As you are well aware if you are reading this Substack, for the past several years I have been moving the center of gravity of our work in Autonomics beyond Polyvagal Theory. This began a number of years ago, as the data we were gathering on our deep learning platform showed us that a number of the foundation conceptualizations of the theory were inadequate to map the lived experience of the thousands of clients we were working with around the world.
(It probably began when I was working on the Official Polyvagal Theory poster with Stephen Porges, which we have discontinued because I no longer believe it is accurate, and I became aware that the entire continuum of appeasement was missing from the model.)
Things got going in earnest in the Polyvagal Study Group, when I published a post entitled Questioning the Orthodoxy of the Autonomic Ladder, which ended up the most commented-upon post in that group's history. The level of engagement with the post, and then the level of pushback I got prompted me to write a series of essays that were originally compiled into The Body Electric: Essays on the Beauty and Mystery of the Deep Nervous System, and which were then reformulated into The Neurobiology of Connection. I started thinking about many of the orthodoxies in modern neuroscience that have been built on the implicit bias of a brain-centric worldview, and unraveling a number of the fallacies that emerge therefrom, including the notion that the social engagement physiology (what Porges calls the ventral vagal system) begins in the brainstem. (It actually ends in the brainstem.)
On Saturday July 29, 2023, I presented a live workshop compiling these findings entitled Beyond Polyvagal Theory, which was derived from these essays and concomitant research we were doing, and which we then produced as The Autonomic Spectrum Course. That autumn I gave a series of lectures entitled The Autonomic Spectrum Lectures: Evoking Connection States as part of the post-doctoral seminar I was teaching in autonomic physiology. A week ago I publicly presented our new foundation model of Autonomics for the first time.
These presentations have garnered accolades from leading experts in the field, and stirred up a non-trivial bit of controversy in the Polyvagal community. We have now bundled all three of these courses into a single package entitled Beyond Polyvagal Theory. I am making it available at a substantively reduced price ($300 versus $773 through Labor Day weekend) as we begin to prepare for the next stage of our work, the new book, the teaching that is coming this semester, and the Autonomics Tour.
If you are interested in having access to many of the ideas presented here in The Neurobiology of Connection Substack in a self-paced video format, as an accompaniment to your learning, it presents nearly 16 hours of teaching, most of it filmed in our stunning Northern California Forestlab. The photo below is the view from our open-walled film studio in the Forestlab: the backdrop to much of this teaching.