HOW IT WORKS
So now let’s start assembling what we know. Your Vagus (new and ancient), with the mobilization architecture mediated by spinal ganglia (what has historically been called your Sympathetic Nervous System) comprises your living Autonomic Nervous System.
This system has two functions: first, to regulate your internal milieu, and secondly to re-tune your body’s systems based on present-moment determinations of safety, danger, or lifethreat.
So this system has three basic elements. Let’s represent them as follows, using primary colors: BLUE = SAFETY, YELLOW = DANGER, RED = LIFETHREAT.
In any given moment, your center of gravity could reside in any of these three places. Does that make sense? You might feel totally safe, slightly in danger, or under lifethreat. In any given present moment, these are your basic options: the primary colors, so to speak.
To help people FEEL this, we often teach it using the analogy of water. Water is very mysterious. If you had never been to earth, and you encountered her in each of her three states, you would not believe that she was the same substance. Your Autonomic Nervous System is like this. The safe version of you is like liquid water. This is where your wellbeing resides. The danger version of you is like steam. It is high-energy, mobilized and polarized. The lifethreat version of you is like ice. It is shutdown, frozen.
Most people, by the time they are adults, have pretty characteristic patterns of responding to threat. Some people become steam, some people become ice. If we spend alot of time in a state we start to identify with it. We start to think that we ARE steam. We start to think that we ARE ice. But both of these responses are results of your physiology – your Autonomic Nervous System - getting stuck in a defensive response.
You are not steam or ice. You are water. And like water, under certain conditions you will change state in order to be able to deal with the level of energy of experiences you had to pass through. You became steam or ice to survive a threatening experience. Something stressful or traumatic.
Steam and ice are not the problem. Steam and ice are necessary components of our ability to survive and endure threats. They allow us to survive things that would otherwise be unendurable.
The problem is when we get stuck in steam or ice and cannot make our way back to liquid water. And guess what?
Most modern people are stuck in steam or ice, thinking that is who they are.