Embodiment and the Deep Nervous System
I have been thinking and feeling alot, over the past couple of weeks, about embodied knowing as a doorway into learning about the Autonomic Nervous System.
You can conceptualize the Autonomic Nervous System in many ways, but one of the most profound is to understand it as the neural architecture of the mindbody connection.
Despite the fact that after 180 years orthodox neuroscience doesn’t really understand that they exist, our interoceptive sensing systems are in fact the largest and most neurologically complex of all our senses, capable of cooperating with and co-opting all of our extero-senses (vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch) as necessary in support of our survival and maintenance of homeostatic balance. For example: during a startle reflex, in the orienting response to danger, your eyes are rapidly harnessed by your Autonomic Nervous System to localize the source of threat. Functionally, in that moment, your eyes become subservient to autonomic survival imperatives: an example of the ANS co-opting an extero-sense for survival reasons.
You wear your present moment autonomic state in your body as much as in your mind. The structure of your anatomy– your weight, your stature, your posture, your degree of flexibility, your strength is conditioned as much if not more by your autonomic neurology as by the musculoskeletal system. Most people alive do not understand this.1
It does however make embodiment a particularly sensible and limitlessly nuanced gateway for gaining a felt understanding of how your autonomic nervous system functions, moment-to-moment.
In March over 3 hours, and again in April over a 5-day retreat from the 23-27th, I’m going to partner with my friend and colleague Marcia Miller, a yoga and movement pioneer with 50 years of experience in yoga, to explore embodiment through the deep nervous system.
Like an infinity mirror, the body you are wearing today is some form of integral (in the sense of physics, yes) of all of the incompletely metabolized allostatic loads that your body has been forced to archive in cellular and structural material.
Like frogs being slowly boiled, modern life creates circumstances where the accretion of allostatic load (stress) gathers so slowly that we are unaware of it much of the time. Over time, its byproducts are both metabolic and structural. The degree of tension in our muscles, the curvature of the spine, the openness of the chest, the collapse of the belly– all of these are more likely to be the result of allostatic load archived through autonomic state than of musculature. Posture is downstream of autonomics. Muscle tension is downstream of autonomics.
The body becomes a fractal kaleidoscopic achive of all accumulated prior stressors that have not been cleared. The body that most people wear is largely residue of unmetabolized distress states.
This is part of what makes trauma healing work so interesting, and also challenging. All of these loads are archived, held together associatively (by pattern and frequency) and archived at varying levels of arousal (in state-dependent memory).
In this class, and in the retreat, we’ll enter into the map of Autonomics through a felt exploration of embodiment. We’ll learn where in the body different autonomic systems reside, how they coordinate and de-coordinate across the continuum of safety, danger, and lifethreat. How we can more completely metabolize fight-flight responses, and shutdown responses.
If you are a person who learns easily through your body, and wants to spend more time feeling, and enjoying what you are feeling, you’ll find these classes useful. Price for the class goes up March 7. Price for the retreat goes up March 23.
Learn more & register: Embodiment and the Deep Nervous System…
This is true for emotional patterns as well. To a degree far greater than most psychotherapy would be comfortable admitting, primary emotions (fear, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust) are felt correlates of autonomic physiology, arising in response to autonomic state.