Restorative Practices of Wellbeing (Digital)

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We heal to the extent that we can feel ourselves. We can feel ourselves to the extent that we feel safe. When we feel safe enough, we can open our hearts to connection. This is the pathway back to human thriving.

The Connection System is a physiological system (the ventral vagal para-sympathetic aspect of the Autonomic Nervous System) that turns on when people feel safe enough to open to connection. Ancestrally, the job of culture was to create a safe enough context for this to happen predictably. In our modern world, surrounded by threat cues, dissociation, multi-generational trauma, and ecological alienation, human nervous systems are not receiving the kind of nourishment they require to access optimal states of wellbeing.

For the past 25 years Gabriel Kram has been studying this problem, since he dropped out of Yale University and began his journey to find a different pathway to wellness for himself. Unable to find an adequate body of guides or mentors in a single university setting, he gradually convened 100 advisors in 25 disciplines of wellbeing across 24 cultures to (re)create a radically comprehensive model of healing based on a very simple and ancient premise: connection is the fountain of wellbeing. This body of work asks two primary questions: How do you turn on, stabilize, and instantiate connection? And how do you remove what gets in the way?

In ancestral and indigenous cultures the world over, there exist bodies of restorative practice designed to help people return to a baseline of safety and connection when stress, threat, trauma, illness, or disaster moved people away from it. This book unites cutting-edge neurophysiology, primarily the application of Polyvagal Theory, with an array of ancestral awareness technologies. It integrates applied mindfulness, neurophysiology, somatic and emotional awareness, anti-racism, deep nature connection, cultural linguistics, and Indigenous Lifeways into a coherent framework in service of deepening connection with Self, One Another, and the Living World. It introduces hundreds of targeted neural exercises designed to restore connection: with the present moment, with ourselves, our bodies, our senses, our emotions, with one another, and with Nature. It is a guide to reclaiming the roots of our shared humanity: a doorway to the ancestral future.

Paperback. 7 x 9 inches. 416 pages with 148 full color illustrations.