, rejection, etc) began to show up as adaptive coping mechanisms to feel safe. Understandably. 

But if you're here, you're not a child anymore. And you know you're not destined to live with what you've got, because the nervous system can be recalibrated throughout our entire lifespan. We can earn secure relating (not so we get a prize, except the one that is your actual experience of relating being awesome, because you deserve to give and receive like that).

Everything you find around here is for the overwhelming majority of people who are not going to settle for the neurological wiring & patterns they developed during childhood. No insecure relating; we're continuing to grow out of the patterns that used to pervade our experience & behavior, and we're loving what attuned relating feels like, sounds like, looks like, and is. Even if it's becoming more and more natural day by day... it's a journey we're here for. Together.

• Attunement: Because of its deep connection to emotional regulation, empathy, and interpersonal integration, attunement is not just one function but a foundational capacity & skill that supports and enables many of the other functions of the mind (like those that follow)
• Emotional Regulation: The ability to manage, notice and harness the power in one's feelings without being overwhelmed by them and loose other mental capacities (like reason).

• Attention: The capacity to consciously direct focus. As Siegel says, "Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows."

• Insight: The capacity for self-awareness and self-understanding, allowing a person to connect past experiences with their present self, integrating for max wholeness & intelligence.

• Empathy: The ability to understand and feel with another person, recognizing their internal states and having cognitive & affective understanding.

• Response Flexibility: The capacity to pause between a stimulus and a response, allowing for a thoughtful, rather than reactive, choice.

• Awareness: The basic, subjective experience of knowing, serving as the hub of the "Wheel of Awareness" that can observe all other mental activities.

• Narrative Integration: The process of creating a coherent life story that links different experiences and identities over time without triggering stress responses internally.

• Fear Modulation: The mind's function to calm down the physiological fear response when there is no longer a threat. The mind functions in a state of ventral vagal dominance, a good amount of the time.

• Intuition: The ability to sense and trust the subtle signals from one's body, or "gut feelings."

• Interpersonal Integration: The capacity to build and maintain healthy, reciprocal relationships, allowing for a sense of belonging, connection and trust.

• Play as a Biological Imperative: Dr. Gabor Maté emphasizes that play is "built into our brains" and is crucial for both brain development and mental health. This developmental need starts in infancy with simple interactions like peek-a-boo and is a core component of a nurturing environment. Esther Perel echoes this, noting that play is connected to our creativity and problem-solving skills, and requires a sense of safety to access. The attuned mind, in a ventral vagal dominant state, is able to access play, alone and with others. The ability to play means feeling safe enough to lift ourselves into an imaginative space where we can explore different versions of ourselves, and still stay responsive and attuned to the other while doing this ourselves. The ability to sense whether you are giving or receiving, doing or being done to, is fundamentally dependent on harnessing the minds ability when attuned.  

Attunement (internally and externally) is the path to embodiment, creation, play, integration and resonant connection.

Attunement is a function of the mind, it is an embodied process that manifests internally, in our bodies, and externally in how we relate to the others, and are impacted by the world around us.

It is high on the list of functions of the mind because it's a foundational process for interpersonal integration with individuation/freedom.  It is the way we build secure attachments and help regulate each other's emotions without it becoming toxic. It is the process that shapes the development of our neural architecture for connection instead of protection, our ability to play, create and relate in a ventral vagal zone of goodness.

When a caregiver is attuned to an infant's state, feelings & needs, they are not only calming the child but also helping to build the neural pathways for the child's own emotional regulation and intelligence in adulthood. It is a process decades in the making, and even in adulthood neural wiring isn't set in stone. Change is possible, thanks to neural plasticity.   

In his work, Dan Siegel describes attunement as being composed of three parts:

• Embodied Resonance: Feeling a physical or emotional knowing of yours or another person's state.

• Shared Focus of Attention: Directing your attention to what you or the other person is focused on, both somatically and cognitively.

•  Responsive Actions: Adjusting your behavior and communication to match your own discerned feelings/needs, or the other person's.  

Because of its deep connection to emotional regulation, empathy, and interpersonal integration, attunement is not just one function but a foundational capacity & skill that supports and enables many of the other functions of the mind.

There are predictable and unwanted adult life consequences of developing with misattunement instead of - attunement, misattunement, repair/restoration of resonance, then deeper attunement.

The difference between "misattuned" and "unattuned" is subtle but important, and "misattuned" is often more accurate, especially in a psychological context.

Here's a breakdown to explain why:

•  Unattuned: This means "not attuned." It suggests a complete lack of awareness or responsiveness. Think of someone who is completely oblivious to what's going on around them emotionally. No registering what so ever. They are not in sync at all. For example, a teacher who is "unattuned to a child's needs" simply doesn't notice them. It's a state of being disconnected and will often be an extreme hypo-aroused reaction (dorsal vagal autonomic nervous system state).
•  Misattuned: This means "attuned wrongly or not good enough." It implies an attempt at attunement that goes awry. The person is registering something, and attempting to connect or respond, but their response is a mismatch, a distortion, or a misunderstanding of what is actually being felt and/or needed. It's an active failure, not just a passive lack of connection.

Why "misattuned" is more often what's happening:

In the context of relationships, especially parent-child or intimate relationships, "misattunement" is a key concept. It acknowledges that people are often consciously attempting to be attuned, but they get it wrong. For example, a parent might see their child is sad and try to cheer them up with a toy, when what the child really needs is a hug and to be heard and not forced to turn that frown upside down.

This is a misattunement.

The parent is trying to connect and attune, but their response doesn't meet the child's emotional need.

"Unattuned" would imply the parent didn't even notice the child was anything.

Misattunement is not only inevitable; it is a necessary and good catalyst for growth, healing, and resilience… the problem is when it’s chronic, and then, it’s also often compounding.

Think of misattunement not as a flaw in the system, but as a rupture—a powerful, disruptive event that, when handled with consciousness and care, provides the very stimulus for re-wiring our human system at a higher, more integrated & resilient level. Like muscles being torn and growing stronger as you work out (just not too much, she writes as she sits with a muscle pulled in my lower back).

Here's how misattunement becomes a necessary and good force:

Misattunement as a Signal: A moment of misattunement—a painful misunderstanding, a broken boundary, a moment of feeling profoundly unseen—is a clear signal that the system is out of tune. It creates a palpable dissonance that demands our attention.

(see image below for examples)

The Catalyst for Growth: This dissonance is not to be avoided.

As Kazimierz Dąbrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration so powerfully argues, psychological tension, anxiety, and inner conflict are not always signs of illness. For those with a high potential for growth (our G.I.F.T.S.), this dissonance is the necessary force that causes a "positive disintegration"—a breakdown of old, rigid structures (our "performative self") that allows for our real self to emerge and lead. Just like Dick Schwartz describes in the 8 C’s of Self Leadership. The discord itself becomes the fuel for consciousness and connection.

Rupture Creates Resilience: The idea that a child needs a "perfectly attuned" parent is a myth. As the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott described with his concept of the "good enough mother," moments of misattunement (ruptures) are not harmful in and of themselves. What matters is the repair. When a caregiver misattunes and then repairs that rupture (e.g., acknowledges the misstep, validates the child's pain, and restores connection), the child learns a vital lesson: that disconnection is tolerable and can be mended. So long as this isn’t happening the majority of the time, there’s a good chance secure attachment will be developed.

Re-patterning the Nervous System: This repeated experience of "rupture and repair" is the fundamental mechanism for building resilience and re-wiring the nervous system. It teaches the system that it can venture out, get hurt, and still return to safety. It builds the Window of Tolerance, allowing us to face future conflicts with courage and trust, rather than defaulting to chaos or rigidity.

The Differentiator for Discernment:

•  The Need for Contrast: How can we truly appreciate the profound, life-giving quality of attunement if we have never experienced its absence? Misattunement provides the contrast. It is the "shadow" that allows the "light" of attunement to be seen and valued for what it truly is.
•  Training the Attunement Radar: Experiencing misattunement is how we train our attunement radar to become truly effective. By learning to "feel the difference" between resonance and dissonance, we develop the Sensory Acuity to spot "brilliant misdirectors" and toxic relationships, and to make choices based on genuine alignment, not on fear or naivete.

The Path to “power with” relating (aka Attuned Relating)

•  Transcending Naivete: A naive view would be to strive for a world without misattunement. This is not only impossible, but it would leave us profoundly vulnerable and weak. The point is in the balance, and the quality of repair.
•  The Attuned Path: Acknowledging the necessity of misattunement allows us to approach it with skill. We stop seeing conflict as a sign of failure and start seeing it as an invitation for a higher level of relationship connection. We learn to engage in the hard, vulnerable work of dialogue and repair, which is the very essence of cultivating genuine "power with" and building a resilient, integrated life.

So as you can probably see and agree to, viewing misattunement as an evil to be avoided isn’t accurate or effective.

It is the necessary discord that, when met with timely and adequate attunement, pushes us out of comfortable but stifling stagnation, forcing us into a state of growth, resilience, profound healing, and deep life affirming connection.