Cycles + Rhythms of Regulation
On befriending our body + nervous system
As we settle into these colder months, it feels like we’re at the end of a long exhale.
We filled up, expanded throughout the year, and now we’re letting it all go. *siiiigh*
All the way in. All the way out.
We’re wired for cycles. Cycles of our day-to-day, week-to-week. Cycles of the moon, cycles of seasons. Rituals + cyclical practices support our body’s attunement and help create a rhythmic resonance within the wildness of life.
I’m here to honor that process. I hope you’ll join me.
I’m hosting a Winter Solstice gathering devoted to honoring this celestial occurrence on December 21st. Details to join below.
I’ve also been parsing together various musings on ways to better understand + work with our nervous system. Read on for more.
Here’s to the ebbs and flows, the cycles of change, and continually navigating the ups + downs (and all arounds) of it all.
❄️ Winter Solstice: Embracing the Arc of Change ❄️
As we approach the Winter Solstice, we will gather to cultivate introspection, reflection, and awareness as we close out the year on the longest night of the year, so we may welcome in the new.
Our evening together includes: somatic release, upregulated breathwork, guided meditation, a sound journey, vocal toning, group shares, journaling, and space for connection.
Location: Center for the Enlightenment Arts | 301 Ten Eyck St. Brooklyn, NY
Time + Date: 6:30pm | Thursday, December 21st
Code: communitylove
🌊 A Dip into our Physiology + Emotional States 🌊
Most of us live in a disembodied state.
We operate from the mind, reason & rationalize through the mind, and essentially, live in our mind. We’ve glorified the organ between our ears to such a degree we’ve tipped the scales out of balance. For most of us in the Western world, we’ve out of touch with the wisdom of our body and often at odds with our vessel — seeing it as a hindrance, a blockage, rather than the gateway or wisdom keeper.
With our ever-present addiction to intellectual stimulation, we’re now waking up to the need for a more embodied way of being. And why it’s worth cultivating a relationship with our body + nervous system, so we can become allies with it.
When it comes to “knowing” something, if we only understand it on an intellectual level, do we fully understand it?
Conceptual knowing is our cerebral categorization, analysis, intellectual sense making. Whereas, embodied knowing recognizes our body serves as an instrument of learning - that through the felt experience we can access a deeper, intuitive understanding of something.
Let’s take psychedelics as an example. You can read all the literature, scour the studies, listen ad nauseam to podcasts of people’s trips until you’re convinced you *know* what an altered state is. But until you’ve steeped in the ocean yourself (whether that’s dipping your toes in the shallow waters or a plunging head first into the deep end…) you won’t fully know what the psychedelic experience entails.
The same holds true for different emotional states — I may have a deeply nuanced, conceptual understanding of chronic depression, severe anxiety, even being in love, but until I’ve walked through the fire myself, I won’t truly know.
What about the felt experience?
When we’re disconnected from our emotional body, we’re more susceptible to reactivity. A comment sets us off. An email causes us to shut down.
Often when we’re triggered, in a reactive state, or are operating from a dysregulated nervous system - we fall out of conscious awareness and default to coping mechanisms that often aren’t serving us.
Cue: Polyvagal Theory.
🚦Polyvagal Theory🚦
This fall, I participated in Jonny Miller’s Nervous System Mastery course — a 5 week training cohort on how to befriend our nervous system + harness our regulation capacity. The course is a deep dive on understanding our nervous system states, and their somatic markers, as a path towards greater emotional fluidity and control over reactive states. (10/10 recommend)
As I’ve distilled nuggets from the course, Polyvagal theory is at the forefront.
For context ~ you likely know we have two main branches in our autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic + parasympathetic. The sympathetic, "fight or flight” state, readies us for action. The parasympathetic, “rest and digest” state, lets us access calm and rest. The yang, to the yin, if you will.
Polyvagal theory suggests our parasympathetic is further divided into the ventral vagal and the dorsal vagal.
Let’s lay the foundation here. You can think of your system like a car:
The sympathetic branch controls your speed. It's the gas that puts your vehicle in motion. Keep your foot on the pedal for too long and you'll end up speeding down the highway, exhausting your system quickly. We aren’t designed to speed for extended periods. We may end up swerving lanes, losing our sense of control. We may be moving fast, but we’re burning fuel at a faster rate, racing through life. When this state is unbalanced, we feel anxious, jittery, and on edge.
The ventral vagal branch helps us regain control. It's like lightly hitting the brake to bring the car back to the speed limit. The ventral vagal works to keep you in a harmonious state. Thank goodness our car has a brake.
The dorsal vagal branch is the emergency brake. It’s the control that shuts the whole system down. We’re lucky we have this system for emergency situations. However, we often shutdown from certain triggers or perceived threats and drop into a numb / disassociated state. We can feel trapped, unable to climb out of shutdown.
I’ll preface by stating the “goal” isn’t to stay in a perpetual state of nervous system regulation per se. Because let’s be real — life is crazy and shit happens. Rather, we want to become antifragile and more quickly recognize when we’re pulled out of balance, so we can build the capacity to course correct.
When we’re in a reactive, dysregulated, survival state, we may experience:
Sympathetic overwhelm: an underlying sense of anxiousness. Jittery, unable to fully focus. Easily agitated.
On a physiological level this presents as: elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, clenching the jaw, tightness in the stomach.
Unconscious self-regulation strategies look like: passive aggressive communication, distracting ourselves by scrolling twitter, habitual substance use, obsessive work habits.
Dorsal shutdown: a sense of numbness, lethargy, the “i want to pull the covers over my head and not leave my bed” energy.
Posture + behavior can present as: hunched shoulders, avoiding eye contact, contracting the body to become smaller.
Unconscious self-regulation strategies look like: binge eating, binge watching netflix, overcompensating with caffeine/stimulants, avoidance, over-sleeping.
This is where the ventral vagal enters to save the day. After taking NSM, I have a newfound appreciation for the power & purpose of our ventral vagal system.
When we have high “vagal tone” our vagus nerve works optimally; we’re in an open, attuned state - primed for connection, creative insights, and flow. Our systems can function properly, our heart rate slows, we carry a more relaxed and open posture, and we experience greater calm and presence.
The magic lies in a harmonious union of our sympathetic + ventral vagal states.
It’s within this union that we’re most connected with our bodies, least in our minds, experience deeper connection with loved ones, and more easily tap into flow states.
Essentially, it’s where we operate at our best.
And this is where the art & practice of “interoception” enters the scene.
Interoception: “internal” + “perception.” Also known as Somatic Mapping. Aka: the art of understanding one’s internal landscape — like a waking moment to moment style of meditation.
🗺 Somatic Mapping 🗺
As you’re reading this, I invite you to take a moment to tune into your internal world:
Mind - How are your thoughts? Are they scattered, foggy, clear?
Posture - Are you sitting in a relaxed manner? Are your shoulders hunched? Which parts of your body are tense? Which areas feel open?
Breath - What is the quality of your breath? Is it faster, chest breathing? deeper, slow belly breaths?
Awareness - Are you in a more narrow + contracted state? Is your awareness expanded + fluid? Distant or distracted?
Emotional - Which emotions are present? What are you really feeling?
You can attune to your inner world & run through this type of self assessment at virtually any moment — while on a run, before speaking in front of a crowd, lifting weights, walking your dog, before connecting with your partner.
Like anything, the more you practice, the more adept you become.
There’s a latent magic we tap into once we simply create the space to cultivate awareness + attune to what’s present and emerging within.
When we approach our physiological state with an angle of curiosity, we can access a deeper wisdom in our body, strengthen the muscle of our intuition, and begin to embark on the path of forging an allyship with our nervous system, rather than working against it.
My hypothesis: the greater our interoceptive skills, the deeper satisfaction, presence, and connection we can experience in our life.
After all, that what we’re ultimately chasing?
I’d also argue the more we expand our capacity for feeling — the whole messy palette of emotions, rather than simply the “positive” ones — the more alive, aware, and in control of our lives we’ll feel.
What if we turned the dial down on our overactive, rational, meaning-making minds, and ventured into the uncharted territory of our physiological and emotional landscapes? What might we discover when we create the space for our body to guide us?
🎢 Shift your State🎢
And to tie it all together, let’s welcome in the element of choice & practical techniques. Once we’re equipped with interoceptive awareness, we can choose if + when to pull the levers on our emotional state. This is where “bottom-up” protocols come into play.
(From a neuroscience perspective, we have nearly 4x as many neurons communicating from our body to our brain then from our brain to our body. In other words — it’s much harder to *think* your way out of a bad mood.)
To shift out of sympathetic overwhelm (stress/anxiety):
The Physiological Sigh
The “physiological sigh” is a bottom-up technique to reduce stress or anxiety. To practice: breathe in deeply, and before you get to the top, sip in a bit more. Then, expel it out with a completely relaxed and effortless exhale — even audibly sighing it out to really exaggerate it (so nice)
Yoga Nidra (NSDR)
A guided meditation + full body relaxation practice that transitions the mind out of alpha into a theta brain-wave state. This practice induces a state of conscious awareness between wakefulness + sleep. The perfect nap replacement, IMO.
Belly breathing + elongated exhales
The secret to shifting into our parasympathetic is deep diaphragmatic breaths, paired with slow + lengthened exhales.
4-7-8 breathing is a perfect down-regulating breath technique.
Mindful movement
Stretching, going for a walk, yin + restorative yoga. Anything juicy, mindful, deliberate, slow.
To shift out of dorsal shutdown (shut-down/freeze):
Up-regulated breathwork
Wim Hof breathing, 3 part breath (belly, chest, forceful exhale), any “Up” sessions from the Othership App
Sauna time
Time in the heat really helps to ‘thaw’ out the freeze state + reorient into the body (amongst all the other benefits)
Cold plunge
Cold water is a quick, beneficial way to shock your system + instantly shift your state. The cold nearly triples your norepinephrine & dopamine - neurotransmitters responsible for mood + vigilance - and leaves you feeling empowered (trust me)
Physical movements
Shaking, ecstatic dance, track sprints - anything to elevate your heart rate and essentially “shake” off the state
What are your favorite ways to shift your state? 🚀
📚 Resources
Additional resources if you’d like to submerge a little deeper:
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (James Nestor)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the most comprehensive deep dives into the power of our breath and how we can harness it for healing & wellbeing. Tip: nose breathing FTW.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Bessel Van der Kolk)
When I first read Van der Kolk’s book years ago I had a lightbulb click moment. I’d always intuitively felt talk therapy couldn’t be the be-all-end-all when it comes to healing. We aren’t sticks with a brain, but have a body that holds and carries emotions and memories from across our lifetime. This book is a powerful, moving, and intense account of his experiences helping his patients work through trauma.
The Anatomy of Change: A Way to Move Through Life's Transitions (Richard Strozzi-Heckler)
While upstate at a Foster retreat, I borrowed this book and devoured it. I resonated so deeply with the stories and frameworks around letting the body take the lead. (side note: if you’re looking to bring your story & writing to life, I highly recommend exploring this beautiful community of purposeful humans)
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (Gabor Mate)
While this book is currently in my reading queue, everyone I know who’s read it says it’s an insanely helpful + insightful resource on the way that society shapes our understanding of normality, and toll that stress & trauma plays.
Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA)
37 questions to assess your interoceptive capacity.
A database for finding somatic practitioners + trauma-aware bodyworkers to work with.
As always, feel free to drop a line if you feel so inclined. I’d love to know what’s alive in your being, what you’ve uncovered within your internal landscape, and any ways I can support you on your journey.
🛸