Archetypal Motor Gestures

Archetypal motor gestures

In my second year of studying Somatic Experiencing, Dr. Peter Levine’s naturalistic approach to the resolution of trauma, my daughter is two. There are moments at this age, as she moves from being a baby into toddlerhood, where her longing to be held expresses itself in a gesture that is so simple and profound it takes my breath away. All of two feet tall and some inches, she stands on legs that have not long since learned to hold her upright and reaches up to us, in a gesture that says unequivocally: pick me up. Hold me. When she does this, something in my fatherly biology activates immediately. I can feel that those hands and arms reaching up are an extension of her heart. I mean this not merely metaphorically, but physiologically.

The year is 2011, and I am, at this moment, immersed for the first time in a study of the Polyvagal theory, and I have been watching, intently, the gestural repertoire of humans healing from deep nervous system dysregulation, and my attention keeps getting drawn to their hands. I watch the hands, and I see them swimming through the air, expressing something in these state changes, these shifts across thresholds between states, expressing some knowing held in the body but rarely the mind, see in them some expression of the heart that if beheld and known on its own terms tells us something definitive about the inner world, but that is not often part of conscious awareness.

This gestural repertoire of the hands cuts both ways, across safety and defense, expressing inner integra tion, yearning, and distress. There is another gesture my daughter’s body makes– I don’t say her– it is her body, not her ordinary sense of self, not the autobiographical sense of self with which she will come to identify, but something else. This gesture is of distress, a sort of rattling of the hands, a shaking of them as if to dislodge the arms off of her, as if to make them go away, make it go away, something to shake off a feeling. Sometimes the gestures alternate. She makes this shaking-off gesture, and then she reaches up for us, and my heart rises toward her, reaches down, scoops her up. I call her into my chest, into the rhythm of relatedness, and we hold eachother.

There are few things as beautiful as the peace that visits us holding an infant in our arms. She tucks into my body, nests into the curve of my collarbone, and I can no longer tell who is comforting whom. These moments, it seems to me, are the seed from which my fathering grew.

We would be foolish to confine the heart to the physical organ. The heart, and we know this polyvagally, expresses through the face and the voice, the turning of the head and neck, the tuning of the middle ear, the gaze of the eye. Our heart is a complex, a ventral vagal complex, and if the work of Dr. Porges has missed one crucial thing it is the understanding that it expresses also through the arms and the hands.

I remember the moment I knew this for sure. I had just completed a plant medicine ceremony, and my body was in the kind of deep peace and listening that comes after astral travel and four hours of meditation. I was sitting in a church late at night, conversations around me, but still deep with inwardness, expanded, sensing. It occurred to me to trace, interoceptively, my ventral vagal physiology. I traced it from my heart up into my face, the lacelines of the facial and trigeminal nerves, the way they led into the edges of the lips, the hollows of the cheeks, the corners of the eyes. I felt my way around the inside of myself like this and then back to my heart, and suddenly I was traveling down my own arms and into my hands. It was in a kind of reverie that I felt this autonomic innervation of my fingers, my palms, the nerves of the arms themselves, and the way that this expression of ventrality arose in symmetries across the body.

This is not to say that all gestures are autonomic, by any means. The hands do any number of things that have nothing to do with the ANS. But rather, and we’ve seen this thousands of times, with thousands of people– when an experience is deep enough, be it one of ventrality or defense, connection system or fight system, it comes through the hands.

There is a repertoire of archetypal motor gesture that is uniquely autonomic. That is birthed down in the basement of the brain, but calls out through the arms and hands.

Dr. Porges can be forgiven for this oversight. He arrived at the theory through comparative neuroanatomy, though also through study of his own experience, which he shares candidly if you ask him. A promising clarinet player in his youth, he makes a decision on the threshold of college to pursue science rather than music. Yet his own experience with the clarinet, which has trained him in pranayama, as he would discover many years later, is his own adolescent font of ventrality, his own expeirence with the wonders of the social engagement system he would later come to name.

Because the theory develops by studying evolutionary comparative anatomy, and because the autonomic nervous system expresses through the myelination of voluntary motor systems at birth that we wouldn’t expect to be myelinated– the face, voice, eye gaze, and tuning of the middle ear that comprise the social engagement system are the only systems of voluntary muscle under the infant’s control at birth– he can be forgiven for not realizing the hands are part of this system.

The hands come under voluntary control around three months of age. It is wonderful to watch as an infant begins to find them, and realize they are under her control. And yet, in tandem with this wiring of the hands into the ambit of the baby’s willful movement, there is another weaving taking place, and that into the deep fabric of ANS.

It happens with the feet as well, which are likewise capable of expressing autonomically. With the feet, this occurs most commonly in the flight state and its hybrid variants. The unconscious tapping of the feet that people do to self-regulate when they are feeling anxious? Archetypal motor gesture affiliated with the flight response.

These gestural repertoires, often veiled to the conscious mind, are ways that our nervous systems work to express and contain the energies flowing through them. Autonomic states are templates for energy management. They are the way our organism structures the distribution of attention across the neurovascular scaffold of the human form, the way it modulates the switches and dials of our interior landscape, tuning it to express and respond.

The same sensory and perceptual systems, from the senses commonly understood, e.g., the big five (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch), to the nociceptors in the skin, and the interoceptive fabric of the vagal systems cobwebbed through our organs and viscera behave entirely differently across the neuroceptive continuum from safety to danger.

For decades medicine understood the nociceptors in the skin to be pain sensors. The latinate origin of the word, as my friend Dr. Jeff Rockwell explained to me, is danger receptors. Yet this misses the simple and profound fact that they are only pain receptors when we feel threatened. When we feel safe, they are the skin’s portal to the ventral system: the love and vitality radar of the living body. Touched in a certain way, these unmyelinated fibers conduct sensation and vitality into the deepness of our brains. The skin, you will or should remember, is in fact the outer surface of the brain. That wind raising the hairs on your arm? It is in fact raising the hairs on your brain. That stress thought? It is closing down the capillaries in the surface of your skin. Our senses, from the external five, to the sixth interoceptive sense, to the seventh? skin sense–is it seven or thirty four?– these are gated primarily in their meaning-making by whether the integral of the aggregate inputs from the ANS is granting us an embodied felt sense of safety or danger.

In either case, except in the dorsal states, which are immobilized, and which when we enter through the gateway of terror ejects us from the body, and from the gateway of intimacy drops the edge of the body away, these deep states are expressed through the hands and arms. There is a vocabulary here that is a vocabulary of the expanded heart.

If, and this is my contention broadly in our work, our objective is to relocate you 18 inches closer to the ground, to help you make that journey of a lifetime from the head to the heart, the farthest distance you will ever travel, the archetypal motor gestures of the hands and the feet are signposts and manifestations of the growth of the heart as the center of our beingness.

I’ve learned to watch humans for this gestural vocabulary, and when it is integrated, when it is an expression of ventrality, to call it up into conscious awareness, where it can be penetrated by attention, which potentiates experience. In this manner we call the expression of the unconscious integrative processes up gently to the surface of the known, where they can bless us with the radiance of their deep wisdom, and we can become more fully who we are, known through the body, one heart, and one mind. This is neurophysiologically-informed ancestral heart(h) science.