listening to one another activates our mirror neurons and resonance circuitry (Iacoboni, 2009) so that we can be said to literally begin to inhabit one another's embodied emotional universe.

Anything we determine to do in advance has already separated us from being in this emerging moment with ourselves as well as the other person.

As long as I was aligned with listening rather than with an intention to receive a particular response or to shift something, we would stay on safe ground.

We live within and beyond our own skin at the same time.

our nervous systems have a preference for the social engagement system that maintains connection

The room was very quiet with that familiar deepening that arrives when something is happening underneath, beyond the words.

Each time we offer a reflection, we are also quietly repairing/disconfirming attachment wounds that always contain elements of our parents or others not being able to see us because of their own injuries.

In various paradigms of practice, we have called these protectors "defenses" or "resistances", as though they were objects that needed to be moved out of the way. This is understandable, because we see that these parts of ourselves sometimes cause injury if we view them only from the outer perspective, without opening to the ways they are sheltering our inner world.

A client's seemingly irrational, out-of-control presenting symptom is actually a sensible, orderly, cogent expression of the person's existing [experience] of self and world, not a 'disorder' or 'pathology