Tending And Restoring The Nervous System

Our Autonomic Nervous system is an elegant and sensitive aspect of our body's wisdom that is part of how we stay safe in a dangerous world, by recognizing and avoiding threats when we sense them. But for many of us, our ANS has been wounded—by adverse childhood events, oppression, trauma, and modern stress—in a way that makes it difficult to relax and feel at ease. Learning to find a felt sense of safety, and practice deactivating from habitual and unconscious reactivities, we can find more ease and joy in our bodies and lives.

Transcript

Namo tassa bhagavato arhato sammasambuddhassa Namo tassa bhagavato arhato sammasambuddhassa Namo tassa bhagavato arhato sammasambuddhassa So we can use vocabulary from contemporary physiology and somatics and some healing modalities to,

I think in a really helpful way,

Talk about what we're doing in meditation.

In the Buddhist language we use words like tranquility for the calming factors,

Concentration for the focusing aspect,

Energy or rapture for the enlivening or uplifting aspects.

These are part of the list of the seven factors of awakening.

In somatic trauma counseling and in other kinds of physiological work,

There's a focus on the aspect of our physiology that we call the nervous system,

Specifically the autonomic nervous system.

Autonomic because it operates below the level of conscious control.

So it's always on and working and you don't have to do anything to make it work.

And the nervous system is primarily oriented or one of its most substantive orientations that matters to us in meditation.

The nervous system does a lot.

It works a lot.

It works with digestion,

Lots of different autonomic functions.

But the thing that really matters in meditation is that it's the nervous system that operates our approach avoidance system.

And this is the way that through our senses we perceive the world.

We naturally,

And again not cognitively,

But we instinctively sense danger and safety,

Threat,

And the body reacts appropriately to try to keep us safe and those we love safe,

Those we're connected with safe.

And so the nervous system is in part this sensation and perception based alarm system.

It's also the response system.

It's the nervous system that mobilizes the resources we need to respond to the situations that are unfolding around us.

So it's the nervous system that mobilizes energy for muscular responses to threat that are sometimes limited to fight and flight.

It's the nervous system that mobilizes social responses to threat like the fawn response where we become smaller in a way,

Verbally or physically in relation to a threat.

It's the nervous system that mobilizes the freeze response that can immobilize the body as a protective mechanism.

And so one of the ways we can think about meditation as a nervous system intervention is to think about the way that in meditation we're often doing two things usually at the same time.

One is that we're working with energy.

We're working to either uplift energy,

Generate more energy,

Or we're working to calm and settle energy.

So this is the part of the nervous system that is sometimes called activation and deactivation.

And a convenient simile for this is there's the gas and the brake.

So we can speed up or we can slow down and we have control of both of these things.

Again,

It's autonomic,

So it's not so much.

.

.

You're not deciding to step on the gas or step on the brake.

Sometimes you try to decide.

We can try to intervene in the autonomic system,

But often at best we influence it by doing things.

But the autonomic nervous system is the thing that actually is doing the action of stepping on the gas or stepping on the brake.

So there's activation and deactivation.

So there's the energetic system.

That's one part.

And then there's this perceiving and understanding part.

If we're doing this practice of orienting through the senses,

Looking around the room,

Seeing what's here,

There's an interpretation where the nervous system is engaged in taking in what's going on through the senses,

Comparing that to what I know of the world already.

So there's some aspect of memory and understanding conditions.

And then assessing whether it's dangerous or not.

So there's a constant process of assessing going on.

What's going on?

Is it a problem?

Am I good?

Okay,

We're good.

And so these two systems,

The activation,

Deactivation,

And the perceiving and assessing are happening all the time.

Some of the physiological language for the nervous system divides it into the sympathetic and parasympathetic modes of the autonomic nervous system.

The sympathetic mode is the gas.

That's the activation side.

When the sympathetic nervous system is active,

The technical word is enervated,

There are distinct physiological changes that happen.

Right?

Breathing is altered,

Blood flow is altered,

The heart might speed up and beat stronger,

Sending blood flow to the limbs.

There can be corresponding shifts in the body,

Like when the sympathetic nervous system activates,

Digestion will stop as blood and other energetic resources are pulled away from less urgent metabolic activities toward what is more urgent,

Which might be musculature in the limbs.

So fight manifesting as musculature in the arms,

Flight manifesting in the musculature of the legs.

And so why does this happen?

The perceiving and assessing system is constantly scanning the environment for threat and danger.

And when our assessment system becomes alert to something that is either dangerous or is perceived as dangerous,

And that's important,

I'll get back to that in a second,

That signal is picked up very quickly,

Right?

Again,

Quicker than we could cognitively decide.

I might not yet know if something is dangerous,

But if I have the felt sense or the nervous system sense of danger,

Then the sympathetic system will kick on,

Right?

In a healthy nervous system,

The sympathetic system kicks on.

Sometimes the nervous system can get wounded or out of whack,

And it kicks on,

Either kicks on at the wrong time,

Right?

Or not at all,

Or in the wrong way.

It's kind of like if the thermostat in your house is broken,

You know,

Or you have one of those radiators in New York at a certain era where you're like,

You know,

It's either on full blast or freezing.

And,

You know,

My cousin on like,

You know,

I don't know,

Sixth,

You know,

Sixth street in the West Village,

Back in the 90s,

I would visit him and he's in this little tiny apartment.

And I'd be like,

You know,

The temperature's not quite right in here.

Is there anything you can do?

And he's like,

Yeah,

Not much.

You know,

We don't control the radiators.

He walked over and just kicked it.

And he's like,

Sometimes that helps,

You know,

So.

So we perceive all the time,

The environment around us,

When the signal danger happens,

There's this kicking in of the sympathetic nervous system,

Energy is aroused,

Activation goes up,

And all of these physiological changes shift.

Toward what is needed for self-protection,

Right,

For fleeing or fighting,

Or other kinds of intervention.

More recently,

The fawn response was added to fight and flight as partially a sympathetic response.

I think it's partially sympathetic,

Has some other qualities in it as well.

But,

You know,

That's really the social response to danger.

So there are times when the thing to do is not to fight or flee physically,

But is actually to manipulate the situation socially to try to get oneself to safety.

In a way,

This is like a second order response.

It is an animal response,

But it builds on our,

You know,

Our social system.

It's a more complex system than just like,

Can I run away?

Or should I,

You know,

Punch somebody?

There's layers that it brings in,

But it still involves very often,

You know,

Sympathetic charge,

You're nervous,

You know,

There's kind of fear in the system.

For modern bodies who are not necessarily in physical danger,

When the sympathetic nervous system kicks in,

Fight and flight are translated into their emotional counterparts,

Which is anger and fear.

So we can get kicked into what we might call the anger spectrum from mild frustration all the way through rage,

Or the fear spectrum from,

You know,

Mild worry all the way through panic.

And so,

You know,

Those are also ways that those same energies activate.

So that's the gas side.

When it's necessary,

The gas kicks on.

In a healthy nervous system,

The corresponding energy is the deactivation.

So perceiving and assessing is always happening.

When the nervous system perceives that threat is gone,

That safety has been reattained,

You know,

I'm free from whatever it was,

I'm back home,

The scary person is gone,

I'm back with my friends,

Like whatever has happened.

Once there's the perception of safety,

Often what happens is activation hits a kind of threshold,

There's a moment when it's at the peak that it's going to be,

And then there can be the realization that,

And again,

In a healthy nervous system,

This happens pretty fluidly,

That whatever I needed to do to get free,

You know,

I got the car to the side of the road,

And I got out of it,

And now I'm standing in a field,

You know,

And I'm shaking,

Which is a good natural discharge response,

But I've hit threshold,

And then I'm going to start to deactivate,

And a lot of things are going to happen,

Right?

Blood flow is going to come back to the trunk,

There's probably going to be some kind of discharge,

I might cry,

I might shake,

I might laugh,

I might be in shock for a while and be numb,

But I'm sweating or something is releasing,

And there's going to be this deactivation,

So the break is coming on,

Right?

The nervous system shifts to like,

Oh,

I don't need that activation to stay safe anymore,

And we're calming down,

And that takes a little while,

But time,

The perception of safety,

And some pleasure,

Like the absence of the threat,

You know,

Something feels good,

Your friend comes up and holds your hand,

You know,

It's really great,

You're not in the car anymore,

Or wherever you were,

And you look around,

And you know,

The purple lilies are blooming,

Or you know,

The field smells like cows,

And you know,

Whatever it is,

Something pleasurable is present,

Right?

The sky is just as blue as it was before the scary thing happened,

And the presence of pleasure and the ability to perceive it,

All of that contributes to deactivation.

So,

Settling,

Calming,

Deactivating,

And ideally,

And again,

This is the ideal,

None of us quite live here,

Because we're all wounded in various ways,

But the ideal is that the nervous system is there,

So that it kicks in at the right time,

Gives rise to mobilization,

That gets us back to safety,

Or those around us,

And that when safety is reattained,

It turns off,

And resettles back down to a kind of equilibrium,

Right?

And of course,

This is happening in fractals all the time,

Right?

In a certain way,

An in-breath is a little activation,

An out-breath is a little deactivation,

Right?

Getting up from your seat to go do something is a kind of activation,

And finishing what you were doing and settling back down is a little deactivation.

So,

We're running through these activation-deactivation cycles all the time in our day,

You know?

You get a little startling email,

And there's a little activation,

Right?

And then you spin out for a little while,

But then you kind of,

Maybe you talk to somebody,

Or you just figure out what you are going to say to them,

Or maybe you get up and walk around for a while,

Or you leave it,

And then you come back,

You get the response out,

Or whatever happens,

You are restored in safety,

And then it deactivates.

So,

This happens in small or large scale phases all the time,

Activation-deactivation,

Activation-deactivation.

So,

A couple other nervous system states.

One of the most common other states is,

Well,

Here,

Let's stick with activation-deactivation for a bit.

Sympathetic,

Parasympathetic.

One of the main things that can happen,

And that happens to all of us in differing amounts in our life that has suffering in it,

Is that we can be in situations,

We are often in situations where one of a few things happens that makes the system not work the way it should naturally.

One is that we fail to attain deactivation.

So,

Something startling or dangerous has happened.

We have been restored to safety,

Like we got out of the immediate thing,

But somehow our heart or our body really never quite got the picture that we were safe again.

Sometimes this is because the things that threaten us are not as simple as they were,

Let's say,

In nature,

Walking through the woods,

Where the threat is like,

I got startled by a coyote,

And then the coyote walked away.

And it's like a one-time event.

I went back to the camp,

And I was like,

Oh my God,

Guys,

I saw a coyote.

I got really scared for a minute,

And the coyote walked away.

And they were like,

Wow,

That's awesome.

Do you want some hot chocolate?

And you're like,

Yeah,

And it's over.

If only all the threats that bedevil us were that simple and momentary and resolved.

But of course,

All of us actually grew up in families and in communities and cultures where sometimes the threat is pervasive.

Sometimes the threat was inescapable.

Sometimes it was repeated over time for a long time.

Sometimes it's systemic.

And in so many ways,

We can now experience threat giving rise to activation and never really find safety again,

Like full deactivation.

So then there's this activation remaining essentially in the body that never really deactivated.

And you can feel it.

So this becomes a lot of things.

This can become a personality that always has a little anxiety,

Like I never quite deactivated out of fear.

Or a personality that always has a little bit of anger or grumpiness or frustration.

Or it can become in the body,

Like shoulders that never really relax or body armor,

The kind of like not able to soften.

It could become insomnia,

Unable to relax enough to go to sleep.

There's all these ways that unresolved activation in the body gives rise to inflammation of so many kinds.

So one of the main troubles is failure to deactivate.

A different one,

Again,

Can be caused by repeated or extended stress or danger or threat,

Is inability to hit threshold.

So not able to activate enough.

This is kind of in the freeze direction.

And I'll talk about freeze in a moment.

For some folks,

Like,

Oh,

I've been wounded in such a way that my sympathetic system doesn't really turn on.

Maybe as a child,

I felt like it was dangerous to be angry.

Or if I really showed how I felt,

I would be hurt or excluded or whatever.

So then I never really actually mobilize in a way that's going to give rise to the energy of getting myself out of a dangerous situation.

So there's failure to deactivate,

There's failure to activate.

And so there's ways that this whole system can over time give rise to symptoms that many,

Many of our psychological but also physiological symptoms you can think of,

Hopefully,

In relation to this model.

What's going on in me where something's really not deactivating,

Really not letting go?

What's going on where something's not really able to activate?

So the not able to activate brings us to this third aspect of the nervous system that,

Again,

It has a role in a healthy nervous system.

But very often,

It lives in us in a way that's unhealthy.

And this is the freeze or collapse system.

Freeze is characterized in a way by very high activation,

So the gas is on,

But also very high inhibition,

So the brake is on.

This is like you've got the e-brake on,

But you've got your foot on the gas and the car is not happy at all.

So in freeze,

Freeze is what happens when there's very high perception of threat,

And the threat or the attack is or feels inescapable.

And so in the situation of inescapable attack,

The nervous system has this,

Again,

Beautiful natural response,

Which is to,

In a certain way,

Play dead,

Which is just to collapse,

To become numb.

So it is actually physically analgesic,

Like physical pain doesn't hurt as much.

This is why in shock,

You can not notice that you're injured for a little while.

So that's very helpful.

And it can be a helpful psychological defense as well.

In systems where actually activation of any kind would be worse,

The system can go into freeze.

And this can,

Of course,

Happen in children where,

In a system of danger,

Like in the family,

It's often the safest response.

So freeze is natural.

It keeps you safe when attack is inescapable.

But again,

Danger is meant to be short-lived,

And we're meant to be able to come out of it.

And so to come out of freeze,

The body,

The person,

The nervous system has to perceive that it's safe enough,

Not just to deactivate,

But actually to feel the activation that sent them in.

Because to come out of freeze,

You have to feel what you were shutting down in order to not feel.

And that can be pain physically,

That can be pain emotionally,

That can be high activation in the direction of rage and panic.

And one of the things that we fall prey to is that if we've gotten really used to freeze,

Like you froze out a little bit as a child and you never quite came out,

That's very,

Very,

Very,

Very common.

And again,

It doesn't have to be like you're in a coma,

That's like deep freeze.

It could just be like,

I come from a family of stoic sufferers who know how to not complain.

And I inherited that from my dad and I am a brilliant inheritor of the lineage of stoic non-complainers.

And when something bad happens,

I'm okay.

I just wash out a little bit and everything's going to be fine.

And so the tone of freeze is like the slow kind of zombie face,

The thousand miles stare.

And it's protective,

It's self-protective,

But it's deeply painful eventually if we can't come out of it.

So to come out of it,

We have to feel,

And this happens in psychology all the time,

In therapy,

To come out of it,

You feel what you were not willing to feel when you went into it.

And so often that's going to be anger.

Almost always it's anger of some kind,

Fear of some kind,

Usually both.

So one of the terrible patterns associated with a syndrome called global high activation is a little oscillation where someone's pretty freezy,

Can't feel much.

In therapy or some situation of deeper safety,

They come out of freeze.

They start to feel more.

They're actually deactivating.

This is a good thing.

They come out,

They start to feel more and suddenly there's anger or fear.

And the system can't actually tolerate that.

And so even though they're deactivating,

They're coming into more intense sensation.

That's overwhelming.

And they pop right back in.

Like,

Oh,

That doesn't feel safe.

And I go back in.

Again,

Not conscious,

You're not doing it on purpose,

But that can happen a lot.

And this happens so much in meditation.

We come into meditation,

We slow down,

We become still.

Often in meditation,

We can connect with those aspects of freeze and we can start to feel a little better.

We can start to relax.

And what happens when you come out of distracting yourself,

Come out of constant entertainment or spinning in thought,

You actually feel what's here under the surface and it's not always pleasant.

And so then,

Oh,

It's actually easier to pop back into distraction or to numb out again.

And so meditation is one of those places where the invitation is to feel what's here.

You know,

If I come into meditation and I'm just like crazy bored,

This is so boring,

I just don't like it.

I'm not good at meditation.

My mind just wanders.

I just don't like being still.

The only way out of that,

I mean,

There's other things to do about that,

But the only thing to do about that in meditation is to stay and to sit through it and to really be like,

What is it that I'm not willing to feel?

That I'm just squirming around and I can't settle.

And it's often painful.

And so to come out of the gas break grip of freeze,

We have to actually feel safe enough to let up,

In a way to let up on both and let the vehicle coast.

And it's going to coast down into realizing that if you let up on the break,

That's coming out of freeze.

You realize that you're going very fast.

The gas is down.

It's like,

Okay.

So,

You know,

Our practice then is in a very simple way to feel more.

If we boil all of this down to a basic practice,

It's to allow ourselves to be real with both this moment's experience.

How do I feel right in this moment?

Do I feel safe right now with doing this or with these people or where I am?

And then could I feel even safer?

So we come into contact with what's here and we notice,

I come into meditation and I notice that it's hard to relax.

Okay.

If I stay with that,

It's a kind of suffering.

It's a kind of dukkha.

Stay with that.

What is it that's hard to relax?

I just noticed that like there's a little holding,

You know,

Sometimes it's just physiological.

At one point,

I spent many,

Many years noticing that there was a certain amount that I could relax my left shoulder and beyond that,

It just wouldn't go.

And if I really felt into it,

There was a slight internal rotation and a pulling forward in the shoulder.

And I spent hundreds of hours of meditation,

Just like,

You know,

Doing my practice with the breath and whatever,

But just aware of that inward rotation and forward pull.

And,

You know,

I would just be like,

Come on,

You can do it.

Like,

Come on,

You know,

And I'm not going to do the practice of pulling it out because that's not actually going to fix what's going on in the nervous system.

That's not resolution,

Right?

That's like,

You know,

Being totally overwhelmed and shut down and forcing yourself to,

You know,

Pretend like it's otherwise,

You know,

To use like almost muscular effort to try to be otherwise.

And instead in meditation,

Our practice is to come into contact with whatever it is,

Whether it's physiological like that,

Or whether it's connecting with the,

Like,

I can't feel anything,

You know,

Stoicism that I did inherit from my father's line.

So that's me in both cases.

I come into contact with that and I'm like,

Wow,

I can just feel the part of myself that like,

Not only can't really connect,

But like,

Doesn't care about anything.

Like,

I just want to be gone,

Right?

So I spent like 10 years in there at some point being like,

Just present with that sense,

Right?

That kind of freeziness.

And,

You know,

And then meditate more and more and more,

Being present with it,

Present with it,

And being with it in other ways,

Being with it,

You know,

With therapists,

With close friends,

In process groups,

In dance and movement ritual,

All the different things.

Because the pathway toward feeling more isn't always direct.

It doesn't always come through sitting in stillness.

But sitting in stillness is one place where when we do integrate that activation more,

Right?

And we start to feel it more.

In stillness,

The thing that we can do then is we can actually find the deactivation that it's leading to.

You can actually find like,

Oh,

You know,

I can feel more and I'm pissed,

But also I know how to feel now.

Like I've been,

And,

You know,

Especially when faith is strong,

And this is a different topic a little bit,

But we can talk about this.

One of the things that refuge does,

That faith does,

Is it says that you are actually safe here,

Right?

So there were times when I'm sitting in meditation and just learning how to feel,

And I'm mad or I'm confused or whatever it is,

But I open my eyes.

And,

You know,

If I'm at Spirit Rock in the main hall,

I would open my eyes and I would look at the Prajnaparamita,

The perfection of wisdom goddess on the altar.

If I'm here at home,

I'll look at Kuan Yin,

Or the Green Tara behind me,

Or the little seated Buddha I brought back from Burma,

And I can feel my refuge.

I think it's not random at all that the core gesture of faith in the Dharma is these refuges in Buddha,

Dhamma,

And Sangha.

When you've gone for refuge,

You're saying to your nervous system,

You can be safe.

There is a safe place.

You know,

The Buddha as a conceptual figure of the one who is free,

That's safe.

That's a safe kind of person to be around.

You can trust somebody who's free.

And the Dhamma,

The instructions on how to practice that,

And the clarity that comes when we see things as they are,

That Dhamma,

You can trust it.

It's reliable.

You have to attain it yourself.

You have to figure it out for yourself,

But you can trust it.

It's a reliable refuge.

It's not subject to impermanence or loss.

It is the way things are.

And the Sangha,

The people on the path,

But particularly the ones who have attained some awakening,

Which is the traditional meaning of word Sangha,

Or people dedicated to keeping the precepts,

For instance.

In a very basic way,

The Sangha,

If you define it as folks who have taken the refuges and precepts,

You can trust them,

Hopefully.

But you have a better chance of trusting them than random folks out on the street,

Because you don't know what those folks are devoted to.

You come to the Sangha,

If these are folks who have taken the precepts,

Then you know folks here are devoted to the practice of not harming,

Not stealing,

Not committing sexual misconduct,

Not misusing speech,

Not misusing intoxicants.

And the whole purpose of all of this,

I think,

Is to give the nervous system that felt sense of safety that it needs to come out of impacted activation,

To come out of freeze,

To come out of all of the syndromes of the inability to fully resolve the dangers and threats that we carry from the past,

Which is really the definition of trauma.

So refuge and sila,

The practice of the precepts,

Gives safety.

And they're meant to teach our nervous systems how it feels to be safe.

And when we can do that,

Then with the support of meditation,

But also study and good friendship as the whole of the holy life,

As the Buddha said,

So deeply about connection as well,

What we are seeking is the conditions that allow the nervous system to do what it wants to do,

To do what it naturally is trying to do,

Which is to perceive and assess that we are safe in this moment enough that we can come out of old impacted threat and just live here with a healthy responsive system.

When threat comes,

We can activate.

When threat is gone,

We deactivate and we don't carry it with us anymore.

I think that is what the Buddha means by resolving old kamma or karma and not creating new kamma,

New karma.

So we'll talk more and we'll see where we go.

We can talk more about kamma,

Of course.

But I'll pause for tonight just with this sense that we can really frame the healing or restorative aspects of the Dharma path in terms of coming out of these symptoms of old trauma,

Symptoms of impacted activation and freeze in the nervous system to come back toward deactivation when necessary and the kind of equilibrium that our animal bodies know how to live in when given a chance.