Summary
Tara Howley interviews lead facilitator Janine Parziali about the concept of attunement — a deep, two-way form of listening that goes beyond hearing words to sensing the emotional, physical, and energetic layers underneath. Janine describes attunement as staying deeply connected to yourself while simultaneously tuning into another person, like a radio station picking up multiple frequencies at once.
The conversation explores how attunement works in practice across relationships — from regulating a scared dog on a muddy trail, to calming a daughter after surgery in three minutes, to resolving engineering-design team conflicts in business. They discuss how attunement differs from leaving yourself to catch someone’s words, how it builds intuition as a byproduct, and how practicing it reduces mental chatter and reveals quieter wants.
A key thread is that most people weren’t raised with attuned parents, so attunement must be learned as a new skill. Janine emphasizes that demanding attunement from others doesn’t work — practicing it yourself creates resonance that naturally invites others to attune back. The episode closes with a guided somatic exercise of attuning to hands, breath, and heart.
Key Concepts
- Attunement is listening without leaving yourself
- Attunement regulates both nervous systems
- Attunement to self produces intuition
- You cannot demand attunement from others
- Attunement must be learned if it wasn’t modeled
- Attuning to your heart surfaces unprocessed grief
- Attunement reduces mental chatter and reveals quiet wants
Key Quotes
“If I’m attuning to someone else, I’m not leaving myself. I’m actually deeply connected to myself, listening to myself and tuned in like a radio station to me and tuned in like a radio station to the person.”
“Attunement is also needs-based. The earliest is in listening to something that maybe can’t tell you with direct language what it needs.”
“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.”
“If there’s something we want from our partners or our kids, our community, our friends, if we do it and practice it first, that is the fastest way to get it.”
“I used to attune as a child from a place of leaving myself, going out to make myself safe. And what we are talking about here has something more to do with something that feels very nourishing at its root.”
“The more I was actually being with myself, the quieter that got. I was able to listen to quieter whisper wants and intuition.”
Transcript
You might change your goals if you’re attaining, right? But listening, it’s like listening to the undercurrent. That can feel scary, terrifying, right? That that speaks back to, oh gosh, if I start to attune to what is really really true underneath for me. Yeah. Oh, what does that mean? You’re I mean, the threat is your whole life might change. 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’m here with Janine Parziali, 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. Hi Dara, very excited. So I want to start out with just the most basic question which is what the heck is attunement? What is attunement? That’s a great question. I see attunement as a mixture of deep active listening connection 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 emotional qualities of a person, the physical qualities, how someone’s using their hand, the intellectual quality, sharp mind or open mind. In tuning into the wholeness of a person from my wholeness. 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 are a couple of pieces of that I want to highlight. One part is when you said abandon yourself. You don’t want to abandon yourself in it. What does that mean? Well, if I’m just listening to you and hanging on to every word you say, there’s a way I can leave myself to catch your words, maybe I’m afraid I’m going to 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 say, inhabiting my body, my core, my heart, my head, my gut, my wholeness, my whole body. I feel warm when you say that like coming home to myself in it. Yes. Yeah. Very much at home in myself. Yeah. So what are the signals then? What are the signals that I am attuning that I’m attuning to myself? For instance, 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. A kind of disconnection. A kind of disconnection. So attunement is a deep two-way connection. And so what’s the value of that? I think I want that. Maybe I want that. Well, first stage value would be this is something that parents do with infants. And so attunement is learned really young. And in the 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 kind of first level of operations. Second, as we get older, attuning 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 going to pry because they have made it clear they don’t want it. They have a boundary, but I’m going to attune to the other thing going on. In 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 or something else is going on. And I can just stay available and supportive to that or go get grounded myself. And in work, we can do it. If a team is 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? You can attune to the team and to actually solve and figure out what the real issue is. 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. The words, the logistics would be the first process. And then there’s what’s going on underneath emotionally, physically, energetically, what maybe it’s subconsciously that a team doesn’t even know is happening. Oh, we have to change our sales cycle. And the team knows something isn’t working, but they haven’t been able to name exactly that. I’m realizing it has something to do with the way I feel about intuition. Like, oh, attunement and intuition feel very linked. Very linked. I would say intuition is a byproduct of attunement to self. So there’s attunement to self. What’s the attunement with another look like? Yeah. 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 in to you physically like, oh, Janine just nodded her head and she’s laughing and smiling. And I can just notice all of those physical things that I see. And then I can tune into the emotional life under the movement. Feels so good to be attuned to and scary. What is up with that? Yeah. I think it’s because we are being deeply seen when we’re attuned to. Beyond the level of ego, beyond this idea of who we think we are. It’s one of the byproducts of attunement is that we get to meet someone in a totally different way. It definitely invites me into a feeling of my own truth. 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. I’m delightful. Yeah. I’m delightful and I’m being seen. So it is hot. Being seen is incredibly vulnerable. It’s an incredibly vulnerable act to be attuned to. And it feels like when you say this, it’s coming from a place of attuning to another from the heart. But I can attune from the gut, too. And I can sense the fears and the life story and the needs. The deepest level of attunement, I think, is tracking needs to needs. You can attune to my gut from your gut. My needs from your needs. 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. It is not a one-way. It’s a back and forth and it’s fluid. It’s movement. It’s shifting every second. And you’ve had experiences of how this has shifted relationships or impacts in companies. The one that comes to mind first is my dog because this just happened. 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 at some point I was like, why is he misbehaving in this mudfield? 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 going to 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 like my normal wonderful obedient dog. So attuning to him regulated his nervous system and my nervous system. 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, but 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 because I was attuning to her below what was going on emotionally. And I got into the bathroom and she was like, “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 and I was like, “Oh, that sucks.” Part of attunement can be reflecting what you hear or see and just reflected to her what I was hearing and compassionately reflecting and then she let me know when she was done. She’s like, “Okay, I’m okay now. Mom’s got to go.” Attuning can be a way to regulate either person’s nervous system. I heard that regulate and also not need to fix it. No. Especially as a parent when a kid is 2,000 miles away, it’s impossible to fix it. 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. That’s the kind of thing I could imagine, especially being a kid that was at times needy for attunement or attention would have just kept looking for it, kept talking and talking and wanting it. I could see, oh, if I got actually attunement, maybe just three minutes would have been perfect. And the irony, so parents, don’t get excited that you’ll give them three minutes and it’ll be done. If 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, “Yep, three minutes done. Got what I needed. Thanks, Mom.” So, it can work in any level of relationship. These are really personal relationships but business too. Absolutely. 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 because 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 and like, “Okay, can you hear what they’re actually saying the design criteria needs to have?” And they could. When the engineering team could hear what the design team needed and the design team could attune to themselves, figure out what this is, they could come up with a solution. But when they were not attuning, when they were not listening actively and connecting with what was going on under the frustration that was under the words, they couldn’t come up with a solution. Very cool. If you told Janine in her 20s that she would be interested in something like attunement, I think I would have just said that sounds too soft of an idea. That doesn’t sound like anything concrete. Yeah. And what I cannot deny is the huge impact it has had on all of my relationships. It has seeped into kind of every corner of both and I include in that my relationship with myself. How has it changed a relationship? 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. And that’s really fun. 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, going out 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. It does feel deeply nourishing. And I’ll say a personal byproduct I’ve experienced is there’s actually less noise in my head. It’s like a counterintuitive thing, but it’s like, oh, I used to circle in my head. Oh, what if I did this? Oh, I did this. I shouldn’t have done that. 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 intuition. I could hear like, oh, gut, 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.” Until I understand it 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 going to stay tuning into this until I get more information. It reminds me of the question of like, well, so how would attunement help me achieve my goals? Yeah. Exactly that way. You might change your goals if you’re attuning, right? But listening, it’s like listening to the undercurrent. Like, 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 want to 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 want to make? What’s the next step I want to make? That can feel scary. Terrifying, right? Still scared, Tara. Still scared. Yeah. Terrifying. You’re right on track. 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. What happens when you’re attuning and moving fast? 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 ball. But if I’m attuned to myself, then I’m not going to go any faster than my system can actually go. And so I’m going to not drop as many balls. I’m not going to break something. I’m not going to stub my toe. There’s a delay. For me, there’s a factor of delight in attunement. It’s like, “Oh, is this tempo delightful?” And this worked. I noticed hiking, like I’ve 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 that where that edge was. And if I go a little over like, nope, I’m afraid I’m going to twist an ankle at that pace. Right here, this is my pace. 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 in the same area. In the same boat, this connection, listening, active listening, presence, flow. So I have 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 20s, early 30s, and I hadn’t done theater for a couple years. I’d moved to LA. My life had been very dry. I’d been struggling. And I got my first gig. And it was a 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. I had all these stories. And he was just like, “Oh, I want to hear. Your whole self is welcome here. Your anger’s totally welcome.” And then I think I let him have it for a minute. This is before we really learned great skills. So, I took my anger out on him. And he’s like, “Yeah, what else do you want to tell me?” And he just stayed attuned to me. Like he could feel the hurt and the fear underneath it. Like, oh, does my partner not care about my career? Does my partner not like theater and not care about this art form? I could get to the fear and the hurt under my anger. And it totally changed our fight in that moment. And that’s happened numerous times throughout our lives together. 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.” 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. Stopped at a car. Oh, where are my feet? Where are my hands? Car just stopped at a stop sign. There’s my breath. Baby steps. Building up to like, oh, how to remember when a partner is angry at you. My guess is you’re going to forget the first 20 times, and that’s totally okay. And being compassionate. And I like to have visual cues. So if fights are going to happen in the kitchen, have a little sticky note on the fridge or in the bathroom or on your computer. If your boss is going to get angry about something, maybe it’s a phone thing that pops up every four hours like, “Oh, have you attuned to yourself?” And then you start practicing. There’s simple hacks like what do I need right now can be an intellectual way into attunement. If I’m too dysregulated, what do I need right? 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 need? Oh, they need — I don’t know what they need. Okay, just ask. What do you need? Back to what do I need? That’s so simple. I love the two questions. What do I need? I like the I need first. That going to that little relief. It feels really good. And then the parasympathetic nervous system calms down and then instantly I’m here. I’m so curious though. So, what makes it that we don’t attune more if it feels so good? It’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. The generations of people who didn’t know how to attune. So getting attuned to I think is a really rare quality. So it’s rare in that we didn’t have it. And now the invitation is we get to try it on. Like if you didn’t grow up speaking Russian how would you know to speak Russian? If you didn’t grow up speaking attunement, how would you know to attune? So simple. It’s nothing, nobody’s fault. My own upbringing is one where I think I was a very sensitive kid and being sensitive in certain ways of like I didn’t feel comfortable in my own body. You get awkward and so actually coming back home or inhabiting the body is almost like going back to something that feels quite uncomfortable and then finding my way home slowly in that. So it has been a real process. 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 and I had to go through — I consider it housekeeping. I would just sit and cry every time I attuned to my heart. And then all sorts of gunky emotions came up. So I think sometimes we avoid the body because it’s housing grief that we haven’t finished processing. So 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 damn it. Attune to me. It’s not working. Why aren’t they — I’ll say what not to do. Do not demand attunement. It’s probably not going to work, but 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, that 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 because it’s like a tuning fork. If you’ve tuned an instrument — resonance — they resonate. Or someone’s like that looks delicious. What’s that? They might even ask. But the act of attuning increases more attunement, increases the resonance. It resonates with people. But I don’t want to do it first, Tara. They owe me. I’m resentful. Yeah. Great. Attune to that resentment. Yeah baby. And that is the thing I hear with my clients most of the time is like I don’t want to 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? Yeah, it’s confronting, humbling. There’s something vulnerable in that act. Often I think “I don’t want to 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 going to get that thing I needed when I was little. I’m going to get that need met which actually isn’t going to get it met. So my last question is what has to fall away like on the identity level what has to fall away in order to attune? 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 make 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. The 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, humane. I imagine there’s a way that we could just begin the practice of how would I begin noticing attunement to self? Should we do an exercise? Let’s do it. So, we’ll go to the simplest — a simple exercise. And I would encourage everyone to put two hands together. Put your 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 your fingers? And how do they feel around your palms? Just 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 that 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? 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? Breath can be one of the simplest ways — if we come down and listen, 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. 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 breath, 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 area and let your hand attune to the movement of your chest. Feeling your 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. It was so yummy. I felt like downregulated and calm. Thank you so much. I’m glad we got to do this. Me too. It’s total joy, Janine. Thank you.