Episodes

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning... READ MORE The post Season 3 Ep 11: Mission, Endurance and Post-Traumatic Growth – Interview with Two Wolf Foundation appeared first on StefanieFaye.

To update our algorithms and enhance our brain functioning, there is one key thing we can do: Intentionally add experiences into our weekly routine that engage our sensory-motor systems in ways that are completely unfamiliar to us. That is the essence of my interview with Jason Knight, director of Alderleaf Wilderness College. In this interview, we discuss: -Jason’s journey to becoming a wilderness expert and his desire to connect people more deeply with nature and the types of thinking that c...

What is moral injury, and how can we use it as a path to cognitive flexibility, sense of purpose and forgiveness? In this episode, we explore the following: - what is moral injury - what is morality and how it can be used to improve energy efficiency and resilience of the human species - how forgiveness and flexibility help us activate highly sophisticated and evolved neural mechanisms - that brain activations that are different in trauma compared with moral injury - how the human species ...

Attachment theory is not a 'theory'.. it's a part of our neurophysiological operating system Attachment is a way of seeking proximity to an attachment figure. It’s a biobehavioral adaptation that helps us regulate ourselves and explore new frontiers. This in... READ MORE The post Season 2 Episode 11 – The Neuroscience of Attachment and Emotion Regulation appeared first on StefanieFaye.

Have you ever had the experience of feeling like someone really ‘gets you’? This can take various forms - like being able to share what’s on our mind and the other person holding space for us to explain. It... READ MORE The post Season 2 Episode 10 – The Science of Feeling Understood appeared first on StefanieFaye.

Why do systems fall apart or become dysfunctional? A system can be a family, relationship, community, business, organization, society. The human mind-brain-body is also a system. One reason dysfunction can happen is related to hierarchy and ‘signal flow’. Hierarchies exist throughout nature and throughout human society. Hierarchies are best able to serve the system when there is efficient signal flow from subsystems to the higher levels and vice versa. We can see dysfunction happen when the...

In this podcast episode, I talk about something called ‘shifting the burden’. It’s about the topic of what we depend on ourselves for, and what we look to others to help us with. The balance of our dependence on ourselves and others - whether in adaptive maladaptive ways - is based on our first experiences with depending on someone. Many of us simply don’t know how deeply emotional of a subject this is. It is one of our most primitive, primal CORE-to-the-CORE experiences of being human… a battl...

Normal is based on historical data. It’s based on what has happened the most often in the past. Our past ‘normal’ can make it easy to not question if there is more that’s possible in terms of wellbeing and a deeper sense of meaning for our life. But what we really, truly, deeply need to understand is that the ‘normal mode’ of consuming and doing the same combination of movements day after day without challenging our brain-body to higher and higher levels of creation and exploration is not NATURA...

When we focus on trying to 'fix' dysregulation without acknowledging how it emerged, we are conveying a message that somehow the anxiety or overreaction just ‘appeared’ because of an imbalance in their brain and that distress, dysregulation and anxiety are... READ MORE The post Season 2 Episode 6 – Why are humans so anxious? and the dark side of mindfulness appeared first on StefanieFaye.

The formation of self-identity and group identity through the lens of hyper-coherent networks, key features of what makes a system resilient. (remember - your brain, your relationships and human society are all systems). To help systems become more flexible and innovative, we need to understand the mechanisms of change. A mindset or paradigm shift is one of those mechanisms. A level higher than that: being able to rise above paradigms altogether*. This is what can free our mind to experiment...

The human species has some pretty spectacular systems built into us to achieve mental, emotional and physiological states that most of us are not even really aware of. We also have systems and features within us that make us very vulnerable to being influenced and 'programmed' into behavior that is not reflective of our most evolved neural circuitry. Technology is interfering with and manipulating those systems. And the more we get to know how technology is interfering with those systems, the...

What do a viral video and a stampede of animals have in common? It's a mechanism that is also related to 'self-fulfilling prophecies', self-beliefs, anxiety and negative thinking in general. It has to do with something called 'positive feedback'.... READ MORE The post Season 2 Episode 3 – Feedback Loops appeared first on StefanieFaye.

One of the most complex adaptive systems we know of is the brain*. When we are trying to understand a complex system, one of the most important things for us to think about is its function. ... READ MORE The post Season 2 Episode 2- Your Brain’s Predictions and Paradigms appeared first on StefanieFaye.

This episode focuses on the idea of systems thinking, and how we can use this 'lens' or paradigm as a way of expanding our thinking so we can see new ideas for solving challenges in our life and in... READ MORE The post Season 2 Episode 1 – Systems Thinking appeared first on StefanieFaye.