Create tensegrity in your tongue via this Parasympathetic practice.

“The Parasympathetic Life” offers you a tool you can incorporate into your routine that will allow your Nervous System to come out of chronic Fight or Flight states. The stress response is meant for surviving physical threats, but it is getting activated when the train is delayed, your friend didn’t call, or someone offends you. This work is about how we have gotten to this point where we no longer have resilience and adaptability in the face of even mild adversity, despite our best efforts.

Our unconscious brain is designed to manage all of our bodily systems based on our location in the environment. When we remove one system to work with it (such as the nervous system, or one nerve) in order to induce a change, we are no longer operating within a holistic paradigm where all systems function together autonomically. Altering the nerve from the outside may cause a shift, but since the unconscious mind did not create it, it cannot recreate it. The nervous system’s perception of danger in the environment didn’t actually transform, it just got overruled. Our body knows how to find homeostasis based on where we are, not how we feel.

This depiction of Fight or Flight physiology happens to show only the active stages of the stress response. Missing are the passive stages of the Sympathetic Nervous System that also occur reflexively but are not as well-known or understood. Also missing from most information about the stress response are the structural changes. Every mammal tucks their tail, ducks their head, shifts forwards on their toes, narrows their vision, and more.

Now that I have stepped away from teaching and practicing yoga, I see how yoga kept me and my fellow yoga students mentally occupied with all the instructions we were constantly following (keep the inner heel anchored, deepen the hip crease, draw your shoulders back and down…) We were changing our musculature mostly by pulling on our muscle attachments (a frequent site of injury for yogis). We were getting ego boosts from achieving more advanced asanas and attaining extreme ranges in the poses. (Do we really need to take our ankles behind our necks?) The adrenaline/cortisol release from the breathing practices created an addictive high that kept us coming back for more.

The more I learned about the nervous system in my CranioSacral Therapy studies, the more my meditation practice became essential to promote what I thought was Parasympathetic tone, give me insights into my actions, reactions and relationships, as well as to prepare my instrument for optimal performances on stage. Even though having my son and becoming separated created a challenge to have a consistent sitting practice, I still managed to meditate most days, even if my only time to practice was when nursing.

After a whiplash/concussion injury at the end of 2018 left me debilitated, one would have thought that the Nervous System work of CST would have been exactly what would help me heal. How wrong I was. In fact, I believe that all the time I spent studying and receiving this modality created so much fluidity, sensitivity and slack in my system, I was left vulnerable to injury. When CST, which I had so much faith in as a system of healing and wellbeing, failed to help me move past this incident, I turned to other modalities. As with CST, these other methods only offered temporary relief, if at all. I was completely confused how I, a Somatic Movement Therapist, Somatic Experiencing/trauma healing practitioner, longtime student and practitioner of Visceral Manipulation, Neural Manipulation, yoga and meditation could still be stuck in a stress response despite my best efforts using all my skills while receiving consistent bodywork from many highly skilled practitioners..