THE AUTONOMIC COMPASS
Possibly the world’s most sophisticated self-healing platform.
YOU KNOW WHaT A COMPASS Is.
You know what a compass is: an instrument that helps you find your way home if you are lost. A compass doesn’t have to be a metal disc, though that’s what most of us think of. A small metal disk with a magnetic needle balanced delicately on a pivot. You hold it in the palm of your hand, flat, so that the needle can float, and the needle wobbles until it points North.
A compass could simply be knowing which side of the trees more lichen grows on. Or which direction the prevailing winds tend to blow. Or the direction of a prominent visible landmark like a mountain. Or that if you travel down to the bottom of the valley there will be a watercourse, and if you follow that long enough it will lead to a larger watercourse, which will eventually lead to the Bay. By which I mean that you can internalize the compass; it doesn’t have to be something out there. A compass is a tool that helps you orient to an environment, even if unknown, and determine the coordinates you need to follow to get to where you need to go. It is a tool of orientation. A tool you can turn to if you are lost; a tool that will help you get home.
Your Autonomic Nervous System contains the most powerful biological levers that govern your thriving. Its function governs the deepest root drivers of our wellbeing. It is the biological system with the most control of any over your direct moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing. And yet most modern people don’t even know what it is. Which after thirty years studying neuroscience strikes me both as bizarre, and sub-optimal.
The Autonomic Compass is a tool that you can use to help you decipher the readings that your Autonomic Nervous System is giving you. A compass that can help you figure out– Huh, what is the information that my Autonomic Nervous System is giving me, and how can I translate that into guidance that will get me home? Because make no mistake, your Autonomic Nervous System is giving you guidance all of the time, because that it what it does. You know what that guidance is?
The guidance of the Autonomic Nervous System is the way that you feel.
Your inner landscape. Whether it is sunny or stormy, calm or agitated. Your moment-to-moment experience of how it feels to be you, the you-in-your-body, the you-in-your-mind, all of this is autonomic landscape. The readings are also present in your voice, your face, your gesture, your posture. How open and available or closed and defended you feel. Whether you have access to flow states or feel shut down. All of this landscape is autonomic.
ASSESS YOUR AuTONOMIC LANDSCAPE
In this work, your body is the site of your experimentation and the doorway to novel ways of knowing.
The Autonomic Compass trains you to understand the landscape of your present autonomic state, and the landscape of your ideal autonomic states. It helps you learn to understand the deep needs– for safety, connection, belonging– that are driving your deepest neurology.
It helps you learn the language of these autonomic systems through the patterns they present in your body: how they impact upon how it feels inside your body, how you perceive yourself, your emotions, your thoughts, how you perceive the world around you, and how you behave. Learn the primal, elemental, ancestral language of your deep nervous system.
Then identify targeted neural exercises to help you change the inputs to your Autonomic Nervous System, from our library of over 300 practices. Find the intersections between your symptoms, and how you make meaning. Find the practices that are relevant to your growth and transformation, not some generic cookie-cutter assignments, but the uniquely neurologically-relevant inputs that your deep nervous system needs for flourishing.
TAILOR PRACTICES TO THE NEEDS OF Your deep nervous system
We change our autonomic experience by changing the neural inputs to our Autonomic Nervous System. And the recipe for flourishing is ancestral– we help you find targeted neural exercises that don’t feel like chores, because they are actually the way that humanity spent 99% of its lineage history living.
Find practices that meet your particular neurological needs– whether your system is stuck in shutdown, placating, fight, flight, appeasing, or accomodating– we can help you find the understandings and the practices to begin moving the neurological dial on these states in ways that are personally meaningful to you. Whether your thing is to be alone or with others, to be crafting or in nature, to be on a mountain or in the water…whether you move at bicycle speed or walking speed, whether you want to communicate better with your partner or speak the language of birds, whether you are seeking relatedness with an element or a honeybee, wanting to learn through your feet or your hands, your heart or your belly– we have practices for you. And as you begin to heal, and can put more of your attention on building safety and connection, we can help you work with every neurological portal to your connection system: the neurobiological foundation of wellbeing.
$29/month, 7-day free trial
Watch a demo of the Autonomic compass.
What people are saying…
“I use the tools FROM the autonomic compass every single day. With myself, with my family, with my clients. Everybody. Every day.”
— Amy Keala
“I'm not even sure how to talk about the healing I experienced in ordinary language. UNBELIEVABLE.”
-Participant (Anonymous)
“This work feels like a foundational piece of wellness and overall health that I feel has long been missing from the medical conversation. I love how it is based in the science of how we function- it is very practical, very direct. I've witnessed its effectiveness with my patients. These are places that I don't think traditional medicine or mental health has succeeded in reaching, and I find this work extremely inspiring and hopeful in its implications for healing.
-Nadine Burke Harris MD MPH, Formerly First Surgeon General of California