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We evolved as a social species to be seen in our uniqueness.

In-person contact syncs two nervous systems in ways that don't happen otherwise.

Becoming a therapist requires embodied presence.

A few weeks ago, I was standing in a hotel ballroom with about 200 people who wanted to become better therapists. We had been working hard on the first of two days we’d be together. Then I asked them to do something simple and a little frightening — to turn to a partner, drop the clinical script, and let themselves actually see the other person for 60 seconds.

And then I took it up just a notch. I asked them to notice that they were being seen.

You could feel the room change. Eyes filled. Bodies shifted. Some people laughed the nervous laugh of someone who has just been caught being human. No fixing. No need to pretend. No technique. Just two people letting their guard down enough to know and be known. And then they settled in, like a person settling into a hot bath that was too hot for just a moment but then was awesome.

By the time it was over, the texture of the whole room was different. We had become, briefly, a we.

I have run that exercise on a screen too, in a video room full of little squares. It is not nothing. But it is not that. The difference is real, it is deep, and the science of the last few years has begun to tell us why.

I have been doing more live training lately — including a large boot camp coming up in Cleveland this fall — and people keep asking me, kindly, why. It’s a fair question for a guy within weeks of being 78. Yes, I reach more people online, more cheaply, with less jet lag, less carbon, and less wear and tear on this old body of........

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