Portals to Connection

Dear friends,

This Saturday, November 18, I am leading a workshop called Portals to Connection: A Workshop on the Nervous System through the Lens of Polyvagal Theory.  The in-person spots have a wait list at this point but there is still plenty of room online, either in person or by recording. 1:00 to 3:30p ET. Cost is $55 and you can sign up through Radiant Yoga and Wellness.  If your normal studio is The Yoga Tree in Seattle, you can sign up there. The full description is in the links. In the meantime, I want to offer an idea of how I have been working with some of this material in the past week which has led me to think of myself as a nervous system connoisseur. To me, this means that I’m taking sips of what is happening in my nervous system, swirling what I find around in my system and using all my sensing abilities to learn what I can know about it.   

In the course I’m taking on Polyvagal Theory and the autonomic nervous system (ANS), we had an assignment. The assignment was to spend the week watching closely, as often as possible, to see what state/s we were in our ANS throughout the day. And, as we did this, the questions we were encouraged to answer were: where are you and how do you know? What does my mind and body feel like as I straddle connection, fight, flight and collapse? In addition, what do the blended states feel like? These are questions I have been exploring for decades, but with better knowledge and more language for what is happening, this week has been extra interesting.

As you probably know, Ohio just had a major election issue on reproductive rights that I really wanted to win. Another member of the training and I were texting about it on Tuesday afternoon before we heard the results. In honor of my assignment, I kept feeling into where I was in my ANS. At one point I realized that I was 50% ok (ventral vagal/VV) about what I thought would happen (our side winning), but half of the other part veered toward the sympathetic nervous system (SNS-fight or flight/danger), and the remaining part would go toward dorsal vagal (DV-collapse/life threat). I was veering back and forth all afternoon. Not very pleasant, but very interesting. From a PVT point of view, if something is unpleasant and I am able to be curious about it, there is still a reasonable level of connection present. I loved knowing and feeling into that. I also noticed that though parts of me were relaxed, I was holding my breath a lot, all afternoon. After we won, there were huge sighs happening, a letting go of my shoulders, and it still took a while for my system to recalibrate. Thankfully, I slept well that night, so clearly a sense of connection and safety were present. 

I’ve adapted this next part from a note I sent our teacher, Gabriel Kram about my experience a few days later. As I write this, I’m here in Chicago helping my son before and after shoulder surgery, and it’s been a week. His surgery went fine (docs always say that) but his recovery will be rough, and he lives alone. We are navigating how best to prepare for that, and it’s still not clear how this will work. I’m not breathing easily again, unless I’m directly paying attention to my breath. Yogis have fine-tuned the understanding of the effects of breathing. We have practices to move the nervous system in lots of directions (calming and energizing for two), though our community has seen variations of the “norm” in up to 20% of people. What I mean by this is that in breathing practices that are supposed to be calming, up to 20% may have a different experience, especially in the beginning. I don’t think any study of the nervous system can be complete without at least a basic discussion of breathing.

And not only is the breath affected by the nervous system, but changing the breath can totally affect the ANS, moving us back toward connection when nothing else has changed. The breath must be included as a portal to connection. 

In our training last week, we had an interesting discussion about sports and how the blended states of play and competition can help us be in flow states. Because I am only one of two yogis in this course, things we know are not taken for granted by others in our group. There is another layer here about breath. There is an interesting discussion in the yoga/sports world about breathing through the nose. John Douillard, an Ayurvedic doctor and author, wrote an entire book about this years ago called Body, Mind, and Sport. One of his main contentions in this book is that you can stay relaxed, in the zone, at high levels of competition, if you are breathing through the nose. I have experimented with this extensively in myself and with my students, and the results have been amazing. When we train ourselves to breathe through the nose, through progressively more challenging activities, it is possible to stay very relaxed the whole time. There is this great feeling of staying in Savasana (yogic deep relaxation) even as the body is really working hard. We could call that the zone, or the ventral vagal connection system, with a side of SNS. I had one student, a runner, who took a year to train himself to breathe through his nose so he could try and run a marathon that way. He had run in many marathons at that point and was probably in his 60s. He ran the whole race breathing through his nose and felt great throughout. He also told me afterward that his recovery was the easiest it had ever been. 

Other portals to connection I’m aware of seem strictly physical. Stanley Rosenberg’s exercises are in this category, and there are many other ones I know (we sometimes call them hacks because they work so well.) I think one idea here is to free up the pathway for the nerves so they can easily pass along all messages of well-being up to the brain. Or maybe just all messages. Perhaps a crimped nerve is a message of danger for the ANS. I think this is especially true for the nerves in the belly but likely everywhere. 

ANS state affects the body shape and actions AND changing the shape can change the state/actions. I think this is one reason why yoga is so beneficial. A well-rounded class gives someone all the shapes of the ANS, but generally leaves them open and relaxed by the end. And hopefully they have a loving relationship with their teacher which magnifies the beneficial effects. One simple example here. When I woke up this morning, I felt somewhat overwhelmed by what had to happen to support my son. I was curled up in bed and part of me (DVS) wanted to stay that way. Most of me did want to meet the day, so I rolled over on my back with a pillow under my upper back to open my chest/heart. Breathing opened and deepened and in a few minutes I felt like getting up. At that point I was also able to do a few more exercises to nourish myself before jumping into helper mode.

This next part was not part of my note to Gabriel but was an amazing part of my day. My son and I spent the morning getting him ready to be on his own for several hours while I taught a long-planned Dancing with Dragons Reiki workshop with Linda Oshins. For two hours I was in beloved community. Despite the challenges my son and I were facing, I could feel my whole nervous system relaxing and settling as we gathered on Zoom. And I was really excited (VV with a side of SNS) to tell everyone my news.  Before I got on Zoom, I had told my son that I would be with Reiki folks who would likely want to send healing energy to us and asked if he would be open to that. Though attuned many years ago, he has since dismissed the use of Reiki for himself. On this day he said he was open to receiving Reiki from us all. Such joy! Linda guided us through an exercise of sending Reiki to him, in a way that I could feel the wholeness of the universe lovingly blessing us all.  I could feel the loving embrace of our community. It released me from worry and dropped me right into love. My whole body felt shimmering and vast. Ahhhh. Pure connection state/VV.

After the workshop I glowed for a while longer and then settled back into some stress of what we were facing and doing.  But when I went back to bed that night, buzzing with exhaustion, I remembered the time of delight and loving support through Reiki and once again, there it was—a gentle and relaxing opening into ease and then sleep.

I hope you will join the group on Saturday as we dive into ways to connect to our sense of connection—some very personal and others likely to be useful for us all.  As usual, we’ll share what our experiences are so we can get a sense of which practices might be most useful in which situations.