Originally, I wrote this introduction to assist the Polyvagal community, because the Wikipedia page that describes the theory has been a dumpster fire for years, largely authored by Porges’ detractors, of which I am not one. As Autonomics has further differentiated from Polyvagal Theory I have continued to evolve it, to clarify our positions relative to the total body of PVT and its clinical applications.

To be clear, I believe Stephen Porges, PhD is a genius. His work probably saved my life, allowing me to reorganize my own history, and transform how my nervous system works. I worked closely with him for several years, writing and art directing the Official Polyvagal Posters. I interviewed him a number of times for global events. Our two firms (Hearth Science and Polyvagal Science LLC) had an open-ended intellectual property development agreement. I taught Polyvagal Theory to thousands of wellness professionals around the world for many years. I ran the largest global study group on Facebook focused on PVT.

Hearth Science would never have been able to develop Autonomics without having deeply studied Polyvagal Theory. PVT is also anatomically, physiologically, and functionally incomplete, which means that its translation into clinical application is sub-optimal. Some of these errors are due to Porges, some of them are the constraints of the ‘empirical methodology’ of the scientific discipline in which he is situated (just because Steve intuits, believes, or understands something, doesn’t mean he can publish on it), some of them are due to errors in the foundation maps and the worldview Polyvagal Theory built upon, and took for granted.

I am an indigenously-trained interoceptive tracker, neural cartographer, and connection phenomenologist. I studied neuroscience and neuropsychology at Yale University, and have studied neurophysiology with mentors from academia around the world. (Hearth Science has well over 100 mentors and advisors). I have, in parallel, studied and taught mindful awareness for nearly thirty years, and have been apprenticed to various lineages that prioritize non-cognitive ways of knowing for the same duration. The epistemology of our work, and its method are different than that of Porges, which has allowed us to notice and comment upon different things. My primary literary representation of what follows is elaborated in The Neurobiology of Connection. What follows is a summary.

Ergo,

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?

two thousand years of early neuroscience

The study of the nervous system is not new. Humans have probably known about the Vagus since the 3rd century BC, when Alexandrian anatomists described it for the first time. The Greek physician/philosopher Galen (129-200 AD) wrote anatomical treatises describing seven pairs of cranial nerves, based on the anatomical work of his mentor, the Alexandrian anatomist Marinus, and the study of animal models (dissection of human cadavers was taboo at this time). Galen’s descriptions endured about 1,200 years (until around 1265 AD), until the early Italian Renaissance, when human cadaver dissection began to reveal errors in Galen’s models. It was not, however, until 1788 that the German anatomist Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring established the contemporary model of 12 cranial nerves.

Modern neuroscience, we could argue, begins with the pioneering neuro-anatomical visualizations of Santiago Ramón y Cajals, a mere 140 years ago (Nobel Prize 1906). An understanding of the role of neurotransmitters begins in 1921 with the work of pioneering psychobiologist Otto Loewi. Initially named Vagusstuff, Loewi demonstrated that this substance released by the Vagus nerve slowed the heart rate: we now know it as the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (Nobel Prize 1936).

The dominant model of the Autonomic nervous system, which conceptualized it existing in a balance between ‘sympathetic’ and ‘parasympathetic’ modes (just so you don’t get mad at me later for not telling you, there is no such thing as the sympathetic or the parasympathetic nervous system) endured until 1994.

Polyvagal Theory

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.