Discovering Peace and Calm is your natural state
When your nervous system is regulated, you are open to experiencing peace and Calm. It is a magical place of harmony and connection.
A nervous system not activated by past overwhelm is a system in which you can enjoy life. You experience your mind and body resonating as one, in the present moment. You respond appropriately to the ups and downs of life because your nervous system is no longer triggered by an outdated internal alarm bell.
Stress is endemic in our society. You may work in stressful environment, with too much to do. You may also have a family and commitments that add to an inner stress load you are already carrying from your childhood. This stress load takes a toll on your nervous system.
To come into balance, you need support from people who embody this state of balanced regulation, and can facilitate deep healing states in others. Somatic practitioners like Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapists offer a rich support for assisting the body to come into a deep sense of balance, discharging excess energy held within the nervous system.
Your Marvellous Nervous System
Your nervous system detects and responds to stimuli. It is highly adaptive and shaped through learning what happens as you interact with people and your environment.
Whilst the neural pathways developed as children are critical in shaping your nervous system, the neuroplasticity of your brain means this process is ongoing. You can change patterns in our nervous system.
The nervous system has both a voluntary and involuntary component. Your autonomic (involuntary) nervous system regulates many aspects of your physiology without our conscious awareness – neural pathways initiate responses automatically.
Your autonomic nervous system affects your:
Eyes
Saliva glands
Lungs
Heart
Gallbladder
Stomach
Intestines
Sex organs.
Your autonomic nervous system has two branches; the parasympathetic and sympathetic. Your body is constantly receiving information and responding to what’s happening to you. There is a natural movement in and out of these branches as and when you need. It’s a dance based on your body’s perception of what is happening to you – information that is below conscious awareness.
Stress, Trauma and your Nervous System
The level of stress you experience and your associations with stress-triggers affect how your nervous system responds to stimuli. Your neural pathways are based on what’s happened to you in the past.
When your nervous system perceives you are in danger, this produces a state of stress that affects a lot of your organ functioning, blood flows, and hormonal balance. You experience an array of symptoms throughout your whole body.
ONCE BITTEN, TWICE SHY
If you were once bitten by a dog (an overwhelming event), your body may well interpret any further barking dog, or any dog… as hostile. This association is automatic.
Your Responses to Danger
According to experts like Stephen Porges, there are three stages to your response to perceived danger:
Defuse the situation (in social relationships)
Fight or flight
Freeze
Let’s look at these in more detail.
1. DEFUSE THE SITUATION
According to the polyvagal theory, the first thing you will attempt when you detect danger within a relationship, is to try and defuse the situation. You are a social creature and you are wired to want to maintain social connection. So the first step in meeting danger is to manage the social situation by avoiding eye contact, changing your hearing either elevating it or reducing it – that is, you have a physical response.
You will also do what you can within the relationship to reduce the sense of threat. For example, you might tone down what you say and how you speak to defuse anger or to prevent an escalation of anger. You will behave in ways that make you feel safer.
2. FLIGHT OR FLIGHT
The next thing your nervous system will do to protect you from danger is to activate a fight or flight response. This is a sympathetic activation. Your body will divert resources from activities like digestion, and release hormones that allow you to run. Your body pumps more blood to help you mobilise and get out of trouble or stay and fight. You go into a hyper-aroused state.
When hyper-aroused, you feel a mixture of agitation, anxiety, anger, unsettledness, restless or inability to sleep, and hyper-vigilance.
3. FREEZE
If you are in situations where you can’t soothe the social connection, and you can’t leave or fight, your system will feel overwhelmed. This often happens to children simply because of the power dynamic between adults and children.
When you are overwhelmed, you freeze – you ‘play dead,’ like the mouse that couldn’t escape a cat. A mouse does this in theory so that maybe the cat won’t be so interested and / or the mouse won’t feel so much pain if it’s actually eaten. Freeze is your last option to cope with an event that is dangerous to you on some level. Freeze is a parasympathetic activation, or a hypo-aroused system.
A hypo-aroused nervous system is in some sort of collapse inside. You might feel depressed, lethargic, confused, dissociated, and become numb to your pain. This is what your body does; you can’t help that this happens.
your Over-Stretched Nervous System
Your biology is not intended to cope with prolonged activation. It’s supposed to operate within a range, and if it spikes over into hyper or hypo come back down into the healthy range.
Consider the stress in your ordinary day-to-day life and the sheer number of stress-triggers to which you are regularly exposed (e.g. workloads, finances, families, COVID-19, global news, climate change, cost of living crisis, social media). Now add the past stresses from childhood and that’s a significant stress load - without there being a clear ‘traumatic’ event in your life. So add in those if you have experienced (surgery, accidents, abuse, violence and so on).
No source
You may not realise where your stress orgintaes. It can be overlayed in your body from many different events in your life.
Most of people have a stress load that has not been fully digested within their body. This means that when you perceive the same danger cues today, because there is an active association based on your past, you act as if historical dangers are present day threats. You have a physical response to this perception that is very personal.
Dr Libby Weaver refers to stress as an invisible load. It’s invisible because you get used to living in hyper- and hypo-aroused states – it becomes habituated in you and it lives in many different layers of your system - it isn’t straightforward.
HOW IS YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM?
To start exploring how your nervous system is functioning you can ask yourself the following high-level questions:
Do you feel like you can stop everything you are doing and go into a felt-sense deep relaxation?
Does your whole body participate, or do some muscles for example refuse to relax?
Do you have a felt-sense awareness of what is happening inside your body or are you dissociated? Where? Is it global, or in certain places?
Do you have the energy you need to get out of bed and enjoy your day?
Your Over-Stretched Nervous System
Do not underestimate the power of deeply relaxing.
Your body wants to come back into harmony after a stressful event has passed. When you are carrying an invisible load of stress, it will take time to come back into optimal health – it’s as if you need to recalibrate your system.
Shifts in your system need to be appropriately moderated, so these do not overload you (e.g. re-traumatise), and you need to literally integrate the changes slowly so new levels of health emerge. That’s why going with the intelligence of your body is so effective – your body knows what and how much to process.
Somatic practices like Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy sessions are like dipping, and re-dipping, into a pool of calm that helps your body shed its stored trauma and held tension patterns. You transform from within. There is a cascade impact in your physiology over time.
Letting go of your traumatic past deeply relaxes your tissue body. Your nervous system becomes much more peaceful and balanced.
