self-propagating hope

I’m finished with my advanced 1 training for Somatic Experiencing (how cool?) and after 6 days of 8-10 hours of learning and practicing I am saturated… and also teeming over with excitement for how this will integrate into my work.

We worked with syndromes- clusters of symptoms that don’t have a medically known cause or cure- things like auto-immune disorders, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, gastro-intestinal things (IBS), etc.

The thing that really hit home- when working with anyone, but specifically someone who you don’t want to send into a flare… a flare that could be debilitating for days, weeks…. is this piece of knowledge: titrate the titrations, and work the edge of the periphery.

The edge of the edge, the thing before the thing. Imperceptible shifts so that the nervous system can integrate without sounding the alarm- this is the goal.

Trauma is defined as a state of overwhelm by something that happened that was too much, too fast, too soon. Trauma exists because there wasn’t enough support, resources, or completion of our biological self-protection responses, so our system still detects threat and is doing its very best to keep us safe. Our bodies are brilliant in that way, and in more natural environments- ways of living that are more in rhythm with nature, and life itself- humans are pretty good at having less trauma, and specifically syndromes. Syndromes are even called the disease of civilization- a dysfunction that occurs in more rapid rates in “1st world” countries, and less in others.

Trauma can replicate pretty much any known disease or disorder- it is nervous system dysfunction and disorganization- trying its very best to stabilize you. Stabilize, manage- so that you can do the things you want to do- need to do. You know your system really well, you’ve had to- one, as a function of having a body, and two, as a necessity of not going into a flare, or managing as best you can to prevent, or curb it, and recover from it.

It’s a tightly walked line, and your life force has suffered, by no intention of your own. The body is bound tightly in constriction, or functional freeze, and is having disorganized signals from different aspects of your autonomic nervous system. Your dorsal vagal is sending the breaking signal, to slow down, conserve energy, and speed up digestion. Your sympathetic system is sending the signal to slow down digestion, and increase muscle tone, respiratory rate. The gas and the brake are on at the same time, or are disorganized in their flipping back and forth- sending mixed and confusing signals to all the organs and glands in the body.

With nervous system signals going awry, the body is trying to stabilize- so pulsation, pendulation- our natural life force of expansion and contraction becomes very small, very contained. The body starts to register expansion as dangerous- a threat, a shift too great that would topple the delicate balance of stability available.

It’s important- crucial, to know that this is your body surviving, trying to make sense of a disorganized world we live in- a disrupted- ruptured world. We are in disharmony with nature, with each other, and with ourselves, by no fault on a personal level. Our innate wisdom- the wisdom of being alive, having a body is becoming thwarted by our environments, maybe by specific traumas, but most likely by larger- enveloping circumstances. As crucial as it is to recognize that this is a byproduct of global shifts from civilization- it is even more imperative to orient towards the resulting resiliency.

Resiliency out of necessity. Resiliency as an inherent part of being alive. Resiliency as moving towards life- vitality, because we have suffered. Its that funny thing where we have to move between, to pendulum swing, to pulse, between suffering and happiness, the deeper you go into each, you find that they have an equal and opposite counter- and the deeper you go- the more intensity perhaps there is a single point of unity- life itself, an equal mix of suffering and not-suffering. Yin yang in traditional Chinese medicine, and in science the principal that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and in the bell curve and principals of polarity- there is this idea that if you go to either end of the spectrum, the extremes you find the same thing.

I’m not a scientist or a philosopher, although sometimes I loose myself in an attempt to articulate, that I sound like a budget impersonator of one. I have this image in my head of me putting a bald cap on, a long fake beard, and a robe- being hired for a kids birthday party as socrates or some shit- an entertainer, maybe I would even do a song and dance- cabaret style about big brain ideas… something like that is how I feel, often. Its light hearted, it’s funny to me, and maybe as I keep writing I will feel less like I’m dressing up in a weird way, and more like I’m just saying what I think, as myself, talking to y’all or whoever.

And sometimes I loose myself on the thought train of, “why should I try to articulate myself, because its all been said before, far better than I could ever?”, and “what am I contributing?”…. and the thing here, is- it doesn’t really matter. I’m making sense of it for myself, through my own filtration, and that’s valuable to me, albeit probably not the most revolutionary contribution to ideas about life, healing, and whatever…. from my substack, my… blog… lol

So what the fuck am I saying- I am saying that we are in a crisis of the state of our world (if you didn’t know), and that is affecting us, our biology is affected as our systems are trying to stabilize- trying to make sense of the world. Part of that is an impossible task, and part of it is this beauty of moving through the suffering into our vitality, that one provides this opportunity to pendulate, to swing back towards health from suffering, with a deeper sense of knowing about life.

My final point, is that from a point of disarray, so much disorganization- we have to start small, gentle, and we have to allow our systems to register these little shifts as safe. We have to slowly build capacity, let the resilience move through our system in subtle ways, so we don’t jump into further disorganization out of fear.

When I think about the state of the world, be need swift shifts if we have any hope at all, and I don’t know how that is possible- particularly when I think about my knowledge of life within our organism moving towards health and harmony- its slow, titrated. I do believe that on a larger scale, the model is replicable, but what we need is intensely quicker, bigger shifts, if we have hope at all.

But then, ah, yes… then, I remember that coherence, organization, moving in harmony, flow- is self propagating, like plants growing out of concrete, and spreading, blooming all over. So while, the initial conditions are slow, there becomes a rapidity, an inertia, as the pendulation swing gains moment towards the other side, as we organize toward flow.

This gives me hope. That we can start small, maybe in your own body, your own community, and there will be waves of healing, of orienting towards our interconnectedness. We can talk about socialism in our friend groups, unions in our place of work, we can care for our neighbors. We can decide what kind of care and healing we want to immerse our own beings in. We can make the decision that now is the time to shift, and as we start getting some movement, some expansion and contraction, some pulsation- those efforts too, might be self-propagating.

This is me putting on my poet costume now, or my preacher costume- you pick, but please make them both cuter than me in a bald cap and beard in your mind.

It feels hard to not orient towards hope when everything feels so dismal and ruptured. It feels hard, because without it, we truly would crumble. Here is my attempt, filtered through the things I know about and the things I gesture towards, and messily attempt to convey- the things I vaguely know about, and are often simmering in the back of my mind.

I wonder how you might anchor into your own hope, find your own sense of vitality that wants to self propagate. It might be slow to start, but I hope you notice as it cascades later, into more depths, more connection.