Finding Home - July 18

Finding Home in Your Nervous System is a live, non-technical introduction to the art and science of Autonomics, and why it matters for your life. You will learn why autonomic fluency is a foundation for the moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing, get a sense of how your particular body tilts into habitual stress response (most adults have a pretty clearly etched preference in this direction), get a foundation sense of our color theory model of autonomic state (three variables), as well as how to apply this framework to adjusting nervous system inputs in your life in support of wellbeing.

You will come away from the training in more direct contact with your own embodied experience, and your Autonomic Nervous System itself, which shapes the deepest and most powerful levers that govern your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing.

Much of what I write is non-fiction. I was trained in writing at the creative writing department at Stanford University, and I write alot about autonomic physiology here, and in my books, in a way that I hope brings some of who and what I am personally to the conversation, such that why it matters registers. Yet for our work to assume its proper place in the fields of medicine and mental health, so that there is effective systemic uptake and it support human flourishing at the level it can, it has to be properly established in the research literature.

For the past 15 years we have been pursuing a radically different approach to understanding the autonomic nervous system that is based on interoceptive access to its living moment-to-moment dynamism, and that dramatically refines the autonomic cartography of the ANS, in its peripheral localization in the body (as in outside of the brain and spinal cord), which has been systematically neglected in the field. Better maps lead to more refined intervention. Corrupt maps prevent effective intervention. There are fundamental hitorical and methodological reasons why the methods through which classical neuroanatomy mapped neural structure necessarily fail to map the fine fiber network that comprises much of the living ANS.

As many of you likely know, I collaborated with Stephen W. Porges, PhD, for five years, during which time I wrote and art directed the Official Polyvagal Poster (with advisory review by Deb Dana), interviewed Steve a number of times, and participated in trans-disciplinary research dialogues organized by David Hanscomb, where I was in dialogue with Bob Naviaux MD PhD, and Ruth Lanius MD PhD among others.

Shortly into the process of creating the Official Polyvagal Posters, in 2020, it became patently obvious to me that the received neuroanatomical maps off of which Porges had built PVT, and on which modern autonomic neuroanatomy rests, were fundamentally flawed.

Over the last six years, this has played out like a detective story. My intuition in 2020 was that multiple aspects of the peripheral autonomic nervous system were recognized anatomically without being understood physiologically. One of my first intuitions of this was with respect to the celiac plexus; soon it became obvious that the nucleus ambiguus was the same. In both cases, specific medical and or neurological disciplines had distinct, particular, and non-aligning descriptions of what the neurology actually did that were siloed deep with the particular disciplines’ literature, and contradicted one another in obvious ways. Each discipline seemed to understand the neurology’s importance relative to its particular scope- if you ask an ENT surgeon about the functions of the nucleus ambiguus’ they will describe it in a way that does not align with what a Polyvagalist will tell you. If you ask a practitioner of Visceral Manipulation about what the celiac plexus does, it will not align with what a gastroenterologist tells you.

University of Bologna, where I was viewing the most famous dissecting theatre in the western world

Slowly, over the past six years, we have assembled clues…At a certain point in 2023 we jettisoned the received maps entirely and began working with an entirely different methodology, which I have described as autonomic tracking. Where this contradicted either the received mainstream neuroanatomy, or Polyvagal Theory, we studied to see a) was the deviation replicable across a variety of individuals clinically, b) was there some potentially methodological or historical explanation for the variance, c) was there some potentially neuro-developmental explanation for the variance.

In June of 2024 we completed the new foundation model of the living ANS.

This new cartography, in combination with autonomic tracking as an emerging clinical approach, has led to significant breakthoughs on the clinical side (we have successfully resolved, at this point, dozens of specific neurological cases that allopathic medicine insists cannot be healed), that are and will continue to unfold.

In June of this year, in Europe, I conducted several clinical sessions that revealed a sequential ignition architecture in the Autonomic Nervous System that seems to be the set of cascading initializations whereby the by fetus transitions, through birth, from a marine animal to a terrestrial animal.

Take a moment to consider how massive and strange this transition actually is. A fetus is neutrally bouyant (effectively outside the field of gravity), externally pressurized by the intrinsic limitations of the size of the womb, fed air and nutrients through the belly. Upon birth, the a) manner in which the heart works transforms on first inspiration of breath, the b) lungs inflate for the first time, c) the body is now breathing through the face rather than the umbilical cord, d) the body now ingests through the mouth instead of the umbilical cord (essentially these transitions migrate ingestion and respiration from your belly to your face), e) the body has to inflate the vascular beds to pressurize (blood pressure is intrinsically necessary, because only if the body is internally pressurized can blood be pushed upwards against gravity to the cranial brain, which is extremely sensitive to oxygen levels). All of this happens in the first minutes and hours after birth– and seems to be profoundly depending on the ambient neurochemical context, and specifically oxytocin levels.

It seems to be the case that this initialization sequence does not necessarily complete for everyone at birth, and/or elements of it may remain incomplete.

Witnessing this has, literally, totally blown my mind. Like, my jaw is still on the ground.

I started to write a research paper about it shortly after the experience, but realized that in order for this to be received in the correct way, I needed to write a series of antecedent papers to explain the ideas that preceded it, and out of which it emerged, otherwise concepts that I am taking for granted in the paper will be misconstrued. As I worked backwards - what needs to be established prior to this paper - a chain of papers began to organize, and to this end I am writing a series of Autonomics Foundation papers.

The first one, which sets the historical epistemological context, is what we published as a preprint yesterday.

Forest Not Lumberyard: Methodological Bias, Structural Error, and a Necessary Transformation of the Epistemic Ground of Autonomic Neuroanatomy

Over the next several months I will publish the series of papers, initially as preprints while we seek peer-review.

In July and August I am going to teach several advanced classes directly on these themes, which can be viewed as a mini-series at the cutting edge of our work. These take place Saturday mornings 8 to 11 am Pacific time.

July 25- Autonomics of Breath

August 8 - The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

August 22 - The Tonic Labyrtinthe Reflex as a General Purpose Vestibular-Proprioceptive Recalibration Mechanism

If your mind is not blown I will be very very surprised.

Part of the reason I am in Europe is to conduct the keystone 5-day trainings that conclude our yearlong autonomics practicum. Our plan is that these will take place in Europe annually going forward.

There is still space in our Yearlong Autonomics Practicum enrolling September 2026.

We have two cohorts, one in the morning in the US and Canada, one in the afternoon. These are timed for practitioners in Europe, and in Asia respectively.

The first step in that process is the application, which is here

Yearlong Application

If you do read the paper on Research Gate, please let me know what you think. Comments are open for all subscribers, free and paid.

Today we are publishing Forest Not Lumberyard: Methodological Bias, Structural Error, and a Necessary Transformation of the Epistemic Ground of Autonomic Neuroanatomy.

Part of the research for this paper was conducted, quite recently, at the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio e Teatro Anatomico at the University of Bologna.

The temporal displacement is also subtler, something in the air; an altered sense of time. There is something about being in a place so much older than you that changes the bodily registration of the length of a human life, and perhaps therefore the rhythm at which we proceed. I cannot help but feel it, which I know because I am jarred at the periphery of these old cities, when this temporality is contested by modern materials and people and cars moving at modern velocities.

There is also then something of the particular, obviously, about each city. These are deeply rooted in place: their geology, agricultural and cultural context. Most of them are old…date back to the Romans at least. In Bologna the perimeter fortifications of the city are Etruscan; the bricks 2500 years old.

I’m in Bologna now for the first time: home of the oldest university on earth. The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 AD. It was originally a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which translates roughly as ‘community of teachers and scholars’: a scholars guild, a union. The word which we use, university, originally referred to guilds or corporate bodies of students and masters, derived from universus (meaning "all taken together" or "entire"). I’ve only been here a short time– long enough to arrive from the train station in sweltering heat, collapse on the bed, take a shower, walk out into the scorching afternoon, be astonished by the quality of italian tailoring and then italian prices, circumambulate my wife and daughter while they shopped for a swim suit, duck into a church (magnificent, dark, somber), gorge in a trattoria, walk home, go to sleep, dream of conflict, wake early…

My impression thus far is that Bologna is a city of porticos. They are everywhere, covered understories of buildings that carve a sort of network of almost tunnels in twin parallel lines along most streets in the old city.

In a city of porticos, there are then furthermore two things that call your attention strongly. That would be doors– etymologically linked to porticos in Italian though not in english (portico ita - portico eng), (porta ita - door eng)…

And then the handles that open them, of which there are more magnificent (and very strange) here than anywhere I’ve ever seen. Bologna is, apparently, quite famous for its doorknockers, and deservedly so…battiporta (door knockers) and picchiotti are everywhere and of all description.

My wife made this face spontaneously upon grasping the affiliated knocker– I hesitate to gloss it autonomically; I’m not sure if she’s being electrocuted or exhilarated, there didn’t seem to be any enduring ill effects.

The net effect of all of this portico walking, which is shaded, but has a bit of a subterranean feel, while the buildings are brightly colored yet largely earth-tone, betwixt and between fabulous structure, in a city filled with gas and diesel vehicles and a population that likes to smoke and will out of consideration step out of a restaurant and into its open door to smoke outside (WTF? Ever heard of a thing called wind?) and the sensory and inhaled texture of Bologna is not like anything I’ve ever experienced.

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with Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown at Magdalene College, Oxford University, Oxford UK

Doing this in Europe is both similar and different than doing it in the states. The architecture of what moves through the body is the same; the expressed language of the ANS, the way that allostatic loads are retained, the pervading neurochemistries- all of that is the same. What is different, in my observation thus far, is the baseline impact that having two land wars on European soil has made on the nervous systems of the second and third generations since those wars took place. The collective normative neurological baselines are different.

In October, from Wednesday October 14-Sunday October 18 I’m going to teach another 5-day autonomic tracking training. This will be held at our eco-reserve in Northern California, on an indigenous sacred site, in a grove of old-growth Douglas Fir trees, some of which date back to when the land was indigenous territory. The land we steward was ancestrally a birthing center, and she always plays an active role in these retreats.

If you would like to learn to follow the living language of the embodied nervous system in realtime, you can learn more about the California retreat here, and apply here.

Apply for Tracking in California

The trip has been a fanstastic teaching trip, but also an absolutely astonishing research trip. I’ve had the opportunity to work with several people on birth and peri-natal phenomena that are simply extraordinary from an autonomic perspective. We are on the threshold of publishing a series of papers about these phenomena, but in order for them to make sense I’ve had to write a series of papers that precede them, establishing the proper antecedents and conceptual frameworks. These will be available in the near future. Later this summer, I am going to teach several of these phenomena in a series of 3-hour advanced zoom classes. The last two will be of special relevance to Occupational Therapists (possibly quite disruptive to the frameworks upon which you have been trained, though I’ll try to be gentle about this…)

On Saturday July 25 I’ll teach the Autonomics of breath. Everyone uses HRV as a non-invasive metric of the ANS, but this is not even close to the best autonomic signal. In this 3-hour classe, I will examine why respiration — continuously updated by brainstem central pattern generators — encodes and regulates autonomic state with a precision that heart rate variability cannot match, and what becomes clinically visible when breath is read accordingly. (3 hours).

July 25- Autonomics of Breath

On Saturday August 8, I’ll explore the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade: a presentation of birth as a marine-to-terrestrial transition requiring a precisely ordered series of autonomic initializations, and the clinical consequences when that cascade is disrupted and its incomplete stages are retained in the body's neural architecture. (3 hours)

August 8- Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

On Saturday August 22, I’ll look into the tonic labyrinthine reflex: a review of clinical evidence that the tonic labyrinthine reflex is not a superseded developmental primitive but a general-purpose recalibration mechanism available throughout life, with implications for treating impact injuries, vestibular compromise, and proprioceptive loss. (3 hours).

August 22- Tonic Labyrinthine Reflex

Please join me for these explorations at the cutting-edge of autonomic tracking and neural cartography. I hope you are having a good summer so far…

I make my way out a series of doors locked with progressively more and then less ornate keys, down to the cobblestone street. It is just before dawn, the mountains across the lake are haloed by anticipatory luminescence. Just across the road from our apartment, a hundred yards, is the old church. Last night, returning from a late dinner, the illuminated vault, visible through a round window, caught my eye: it looked to be filled with mosaics of astonishing beauty.

And so I come around the front of the building, climb the steps, and find myself standing at the end of a long portico, the pediment of which could be Greek or Roman, which contains a series of frescoes of the stations of the cross.

Unless I’m quite mistaken, neither you nor I have ever heard of the painters of these frescoes. This is not, to my knowledge, a church of great renown. Yet the technique is fresco undoubtedly; you can tell by the quality of color and the crystalline flecks embedded in the surface.

The emotional expressivity of the imagery is so great, the pathos and beauty, the articulation of the hands, which owes its form directly to the High Renaissance although I have reason to believe that these frescoes were made in the past hundred years– it is so extraordinary I find myself moved to tears.

In the penultimate panel, the representation of Jesus, no longer clothed, his body glowing with a luminescent and slightly otherworldly greenish hue, is so anatomically perfect that I am rendered speechless. I have lost all anchoring outside of the painting: I have fallen in. I am helpless, overcome with emotion. The painting has simply taken me.

At station XII I am slain. I am nowhere, in a tiny church in a remote corner of Italy, and the image of the crucifixion is the most powerful I have ever seen. The artist has triumphed: my distance has been removed; I am transported. I kneel at the foot of the cross. I cannot help it: it seems the only appropriate response.

I would propose to you that there is something about what the paintings do, as opposed to what they mean, that importantly subverts our received narrative about them. While the church was arguing back and forth about the corporeality of the body of Jesus, affirming its difference from our own, the images land the body in its beauty in our bodies. Think what you want– there is a direct transmission in the images independent of ecclesiastical interpretation. We can talk all day long about what the story of Jesus means, but there is something that the paintings do. They act upon you. Upon what it means to be you, the viewer, wearing your own body. Like an ornate key slotted into the locked door we did not know that we are, the paintings open the body. His body, and through some kind of affinity, the visual and neurobiological mechanism of which is yet opaque, your body. Beauty, like the swallows whistling and knifing through the dawn, cannot be kept out of the church. It enters.

I’m not saying the Italian Renaissance invented beauty; I’m saying something more nuanced, but also possibly more radical. In the same way that an infant comes to experience their own interiority by the quality of attunement and reflection a caregiver gives them– in this sense we do not self-regulate, but rather we co-regulate based on the caliber of neurological inputs that we receive from primary caregivers: this is the basis of attachment theory– I’m saying that we do not truly grasp, collectively, the magnificence of the human form in its relationship to the Divine until Leonardo and Michelangelo show it to us. This bodily registration of the magnificence then becomes part of us. In this way these drawings, frescoes, and sculptures do not simply reflect us to ourselves, for this would be to show us something that we can already see. Rather, they invent how we see ourselves. They invent our bodily registration of this relationship.

I’m not sure that I can adequately explain how important this becomes to the next several hundred years of cultural development. The compounding effects of innovation are hard to anticipate. The first car, the first plane– these are essentially miracles of innovation. I remember early plane rides as a small child, the sense of absolute wonder as we broke through the clouds (it is raining down there) into the atmosphere above, the startling robin’s egg blue of the sky, the silence of the cabin. Truly these machines transform not simply the way we get around, but how we experience the world. Yet today, with their proliferation, their dominant form of generating power (combustion of fossil fuels) the very proliferation of the inventions threaten the terrestrial ecosystem. So it is as well with this invention of representational visuality. In its individual unit of occurrence it is a miracle that opens us to ourselves: become the de facto way of knowing the world it arrives at a hegemony of visuality that blinds us to as much as it reveals.

Across the duration of the High Renaissance, vision, as a means of knowing the world, accretes to itself a sort of confidence born of the representational wizardry developed by Leonardo, Michelangelo– all the painterly ninja turtles of Florence- that it does not rightly deserve.

With the development of linear perspective, techniques of foreshortening, the anatomical studies that broke into the body to understand its underlying mechanical structure, close studies of the expression of emotion through the face and body– a level of realism emerges on the two dimensional surface that tricks the eye. Because it is devoted to such noble ends– statistically the predominant Renaissance painting subjects are certainly Jesus and the Virgin Mary– and because the faces, hands, bodies, postures, scenes depicted are so deeply resonant with emotion, faith, yearning– they come to be indistinguishable from our experience of our place in the world. Remember that during this period of time most people didn’t read. Immersed as they were in the stories of the Bible, they could not read them, and as such they could not necessarily visualize them inwardly, which is part of how we partake imaginally in the stories themselves. To be able to see the stories rendered visually, in their glory, with the colors imbued into these frescoes: aquamarine, magenta, azure, spanning the vaults of Renaissance churches, was to be transported into the stories.

Yet these are techniques that collapse a three dimensional reality onto a two dimensional surface. They encode an illusion of depth that although accurate is in fact a tiny fraction of what we can see if we are able to use the eyes to experience volume. It is thus that in the same stroke they invent our experience of the world around us, and our place in it, they foreclose it.

In order for you to understand viscerally what I am saying, a brief exercise is in order:

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We make our way down a long, dour, fluorescently illuminated corridor, descend an escalator, wait en masse for a train. A five minute ride and we reach customs, where the agent ushers us towards a rat maze of switchbacks. Our flight seems to be the only one that has arrived at the moment: there is no one in the queue. We could, ostensibly, walk straight down the aisle to the gate agents to whom we have to present our passports, but rather are corralled into this arbitrarily winding channel.

We are on London time now, clock time, there is somewhere to be. There is a universal cadence to the velocity of passengers moving around me, and I am full two beats slower. Having no such urgency myself, I have found myself at the tail end of the line, from which I watch the manic back-and-forth of my fellow passengers dutifully snaking through the switchbacks. This is perhaps the first moment in the UK that I feel my ‘Americanness’ standing out. It takes all of my restraint not to simply duck the ropes and walk straight up to the queue.

The thing that prevents me from doing this– I would probably go for it in the States– is that there are the obviously protruding spherical eyestalks of security cameras everywhere. Its not that I’m being watched by people; rather by the machine eye, and I realize I do not know what intelligence it is tethered to. The facticity of being observed like this– I later visit, in Oxford, what proclaims itself to be the oldest coffee house in Great Britain - The Grand Café, 84 the High Street, Oxford founded 1650 (don’t bother) - where I am not permitted to use my laptop but again find myself under the gaze of two spherical eyestalk cameras– is the source of my restraint. Leaving Bergerac I am fingerprinted robustly (digital), and photographed precisely: I assume this information makes its way into the European immigration database. Again on arrival in the UK I will be thoroughly stamped and photographed. The assumption I am making, Silicon-Valley-adjacent that I am, is that this biometric data required to secure my entry into the country is being fed into some giant AI database managed by the likes of Palantir, the data analytics company founded by Peter Thiel, as sinister a character as the modern panopticon of tech villainry has offered us, and that if I take a piss on a tree near Hampstead the police might show up to deport me.

I will dwell for the duration of my stay in the UK on what it means to be watched, because I have come to the conclusion that a large part of what motivates British behavior broadly construed is the keeping up of appearances, a sort of uber-consciousness that you are being observed, your behavior documented, decisions that effect your life being made based upon how you measure up to scrutiny. A sort of vague constant awareness that you are being evaluated: your accent, syntax, and the way that you manipulate silverware being used to discern where exactly in the dual hierarchies of social class and power/wealth you sit. It occurs to me as I dutifully (and resentfully, boiling over about it if we are honest) wind my way through the intestinal corridor preceding customs that the first thing that I am being acculturated to do prior to being officially admitted into the UK is being psychologically prepped to dutifully follow rules that make no sense to my body, sense of direction, or even to the ergonomic necessity of the moment.

I then watch, with mild astonishment that turns into a wry smile, as two people of importance (the VIP line, it seems) are ushered by a gate agent directly through the snake of ropes, the agent courteously and precisely removing a segment of the switchback so that they can progress in a straight line to waiting customs agents. The intestinal snake of the thing is for the riffraff, I realize, of which I seem to be one. The upper echelons do not suffer this indignity: the way is cleared for them, made straight and narrow. Welcome to the UK.

I see why we left, I say to no one in particular. Referring to the general American determination that led to the 250 year experiment we have undertaken on further shores, which commenced with a leave-taking from all this. I see why we left, and I haven’t even gotten here properly yet.

***

It doesn’t get much better out of the airport. Blokes smoking and cursing in the rain-spattered arrival gate, confusing signage. I make my way down to the train to Liverpool Station, underground. I’m having a fairly strong adverse reaction to arrival in the UK that I am somewhat unable to pin down, yet is pretty visceral. Dirty, smoky, dark, rainy, wet. We shoot through countryside that is idyllic enough, yet as we approach London both the age of the city (rows and rows of flats bedraggled in a way that only several hundred year old tenement housing can be), stations embroidered with graffiti, erratic advances and slowing in the gathering dark. Sitting in the train, coming into London, I watch a woman in a building beside the tracks facing away from the train pull a shirt down over her milky tits unaware she is being watched by a rack full of strangers. We move into the gaping maw of the underground coming into Liverpool station, yawning chasms of old subterranean corridor visible in gritty half-light. Pulling into the station the train coughs me up into a Hogwartsian cavern, we are disgorged into a giant vault, the intricate wrought-iron and glass ceiling sixty feet up.

Liverpool Station

Londoners are a diverse bunch ethnically, drawn from all corners of the world, but the white people are pale, boast hairs sprouting in weird places (ears, adam’s apples, between their teeth), are racked and stooped and carry a general air of ill health. Not all of them of course– there are some ruddy young ones, some lads that look like they just came off the rugby pitch, or out of a scull on the Thames– but these are the statistical minority. It is June, but the sense of Northern Europe comes to me, after having just left the south. Nordic faces, the guttural inflections, blond hair. The smell of the bog. English being tonified with a lilt that makes my american accent seem anodyne; makes me feel like I don’t know how to properly inflect the blessed language as it clips through the lip trap.

If something doesn’t look right, the speakers keep saying, text the British Transport Police. They’ll sort it. See it, say it, sort it.

At Liverpool I waylay a station agent, get directions to the Elizabeth line. Avoid eye contact with a man looking for a mark. Get myself an Oyster ticket, pass through an electronic gate, into a white-tiled hospital hall. The sense of being subterranean pervades. I am following signage: make my way onto an escalator so steep and deep my body initially reacts to it the same way it did when I used to ski and came up to the edge of a run. Another snaking through corridors, labyrinthine bowels, another monumental escalator down.

I reach the level of the train. At this point, by my own estimate I am a good five hundred feet underground. I don’t know if I’ve ever descended so far downward beneath the surface of the earth in something that wasn’t an immense cave. I take the train to Paddinton Station, make my way back up up up to the surface, again find myself in the vault of a train station. Buy a ticket for Oxford, pile into a train that will fill to the gills before it sets of west. I stand for thirty minutes until the first stop, sit down next to an Asian man staring into his phone, move to my own seat as the line continues. My host phones me. At Oxford Station I disemark, snap a disembodied selfie on the walkway above the tracks.

Arriving in Oxford, above the train tracks

Learning somatics without learning autonomic physiology is literally building a house in quicksand. Autonomics are the primary governor of the body’s physical and energetic structure. This includes bones, joints, connective tissue, fascia, muscles. Starting with anything other than the autonomic physiology will lead to situation where you have over-indexed on some element of structure that is not at the root of what is organizing how the body structures, moves, and relates. Learning autonomics changes the WHY of everything.

-Natureza Gabriel

ANNOUNCING THREE ADVANCED OPEN SHORT-FORM COURSES ON ZOOM

You may take these as a three-part series, or as stand-alone classes, but they will build upon one another. Individually classess are $200. Classes meet from 8 to 11 am Pacific on Saturdays with two weeks between them.

SATURDAY JULY 25 - AUTONOMICS OF BREATH

For three decades, heart rate variability has served as the field's preferred noninvasive window into autonomic function — a choice driven largely by the computational affordances of the 1970s rather than by the richness of the signal itself. Heart rate is a discontinuous output that captures only a fraction of what the autonomic nervous system is doing at any given moment. Respiration, by contrast, is continuously updated by the brainstem's central pattern generators and encodes the full dynamic negotiation between the Connection System, the Movement System, and the Grounding System in real time. Breath is not merely a correlate of autonomic state — it is one of its primary expressive and regulatory channels.

In this three-hour class, we will examine the neurological architecture of respiratory control, the specific ways in which breathing both reflects and actively reshapes present-moment autonomic state, and what becomes clinically visible when breath is read with the precision the signal actually affords.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Articulate why respiratory sinus arrhythmia and HRV, while valuable, capture only a subset of the autonomic information encoded in the breathing signal, and describe the neurological basis for breath's superior fidelity as an autonomic index.

2. Identify the brainstem central pattern generators governing respiration and explain how breathing rhythm reflects the cooperative coordination — or hierarchical decoupling — of the three autonomic systems under different neurochemical conditions.

3. Apply a breath-based observational framework in clinical settings to distinguish present-moment autonomic state more precisely, and recognize how conscious and assisted respiratory interventions work through autonomic channels rather than psychological ones.

Autonomics of Breath

AUGUST 8 - THE PERINATAL AUTONOMIC CASCADE

At the most fundamental level, birth is a transition from marine to terrestrial existence. The fetus lives in a neutrally buoyant, pressure-equalized environment, without gravitational gradients to manage cardiovascularly, without pulmonary gas exchange, without the requirement to source nutrition from outside the body. In the first moments and hours after birth, a precisely ordered series of neurological and neurochemical transformations must occur to prepare the physical body for this entirely novel reality. We call this the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade: a sequential initialization of autonomic systems — cardiovascular, respiratory, gravitational, visceral — each stage dependent on the successful completion of the one before it. The cascade is exquisitely sensitive to neurochemical context, particularly the presence of oxytocin. Disruption at any stage — through difficult delivery, separation, pharmacological interference, or insufficient oxytocin — results in incomplete initialization that may* be retained in the autonomic architecture throughout the lifespan, with measurable consequences for physiological regulation, somatic organization, and clinical presentation. This class presents the theoretical model, the clinical evidence for retained incomplete initialization, and the conditions under which completion may be possible.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Describe the major stages of the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade — including lung inflation, suck-swallow-breathe coordination, genital/pelvic neural ignition, cardiovascular pressurization through inspiratory hemodynamics, respiratory-gravitational adaptation, and the sequential integration of anterior vagal and posterior spinal architectures — and explain why each stage is prerequisite to the next.

2. Explain the role of oxytocin as the neurochemical substrate enabling cooperative coordination among autonomic systems during the cascade, and identify the categories of perinatal disruption most likely to produce incomplete initialization with lasting clinical consequences.

3. Recognize clinical presentations that may reflect retained incomplete perinatal initialization — including patterns of autonomic dysregulation, somatic organization, and sensory calibration anomalies (generally ascribed generically to a ‘difficult birth’ if noted at all) — and describe the neurochemical and neuroceptive conditions required for evocation and completion of retained cascade stages.

*this is some of our newest, and possibly most profound research, and the data set upon which it is built is both very convincing, and statistically small. While applying some of the general principles of autonomic physiology regarding retained allostatic loads seems defensible, we are still deeply involved with exploring this and are hesitant to make categorical assertions about what happens when elements of the cascade are incomplete. Our certainty about this is likely to have increased somewhat by the time the class occurs.

Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

AUGUST 22: THE TLR (TONIC LABRYNTHINE REFLEX) AS GENERAL PURPOSE VESTIBULAR-PROPRIOCEPTIVE RECALIBRATION MECHANISM

The tonic labyrinthine reflex is conventionally understood as a primitive developmental reflex that integrates and is superseded in the first months of postnatal life. Our clinical research suggests this framing is incomplete. The TLR — a full arc from extension through flexion driven by vestibular input — appears to function as a general-purpose recalibration mechanism available throughout the lifespan, deployable whenever the relationship between vestibular input and somatic mass requires fundamental reorganization from a new baseline. We have documented spontaneous TLR arcs in numerous clinically distinct contexts including during completion of the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade in an adult patient, and following restoration of proprioception after eight years of complete loss in a case of complex regional pain syndrome (both adult cases). In all cases the reflex appeared endogenously, without instruction, at precisely the moment of vestibular-somatic recalibration. In this class, we will review the neurological architecture of the reflex, examine these two clinical cases in detail, and explore what spontaneous TLR expression means for the treatment of impact injuries, vestibular compromise, and conditions involving disrupted proprioceptive mapping.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Describe the neurological substrate of the tonic labyrinthine reflex — including its vestibular, brainstem, and proprioceptive components — and articulate the evidence from clinical cases that the reflex serves as a general-purpose recalibration mechanism beyond its conventional developmental role.

2. Analyze the two presented clinical cases to identify the specific conditions under which spontaneous TLR arcs emerged, the mechanistic rationale for their appearance in each context, and what the reflex accomplished neurologically in each instance.

3. Identify clinical presentations — including sequelae of impact collisions, vestibular injury, and conditions involving proprioceptive loss — in which the conditions for TLR-mediated recalibration may be present, and describe the facilitation principles that support rather than interrupt spontaneous reflex expression.

Labrynthine Reflex

Je me trouve dans une ferme au sud-ouest du pays, où nous effectuons le formation des Autonomics.

Our first European training is complete. Thursday I head to the UK. In the meantime,

A few spaces available in Oxford. A few spaces available in Italy, where we are exploring initiating an autonomics in education project. Back in the states in July.

The next 3-hour introduction to our work Saturday July 18 (Finding Home in Your Nervous System). The next advanced dive into the Autonomics of Breath is July 25.

It has taken me less than 24 hours here to become convinced that Silicon Valley has ruined the world, and that the next generations of young people are fucked because of it. I’ve been in the international terminal at San Francisco International, on a flight across the ocean (the most endearing part of which was sleeping communally with about 400 strangers), into the terminal at Orly, down into the Paris Metro. During this entire time I have not seen a single person between the ages of 18 and 40 years old who is not on their phone. These might as well be appendages for the degree to which they are welded to the hands of young people.

I turned 50 a year ago, and I fancy myself a young 50, but the way I use a phone and the way that younger generations do reveals something about my own position at the edge of this demographic techno-phenomenon. I see this in my daughter, in twenty-somethings who look something up for me on their devices, even in my younger brother. There is a way that their fingers merge with the device, text without lifting a finger, pinch and squeeze and pivot through screens, that is dizzying to me, but is perhaps what others feel when watching me type. The interface I grew up with is a keyboard: I think that is what I’m saying. I pound keys that way that these screen natives navigate digital space; fingers flying.

It would be hard to argue that there is a more successful product ever created than the iPhone, if we are measuring both by adoption, and the velocity with which a product changed people’s behavior. In most public spaces I have been moving through, including Metro cars and now the high-speed train, people are on their phones, and an increasing number of them are jacked into earbuds, or wearing noise-cancelling headphones, which is also to observe that they are completely divorced from communal sensory inputs. With your face in your phone you are visually occupied: the second-order effect of this is that intentionally or no you are less available to conversation. Put in earbuds or put on headphones and the picture is complete. You register your unavailability pretty loudly. Of the four of us sitting facing two-by-two in this train cars chair set, two of us are wearing hoodies, which are a sartorial way of doing the same thing. You pull the thing up around your face and become completely socially unavailable. A turtle drawn into its own iPhone encrusted shell.

This is particularly on my heart and mind this morning because of an interaction I had at the hotel in which I stayed last night, with a handsome Tunisian man named Bilel with whom I struck up one of those rare conversations that you sometimes have with a complete stranger, premised partly on the recognition that you are unlikely to ever see one another again. On arrival at the hotel last night, he was kind enough to complement the broken French I am attempting to rescuscitate; this led to a slightly longer and amiable conversation about what I am doing in France. When I awoke this morning at 4 am, descended five flights of stairs in the hotel after lingering on the third floor to open a window out into the alley pre-dawn and inhale the still early morning air of Paris- the mansard roofs, an architecture replete with Hausmann apartments and their small terraces– I found him awake at the front desk; he had worked the overnight shift and if he slept there was no evidence of it. We walked back into the room that serves as a restaurant, where he made me an instant cappuccino and began to tell me his life story a propos of nothing beyond the fact that I was listening intently.

We talked for about an hour and half, during which he told me a story that would make a fine 19th century Russian novel. We spoke of his failed marriage, the courtship that preceded it, red flags he should have noticed, but did not at the time.

We entered someplace outside of the flow of ordinary time– an everywhen in which the details of this relationship, with a woman who was so deeply estranged from her authentic self that she simply became the woman he desired, until three weeks after their marriage when this constructed facade began to spectacularly collapse in the wake of his telling her about a nightmare related to the true paternity of the son that she planned to have with him penetrated into the actual underpinnings of the deceit, and exposed something from which she was unable to recover.

My eyes teared up, we traded stories, anecdotes, observations about life, failed relationships, heartbreak, what it means to leave a trace in the world through your actions…

I was not simply enriched by this conversation: it re-awakened the French language lying dormant inside of me basically since highschool. I had to make myself understood– I searched someplace inward oblique to my ordinary sense of linguistic awareness until the words surfaced in French such that we could understand one another. It was as if this unexpected friendship arising as suddenly as a flower in desert rain kindled the fire of the language that had been lying dormant in me for thirty years.

Had I taken a French-speaking or comprehension test prior to the conversation, and again after, I would have failed and then passed. This fortuitous social interaction was a byproduct of several things, but antecedent to all of them was the fact that neither of us was staring into a black mirror with our ears plugged. Does this moment of star-crossed mutual ensparkedness even happen for the generation plugged into their black mirrors? Are we becoming, through dependence on these black boxes, ever more alienated from the deep mystery of the effort to understand one another and be understood?

The degree to which smartphones categorically occlude casual conversation is not necessarily a feature of their design: it is more a feature of how they are used in society. Which is to say that it has become culturally acceptable to have them out all of the time. This cultural conditioning is not directly a result of the technology, but rather what I would term the cultural creep of them deeper and deeper into the domestic spheres of life, for there are (or have been) many kinds of technologies extant whose uses are dictated by social morays. For example– in most places it is considered impolitic if not illegal to walk around carrying a handgun, or set it on the dinner table next to your plate. You can easily imagine a society where it would be considered rude to take out your phone in the presence of others unless you were engaged in a defined task; where their utility was acknowledged, but their use was largely a private affair. But that of course negates the degree to which phones have a function that is quite obvious but rarely acknowledged, which is to say that they form a very effective social shield from exactly the kind of awkwardness through which we must pass to establish social connection.

I did not realize until I was in my mid-thirties, and formally studying connection phenomenology, how much practice is required to become a fluent conversationalist. What do I mean by fluent conversationalist? Essentially the ability to strike up a conversation with anyone you would wish to. You might ask yourself now, pausing as you read this – perhaps conversations around mating excepted, because I’m not here speaking about flirtation – whether or not you feel comfortable striking up a conversation with a complete stranger. Whether or not you have a habit of so doing? Whether or not you can tolerate the lapses in such a conversation that inevitably arise?

Does the thought of this inspire interest and delight, or does it raise your heart rate a bit with anxiety? The statistical answer to this, in the current generations of living humans probably tilts towards the latter, and so, guess what– If you are holding a phone in your hand you don’t have to. You could, of course, engage a prior generation of social cues to make your unavailability known– we can and do avert our gazes, look away, in general orient our attention to other places…put up a hand or other gesture of self-protection to make it known that we are not available if the subtler cues are not taken– I did this earlier walking with my bags to the train station when it became obvious that a slightly disheveled looking guy in an argyle sweater was going to ask me for money– but the lingua franca of the young is to evade all this nuance with the simple facticity of orienting your gaze into your phone.

Paris is a place where it is still a thing to kiss passionately on the street– I watched a couple in a lip-lock for a good long while last night, not out of prurient interest, but because they were doing this walking down the sidewalk and I didn’t want to collide with them – but I confess that I do wonder how the next generations will sustain the coupling required to maintain the population if we don’t know how to strike up a conversation with a stranger since everyone you know, outside of your immediate family, was at some point a stranger. At the risk of waxing strange, someone recently told me that in the future the population will crash because young people will prefer frictionless AI companions to inscrutable human ones. I would have laughed this off as lunacy a few years ago; I’m no longer quite so sure. The degree to which the current and next generation of LLMs can meld to your preferences, in a way that feels frictionless, like Scarlet Johansson’s character in the movie Her, which dramatized this scenario, makes me wonder.

We are about fifty minutes south of Paris, shooting through a landscape that looks like rural Missouri, but with finer and more antique houses. We blow past tiny hamlets with peaked roofs and church spires, hay rolled in the fields. The stonemasons building these homes hundreds of years ago would never have anticipated that one day they would be passed by trains traveling in excess of 150 mph. Passing an 18th-century chateau at 200 miles per hour is something my body cannot quite make sense of: this juxtaposition between the temporal and visual realms of the historical and the modern. How are we to live simultaneously in all of these different temporalities? With access to the internet that can whisk us away to anywhere in the blink of an eye, where are we exactly? What does it mean to be rooted in place if our attention can leave so easily?

I recently had the experience on a flight of literally touching someone for two hours– he was overspilling his seat, during which he pretended that I did not exist socially. There was no acknowledgement, no greeting exchanged, no meeting of the eyes. We were two flesh cabinets who happened to be in physical contact, but were otherwise remote. This chilly reception on arrival precluded my instigating any sort of conversation– I thought, Fuck it, this prick is not going to look up from his phone. Likewise the two young people sitting opposite me are sharing an arm rest, his bare arm and her hoodie-enclosed arm within millimeters of touching. They look to be about the same age, both in their mid- to late twenties I’m guessing. In another era, a woman of childbearing age would not sit this close to a man she didn’t know (I’m not saying this is better, just different), but these two seem to be existing in the same non-acknowledgement I existed with my fellow plane passenger in for hours. The ride on the train is several hours, and the unstated yet agreed-upon subtext seems to be that we will all pretend that none of the others exist.

When the train conductor comes by to ask for tickets, I am astonished by her warm and sonorous voice. QR codes are registered, identifications presented, and then we are back to our screens. The large one of my laptop; the small one of their phones. Their will be no conversation exchanged in our block of seats: the most visual communication that arises a tiny nod of acknowledgement between me and the man sitting next to her as we take out our digital tickets. After he leaves she will turn away, look out the window, and weep, clearly about something that has nothing to do with any of us or the immediate moment. I will refrain from asking her if she is ok, since she has assiduously avoided my eyes as well and I do not want to intrude upon her privacy. This display of intense emotion, in the ambit of a city such as Paris, will make itself known and yet be contained entirely within the sphere of the private. And we wonder why people are lonely…

Within the next few hours I’ll be at a farm in countryside of southwestern France, where my next 5-day autonomic tracking retreat awaits…

There is still space in our retreat in Oxford (UK) June 12-14 should you care to come autonomic with us…

Apply for Oxford here...

There is also space in our Northern Italy retreat in Civiasco (90 minutes NW of Milan) June 24-26.

Apply for Italy here...

Single volume OED, and requisite reading tools…

That book was thick enough to use as a step stool.

Other books you kept for reference? A thesaurus. Bartlett’s familiar quotations. Strunk and white. Dreyer’s English - funny story… I know Ben Dryer. When he was copy chief at Random House, I almost sold him my first novel (very very close, which is only good in horseshoes), which he really loved, but could not figure out the genre of. I once bought him a metal belt buckle inscribed with a picture of the Sutro Tower. I really wanted a book deal…He really liked San Francisco.

A Field Guide to the missing words is not necessarily a book that you sit down and read in one go. It is a book that you refer to. It’s a book that you go find when you vaguely remember that there’s a word that is the opposite of being homesick for a place you can’t get back to (hiraeth- Welsh). Sort of opposite a longing for all that is familiar and dear to you–that terrible beautiful ache (saudade, Portuguese). A word that actually means a yearning for faraway places. A longing for the unfamiliar, the unknown. A need to travel, to explore, to find yourself against a backdrop you do not recognize.

You look it up because even if you don’t know the word, you feel the yearning. And there is some strange, deep, and satisfying comfort in being able to attach a name to it.

A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America is, among other things, of words you didn’t know you need.

A Field Guide to the Missing Words

I am pleased to announce the arrival today of a substantive revision of our 2023 book Keywords, which was under-appreciated at the time if you'll forgive me for being so blunt.

I have been identifying holes in the English language since I was 19 years old (almost 32 years ago), a freshman at college, began to meditate, and daily began having experiences I could not translate into English.

I became convinced (I am still convinced) that there is a meta-pattern to the lexical gaps in English. A lexical gap, or lacuna, is a place where a language is missing a word. We can identify that it is missing because a word referring to the phenomenon exists in another language. For example– in Japanese you can refer with a single word to the greengold color of sunlight filtered through leaves. This word, komorebi, titles a phenomenon that then becomes a strand in the net of language we carry around within and between us and make sense of the world through. Language is not our only, or even necessarily primary mode of knowing the world, but it sure is easier to talk with other people about things we can name.

(Here is a page of the glossary E-F-G)

My contention, roughly, is that the long project of imperial domination, back to Rome, has continued to stripmine our language of words for interiority, relatedness, earthing, and connection, simply because these are facets to which domination cannot attach. That which it cannot extract it attempts to disappear. And in this way these holes in the language– many of which are words thieved from us by imperial decree– bear directly upon our capacity to experience ourselves inwardly.

This bears directly upon our work because these words are necessary to our ability to skillfully interocept– which is to feel our bodies from the inside, as well as to name these territories to which the hegemony of thinking, and the hegemony of visuality (if you can’t see it, it ain’t real) have occluded our access. Our work in neurophysiology is, in large part, capacitizing people’s direct access to inward experience that is very difficult to name in English because we are missing the words.

Today I am republishing an updated version of this book with some changes to the order of material and updates to the physiology section based on our new foundation model in Autonomics.

The book is available in the US, UK, Australia, and Europe.

A Field Guide to the Missing Words

While you are shopping for books, our previous release, Autonomics, Placing the Lineage History of Neuroscience on a Sacred Foundation, is pretty interesting.

Have you ever been to a restaurant with a secret menu? if you are in the know, you can ask for something that isn’t part of the visible menu, but that the restaurant is known for making.

Along the journey of the development of Hearth Science, we have continued to develop products including books and posters and workbooks and manuals as the work matured. Some of these have become slightly obsolete as our understanding of autonomic physiology has evolved over the past several years. It was for this reason that we returned the intellectual property behind the Official Polyvagal Posters to The Polyvagal Institute. I was not comfortable selling a product that we did not believe to be accurate.

In other cases there was simply a question of having too many products, which led to too many starting points or entry points into the work. People didn’t know where to start.

And then in other cases still, the logistics of delivering something for example, the difficulty of finding a suitable printing partner or the frequency with which product arrived at sub-standard quality led to a decision to terminate a product line. This is in fact what happened with our line of posters, many of which were beloved.

We periodically receive requests for posters. We periodically receive requests for versions of books we have published with previous covers. (Some people love the blue cover for Finding Home in Your Nervous System. We would be foolish to argue against such tastes…)

For serious students of our work, I have created a secret menu where are you can purchase many of these archival products.

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After that, I will be doing VERY LIMITED one-on-one consultations. The Autonomics Clinic that I run does targeted individual work on complex autonomic challenges. We frequently work with people who have consulted with numerous (in one case more than 15) neurologists and specialists without sufficient result.

I do not work with complex chronic illness. I do not work with people taking psychotropic meds. I do not work with Axis II disorders. I am regularly working on the following types of cases:

• Impact collisions, especially with complex motion vectors (car, bike, ski accidents, etc.) with expertise in restoring vestibular function

• Failed recovery after successful surgeries (e.g. brain fog, and/or other kinds of limitations (mobility issues in areas where surgery happened, etc.) in the wake of surgeries that were technically successful)

• Various neurobiological sequelae of early childhood adversity

• Disease with autonomic origins broadly construed (more pathology has autonomic origin than most people realize)

• Early developmental traumas

• Pre-/ perinatal traumatic injuries including due to maternal stress

• Proprioceptive / Interoceptive Deficits

• Complex Regional Pain Syndromes

• Lateralized autonomic asymmetries (left and right side of body/ face feel different)

• Various other neurological conditions with an autonomic component

If you are interested in working with me face-to-face in Europe (or remotely via Zoom, which is how I often consult), the first step is filling out our Autonomics Clinic Consultation Request form. Provide as much information about what is happening as possible. If we believe that we can be of use, my team will follow up to schedule a preliminary conversation and we can determine whether or not face-to-face work is indicated.

Consultation Request

I then head to Oxford in the UK, where I will be leading another weekend training in the neurobiology of connection. This is our first time training in the UK, and there are several spaces remaining there. We will deep dive into Autonomic cartography at a healing studio with a private garden, and lay some groundwork for an autonomics community based in the UK. Join us!

Oxford June 12-14

Warmly,

Gabriel

You may have a sense already that deepening or extending the inbreath increases arousal, and that deepening or extending the outbreath increases settling. Perhaps you are acquainted with the pause at the end of the inhale, and at the end of the exhale. Maybe you’ve had the experience of putting in earplugs and surfing your breath. Or maybe you’ve noticed its sensitive correlation to mood. That you cannot get anxious or angry without it impacting the breath. That the movement into shutdown states always includes a suppression of breath.

While Heart-rate variability has been the de facto non-invasive autonomic signal for three decades– sensors that track it are built into just about any health-tracking device you can think of, from the Oura ring to your Apple watch, what you might not realize is that HRV is not the optimal autonomic signal. Breath is.

For the past several years we worked with a small team to refine an autonomic diagnostics technology that centralizes respiration in autonomic measurement.

On Saturday July 25 I’m going to teach a deep-dive into breath through an autonomics lens. We will

• explore the distinct features of the neuroanatomy of the breathing Central pattern generator in the medulla

• examine its sensitivity to endogenous opioids and what this implies about working with shutdown

• look at tracking the breath from an autonomics perspective, and explore various information that the breath can give us about global autonomic states and organismic functioning

• take a look at various kinds of spontaneous non-ordinary breathing patterns that have an autonomic component

• we will explore various breathing practices, both new and ancient, from the perspective of their effects on the autonomic components of respiration and the unique location of the breathing mechanism at the interface between autonomic and voluntary control

I will also take whatever questions you want to throw at me about this topic, clinical or otherwise...

Breath through an Autonomics Lens

Saturday July 25, 8 -11 am Pacific time. 11-2 pm ET. 4-7 in the UK.

The story of modernity is a story of exile from home: Adam and Eve from the Garden, Cain from his family and the presence of the Lord. The story of Odysseus, titular hero of the Homeric Odyssey, another quintessential epic of the modern world, begins with him stranded by war far from home and hearth, and proceeds through the overcoming of insurmountable obstacles to make it back to dear Ithaca, his wife, son, and fireplace.

If the story of modernity is about exile, the story of our healing and wholeness is about coming home. Many languages have a word for this yearning for home: in the Greek of the Odyssey it was nostos. This yearning is the very engine of character, it is what drives the plot; the compass that orients action. It consumes Odysseus, and of his distance from home he is well aware. Most of us moderns are attempting another homeward odyssey, yet this one is inward, and I’m not sure how many people truly understand the cartography they are navigating or the compass they are navigating it with. It too is filled with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, with endless seductions and monsters, yet its cartography is neural, not geographic.

One place we can look for a clue about ourselves is our dwellings, because they represent who we are, what we believe we are, and what we aspire to be. They tell a tale. I am not a builder by trade, but I have designed several structures, and the one that I expended the greatest effort on by far, a film studio with an open wall deep in a forest, astonished me on completion by the degree to which it was an obvious stand-in for my own psyche.

On Bainbridge Island, a half-hour off the coast of downtown Seattle by ferry, is an extraordinary garden and nature reserve called the Bloedel. It is worth making a visit to the island for. It is named after the family that bought and enlarged the property: a timber magnate who was perhaps seeking some salve to the destruction he had wrought through the preservation of nature. The reserve manages to balance the primary tensions I find in all great art, which is to say a wildness verging on abandon counterpoised against a refinement of great precision. When a tree falls at Bloedel they are just as likely to let the trunk stand and get riddled with holes by woodpeckers as to leave it where it lies and let moss, lichen, and the roots of trees writhe all around it. One of my favorite spots in the place is the site of a massive treefall: several immense firs that toppled together into the lake and were left there, the gnarled mass of their root balls perpendicular to the ground, their massive bowing trunks smooth as some sculptural bridge diving into the lake, twinned in the water by its reflection. Standing there admiring the wildness of the scene I almost got struck in the head by a missile of a mallard winging down to land on the water: he came close enough to my face that I could feel the rush of air pulling off the back of his body: he whistled at me to yield as swerved to knife past my face.

This great wildness is balanced by painstaking precision. On a recent visit I watched a groundskeeper on a ladder hand-twisting single buds off shaped pines in the Japanese garden; another group of volunteers was on hands and knees removing twigs from the moss garden. I wouldn’t be surprised to see staff walking around with a chainsaw and tweezers. When I paint I use brushes as wide as your hand and as fine as a few hairs. The assault of beauty is full contact: I get it. Feral and sophisticated.

At the center of the property sits a villa in the Neoclassical style, perched on low cliffs above the water, as indifferent to its surroundings as any French chateau placed upon the west coast of the Americas would be, but it is not the primary residence that I want to tell you about: it is the Japanese teahouse. This teahouse wouldn’t be altogether out of place in Kyoto; the design is just so. You come upon it after a curve in the road, there is a stone walkway making its way through a shock of purple grass, then a gate, and then a rock garden in the Zen model.

The teahouse, which was originally created as a guesthouse, rises behind it. Coming around the side of it, after studying the texture of the walls– aged wooden slats burnished green by lichen– and the beams of which it is scaffolded: cylindrical logs carefully aged, incredibly straight, with not a visible crotch or knot I could find, I walked around the deck of it to behold the single most sublime garden view I think I’ve ever seen, as below.

Before me were Japanese maples in crimson and fluorescent green, willows, ornately shaped pines sculpted to resemble clouds. The beauty and harmony of the scene was breath-taking: I was in a rapture. I walked in through the slatted doors on the side of the structure shaking my head, and dropped down several steps to the recessed main space, above which a chimney towered, and through which the forest was visible above: the central axis of the structure was entirely made of windows spanning the vault.

I stood there for a good long time, entranced, looking up. The simplicity of the building, its symmetry, the vault which registers the archetypal form of a sacred space to me, all of it was at the limit of beauty I have seen in a building in this world. I am no slouch in architecture, but this was nearly the most perfect structure I had ever had the pleasure of standing within. Its simplicity and beauty were unmatched. Each door perfectly framed the view outside: the rock garden on one side, the lake on the other. Here is the view from the interior across the lake:

It was in this state of reverie that I stood up, overbrimming with appreciation, vaguely looking for someone with whom to share my enthusiasm – was there anyone around who was having the same reaction to this space as I was? – when I noticed something strange. Or, to put it more precisely, when my body noticed something strange.

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Some British rabbits live in holes (warrens), but all of the rabbits in Lewis Carroll live in holes, which is why we still go down them. I get fascinated by the rabbit hole, because it is more-or-less linguistic nonsense: a language artifact from another place that we treat as fact. If you didn’t do research on rabbit domiciles (most people don’t) the language would convince you that rabbits lived in holes, elsewise why would we all be going down them? We might as well go up the skunk nest, or into the crow pantry, or descend to the bovine cavern for all the sense the rabbit hole makes.

You have a murder of crows, but people look at you funny if you describe a murder of politicians. Ravens never assemble murderously: they generally congregate in an unkindness or a conspiracy. Politicians never form a conspiracy, even when they are actively conspiring. A group of foxes is called a skulk, but good luck finding a group of foxes. A group of politicians is never a skulk, even if they are skulking.

A misnomer is an incorrect, unsuitable, or misleading name applied to a person, object, or concept. Like calling the United States a democracy. Or calling the latest shitty tax grift a ‘big beautiful bill’. The parlance of politicians and attention merchants generally speaking is interlaced and studded with locutional deception, designed to taint, taunt, and obfuscate. We think about the misappropriation of funds regularly, but what about the misappropriation of language? We should develop a unit of measure of the velocity at which falsehoods outpour the mouths of talking heads. (We could calculate it in Hegseths per minute).

Language is a map: certain philosophers have suggested that it is co-terminous with the limits of our worlds. While this is obviously not true– I have sensations and feelings all the time that I cannot translate into words– it is often a limit of what I can share from my world with others. To the extent that I can map language onto my experience, the extent to which I can cause it to adhere with some sense of proportionality to the contours of what happened, I can share the experience with someone in a way that they can understand.

I was recently humbled and vitalized to have an experience that I could not translate into words at all. I recently received bodywork from the preternaturally gifted body therapist Kelley Curtis, (you would not regret traveling to Portland simply to receive the gift of her touch) and the experience was singular.

At one point, while she was working on my back– I was lying facedown and she was touching my back– the best description I can give you about this (I’ve thought about it a lot) is that the cadence and pressure of her hands caused a thick cerulean blue paint apparently endogenous to my body to flow diagonally forward through the space to the left of my heart, clearing out accumulated residues of encrusted emotion and cynicism that then flowed out vaguely forward of my heart (the current was definitely left to right and back to front). When she moved her hands to the right, the paint changed color and texture (purple, more viscous) until it became nearly black and opalescent.

Later in the session, when I was on my back and she palpated my celiac plexus, it felt as though she had firmly grabbed hold of an inward octopus whose writhing tentacles were clearly nerves, and from which I was able to feel the neural innervation of my liver, the back of my heart, the lower left quadrant of my digestive system above my left hip, etc.

My abject failure to be able to describe this experience increased my empathy for people studying autonomics with me, who are regularly noticing that they have a hard time finding descriptive textures that adequately map onto neurological experiences they are having. Sometimes when I am working clinically I ask a person, How does that feel? And they look at me and shake their heads like- There do not exist words for this.

Which may or may not be true. In all probability there do not exist words for this IN ENGLISH. Possibly the reason that I’ve been fascinated by lexical gaps in English since I was a teenager more than thirty years ago resides right here. Since sitting down on a meditation cushion at 19, interocepting, and realizing it would be next to impossible to share what I was noticing with someone else, my interest in interoceptive neurology and the lexical gaps in English have developed together. Very soon I am going to publish the revision of a book we originally published in 2023 as Keywords. The book– revised, illustrated anew, and retitled, is now called A FIELD GUIDE TO THE MISSING WORDS OF NORTH AMERICA.

As many of you know, I am a cartographer (mostly neural and interoceptive), and my lifework in Autonomics is, in part, a new map of the living autonomic nervous system. A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America is also a map: words collected from 46 languages for things that are impossible to name in English. It is designed to increase the surface topography over which you can spread language. Please come down the bovine cavern with me in this exploration of all the words we cannot say. Preorders are open. Books will ship in the next couple of weeks….

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE MISSING...

I’m headed northwest on Wednesday to spend the weekend teaching the neurobiology of connection on Bainbridge Island, off the coast of Seattle. I've not been to Bainbridge before, but I have been in the Pacific Northwest in May: it is spectacular.

This will be a small group deep-dive into living the neurobiology of connection.

We will drop into the five doors model: safety > settled interoception > intuition > relatedness > wellbeing.

We’ll have time to take lots of questions.

Join us…

Bainbridge Island May 2026

Stress is a little bit like pornography in the following specific sense: you know exactly what it is when you see it, but it can be a little bit hard to define. What is stress? What makes something a stressful experience as opposed to simply being intense? What is the difference between good stress (eustress) and bad stress?

Peter Levine, PhD is the developer of a naturalistic approach to the resolution of trauma called Somatic Experiencing®. In his 1976 dissertation, Accumulated Stress, Reserve Capacity, and Disease, he defines stress as: a reaction resulting from stimuli which sufficiently activate the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and is either resolved or accumulated depending on whether the pre-stimulus baseline is re-established or not.

Let’s break this sentence down into its component assertions. Stress is a reaction resulting from a stimulus: something that happens. Most people think of stress as a response to an external event, but a stimulus can also be internal. It can be an endogenous event in the body, such as an illness. It could also be an emotion that we don’t know how to be present with. So let’s just begin with this notion that something happens. Levine says that it sufficiently activates the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is the neural architecture of the mind-body connection. It is responsible for (1) regulating the internal milieu, and for (2) surfacing various energy-processing templates in response to experience. These energy processing templates are autonomic states. They are sort of like the sliders on a graphic equalizer that turn certain frequencies up and certain frequencies down to control the sound coming out of a stereo.

The genius of biology is the efficient use of energy. Our autonomic nervous system is the aspect of our neurology with the most direct relationship to our survival, which is to say the deepest deployment of available energy, and so it’s modulation of these deep levers governs many facets of our moment-to-moment experience. The ANS governs the subjective experience of visceral state, which is to say plainly how it feels to be in our bodies in any given moment. It governs the range of emotional response available to us. It governs the type of thoughts we can have. It governs our perception of the world around us. It governs the range of behaviors with which we respond.

Furthermore, autonomic states that we habitually reside in we begin to experience as existential. If my body moves easily into a flight response and stays, I begin to experience myself as an anxious person. I know myself through the lens of the states that become habitual to me.

So returning to Levine’s definition: the experience we are having is of sufficient intensity or relevance to cause the autonomic nervous system to activate an energy processing template. The body has a finite number of these: they are combinations of threat detection, recruited neurology, and pervading neurochemistry.

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This is a straightforward exploration of

• what your nervous system is (a lot of what you have been taught- if you have been taught about it- is under-accurate)

• why the Autonomic Nervous System is the layer of it that you should understand

• how this layer has the deepest shaping force on your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing

• the three primary variables that govern how it makes sense of your internal and external experience (autonomic temperature, recruited neurology, pervading neurochemistry)

• how we can increase the inputs to wellbeing (increase health)

• how we can work more effectively with the two primary kinds of stress (there are two, not simply one)(decrease, metabolize, and transform stress)

This is part of our larger project of developing a non-technical version of this work for the general population (I’m going to teach it in person May/June of 2027 at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. You can use this link add yourself to the notification list when this training opens for registration.)

Join me Saturday April 25 (in three days!) for the class. After this class I’m off to Bainbridge Island, back to teach in Northern California, then off to Europe to teach. In other words, this is your last chance to do this for awhile.

Finding Home - April 25

From the publishing side of our work…

is open for preorder, shipping May 15, 2026.

Inuit peoples have 50 words for snow because their survival requires this. Language provides texture, clarity, and differentiation of our experiences. It maps the knowable, and provides containers for our experience. The origin of words also deeply reveals how we see ourselves, our world, and our place in it. But how can you talk with clarity and precision about something that has happened if there are no words for it in your language? Driven by personal necessity, and the awareness that things were happening in his mind and life that the language he grew up speaking did not have the capacity to describe, Natureza Gabriel has spent more than 25 years learning words from different languages and cultures that map aspects of our internal, relational, and nature experience unnamed in the English language.

Compiled here for the first time in one place is a map of words with power to change your mind and what you see. This book opens a doorway to a new relationship with language, and possibilities of describing, with precision and nuance, aspects of our human experience that haven’t been named in English. Did you know, for example, that there’s a word in Yiddish for a kind of knowing that comes from your guts? That the word for neighbor in Filipino really means an awareness that we are not alone? That in Japan there is a word for the color of sunlight filtered through leaves? That the word for meditation in Hebrew literally means, ‘bring your heart to it.’ That there’s a word in the Indigenous Kumeyaay dialect that means, ‘I see the fire in your heart.’ A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America opens the door to a new world of meaning.

This is the paperback version of the book. (This is an updated, revised, re-titled and reimagined version of our book Keywords: A Field Guide to the Missing Words, from June 2023, previously published in hardcover)

Field Guide - Preorder

The neuroscience of the modern world has lost contact with the Sacred – ironic given that many of its pioneers were animated by visionary and intuitive ways of knowing. What would be required to reorganize neuroscience doing honor to its animist origins? What would be necessary to refigure the discipline, moving it out of the cranial hegemony of a brain-centric bias and back into the fullness of our embodied experience? How could it be re-conceptualized as a liberatory project and praxis?

In AUTONOMICS, pioneering ancestral neuroscientist Natureza Gabriel, author of The Neurobiology of Connection, GROUND, BODY AS VERB (forthcoming), and Developer of a new foundation model of autonomic physiology, re-writes the lineage history of neuroscience through the lens of interoceptive epistemology, revisiting the work of its principal architects to reveal a lucid trail of animist and visionary neuroscientists.

Rather than being peripheral or anomalous, Gabriel reveals the ways in which visionary, intuitive, and interoceptive knowings are a ground of the line of neuroscientific breakthrough by which the discipline has evolved since inception. From the visionary art of Santiago Ramón y Cajals, to the linguistic origins of Leopold Auerbach’s discovery of the myenteric plexus, to the hidden origin story of Polyvagal Theory, to the birth of Autonomics, Gabriel demonstrates that many of the foundational discoveries in the field happened outside of the orthodoxy of the scientific method.

In this journey, he interrogates the impulses beneath the orthodox mechanisms for assembling medical knowledge, while re-centering the power of self-directed discovery, interoceptive tracking, and the reclamation of deep inwardness as core components of a liberatory psychobiological inquiry. In so doing, he illuminates the depths and contours of a new, and possibly very ancient science, and puts its transformational power back in your hands. Anchored in our embodied subjectivity, a neuroscience grounded in Life Itself uses our felt embodied experience as a primary way of knowing, and a vehicle to new ways of being. Like all of his work, this is a celebration of homecoming to deeper and more embodied ways of knowing and being in the world, putting nervous system science back in service to Life.

Autonomics book