Self-Regulation Doesn't Exist

Being Alive as Life Means You Are Never Truly Alone

I started saying this out loud this year. To my wife at first, then slowly to my clients, and last week on a podcast episode that thousands of people will hear. It’s been a deepening realisation that now feels settled in my marrow, in my gut and heart.

Self-regulation doesn’t and cannot exist, ever.

That feels a bit controversial to say in my line of work as a coach.

Firstly, it’s important to define what I mean by self-regulation. This is a term that comes from nervous system health modalities and polyvagal theory. It’s the notion that our nervous systems are often dysregulated, either switched on to a manic max or turned down to a frozen min as a result of living in a world of intense confusion that carries with it an underlying sense of pervasive threat to our bodies.

Our nervous system states are an embodied reflection of all the external confusion and turbulence in the world right now. A world in which nobody has the faintest idea what’s going on, which consequently makes it very hard for our inner experience to flow gracefully between heightened and relaxed states as our mammalian physiology is designed to do under normal circumstances. Normal being the previous 300,000 plus years of human existence, where we weren’t constantly asked to make up the rules of life on a daily basis and where global catastrophe - barring a meteor strike or geo-magnetic pole flip - was not on the cards as a real possibility.

An important field of internal healing work has emerged out of this recognition of dysregulation. It’s essentially the process of coming back into relationship with our inner experience at an energetic level by becoming more comfortable sensing our sensations and feeling our feelings. It’s also the process of actively calming our nervous system in order to retrain it to come back to states of relaxation more readily. Over time, this allows the nervous system to recalibrate and release much of the need to be on high alert, which in turn allows for better sleep, better health and better relationships.

It’s important and helpful work, and I bring many of these perspectives and practices into my coaching and group work. But it’s based on a false premise: That this process is done by you and me in isolation, that we can self-regulate at all.

To be fair to nervous system regulation practitioners, there is also the concept and experience of co-regulation to factor in here. Co-regulation is the ability of one nervous system to bring another nervous system back into regulation. It’s the secret source of all good coaches, therapists, parents and friends. The more grounded and relaxed I feel, the more ability you will have to be with what’s disturbing your nervous system and, through the alchemy of connection, for you to begin to come back into a greater state of relaxation and rest.

You know the felt experience of this. If you are feeling stressed, then hanging out with other stressed people just agitates your system further. Likewise, hanging out with someone relaxed and open feels like a big internal sigh of relief. You relax. You are in relationship at a nervous system to nervous system level. You are a tuning fork, resonating with the vibrational frequencies of another. This is true.

But what if this were true of the whole of Life, the whole of the time? What if the process of self-regulation (when you don’t have another nervous system on hand to help you relax) is false?

I’ve been sensing into this through my own lived experience for several years now. Earthbound offers coaching from the foundational premise that we are not atomised separate selves but rather, we are Nature. We are a seamless togetherness when we notice our experience at the deeper levels of Life.

So what if we let go of the notion of self-regulation entirely and just relaxed into the more true experience of continuous, unbreakable co-regulation? What if what we thought was “self-regulation” was actually just an experience of remembering our seamless togetherness with existence? What if that act of embodied remembrance was all our nervous system was seeking in the first place?

Take some of the basic practices of “self-regulation” and feel into them as a remembrance of seamless togetherness instead.

Breathwork is one of the most powerful tools we can work with to bring rapid changes to our nervous system states. But rather than it being a process of “me breathing to support my system”, what if it is an act of receiving and remembering our relationship with air, forests, plants, and oceanic oxygen-producing phytoplankton? What if each lungful was a gentle greeting from Life? A reminder that we are not alone?

“Orienting” is another classic nervous system practice. It’s the gentle process of noticing where we are and what surrounds us as a means of allowing us to land back into the here/now. We feel the floor beneath our feet, notice objects around a room, or if we’re outside, we engage our outer senses on the landscape, the buildings, other beings. This is often framed as a process of bringing ourselves back to our selves and away from being lost in a cloud of turbulent, thoughts, feelings and sensations. But what if this was actually the world bringing us back to itself instead? What if the process of orienting was an invitation by Life back into the centre of Life again? Another reminder that “alone” doesn’t really mean anything.

Our bodies are teeming with other microorganisms, our blood is coursing with iron from ancient supernovae, our cells are drenched in the lifewaters of stream and cloud and sea. Our bones and muscles are built from the body of the Earth and from countless bodies that have built that earth. The magnetic pulse of the planet resonates through our body, and photons from the Sun flood our flesh with luminosity.

There is no alone. You are never alone. You can never be alone. There is only relationship. There is only seamless togetherness and the embodied sense of fundamental safety and connection that recognition brings.

There is no self-regulation. There is only co-regulation. We just need to remember the truth our nervous systems know already. What changes then?