Body as Verb - Advance Review Copies
The third book in the Autonomics Trilogy
I have finished the third book in the Autonomics trilogy about eight months ahead of schedule. It is possible that there will continue to be some revisions, but the bulk of the text is now in fourth draft form, and I have prepared an ADVANCED REVIEW COPY that is now available to paid subscribers to this Substack. I would like to make that available to folks for a couple of months and then gather on zoom to get your feedback.
If you would like an advanced review copy you can use the link below to order. I’ll follow up with everyone who orders either later this spring or early summer to harvest feedback. (If you do not see the link it is because you are not a paid subscriber. Subscribe and it will become visible. We prioritize the community supporting our work financially for advanced access to our newest stuff.)
Just FYI, part of the reason that we produce our own texts is economic, and part of it is because we can bring you our newest thinking and research in a tiny fraction of the time a traditional publisher requires. The newest books about autonomic physiology coming out of a traditional publisher were finished mid-to-late 2024. This text includes material revised in the past three weeks (post Grossman et al. Polyvagal critique, etc.). So you are getting the cutting-edge of what we understand. Cut-off date for this manuscript: April 4, 2026. Cut-off date for newest book from traditional publishers: December 2024.
In the third book of the Autonomics Trilogy, ancestral neuroscience pioneer Natureza Gabriel explores the beauty and mystery of the vertebrate movement system. Misnamed by traditional neurology as the Sympathetic Nervous System, and associated by most people who know about it with fight-or-flight responses, this spinally-mediated neurology is the animating genius of the vertebrate body plan.
By locating the neurological control nodes of complex patterned movement in proximity to the limbs and organs that they subtend, the vertebrate movement system distributes hardwired and adaptive survival programs across well over fifty brains in the body.
In this volume, Gabriel argues that existing in a vertebrate body is such a fundamental substrate of our lived experience that we cannot understand what it means to be wearing a human body outside of this construct. He explores the autonomic intelligence of this embodied system, and what it means to learn to trust the billions of years of evolutionary history hard-wired into each of our living breathing bodies. By regarding the body as a verb (energy in motion) rather than a noun (a thing), Gabriel provides language and texture for knowing the third autonomic facet of our dynamic lived experience.
Blending science and poetry, neurophysiology and social commentary, philosophy and polemic, the book is the extraordinary conclusion to the three part exposition of autonomic systems begun by The Neurobiology of Connection, continued in GROUND, and concluded here. A tour de force that you will not want to miss, Body as Verb completes the explorations of the autonomic trilogy by naming a third mode of knowing ourselves: through movement. This is, in the author’s words, a book of joy.
