Autonomic Tracking

Ways to continue to refine your tracking of the living nervous system

I finished teaching our first autonomic tracking retreat in Europe nine days ago, and our first Neurobiology of Connection retreat in the UK three days ago. At the UK retreat I said, “I’m not going to do any autonomic tracking.” And then, “I said I was not going to do any autonomic tracking.” And then, “I’m not going to do any autonomic tracking, but if I were…”

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.

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…)

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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).

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)

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).

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…