Your deepest state of freedom and aliveness is biologically driven.  

Natural thriving is rooted in the laws of biology.  It is dependent on the balance of our internal states.  Our inner states are in a constant process of navigating the environment, scanning the landscape for places of safety and threat in order to reduce stress and conflict and therefore maximize survival.

Communication as a skill also lies at the center of the ability to navigate.  And how we communicate largely determines whether we survive or thrive. Dr. Stephen Porges’s work established that this is more than a sociocultural need, it is a biological imperative.  Through the work of his Polyvagal Theory, we are now able to determine, to some degree, how safe voice tonality, emotional affect and facial gestures not only regulate relationships, but actually determine the state of positive health in our internal organs (via vagus nerves dorsal and ventral), from our digestion, to our heart, lungs, and breath, to self-regulation of stress hormones.  From this biological perspective, greater aliveness and freedom in one’s relational communication improves the same in one’s systems of health.

The Arousal System
The terms below are relevant to the “arousal system,” those components of the brain and nervous system which attempt to maintain our survival and protection.  At times, this comes at the cost of our connection.  When short-term nervous system survival-protection persists for days, weeks, and years, the felt-sense of safety and trust in ourselves, others and our environment becomes seemingly lost. And our health suffers.

Past Re-Cognizing to Re-Connection 
Too often we attempt to manage ourselves, our relationships, and our environment,  with cognitive means – ie, intellectual and cognitive concepts and methods. Indeed re-cognizing needed change is a good start.  It is necessary … but not sufficient.

Embodiment is the re-connection key. It is here that a sense of trust needs to be regained (first in oneself), neglected needs must still be met, and a true feeling of compassionate respectful connection and bonding must be restored. In fact, it is the managing mind that is often the first to get in the way of true, felt connection, or, secure embodiment.

Begin with Education 
The source of knowledge below comes from my studies in the somatic field, beginning in 1980 with Kinesiology at the University of Maryland, and extends over 40 years to countless teachers full with wisdom and personal guidance.

The terms themselves come from in-depth studies of the understanding of how the “internal rhythms” of the body affect our mind, mood, emotion, thought processes . . . .  and health.  These teachers include Dr. Peter Levine (SE), Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, Steve Hoskinson (OI), Dr. Stephen Porges, Debbie Rosas (Nia), Eddy Marks and Mary Obendorfer (Iyengar Yoga), Dr. John Upledger (CST),  and Jean Pierre Barral, D.O. (VM).

Thank you for your interest in education. Wherever there is chronic conflict, physical or relational, there are the vestiges of past powerlessness and helplessness.  Knowledge provides new and necessary answers for change.  So take your time, read in small bites, digest what you can, be gentle when what you read is activating, and always continue to challenge yourself on this essential path of growth.

From Protection to Connection
This PC-30 list (Protection-or-Connection) is for Change Leaders whose capacity for genuine communication is crucial to building engaging, emergent platforms that support meaningful relationship and satisfying accomplishment.

 

PC-30 Glossary 

Activation and Settling
The ability of the self-organism to stay balanced through a gentle rhythm of sympathetic and parasympathetic tone.   The problem:  the activation of self-protection often persists far too long before returning to self-regulation. There is a cost of not de-activating:  we adapt to it, re-arranging life to accommodate this state. This is akin to the experience of driving down a freeway where debris falls in the middle of the road – you have to accommodate, braking, slowing down, driving around it time after time. Moreover, a lack of de-activation sends the message to the unconscious of a reduced chance of survival (“If I’m always an activated impala, there’s no way I’ll survive.”  “What doesn’t come down gets eaten.”).  Reducing levels of activation brings all parts of the brain-body-emotions back online to lower levels of stress.

Boundary:  A personal membrane communicates the internal state of the self to the external state of the environment.  You must have a boundary to have a relationship, because without a “boundary between two” there is only one entity.  Without de-activation of the self-protective responses, the membrane (boundary) is weakened which permits the perception of excessive threat, even when real threat to one’s survival isn’t present.  The greater the loss of boundary, the more difficult it is to perceive safety, and therefore to receive help.  This is extremely important in the healthy regulation of neuro-chemical-endocrine balance.

Completion: Completion is the full expression/experience of an organic impulse and the achievement of a boundary.  Completion of an impulse allows a cycle or phase to arrive to fullness.  Life can then move on to its next phase.  This happens when previously aborted somatic and autonomic responses can emerge and fulfill their original function. We have a pre-disposition toward completion (finishing = gestalt).  The completion of a self-protective response is the signal to the entire nervous system to de-activate.  Completion happens when we can fully be with the total experience.  This integration leads to the ability listen within, to ourselves, and without, to others, with greater coherence.

Containment:  Containment is biological inner resilience, where the personal membrane can flex and maintain integrity (not rupture) while holding the shape of a feeling, emotion or interaction. This allows for a somatic process to move through its full cycle toward even greater resilience and security.    External containment comes from the managing mind, where “fixing feels better,” and is often a band-aid that does not allow for deeper internal repair.

Containment vs. Catharsis
1)  Imagine popping an overstretched balloon with a pin to let the air out.  While the release of pressure can give relief, it is temporary.  More often it represents uncontainable catharsis and the energy that discharges too fast.  Without integration, it causes fragmentation, explosion, and dissociation.   The fragmented charge often later reactivates threat response, even when not provoked by outside stimuli, showing up later as symptoms such as rage or panic attacks.
2)  Imagine letting go of the mouth of an over-stretched balloon. What results from flying across the room is not unlike the energy released in anxiety.
3)  Now imagine gradual release of the air.   The balloon may make a slightly squeaky sound between pauses, like gear shifting.  Eventually the balloon is relaxed, and container is not broken, and still intact.  Its integrity and functionality is maintained in the process. 

Curiosity:  the opposite of trauma.  If I can be curious, it must be safe.  Trauma is conditioned limitation, caused by a sense of threat.  Curiosity opens the doors to new possibilities.

Differentiation/ Symbiosis/Separation:  Symbiosis is the self that dissolves into the other with a loss of boundary, a loss of oneself – when you move, I move.   Separation is dissociation from a relatedness to others.   Differentiation is the middle, balanced road between these two:   “I am separate AND I am related” – I am connected to you, and I am also me alone.  Early trauma decreases maturity, differentiation and proper processing – it disorganizes – the earlier and more intense the stress, the more potential disorganization occurs.  For some, a loss of symbiosis feels like complete separateness, and challenges one’s existential self.  Symbiosis = I’d rather feel you than feel me. For others, only separation feels safe, and moving toward connecting can also challenge keeping one’s existential self intact.

Discharge:  Neurogenic release through the ANS in attempt to re-regulate the reciprocal action of the Symp and Parsymp NS

Felt Sense: A complete experience of the aliveness of the self through a gestalt experience within the self, and with the environment.  One is able to sense the awe in the wholeness of life, rather than analyze disparate parts.

 

Defense Responses
Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fold:  Necessary self-protective responses that, when intact, foster basic instincts.
Fight:  Constriction that may lead progressively to irritation, frustration, anger, then rage.  Passive/aggressive is the inability to fully embody one’s own FightFlight, and to project it to someone else to engage in it.
Flight:  Constriction that may lead progressively to uneasiness, concern, anxiety, fear, panic, then terror.
Freeze: High tension co-contraction of agonist and antagonist muscles, ie “scared stiff”.  Can also be the dissociative absence of emotion, fear, lack of concern, numbness, lack of affect. As all protective responses are a gift from god, freeze is a circuit breaker when the system is overloaded with activation.  The system shuts because there is too much draw on it.    If a person is frozen, the loss of control means complete and utter “danger”.   Dissociation is an aspect of the freeze, but is a regulated response when one can associate again at will, like in popping out of visualizing the dinner one might fix that evening.  Immobility:  Innate, primitive default reaction when active fight/flight from predation is not possible.  It consists of freezing and collapsing.
Fold:  A complete or sudden loss of bodily tone, and a greater degree of nervous system disorganization.
Re-establishing Defense responses:  Allowing for the motor action (muscles and nervous system) of Fight Flight that re-establishes power in the nervous system and makes one capable of a true response.  It restores natural boundaries.

Inner/Outer Vortex:  Outer vortex feels like it has a life of its own, a pull, a gravity, a movement away from the self.  Internal vortex is best strengthened when with a felt experience of our own basic inner goodness, and a sense of being resourced internally (and perhaps externally as well).  Stabilizing the Inner Vortex:  this allows for the discharge of the Outer Vortex.  You strengthen it by noticing it more, observing it more, and reinforce it by joining with someone in it . By lending your own interest and curiosity here, you impart a feeling of biological safety.

Joining:  The (therapist’s) capacity to enter into a shared experiential field while maintaining healthy boundaries.  Here, you support a client’s organic impulses with your own movement, body, communication, energetics (through mirroring and differentiation both).  Joining says to the other “you already have within you whatever is necessary to take your next step.”  Joining is complete when it happens on two levels, the unconscious and unconscious manifest.   We strengthen boundaries through the Goldilocks relationship of joining – not too close, not too far.

Observer: The observer allows for a sense of stabilization as well as containment.  It lends attention.  Therefore without it, we cannot integrate our experiences.  Those who don’t like looking at or feeling their weaknesses have lost the observer and are in a state of collapse that creates unconscious over-symbiosis.

Organism:  Somatic work is primarily with organismic biological organization, and secondarily with personality and story.  An organism goes through organic cycles which regulate its function in relation to both internal and external environments.  These cycles are flexible and self-regulating, and as such, they are the ground substance of a sense of inner foundation and inner security.

Orientation:  A feeling of engagement and harmony with the environment by connecting to it through the senses.  The next phase of orientation is preparatory self-protection, where animals scan the environment for the movement of large shapes and shadows. Two marked body responses are:  1)  agility of the body as the head turns with eyes ears and nose to the source of stimulation, and 2) autonomic shifts such as pupil dilation, a drop in skin resistance and a momentary drop in heart rate. These bodily preparations register environmental information to determine the take off point for further autonomic response, which can be dorsal vagal, sympathetic, or ventral vagal  – that is, fight, flight, freeze, or their opposite:  friend.  Re-establishing Orienting responses: The ability to establish orientation, and therefore social engagement, inhibits the self-protective responses (activates the ventral vagal response) and allows for relaxation in the self, and in relationship to others.

Pendulation: The primal rhythm of life, a movement from the positive to the negative that creates relationship and balance.
Positive/negative:  expansion/contraction, as in, the eyes see because of this contrast between dark and light.  Our conditioning is based on our need for duality to keep us safe.  When we are not able to maintain a natural “figure 8 movement” between both ends of the spectrum, we become polarized.  PETER LEVINE on Trauma Resolution and Polarity Therapy (pendulation)  (Seminar 6/97)
“…The two polarities, just like in Polarity Therapy, are expansion and contraction. The two results of polarization are expansion and contraction, so you have a wave undulation between the expansive quality of the energy movement and its contraction. That’s the normal response of that universe:  expansion-contraction, expansion-contraction.”  (One vortex is the compression. The opposite is an experience of expansion.)  “Again, they have to be linked together, because from a physics point of view, singularities are notoriously unstable. If you have something that’s just one polarity, either expansion or contraction, it will eventually go into an unstable explosion or annihilation, either rigidity or fragmentation. You have to have this pulsing back and forth. This is the key that we come to over and over, really the fundamental essence phenomenologically of this (SE) approach. The movements between  expansion and contraction is the normal process of self-regulation, the energetic basis of self-regulation.  “As I talk about this, I really see how deeply I was influenced by Stone [in 1966]. I had not thought about it for years, but being here I can really see how he got me to start thinking in these terms, how he helped me start to put these thoughts together, as did many others mentioned in the book acknowledgements. But he is one person I should put in, in the second edition.”

Resourcing: Internal and external strengths that help a person maintain a sense of self and inner integrity in the face of disruption.  Skills, qualities, characteristics of the individual that give the power to deal with challenge.  Resource is generated by self-regulatory capacity.

Relationship:  A natural rhythm between the inner and outer vortex, between self and other.  We’re meant for relationship, but are often taught to conform in order to keep a relationship.  For one’s own relationship to self to come to completion, both Experience (down & in) and Expression (up & out) must come into conscious awareness and to fullness.

Experience:  The internal code for processing an event or condition.  Internal processing for the organism occurs through the Somatic Trinity – Sensation (reptilian brain), Emotion (mammalian brain) and Cognition (neocortical brain).  The lack of one channel of processing can cause the others to get into overdrive. Together these form the gestalt of our experience.

Expression:  The movement up and out of energy and connection in relation to the environment to acquire and fulfill one’s needs.

Resource: The ability to associate with (in the nervous system/brain) and to utilize both internal characteristics and external conditions to empower the self in order to settle, to change in perception, take fruitful action and find mutuality.

Safety: The felt-secure internal presence of oneself or in joining others. This establishes a broad (therapeutic) relationship that promotes exploration, balance and growth.   Kindle: The fire of threat is stoked by rising sympathetic activation and lack of an online observer (lack of consciousness).   Quench: The fire of threat is cooled by sympathetic de-activation, settling and processing of the situation by a conscious (inner) observer.

Self-regulation/Dysregulation:  The ability of the organism to maintain its natural cycles and phases, regardless of external conditions or violations.  If this process is stopped (by polarized nervous system processes), dysregulation occurs until one discovers re-regulation within and without.  

Sensation:  This is the language of the deeper self, because it leads to a felt-sense of self more than any other sense.  It is through sensation that we know how to regulate the self (hand on the hot stove) without thinking (neocortex), and therefore to guide our lives rather than control and manage (neocortex).  Our senses get dulled by obedience (neocortex), stress, trauma, and more. Sensation is the language of the body, the unconscious, which is most of who we are.

Stabilization:  A dominant association with the Inner-Blue Vortex, a feeling of being resourced either internally, externally or both.  Because of this dominant association in the nervous system with the sense of empowerment, the Outer-Red Vortex becomes “smaller” by comparison.

Titration:  Instead of popping an overstretched balloon (catharsis), let the air out slowly.  Another example:  instead of skiing straight down the black diamond, traverse.

Tracking:  Allowing the observer to notice and be present with the Sensation, Emotion, Cognition.  A therapist tracks a client, following their inner and outer experiential process, by feeling it in themselves viscerally, conceptually, and intuitively.  The aim is to provide containment for the self-organizing process to build and restore .

Trauma:  Overwhelm.  Too much, too fast, too soon.  A staggering or repeated inability to meet a need, to barely cope.  A breach in the boundary of the self, a break in the protective membrane that leads to an overwhelming helplessness (or to hopelessness, freeze).  The result is separation and loss of communication.
Communication then becomes conditioned, survival-based, over or under adaptive but not responsive, due to a lingering perception of threat. There is a failure of the ability to discriminate. We can become conditioned away from organic natural heart-based responses to life.  Trauma is stored in implicit (non-speaking) memory, body consciousness.  Trauma is a state of dysregulation of implicit organic organization – it causes disorientation, a disorder in the capacity to be present to who and what is in front of me.  In the face of disorientation, one dominantly perceives past memory.

Trust:  The inherent association with a sense of goodness in oneself and in life.  Feelng resourced, the individual feels empowered, and with empowerment comes stability, settling, and solidity,  Settling becomes the dominant relationship to oneself and others, as opposed to activation.  With that, there is an ability to be in the Inner-blue/Outer-red vortex with higher degrees of containment irrespective of the degree of activation in a given challenge.