MODERN LIFE
FOR INDIVIDUALS
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“I regret learning to mOVE the levers that govern my deepest sense of wellbeing.” - No One Ever
Let's take a step back from the immediacy of how you feel, and examine the context in which your health is being continuously shaped. At the deepest neurological level, your body's priority is to survive. The way that it accomplishes this is by calibrating how your bodymind functions based on the foundation parameters of whether or not you feel safe, in danger, or under lifethreat. If you do not feel safe, your deepest neural architecture will prioritize survival over thriving.
Your body's prioritization of survival over thriving translates into your felt experience as stress. While our bodies can thrive under acute physical stress (our ancestors in deeptime were all basically extreme endurance athletes) we are terrible at enduring social stress. This is because human wellbeing is social in nature. Our thriving is a function of our ability to relate: inwardly to ourselves, outwardly to our community, and with the Living and More-than-Human Worlds.
Civilization so-called, the modernity in which we live, has created a context that actively and aggressively undermines our wellbeing, because it makes it very difficult for us to feel safe in our bodies. Surrounded by existential and economic threats, it has become increasingly difficult for modern humans to turn off our biology of defense.
If we are not able to activate the neurobiology of connection, the biology of defense does not turn off. When the biology of defense becomes our normal state, when it becomes chronic and non-resolving, when it endures – guess what – we become ill.
This phenomenon of modern people being stuck in non-resolving stress states is so pervasive that four out of five visits to primary care are either stress-related, or made worse by stress.
80% of prmary care visits are stress-related
There are two ways to respond to not feeling well. One of them is the route that most people take, which is to attempt to resolve the specific symptoms that are arising. This takes us down the route of modern allopathic medicine and mental health. In this view, the problem you are dealing with is the symptoms that are arising (anxiety, depression, gastro-intestinal distress, sleep difficulties, auto-immune issues, etc.). In this view, we have to treat the dis-ease and when it goes away we hope to return to our pre-illness baseline.
This is not smart for three reasons. First of all, it treats the symptoms as the problem. The symptoms are, in reality, your body's solution to the deeper problem that you cannot see. Despite the fact that it feels terrible, anxiety is your body's solution, not the problem. Because of this confusion about what are the solutions and what is the problem, these approaches secondly try to make the symptoms go away by suppressing them. (E.g., let's give you an anti-anxiety medication.) Yet the symptoms are the information your body is giving you about what is wrong. If you suppress the symptoms you are telling the body that its communication with you is meaningless, and thereby are taking away your body's innate compass for healing.
Symptoms are always a perfect expression of your body's innate directional sense– they are never random. Symptoms are the way that your body communicates what it needs. Our inability to listen to and understand this language (the body doesn’t talk to us in English) – this need to silence the communications of the body – is stupid in its most generous interpretation, and deadly in its most malignant. Thirdly, healing is never the same as returning to a pre-illness baseline. True healing is always transformational. Did you feel wonderful before you got sick? Were you thriving before you got sick? I doubt it. You don't want to get back to a pre-illness baseline.
What you want to do is actively turn on the root drivers of thriving. And here is a secret, because no one in the allopathic medical or mental health community will tell you this. The alternative response to not feeling well (the one that sadly very few people take) is to approach health in a salugenic, rather than a pathogenic model. A salugenic model is focused on health creation. It looks at the root drivers of wellbeing, and how we can activate them. These root drivers are autonomic. The route to enduring wellbeing is simple, but not easy.
1) Activate an embodied felt sense of safety
2) turn on the neurobiology of connection
3) allow this neurobiology to activate settled interoception
4) allow this interoception to awaken your intuition
5) train your intuition to awaken your moment-to-moment experience of relatedness
6) establish our baseline in relatedness, which is the ancestral context of thriving
When we turn on the neurobiology of connection, we create the internal conditions in the body for self-healing to take place. We create the internal context, based in safety and connection, that recreates the ancestral baseline of human flourishing.
You know, innately, how to do this. Most of us, however, have been conditioned by modernity not to live in a manner that is consistent with this deep ancestral knowing. If you feel like you can do this yourself, more power to you and by all means and with great happiness we send you on your way. If you'd like help with this, from the team that has architected the most complete model of living autonomic physiology on earth, do you prefer to learn by reading or by watching?