New Year, New Nervous System!
A Free 10-Day Autonomic Super-Challenge
Day 6: Populating Our Somatic Algorithms

Hey Regulators!

Anyone who knows me, knows I'm obsessed with dogs. But not just any dog, Golden Retrievers in particular. Instagram also knows. The platform serves me Golden Retriever memes and ads for anything Golden Retriever related. The platform is obviously listening to everything I say (and most likely watching everything I do, too). It's paying particular attention to what I look at on their feed (four million golden retriever memes), so it can serve me ads and get me to buy something. It's building an algorithm specifically designed for me.

Okay, so what does populating my Instagram feed with Golden Retrievers have to do with the nervous system? Well, our Nervous System is essentially doing the same thing. What we are paying attention to, constructs our internal systems. The way we respond to our lives, becomes the default responses of our neural network. If something traumatic happens, that one event can potentially change our internal systems instantly. But oftentimes, the construction of our bodily rhythms happens over time. Like they say, “Rome wasn't built in a day.” 

The more we look at the dog memes, the more the app will populate our feed with them. The more we pay attention to danger, specific triggers, or certain environments, while having a particularly strong response to them, the harder it becomes for our systems to respond any other way. We need to re-populate our somatic environments with new material. 

The only way to shift your Instagram algorithm, is to stop looking at the same stuff all the time. In this same regard, the only way to evolve the way your nervous system responds, is to stop reacting in such an overwhelming way to the triggers. But how do we change our responses if our biological impulses are urging us to follow them? Well, that's the great paradox of this work. 

Asking someone to not freak out, when their biology is imploring them to, is like telling someone to not run away from a giant bear or mountain lion. Everything inside a body will signal to run. But running could be detrimental to your survival. Instead, you are supposed to do the opposite. Stay calm, breathe deep, make yourself big, and slowly walk backwards away from the animal until you are safe. This takes incredible mental and physiological fortitude and control. It means overriding what your body is telling you to do in service of keeping yourself alive. A huge component of somatic healing is the ability to discern when you need to follow the natural rhythms of your body so they can move toward completion, and when you need to use your education and understanding of it to disrupt outdated responses. 

This is really hard to do when we get stuck in the same state again and again, and are only available for interpreting the world through that particular nervous system lens. To change your state, you have to have enough awareness you’re in it in the first place. Then, you have catch it, in service of transforming it into something more biologically productive. 

We have a massive level of self-accountability in how this plays out contrary to what we've been taught, or what our egos feed us. The idea that “this is just who I am, or how I was born,” is bullshit. Studies show that our environment, and our repeated exposure, is so influential, it can literally change our biology– the very programs on our genes (check out epigenetics). 

This is the nasty truth about healing your nervous system. I share this not to diminish the events, traumas, or complex constellations that have potentiated these responses. We can't change that. And we can't change how a system reorganized itself to protect you from ever going near historical wounds. Somatic work isn't about changing your reality, or changing the past events. It's about changing your body. Everything else will follow.

So, the good news is, who you are is not a fixed scenario. You can influence what you’ve personally and culturally laid down inside of you. Your nervous system is constantly evolving. Sometimes this tends to be the hardest part about sharing how all of this systematically works. It's like hearing the Taylor Swift song,``Anti-Hero,” for the first time, and realizing the lyrics are about you, but not wanting to believe it. She says, “Hey, it's me. I'm the problem, it's me.” I’m sure you are seeing a theme in these emails by now. Hate to break it to you– but no one is coming to save you. You are the hero you’ve been waiting for. So strap on your cape and headlamp, and get to it. I've done it and so can you!

Day 6 Practice: Block Breath & Vagal Massage

Love you all!
LDD