Finding Home in Your Nervous System - Saturday April 25

The deepest and most powerful levers that govern your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing are neurological– autonomic in fact. Based on our moment-to-moment embodied assessment of safety, danger, or lifethreat, the body surfaces various energy processing templates (autonomic states) that tune our physiology to dynamically respond inwardly and outwardly to what is happening in our worlds. Most of these tunings happen in the body, not the brain, yet they govern

• • our visceral state
• • our emotional range
• • how we think
• • how we perceive the world around us
• • how we behave

If these settings become habitual they also gel into something more existential. A person who habitually finds themselves in a flight response comes to know themselves as an anxious person. Someone who habitually moves into shutdown comes to know themselves as depressive. Think of autonomic state as a set of neural glasses that you cannot take off: one that is coloring every aspect of your experience of the world in every moment of your life.

THE MODERN CONTEXT

Humans have always lived in dangerous situations and faced uncertainty. We’ve always had to make decisions with limited information, and faced moments of great change. What is different today is that most of us are doing this outside of the species-normal baseline of being part of a small band or tribe. Since human wellbeing is largely social in nature, this means that a primary source of the neurological inputs that used to return us to a baseline in safety and connection are simply absent.

AUTONOMIC FLUENCY

Your autonomic nervous system has its own language, but it is not a language of words. It is a language of the felt. While it is beneath the threshold of most people’s conscious awareness, we can train ourselves to become aware of, and to speak this language that connects the body to the mind. Once we begin to speak it, we can begin to change the neurological inputs to these systems, so that we can begin to have more agency in shaping the autonomic states through which we meet the world. This can move the nervous system from reactivity, which is where most people spend their lives, to pro-activity where we have more options in how we respond. This allows us to rise to the occasions life presents us, rather than becoming enraged, terrified, or overwhelmed by them.

This short course is a companion to our book:
Finding Home in the Nervous System

ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTOR:
Natureza Gabriel is the Founder of Hearth Science and the Developer of Autonomics. He is the Principal architect of the Craft of Being Archive. He has delivered over 2,500 trainings internationally.