Active Pause

How does the Polyvagal Theory affect our understanding of mindfulness? Blake O'Connor, Education Director of the Polyvagal Institute, interviews Serge Prengel.

We talk about freeing meditation from pressures and welcoming every aspect of our inner experience.

Antonio Damasio described Nora Arikha as a poet and a painter with the soul of a scientist.

We discuss how we make sense of the world and our place in it, i.e. what is usually called spirituality & philosophy.

We explore a concept that is very important to Bruce Gibbs, finding the right distance from our experience.

The Relational Implicit podcast is now located on the Active Pause website. Our focus is on redefining mindfulness based on trauma-informed therapy and the Polyvagal theory.

This change reflects the experiential and intersubjective nature of what we do as therapists.

We are not providing impersonal “treatment” to people we are observing as detached observers. We are engaged in a deep process whose effectiveness is related to our ability to engage.

The moment-by-moment dance between empathy, connection, and self-awareness is a dance of mindful engagement.

Regardless of whether or not we practice mindfulness in traditional ways (e.g. meditation), mindfulness is a big part of what we do.

The practice of trauma-informed therapy and the Polyvagal Theory have been changing the way we think of mindfulness, in our work, and in our life.

It takes a pause to shift from a mindless, reactive mode to a more mindful mode. It takes safety for the pause to be an active process as opposed to a mere interruption (or, even, a frustration). We know this in the way we work with our clients, and in the way we track ourselves while we are in session.

I am inviting you to join in this exploration of how we can further deepen our emerging understanding and practice of mindfulness.

Published April 2022

This conversation with Ken Benau serves as an introduction to shame and pride-informed psychotherapy with adult survivors of relational trauma

We share with you what we like about the notion of "inquiry," and to do so by giving you a flavor of what we mean by it.

We start this conversation from the perspective that human beings are self-interpreting animals, and go on to explore what gives us a sense of meaning.

Jacqui Lewis & Serge Prengel talk about bringing a quality of fierce love to our life, as a person and as an agent of change.