014 - Rhythm & Regulation

PLEASE NOTE: I am teaching the framework of the book publicly for the first time in a training Fridays March 1 and 8, 2024 from 3-4:30 pm PST (-8 hours GMT) on Zoom entitled “Turning on the Neurobiology of Connection”. The training is offered on a sliding scale. Learn more here.

When we look at this womb-with-a-view period, and specifically the first nine of the 18 months after birth, we notice that swaddling is closely coupled with another ancestral technology, which is that baby is being carried around on the chest or back of a regulated caregiver nearly all of the time.

What happens neurologically to the infant when they are carried on a caregiver’s back? Part of it is that they are in rhythmic contact with the parent’s heartbeat. And breathing. And bodily rhythmic frequencies. This phenomenon of entrainment is poorly understood and under-emphasized in healing. When we talk about rhythm, people tend to think about dancing, but neurological rhythm begins with heartbeat. Drum, the primal rhythm, moves us the way it does because it emulates heartbeat. Music externalizes and augments rhythms that are within.

Our entire beings pulse, in fact, with rhythm. Dr. Bob Naviaux, one of the world’s leading researchers on mitochondrial disease told me, in a recent conversation, “Signals of safety are always pulses. It is danger signals that are constant.”