Sometimes, the more nervous system language we learn, the less closely we look at the nervous system.
“If you don’t obscure things with names, you can sense their inherent aliveness. They speak to you, there’s another dimension that reveals itself to you”
- Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth (chapter 1)
Something I have seen happen in coaching, teaching, and leadership is that when nervous system language becomes popular...
...a lot of times those words start getting used in ways that disconnect us from our lived, embodied experiences of whatever it is we're trying to name.*
Many of these terms are ones we have heard and used:
Fight-flight-freeze-fawn.
Dorsal, Dopamine. Amygdala.
Again these words can be useful (*see my note below).
But sometimes... once we believe we have a word for what we're experiencing, we narrow our exploration of it...
"I'm in freeze."
And suddenly a breath-takingly complex socio-electro-mind-brain-body state has been contained in one word or phrase.
Exploration could look like...
Is the 'freeze' related to being anxious or truly immobilized?
More exploration would be...
Where is your 'beam of awareness'?
.. is it shining on a past event,
a future projection,
is it darting around,
is it focused on a sensation in the body or a stimulus in your environment?
... Are you foggy or intensely alert?
Do you want connection or distance?
Is your body heavy?
Is your mind racing?
Do you feel like your limbs and body want to move, but there's something stopping you, or does it feel like there's zero impulse to move.
Those explorations paint a spectrum of nervous system experiences that might all fall under someone's idea of "freeze"
.. without us knowing where they might really be on that spectrum.
This is one of the reasons I am so deeply passionate about giving people richer maps, rather than simply just more 'neuro-words'
(especially brain and nervous system parts vocabulary).
(and why i like to draw a lot of diagrams and x-y axis maps !)
I've spent almost two decades looking at nervous systems through brainwaves, heart rhythms, skin conductance, eye movements, facial expressions and other physiological signals.
And one thing becomes very clear when you look closely:
there is so much more terrain than so many of our popular nervous system words could possibly capture.
I love that.. it's exciting to me.
Because a richer map doesn't have to disconnect us from our experiences.. it can do something powerful and wonderful for our brain:
it can give us new places to look.*
*just writing that makes my heart feel electric and happy
Now we get to experiencing things like...
"Oh... THAT'S what's happening.
I've never noticed that before."
And suddenly, instead of fitting their experience into an already established category, they can create more sophisticated observations of their own system.
That's one of my favorite purposes of neuroscience.
Helping people expand their view of the incredible neuro-chemical-electro-kinetic terrain in which they can discover more of themselves...
and in doing so, find more nuanced, precise tools to help them create their desired experiences.
Wishing you nuance, noticing and non-word experiences this week...
Stefanie
P.S. - take a moment in nature this week and allow your pace, and your gaze to softly take in what you see...
- watch how quickly your mind moves to name it, describe it with words.
- See if you can hold your gaze softly a bit longer and simply experience the moment with that flower, ant, tree, horizon, etc..
This is by far one of my favorite practices (and there's measurable brainwave changes that go with all of it)
P.P.S. This is a major reason I created Teach the Nervous System.
I wanted to give coaches, leaders, practitioners (and deeply curious humans 🙂
- a richer scientific map to help complement our understanding of the popular nervous-system terms so many of us know*
*(less about which ones are 'right or wrong'.. as always with embodied systems thinking.. more about expanding our view.)
It's 9 bite-sized modules, including the multidimensional state map I use to help people understand regulation with much more nuance.
→ Explore Teach the Nervous System $44
*I'm contradicting myself here.. bear with me.. s 🙂 I also share the idea that naming our feelings is an incredible powerful tool for linking brain systems that help us self-regulate (there's neurological reasoning behind "name it to tame it", which I'll share in more articles, and we cover in Module 4 of Teach the Nervous System. And p.s. - that's what complexity looks like.. not one grand formula that covers every single context for all eternity.. nuance and being able to hold contradictory ideas as all being possible...)
