Role of Nervous System Regulation in Accessing Nondual Consciousness-[Copy #391]
I. What is the nervous system?
Polyvagal theory, articulated by Stephen Porges in the mid 1990’s, and adapted for clinical settings by Deb Dana and others, exploded onto the clinical scene in the last decade. Because Polyvagal comes from neuroscientific research, it can feel daunting. At the same time, understanding (and befriending!) our nervous system is perhaps the single most helpful thing we can do for ourselves and others. Polyvagal theory helps us understand the autonomic nervous system (ANS) as the foundation of health and wellness, regulating neurochemistry, the immune system and most behavior.
The ANS has three basic states:
- safe (ventral vagal),
- mobilized (sympathetic mobilization, or fight/flight/activated freeze);
- immobilized (dorsal vagal or collapsed freeze)
In this section I provide a gross oversimplification. Two resources I recommend are: Deb Dana’s “Beginner’s Guide To Polyvagal Theory” and Trauma and The Nervous System: A Polyvagal Perspective.
When we’re in a ventral vagal state, we feel open, able to connect with others, curious, creative, and regulated. Sympathetic mobilization, or hyperarousal, feels like agitation and often corresponds with rapid heart rate, shallow breathing, muscle tension, anxious feelings, and restlessness. Our bodies urge us to get away or fend off a predator (with the last choice option involving ‘playing dead’, an ‘activated’ freeze response). The dominant script of sympathetic mobilization is that of protection.
When we’re immobilized, in a dorsal vagal shutdown, we might feel: no breath or deeply restricted breath; no energy in the body; “not here”, or numb and dissociated. While the dorsal script is also protection, in a way it can feel more like a collapse, like we’ve already given up, rather than the mobilized feeling of trying to survive. Physically, dorsal takes the shape of being curled into a fetal position, and is marked by the absence of energy (hypoarousal).
One way Polyvagal theory invites us to think about the relationship between what’s happening, and what subsequently happens with our nervous system, is to sort arisings into those that either lead us to more regulation, or to more dysregulation. Triggers (people, places, things or situations that our system processes as potentially threatening) lead us to increased dysregulation. Triggers create a sense of danger, activating our ‘protect’ scripts, and move us towards mobilization (fight, flight, mobilized freeze) or immobilization (dorsal collapse). In Polyvagal theory, we call the opposite of triggers, “glimmers”. Glimmers, which move us into ventral vagal, might include experiences, interactions or resources that initiate the Social engagement system (SES) and mean we feel safe enough to connect with other people, ourselves and our environments.
Polyvagal contains the baked-in sense that we are not pining after some idea of a static end state. It helps us see, in our own direct experience, that we move in and out of nervous system states continuously throughout the day—sometimes minute by minute. And so what is the connection between nervous system regulation and nondual consciousness?
II. Connection between Nervous System Regulation & Nondual Consciousness
Our human nervous systems are hard-wired to try to keep us safe. We know that the nervous system struggles to connect and to protect at the same time. When we’re in a calm, relaxed, open ventral vagal state, we perceive ourselves to be happily interdependent—we have access to the truth of our human selves as ‘hardwired to connect.’ The argument I put forth here is that it’s possible to consider that while ‘being in ventral vagal’ is not precisely synonymous with ‘being in nondual consciousness’, it’s also not exactly incorrect to notice that it will feel almost impossible to reside in our beingness–to have conscious access and awareness of nondual consciousness–when we’re NOT in ventral vagal (i.e., when we’re in sympathetic mobilization or dorsal vagal nervous system states.)
When we’re in the midst of being flooded and dysregulated, either in the sympathetic mobilization of fight/flight or the dorsal vagal state of collapse + shutdown, our nervous system is engaged in the protective script of ‘us vs. them’. Another way of saying this is that we find ourselves in a Quentin Tarantino-style dualistic movie with really scary bad guys, carrying really big guns. Our senses and nervous systems cast people into the role of ‘other’, and tell us we cannot trust, we cannot stay open. An easy way to summarize and synthesize this understanding is that being dysregulated (either mobilized or dorsal vagal) functionally keeps us in a dualistic paradigm, while ventral vagal represents the doorway into nonduality.
III. We Can’t Trust What Our Senses (+ Neuroception) Tell Us
Being able to come into contact with the difference between what the nervous system believes is happening– vs. what is actually happening–helps us get closer and closer to clear seeing. As most of us recognize (and generally the more ‘work’ we’ve done, whether through spiritual or psychotherapeutic inquiry, the more we truly acknowledge how staggeringly frequently this happens) we as humans so often get tricked. Distortions, misperceptions, and confusion frequently arise as we move through our lives. If we either “believe” these distortions, or try to get away from them (through avoidance, distraction, repression, denial, spacing out, numbing), generally our suffering increases. The more distress (and nervous system dysregulation) we’re in, the more we get tricked. Using discernment practices, we can skillfully move closer and closer to “clear seeing”, seeing life as it actually is.
However, from the ‘but I step on the flat ground!’ part of ourselves, it often feels, initially, like our reactions are immediate, inevitable and instinctual: the only possible reactions we could have. Ever elegant, Thich Nhat Hanh summarizes what it feels like down here on the flat ground of experience in this poetic passage:
Confused minds suggest that existence is meaningless, even absurd, and this adds another coat of black to our darkened hearts…Even while adopting such mindsets, people cling to the illusion that we are free to be who we want. Yet most of the time we are merely reacting to the wounds engraved on our hearts, or acting out of our collective karma. Almost no one listens to his or her true self. But when we are not ourselves, any freedom we think we have is illusory. Sometimes we reject freedom because we fear it. Our true selves are buried beneath layers of moss and brick. We have to break through these layers to be liberated, but we are afraid it may break us also. We have to remind ourselves over and over again that the layers of moss and brick are not our true selves.
Hanh’s lovely description of the need for continuously reminding ourselves that the ‘layers of moss and brick are not our true selves’ reminds me of the importance of differentiating between the awareness itself, and whatever plays on the screen of experience, which we so often confuse with our essence, our true Selves. In terms of what these scientific theories have to tell us about the process of ‘merely reacting to the wounds engraved on our hearts’, we could conceptualize that we have three big initial challenges to work with as we set off on a polyvagal-informed deconditioning path (to read more about these, see other writings on “Understanding & Unlocking the Body”, “The Problem of Clock Time”, and “Neuroception: How We Process Information”).
Ever since a client mentioned it, I’ve loved the title of Mary O’Malley’s book, What’s in the Way is the Way. I agree with O’Malley’s titular sentiment wholeheartedly, having found in my process that our challenges also contain the seeds of our liberation, pointing us towards clear seeing by bringing our blindspots to conscious awareness.
Revealing that the spiritual and scientific framings do seem to be saying that exact same things, albeit in different ways, I was struck by a section of Neale Donald Walsch’s classic Conversations With God, which offers the perspective that “all human actions are motivated at their deepest level by one of two emotions–fear or love.” From this ‘uncommon dialogue’, we hear:
Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals…Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have the free choice about which of these to select.
As a clinician, and as a human, I agree wholeheartedly. I feel like polyvagal theory takes a complex scientific journey to say, essentially, the same thing as Walsch. Sympathetic mobilization and dorsal vagal, when not held in (or mitigated by) enough ventral, take us to fear. Although the fears are differently-flavored, with mobilization fear relating to the shakti body and its safety, and dorsal fear relating to fears of the heart, both lead the system into scripts of protection (which seem to be synonymous with the felt sense of separateness). Mobilized fears want to know: ‘Am I safe?’; ‘Am I going to survive?’; ‘Are you going to hurt me?’. Dorsal fears ask questions like: ‘Am I alone?’; ‘Am I good enough?’; ‘Am I loved?’. Ventral vagal is the love place—the space of expansiveness, openness, and connectedness. So my brain, like Walsch’s in his follow up question, goes immediately to confusion: if love is clearly preferable to fear, why do we so often seem to ‘choose’ fear?
In a way, polyvagal theory unmasks the process of ‘choosing’ fear by showing us how much our perception of threat triggers us, and activates our parts. Thom Rutledge, in Embracing Fear puts it beautifully:
Fear fuels our negative and judgmental thoughts and our need to control things…Every difficult emotion we experience represents some kind of threat-a threat to our self-esteem, or the stability of a relationship, even to our right to be alive. Start with any difficult emotion you choose, get on the elevator, press B for basement, and there, below the guilt and shame and anger, below the negativity and judgments, you will find it: fear.
Rutledge’s conceptualization of the role of fear, and the perception of threat, helps us see that even if the surface picture appears more complex, we’re really just reacting to what our nervous system feels is ‘undeniably’ threatening to us. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve come to think of scientific models like DBT’s model for emotions, or polyvagal’s modeling of how triggers influence nervous system responses, as representing ‘the truth’– even though they don’t particularly match up with the felt sense in the body in a moment by moment way. I often talk with clients about the metaphor of how our minds shifted when we first saw pictures of the earth from space. It was probably quite confusing to reconcile the image of a perfect circle with our everyday experience of walking on the flat ground. Likewise, as a clinician (and a person with a quite sensitive nervous system), I have tremendous compassion for the situation we find ourselves in as we practice coming out of reactivity, and endeavor to ‘de-condition’ our nervous systems.
IV. How To Choose Love Over Fear
Rutledge, Thom. Embracing fear: and finding the courage to live your life. Harper Collins, 2002.
By the time I came to Polyvagal theory, 10 + years into practicing, it made perfect sense to me, and fit like a very welcome puzzle piece into existing ways of conceptualizing. My therapeutic training had instilled a healthy respect for, and awareness of, my mind’s unreliable thoughts, and the bits of neuroscience and evolutionary biology I’d learned over the years made me know that transient emotions could, and often successfully did, hijack my nervous system. The scientific frame offered increased understanding into what’s happening–and what we’re getting wrong about what’s happening–with the idea that this increased understanding can empower us and give us more skills to navigate, identify when we’ve become dysregulated, and bring ourselves back to regulation. The spiritual frame doesn’t disagree with what Western theorists, and later Western neuroscience, seem to have caught onto (many years later). As Judith Blackstone points out in The Empathic Field, citing Forman and Loy,
There are remarkable parallels between the fourth- century Buddhist philosophy of Yogacara and contemporary constructivist thinkers. “All maintain that the activities of the mind, as Katz (1978) notes, ‘half sees and half creates,’ drawing upon categories of perception based on habits and language. All maintain that such categories are not absolute, but are largely conventional and derived from language and the general background of experience”…Loy (1998) writes, “It was not until Kant that Western philosophy became truly aware of the role of the mind in self-perception: how the mind does not just receive but interprets and synthesizes perceptions into the phenomenal world we experience. That perception involves conception is a commonplace of contemporary philosophy, although attention has shifted from Kant’s Aristotelian categories to language as the means by which organization occurs. But Indian philosophy has been aware of this since at least the time of the Buddha”.
What Blackstone goes on to say, however, is that within Buddhist traditions and nondual thinking (what she names in her brilliant, academic way as ‘soteriological’, meaning: containing a hypothesis for salvation) we only care about this process of mental perception insofar as we want to understand it (specifically when our mental processes have taken us into unwholesome mental states, or kleshas) to break free of the bonds of cyclic existence (saṃsāra) and attain liberation (nirvana). In other words, a spiritual frame concerns itself with what’s happening in the conditioned world to see beyond the paradigm of the conditioned world. But polyvagal, which arrives in the sterile white packaging of the scientific frame, helps us see ‘the truth’ of the shakti emotional-psychological-somatic-neurobiological molecular level. Since this (shakti) level is comprised of the same stuff as the (shiva) beingness level (i.e. the drop of the ocean is still saltwater), exploring this shakti nervous system level brings us into direct contact with ‘answers’ to questions that previously seemed imponderable.
To me, polyvagal pulls off a neat trick by not just reframing ‘cure’, but instead rendering the idea of cure (and the idea of a static ‘happily ever after’) moot. Instead of attaining a static state, polyvagal points us to a truth of our shakti nature, which is that it’s always in flux. AND, polyvagal tells us that even though our shakti nature will never not be in flux, we also don’t have to feel like we’ve been handed a life sentence of constantly getting triggered, wrenched into mobilization or dorsal, with us as powerless beings only reacting to the triggers (and occasionally being blessed with glimmers). Instead, we can bring our understanding of what’s happening– at this molecular nervous system level– to help us befriend our shakti nervous systems. We can find (in our own experience!) the power to free ourselves of distortion and suffering. We can access the equanimity of ventral vagal in this very life.