Since our nervous system, at the most fundamental level, is an input/output system, the way that we feel–the embodied experience of being ourselves in the present moment–is governed by the inputs we are experiencing and our interpretation of them. If, therefore, we want to feel different, to feel better, there are two deep levers here. We can change the inputs, and/or we can change our interpretation of them.
Modern humans are pretty good at forgetting what creates wellbeing. This is partly because what passes for culture in modernity is a highly dissociative matrix, the cascading results of intergenerational traumas born of separation. It is also because we don't really understand our own nervous systems, and how they work.
Although the nervous system has a number of branches, the one that we are concerned with primarily in our work is the Autonomic Nervous System, which you can think of as the deep nervous system, and which is essentially the architecture of the mind-body connection.
At the deepest level, and from its inception, what the nervous system is doing is mediating between inside and outside. It is formed, embryonically, through an infolding process, whereby cells that are on the outside of the early embryo fold inwards, becoming the spinal column. As the nervous system elaborates, it creates conduits between inputs from the outside of us (the senses, roughly speaking), the inside of the body, and the gut, heart, and brain.
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