So this is a deeper piece.
Slower and more detailed.
Than most of what you'll hear about the nervous system.
In other talks,
I've kept the nervous system very simple.
But here I'd like to open the bonnet a little.
To show you the actual map that clinicians work from when we help bodies heal and to explain each part in plain language.
No jargon without an explanation.
And no claims that go further than the evidence.
There is a practice at the end,
If you can.
Listen somewhere you won't be interrupted.
And if you need to stop and come back to that another day,
Please do.
That's very much in spirit of what we are about to talk about.
So,
I work as an integrative therapist.
Which means I spend my days with people whose bodies are carrying more than they can comfortably hold.
Anxiety that won't switch off Numbness that won't lift.
Old experiences that still live in the chest,
The gut and the jaw.
And over the years.
.
.
I have become quite wary of how this subject is talked about.
The quick fix is the one hour transformations.
The idea that if you just find the right technique,
Everything will release at once.
Because what I see again and again is that bodies heal in a particular way,
Slowly,
Through repetition,
In small doses,
Inside safe relationships.
And the science,
When you look at it properly,
It tells the exact same story.
So to make this real rather than abstract.
Let me describe someone today.
Now,
She's a blend of many people I've sat with over the years,
With details changed of course,
So nobody could recognize themselves.
But everything about her is true to what I see in the room.
And I'll call her Neve.
So,
Neve came to me after years of what she called,
Being fine.
Really good job.
Kind to everyone.
Never any trouble.
And a body that hadn't properly slept in a decade.
A jaw that ached every morning.
And a habit of going completely blank.
Whenever anyone raise their voice.
Now she'd read every book.
And she really could explain to me her own nervous system better than some professionals.
But somehow none of that reached her body.
And I'll come back to Neve as we go.
Because her story shows the map better than any diagram.
So let me walk you through it.
Let me start with something called Neuroception.
Now it's a term coined by the researcher Stephen Porges,
And in plain words it means this.
Your body is constantly scanning for safety and danger below the level of your awareness.
So sometimes before you've had a single conscious thought,
Your nervous system has already made a judgment about the room you've walked into,
The face in front of you,
The tone of that voice.
Roughly the way a dog decides about a visitor before anyone has said hello.
Now this matters because it explains something that confuses a lot of people.
You can know in your head that you are safe.
And you can tell yourself.
This is fine.
Nothing bad is happening.
And your body can completely disagree with you.
Now,
That isn't you being irrational.
It's two different systems giving two different answers.
The thinking brain is slower and more logical,
And the body's detection system is faster,
Older,
And very cautious.
And when they disagree,
The body usually wins.
Which is why you can't simply talk a frightened body into feeling safe.
It has to experience safety repeatedly.
Before it believes it.
Now this was Niamh's whole problem in one sentence.
Her head had known for years that she was safe,
But her body had never once been consulted.
The second idea.
Is one of the most useful maps in trauma work.
And it's called the window of tolerance.
Now that's a phrase from a psychiatrist,
Dan Siegel.
Now really imagine a window.
Inside it.
The range where you can function.
Where you can feel things,
Even strong things.
And still think,
Still connect.
And still respond rather than react.
So you might be stressed,
Sad or angry inside the window,
But you are still you.
You're still at the wheel.
Now,
Above the window is too much.
Overwhelm.
Panic.
Rage.
Racing thoughts and the body flooded with energy it can't settle.
So below the window is too little.
Numbness,
Shutdown,
Fog,
Flatness.
Being there,
But not really there.
So everyone has a window.
But for people who've been through a lot,
Especially early on in their life.
The window is often narrow.
And it doesn't take much to tip them above it or drop them below.
So a raised voice,
A change of plan,
A certain look,
And they're out.
Neve's window when we started.
Was about the width of a letterbox.
She didn't get angry.
She got absent.
One sharp word in a meeting.
And she dropped straight below the window into the fog.
And spend the rest of the afternoon wondering why she couldn't think.
And here is the heart of all this.
A great deal of healing is not about getting rid of feelings.
It's about widening the window.
I'll say this again.
A great deal of healing is not about getting rid of the feelings.
It's about widening the window.
Slowly increasing how much you can feel and hold and stay present with without being knocked out.
Without panicking without falling into a freeze without dissociating whatever you want to call it And you don't widen it by forcing yourself through floods of feeling.
That just teaches the body that the feeling is dangerous.
So you widen it by working right at the edge of the window.
And then gently coming back inside over and over and over and over and over again.
So you might have heard of the polyvagal theory.
It's everywhere at the moment.
Very simply,
It describes three broad states.
A safe and connected state.
Where we can rest and be social.
Then immobilize state,
The fight or flight energy.
And then a shutdown state.
The collapse,
The freeze,
And the numbing.
So you could think of them,
And this is again me taking all the jargon out,
The break.
The accelerator and the power saving mode.
And as a map I find it really useful And so do many of my clients.
It just gives people the language of what's happening to them.
And it helps them stop blaming themselves for states they never chose.
But I want to be honest with you.
Some of the detailed biology behind polyvagal theory.
Is actually debated by neuroscientists.
Parts of it haven't held up as neatly as the popular version suggests.
So I use it the way you'd use a map of the London underground.
It's very helpful for getting around.
But if you've actually used one,
It's not an accurate picture of what's actually under the streets.
And I mention that because If you are going to trust someone with your healing journey,
With your nervous system,
You deserve someone who will tell you where the evidence is strong and where it's still being argued about.
Now here is the question I'm asked most often.
Why is this so slow?
And part of the answer is a concept called allostatic load.
And that comes from another neuroscientist.
Bruce.
Bruce McEwan.
It describes the wear and tear that builds up in the body from long-term stress.
When stress goes on for months or years,
The body adapts to it.
Stress hormones,
Sleep,
Digestion,
Immune function,
All of it recalibrates around the expectation of threat.
It's like my body now has somehow adapted to live with that stress.
And that recalibration did not happen in a day.
It actually happened through thousands if not more of repetitions.
So it won't unwind in a day either.
It's a bit like a house where the heating has been left on for 10 years.
And you can turn the dial down this afternoon.
But the bills don't stop arriving that week.
So the other part of the answer is how the brain learns.
There is an old principle in neuroscience.
And again,
The short jargon free version,
Neurons that fire together,
Wire together.
Every time the body goes through the same pattern,
The pathway for it gets a little stronger.
And this is how habits form.
That's how fear responses become automatic reactions.
And strangely,
It is also how new patterns form.
The good news is that the same mechanism works in both directions.
But it works through repetition.
Not revelation.
So a single powerful moment that you had or you saw somebody have,
It can open a door of course.
But it's the reputations afterwards that build the house.
Now before I trained as an integrative therapist,
In another life,
I worked as a personal trainer.
And this is exactly how strength works also.
Nobody walks into a gym and lifts the heaviest weight in the room on the first day.
Well,
Some people do try,
But they don't come back on day two.
So you lift a little more than you can easily manage.
Then you rest.
Then the body adapts.
Then you come back.
Then you do it again.
So bodies change through steady,
Repeated,
Manageable challenge,
Followed by recovery.
Muscles and nervous system both.
We come to what I believe is the most important tool of all.
This comes before any technique,
Before any breathing,
Before any shaking,
Before any humming,
Before any 12D breathwork or anything else.
Self-awareness.
And in the body,
That is a specific scientific name also.
It's cold.
Introception Interoception is your sense of what's happening inside of you.
Hunger,
Thirst,
Heartbeat,
Breath,
Tension,
Warmth,
Knot in the stomach,
Lump in the throat,
Getting excited.
Much of it is processed by a region deep in the brain called insula.
And researchers have found something very interesting about it.
It isn't one's health There's how accurately you sense your inner signals.
And then there is how you interpret them.
Some anxious people are actually very tuned into their heartbeat.
But they read.
A normal flutter as a catastrophe.
Others who have been through trauma?
They've learned to tune their inner signals.
Down almost completely.
Because at some point,
Feeling them was too much.
Both can be hurt.
And both our head the same way.
Slowly,
Gently,
By noticing sensations with curiosity rather than alarm.
Learning a vocabulary for them.
Won.
Buzzy Heavy Hollow building the ability to feel something and stay with it.
Without panicking or disappearing,
As long as it takes.
So with Neve.
We spent the first several weeks on almost nothing else.
Not her history.
Not the hard stuff.
Just what do you notice in your hands right now?
Is that warm or cool?
And she found it maddening at first.
She wanted to get on with it.
But the day she said,
Unprompted,
I think I'm actually tired,
Not sad.
Now I knew something had started to move.
For someone who has never been able to tell the two apart.
Which by the way is a very useful distinction to have before you reply to an email.
This is why I say self-awareness that you build over time comes first.
Because a tool is only as good as your knowledge of what you're using it on.
Am I above my window or below it?
Is this today's stress or is this something old?
Is this fear?
Is this excitement?
And they feel surprisingly alike.
Is this tiredness or is this grief?
Knowing what you're tapping into changes everything about how you meet it.
There is also a distinction in trauma work between top-down and bottom-up approaches.
So what does top-down mean?
Jargon-free.
Top-down means working from the thinking brain.
Understanding.
Talking.
Making sense of things.
Changing thoughts.
And bottom up means working from the body.
Sensation,
Breath,
Movement.
For a long time.
Therapy was mostly top-down.
And talking helps,
Understanding helps.
But many people find they can understand their history perfectly.
They can explain it beautifully.
But their body still reacts exactly as it did before.
So insight on its own doesn't always reach the parts of the nervous system that run below it.
Insight on its own doesn't always reach the parts of the nervous system that run below thought.
That's why body-based approaches have grown.
But I'd add a caution here too.
That the body alone isn't the answer either.
In my experience,
The best work weaves the two together.
Feeling and making sense of what you feel,
Body and me next.
So,
How do you actually work with the nervous system?
If not by flooding it.
Now two ideas,
And they come from a trauma specialist,
Peter Levine.
They're also central to the way I work.
Titration and pendulation.
So titration is actually a word from chemistry.
It means adding something drop by drop rather than all at once.
Drop by drop.
The solution can absorb it.
So in the body,
Hydration means.
.
.
Touching difficult material in very small amounts.
Just a little.
The edge of it.
As much as the body can take without being overwhelmed.
And pendulation means Moving back and forth from difficult sensation to something that feels alright.
Like a pendulum swinging gently.
The body learns through that rhythm.
That it can go towards something hard and come back.
It can go towards something hard and come back.
That it doesn't have to be trapped there.
And in my practice,
I call this tapping in.
A small touch of what's hard.
Then back to somewhere steady.
Safety sensation,
Safety sensation,
Safety sensation.
That's how the window widens.
And in my experience,
It doesn't happen in one dramatic session.
And I'm a little bit wary of the things that we see on social media now.
The videos,
The claims,
The shaking.
So I've never seen anybody shift all their life's trauma in one dramatic session by having a release.
That's not how the window widens.
Drop by drop.
So when Niamh and I eventually came to the raised voices We never went near the worst memory.
I asked her this,
The mildest one she could find.
And she said,
A teacher being sharp with her at 12th.
And we touched it for a breath or two.
And came back to her feet on the floor.
And that was the whole session.
So she was faintly insulted.
A few months later.
Someone shouted in our office.
And this time she stayed in the room,
In the building,
In her body and said,
That's not alright.
First time in her life.
And nobody filmed it.
Nobody made a reel out of it.
But it was the most dramatic thing I'd seen all year.
This is how the work happens.
Unglamorous.
Body-led.
Slow.
Boring.
At a pace that your body can handle.
There is an old Chinese story.
About a farmer who was worried that his crops were not growing fast enough.
So he went out in the field.
And he pulled each little shoot up a bit to help it grow.
And he came home very pleased with himself.
The next morning,
Every shoot had withered.
The crops were destroyed.
So that's what flooding does.
It's the opposite of titration It pulls at the shoots.
And the bodies that are flooded often don't grow.
They wither or they clamp down harder.
Having learned that this work is dangerous too.
Another simple way of explaining it.
You are working with a part of you.
That has never felt safe.
So if you threaten it,
Chances are it will hide deeper.
It will choose not to work with you the next time you try.
One last piece of the map.
And it may be the most important.
Nervous systems regulate each other.
A baby can't calm itself.
It borrows the karma of a steadier adult.
And we never grow out of that.
In therapy research,
One of the most consistent findings.
Across every kind of therapy.
Is that the quality of relationship between a client and the therapist.
Is strongly linked to how much people improve.
So the fancy modality,
The techniques,
The tools,
They all come after the therapeutic relationship.
In body based work.
That relationship is often doing a lot of work in the diagram.
Long stretches of what looks like nothing.
Sitting together,
Noticing the chair,
The floor,
The breath.
A steady voice and a consistent presence week after week.
And to your body that's not nothing.
That's evidence.
That is evidence that it's possible to be with another person and be safe.
And for some people,
That's the first time their body has ever learnt it.
So if you ask Neve what helped most?
She would not name a technique.
She'd say something like.
.
.
You didn't rush me.
You didn't judge me.
And you've turned up every week.
Which sounds like nothing But it was the whole thing.
So now let me put all of that together into what I actually believe.
Awareness comes first.
Learn the language of your own body.
Know then what you're tapping into.
And how big it is.
And just be honest about the size.
Sometimes you're dealing with something that's stronger than you.
Stronger than your willpower.
Older than good intentions.
That's not defeat at all,
It's respect.
It actually will make you slow down and get the right support.
Then patience,
The real kind of patience.
That this allostatic load took years to build.
The pathways took thousands of repetitions to wire.
Every time I see this,
This happens.
Every time I go to XYZ place,
This happens.
So those pathways took thousands of repetitions to wire.
And they might take a lot of time to rewire also.
Then open hands.
Be open to the possibility that some things may never fully go.
And some sensitivities stay.
Some patterns soften but they do not disappear.
When you stop demanding that something leave before you can live,
The body stops bracing against your disappointment.
And very often,
That's when things begin to loosen.
Then trust.
In the steady process.
Almost any process with someone you trust will work.
Rather than switching methods every time something new comes along.
And you can ignore this part,
But don't get therapy advice from social media,
TikTok,
Reddit,
Instagram.
Trust your own intuition,
Trust your own gut and find the support that feels right for you.
And then the tools.
Breath,
Movement,
Touch and sound.
They all have their place.
And they work far better once the foundations are in place.
Now the Romans,
Because we love philosophy,
The Romans had a phrase for this.
Festina lente.
And that means make haste slowly.
Like carrying a full cup of tea up the stairs.
So the fastest way to the top.
Is the careful way.
Yeah.
Carrying a full cup of tea up the stairs.
And the fastest way to actually reach there is the careful way.
Let's put the map into practice now.
For this part Find a comfortable position.
Lying down sitting up whatever works for you before anything else we do today.
Let's simply arrive Nothing to do.
Let the body notice where it is.
The surface beneath you.
The temperature of the air.
The sounds near and far.
And this is the part that looks like nothing.
To your body,
It's the beginning of evidence.
Now let's find a resource.
Or a home base.
Look gently.
For one place in your body.
That feels alright.
One place.
Not wonderful?
Just slightly present.
Maybe it's your feet.
Maybe it's your hands.
Maybe the back of your head resting on something.
Your rear loops.
Or the inside of your mouth.
Just find it and rest your attention there.
And if nowhere in your body feels alright.
Use something outside of you.
The softness of a blanket,
Maybe my voice.
A spot in the room that's pleasant to look at.
Everything counts.
And rest your attention now on your home base Let's stay with the homebass.
For a few breaths.
And let your body know.
That we can always come back to this.
Now let's exercise the inner sense.
A gentle warm-up of introception.
Staying with your home base.
And first see which words fit what you notice there.
Warm or cold?
Heavier light still or tingling or pulsing Soft or firm So you're building a vocabulary here.
The language of your own body.
Most of us were never taught this.
How does my home base feel?
Find that bird.
Nothing has to make sense to your conscious mind.
Now let's check where you are in your window Just a rough sense.
Are you somewhere in the middle?
Able to feel and think at the same time?
Are you a bit above,
Buzzy,
Restless?
Or on the edge.
Or maybe you are a bit far away There's no right answer.
This noticing is self-awareness and is the most important part of the whole process.
If you are well above.
Or below your window right now Just stay at your home base for the rest of the practice.
And that's not missing out.
That's titration.
That's respecting your own edge.
And that's honoring information from your body.
If you are somewhere in the middle.
We can explore and do a small piece of tapping in.
For this part Let your attention move.
Just a little.
Towards a place in the body that feels mildly uncomfortable.
Not painful.
Not a memory.
Just this spot that's a bit tight.
A bit tense.
Or a bit busy.
Around a 2 out of 10.
I'm going to find that little bit of sensation,
Little bit of tightness in my body,
Wherever it is.
And then touch it with your attention for two breaths only.
What is it like?
Tight,
Hot,
Buzzy,
Heavy How big is it?
Can I be with this right now?
Or is it bigger than me today?
Just get your information.
You can't get this wrong.
And now 3 2 1 swing back like a pendulum How were you describing your home base?
Let's go back there.
Let's go back to the warmth in my hands.
Let's go back to the feeling of my feet on the floor.
The all right place,
The all right place,
The all right place.
And now rest in the all right place,
In your home base once again.
Now notice the coming back.
Maybe a small breath.
Maybe a yawn for some of you.
A slight easing Nothing obvious.
The swing back is the exercise.
It teaches the body that discomfort has edges and that there is somewhere to return to.
Now just rest.
And I want you to watch the small signs of a settling body because they're very easy to miss.
But clinicians look for them closely.
You don't need to make anything happen.
In my home base now,
A sigh,
A yawn.
Warmth is spreading maybe.
Maybe my eyes want to soften.
Any of these can be signs.
Of your nervous system shifting.
And remember,
This was just a taste of the work.
You're not opening anything deep today.
While you rest now at your home base.
Just rest.
A few quiet words to the body.
Not to fix it I am listening.
I won't rush you.
And I'll come back again and again.
I am listening.
I won't rush you.
And I will come back again and again.
Now let the words go.
Wriggle your fingers and toes.
So that's the map.
The body decides about safety before the mind does.
Each of us has a window and the healing widens it.
Long-term stress leaves wear and tear that takes time to unwind.
The brain rewires through repetition,
Not revelation.
Awareness of inner sense comes before any technique and talking and body work belong together.
Difficult material is best met drop by drop.
Now none of this is glamorous.
Unfortunately it doesn't make a dramatic video.
But it's how nervous systems can actually heal.
It's how Neves did.
And it's how I've seen it happen more times now than I could count.
You can return to this practice whenever you like,
Your home base,
Check your window,
One drop,
Swing back,
Rest,
Little and often.
For these last moments.
You're welcome to rest again at your home base.
And I leave you with these words,
Make haste slowly,
Drop by drop,
The window widens.
So thank you very much for joining me and Namaste.
