New Year, New Nervous System!
A Free 10-Day Autonomic Super-Challenge
Day 2: Student of the Body
 

Hey Regulators!

In 2015, I’d spent two years in trauma therapy for a PTSD diagnosis. I’d done a ton of therapeutic work to process my childhood, my parents, the car crash that sent me over the edge, a slew of failed relationships, and career opportunities. But I still kept finding myself back in the same physical and mental scenarios, filled with anxiousness, skin irritation, gut-pain and overwhelming emotions. How could I have spent the last few years in therapy, but still wasn’t getting better? 

What I realize now is that cognitive therapy helped me redirect my attention and belief system around my own historical events, and of myself. Sometimes that can be enough. But even with that intellectual understanding, I was still struggling. The truth no one could articulate for me, that I'd eventually end up discovering on my own, was that if I wanted to get better, I needed to explore the spaces inside of me deeper than cognition. I needed to become a serious student of my own body.

Here is the first nugget of wisdom that helped me finally comprehend what the heck my body was doing: the job of our brain-body system is to keep us alive, not to make us happy! Our first response is defense, which at some point in our evolutionary history, probably saved us. We're like tiny reflexive sea urchins– always closing and opening. Our bodies have an abundance of adaptive, self-protective, and reflexive responses to ensure our survival. 

But sometimes, if those responses keep repeating when they are no longer needed, they become maladaptive causing a ton of problems. Understanding this is Nervous System gold! It will pave the way for more compassion and normalization toward your mind-body experience as you move through this journey. We're always constructing our Nervous Systems through our responses, albeit conscious or unconscious, based on past algorithms. Our bodies are designed to track and preserve data that could potentially ensure survival. But the organization of this inherent auto-system is a double edged sword. It can work for us, and sometimes against us too. 

My body had constructed a Nervous System primed toward threat as a result of my own history. This was its way of protecting me. Trauma manifests in a lot of ways, but particularly at the level of the Nervous System. (Trauma is a spectrum. There are large traumas and small traumas that can equally disrupt a NS. More on this later). This can create dysfunction and dysregulation in our physiology, like the constant firing of internal alarms, even when the threat is gone. My body was just doing its job, alerting me to not go near anything that hurt me in the past. But how it was now responding, was also keeping me sick. This is the ironic and confusing loop of trauma symptoms. They emerge to protect us, but end up perpetuating illness and dysfunction.

To get better, I had to bridge the gap between my psychology and physiology. I had to heal my mind, by helping it integrate and understand the things that happened. And I needed to heal what those events did to my body-- to my own Nervous System. If we can't cross this psycho-bio bridge, therapeutic interventions are incomplete. Developing awareness of where your nervous system is stuck, understanding your default patterns, and learning how to influence your involuntary systems so you can stop perpetuating trauma symptoms-- is the key to healing your mind-body system. The other massive piece of this conversation is SAFETY. Without it, our systems will stay on high alert. Protecting our environments, holding boundaries, and creating optimal conditions for ourselves is crucial to healing.

I know this is a MASSIVE topic we can't tackle all at once. So, I'm just going to start with a very basic overview of the Nervous System. Each day, we will build on understanding how all this works on a continuum within the MIND-BODY system. My vision for this challenge is to help you better understand yourself, so you can begin to master your own system. This will set you on a more complete and tangible trajectory toward healing. As the Greek Philosopher Plutarch once said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” 

Nervous System Nuts + Bolts:

The Nervous System is our command center, communicating brain to body, and body to brain, what’s incoming and outgoing, and how to proceed based on that information. It is our own personal automatic ADT security system– an organized network of nerve tissue in the body. It downloads our internal and external ecosystem, then sends electrical signals that travel between the brain, skin, organs, glands, muscles and pretty much everywhere else. These messages help automatically mobilize a body to do all the things it takes to survive– breathe, think, move, feel sensation, go to the bathroom, respond to inner and outer stimuli, mobilize, rest, digest, be intimate, and so much more.

 This system is made up of the brain, spinal cord and nerves (which are basically everything– since we are a bundle of trillions of nerves). It has two main parts: The Central Nervous System (brain and spinal cord) and the Peripheral Nervous System (Somatic NS, and Autonomic NS). 

The Nervous System controls everything we do through a vast network of messages carried by individual units of circuitry called neurons. When this system is functioning fluidly, all other systems work together to make sure our bodies stay balanced and healthy. But this system is one big feedback loop. So, if one part of the system malfunctions, the other parts take a hit as well. Because it's designed to protect us, it's quite sensitive, reflexive, and habitual.

This might sound like a lot of jargon we have no control over. But, it's actually the opposite. Once we understand the boomerang-like nature of this system, we can begin to see how we may be perpetuating these responses through our reflexive habits and patterns. This insight allows us some agency in interrupting our own systems from going down the same old physiological rabbit-hole. We just need to know where to look. And that's exactly why we are here!

Somatic work is about the awareness of our own bodies. This attention helps us become better drivers of our physiology, and expert trackers of our symptomatology. The emergent qualities arising from our systems can become clues to our internal mysteries. Our embodied understanding offers us the opportunity to ride our sensory waves back into a state of homeostasis, rather than continuing to interrupt our survival responses from completing. A healthy nervous system is a flexible nervous system. It has the ability to stay present with a wider range of sensations and emotions without being swallowed up by them. That's what we want. And that's also what this work can help us discover-- more physiological and psychological freedom within.

Practice Day 2: RAIN: An Embodied Experience Of Your Nervous System

And of course a little Tara Brach for you!
https://www.tarabrach.com/rain/

Love you all!
LDD