People come into the coaching, learning, personal growth space for real reasons (as learners and leaders).
They want to feel more agency over their desired states and experiences.
Part of this process is understanding what's happening inside them.
Then they learn the vocabulary.
Dorsal. Amygdala. Fight-flight-freeze-fawn.
The language gives them something to hold onto. A way to point at an experience.
But sometimes... I watch what this happen next:
The naming pulls them up and out, into theory, into something more word-based than felt.
And they start to disconnect from their body. They go into a more 'cerebral' type of space.
The frameworks many of us have learned give language to experiences that used to feel unnameable. That matters.
AND...
Our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy.
What's emerging is that the brain doesn't work in isolated parts. It works in functional networks. Patterns of relationship that shift depending on what the whole organism is doing.
When we teach with theory and parts vocabulary, we're activating brain networks that are more Word-based in many ways.. categorical.
A layer removed from our real, enfleshed experience of human-ness.
Example: the networks that light up in someone who's never played a bassoon when they hear the word "bassoon." are more associatied to the word networks of 'bassoon'.
The bassoon player has something else happening. Their whole system simulates the texture of the instrument and the vibration of sound moving through their hands.
An embodied anchor. The experience itself, re-running.
When we use polyvagal or parts vocabulary, we can hand people the bassoon-listener version. A map of words without the simulation underneath.
Sometimes.. we then lose the chance to connect them with the deeper layers, the ones that would tie them to their own body-based, felt, sensory experience.
Our intelligence is enfleshed.
We perceive through the vibrational and sensory mechanisms in our tissues and organs.
The words we use are translations of what happens in the body... and they generally only translate what we notice in the first place.
Some words are too far away from the brain-body’s ability to connect with them.
When teaching stays in a theory-based vocabulary, people learn a translation.
When teaching brings them back into their bodies and their actual lived experience, they explore their own territory.
It becomes a gateway...
Not just the body. The systems of existence we all share, and the vibrational speeds and conditions across the wide spectrum of states a human can move through... states that often feel familiar to people long before they have any name for them.
When we open our language this way, more people can anchor into something they actually know. Viscerally. Not just academically.
A reflection, if it's useful:
Think about the last time you reached for one of these words. What were you actually trying to point at? What was the experience underneath the term?
Tomorrow I'll share part two, where I'll go deeper into what it means to teach this way... and why the people in your life feel the difference even when they can't quite name it.
With deep respect for your journey,
Stefanie
P.S. The maps and theories so many of us know and have heard about are incomplete. They pointed us somewhere real... but there's a rigidity to them that keeps us away from nervous system territory that is alive, dynamic, constantly changing. And those maps can't keep up*.
*beware of AI that keeps people regurgitating outdated theories!
A world opens up when we expand our language...
to include the world of vibration, attunement, and embodied authority of our own Inner Intelligence..
it becomes a new 'dialect' of teaching that walks people into landscapes that much of the trending vocabulary can't show them.
With Teach the Nervous System, you get the science, the language, and the embodied authority to explain nervous system regulation in ways many people haven't caught onto yet.
This expands your voice into one that stands out and can lead the way in a crowd that's been learning the same theories and repeating the same words and ideas. (to the point where many people feel like they've heard it before).
People inside the course are emailing me to say how much they are loving the micro modules and using the tools for their own content creation, workshop titles and ideas for sessions with clients and students.
Universities from all over the world have let me know they are using this course as an anchor for their fall courses!
You can grab the dynamic, multidimensional nervous system map and 9 bite-sized modules HERE
References:
Macrine, S. L., & Fugate, J. M. B. (Eds.). (2022). Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning. MIT Press.
Sherwin, J., & Sajda, P. (2013). Musical experts recruit action-related neural structures in harmonic anomaly detection: Evidence for embodied cognition in expertise. Brain and Cognition, 83(2), 190–202.
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645.
Schiavio, A., & van der Schyff, D. (2018). 4E music pedagogy and the principles of self-organization. Behavioral Sciences, 8(8), 72.
