Hi Everybody-
I finished editing the 3rd draft of the manuscript Saturday evening. It will be rather majorly expanded from what you’ve read in the chapters here. There is new front matter, including a legend and full visual design language. Because many people were confused by the Polyvagal Theory language, and because our new foundation model in Autonomics renders much of that specialist terminology unnecessary, we have removed nearly all of the polyvagal terminology from the text, leaving it cleaner, lighter, and clearer. We’ve added several new chapters on the different autonomic systems, and new chapters on movement. I’ve pulled down some of the f*bombs, and addressed a lot of typos.
Over the next weeks the manuscript will head over to our editing team, where they’ll continue to polish it. (This whole phase is like passing progressively finer and finer sandpaper across the book, smoothing rough edges, until the hands can slide along the surface without getting any splinters, and then until it gleams ;)
A particular thank you to several readers who have been actively wrestling with the text: your feedback has been important and is making the book better. The decision to publish it on Substack with this community of engagement is proving to have been an important decision. My appreciation to Sigurd Anderson, Jimbo Graves, Theia Rose, Anna Mulholland, Aubrey Wallace, Dr Stephen Hughes, MaryAnn Reynolds, and Claire Gleeson. Your comments have inspired me to keep writing and refining. I am deeply grateful for the generosity of your time and attention!
We’ve also had about fifty people read Advanced Reader copies of the book, from a wide range of disciplines, and again this feedback is making it stronger. Thank you all.
We are still on-target for an October release, and will keep you appraised of any changes to timing. If you haven’t ordered the hardcover, and would like the analog version of the finished text, you can find that here. It will be 6 x 9 inches or so, with 150 full color illustrations, clocking in around 385 pages. These should ship mid- to end of October.
This substack will continue to remain the home for all the material associated with this book. We are in the process of filming videos to accompany the text– these will begin to live here for paid subscribers as well.
If you are hungry to stay current with our work, Jaguar, our literary imprint, has launched two beautiful new Substacks today. They will provide opportunities to engage with two particular aspects of our work.
First, the Restorative Practices Substack.
As many of you know, we’ve spent the past decade collecting, from many thousands of people around the world, and Indigenous cultures the world over, a living library of restorative practices. These are antidotes to the techno-acceleration of modernity: analog activities that reconnect us to ourselves, others, and the Living world. That connect us to our senses, to slowness, to wonder. That engage the portals to our Connection Systems, and help us heal from separation, alienation, disconnection, isolation, and loneliness.
We’ve created a dedicated newsletter that will deposit two restorative practices in your inbox per week, on Saturday and Sunday, when perhaps you are more likely to have the mental space to peruse them, and allow them to settle into you. These are invitations to incorporate the rhythms of restoration more deeply into the texture of your daily life.
As with all of our work, we will curate every image and every word in this Substack. You will receive, by subscribing, a steady and beautiful hand-made stream of restorative nourishment.
As this library grows, we’ll continue to add tags that differentiate practices, so that if you are looking for practices you can do with your hands, or do in the forest, you’ll be able to search for those.
Should this sound familiar to you, there is a diagnostically-focused video-based version of this library at the center of our Autonomic Treatment Atlas. Should you be so inclined, you can view an interactive data visualization of that model here. And our beautiful full-color hardcover book, Restorative Practices of Wellbeing, catalogs about 300 of these practices (it is also the analog app to the Autonomic Treatment Atlas).
The Restorative Practices Substack delivers these practices to your inbox, with some seasonal attunement (forgive us here if you live in the Southern hemisphere, because your summer is our winter and vice versa, so these may be temporally out of tune with you).
Read more about Restorative Practices Substack here:
And second, our new Keywords substack.
Again, for those of you who have been following our work, this will be no surprise. In 2023 we released Keywords: A Field Guide to the Missing Words, the fruit of a 25 year exploration of lexical gaps in the English language.
Keywords is a sort of linguistic wayfinding – the seeking out of the particular places that the blanket of the English language is not large enough to cover our toes. Some of these places, these lexical gaps, where a word could exist but doesn’t, are because the word was not conceptualized by speakers of the English language, yet some of these gaps are because empire truncated the language.
Taken together they form a sort of portrait, a constellated negative space of what has been removed in the very linguistic fabric of our relating.
We’ve spent nearly 30 years tracking down missing words from around the world, from over 50 languages, particularly missing words of relating: to self, interiors, others, between-space, the Living World, the more-than-human worlds...
We propose to share with you a portrait, to help re-indigenize your tongue since, as Wittgenstein famously noted, The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Read more about why we started the Keywords substack here.
If you find either of these newsletters useful, it would mean the world to us if you would become a paid subscriber. Your support helps us bring this work into the world, bringing closer the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Thank you.
-Gabriel
Gabriel, you are a force of nature, L O L. Your capacity for creative output is astonishing. as the opera lovers say, toi, toi, toi! Bravo maestro.🙇🏼♂️