Dismantling Season: A Preview

2026 has been a big year in autonomic science and related disciplines. The year started off with a bang when Swiss mindfulness researcher Paul Grossman recruited 38 colleagues to publish a sweeping critique of Polyvagal Theory. The article was published in a fairly obscure Italian Journal called Clinical Neuropsychiatry. The same issue that contains Grossman’s critique contains Porges’ rebuttal – esoteric – and is essentially a refusal to engage Grossman’s arguments on epistemological grounds (he asserts Grossman is not critiquing PVT but a straw man version of the theory). These two papers put together led to a cascade of assertions that Polyvagal Theory was debunked – made largely by people who do not understand Polyvagal Theory or Grossman’s assertions. I was deeply, directly, and personally involved in this collision of ideas, communicating directly with Grossman over LinkedIn (not pretty) as well as the executive leadership and inner circle at the Polyvagal Institute, who asked for my advice.

I have two significant forthcoming pieces about this controversy. One of them is written largely for clinicians in a narrative register and is forthcoming in the Psychotherapy Networker: Separating Signal from Noise in the Polyvagal Controversy: A Personal History. The other is a paper co-authored with Heather McDuffie PhD and provides a mechanism for resolving the 20-year stasis in this debate. The preprint of this is is forthcoming here, as part of Dismantling season.

On July 27th the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research had the audacity (not that I dislike audacity, to be clear) to assert that it was making publicly available the world’s first comprehensive human vagus nerve maps. People are understandably excited about this and it would be great if the very methods that they had employed did not make this methodologically impossible. While it does represent a substantive advance in the trunkline representation of these systems, the mapping continues to suffer from a fundamental category error that precedes its construction: necrotic anatomy cannot map the fine fiber network. So this is not in fact a comprehensive map of the vagus; it is a comprehensive map of the trunk lines of the vagus. This difference matters deeply for an AFFEREENT SYSTEM. A map of the highways in New York City is very different than a map of the streets of New York City. If you need to find a house, the highway map will not get you there. In the same way that no reasonable person would mistake a highway map for a map of every street- a comprehensive map of the trunk lines of the vagus should not be mistaken for a map of the Vagus. Sorry- it is NOT a comprehensive map of the human vagus nerve anymore than the denuded trunk of an oak tree is a comprehensive map of the oak tree.

This brings me obliquely to one of the quiet themes of the year - which is when a research paper is published by a group that fails to disclose their financial interest in the ostensibly neutral conclusions they have come to. Do a little digging and you will soon discover that Kevin J Tracey MD, a neurosurgeon and the president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health is also the author of a pedestrian book on the vagus (The Great Nerve: How New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness its Healing Reflexes) as well as the inventor of a recently FDA approved vagal stimulator. The book is an extended marketing piece for the vagal stimulator. The research proposes to find more individualized and specified targets for vagal nerve stimulation, which is to say that it well aligns with the financial interests of the developers of this technology.

I have argued elsewhere and will argue here again that this entire focus on vagal stimulation is medieval. Category errors in the foundations of modern neuroanatomy have prevented us from understanding the actual scope and nuance of these systems. You do not need to put a bolt of electricity into someone’s neck to change the parametric inputs to the vagus nerve. There are much more nuanced, attuned, and safer ways to do this. Furthermore, absent an understanding of both neuroception (moment-to-moment neural detection of safety, danger, lifethreat), and the way that it gates pervading neurochemistry means that in certain cases vagal stimulation is likely to have exactly the opposite of the intended effects with the specific populations (people with a dysregulated ANS) it is designed to benefit.

Like the new stellate ganglion blocks (I have not yet heard of one of these that worked) which seem to be just as likely to fail as to succeed- allopathic medicine and mainstream neuroscience’s fundamental failure to understand the entire picture of how autonomic state is created leads to interventional strategies that are foundationally misguided. I have no idea how these things are being FDA approved, although given the current administration, which is authorizing peptides, dismantling the vaccine schedule, and whose chief lies to make videos with Kid Rock while sitting in hot tubs and cold plunges in his jeans drinking milk, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Thankfully, Dr. Tracey is not the author of this study. The conflict of interest is thereby present but not central. This pales in comparison to the flagrant conflicts of interest that undergird the entire ‘refutation’ of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s work embodied by the new opinion paper in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience lead-authored by entrepreneur and performance expert Steven Kotler.

On April 29th, Steven Kotler, a journalist and entrepreneur behind the Flow Research Collective published a provocative opinion paper in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. For some reason that I continue to not understand people are referring to it as a research paper. It is not a research paper. It is an opinion paper. These are not the same. A research paper must marshall evidence from somewhere- a laboratory, a clinic, experiments, etc. This paper does not do that at all.

Since that time I have heard several people assert that Bessel van der Kolk’s work has been debunked. This has all of the empirical rigor of someone telling you that they overheard someone at the gas station say Pluto is the center of our solar system. The Frontiers Journal ecosystem is increasingly a pay-to-play ecosystem (oops - did I say that out loud?). We are therefore on the threshold of releasing a paper that tears the Kotler paper apart line by line.

The Kotler paper explicitly disclaims conflicts of interest while the Flow Research Collective that employs three of the four authors is raising 50M to fund research into the topics the paper asserts define this terrain: the fourth author is cited by the Flow Research Collective as the mathematical inspiration behind their model. How that got through an ethics committee I don’t know– were they by any chance busy snorting cocaine off a bathroom toilet seat?

Join us for Dismantling Season on The Neurobiology of Connection.

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Over the next several weeks, we are going to actively dismantle a number of theoretical positions that are, in my extremely arrogant opinion, orienting the field in ways that are fundamentally counter-productive, anti-factual, and mis-guided.

These articles and refutations will be available for free here, on The Neurobiology of Connection.

Tell your friends! It’s going to be fun, intellectually stimulating, and you might just unlearn something.

I will also keep comments open to anyone (unless people get too rude), and for extra fun (and because it is the respectful and rigorous thing to do), I will be sending the articles directly to the people and institutions to which they are responding with the invitation to them to reply or rebut.

I will be addressing, among other things…

A New ‘Comprehensive’ Map of the Vagus

Steven Kotler’s opinion article

The Polyvagal Controversy…

Stay tuned.

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In this video I’m talking about the 3rd (of ten) stage of the cascade. This is about coordinating the timing between the suck-swallow reflex and breathing.

Join us. Perinatal Autonomic Cascade, Saturday August 8, 8 to 11 am PT.

Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

Bringing you the next paradigm in nervous system science.

Saturday August 8, 2026

The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

Perinatal Autonomic Cascade - August 8

This is why people come to our clinic to work on something from the present day, and it turns out to be connected to a pattern that was organized neurologically in childhood. The fundamental templates of many of our responses, which are organized at the level of autonomic physiology, form early in life.

Our recent research in Europe has added another more fundamental layer to this, which has the potency to reconfigure much of our understanding about the origin of autonomic dysregulation. Our lab has identified a series of ten discrete autonomic initializations that happen at birth to facilitate the transformation of the fetus essentially from a neutrally buoyant marine animal to an air-breathing, food-eating terrestrial mammal moving in the field of gravity.

These are essentially ground zero autonomic ignitions, and they are exquisitely contingent on oxytocin in the birthing environment, and interruptible by stress chemistries of various kinds, which is to say that for many modern people they do not successfully initialize at their maximally available depth. Our research suggests that for many kinds of autonomic challenges, and likely for specific classes of pathology, the origin in incomplete perinatal initialization.

If you’d like to geek out about this a little, you can read our new paper on Researchgate, THE PERINATAL AUTONOMIC CASCADE: A Sequential Model of Neonatal Autonomic Initialization. If you’d like to understand the cascade more deeply, get a sense of how it shows up in people, a sense of how you might look for it, a tiny sense of how you might begin to think about working with it (this is not something really teachable in short form), please join me for a 3-hour advanced zoom workshop Saturday August 8 from 8 am to 11 am Pacific time.

The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

9. You didn’t really understand the Polyvagal Controversy, who is Paul Grossman, etc., but ok, is Polyvagal Theory accurate or not?

8. You’ve heard that there is a science of breath in yoga, pranayama or something. But why would a science of breath be important?

7. You’ve noticed that anytime you get frightened, stressed, or upset your breathing changes. Why it that?

6. You know what your respiratory diagphragm is, but didn’t realize it is filled with receptor sites that bind endogenous opioids.

5. What is a central pattern generator anyway?

4. Something about the brainstem. The Pre-Botzinger what?

3. You didn’t realize that you could look at yourself and clients through the lens of breath as a primary way to determine present moment autonomic state.

2. You’ve been taught the power of breathing patterns without being educated in the ways that spontaneous breathing can be used clinically to support wellbeing.

1. The number one reason you should join us Saturday? Breath is THE optimal autonomic signal: the read/write function of the autonomic nervous system. Nothing autonomically in the body changes that is not reflected in the breath. Learn to read and work with breath directly in yourself and others and you are working on a primary autonomic fulcrum.

BREATH THROUGH AN AUTONOMIC LENS.

SATURDAY JULY 25, 8-11 AM PT

TEN SPACES REMAINING.

Breath through an Autonomic Lens

PS- If you have trouble registering for any reason, send us an email at support@restorativepractices.com with ‘Register for July 25 - Autonomics of Breath’ in the subject line. Our e-commerce site is being rebuilt- it may or may not work for you.

In which I will now translate the abstract of the paper published yesterday (THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIMITIVE REFLEX: Restructuring Reflexes as a Distinct Category of Hardwired Autonomic Calibration) into English and explain why it matters.

One of the foundational yet distorted premises of the modern world view is what I tend to refer to as ‘the hegemony of visuality’. Broadly construed this is to say that people tend to believe things they see are real. We tend to equate seeing something with understanding it. This is a linguistic as well as a cognitive phenomenon. When someone says, “I see what you’re saying,” they don’t literally mean they see the words: they mean they understand them.

The history of modern neuroscience is filled with scientists mistaking things they see for reality. The most astonishing failure to distinguish a visual artifact from how the nervous system actually works is the division in classical neurology between the brain and spinal cord. There is no functional division between the brain and spinal cord. Yet there appears to be if you are an anatomist looking at it in a cadaver. The brainstem exits the brain at an opening called the foramen magnum: an oval hole in the bottom of the skull into which it coordinates with the vertebral column. In the cadaver, the brainstem and spinal cord present as two visibly separate structures: the brainstem sits enclosed in the skull, the cord descends through the vertebral column, and the opening at the skull’s base creates a visible architectural discontinuity between them, reinforced by a narrowing of the cord at that point.

To a dissecting eye working under the conditions available to classical anatomists — poor lighting, no microscopy, no histochemical staining, and dissection preceding the Neuron Doctrine entirely — that kind of visible discontinuity was the only reliable signal available. “I see a boundary between these two structures,” declares the dissecting anatomist. “Therefore, a boundary exists.”

A clear structural break like the foramen magnum registers as exactly the sort of landmark early anatomists rely on. The problem is that this is a boundary in the skeleton, not in the nervous system. The brainstem and spinal cord are, crucially, continuous neural tissue — there’s no neuronal juncture at the foramen magnum, no point where nerves terminate and restart. What the classical distinction actually tracks is where the skull ends and the vertebral column begins, not where one neurological system ends and another begins.

Yet this false distinction has been baked into neuroscience ever since. What is the Central Nervous System? Brain and spinal cord. A non-sensical statement since the spinal cord is the same part of the nervous system as the brainstem. This illogic has infected then every neuroanatomical model built since, up to and including Polyvagal Theory.

The broader pattern: from the outside looking in (situating ourselves in the location of the anatomist gazing into the body into which we are trying to break) the way things appear becomes the fulcrum of attention and discernment. The visual artifact becomes the very thing studied– because we can see it – even if it is not the actual phenomenon, or even if it is ancillary to the phenomenon.

Because we have culturally reified a worldview and ways of knowing that occlude the possibility of a reliable subjectivity, preclude the possibility that things can be known and sensed and felt accurately from within themselves, that an organism can know its own inwardness in quantifiably accurate ways, the field entire has organized around ‘looking in from the outside’.

This perspective informs not only our anatomy and neuro-anatomy, but the interventional landscape. Because we do not understand that we can non-invasively change input signals to the afferent vagus, the state of the art involves putting a bolt of electricity into someone’s neck (vagal stimulation) a technique that we will look back on in fifty years and classify in about the same territory as attaching leeches to a patient to balance their four humors.

There is no such thing as a primitive reflex, because what we are seeing, and naming as a ‘primitive reflex’ is the visible output motor signature of an inward autonomic calibration the function of which modern medicine, physical and occupational therapy, and developmental neuroscience do not understand.

There has been no teleological – what is the purpose, goal, or ultimate end - inquiry into what function these reflexes serve in terms of organismic calibration or development. There is not even a category in the taxonomy of reflexes to ask this question. This is a bit like listening to the intestines from outside, watching peristalsis, and declaring that digestion is the patterned contraction of the smooth muscular walls of the intestines. What does this description miss? Nearly everything that digestion is: namely its function and what it is actually doing. It describes what you can see from outside; not what is happening.

The current descriptive taxonomy - primitive reflexes - is the visible surface phenomena absent the entire meaning of the act.

Now we understand what that visible surface phenomena is in service to: organismic calibration of the newborn from a neutrally buoyant marine environment to an air-breathing, food-eating, terrestrial mammal locomoting in the field of gravity. The two new papers - The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade: A Sequential Model of Neonatal Autonomic Initialization, and yesterdays’ THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIMITIVE REFLEX: Restructuring Reflexes as a Distinct Category of Hardwired Autonomic Calibration answer the deeper unasked and foundationally important question: what the visible surface means.

They also provide a broad corrective, because if the reflex is the visible output signature of a deeper autonomic ignition or calibration, creating interventional strategies that target extinguishing the reflex in the absence of that functional goal completing would be – well – not useful.

I’m teaching this new research over the next month. Learn more here. View the Hearth Science research program in its entirety.

My first writing about the nervous system for the Psychotherapy Networker should be available by the end of July. My first article, Separating Signal from Noise in the Polyvagal Controversy, addresses the history of Polyvagal theory, the Grossman Controversy, the Porgesian refusal to engage, what is actually being contested in the debate, what part of this matters, what part of it probably doesn’t, what is crucial to hold onto from PVT, what probably should be dropped, and what you can do about it all…more details when it publishes.

Doing research in Bologna in June I visited the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio e Teatro Anatomico, an 800 year old dissection theatre at the University of Bologna. A literal theatre– a forum for the gaze: hegemony of visuality as truth-seeking mechanism.

What the developmental literature calls "primitive reflexes" are the clinically visible motor output signatures of a sequential series of foundational autonomic initialization events – the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade. The movement observable from outside – the tonic labyrinthine reflex extension-flexion arc, the rooting reflex, the Moro reflex – is the surface signature of an initialization event whose actual function is occurring at the level of the fine fiber autonomic network, the neurochemical environment, and the calibration of vestibular-proprioceptive-cardiovascular integration. These patterns are not primitive in the sense of being superseded. They are foundational in the sense of being load-bearing.

The developmental sequence is not the replacement of lower-order patterns by higher-order ones-it is the stacking of higher-order patterns on top of completed lower-order initializations. If the lower-order initialization did not complete, the higher-order pattern stacks on top of an incomplete foundation, and the instability propagates upward through the developmental sequence in ways that may not become visible until much later, and may not be recognized as having their origin at the initialization layer.

We propose the term restructuring reflex as the correct functional category: a hardwired extracortical sensorimotor arc whose function is the one-time accomplishment of an irreversible autonomic calibration, establishing a new baseline state of neural, vascular, vestibular-proprioceptive, or somatic organization upon which subsequent development depends. There is no such thing as a primitive reflex. There are restructuring reflexes that completed, and restructuring reflexes that did not.

PREPRINT

• DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12018.26565

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIMITIVE REFLEX: Restructuring Reflexes as a Distinct Category of Hardwired Autonomic Calibration

Our two most recent preprints (the above) and The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade are the direct result of clinical and scholarly research done in Europe, and the subject of two advanced classes I will teach Saturdays August 8 and 22 on Zoom. More information about the classes can be found here on our new website.

Detail of the Doni Tondo, 1506-1508, Michelangelo, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy

Yesterday we published the preprint of a paper entitled ‘The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade: A Sequential Model of Neonatal Autonomic Initialization’. Today I want to explain to you a little bit of what it means and why it matters.

If you haven’t had your head in the sand for the past decade, and you are anywhere near the healing arts, as patient or practitioner, you have been hearing for a long time about the healing power of the vagus nerve. The vagus is the primary conduit of the ANS, which, to gloss it in a certain manner, is the neural architecture of the mind body connection. The ANS controls the deepest biological levers that govern your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing/ illbeing.

Many people working in trauma therapies over the last couple of decades have recognized that the primary archival sites of allostatic load are peripheral, locked into tissue localized at sites in the body where incomplete autonomic responses did not execute, or where shutdown responses did not thaw: not in the cranial brain. Archived allostatic load changes things in the brain because it changes the input architecture of afferent signaling to which the brain respond. While some recent (opinion) papers would have you believe that these mechanisms are in predictive processing networks in the brain, which is not false, it misses the point entirely, which is that predictive processing is driven by the quality of afferent signal. It is not decoupled from sensory and interoceptive inputs. Changing the brain’s predictive processing upstream - in the brain - without addressing the allostatic loads in the input system is a bit like adjusting the thermostat in a burning building so that the thermostat can tolerate a fire.

Less alarm signal, yes. Building is still on fire.

When I work with people in the Hearth Science autonomics clinic, one of the remarkable and predictably strange things about this is that often people arrive with a presenting condition that seems directly attached to an event (e.g. a surgery, an impact collision, etc.) and as we work on the healing trajectory, it turns out that there are other events with a similar pattern – e.g., down to the specific way that a person rotates an arm to attempt to catch themselves when falling – that are ‘buried’ underneath the thing that brought them into the clinic.

Having just come from Rome and Florence, where Etruscan buildings were overset by Roman architecture, which was used as foundation for Renaissance buildings - this is a little bit of what comes to mind. The foundations of the newer buildins ARE the older buildings. They often sit right on top of them, in their footprint.

As clinical example– I recently worked on a case with someone in their late forties where an event that happened at 29 years old (a bicycling accident), an event that happened at 4 years old (a fall), and an event that happened at 9 months old (a surgery as a result of something falling on the person) all had essentially identical movement escape action pathways. A particular twist at the trunk, one hand coming up and across the body in a specific arcing motion, the other hand coming up secondarily, the turning away of the shoulders, neck, and face.

What does this mean?

Often what we are treating with the Autonomic Nervous System is simply the most obvious visible surface of an autonomic architecture that has deeper, older, and invisible priors. Something the body has been trying to do again and again since it was interrupted when it first happened.

Ok- why am I telling you this?

Well, if you think about being born and how strange it is- essentially the transition from a fetus that is more-or-less a marine animal being fed, watered, and breathed from outside– to an air-breathing, water-drinking, food-eating, terrestrial animal that has to organize movement against gravity, there has to be some set of mechanisms for turning all of this newly needed equipment on. The heart has to reorganize its beat mechanics, the lungs have to inflate and activate, the body has to pressurize so it can maintain blood pressure against gravity, the body has to activate thermoregulation, the balance systems have to initialize.

That mechanism IS the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade.

It is not the only mechanism, or the total mechanism, or the final mechanism: it is neural ignition of all these systems. A bit like firing up an engine for the first time. Neurology is not the only mechanism of bodily signaling- neurochemistry is also profoundly involved, diffused through vascular architecture and across fascial architecture, but the wiring, down to the finest unmyelinated fiber networks, has to initialize in terrestrial format.

We have now precisely mapped this sequence in its totality in two adult patients. The first one happened June 6. We did it partially again June 13&14 with a different person, but their birth story made it more complex. We did it completely again on June 27.

I have been seeing and working with elements of the cascade in isolation for a long time. I have seen elements of it in dozens of patients. I sensed that there might be a larger architecture at play. Now we have witnessed the complete sequence two times. N=1 could possibly be an anomaly. N=2 with something this intricate? Unlikely. Obviously we are early stage with this, but the implications are pretty significant. Why?

Because if the pattern from the hundreds of complex cases we have seen at the clinic holds true, and in fact much of what is presenting to us as active symptomology is in fact reverberations, echoes, or repetitions (the available visible surface) of early autonomic events that have been lost to us because we don’t remember them consciously, didn’t have a felt vocabulary to resolve them when they happened, and didn’t know what they were at the time– then what we have found here, with the perinatal autonomic cascade, is the ‘source document’ of incomplete structuring that may be the original incomplete or unstructured source of the allostatic loads whose pattern language expresses itself later in life as pathology. Likely across an extraordinary number of disease vectors, since the cascade is what activates and coordinates so many biological systems.

On the converse side of this, on the salutogenic (health-creating) side, perhaps the reason some people are so enduringly healthy is because they did complete this at birth.

What we are hypothesizing, and in the midst of documenting, is that completing the cascade later in life may, at a neurological level, reset the baseline conditions of organism such that it can reorganize truly from the ground up. In plain words, resetting the original autonomic template for thriving.

May you be well this day.

-Gabriel

DO YOU WANT TO LEARN THIS?

I am teaching an advanced three hour class on the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade August 8. It is part of a series of three advanced classes I am teaching on zoom this summer. If you are not ‘advanced’ in this work, you are still welcome to come, you will find it interesting, I am just likely to use a level of technical terminology some of which you will not understand, and my primary pedagogical purpose in these classes is to train wellness professionals to begin to recognize and make use of elements of the cascade in their treatment protocols, which means that I will not answer basic questions.

If you recognize yourself in this story, think you may have had a difficult birth, were told that you did, et cetera, and you are interested in experiencing this work directly, I run a boutique, high-selectivity clinical practice at the intersection of advanced autonomic science and complex case intervention. It is referral-based and intake evaluated. A lot of our referrals come from neurologists, integrative medical practices, advanced somatics practitioners, etc. It is also expensive: not a general wellness offering. I work with people around the world, primarily over zoom. I see a limited number of people face to face at our eco-reserve in the Bay Area.

We have a couple of clinical spots available in late July and August. A couple more in November and December. First step there is to fill out a clinical intake form.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AUTONOMICS CLINIC, DECIDE IF IT IS RIGHT FOR YOU.

The Autonomics Clinic

Here is the paper. Again, fairly technical but you’ll get the gist of it even if you don’t have a technical background. You can read about the nine phases of the cascade itself, and what they are accomplishing for the organism. A second of our foundation papers, after the paper on Epistemology. Freely available as a resource, as are all our lab’s papers on ResearchGate.

Read the Paper

Join us for an advanced class

July 25 - Autonomics of Breath (learn more and register)

August 8 - The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade (learn more and register)

August 22- The Tonic Labyrinthine Reflex as General Purpose Vestibular/ Proprioceptive Recalibration Mechanism (learn more and register)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/408481380_THE_PERINATAL_AUTONOMIC_CASCADE_A_Sequential_Model_of_Neonatal_Autonomic_Initialization

Perinatal Autonomic Cascade - Research

Abstract:

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, vascular/baroreceptive, proprioceptive, interoceptive, vestibular, thermoregulatory, and neurochemical— each stage dependent on the successful completion of the one before it. This paper proposes a novel model of neonatal autonomic initialization — the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade — describing the sequential activation of the body’s autonomic systems in the minutes, hours, and days following birth. Drawing on established neonatal neurophysiology, the Autonomics framework developed by Hearth Science, Inc. (Kram, 2025), and clinical observations from over a decade of practice, we argue that the transition from intrauterine to extrauterine life involves a precisely ordered series of neurologically and neurochemically distinct ignitions and calibrations (autonomic structuring events), each contingent upon the successful completion of the preceding stage. The cascade is exquisitely sensitive to neurochemical context — particularly the presence or absence of oxytocin at critical initialization windows. Disruption of the cascade at any stage results in incomplete structuring of autonomic baseline parameters that may enduringly configure respiratory, neurocardiological, vascular/baroreceptive, proprioceptive, interoceptive, vestibular, thermoregulatory, and neurochemical baselines. Clinical case evidence suggests that the entire cascade, or selective incomplete elements can be identified and reinitiated in adult patients decades after incomplete perinatal initialization, reseting baseline autonomic parameters that undergird physiological function across numerous domains.

I am teaching this Saturday August 8, 2026 from 8 - 11 am Pacific time.

The Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

Florence Day One

It takes me about three hours after seeing the Florentine Pietà to realize that I have entered a fugue state– of aesthetic rapture– in which I have been revolving without recognition, perambulating like a gobsmacked child– and that in an unconscious attempt to ground myself in its wake…I have turned to shopping for books, paper goods (?), linen napkins (?), fashionable men’s clothing in three different stores, food, news…

I realize, in a specific moment of scrolling through the news feed on my phone– what the actual fuck am I doing? - that I am attempting to distract myself from this state because I don’t know what to do with it. I left the museum high. The visit has done something to me. In a totally altered state; a sort of aesthetic bliss, moved to the core, buoyed, carried up and in and out simultaneously I have been wandering around Florence looking for something... Transported. I don’t have a word exactly for where I am now.

It happened like this. I was in the museum bookstore, and saw a book about Michelangelo’s Pietà, and I picked it up. Because it was not the Pietà that I have seen photographs of numerous times; the one in Rome, at St. Peter’s; the one I’ve written about; the one my friend Jeffrey saw as a child that moved him so; the one with Mary much larger than life, younger than she would have been; the one he made when he was twenty-three and signed, when his career was just beginning and he, we, none of us knew exactly who he would become, regretting it ever after, swearing not to sign another work of his hands (he did not).

And so because I did not recognize the sculpture I thought that the writer of the book was the sculptor of this other sculpture, and yet I could not stop staring at it in the pages. There were perhaps 25 plates in the book; each one more compelling than the previous; all in black and white. This happened around 4:30 pm. Then I went up in the bell tower. And then, on the way to pick up the backpack I had deposited (no backpacks in the bell tower) I passed in front of the Museo dell’Opera dell Duomo di Firenze, and wandered in. In the third room I found myself standing before it.

A little bit like wandering into the forest, following a trail, and suddenly emerging into an opening filled with hallowed light into which some feature of nature– a waterfall let us imagine– of such unexpected astonishing beauty comes into view that you cannot stop staring. I shook myself. It felt a bit like coming up from under water.

Time broke.

It was lit from above, on a large pedestal such that the base was chest high. You stand looking up at it, as you would were it on an altar. (Michelangelo was in his seventies when he began; it was supposed to be part of his own funeral monument.)

The sculpture is perfect. Words fall back. It stands totally outside of time. It is impossible to know when it was made by looking at it. If you had told me it was a work of Picasso’s, and thus the reason parts of it were abstract almost to the point of Cubism, I would not have argued with you; that is how undefined faces are in some places. In this sense it is a piece of totally modern art. And yet.

It is deeply deeply strange, at a technical level. Jesus is sprawled back, falling into the arms of Joseph of Arimethea, supported by the Virgin Mary, his legs held by Mary Magdalene. The eye is drawn to the body of Jesus below the head, to the torso, the belly, the drapery across his loins, his legs, the left arm thrust out at an awkward angle and folded back upon itself at the wrist because these parts of the sculpture are finished completely, polished to mirror gloss.

His face is not fully defined. Look closely and it still bears the rake marks of a fine gradina: a claw chisel. This surface texture occludes something, steps it back away from us, away from immediacy. Away from being understood. It retreats from us, just a bit, the stone has not received its final shaping and yet there is a definitive attitude in the face, the nose specifically, the right eye in particular; it moves us this face; we recognize it elementally without quite being able to see it. The body itself moves us, its sprawl, its lifelessness palpable; the surrender to gravity; to weight; inertness. The stone conveys this absence of vitality somehow, in contrast to the aliveness of the Marys, Joseph, who, though pained, are vital yet.

Beyond the face of Jesus, Mary Magdalene: her face the least finished of the four; merely a suggestion.1 A block, an abstraction; unfinished form, Picasso-esque. Joseph has a face hooded by his garments and so the way the light falls defines it merely approximately, yet you receive the gesture, the gaze, the riveted attention of the hooded figure. It is finished to the same degree as the face of Jesus: fine teeth of the chisel visible on close inspection. The Virgin Mary– she has the softest face, the one closest to finished, the one that we can see in this moment, the one that is nearly human. It is sanded but not polished, and yet she looks somehow alien.

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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.