Now that our social engagement physiology (the face/voice complex) is awake, our hands are open, and our feet are back on the ground, let’s have a look at gesture: autonomic gesture specifically.
In the wake of a challenge to our autonomic equilibrium, it is not the return to safety that shifts our ANS back into a connection state, but rather the completion of the motor movements of defense. What does this mean?
When we are pushed out of safety and connection into a fight or flight response, the mechanism whereby the ANS resets is to complete a defensive movement protocol. Think for a moment about two cats getting ready to fight. There are a whole host of specific movement patterns that accompany this interaction. Their hair stands on end. They snarl at eachother. They move in an almost dance, tiptoeing it seems, circling one another. But this tiptoeing is not a quality of lightness, but rigidity. It is tensioned tiptoeing. The snarls and whines are guttural. Their eye gaze is electric. Ears might flatten. And all of this happens before the first strike. Often, dominance and submission is established without the animals touching– but energy is, assuredly, being combatively exchanged. Someone turns tail and slinks away. But sometimes not. Hackles rise. Someone gets swatted. Someone wails and moans. And then there is a full-on attack.
These movement patterns are not ordinary, volitional movements. Rather they are connected to this deeper layer of our system: expressed by the ANS. They are connected to a particular level of activation: a certain increased heartrate, muscle tension.
Successful completion of these motor movements of defense: both fight responses, and escape responses, depending on what happened and how our ANS experienced it, can re-calibrate our systems. They are more-or-less the reset button on the ANS. The movement pattern will be based on what happened. They are not generic movements, but motor sequences of particular defense: of fight, of escape. Striking, kicking, scratching, biting, leaping away, running, etc.
Ancestral cultures were good at creating contexts where these movement patterns could be spontaneously evoked. Trance states, ceremony, and shamanic intervention often create contexts for this to happen spontaneously. Part of what makes someone a gifted healer in these contexts is not necessarily what they are doing, but rather the context they create that allows for the disinhibition of what the body already wants to (needs to) do to come back whole. Often what is required is to get the mind, the ordinary sense of self, out of the way. In these cultures, people are often more in touch with their animal selves, so this is easier. The animal and the animist haven’t been equated with the base, the evil, and so people are less reluctant to allow themselves access to modes of primal knowing and expression. They give themselves permission to kick like a chicken, to swat like a cat, to bite, to tear, to eviscerate– even if the mind doesn’t understand this.
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