Just who do you think you are?

On fragmentary autonomic selves

“THE BODY IS OUR GENERAL MEDIUM FOR HAVING A WORLD,” says Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception.

Yet the sentence implies that we have a single body. One body. It speaks of the body as if it exists as a unity. And while I’m not going to argue that you have more than one physical head, more than two arms, and two legs, et cetera, I will argue that quantumly speaking most people walking around in the world are not a singular body.

Have you ever happened to stand between two parallel mirrors, and caught a glimpse of yourself infinitely refracted? I did this once, accidentally, toweling off at the YMCA after a swim. There was a part of the men’s locker room where a wall of mirrors above a row of sinks was set in parallel with a full-length mirror on the opposite wall, and I happened to stand between them. What I saw was a bit like the image below. Versions of myself refracting from the primary image into infinite regression.

At the time I was thinking a fair amount about incarnations. How many times we have been here before. And the image was informative, as it gave me a visual sense of the way that prior incarnation could compile into present existence. But that’s not how I think of it now. I believe it has a meaning that is much more immediate. Much more visceral.

A primary goal of our work at Hearth Science is to help people live in their bodies. Most people do not, in fact, live here. And the reason most of us don’t live in our bodies is because they don’t feel very good to inhabit. The reason they don’t feel very good to inhabit? Trauma. Stress. Allostatic load. Accumulations of distress that have not passed through us, and are therefore archived in the body. Things we have experienced that we do not want to feel.

Your body is an archive– probably an integral¹– of all of the previous experiences you have ever had, and its structure and contours and tension and pain are in fact the result of the incompletely metabolized residual neurological and chemical residues of these experiences. They can be nothing else.

To a far greater degree than most of us realize, the bodies that we are wearing are the allostatic inheritance of everything that we have endured. I want you to take a moment to really understand this. Most people don’t. I didn’t for decades.

The yoga that you are doing today to help you unwind the body? Why is it that you will have to do it tomorrow as well? Why will the body, over the course of the next 24 hours, re-accumulate the tension you are spending 90 minutes unwinding? Of course it is possible that your day is so stressful that simply enduring 24 hours brings you back into deep stress. But for most people that is not what is going on. You are going to be tense tomorrow because the yoga (marvelous through it is) doesn’t actually touch the neural setpoints in your Autonomic Nervous System that are governing the archived allostatic load in your body. It can’t, as its mechanism of action does not address them directly.

You can mechanically release this tension all you want, even unwind it with the breath, but until the neurological motor patterns underneath it are actually completed and the neurochemistry of it exits your body, you will wake up tomorrow as tense as you woke up today. This is what I’m talking about.

The body you are wearing is the historical accumulation of all the allostatic loads you have ever been unable to clear.

Your body is, of course, much more than this, but the general sense toward which I’m aiming in this essay is the recognition– the revelation– that the way it feels to live in our skin, the visceral breathing moment-to-moment experience of self-in-a-body that we are having is to a far greater degree than most of realize the accumulation and constraints of incompletely enacted protective motor movement sequences, undigested and unmetabolized information, emotion, and chemistry, and then the meanings-we-have-been-unable-to-make-of-this held in limbo in organ tissue, and muscle, and fascia, and nerve. It exists in two forms: hot stress (fight-flight responses), which are things you feel (and that don’t feel good). And cold stress (shutdown responses), which are lacunae, absences, gaps.

Most of us are this infinite refraction, every recurrent image in the mirror a fragment of self that got left behind, distributed, across the threshold of an autonomic response that did not return to baseline.

I sometimes use the metaphor of three states of water to represent this, because it becomes easier to see and feel. Each of us is a droplet of water. But every experience we have endured that caused us to shift autonomically out of safety and into a defensive response, has turned us either momentarily into steam or ice. And every time that we were unable to condense that steam back down, or thaw that ice, is still living in us as a fragment. Vast swaths of self are archived across the thresholds of these transitions between liquid, steam, and ice.

The time you got so scared of monsters at age six, when your 13-year-old cousin who was sleeping over decided it was a good idea to tell you a bunch of stories about people breaking into the house, that you hyper-ventilated yourself into a state of alarm so profound that when you finally fell asleep, it felt as if your eyes were on fire and your brain was swarming with intruders amongst whom you wandered lost? That experience, its feelings of helplessness and terror, and the neurology of shutdown associated with it, the way you sank into your deep belly until you couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t cry out for help, the way the endogenous opioids released and then suffused the central pattern generators up and down the sympathetic ganglia chain, the way it felt as if your skin had become porous, and you no longer knew where your body ended and the dark and terrible night began...

And your teenage cousin must have known something was wrong in the morning, otherwise there is no reason they would have apologized to you, told you they were just joking, that they had made it all up, that these things never happened. They must have looked at you hollow-eyed in the morning, vacant, distracted, elsewhere– and realized they had gone too far. Realized your parents might ask them questions they didn’t really want to have to answer.

Where does that fragment of self go?

Nowhere. It lives in the body.

It recedes.

Until it is buried by the next thing that happens. And the next. We will ourselves forward.

Uncontacted, moving farther and farther into the past, we ‘get over it’. We lumber on. We drag the body and the mind forward in space and through time.

These insults to our autonomic selves. These moments where through experiences that overwhelm our innate resilience, our bodies’ ability to re-establish equilibrium, parts of us get fragmented, and then lost to us across the threshold of an arousal state outside of our ordinary experience of reality.

This experience lives on in us, buried, subterranean, archived in the body, until some new experience matches the arousal threshold and neurochemical profile of it, and at that point this original experience can communicate viscerally with the present moment we are in, associatively reinforcing its terror. This part of us, frozen in fire and ice, meets another moment of fire and ice, recognizes itself, and is affirmed in its alienation.

Humans are, to a degree for deeper than most of us recognize, this walking embodied accumulation of all the incompletely digested experiences that have shifted us out of a baseline in safety and connection.

And this is the importance of trauma healing.

The importance of the somatic reconciliation of all of this allostatic load. This is the work that we undertake.

Because most people do not have a body, in the way that Merleau-Ponty means it. Most people have a swarm, a kaleidoscope, a hall of mirrors of body strung across the same lacelines of the nerve, the same vectors of blood pulse, the same caverns of intestine, temple of bone, envelope of faschia.

A swarm of bodies harmed, a cloud around us, cohering and de-cohering like an agitated swarm of fireflies conductor-less in their loss of the coherent pulsing of safety.

We need to unite inwardly. And this is the alchemy. This is the work. This is the healing. This is what that shamanic apprenticeship is for.

There are no shortcuts. Each of us gets to, and has to, work with the material of our lives. Only we, living in here, inside the sovereign body assaulted by all these systems of domination, and the unkindness of the ordinary world where people have stepped on our vulnerability like kids jumping in a puddle, and the breakdown of the village, and our failure to understand where wellbeing comes from… only each one of us, in the proper sphere of our lives, is capable of this undertaking of uniting the body inwardly.

And only when the body is united inwardly is it possible to single the eye.

IF THINE EYE BE SINGLE, THY WHOLE BODY SHALL BE FULL OF LIGHT.–Mathew 6:22.

This is what the scriptures were talking about.

Excerpted from the forthcoming Phenomenology of an Embodied Neuroscience. Wanna learn what the fuck I’m talking about? Our Practitioner Monthly Training Series begins this Saturday.

1. quantum super-positioning?