Whatever you are feeling . . . of course.

I've been stuck on posting a write-up of the next energy session I had. It's confusing. It's complicated. It's personal.

While I garnered a lot of meaning from it, I'm not sure it will translate on the page. I'm still deciding how it needs to show up here - or if it needs to show up here. I realized yesterday I was stuck, so I'm posting something today to get me moving again!

So, today is a podcast recommendation. This episode of On Being is amazing. Krista Tippett interviews Christine Runyan and it's titled: What’s Happening in Our Nervous Systems? She is the one who gave me the title of this blog post, when she said, "Whoever you are, whatever you are feeling . . . of course.".

Here is a brief description from the show notes: "Clinical psychologist Christine Runyan explains the physiological effects of a year of pandemic and social isolation - what’s happened at the level of stress response and nervous system, the literal mind-body connection. And she offers simple strategies to regain our fullest capacities for the world ahead."

Their discussion looks at the impact of the species level trauma we've all been going through over the past year+ through the lens of our nervous system and bodies.

Basically, when our bodies are assaulted in any way we have a natural response from our autonomic nervous system (the fight/flight we all know about). The threat and response is not detected at a conscious level of awareness, it is detected in our basic nervous system. This activates a series of very predictable physical responses that give us the reserve necessary to fight or flight from whatever the threat is.

Typically, when the brain tells the body that the threat is gone then the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) can jump in. This is also innate and its job is to calm things down to our natural state of calmness and present awareness.

The challenge this year with Covid, racial reckoning, the US election, the isolation and death surrounding us is that the threat has never felt like it was gone so our parasympathetic nervous system has not stepped in to do its work.

Without this natural system stepping in, we either stay in a heightened state of fight/flight arousal or dive into another natural variation in our nervous system - the freeze response. While the freeze response is actually a highly aroused state, it presents as numbness and detachment. Kind of like what Adam Grant described in the now viral languishing article. The body 'tucks in' to protect itself, but for people who have experience with depression, this can be a scary place to land because even though it is a natural response, it feels so familiar or 'on the road' to a depressive state.

So what do we do?

What I love about this podcast is that Christine talks about simple ways we can manually restart our parasympathetic nervous system and kick it into gear to help us relax. We need to give our bodies what they are missing to feel safe and protected so that they our nervous systems can calm down.

She reaffirms to us that our bodies are doing their best to take care of us and we have more power than we realize to reorient ourselves and tap into our innate abilities to take care of ourselves. Connecting with our bodies, trusting our bodies, accepting our bodies and loving our bodies is powerful.

We have a choice here about how we react.