Lesson: Student of the Body

Here is the first nugget of wisdom that helped me finally comprehend what the heck my body was doing: the job of our brain-body system is to keep us alive, not to make us happy! Our first response is defense, which at some point in our evolutionary history, probably saved us. We're like tiny reflexive sea urchins– always closing and opening. Our bodies have an abundance of adaptive, self-protective, and reflexive responses to ensure our survival. 

But sometimes, if those responses keep repeating when they are no longer needed, they become maladaptive causing a ton of problems. Understanding this is Nervous System gold! It will pave the way for more compassion and normalization toward your mind-body experience as you move through this journey. We're always constructing our Nervous Systems through our responses, albeit conscious or unconscious, based on past algorithms. Our bodies are designed to track and preserve data that could potentially ensure survival. But the organization of this inherent auto-system is a double edged sword. It can work for us, and sometimes against us too. 

My body had constructed a Nervous System primed toward threat as a result of my own history. This was its way of protecting me. Trauma manifests in a lot of ways, but particularly at the level of the Nervous System. (Trauma is a spectrum. There are large traumas and small traumas that can equally disrupt a NS. More on this later). This can create dysfunction and dysregulation in our physiology, like the constant firing of internal alarms, even when the threat is gone. My body was just doing its job, alerting me to not go near anything that hurt me in the past. But how it was now responding, was also keeping me sick. This is the ironic and confusing loop of trauma symptoms. They emerge to protect us, but end up perpetuating illness and dysfunction.

To get better, I had to bridge the gap between my psychology and physiology. I had to heal my mind, by helping it integrate and understand the things that happened. And I needed to heal what those events did to my body-- to my own Nervous System. If we can't cross this psycho-bio bridge, therapeutic interventions are incomplete. Developing awareness of where your nervous system is stuck, understanding your default patterns, and learning how to influence your involuntary systems so you can stop perpetuating trauma symptoms-- is the key to healing your mind-body system. The other massive piece of this conversation is SAFETY. Without it, our systems will stay on high alert. Protecting our environments, holding boundaries, and creating optimal conditions for ourselves is crucial to healing.

I know this is a MASSIVE topic we can't tackle all at once. So, I'm just going to start with a very basic overview of the Nervous System. Each day, we will build on understanding how all this works on a continuum within the MIND-BODY system. My vision for this challenge is to help you better understand yourself, so you can begin to master your own system. This will set you on a more complete and tangible trajectory toward healing. As the Greek Philosopher Plutarch once said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”