Going Para(sympathetic)

Going Para(sympathetic): Health and healing at the level of the Parasympathetic nervous system

This is the fourth meditation in the series.

This meditation is divided into two parts. In the first half, listeners will appreciate change and the nature of direct experience and strengthen concentration in subtler sensations. In the second half, listeners will experience health and healing at the level of the Parasympathetic nervous system through the exploration of the posture, breath and mental state of exasperation.

Transcript

Welcome.

This profile offers a series of meditations and inquiries that explore the interconnections among our thoughts,

Breath,

Emotions,

Posture,

And well-being.

The meditations will vary from 35 to 55 minutes.

Please start in the seated position with the back unsupported,

If possible,

Either on the floor or in a chair.

If at some point you feel the need,

You can lean back against the wall or the back of the chair,

But try to stay upright as much as possible.

And at any point you feel like you would like to lie down to finish the recording,

Please do so.

Each recording will begin and end with wooden clacks.

Enjoy.

Finding the breath in any of its corporal manifestations.

No right or wrong.

Is any notice of the breath a notice of change?

What is changing?

If the attention isn't already down in the abdomen,

Belly,

Lower belly,

Lower back,

Side waist,

And gently invite a movement towards that region.

Moving from body breath awareness to belly breath awareness.

Again,

Belly just is a level rather than sometimes you can focus on a front back or side.

But play with floating the attention at some level.

See if you can be open to anything that's happening at that height.

And whatever height you're at,

Play with moving the attention,

The center of attention slightly towards your spine or at your spine and see what sensations show up when the attention is centered towards the back body.

Then more or less the same height,

Moving it towards the front body,

Maybe the muscles and or the skin.

And at the Hara,

Which is the Japanese word for the space,

Just behind at the level between the pubic bone and the navel and slightly in slightly behind.

But from behind the pubic bone.

And then opening it up bilaterally to flip the attention at the hips and side waist.

I've seen a couple of places,

Read a couple of places,

Where some sort of scientific measurement of neural activity and brain activity that we are conscious and semi-conscious of sensory experience at out of 2 million possible sensations to notice per second,

We notice 2,

000.

So not even 1%.

So,

Moving the awareness is like a little penlight,

Moving around in a dark space,

Bringing things to the fore,

To the awareness,

And then moving it back to the center of the body.

Moving around in a dark space,

Bringing things to the fore,

To the awareness,

While losing contact with other sensations.

There's an assumption that,

Oh,

The other sensations must be there.

But perception may very well only relay to us what it,

The minimum of what it needs for us to feel like we are present.

There are two aspects of the brain or the mind,

I call one the A-brain.

The A-brain is much more immediate in taking in or creating the 2 million sensory experiences per second,

And then perception edits and creates what it will send to or make available to the B-brain,

Our notice of experience at either a subtle semi-conscious level or at a fully aware notice.

How we build our image of our physical body and of our surroundings is a compilation of all the different senses.

So,

There's a level of insight that can come with practice,

That when you feel for the back of your hands and or your fingers right now,

The back of your hands and or your fingers right now,

That you're not taking in the direct experience alone,

But you're projecting what you assume and expect to be there.

So,

You'll have visual notions and conceptual notions that create and fill in.

So,

You're using your past sensory experiences to modify and understand and generate what you feel to be your hands.

But,

As you play with noticing,

Well,

What is my direct experience in this moment,

No matter how it's generated,

That there won't be a visual aspect of it because your eyes are closed.

So,

What is it if you were an alien dropped into your mind and your eyes are closed,

What would that alien,

How would it describe that experience and those experiences?

Is anything you're experiencing now static?

And depending on the subtlety that comes with a concentration and relaxed and open mind and focus,

What were at first kind of a cloud of tingling,

But the cloud of tingling is more,

For me right now,

Is more like a micro,

Minuscule swarm of bees shifting and changing its shape.

That shifting seems to be somewhat connected to where I feel like I'm consciously directing my attention to different smaller regions of my hands,

The palms,

Fingers,

Fingernails.

Do I even know that there's fingernails there?

What does a fingernail feel like?

Would that alien be able to describe would that alien be able to describe anything that has to do with fingernails?

Or could he even count the peninsulas of individual fingers?

Can you right now discern how many fingers you have,

Or are using concepts and past experience to both kind of assume and expect and give a redified answer?

A redified answer.

So there is a depth of practice that comes with an honesty of being able to drop the assumed and the expected.

So if I'm going to invite to see,

Well,

What are those hands connected to,

My hands are palms down on my knees.

Is it clear that my knees are not just somehow part of in the swarm of awareness and tingle and vibration and density of the swarm and some pressures and tensions?

So that certain density that seems to be defining some sort of loose boundary of where the clouds,

The mist of experience,

The tingly vibration,

If maybe that's your experience,

If not,

That's fine.

And when I look for my skin,

I get a certain different experience to see if I can find a more discrete boundary.

When I play with that,

I can find what must be my forearms.

So I'll invite you to play with noticing what's under,

Where there's,

Feels like there's contact,

But how in this moment,

Are you sure there's contact?

And then play with going up the forearms,

Trying to discern and let go of the concepts,

This mist of experience and the swarming of a tingling vibration if it's there.

Part of meditation practice is noticing what isn't there.

So you assume that you should be able to find your elbows.

My elbows were very hard to discern with direct floating attention.

Every once in a while,

There'll be a squeeze,

Some just hint of a pain or pressure at parts of my elbows,

But any sensation or experience that go,

Oh,

That's the same as that,

Or that is that pain or that sore is the intellectual,

Imaginary psychic mind trying to create some sort of stability and sameness,

Which only exists as a figment of the intellect.

So any subtle,

Direct experience of perception is microsecond fluctuations,

Change,

Arrival and disappearance.

Nice.

This is a very strong practice for concentration to stay at that level of perception,

Reception of subtle experiences.

And to do the entire body would take me more than an hour and would be a workout.

I don't think I could do the whole body at that level at this point.

It would just be tax the strength of my concentration at this point.

Of my concentration at this point.

We're going to do a practice that is honoring the parasympathetic nervous system.

It is a little complicated,

But the main idea is that the autonomic nervous system that is in charge of our organs and glands,

Heart rate,

Digestive tract and genitals has two modes of functioning.

One is sympathetic and the other is parasympathetic.

The sympathetic mode is when when there's an emergency or something very intense and the body is charged,

Ready to fight or flight or freeze.

The parasympathetic is the,

When the nervous system is in running for rest and restoration.

The parasympathetic and the sympathetic modes of functioning only happen one or the other.

So hopefully after an intense experience where the sympathetic mode has taken over and up the heart rate and created adrenaline and sent all the blood to the big muscles,

That it will relax out and the parasympathetic system can take over to generate rest and restoration and return back to the blood,

Back to the digestive tract and the genitals.

However,

There's a state of the sympathetic that's called freezing.

And rather than relinquishing control of the glands and organs,

The body stays in a frozen,

Rigidified state of fight or flight.

And those organs,

Although on a lesser level,

Are still being activated and are taught.

So it's very hard to move from a place of frozen sympathetic system into the parasympathetic.

And it takes a quiet,

Slow work.

And we'll take a look at the breath,

Especially of the posture and the breath of exasperation that helps assuage the sympathetic mode and open up the parasympathetic healing once again.

So that any event that doesn't immediately kind of shake out or fall out of the nervous system and the emotional physiology and the psyche will generate a solidifying or rigidifying of all those systems,

The muscular,

Neural organs and the thoughts.

The psyche will either have a dark spot,

A shunning away,

Or it will have thoughts that it has to completely think about all the time,

Obsessing.

And then I'm sure there's the freezing aspect of the psyche,

Which is going to be a numbing so that if a person has a trauma that doesn't shake out or an event that doesn't shake out,

It gets instilled and reified,

Rigidified in the these three aspects of our being.

That if we can't feel sadness or fear fully when it's happening or afterwards and then let it go,

That we're going to stop feeling at a certain openness depth.

So it can be very hard to,

After a trauma has been instilled,

That we may start to lose a certain lightness and lust for life.

That if we can't feel an anger or a rage,

We're not going to be able to feel joy and compassion.

So there's trauma therapies that I'm becoming more and more aware of,

And hopefully we all are.

I say them as a truth now,

But I offer you to say,

Is this true?

And that is that every thought has an emotional aspect to it.

Even if it's very intellectual,

Rational,

Even those thoughts are connected to the emotional physiology.

We don't make rational decisions without some sort of emotional support response.

So every emotion will state,

Will have an effect or an aspect connected to the breathing.

So we'll change the pattern of breathing.

And then every breath pattern will have a corresponding aspect of posture.

So what I'm learning and what I've heard from three different modalities of trauma,

Intention,

Recovery,

Release,

Healing,

Catharsis,

Is that it takes a postural and a breath and a mental aspect.

And I call this going para,

Going parasympathetic.

So usually we're sitting a little more upright,

But here,

Both out of relaxedness,

But also out of a sense of protection of the front body,

You let the spine curve from the sacrum and you can let the head lower down and let the shoulders come forward a little bit.

So if you have a chair and you want,

Or a wall,

And you could actually lean up against that just to make it just a little bit more easier to be in relaxation in this,

I tend to go sway back.

So this very posture puts up kind of a discomfort in my plexus,

Upper belly,

But that's okay.

And then there's a breath on the exhale that is the breath of exasperation.

And I just am so appreciating,

Appreciating more and more what this means.

So exasperation is usually through the mouth,

Right?

You usually can hear it gently.

And it's an exhale,

But that exhale,

And if I haven't mentioned that,

You might move your hands out onto your knees a little bit,

Just to give a little support for that falling forward,

So that if your hands went away,

You might actually fall forward.

And that exasperation is,

What is an exasperation?

It's like,

It's just surrender.

I give up.

There's nothing I can do.

So you're relinquishing control and responsibility.

And it's a surrender,

Both has a physical and breath aspect,

But a mental aspect of like,

I can't do it anymore.

I can't change it.

I can't make it better.

And acceptance of that which is.

And it's a mental release.

So see if with that exasperation,

There isn't a spaciousness in the brain and the softness of the skull or softness of the brain in a spaciousness of the skull.

So instead of it being kind of a two or three second,

Slow it down just slightly,

Breathe through the mouth.

You can use a little bit of,

You'll feel the pressure maybe build up that palms of the hands,

The wrists.

And long,

Smooth,

Barely audible exhalation.

Aspiration.

And to the point where you feel some of the work we did yesterday,

You feel some lifting of the pelvic floor.

You might feel some energy at the pubic bone,

Lower belly,

Perineum.

But then see if you can't feel something of a pinch in the side waist,

The hips.

Cause that work of the side waist in this full exhale.

Is allowing the diaphragm or the two muscles of the diaphragms.

So from now on,

Say it in the plural,

Unless I'm talking about only one side of the diaphragms to relax up.

And it's most natural relaxed state up into the lung cavity.

So this releasing of the ribs back in this curving forward actually relaxes the both diaphragms.

If the ribs are slightly forward,

It flattens the diaphragm so that on the exhale,

The exhale is actually a relaxation of the diaphragm muscle that goes into a dome.

In this long,

Smooth,

Firm exhale,

We'll use vacuums and pressures and alignment to either allow the diaphragms to fully relax or stretch them.

So it might feel awkward or discomfort that any tightness or psychological manifestations that are in the tissues and the movement of the diaphragm.

But it's also finding the place of where the most health could most health could be all with a sense of surrender and the surrender isn't exasperation may or may not have a sense of just giving it all over this.

Like I,

It's not mine.

I'm going to give it over to the universe to life.

If it's in your mindset,

You might be giving it over to the devil or you might be giving it over to God,

But it's not mine or yours to deal with.

And it'd be nice if it's giving it over to God,

But how,

Whatever it,

Or giving it over to some universal wisdom that seems to make things work.

Nice.

And then through the nose,

Inaudibly,

Slow inhale,

Maintaining some of that pinch of the the waist.

So the breath will go into the back and side ribs.

And as soon as there's any tension on the inhale or work up in the throat or any effort of kind of lifting the shoulders at all,

Then I stop.

It might only be a half inhale.

Or it might be three quarters,

Might be seven,

Eight,

Doesn't matter.

And then the exhale,

I go through the nose again until I get down to about 20%,

10%.

And then I open the mouth and do a slightly audible exhale and see if I can't feel it in the side waists and feel a pinching of the side waists.

Maintain consciously some of that side waist pressure to give the support for an inhale to move into those upper ribs,

Side ribs,

Back body,

Maybe even up to the rhomboids between the shoulder blades.

Maybe not that high because,

But it depends.

And five breaths,

Sequential breath is a lot for my concentration.

The couple places I've seen that invite this practice,

And it can be done sitting,

You can be done sitting in a chair with the elbows on the table.

It can be done kind of at a half bent at a table where you're just standing and putting the forearms and or where you're just standing and putting the forearms and or the hands on a table or a guardrail.

But there's always a curve so that the entire back is relaxed backwards into a gentle curve.

However,

Keep some lordosis of the neck by not letting the head drop and keeping the chin slightly lifted.

So you can go and digest this at back in a full sitting posture.

And if you have the inclination,

You can do a second set.

The people that I've come across invite to go through five sets of five breaths.

I've probably never done more than more than a few sets of a few breaths,

No right or wrong.

This understanding and appreciation of how the different systems of our brain and mind,

Like the limbic system,

Which is the more reptilian and the fight and flight and freeze.

And the emotional component to all this component to all this and the muscular,

The rigidifying in the avoidance and obsessing aspects of our thoughts.

That facilitate and create the greatest opportunity for change at the level of the limbic system.

Is this in the parasympathetic activating the parasympathetic system,

Which is relaxation and recovery.

So to heal any aspect of an experience that has been lodged and instilled in our psyche requires this sort of work,

Which is a surrender,

A invitation and opportunity for change of the diaphragm and the breathing patterns.

And this kind of curved over allows for the diaphragm to relax as much as possible on the exhale.

On the exhale.

And then to gently engage.

On the inhale.

And that's why it's important to just breathe into the back body.

And maybe up into the between the shoulder blades.

Maybe a little bit into the armpits,

But not trying to work the diaphragm too strongly to get an inhale up into the throat.

We'll take just another couple of minutes.

To sit in any meditation technique or style.

And then if you're not already there,

I invite you to gently lower the attention in several breaths or however many it takes to get the awareness floating in the lower belly.

Lower belly breath and do full belly breath,

Which is that surrender of everything,

The pelvic floor,

The perineum,

Forward and back,

Anus and genitals,

Hips,

The punch.

A full belly,

Lower belly,

Relaxation breath relaxes the dynamics that are required for upper torso breathing.

So it might really feel like maybe a 30 or 40% inhale.

Cuídate y cuida los demás.

Take care of yourself and those around you.