Dysregulation Sensation

Nervous System Grounding is Foundational for Recovery, Resourcing, Reconnection and Culture Shift.

Image by IniRiske

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s getting kind of tricky being a human these days. It feels like we’re navigating the Upside-Down, dimming torch in shaky hand, constantly scanning for the next swooping predator to pick us off while simultaneously pretending we’re going about life as normal. Nothing to see here…whistles false-casually to self while scanning the doomscape from the corner of his eye.

Our nervous systems are completely out of whack. We’re either revved up to 11, or almost catatonic, or often both at once. Take a moment to pause, allow your body to come to stillness and turn your awareness inwards. What do you notice? When I first learned to do this, what I discovered was a raging storm of static. It just felt like discordant chaos. Concentrating on a focal object like my breath or a mantra would calm that storm, and after about fifteen minutes of meditation, I could bring back a feeling that felt like neutral. But it felt like wrestling a wild animal into submission. Like a fight for control. And what was perhaps most disappointing was that whenever I checked back in again the next day or the next week, that storm had whipped itself up again. The pixelated snow of a detuned dysregulated system was blaring away underneath everything else.

That’s because I was raised under the false assumption that I could simply think my way into well-being if I applied enough attention and enough effort. Our culture preaches the “top-down” model of control; that the brain is in charge and that if we can rein in the mind sufficiently, then the rest of our body will follow meekly along. This top-down, tight grip of control worldview is pervasive in every stratum of culture from the political governance of nations all the way down to the internal wrestling match we have with ourselves daily. “Get a grip!”, “Pull yourself together!”. It’s endless work and it clearly isn’t very effective as evidenced by the state of human well-being and the deleterious impact we are bringing to bare on the living world as a result of this way of seeing the world.

Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar has researched and written extensively on this subject from the perspective of a left/right hemisphere power struggle which the left brain is currently winning. The Left brain is excellent at dissecting, grasping, fixating, problem-finding and solving. The problem is that it is blind to the whole, blind to connection and therefore blind to the biggest picture of all; Life. The right hemisphere knows how to recognise that we are part of a relational universe, that we are embedded in the centre of Life and that instead of being this separate, lonely, scared individual mote of dust at the mercy of every threat out there, we are, if we allow ourselves to be, carried by the gift of this living planet. Every drop of water in our body, every carbon molecule in our flesh and bone, tells us that we are part of the vast continuum of Life and that there is a goodness, a trueness and an existential safety in that. But currently, our left-brain-dominated culture is blind to that. And so we feel deeply unsafe and all the actions of an unsafe person come to bear: defensiveness, controlling behaviour, aggression, othering and ultimately conflict and war. Ironically, the perception of non-safety as seen through the left-hemisphere lens leads to the actuality of unsafety when that way of perceiving spills over into violence. It is perhaps the self-fullfilling prophecy of what Einstein called an “optical delusion of consciousness”.

So how can we possibly create a life-enhancing culture if we are trapped in that optical delusion? The conclusion McGilchrist and many others are coming to, and the centre of our work at Earthbound, is to bring balance back to the relationship between hemispheres, to re-entrain ourselves to perceive the world through the connective, holistic lens of the right-hemisphere and to discover safety at a cellular level again. From here, notions of control and defence relax and we are able to be in the world in a way that enhances life rather than destroys it.

The revelation here is that we can’t think our way to regulation and wholeness, we can only feel our way there. So we need to bring back online the animate intelligence of our whole body through our felt sense.

This is the transition I discovered through severe burnout and chronic fatigue. That all that top-down mind control meditation I’d practised over many years was essentially all done from the neck up. I had no real relationship with my body as my body. And that’s important. Looking down from the supervisor in my head at my body below reinforced the feeling of being somehow separate from my body. Shifting out from the “spotlight” mode of narrowly focussed attention from the head to the body was crucial to beginning to really relax and to really come into a feeling of regulation and flow that began a profound healing process for me. The shift was from focused fixation to open awareness and from “thinking about the body” to “feeling as the body”. This is a perceptual shift from the left brain to the right brain. But that means so much more than just the hop across the corpus callosum from one hemisphere to the other.

As Dr Reginald Ray, Buddhist Scholar and somatic meditation teacher explains:

“In fact, these two ways of knowing, while primarily associated with the two hemispheres, actually involve a much more geographically diverse spread throughout the entire brain and beyond that, for the “right brain,” the entire neurological network of our body—to the point that even talking about a right “brain” may be questionable.

Thus some neuroscientists are now talking about two “functions,” rather than two hemispheric locales, of the two ways of knowing. One is the function of the conceptualizing, abstracting, executive, conscious ego mind, which is primarily associated with the left hemisphere, and the other is the function of the holistic, nonconceptual awareness of the body, which is more closely associated with the right hemisphere but includes our entire subcortical neurological system.”

Reginald A. Ray. “The Awakening Body”.

So the first real shift is to acknowledge that rather than just being a “meat taxi” for our brain, we are our whole body and that the brain is just a part of a much wider wisdom system. 95% of everything our body senses, decides and does lies outside of the control of our neo-cortex so acknowledging that fact is a good start. Our whole nervous system is in charge, not just the big lump at the very top of it. There’s something incredibly liberating to discovering this. I spent so many years being the enemy of my body because I identified as my head. When in actual fact my body had been communicating through ever louder messages that there was something out of balance in my sense of Self and that I needed to come back into relationship with the whole of me as the whole of me. Chronic fatigue was not a mechanical failure, but a love letter to myself to stop, recover, resource, regulate and reconnect.

And now I see the pattern of dysregulation everywhere. In people around me, in our relationships with each other and the natural world, in the way we conduct ourselves as a global culture. The same pattern of dysregulation and disconnection is playing out in nearly every bodymind everywhere we care to look. Taking the time to look inside ourselves and notice, “is this true for me?”, is the first step in that recovery process. Is there a raging storm of static, or a bundled mess of overwhelming full-upness, or a sense of constricted white-knuckled “grip” inside of you right now? Does that feel dysregulated or discordant? Simply bringing awareness to this can release pressure, it might bring emotion, it might bring a big sigh. It’s the beginning of coming back into rhythm with the living world again.

In the beginning we need to engage quite specifically in practices that will help us regulate our nervous system and come back to a felt-sense of the safety and trustworthiness of the body. This is a process of grounding or earthing back into the physical body and back into the arms and energy of the Earth. It will take some time and some practice but the beneficial effects can be felt really quickly and the practice can be initially as short as a few minutes at a time.

In subsequent posts I’ll go into more details as to how to shift from dysregulation to self-regulation and eventually into auto-regulation. This is a process of moving from chaos to resilience and from resilience to “prosilience”. Prosilience is a bodymind state that is fundamentally OK and feels existentially safe and therefore is flexible and adaptable to uncertainty and change. We can become a still point of grounded coherence around which the turbulence of the world can move. And if enough of us come back to our bodies and back to the world we will be beacons of regulation and connection for others. Powerful nodes of transformation for others to connect with. The power of a regulated person to regulate others is well known to all of us. The soothing tones of a mother holding her distressed child, the sense of relaxation and openness you feel in certain people’s company without them having to say or do anything. Their grounded presence grounds you back into presence. It’s called co-regulation and it’s what humans and other mammals have been doing for each other for millennia.

Culture change will only happen nervous system to nervous system and changemakers will become truly transformation catalysts in their communities when they come home back to their own embodied, regulated presence.

So look inside and see what’s here now. And then as a first step, try this practice as often throughout the day as it feels helpful. It’s called “sitting back into presence”, it only takes a few minutes and it can be deeply restorative and transformative.

You can listen to “sitting back into presence” practice here.

If you know someone who might find this helpful please share it with them!

Grounding/Earthing is the first step in a process of embodiment and one that we have been teaching through the Embodied Permaculture Project. We’ll continue to share learnings from this project as it continues over the coming 18 months.

Next time, I’ll dive further into nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory and the ABC of breathwork as a powerful regulating toolkit.