ABOUT HEARTH SCIENCE AND THIS WEBSITE
The Autonomic Nervous System is the neural architecture of the mindbody connection. It is the biological system that will have the greatest impact on your wellbeing, and most modern humans do not know anything about it. Since 1994, when Dr. Stephen Porges conceptualized the Polyvagal Theory, there has been an incredible cascade of advance in Autonomics.
Polyvagal Theory teaches us that when we experience an embodied sense of safety, we are able to coordinate the rhythms and activities of our deep nervous system in a manner that facilitates our deepest wellbeing and the fullest expression of our potentialities. It teaches us that when we are deprived of this grounding in safety, our nervous systems fall into defensive stances, and that the specific nature of these stances determines the kinds of illbeing that will likely arise.
If safety is the bedrock strata of wellbeing, and connection is its expression, the way that we understand public health, social policy, social safety nets, and governance more broadly must evolve in light of this understanding. If wellbeing is social in nature, we must design social systems to support safety. The incorporation of this fundamental awareness, were it to permeate our understanding of the dynamics of social interaction, would alter the way that we organize healthcare, education, social policy, and governance. For this reason, the sociological, ecological, and cultural implications of Autonomics merit attention and rigorous elaboration.
Yet part of the reason that this elaboration has not yet occurred, or been emphasized in the existing arenas of medicine and mental health that the theory has taken root, is because Polyvagal Theory is not properly contextualized in a broader deeper human lineage history context.
Humans have been on earth somewhere between 8 million years (this is when our ancestors first shifted to a bipedal gait and an upright stance) and 200,000 years (this is how old the San, Lakota, and Australian aboriginal cultures are). For 99% of our human lineage history, we lived in Small Band Hunter Gatherer groups, and our lifestyle prioritized connection above all things. The Polyvagal Theory is a modern neurophysiological expression of something that has been known to ancestral and Indigenous people since the dawn of time: real human beings are centered in our hearts and bellies. We prioritize connection and relatedness with All Things as essential and even Sacred values. Our deepest gifts and abilities arise from within a profound peacableness that emerges from the felt understanding that we are elementally organized as the children of a sentient and beneficent Universe. When we feel that we belong– when we experience safety (physical, emotional, psychological, economic), and are able to activate our Connection Systems, and live from them as the baseline of our experience, the way that we experience ourselves, one another, and the Living World changes paradigmatically, and we make different choices. Our living expresses different values.
This larger cultural and contextual framing of Polyvagal theory is required because it helps reveal that the theory is a fragment of something larger, deeper, older, and more complete. It is the modern neurophysiological validation of an ancestral worldview that understands that relatedness is at the root of the enduring wellbeing of all, and that understands humans to be part of a larger community of Life. (1)
From within this view of relatedness it becomes apparent that the way that we have arranged modernity is totally insane.
1) The manner in which we are living our daily lives destroys the only biosphere in the known Universe. When I drive to work, turn on the lights, and flush the toilet I am shitting in my Mother’s mouth. Even if I do not wish to do this, it is almost impossible to stop. This is insane.
2) Our economic systems measure and reduce the value of Life - including human labour, living ecosystems, relationships and life-force - via a crude system of transactional monetary exchange, based on generating and accumulating ever-more commodified surplus value - i.e. more capital - by extracting, separating and abstracting currency from the human and more-than-human world. In simple terms, I get rich by making other things dead, e.g., my forest has no value until I turn it into lumber. This is also insane.
3) Capital is primarily created through debt, and therefore requires perpetual growth. Since the only things in nature that grow without limits are bacteria, viruses, and cancer, which ultimately consumer their hosts, capitalism behaves like a bacteria, virus, or cancer. This is also insane.
4) Capitalism is a self-terminating algorithm based on socialising costs to the many while privatising gains for the few. In simple terms, this means that a very small group of people win capitalism - e.g., Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and everyone else loses. This is insane unless you are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates. (And having won capitalism, each of them has become insane in his own private manner.)
4) In order to endure this system, most modern people are forced into competition for resources that appear more and more scarce, rather than collaborating to create mutualistic networks of benefit that strengthen collective commons. This is insane because it divorces us from the antidote to all of the above, which is community.
Over 12,000 years of deviation from our baseline in safety and connection, we have been denatured by Empire, lost our Sovereignty, lost the birthright of our connection to Source, and been told that we will be healed by a domination mindset that is, in actual fact, a necrogenic death cult. Neither Artificial Intelligence, Electric Vehicles, carbon capture, climate engineering, nor Jesus is coming to save us. Perhaps it is time that we recognize that
And that we have to figure out how to change the manner in which we are living right fucking now.
While there are numerous outward manifestations of such a shift in consciousness, in order to effectuate the inward transition required to move ourselves out of the states of profound fear and dissociation that the massive threat manufacturing system of modernity has produced, we have to figure out how to get our handles on the actual levers of our wellbeing.
And Autonomics provides exactly these transformational levers. Understanding how our autonomic physiology works can dis-intermediate a whole army of healing professionals who have been attempting to grant us wellbeing. Rather, by understanding how to change the inputs to our deep nervous systems, those of us who wish to can take an active agentic role in our own healing.
This website is a manifesto, and a call to action. It is the spearhead of an effort to coordinate a decentralized global participant action research network in autonomic physiology to bring power back to everyday people to take responsibility for our own flourishing.
PRINCIPLES
1) Feeling not thinking
In contradistinction to the Cartesium dictum that undergirds much of our self-concept and the modes of organizing in modernity, it is not our thinking that confers our identity, but rather our ability to feel ourselves. It replaces I think, therefore I am with I feel myself, therefore I am. In order to heal, we must awaken the felt sensibility.
2) Primacy of Safety
clarifies that our moment-to-moment felt sense of safety, via the embodied nervous system, is a neural faculty that organizes our autonomic state, and that wellbeing is directly correlated with how many of our present moments can be undergirded by a felt sense of safety.
3) Connection as nourishment
emphasizes that our ability to connect with ourselves, one another, and the living world – to experience relating – is the nourishment for our moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing. It emphasizes the important of developing the capacity (and strenghtening the neural circuitry required) to help us relate.
4) A continuum of States
There exist a continuum of autonomic states derived from a foundation of safety, and several continuua of states derived from various platforms of defense. By understanding these foundational states, we can exert bottom-up influence of the bodily foundations of visceral experience, emotion, perception, cognition, and behavior. The theory opens the door to myriad and robust novel diagnostic and therapeutic conceptualizations in support of human and planetary flourishing.
5) State undergirds Well- and Ill-being
Autonomic states are the bedrock strata upon which both well- and ill-being are constructed. Centralizing autonomic physiology, therefore, in the diagnosis and treatment of stress-related disorders re-organizes the taxonomy of disease in a manner that facilitates its resolution at the source.
We created this website to
continue to enrich and foster a global dialogue about the Polyvagal Theory and the evolution of a Foundation Model in General Autonomics.
provide an alternative source of meaning-making about the implications of the theory based on deep trans-disciplinary research and study with more than 100 mentors from 25 disciplines of wellbeing in 24 cultures, including Indigenous perspectives on Animacy and the contextual layers of relationship (sociological, ecological, civilizational) that are not generally being explored as part of the physiological inquiry into PVT.
continue to evolve the theory as our own research and clinical experiences suggest that elements of the theory, while accurate neuro-anatomically, are not functionally descriptive of the organization of living processes
enrich the cultural commons around this work by providing visual and pedagogical resources under creative commons licenses to effectuate more rapid dissemination of high quality materials about the theory, about autonomic physiology generally, and about our work
accelerate the global coordination of a decentralized participatory action research network able to apply these findings towards human and planetary flourishing outside of the constraints of capitalism and hegenomic structures
I believe that the medicine of the future will centralize autonomic physiology in the diagnosis and treatment of stress-related disorders, and that Polyvagal Theory and what lies beyond it will be the foundation upon which this more elastic and salugenic edifice will be built. I am endebted to the genius of Dr. Stephen Porges, whose work has transformed both my personal and professional life, and allowed me to heal in ways I would not have had the audacity, as a younger person, to believe possible. I am also committed, as the steward of an organizational eco-system with clients and partners in fifty countries whose purview is to deepen and accelerate human and planetary flourishing, to move beyond the theory when and where we find it inadequate or incomplete.
As the Founder and CEO of Hearth Science, and the Hearth Wellness Clinics, I take full responsibility for the content on this website. Any errors or misrepresentations of the Polyvagal Theory, or autonomic physiology more broadly, are mine.
Natureza Gabriel
07 May 2024
Founder, Hearth Science