Perhaps more than anything, my study of the physiology of human experience has opened me to the realization that my body is the truth-teller of my life, of all my experiences, my relationships, and of the physical environment I am embedded in. It (I) has no other mode of being. This touchstone orients me from moment-to-moment, and with practice I need only ask "what is present?" to receive an answer. Though I may not always understand what it means, and the answer may even lie deep in the past or in the estranged energies of my culture, I listen with curiosity, compassion, and respect for the answer that emerges. As my life moves onwards in spirals and currents, those answers reappear in new layers over time, like the bands of color in sedimentary stone.
The pathways of the autonomic nervous system, and its bi-directional flows of information shows us, clearly and even bluntly, how our social and physical environment is read and translated into the patterns of matter, energy, and the processes of our body by our nervous system, and even into the very nature of our perceived reality. Awareness of sensation, and beyond sensation into a broader and more integrated "knowing", gives us deep permission to exist and evolve exactly as we are, as a perfect expression of our world and our being, even in the extremes of our confusion and despair.
Like most deeper truths, this is both crushing and liberating at the same time. An example of this is my experience that grief and love are precisely the same thing, with the difference being whether connection is present or absent. Information from the "feeling" nature of these emotions tells me this is true. They arise from the same place within me. Similarly, we may think it is the worst sort of news that we cannot exist outside of our embodied experience as a part of the ecosystem of this earth. How could we have ever thought otherwise, though the truth of our continuity with the ecosystem can make us feel very vulnerable? It is the very rupture of trust and connection implicit in this paradigm that is at the root of our suffering. This is present in all patterns of oppression and disembodiment. It is a wound of separation.
And therein lies our liberation, because implicit in the ubiquity of connection is the fact that change is within our reach at every moment. That change begins with listening to, believing in, and trusting the messages of this body that is you and me. It also begins with the fact that each of us has personal autonomy within our shared experience. We are all both the “wave”, as individuals, and the "ocean", as expressions of a continuous ecosystem. The mind trained to dualism aches in the effort to accept this, though it is only an unpracticed skill. The revolutionary (though not new) paradigm that this knowledge of the vagus offers us is one of connection and belonging, of authority over our own perceptions, and ultimately of the empowerment to speak and be just as we are.
This trusting relationship with our perceptions is the basis of our capacity to support the healing of others. It points to our responsibility to know our own nervous system, and the many other systems it joins and influences. It can illuminate the very important process of differentiating what is "me" from what is "not me", especially with respect to culturally normalized transgressions of our essential humanity, and of our right to respect and freedom. With practice, information, personal healing, awareness, presence, and lots of guidance from others we can feel when we are congruent with the moment, and when we are not. We can hold both our own truth and our perception of the other. And as somatic healers know, we can listen to our bodies for clues about another's experience, and allow our presence to become an offering of support for transformation.
Suffering and survival have been my greatest teachers in discovering this capacity in myself, and in growing my faith that by cultivating this open connection to my own experience I can then offer that attunement to others. It is in that act of witnessing, and of being witnessed, that we do the work of transforming ourselves into the unfolding of our fullest expression, and of co-creating the shape and the evolving form of future generations. The universe needs us to do this work together.