What Is Attunement?

Tara: You might change your goals if you're attuning. Right?

Janine: Right. 

Tara: But listening, it's like listening to the undercurrent.

Janine: Right? That can feel scary. 

Tara: Terrifying. 

Janine: That speaks back to, oh gosh, if I start to attune to what is really, really true underneath for me. 

Tara: Yeah. 

Janine: Oh, what does that mean? 

Tara: I mean, the threat is your whole life might change, and the promise.

Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Tara Howley, and today I am here with Janine Parziale, one of our lead facilitators, and I'm so excited to have her on the episode and introduce you all to her. Hi, Janine, welcome. 

Janine: Hi, Tara. Very excited.

So I wanna start out with just the most basic question, which is, what the heck is attunement? 

Tara: What is attunement? That's a great question. I see attunement as a mixture of deep active listening, connection to self. So if I'm attuning to someone else, I'm not leaving myself. I'm actually deeply connected to myself, listening to myself and like tuned in like a radio station to me and tuned in like a radio station to the person.

So it's this very deep back and forth movement where I'm not abandoning myself. I'm right here with someone else in a deep listening on multiple levels. So like just active listening, I might just hear the words, but if I'm attuned listening, I'm hearing what's under the words. I'm hearing that there might be grief under what a person is saying, or sadness or anger.

Tuning into the the emotional qualities of a person, the physical qualities, how someone's using their hand, the intellectual quality, sharp mind or open mind, and tuning into the wholeness of a person from my wholeness. 

Janine: Wow. That was a lot of different layers. It felt like I just dove down a well. It's clear you've been soaking in this for a long time, yourself. There were a couple of pieces of that I wanna highlight. One part is when you said abandon yourself, you don't want to abandon yourself in it. What does that mean? 

Tara: Well, if I'm just listening to you and hanging onto every word you say, there's a way I can leave myself to catch your words. Maybe I'm afraid I'm gonna miss what you said or the importance, but if I'm not abandoning myself, if I'm staying with myself, I might be hanging out in my body with my mind, with my heart, with my gut. So I'm in here listening to what you said. 

Janine: Occupy, inhabiting. 

Tara: Inhabiting my body, my core, my heart, my head, my gut, my wholeness, my whole body. 

Janine: I feel warm when you say that, like coming home to myself in it. 

Tara: Yes. Yeah. Very much at home in myself. 

Janine: Yeah. So what are the signals then? What are the signals that I am attuning, that I'm attuning to myself for instance? 

Tara: For me, one signal, and when I see other people, if they're leaning really forward, they've often left a part of themselves. Likewise, if someone's really leaning back, you see this in some, like when people are listening to lectures a little skeptically and they're leaning way back, kind of squinting, it's like, oh, they're trying to get safety or distance themselves from something, and in doing so, they've left themselves or abandoned a part of themselves. 

Janine: A kind of disconnection? 

Tara: A kind of disconnection. 

Janine: Mm-hmm. 

Tara: Mm-hmm. So attunement is a deep two way connection. 

Janine: So what's the value of that? I think I want that, maybe I want that.

Tara: Well, first stage value would be, this is something that parents do with infants. And so attunement is learned really young and in therapy language, this is where we first hear it as attunement. So a mom knows when a baby cries, oh, they need something. She might not know what, but it's like change diaper, teething, hunger, sleep. So attunement is also needs-based. So the earliest is in listening to something that maybe can't tell you with direct language what it needs. That would be first level of operations. Second, as we get older, I can attune to a friend and a friend might be telling me like, I'm really busy right now, I can't talk, and I can take that at face value. Okay, goodbye. Or I can hear, oh, there's stress under their words. And I can say, okay, I totally get it. You take care of you and just know I love you. Like I can attune, there's something else going on. I'm not gonna pry. 'cause they have made it clear they don't want it and they have a boundary. But I'm gonna attune to the other thing going on.

Likewise in relationships, a partner might get really gruff with us or might be suddenly cold and distant, and we could take it personally, but if we attune to them, if we're listening to them from the head, the heart, and the gut, from our own bodies to theirs, we can get a sense of like, oh, they had a hard day at work.

There's something cooking over there. I don't know what, but something else is going on and I can just stay available and supportive to that or go get grounded myself. And in work, if something's happening in a team, you can just yell at a team, hit your goals or you can attune to a team and actually, okay, what makes it that we didn't hit goals this month? What's going on to actually solve and figure out what the real issue is? 

Janine: So I hear attunement as this whole other layer. There's the layer that's the content layer or the information layer, and attunement is listening, taking that in, absorbing that and also being there with this underneath layer, like you've called it, the secondary process, I think before, right?

Tara: Yeah. Right. The words, the logistics would be the first process, and then there's what's going on underneath emotionally, physically, energetically. Maybe it's subconsciously that a team doesn't even know is happening. Oh, we have to change our sales cycle, and the team, you know, knows something isn't working, but they haven't been able to name exactly that.

Janine: I'm realizing it has something to do with the way I feel about intuition. Like, oh, attunement and intuition feel very linked all the sudden.

Tara: Very linked. I would say intuition is a byproduct of attunement to self. 

Janine: And then what's the attunement with another look like?

Tara: So I'd say that's where attunement starts is being here, being in with ourselves, with our heart, our gut, our head, our body and from here listening, tuning in to the person we're with. So I can tune into you physically. Like, oh, Janine just nodded her head and she's laughing and smiling. Oh, there's like a delight of oh I'm being tuned into, like delight. 

Janine: For sure. 

Tara: I can just notice all of those physical things that I see and then I can tune into the emotional life under the movement. 

Janine: Oh, it feels so good to be attuned to and scary. What is up with that? 

Tara: Yeah. I think it's 'cause we are being deeply seen when we're attuned to, 

Janine: Yeah. 

Tara: Beyond the level of ego, beyond this idea of who we think we are. 

Janine: Hmm. 

Tara: It's one of the byproducts of attunement is that we get to meet someone in a totally different way.

Janine: It definitely invites me into a feeling of my own, i'm gonna use the word truth here. 

Tara: Yeah. 

Janine: Like what's really authentic when you're tuning to me, it invites me also to really look oh, to be with me. Oh gosh. 

Tara: Oh my gosh. I'm delightful. 

Janine: Yeah. I'm delightful. And I'm being seen oh dear. Yeah. Uhhuh. 

Tara: Yeah. So it is hot. I mean, hot, like woo. Like being seen is an incredibly vulnerable act to be attuned to. 

Janine: It feels like when you say this, it's coming from a place of attuning to another from the heart. 

Tara: Mm-hmm. From the heart. But I can attune from the gut too, and I can sense, I'm like, oh, the fears and the life story and the needs. The deepest level of attunement, I think is tracking needs to needs. 

Janine: You can attune to my gut, from your gut. 

Tara: From my gut. 

Janine: My needs, from your needs. 

Tara: Yeah.

Janine: That's how that works. 

Tara: Well said. Yes. 

Janine: In that sense, it feels like an invitation, like I'm getting invited to connect that way to be with that. And there's a dance to it.

Tara: Totally. It is not a one way, it's a back and forth and it's fluid, it's movement. It's shifting every second. 

Janine: And you've had experiences of how this has shifted, I don't know, relationships or impacts in companies. I'm curious to hear a couple of those stories. 

Tara: Mm-hmm. The one that comes to mind first is my dog 'cause this just happened. 

Janine: Yes. 

Tara: I've been hiking a lot. And I was taking a hike with him, it had just rained. We were in deep mud and we were going down a steep trail. It wasn't even a trail at that moment. It was just a mud patch. And he got excited and he started running and I yelled, stop. And he stopped, but then he started freaking out and he started jumping on me and muddy paws all over me and my hiking kit and I was getting annoyed. And I was like, oh, come on. No, no, no. And I wasn't using any of my normal language with him. And I had yelled at him, which this is a dog who has had lots of cuddles and very little yells in his life. And at some point I was like, why is he misbehaving in this mud field? I was like, oh, I yelled at him. He's scared. We lost. Our connection. And I bent down towards him in the mud and I was like, oh, I'm sorry buddy. Like I yelled, I was really scared I was gonna get pulled into the mud and fall over. And we have another two miles to get out and I'm so sorry. And we're okay and we're safe and I'm right here with you now.

And almost instantly, his behavior changed, his nervous system regulated. We got up and we hiked down the muddy field. No pulls my normal, wonderful, wildly obedient dog. So attuning to him, regulated his nervous system and my nervous system. So it's a two way street. With kids I had an experience where our daughter had surgery the other day and I was in a business meeting. I answered the phone and I could hear her go, mom. I was like, uh oh, something's going on here. And I stepped into the bathroom 'cause I was attuning to her below what was going on emotionally. And I got into the bathroom and she was like, oh, it was really hard. The doctor wasn't attuned to me and it hurt and the novocaine didn't work and I just sat and listened to her. I was like, oh, that fucking sucks. A part of attunement can be reflecting what you hear or see, and she let me know when she was done. She's like, okay, I'm okay now, mom. Gotta go. So attuning can be a way to regulate either person's nervous system. 

Janine: I heard that regulate and also not need to fix it.

Tara: No. Yeah. I mean, especially as a parent, when a kid is 2000 miles away, it's impossible to fix it. Yeah and knowing that she can take care of herself, I think she just needs to be attuned to, for literally, I was in the bathroom for maybe three minutes. 

Janine: Wow. Oh gosh. That's the kind of thing I could imagine, especially being a kid that was at times needy for attunement or attention, would've just kept looking for it, kept talking and talking and wanting it. And I could to see, oh, if I got actual attunement, maybe just three minutes would've been perfect. 

Tara: And the irony, so parents don't get excited that you'll give 'em three minutes and I'll be done. When you first start attuning to kids, it's like they have a hungry well, that has been waiting to be filled.

So I didn't start doing this with Esme till she was three, and it was like she was a sponge. So there was a lot that happened at first, and now she's like, oh three minutes done got what I needed. Thanks mom. 

Janine: Hmm. So it can work in any level of relationship. These are really personal relationships, but business too?

Tara: Absolutely. So working in a company recently I watched an engineering team and a design team, they're tackling the same problem from two different perspectives, but they were in constant fighting 'cause they weren't attuned to each other. They weren't listening to what the real problems each team was having, so they could not come to a solution that solved everybody's needs, and just sitting like, okay, can you hear what they're actually saying the design criteria needs to have? When the engineering team could hear what the design team needed and the design team could attune to themselves, figure out, oh, this is what we're trying to say. It needs to be user friendly and aesthetically look like this. When they could figure that out and then attune to the engineering team, they could come up with a solution. But when they were not attuning, when they were not listening actively and connecting with the frustration that was under the words, they couldn't come up with a solution. 

Janine: Very cool. If you told Janine in her twenties that she would be interested in something like attunement, I think I would've just said that sounds too soft of an idea. That doesn't sound like anything concrete. 

Tara: Yeah. 

Janine: And what I cannot deny is the huge impact it has had on all of my relationships. It is seeped into kind of every corner, and I include in that my relationship with myself. 

Tara: How has it changed a relationship? 

Janine: I feel more grounded in who I am, and that means I show up more confidently. I don't doubt what I have to say. Right now, I'm not predetermining something. It's just here. It's just with us, right? So it's brought more fun to my life, more aliveness to my life and more confidence, that kind of sense of my own truth, like I get to be more me and that's really precious. I think I used to attune as a child from a place of leaving myself, right? Like going out to, to make myself safe, to make it okay. And what we are talking about here has something more to do with something that feels very nourishing at its root.

Tara: Yes, it does feel deeply nourishing. 

Janine: Yeah. 

Tara: And I'll say a personal byproduct I've experienced is there's actually less noise in my head.

Janine: Yeah. 

Tara: It's like a counterintuitive thing, but it's like, oh, I used to like circle in my head, oh, what if I did this? Oh, I did this. I shouldn't have done that. Oh. And it was just constant chatter going on. And the more I was actually being with myself, the quieter that got. I was able to listen to quieter whisper wants, and those intuition I could hear like, oh, gut, like something isn't working here. And when there was all the noise in my head, I couldn't hear the, oh, this doesn't work for me. I don't know why. I don't know what it is, but I'm gonna stay with this sense until I understand it. 

Janine: Hmm. 

Tara: Or I feel pulled towards this person, or this thing, or doing this, and I don't know why. It's counterintuitive. It doesn't make any logical sense, but I'm gonna stay tuning into this until I get more information. 

Janine: It reminds me of the question, so how would attunement help me achieve my goals? Right? 

Tara: Well, exact exactly that way you might change your goals if you are attuning. Right? 

Janine: Right. 

Tara: But listening, it's like listening to the undercurrent like, oh, I said that I wanted to have 40 coaching clients by the end of 2026, and if I'm attuning to myself, might be Oh I actually don't want 40 coaching clients. I want 20 deeply fulfilling coaching clients that I feel really connected to, or it might be for me, as I was attuning to myself, I had a full roster of coaching clients and I started hearing, I wanna teach and hold groups, and the more I listened to it, the more it became like a gong, gong, gong.

And I had to change my career goals, and then I could pursue them through listening. Okay, what's the first step I wanna make? What's the next step I wanna make? 

Janine: Right? That can feel scary. 

Tara: Terrifying.

Janine: That speaks back to, oh gosh, if I start to attune to what is really, really true underneath for me.

Tara: Yeah. 

Janine: Oh, what does that mean? 

Tara: I mean, the threat is your whole life might change and the promise.

Janine: Still scared, Tara. Still scared. 

Tara: Yeah. Yeah. Terrifying. 

Janine: Yeah. There's also an attunement that can happen even if I'm moving fast. When we facilitate together, we have to move quick and there's something great about getting to attune even when we're fast. I don't even know how it fully works. What happens when you're attuning and moving fast?

Tara: Great question. If I'm deeply attuned to my body, I can move faster. If I'm not attuned to my body and I'm moving fast, I will literally stub a toe or trip or break something or drop an important facilitation ball or something. But if I'm attuned to myself, then I'm not gonna go any faster than my system can actually go.

And so I'm gonna not drop as many balls. I'm not gonna break something. I'm not gonna stub my toe. For me, there's a factor of delight in attunement. It's like, oh, is this tempo delightful? And this worked, I noticed hiking, you know, I'd been doing all of this hiking recently and there were times when we really had to book to get back by sunset, and it was like, I could feel the pace where, oh, from tuning into my body and the earth and the slipperiness of the rocks, this is the pace I'm safe at. I could tell from attunement just where that edge was and if I'd go a little over like, nope. I'm afraid I'm gonna twist an ankle at that pace. Right here, this is my pace. 

Janine: It's a real acceptance in that the zone of tolerance comes up for me, flow comes up for me. Like these are all sort of, 

Tara: In the same area. 

Janine: Yeah, in the same boat.

Tara: Connection, 

Janine: same basket 

Tara: listening, active listening, presence, flow.

So I've had personal experiences of being attuned to can actually entirely shift the tenor of a fight or an argument. And I've had this experience where Joe and I were fighting over something. I was doing a piece of theater. This is in our late twenties, early thirties, and I hadn't done theater for a couple years. Like we'd moved to LA, my life had been very dry. I'd been struggling, struggling. And I got my first gig and it was just a one day reading. And he couldn't make it. He didn't make it. And I came home livid. Like, what? You don't care about me. You don't care about my work. You don't like theater? This is the thing I love more than anything in the world.

And he was just like, oh, your whole self is welcome here. Your anger's totally welcome. Then I think I let him have it for a minute. This is before we really learned great skills. So I like took my anger out on him and he is like, yeah, what else do you wanna tell me? And he just stayed attuned to me like he could feel the hurt and the fear underneath it and it totally changed our fight in that moment. And that's happened numerous times throughout our lives together. 

Janine: Oh. The thing I had to come up immediately was, so how do you remind yourself to attune? Because gosh, if my partner started to just come at me all of a sudden, I think I would also just be like, all right, we're in it. Let's go. 

Tara: Oh yeah. Right. How do you stay attuned in the face of anger? Well, I think baby steps, practicing attunement first, like what is it to drive staying attuned to yourself and the surroundings as you drive. What's it like to scroll on the computer attuned? You might find you might not scroll so much.

So I'd say the first thing is just practicing and really developing that muscle and you can practice it anytime. Where are my feet? Where are my hands? Car just stopped at a stop sign. There's my breath. Right baby steps. Building up to like, oh, how to remember when a partner's angry at you. My guess is you're gonna forget the first 20 times, and that's totally okay.

And being compassionate. And I like to have visual cues, so it's like, oh, if it's gonna happen in the kitchen, have a little sticky note on the fridge or in your computer if your boss is gonna get angry about something, and then you start practicing like, oh, right here we are, we're having this loaded conversation.

Uh, can I attune to myself and then come to my partner? There's simple hacks too, like what do I need right now? Can be a intellectual way into attunement. If I'm too dysregulated, what do I need? I needed a breath. I need a sip of water. I need a minute to regulate. What do they need right now? Once I'm regulated, what do they, oh, they need, I don't know what they need. I could just ask, what do you need back to, what do I need? 

Janine: Oh, that's so simple. I love the two questions. What do I need? I like the, I need first. 

Tara: Yep. 

Janine: Going to that little relief. It keeps coming up in both of us. Yeah. That's really nice. It feels really good. 

Tara: Then like parasympathetic nervous system calms down.

Janine: Uh, yeah. 

Tara: And then instantly I'm here. 

Janine: I'm so curious though. So what makes it that we don't attune more if it feels so good? 

Tara: Yeah, that's a great question. I think most of us, I can speak for myself, I was not raised with parents who knew how to attune, and that's no fault of theirs. Their parents didn't attune, you know, the generations of people who didn't know how to attune. So getting attuned to I think is a really rare quality. 

Janine: Mm. It's rare in that we didn't have it. The invitation is we get to try it on. 

Tara: Yeah. Yeah. Like if you didn't grow up speaking Russian, how would you know to speak Russian? Right? If you didn't grow up speaking attunement, how would you know to attune 

Janine: So simple.

Tara: I mean, it is really simple. It's not no fault, nobody's fault. 

Janine: You know, inhabiting my own upbringing is one where I think I was a very sensitive kid, and I mean sensitive in certain ways of like, I didn't feel comfortable in my own body, like, you know, like you get awkward and so actually coming back home or inhabiting the body is, it's almost like going back to something that feels quite uncomfortable.

Tara: Yeah. 

Janine: And then finding my way home slowly in that. 

Tara: That's an important point because I think sometimes when we first start attuning to our hearts, grief might come up. I actually learned this from, I had a teacher who was like, I spent all this time meditating, listening to my heart. I was like, that sounds cool.

So I'd come and listen to my heart and tears would spring every single time, like I consider it housekeeping. I would just sit and cry every time I at tune to my heart, like all sorts of gunky emotions came up. So I think sometimes we avoid the body 'cause it's housing grief that we haven't finished processing.

Janine: A question I imagine a lot of folks would ask is, well, but how do we get other people to attune to me the way we want? Like my partner, my boss, whoever I want more attunement. How do I get that to happen? God dammit. 

Tara: Attune to me. 

Janine: Exactly. 

Tara: It's not working. Why aren't they? That's like what not to do. Do not demand attunement. It's probably not gonna work. Go ahead, try. I always think that if there's something we want from our partners or our kids, our community, our friends, if we do it and practice it first is the fastest way to get it. We can't ask for something that we're not ready to offer, or it would be sort of kind of weird to say like, attune to me.

I'm not gonna attune to you, but attune to me. But if I practice attuning to my partner or I practice attuning to my friend group or my parents or my company, often without even knowing what they're doing people will start attuning back. It's like a tuning fork or you know, if you've tuned an instrument they resonate, right? Or someone says like that looks delicious. What's that? They won't even ask. But the act of attuning increases more attunement. It resonates with people. 

Janine: Hmm. But I don't wanna do it first, Tara. They owe me. I'm resentful. 

Tara: Yeah, yeah. Great. Attune to that resentment. Whoa. Yeah, baby. And that is the thing I hear with my clients most of the time is like, I don't wanna do it first. Well, what would happen if you did it first? What part of your story would you have to let drop away to do it first? 

Janine: Yeah. It's confronting, humbling. And there's something vulnerable in that act, right? 

Tara: Often I think, I don't wanna do it first, is a very young part of us that needed to get attuned to that is still sort of needing it to come from something bigger than us that hasn't healed. So it's like, oh, if they give it to me, then I'm gonna get that thing I needed when I was little. I'm gonna get that need met, which actually isn't gonna get it met. 

Janine: So my last question is on the identity level, what has to fall away in order to attune? 

Tara: I think in attunement, our idea of who we are falls away. Oh, I'm a woman. I'm 54, sitting in a chair in Santa Rosa, but in deep attunement, I'm tuning into the parts of me that are under that identity, under my ego identity, even tuning into things that might not have a name that makes sense. And I'm doing that with someone else tuning in below ego identity. And so it's like the story of who I am falls away a little bit, a story of who someone else is falls away so that I can meet more of me, more of them.

I can meet something more ephemeral, universal, interconnected. 

Janine: Humane. Yeah. 

Tara: Yeah. Jump in. Should we do an exercise? 

Janine: Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. 

Tara: So we'll go to like a simple, simple exercise and I would encourage everyone to put two hands together. Palm of hand on palm of hand, and bring your attention to your hands.

And just notice mine are a little sweaty and damp which, if I'm attuning to myself, I could go, oh, I might be a little nervous doing this. And then just notice what's the texture of your two hands meeting? What's the temperature? How do they feel? Maybe how do they feel in their fingers and how do they feel around your palms?

Letting all your awareness come down to your hands and seeing what you sense.

That would be a very simple act of attunement, somatic attunement, hand to hand. You could take another step and bring your attention to your breath and just close your eyes for a minute and notice your breath. You might even notice your thought. You might have had the thought of like, oh man, are we going to our breath again? Jesus, right? Great. That's attuning to a thought. And then come and bring your attention to your breath and just notice like, oh, your chest expands perhaps when you breathe, perhaps your belly expands.

See, if you notice how the air comes through your nostrils or your mouth, what's its temperature?

Attune to our breath can be the simplest way to start to come to our internal world, our inner body.

And from here go like 3.0 it. Bring your attention to your heart, and that could be your whole kind of chest area, lungs, upper torso, and you can notice your breath moving through that heart area.

Maybe you notice your chest expanding and contracting.

And maybe you notice something else going on around your heart, maybe you notice some tension or muscular tension or heartache or your own heartbeat. You can even put your hand right on your heart center, chest area. And let your hand attune to the movement of your chest, feeling your chest move and let your heart attune to the warmth of your hand.

Can it feel the warmth of your palm? How much can it feel it?

And sometimes when we come and attune to our hearts, some people will have emotions arise and little tears will spring to the eyes. I like to think of it as house cleaning or any emotion. The heart center is the center of emotions and our love. So again, in attuning, you're just listening and being with whatever comes up.

Not trying to change it, just noting and being with it.

This would be a very simple act of attuning to the heart and you can do that with all parts. You could attune to a hand, to your feet, to your gut. 

Janine: Oh, Tara, it was so yummy. I felt like downregulated and calm. Thank you so, so much. I'm glad we got to do this. 

Tara: Me too. A total joy. Janine, thank you.

I hope you had as much fun as I did talking with Janine. Thank you so much for listening to us. If you enjoyed it, please share it. And you can find us on X @artofaccomp or at artofaccomplishment.com, and I hope you have a lot of fun playing with attunement.