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.

Read more

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

01

Biology. Bio. Logos. The study of life. Biophilia. Bio. Philia. The

loving of life. Biobios. Bio. Bios. The living of life.

In Tzutuj’iil Mayan, N Kasea. To live. Literally, the ember yet

burns. Smouldering, potentially other-igniting, this ember,

which is us, yet burns. To burn is to combust, and to be in

motion.

Old Lakhota, a two-hundred-thousand-year-old language

aboriginal to Turtle Island, the prosodics of which sound like

the earth singing, is described by one of its speakers to me as

a non-mathematical quantum mechanical language of intuition. A

verb-based language, it describes the motion of energies. The

language has no word for ‘I’.

We moderns concretize a sense of self: we attempt to reify it, solidify

it, make it Newtonian. Turn it into a thing. We attempt to

turn a verb into a noun, because we want to capture something,

enclose it, own it, possess it. Make it ‘mine.’

This is like trying to own the wind. Let it go. It is an attempt to

catch water in your hands. Water is life; it spills right through

your fingers. What you be is in motion, animated by an entelechy

that pervades animacy, a source frequency of which the

ordinary sense of self we attempt to localize, reify, concretize

and own is merely derivative.

What would it mean to have a more fluid sense of self, or better

yet to release it all together: to release the compulsion to name

it, to accrete a solid sense of identity?

What would it mean to allow ourselves to return to a more

primal and limpid flux, to permit ourselves to be water, to be

embers rising on the wind, to release the contracted ‘I’, to open

ourselves to the notion that life itself is something moving

through us, to become the flow itself, to realize that I move,

therefore I am.

ARRIVING LATER THIS YEAR…

nervous system as inward forest…

In a group about ‘Healing the Nervous System’ on Facebook, someone asked a question recently about what the nervous system is. There were more than 20 responses to this question, all of them partial in some way. Some of the responses were accurate, some of them were 🤦‍♂️.

In the context of 'healing the nervous system' much of what people are talking about is healing the Autonomic Nervous System, the central conduit of which is the vagus (10th cranial) nerve.

But let's start with what is the nervous system at all. If you take a neurobiology course at most universities, you would begin with studying the individual unit of the nervous system, which is a neuron. But this isn't necessarily the most useful place to start thinking about what the nervous system actually is.

scanning electron micrograph of a neuron

In an adult human body there are approximately 30 trillion cells. Each one of them is, in its own way, a tiny world. Yet they have to cluster and function together. The body is, in a way, like a murmuration of starlings: a swarm of trillions of cells that has to move together and coordinate closely. The body has multiple ways for doing this, but the most comprehensive rapidly coordinating internal system is our nervous system. It is the communications infrastructure for the body. Both inwardly (inernal milieu of the body) and in relationship to our environment.

This system communicates electrically.

When neurons develop, they are a lot like plants. They grow from a source to a target. A plant grows toward sunlight. Neurons grow as they are used (attention is the sunlight). Nerves are linked chains of neurons. They bundle and cluster together in pathways in the body. Neurons cluster and cross-talk. The largest cluster is the cranial brain. But there are neural clusters distributed throughout the body, in the heart (neurocardiology), in the gut (enteric brain), in the pelvic floor, up and down the spine (sympathetic ganglia) and in other places: they are called plexes and ganglia.

Traditional neurology has been highly focused on the brain in the head because modern people tend to identify self with thinking. In a world where 'I think, therefore I am' we have given pride of place in our neurology to the structures where thinking takes place in words and images. Yet there is an important counter argument to be made, which is that 'I feel, therefore I am.'

Cells are designed to feel. From this perspective, sensitivity is the root of our intelligence. The embodied neural architecture of feeling is sensory. The part of the nervous system that senses our interior is the autonomic nervous system. When people are talking about 'healing the nervous system', this is the part of the nervous system they're generally referring to.

You can think of autonomic as automatic. In other words, this is the part of the nervous system that we don't have to consciously control. It beats our hearts, breathes, governs our immune function, digests our food, regulates body temperature, controls the arterial and venous flows of blood in the body. It is responsible for homeostasis.

Yet the world is also waking up to a second crucial function of the autonomic nervous system. Based on our present moment detection of safety, danger, or lifethreat, the autonomic nervous system surfaces energy processing templates that tune our bodies and minds to respond to the environment. If we feel safe enough in the body- and this is not a detection made by our thinking or our ordinary sense of self- we can coordinate various aspects of our autonomic nervous system, and create the conditions for health, growth, and restoration.

Yet if the body finds itself in danger, it re-tunes into defensive states. This capability is necessary for survival. If there is an emergency, the body sometimes needs to mobilize tremendous amounts of energy to respond. These defensive responses allow us to do all kinds of incredible things. In extreme cases, we can jump fifteen feet to get away from a crocodile, or lift a car off our toddler. The problem happens when these defensive responses become chronic or non-revolving, because these are very energy-intensive responses.

There are two primary categories of autonomic defensive response. One of them is a mobilized high-energy response which is commonly called fight-or-flight. This is what most people think about when they imagine stress. The other is an immobilized shutdown response.

If people experience chronic defensive states in early development, because their environment was not safe, their caregivers were not attuned, etc., and cannot shift out of them, the accumulated stress of these responses is retained in the nervous system, body, and brain. We retain stress neurologically and neurochemically. It also changes predictive properties of the cranial brain. This is generally called 'trauma'.

Healing the (autonomic) nervous system then is about several things. It is about familiarity with this embodied autonomic nervous system that communicates through sensation, emotion, and meaning, and is not our ordinary sense of self.

It is about understanding that our survival responses are stronger than our cognition and learning to be in our bodies with grounded sensitivity (which is to say grounded intelligence).

It is about learning to change the neurological inputs to our systems to give us greater experiences of safety and connection so that we feed these deep systems nourishing inputs. These include the rhythmic inputs of the natural world, healthy relationships, etc.

And it is about learning to transform residual stress responses that have accumulated in the body.

As some of you may know, we recently added a German publisher so that we could print and ship books in Europe without import duties. Prior to this transition, we took several books out of print, including a book called Keywords that we published in 2023. Since that time I have had a number of requests for that book, a number of people sharing with me what it meant to them. It was previously available only in hardcover, and I went back and started re-reading it. It connects deeply to the Autonomics book I just released, about the lineage history of neuroscience. It is a book of missing words.

For at least the last 25 years I have been collecting words in other languages that allow us to say things that cannot be said in English because these words do not exist in English. A lexical gap or lacuna is a place where a language could have a word, but is missing one.

The history of lexical gaps in English- the active usage of a language- tells us a lot about a culture, its history, values, and priorities. Over the last several decades, the Oxford English Dictionary, and its Junior version in particular, a quasi-official arbiter of the English language, has tended to replace words for the living world with words for technology, a trend that has been highlighted in a number of places. Gone are acorn, kingfisher, and bluebell (2007 and 2012), replaced with broadband, blog, and cut-and-paste. You tell me– how does that trade sit with you? My personal reaction– you took acorn out of the dictionary? ARE YOU F*CKING SERIOUS?

Language is the net that we cast to throw naming over the world we encounter. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus says, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I don’t exactly agree with him– things happen nearly every time I meditate for which there are no words in English, so I experience on the daily that my language is not the limit of my world– however I would agree that language is a limit on my ability to share my world with others.

A child who grows up without knowledge of the word acorn loses the entire metaphorical and metaphysical understanding of how a mighty oak can grow from a tiny [acorn]. She loses the pattern language of the oak tree. I live in an oak forest now– Blue Oak, Coast Live Oak, California Black Oak, possibly others– with several different related species of oaks that all adore the soil substrate of this place. Their leaves are different (in shape, and tone (it is called Blue Oak for a reason), and velocity of coming in during the spring and the tenderest color shift they make from bud to full grown). Their bark is different, their vascular-looking structures of growth are slightly different. They look like cousins, some like siblings. They are each different, related, unique, majestic beings. The girl with no acorn in her dictionary doesn’t know anything about any of them. I grieve therefore this loss.

Yet languages are living, and so they get expanded and trimmed all the time, tailored to the requirements of those using them. Children growing up in urban spaces, in boxes of various kinds, stationary and moving (apartment, school, bus, subway) interact with a different imaginal world than I do stalking coyotes in the marsh and through the acorns, which I can differentiate by species. Some words fall out of usage, some are thieved from us by imperial power trying to cause us to forget that we are sovereign beings.

And so we don’t have a word in English for the color of sunlight filtered through leaves, despite the fact that this green gold color is our primal evolutionary homescreen– what do you think we were looking at for the millions of years before we came down from the trees seven million years ago? (see komorebi in Japanese). When we greet somebody, we do not say– Hello my other self, despite the fact that at some existential level that’s what a greeting between two members of the same species always means. (See Aang Waan in Unangan.) Our word for meditation doesn’t mean- bring your heart to it- despite the fact that this is part of what meditation means. (See Lasser Lev in Hebrew.)

Like rare or exotic birds believed to be extinct until they are glimpsed in aboriginal forest, the missing words in this volume will bejewel your life with the rememberance of happenings to which you have not previously been able to attach language. Glimmers in the mist, embers in the dark. They will expand your world, because that is what words do ;)

You understand.

Preorders are open. Book should ship May 15, 2026

Preorder a Field Guide Missing Words

I recorded this with an audience on Saturday February 28, as part of a course called ‘Finding Home in Your Nervous System’. I think it stands up well on its own. I hope you enjoy.

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How can I assert this with such blithe assurance?

Only a bird that’s sick would foul its own nest. It is this simple. Our collective fouling of the only biosphere in the known universe is all the evidence we need that modern humans have lost our way. No terrestrial creature can foul its home without undermining its very survival. We know we are doing this, we tell ourselves that we are the most intelligent creatures on earth, and yet we cannot seem to stop. We cannot even seem to collectively maintain a focus on it without devolving into partisan politics.

Yet assuredly the evidence does not stop here. Look around you. How many people do you know that you can say are genuinely thriving? How many people do you know who have the kind of resilient deep stability required to navigate a world in flux? How many people do you know living out their true purpose? How many people do you know who feel hopeful about the future?

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering, says poet Gary Snyder. People are turning away from religion in record numbers–this is an old story– because the church story doesn’t meet our need for meaning. Many of us have merged with the black mirrors in our pockets, sequester ourselves online in digital worlds where we are harvested by the Machine. Capitalism has reached an endstage increasingly detached from the human scale. We have become collectively unmoored, that’s my contention here at the outset. We have lost our way. Doesn’t take a genius to notice that.

And what have we lost our way from? We have become alienated. Like Odysseus pulled to foreign lands to fight a war, and then unable to get his ship homeward bound to Ithaca, we are stranded far from home and hearth, trying to make our way back to where we are from. Yet for home we certainly yearn.

The Greeks had a word for it. This longing to return to the place we belong. The word is nostos. It is at the heart of the story of the arc of becoming modern. It is the engine of narrative in The Odyssey, the archetypal hero’s journey, and by extension the engine of narrative in the modern story.

And while this leitmotif of home is certainly a place– we have lost the coordinates of our belonging– it is more deeply a relational loss. A relationship with inner dimensions. The origin stories of modern ‘western’ culture document this falling out of relationship with All That Is. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babble– these are palimpsests, writ over and over with the knowledge of lost relating, attempting to explain why we are no longer in contact with the Sacred Source, the Creation, with one another.

We are stranded outwardly, and we cannot get home, but the home from which we have been most deeply alienated is not a place. It is not a geographic location. It is an inward home. Our inward home. An intimate contact with our true nature. Inwardly, then, are the coordinates of our possible return.

You have felt this. It is likely why you were drawn to a practice like mindful awareness. Why you were drawn to the yoga mat. The call of self-reflection, somatic work, embodiment. You turned inward to make contact with a certain landscape of who you are, a landscape that the culture-at-large, the English language, doesn’t even have very good words for.

Everyday, sitting on the cushion, or the yoga mat, you have experiences that are so difficult to translate into English that many of the words you use for them will have been birthed in other, and more ancient languages, tongues more fluent in these inner sciences. It is why you will describe yoga postures, and types of inward clarity in Sanskrit, Japanese, or Tibetan.

Because the modern world– eviscerated of deep interiority– denatured of sovereign indwelling– does not know how to describe these landscapes.

And yet.

There is still something missing. Perhaps it is because the importation of these awareness technologies have been filtered through layers as they made their way to you. The yoga you learned has been filtered through a ballet studio in France on its way to American shores. A yoga room with a wall of mirrors is a modern invention– a marketing tweak to the tradition making the import more palatable to Westerners- not a product of Vedic science. We’ve brought the ancestral technologies over– the Sun Salutation, the zafu, the zabuton– but we’ve had a harder time bringing over the cultural context.

And importantly, the cultural context out of which these awareness technologies was born– it was not modern. People who came to learn to meditate hundreds or thousands of years ago in the East were people whose cultural context, rural location, circadian rhythms, and therefore deep physiology were profoundly different than ours. From this different physiology unfold different topographies in consciousness.

Most modern people walking into a yoga studio or a meditation center are far more deeply traumatized than they realize, far more shut down than they understand, are carrying far more archived allostatic load than would have a corresponding student in 12th century Japan. We moderns– we are really fucking stressed out.

And because the way that attention works is downstream of your neurophysiology– specifically your autonomic physiology– the practices that you are doing, even if they are the same exact practices this 12th century student was doing, exercised with diligence and precision, do not lead you home in the same way.

From where your body resides now, its physiological baselines, from the nature of your daily stress responses, you cannot access the psychic terrain described in the literature of enlightenment. No way.

You are generally bereft of safety and connection in a way that was not possible hundreds of years ago, lest you had been in a war or survived an earthquake. And no one has really told you this. There is a fundamental structural map of your alienation, and it is held deep in the body, and it is mediated neurologically.

All of this hubbub about the vagus nerve– much of it shallow, over-simplified, poorly illustrated, under-informed… all this talk of vagal stimulators, vagal exercises, the autonomic ladder...all of these new somatic trauma healing modalities, Polyvagal Theory– these are pointing in the direction of a nervous system science you need to know.

You need to know it for practical reasons, because it explains things like why the exhale is longer in pranayama, or why you should not practice traditional mindful awareness techniques when you are anxious. Or why there is a regular uptick in psychiatric admits at the local hospital whenever the meditation center has a longform retreat. (Did you know that?) It can help us resolve the confusion about the difference between equanimity and dissociation, which most meditation students do not understand at all. It clarifies the neurophysiology of spiritual bypassing.

It is an inward map that you have been missing, a cartography you need to be able to locate yourself upon. Because once you begin to understand it, it will change the way that you practice.

I’ll be teaching autonomic cartography and tracking at a number of face-to-face retreats from May through October this year.

Apply to train with me in person

If you would like an advanced review copy you can use the link below to order. I’ll follow up with everyone who orders either later this spring or early summer to harvest feedback. (If you do not see the link it is because you are not a paid subscriber. Subscribe and it will become visible. We prioritize the community supporting our work financially for advanced access to our newest stuff.)

Just FYI, part of the reason that we produce our own texts is economic, and part of it is because we can bring you our newest thinking and research in a tiny fraction of the time a traditional publisher requires. The newest books about autonomic physiology coming out of a traditional publisher were finished mid-to-late 2024. This text includes material revised in the past three weeks (post Grossman et al. Polyvagal critique, etc.). So you are getting the cutting-edge of what we understand. Cut-off date for this manuscript: April 4, 2026. Cut-off date for newest book from traditional publishers: December 2024.

In the third book of the Autonomics Trilogy, ancestral neuroscience pioneer Natureza Gabriel explores the beauty and mystery of the vertebrate movement system. Misnamed by traditional neurology as the Sympathetic Nervous System, and associated by most people who know about it with fight-or-flight responses, this spinally-mediated neurology is the animating genius of the vertebrate body plan.

By locating the neurological control nodes of complex patterned movement in proximity to the limbs and organs that they subtend, the vertebrate movement system distributes hardwired and adaptive survival programs across well over fifty brains in the body.

In this volume, Gabriel argues that existing in a vertebrate body is such a fundamental substrate of our lived experience that we cannot understand what it means to be wearing a human body outside of this construct. He explores the autonomic intelligence of this embodied system, and what it means to learn to trust the billions of years of evolutionary history hard-wired into each of our living breathing bodies. By regarding the body as a verb (energy in motion) rather than a noun (a thing), Gabriel provides language and texture for knowing the third autonomic facet of our dynamic lived experience.

Blending science and poetry, neurophysiology and social commentary, philosophy and polemic, the book is the extraordinary conclusion to the three part exposition of autonomic systems begun by The Neurobiology of Connection, continued in GROUND, and concluded here. A tour de force that you will not want to miss, Body as Verb completes the explorations of the autonomic trilogy by naming a third mode of knowing ourselves: through movement. This is, in the author’s words, a book of joy.

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Rather than attempting to resolve the ongoing theoretical dispute, our paper identifies points of stability and utility within existing autonomic frameworks while examining areas where current models may not fully account for observable clinical phenomena.

We move beyond the Polyvagal Theory two-variable (neuroception/ neurology) model of autonomic state to a four variable model (neuroception/ neurology/ neurochemistry/ systemic conditions) incorporating both fast, and slow processes (temporal dimensions of change) that more closely aligns with clinical observation.

We introduce a clinically grounded multi-modal observational approach to studying autonomic function in living systems, emphasizing the integration of interacting physiological signals.

ABSTRACT

Polyvagal Theory (PVT) has significantly influenced clinical approaches to trauma, development, and autonomic regulation by emphasizing the role of physiological state, social engagement , and perceived safety in shaping human behavior (Porges, 1995, 2007, 2025). At the same time, key aspects of the theory particularly its neuroanatomical, physiological, and evolutionary claims-have been subject to sustained critique (Gross-man & Taylor, 2007; Grossman, 2023; Grossman et al., 2026). Despite extensive discourse, this debate remains unresolved. This paper takes a pragmatic and clinically oriented approach. Rather than attempting to resolve the ongoing theoretical dispute , it identifies points of stability and utility within existing autonomic frameworks while examining areas where current models may not fully account for observable clinical phenomena. Drawing on in vivo observation and physiological tracking across clinical contexts, it proposes a multi-variable model of autonomic state that integrates neuroception, neural activation, and neurochemical and systemic conditions. It further introduces a clinically grounded, multi-modal observational approach to studying autonomic function in living systems, emphasizing the integration of interacting physiological signals.

Read the Paper on Research Gate

Join me, Natureza Gabriel, Founder of Hearth Science, and Developer of Autonomics for a special 3-hour non-technical introduction to our work: Finding Home in Your Nervous System.

Learn autonomics.

Saturday April 25, 8 to 11 am.

$75.

If this isn’t one of the most useful classes you’ve ever taken, 1) we’ll be very surprised, and 2) we’ll refund your registration no questions asked.

Finding Home in Your Nervous System

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Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: The Neurobiology of Connection subscriber chat.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a collective group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

While I will probably not have time to address all questions, I hope that this is a dynamic and useful curated space. Questions and themes that people are passionate about will likely make their way into articles, videos, etc.

I may also provide early access to things that we are working on, like preprints of papers, or early drafts of articles or books.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

WARNING: Geek stuff ahead…

I’ve been head-down for the last week or so, working to break through the statis in the Porges/ Grossman controversy and working on creating the foundations for a new paper that I will be co-authoring with several interesting people and submitting for peer-review:

ABSTRACT (so far)

This paper is designed to break through the stasis surrounding the Porges/ Grossman debate incited by the Grossman et al assertion of untenability of Polyvagal Theory (2026), and Porges’ response (2026), which is essentially a refusal to engage on epistemic grounds. The authors, with over a decade of rigorous application of PVT across trauma healing, somatic practices, and psychology find it a work of substantial merit — yet have identified clinically observable gaps in its explanatory reach. The paper pursues five primary objectives. It explains why both PVT and the Grossman critique have inadvertently embraced foundation errors in neuroscience that corrupt core premises of both arguments. It identifies relevant errors in the foundation of neuroscience. It articulates a novel methodology for addressing those errors. It describes a novel autonomic measurement technology to supersede RSA as a non-invasive measure of in vivo autonomic functioning. It posits a novel foundation model of autonomic physiology that retains viable elements of PVT, obviates the Grossman critique, and offers a clinically verifiable in vivo autonomic cartography of greater refinement and clinical utility.

If you have not seen it yet, we released a white paper last week on ResearchGate about methodology. Autonomic tracking: methodological viability of an alternative epistemological approach. The de rigeur validated methods of modern neuroscience, by which much neuro-anatomy has been described, has the unfortunate baseline requirement of investigating bodies that are dead. Methods that investigate living tissue tend to be cranially-focused. The autonomic nervous system is neither dead nor in the brain, ergo this methodology is not particularly useful.

If you have not seen this, you can download our free PDF of polyvagal debate bulletpoints. This is designed to separate signal from noise in this debate.

PVT debate bulletpoints

This is part of a larger conversation about HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW (epistemology) and THE NATURE OF BEING (ontology) THE NATURE OF DIRECT EXPERIENCE (phenomenology) and what constitute validated methods for accruing medical knowledge. I reflect on many of these themes in our new book:

Autonomics book

All our books are now available in EUROPE, AUSTRALIA, the United States, and the UK through our website.

Shop Books

IN THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED

Do you want to be in ‘the room where it happened?’

Autonomics (me, and at times members of our faculty) is going on tour.

The following locations/dates still have space in them. Our face-to-face trainings require an expression of interest and an interview. We want to curate participants in advance. We are not looking for evidence of expertise so much as sanity and relevant practice (awareness, somatics, movement, etc.) We want to work with people who are to some degree embodied.

You can view our

Complete list of live events

May 8-10, 2026 I’ll be in the greater Seattle area teaching The Neurobiology of Connection.

Seattle- Learn More

Wednesday May 20- Sunday May 24, 2026 I’ll be in Northern California (at our eco-reserve) teaching a 5-day deepdive into autonomic tracking. We just had a cancellation and so there are a couple of spaces that have opened up in this training. What is autonomic tracking? See the research paper above.

Norcal Autonomic Tracking - Learn More

At the beginning of June I head to Europe, where I’ll be teaching a 5-day deep dive in Southwest France from Wednesday June 3- Sunday June 7.

SW France- Learn More

Then on to Amsterdam

Amsterdam- Learn More

And Northern Italy

Italy - Learn More

Possible additional stops in Basel (Switzerland)… Not yet announced.

In the fall I’ll be in Columbus Ohio teaching a large format training September 25-27, 2026.

Columbus Ohio - Learn More

And likely in upstate New York…not yet announced.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Finally, I’m teaching an introduction to the basics of our work on Saturday April 25- Finding Home in Your Nervous System. For this you do not need to apply.

Finding Home in Your Nervous System

It examines traditional hard-ground tracking as an epistemic frame directly applicable to understanding the structure and function of the autonomic nervous system.

It explains how this method provides an alternate non-invasive and empirically verifiable methodology for testing hypotheses about autonomic state composition, organization, and response hierarchies.

We are sharpening the methodological tools required to crack open the validation paradigm for validated neuroscientific knowledge.

Autonomic Tracking Whitepaper

Advanced review copies of Gabriel’s forthcoming book Autonomics: Placing the Lineage History of Neuroscience on a Sacred Foundation are now exclusively available through our website. We have accelerated the production timeline of this book because the topic is intimately connected to the current Polyvagal debate that is roiling the world of psychotherapy.

This is a brief interview with Gabriel about the new book.

Gabriel, why did you write this book?

I started writing Autonomics shortly after publishing The Neurobiology of Connection in November of 2024. I had worked towards being able to write TNOC for about 15 years. Our entire team knew it was groundbreaking work. We knew that it pushed our understanding of in vivo autonomic physiology dramatically forward. The book was based on input from over 100 advisors, 5000 wellness professionals, and a data set collected from more than 10,000 people in 50 countries. Much of it we had validated with a cutting edge autonomic diagnostics tool utilizing respiration as the primary signal, which provides much more nuanced autonomic feedback than HRV/RSA. Chapters of the book had also been read by several thousand people on this Substack, and we’d gotten many hundreds of comments that had shaped the text. The book and the foundation model undergirding it had solved a number of problems with the Polyvagal Theory formulation, including

• explaining the movement out of shutdown states straight back into connection states that is readily observable clinically and fundamentally contradicts the notion of the autonomic ladder (people move back through fight-or-flight states from shutdown, IF that was the state that preceded moving into shutdown. If, however, shutdown becomes etched as a habitual stress response the transit from connection to shutdown can be direct, as can its return. It is also possible to transit people from shutdown directly to connection, as a variety of matrilineal healing traditions around the world, as well as psychedelics, do on the regular)

• differentiating autonomic neurology from its suffusing neurochemistry, which better maps states like ‘play’, where there is movement but not activation chemistry (traditional neurology wants to call these fight-or-flight states but they are not)

• increasing the mapping of the CONNECTION SYSTEM to include the palms and ventral surface of the hands by reconceptualizing the definition of human gestational periods to include the first 18 months after birth (until the closing of the fontanelles) in alignment with understanding from anthropology and indigenous childrearing practices

• mapping the GROUNDING SYSTEM through to the feet, recognizing its subcomponents (enteric, psoas, pelvic floor) and recognizing a health-creating facet of what Polyvagal Theory terms the ‘dorsal vagal complex’

• rejecting the false division between the spinal cord and brainstem with respect to the vertebrate MOVEMENT SYSTEM.

• clarifying that health-creating states coordinate all three autonomic neurologies rather than elevating one (e.g., ventral vagal)

• et cetera

Shortly after publication I was alarmed and disheartened by a certain amount of backlash directed at me personally from members of the Polyvagal community, some esteemed therein, who asserted that our work in autonomic physiology was discrediting, attacking, or undermining Polyvagal Theory. So this book began as an attempt to frame transformations in paradigms in neuroscience as productive frictions, à la Thomas Kuhn’s formulation from The Structure of Scientific Revolution.

I was having a hard time understanding why the Polyvagal community was not extremely excited about our work, because we had resolved some of the obvious limitations of the theory in deeply elegant ways, which we had then vigorously tested clinically. The reasons we were able to make these advances were because we were applying Polyvagal Theory as rigorously as any group in the world, and because we were synthesizing highly trans-disciplinary perspectives, including much Indigenous understanding. This was, therefore, not an attack on PVT, but a form of respect that compelled us to move it further forward and broaden its explanatory power.

And this seeing was also surfacing, with greater clarity, significant holes in the very foundation of modern neuroscience. Bluntly- modern neuroscience emerged from within a Cartesian split between the mind and the body. People who believe that ‘I think, therefore I am’ give pride of place in their neurology to the organ where thinking happens, namely the cranial brain. But the ANS is an afferent system. Afferent neurology does not begin in the brain. And all of the extant foundational neuro-anatomical maps in the world were made from cadavers, which have lost all the finest ramifications of their neurology. This means that the entire modern history of nervous system anatomy (1650 to present) was directed by people who identified with their thoughts, and were looking only at the dessicated remainder of a living nervous system that they didn’t think was important. THE EXTRA-CRANIAL FOUNDATION MAPS OF MODERN NEUROLOGY ARE, THEREFORE, FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG.

Modern neuroscience, in fact, barely recognizes the largest SENSORY ORGAN of the human body, which is our interoceptive capacity that subtends sensation in the body entire. You were taught as a child that you have five senses. But those are extero-senses. The mother of all those senses, which can co-opt or cooperate with all of them at will (or at necessity) is in fact an intero-sense. Interoception. Your interoceptive capacity coordinates directly with your flourishing, and unlike vision or hearing has never once been tested in your life. Modern civilization has failed to mention your most important sense exists at all– an astounding realization.

Two things happened fairly quickly as I began to work with the ideas in the book and grapple with the lineage history of neuroscience as a discipline. One of them was that I began to think of the origin story of Polyvagal Theory through the lens of the story Stephen Porges had told me about its more private and personal origins in his own experience the second time I interviewed him at length (Connection Masterclass April 2021). The other was that as I continued to study the lineage history of neuroscience I kept encountering origin stories that were deeply personal and undermined our received narration about how innovations in the field happened.

We are told that innovation happens in science empirically. But that is not what the actual lineage history of neuroscience shows. What the history shows is that innovators have an intuition or revelation, and then seek the evidence that supports it. This flips the notion of the process of discovery on its head and significantly complicates our understanding of where ‘validated’ medical knowledge originates.

When the Paul Grossman critique re-united the public debate about Polyvagal Theory in 2026, one of the things that struck me was the distance between mechanism (source nucleii of a brainstem neural circuit) and meaning. We get super hung up on mechanism, but what matters more at a practical level is meaning.

It also became clear to me that scientific jockeying back-and-forth about esoteric inferences happens in a domain that is both connected to and remote from the experiential intimacy of our felt experience.

I would propose Stephen Porges intuited the ‘social engagement system’ because he felt it, and then sought out a plausible evolutionary mechanism for it. Paul Grossman is refuting it because he cannot feel it, and he is seeking out established inference that refutes it. Both views are partial. And both views are anchored in faulty foundation maps of our neurology.

So this book- Autonomics: Placing the Lineage History of Neuroscience on a Sacred Foundation, is for anyone who is grappling with meaning in science, how we know what we know, the difference between experience (phenomenology, ontology) and empirical claims, and with the notion of what constitutes a ‘valid’ claim on knowledge. It is for anyone interested in the history of neuroscience. It rewrites the lineage history of the discipline by honoring, rather than displacing the central role of interoceptive discovery and personal experience as a primary engine of neuroscientific research and innovation, WHICH IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. And by so doing re-unites the discipline with a reverance for life. When I say putting the discipline on a sacred foundation- this is what I mean- that neuroscience, as a discipline, serves the sanctity of all life.

Anything else you’d like to tell us about the book?

The book had six different working titles, including Visionary Neuroscience, and Phenomenology of an Embodied Neuroscience, before I settled on the current one. I worked on it for quite some time before this past week, when something about this moment of Polyvagal debate just gelled the focus, and suddenly I saw clearly how to unite the threads of the book.

Many of the illustrations are in the form of woodblock prints.

Buy the book

Download PDF of the bulletpoints (1 pg)

This is not an official Polyvagal Institute perspective: I have no formal affiliation with Stephen W. Porges or PVI1 .

I am writing for people whose practical work involves supporting clients in felt moment-to-moment contact with the dynamism of the living nervous system, which would include therapists, bodyworkers, and coaches of all kinds. The people who have been putting Polyvagal Theory to practical, not theoretical use. The people who have witnessed its ability to help a person organize an understanding of how their bodymind is responding to the inner and outer world based on safety/danger and the historical accumulation of stress.

I am writing to help you discern signal from noise, smoke from fire in this debate, which is not advancing in the public spheres because both sides are dug in, for different reasons, one aggressive and one defensive, in ways that are understandable based on a variety of factors and yet ultimately not useful.

Let’s start with–

What does Polyvagal Theory get right at the level of theory

• The ANS is comprised of three primary systems (two vagal, one ‘sympathetic2’), not two (autonomic balance)

• This conceptual scaffolding permits us to attach descriptive language to stress states that do not involve activation, muscle tension, adrenaline, cortisol, etc.

  • Specifically providing a plausible neural mechanism undergirding ‘shutdown’-type stress responses that have been clinically observed for at least a century, but could not be explained previously

• Autonomic state functions as an intervening variable between our physiology and our environment, surfacing neurophysiological platforms (energy-processing templates) that shape how organisms detect, evaluate, and respond to cues of safety, danger, and life threat.

• Proposes a mechanism for this moment-to-moment autonomic discernment, which is not made by our ordinary sense of self. 3

So what and who cares? Why does this matter?

• At a physiological level, PVT orients us towards

  • the importance of safety as an embodied experience shaping well and illbeing

  • awareness of the dynamism of the Autonomic Nervous System in responding to the moment-to-moment texture of our experience

  • the recognition that the same person in states of safety, danger, and lifethreat may be as different as liquid water, steam, and ice

• At an ontological level (of being), PVT orients us towards embodiment, towards the notion that ‘I feel myself, and therefore I am.’

  • This is a corrective to a Cartesian worldview that locates identity in thinking

  • It restores primacy to embodied experience, to the felt, to the present moment

• At a phenomenological level, PVT orients us to the direct experience of the embodied nervous system, rather than the story we tell ourselves about what happened

  • What did you notice, rather than what did you think

  • this expands the tactical surface area of intervention available for transforming our experiences to include sensation, images, tactile experience, behavior, perception, affect, and meaning which substantively broadens the range of interventions we might bring to bear to support someone

• At an epistemological level (how do we know what we know), PVT orients us to meaning-making in the felt relational fabric between people, and in particular to moment-to-moment awareness of our sense of sufficient embodied safety as a precondition for healthy relating

• At the level of lineage history (deep human ancestral understanding) PVT aligns with a view that Small Band Hunter Gatherers are the baseline of human normalcy, and that safety and connection are species-normal attributes

  • This is a corrective to prevailing notions that ‘life in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Thomas Hobbes, 1651, Leviathan)

  • It reminds us that human wellbeing is social in nature, and that part of the role of ‘society’ is to reinforce this social nature, not undermine it

• At a public health level, PVT orients us to attend to safety as a public health need: a precondition for thriving, not a privilege but a human right

Importantly, none of the above is at issue in the Grossman critique. Most of the above is entirely outside the sphere of what Grossman and colleagues are critiquing. You can continue to assert any and all of the above without saying anything controversial in the least.

What does the Grossman et al. critique of PVT say:

• Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia is not a direct and reliable measure of central vagal outflow to the heart. This is asserted to be a methodological error in PVT.

• PVT characterizations regarding the neuroanatomy and functions of two major brainstem vagal nucleii (the ventrally situated Nucleus Ambiguus and the Dorsal Motor Nucleus of the vagus nerve) are not accurate

• PVT assertions regarding the evolution of the vagus nerve are not accurate

• PVT claims about the specificity of mammalian social behavior in relation to nonmammalian vertebrates are not accurate, and

• PVT interpretations of earlier seminal physiological literature are not accurate.

So what and who cares? What is at issue and why does it matter?

• The primary autonomic signal that Stephen W. Porges, PhD used to measure/ organize vagal tone is a cardiac signal called Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia. “Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia — the rhythmic acceleration of heart rate during inhalation and its deceleration during exhalation — has been the dominant non-invasive index of vagal tone in autonomic research for three decades (Task Force, 1996; Porges, 2007;Berntson et al., 1997).”4 Grossman is saying that this signal is not a reliable metric of central vagal outflow to the heart (because it is coupled with other systems and feedback loops).5 This is true. RSA is not, in fact, the optimal or primary autonomic signal in the body. This is an accurate methodological limitation – RSA cannot separate respiratory drive from vagal responsiveness, and this is true whether or not PVT’s specific anatomical claims are correct. What is to be done? Porges and colleagues (or someone else, as they don’t seem inclinced to do this) should evaluate the claims of PVT using alternative autonomic diagnostic metrics. WE RECOMMEND USING RESPIRATION.

  • Until an alternative set of autonomic diagnostic metrics confirms PVT assertions, Grossman’s assertion that RSA is problematic is sustained.

• The discussion about brainstem vagal nucleii, the evolution of the vagus nerve, and the specificity of mammalian social behavior all directly bears on PVT assertions about the autonomic ladder, and a hierarchy of autonomic state. Porges himself has stated that the evolutionary claims are speculative. You can hear him say this, verbatim, right here in my 2021 interview with him (see 8 minutes 30 seconds or so). This is really the meat of the rebuttal to PVT. Grossman is saying that experimental studies of the vagus nerve, the ANS in vertebrates, and established phylogenetic inferences of social evolution in vertebrates contradict the assertions of PVT.6 What I would like to direct your attention to in the Grossman critique is the phrase ‘established phylogenetic inferences of social evolution in vertebrates.’ What is an inference? A conclusion based on evidence and reasoning. An inference is not a fact. It is not a law. It is not an axiom. In the parlance of science, an inference is a best guess. So in plain language, Grossman is saying that the collective best guess of the leading vagal physiologists about the differentiation between the vagal brainstem nucleii, evolution of the vagus, and specificity of mammalian social behavior contradicts the best guess of Stephen W. Porges, PhD.

  • To err on the side of caution, this suggests that equating the Dorsal Motor Nucleus (DMX) with shutdown MAY be tenuous. It suggests that equating the Nucleus Ambiguus with social engagement MAY be tenuous. Or, the established inferences may be wrong. Or (what I think), Porges has got it partly right, and the established field has it partly right, and neither have it fully right.

What is a theory anyway?

A theory is an explanatory scaffold. Theories in science endure to the extent that they can explain observed phenomena. We thought the earth was at the center of the solar system (the cosmos in fact) for most of human history. At a certain point– not that long ago– there were enough phenomena that could not be explained by this geocentric theory that it collapsed. The field entered a period of disruptive upheaval, and eventually a heliocentric model (sun as center of the solar system) came to bear. This model better explained observable phenomena (retrograde motion of the planets, for example) than the previous earth-centered model.

The evolutionary claims of both PVT and a consensus of vagal anatomists are relatively difficult to adjudicate, because the phenomena they are describing changed several hundred million years ago. We can argue in an impassioned way about whether or not this brainstem nucleii migrated ventrally, but such arguments will always be inferred, because no one alive now witnessed this taking place. Not Porges, not Grossman, not any of the 38 signatories to the Grossman paper.

What PVT brings to bear is a plausible explanatory mechanism. What Grossman’s critique does, usefully, is assert that this mechanism is speculative, and at odds with the general understanding of the field. I happen to agree with Grossman specifically about the fact that the brainstem nucleii theory of PVT is not accurate, but not for the same reasons Grossman disagrees. Because– take a deep breath– the entire field of vagal physiologists could also be wrong. Because - get this- evidence of the DMX’s failure to elicit bradycardia (sudden drop in heart-rate) may not mean it doesn’t. It just might not do this unless there is the neuroception of lifethreat, release of endogenous opioids, and apnea– none of which have ever been tested in a research setting. Because- and PVT is flat wrong about this– the subdiaphgramatic vagus has a role in health creation as well as in lifethreat responses. Yet here’s the thing– I don’t actually think that these claims will be definitively adjudicated one way or another as currently constructed. And I’m not sure it matters. Why doesn’t it matter?

Because Polyvagal Theory already cannot explain a great number of phenomena that we don’t have to speculate about things that happened 200 million years to notice.

What can PVT not explain that we don’t have to speculate about 200 million years of vertebrate evolution to notice?

PVT cannot explain

• Why does a certain percentage of the clinical population shift out of shutdown responses and directly back into autonomic connection/ social engagement states without moving through sympathetic states? If autonomic state is a ladder, with social at the top, and dorsal at the bottom, a person moving out of dorsal would have to move through sympathetic to come to social. While this happens in our clinical experience about 80% of the time, we have observed a statistically significant percentage of the population that moves out of shutdown back into connection. This is direct experiential clinical confirmation that the ANS is not a ladder. If it were a ladder, you could not skip from ‘dorsal’ to ‘ventral/social’ without passing through sympathetic.

• If the DMX is uniquely associated with shutdown responses, and regulates the enteric nervous system (sub-diapghragmatic autonomic/ vagal architecture) how come there is rhythmic coordination in newborns between the suck/swallow reflex (proposed to be ventral vagally mediated by the NA in PVT) and pulsation of the anus (proposed to be mediated by the DMX in PVT)? Answer? Because the ventral and dorsal vagus coordinate in health-creating states. PVT does not understand this.

• How/why do certain shutdown phenomena localize in body parts other than the sub-diaphragmatic vagus? If the unmyelinated vagus under the respiratory diaphragm is the neural architecture of shutdown responses, why do we observe in clinic that people regularly experience ‘localized shutdown’ in a shoulder, knee, one side of the body, other joint, etc.?

• How do we explain states that are ‘sympathetic’ that have no activation (adrenaline/cortisol)? States of play make use of the ‘sympathetic’ movement architecture, but do not contain activation chemistry.7

• I could go on…

What do you need to do differently in your practice to be responsible to this moment of debate and challenge to PVT

• stop talking about the ‘autonomic ladder’ and using diagrams like this. This is not how your Autonomic Nervous System works. If it were truly this simple, anyone on TikTok or Instagram could go around claiming they were a nervous system expert. Oh wait…:

• Instead of saying ‘your ventral vagal system’ say ‘your CONNECTION system’. If you are talking about lifethreat and shutdown, instead of ‘dorsal vagal complex’ say SHUTDOWN response. In other words, describe the ACTION OF THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM, not the ‘brainstem source nucleii’ that have not been conclusively tied to them.

• Don’t teach your clients things that you don’t understand. I’ve heard so many practitioners saying - Well, I never REALLY understood PVT. Why on earth are you teaching people something you do not understand? That is not ethical. Stop doing that.

• Do your research. Discern which sources of information are viable. Engage primary sources. I encourage you to read the research papers. Grossman’s paper is here. Porges’ rebuttal is here.

• Polyvagal Theory has been operationalized both through Polyvagal Institute courses, and through two listening therapies patented by Stephen Porges’ company Polyvagal Science LLC, and licensed by the Canadian neurotechnology company Unyte. They have released the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), and the Rest and Restore Protocol (RRP). There are numerous reports of the SSP engendering adverse reactions in clients. Unyte was actually warned about this by their original Clinical Advisory Board prior to the release of the product, and proceeded to fire the Advisory board. There are at least three reasons that the SSP might cause problems

  • It is administered to someone who is not a good candidate for it

  • the dose administered is not properly sized

  • the practitioner administering it is not properly trained

  All the above duly noted, there are also clients for whom the SSP is an extraordinarily supportive intervention. The RRP is an extraordinarily supportive intervention. The fact that these tools work at all is evidence that PVT is not categorically false. If you are using these tools, use them responsibly and understand their limitations and contra-indications.

What actions might you take to feel like you are doing something proactive about this?

• If you have found Polyvagal Theory important to your understanding of the work that you do, encourage Stephen W. Porges, PhD and the Polyvagal Institute to substantively engage the critique. I get it– Grossman is angry, aggressive, disingenuous, and obstreperous. He is seeking a takedown. This seems like a vendetta. He has been publicly tampering with the PVT Wikipedia page for years. (He lost his mind when I asserted this publicly, but the editing record is transparent. If you’d like to see his edit history, go to Polyvagal Theory’s Wikipedia page, and visit the revision history. Go back to 2017. Look for an editor named ‘Paul Grossman’.8 Since around that time algorithmic editing of the page has pushed it in the direction of fringe science, and all changes that have sought to bring neutrality to the page have been overwritten, largely by the algorithmic censor MrOllie.) But as problematic a person as Grossman is, categorically asserting that he is attacking a straw man of the theory and that this has already been responded to amounts, functionally, to the Developers and stewards of Polyvagal Theory exhibiting a shutdown response in relationship to being challenged. Rather, encourage them to do the more difficult work of engaging the critique. Attempt to validate PVT through a different autonomic diagnostic than RSA, for example the Respiratory Profiling Analysis tool developed by Samar Singh, PhD.

Resources

• Our one page PDF entitled ‘Polyvagal Bulletpoints for Practitioners’ is free and shared under creative commons attribution. Downloading it will put you on our mailing list (stated for transparency), from which you can opt-out if you wish.

• My new book, Autonomics: Placing the Lineage History of Neuroscience on a Sacred Foundation, deeply explores not just our history with the Polyvagal Theory (I have been quite involved with Porges and the Polyvagal community historically) but how the orthodox mechanisms for assembling ‘validated’ medical knowledge fundamentally deny the reality of the lineage history of scientific breakthrough in the disciplines. You can read the preface to the book at the purchase link.

• Hearth Science teaches autonomic physiology to wellness professionals internationally, as well as interested laypeople. You can see all of our classes, as well as their level of difficulty (when working with wellness professionals we assume a basic knowledge of neurology), when working with the general population we assume no relevant scientific background, here.

5

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401680678_Measuring_the_Conductor_and_the_Orchestra

A relevant excerpt from the paper (MacDuffie & Singh, 2026) is below:

8

Polyvagal Theory Wikipedia editing history excerpt:

For the past 15 years, I’ve been working at the intersection of autonomic physiology, mindful awareness, and ancestral lifeways. I’m watching as more and more people in the world are awakening to a recognition that their nervous systems are the primary mediator of their experience.

While most of us have been trained to view our life and mental health largely through the lens of psychology, the advances in autonomic physiology over the last couple of decades show us that the autonomic nervous system is the primary and dynamic substrate of our human experience. Based on both our present moment experience of safety, danger, or life threat (autonomic temperature), in combination with our personal history, life experiences, and archived stress, the autonomic nervous system surfaces energy processing templates that govern our moment-to-moment experience.

I work with people all over the world, including wellness professionals, wellness and executive coaches, and everyday people to sensitize them to this primary layer of felt embodied experience. And guess what– although your nervous system does not speak in your native tongue, you can learn the deep aboriginal language of your autonomic self.

For the past six years, I have been working with a small team to build an autonomic diagnostics tool and practice archive that helps people

1. identify their present moment autonomic state, and either

2. enhance it if it is health creating, or shift it if it is ultimately toxic to well-being.

There is nothing else quite like it in the world.

After taking the software down for five months to reconceptualize it and re-design its diagnostic front-end, I’m pleased to formally announce the release of version 15 of the The Autonomic Compass, today. While I don’t want you spending any more time on a screen than you do, this is a sophisticated interactive tool that helps people to identify their present moment autonomic state, and offers a wide range of neural exercises, restorative practices, educational films, dialogues, and frameworks to help people become more agentic with their moment-to-moment experience of state. It teaches you how to get your hands directly on the deep levers that govern your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing.

Several years ago, when we first brought the software to market, we thought it would be an incredible adjunct to therapy. But therapists did not actually like it. Why? Because teaching people the original language of their own deep nervous systems showed them that many of the challenges they had been conceptualizing as psychological were simply patterned responses to threat. Once they understood this, they could work more directly on the primary substrate of these experiences, and they left therapy sooner. Just to be clear– this was not our intention. This is just what happened. I’m not saying therapy is not extraordinarily useful. I work with a hakomi-trained therapist myself. I’m just saying that much of what is happening in our psychology begins in the autonomic nervous system with the felt experience of safety, danger, and lifethreat, and our lifetime patterns of accumulating stress.

The logic of the platform is unique in that it is totally non-linear. You can play with the diagnostics tool for free here.

The tool lets you explore your experience through the lens of autonomic state (Navigate Wellbeing Autonomically), through a physical symptom, a mental health or emotional issue, a performance issue, or something else. You can use it to deepen a health-creating state or find ways to change the neural inputs keeping you stuck in a chronic, toxic, or traumatic stress response.

Once you’ve identified an issue that you want to focus on, the platform will present you with a variety of optional points of entry. If you find one that appeals to you, you can engage in a neural exercise, learn a practice, understand a framework, or watch an educational film. Something unique about the construction of the platform is that it will show you every other item in the archive related to the one that you’re currently exploring, presenting you with many pathways that branch out from what you are interested in. This turns the entire archive (nearly 400 elements) into a grand choose-your-own-adventure.

If you’re already on a health-creating trajectory, working in somatic therapy, or any kind of awareness-based healing modality, the archive provides an extraordinarily robust archive of experiential practices that can complement what you’re doing and work directly at the nervous system layer. This will build your interoceptive awareness, sensitize you to your body’s own innate autonomic intelligence, and deepen your fluency in reading autonomic states in yourself, and those around you. The platform is specifically focused on helpding you be very intentional about identifying practices that work for the present state of your nervous system, which mediates your moment-to-moment experience. This is important because present moment autonomic state GOVERNS your visceral experience, emotional range, how you are thinking, your perceptions of the world around you, and your behaviors. How attention works is downstream of present moment autonomic state.

This is why, for example, meditating isn’t particularly useful if you are anxious. (Interoceptive attention during a defensive response will make the defensive state louder - since attention potentiates experience. In other words, if you meditate well while you are anxious you will become more anxious.)

This is also why bringing interoceptive attention into shutdown responses in the body will increase your dissociation, not bring you out of them.

Intervention in survival responses (stress) must be tailored to the type of stress response. If the body turns to ice, cooling it down is ineffective, whereas if it turns to steam, that is necessary.

Here’s to your autonomic fluency, to learning the deep language of your nervous system, the science & poetry of your inwardness. Here’s to being able to get your hands directly on the deep levers that govern your wellbeing, no intermediary required.

The Autonomic Compass. Ancestral neurotechnology for wellbeing from Hearth Science.

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