INTRODUCTION

What if I told you that the primary drivers of your deepest innate wellbeing were levers that you could learn to dial up and down in your own life in order to transform your experience of yourself and the world around you from the inside out?

What if I told you that for 99.9 percent of human history the way that we were living, the way that we were socially organized into small band groups, and our lifestyles themselves prioritized these root drivers of wellbeing so centrally that they were the very implicit wellspring of culture?

What if I told you that it is only in the last several thousand years, as we have deviated from this ancestral baseline in safety and connection, as we have shifted our awareness from an experience of horizontal relatedness with all of Life to one of vertical domination that the forces that have degraded our mental and physical health at scale, unleashed cascades of oppression, war, and conflict, and pushed the biosphere to the very brink of collapse have been unleashed?

What if I told you that the route back from the brink, the route home to yourself, the route home to your heart was one that you could cultivate by transforming how you relate to your own innate neurobiology?

Polyvagal Theory was first articulated by psychophysiologist Stephen W. Porges in 1994. Porges had been studying heart-rate variability in infants and was confronted by a paradox. The Vagus seemed to have both protective features essential to infant wellbeing, and could also cause sudden abrupt drops in heartrate (bradycardias) that were lethal to infants. How could the same nerve function both protectively, and cause sudden mortality?

Confronted with this Vagal Paradox, Dr. Porges began the research that would lead to his conceptualization of a polyvagal system. Polyvagal Theory represents a transformational update to our understanding of how the ANS works, and you need to understand how the ANS works because most of the health outcomes in your life will be determined by this part of your nervous system that most people know almost nothing about.