The Autonomic Compass is Back - Ancestral Neuro-technology for Wellbeing

Ancestral Neuro-technology for Wellbeing

For the past 15 years, I’ve been working at the intersection of autonomic physiology, mindful awareness, and ancestral lifeways. I’m watching as more and more people in the world are awakening to a recognition that their nervous systems are the primary mediator of their experience.

While most of us have been trained to view our life and mental health largely through the lens of psychology, the advances in autonomic physiology over the last couple of decades show us that the autonomic nervous system is the primary and dynamic substrate of our human experience. Based on both our present moment experience of safety, danger, or life threat (autonomic temperature), in combination with our personal history, life experiences, and archived stress, the autonomic nervous system surfaces energy processing templates that govern our moment-to-moment experience.

I work with people all over the world, including wellness professionals, wellness and executive coaches, and everyday people to sensitize them to this primary layer of felt embodied experience. And guess what– although your nervous system does not speak in your native tongue, you can learn the deep aboriginal language of your autonomic self.

For the past six years, I have been working with a small team to build an autonomic diagnostics tool and practice archive that helps people

1. identify their present moment autonomic state, and either

2. enhance it if it is health creating, or shift it if it is ultimately toxic to well-being.

There is nothing else quite like it in the world.

After taking the software down for five months to reconceptualize it and re-design its diagnostic front-end, I’m pleased to formally announce the release of version 15 of the The Autonomic Compass, today. While I don’t want you spending any more time on a screen than you do, this is a sophisticated interactive tool that helps people to identify their present moment autonomic state, and offers a wide range of neural exercises, restorative practices, educational films, dialogues, and frameworks to help people become more agentic with their moment-to-moment experience of state. It teaches you how to get your hands directly on the deep levers that govern your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing.

Several years ago, when we first brought the software to market, we thought it would be an incredible adjunct to therapy. But therapists did not actually like it. Why? Because teaching people the original language of their own deep nervous systems showed them that many of the challenges they had been conceptualizing as psychological were simply patterned responses to threat. Once they understood this, they could work more directly on the primary substrate of these experiences, and they left therapy sooner. Just to be clear– this was not our intention. This is just what happened. I’m not saying therapy is not extraordinarily useful. I work with a hakomi-trained therapist myself. I’m just saying that much of what is happening in our psychology begins in the autonomic nervous system with the felt experience of safety, danger, and lifethreat, and our lifetime patterns of accumulating stress.

The logic of the platform is unique in that it is totally non-linear. You can play with the diagnostics tool for free here.

The tool lets you explore your experience through the lens of autonomic state (Navigate Wellbeing Autonomically), through a physical symptom, a mental health or emotional issue, a performance issue, or something else. You can use it to deepen a health-creating state or find ways to change the neural inputs keeping you stuck in a chronic, toxic, or traumatic stress response.

Once you’ve identified an issue that you want to focus on, the platform will present you with a variety of optional points of entry. If you find one that appeals to you, you can engage in a neural exercise, learn a practice, understand a framework, or watch an educational film. Something unique about the construction of the platform is that it will show you every other item in the archive related to the one that you’re currently exploring, presenting you with many pathways that branch out from what you are interested in. This turns the entire archive (nearly 400 elements) into a grand choose-your-own-adventure.

If you’re already on a health-creating trajectory, working in somatic therapy, or any kind of awareness-based healing modality, the archive provides an extraordinarily robust archive of experiential practices that can complement what you’re doing and work directly at the nervous system layer. This will build your interoceptive awareness, sensitize you to your body’s own innate autonomic intelligence, and deepen your fluency in reading autonomic states in yourself, and those around you. The platform is specifically focused on helpding you be very intentional about identifying practices that work for the present state of your nervous system, which mediates your moment-to-moment experience. This is important because present moment autonomic state GOVERNS your visceral experience, emotional range, how you are thinking, your perceptions of the world around you, and your behaviors. How attention works is downstream of present moment autonomic state.

This is why, for example, meditating isn’t particularly useful if you are anxious. (Interoceptive attention during a defensive response will make the defensive state louder - since attention potentiates experience. In other words, if you meditate well while you are anxious you will become more anxious.)

This is also why bringing interoceptive attention into shutdown responses in the body will increase your dissociation, not bring you out of them.

Intervention in survival responses (stress) must be tailored to the type of stress response. If the body turns to ice, cooling it down is ineffective, whereas if it turns to steam, that is necessary.

Here’s to your autonomic fluency, to learning the deep language of your nervous system, the science & poetry of your inwardness. Here’s to being able to get your hands directly on the deep levers that govern your wellbeing, no intermediary required.

The Autonomic Compass. Ancestral neurotechnology for wellbeing from Hearth Science.

Here’s a two-minute introduction…

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