Beyond Polyvagal Theory

The neuroscience of the modern world has lost contact with the Sacred – ironic given that many of its pioneers were animated by visionary and intuitive ways of knowing. What would be required to reorganize neuroscience doing honor to its animist origins? What would be necessary to refigure the discipline, moving it out of the cranial hegemony of a brain-centered bias and back into the fullness of our embodied experience? How could it be re-conceptualized as a liberatory project and praxis?

In BEYOND POLYVAGAl THEORY: PHENOMENOLOGY OF AN EMBODIED NEUROSCIENCE, pioneering ancestral neuroscientist Natureza Gabriel, author of The Neurobiology of Connection, GROUND, BODY AS VERB, and Developer of AUTONOMICS, re-writes the lineage history of neuroscience through the lens of interoceptive epistemology, revisiting the work of its principal architects to reveal a lucid trail of animist and visionary neuroscientists. Rather than being peripheral or anomalous, Gabriel reveals the ways in which visionary and intuitive knowings are a central feature of the line of neuroscientific breakthrough by which the discipline has evolved since inception. From the visionary art of Santiago Ramón y Cajals, to the linguistic origins of Leopold Auerbach’s discovery of the myenteric plexus, to the hidden origin story of Polyvagal Theory, to the birth of Autonomics, Gabriel demonstrates that many of the foundational discoveries in the field happened outside of the orthodoxy of the scientific method.

In this journey, he re-centers the power of self-directed discovery, interoceptive tracking, and the reclamation of deep inwardness as core components of a liberatory psychobiological inquiry, illuminating the depths and contours of a new, and possibly very ancient science, and putting its transformational power back in your hands. Anchored in our embodied subjectivity, an animate neuroscience uses our lived felt embodied experience as a primary way of knowing, and a vehicle to new ways of being. Like all of his work, this is a celebration of homecoming to deeper and more embodied ways of knowing and being in the world, putting nervous system science back in service to Life.