Upcoming Daily Course
Effortless Well-being
Understanding & Regulating Your Nervous System with Feldenkrais
October 7th–11th
Online + Recordings & Notes
2–3.30pm* BST ~ 9–10.30am EDT ~ 6–7.30am PDT
*Please note that the daily start time of this course MAY vary – potentially it will run one hour earlier on both Tuesday and Friday. I hope this flexible start time is not too frustrating!
£100 (suggested fee, or any donation welcome)
I am often asked about the relationship between my Feldenkrais teaching and PolyVagal Theory. The original version of this article was written for my colleagues, and so is a bit information-heavy for a blog. I will edit it more soon, but wanted to get it up on the site quickly. The ideas I am sharing here have been taken from Porges online talk The Science Of Compassion: the organisation of the concepts he is explaining is therefore his, not mine…
Dr Stephen Porges’ research has culminated in a far-reaching theory that challenges some elements of our long-standing view of how humans react to stress. He has shifted the focus from the ‘fight or flight’ response (orchestrated via the sympathetic nervous system [SNS]) versus the ‘rest & recuperate’** response (parasympathetic nervous system [PNS]) into something more hierarchical and evolutionary, based on an updated understanding of mammalian neurophysiology.
This research has lead him to the conclusion that the expression of compassion is “incompatible” with judgemental and evaluative behaviour, as the narrow focus of attention this response requires results directly from the defensive behaviour we manifest whenever we feel that our safety is threatened. What he is claiming is that we as individuals need to feel safe and secure first within ourselves, if we are then to be able to behave in a manner that is kind, understanding, and empathetic towards others.
I do not find this idea surprising, certainly not controversial – it fits with other theories I have investigated in the past, particularly in the books of Oliver James – however, with our current cultural focus on having an “evidence-base” for everything to do with human wellbeing, Porges’ research results have quickly begun to permeate much of what is on offer from a wide range of our alternative and complementary health communities.
He explains that many of the tools humans rely on for achieving a state of calm – tools that are often also associated with an active spiritual practice (rather than simply having religious beliefs, something which is no guarantee of compassionate behaviour!) – are effective ways for generating a feeling of safety and security within our autonomic nervous system [ANS] precisely because they help us regulate the functioning of our 10th cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, so named because it is a wandering “vagabond” nerve that traverses a great deal of our organ-function-related “neuro-terrain” (yes, I am making words up).
**“Rest & recuperate” is also referred to as ‘rest & digest’, which is more in keeping with the rhyming scheme, but underplays the significant influence it has on the effective functioning of our immune system.
Porges lists a number of effective tools for instilling this sense of safety in the human ANS
…and I have expanded his list with comments highlighting the many ways these ideas overlap with the elements that Moshe Feldenkrais built into his method as fundamental for developing our capabilities as fully mature human beings:
Meditation
There are a great many different versions of mindfulness awareness training out there, from ancient to brand new, and from deeply spiritual to distinctly secular. All of these techniques feature some combination of practices for learning to better focus and calm our conscious attention, and for enhancing our ability to perceive our self via our sensory-motor perceptual systems. I saw a quote from the Buddha that could have been written to describe Feldenkrais, and had an epiphany!
The Buddha:
There is one thing that when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centred on the body. (Anguttara Nikaya – 43)
Listening
– fundamental to how we teach in ATM, and also a word Moshe often uses to mean self-sensing/self-observing when he is teaching.
Chanting
– (this is where Porges work overlaps most perfectly with my fascination with voice, sound, and therefore also listening and hearing).
Posture
– Porges seems to be referring mainly to the carriage and movement of the head when he talks about posture.
Breathing
– Feldenkrais includes some pretty unique breathing explorations (although it is easy to see how much our work overlaps with Pranayama, which by the way is the term Porges often uses when referring to breath-work…). Of course all of our work is focussed on improving the functioning of our nervous system, and our awareness of what we are doing and how we are doing it, with a particular focus on maintaining easy fluid breathing, lowering effort and consequently integrating this better functioning into our daily activity, so this research adds to our understanding of why lowered anxiety levels is a very common result of our work.
According to Porges, as mammals we have a complex muscolo-fascial structure – the diaphragm – dividing our torso roughly in two, with our heart and lungs above, regulated by our more evolved mammalian vagal circuit, and the rest of our organs, including our semi-independent, highly intelligent digestive system, below, these being wired more directly to our older reptilian vagal defensive system.
This mammalian upgrade includes:
Blood pressure sensors that are speedy and responsive
Middle ear bones that adjust to focus our hearing on specific vocal frequencies
More sophisticated adrenal functioning
Specialised neuropeptides such as oxytocin and vasopressin – you will no doubt recognise these substances as popular topics for TED talks!
These adaptations enable a direct connection between our facial muscles and our heart; one that helps to regulate our emotional state. When this face/breath/heart connection is working well it increases our sense of safety and security, we feel less anxiety and more calm, our defences go offline, freeing us to interact with others in a positive, friendly, bonding manner that spreads the feeling of safety around the community.
Porges lists how…
The voice/heart connection works through singing and chanting together – for example, choirs begin to synchronise their heart rhythms as they breath in unison.
The listening/heart connection means that we derive positive emotional benefits from music, whether performing together, or simply listening as a community.
The breath/heart connection means that we begin to feel calmer and more at ease as soon as we begin extending our exhalation, so we can use exhaling directly as a method for switching from SNS to PNS, lowering arousal, and improving the functioning of all of our vegetative functions (digestion, for example).
The posture/heart connection brings similar benefits from moving together – dancing, tai chi, and Awareness Through Movement classes of course! – I suspect even simply falling into step with one another will turn out to have a positive influence on our vagal tone.
For us to act in a compassionate way is dependent on the down-regulating of our defence systems: in any encounter, how we feel determines whether we become friends, lovers, or enemies, and those feelings are dependent on our physiological state. Long before I was aware of this theory I noticed that strangers on the Tube tended to look like a friendly and attractive bunch when I was feeling positive, and much less appealing when I was feeling stressed. As I update this article, a great many of us are in a state of chronic stress thanks to the circumstances generated by this pandemic, and there are reports of unusual levels of aggression between strangers in supermarkets as we all struggle with the anxieties that are natural as we are forbidden to congregate and our societal bonds are naturally suffering.
When we are feeling endangered and defensive this feeling-state switches off all our nice new mammalian “social engagement” neural circuits, which means that other humans can easily see that we are not feeling open / receptive / approachable / friendly, but are instead in a mental and physiological state of defensiveness and discomfort. This mental state can make us not just un-friendly, and un-approachable, but even potentially dangerous.
Fear, anxiety, depression and pain all tend to make our faces less expressive – Porges uses the metaphor “flat”. Having a lively and vital expression, particularly in the upper half of the face – around the eyes – is particularly indicative of friendly approachability. In fact the engagement of the orbital muscles around the eyes indicates that we are listening intently too.
A Comment about masking during the Covid Pandemic:
This article was originally completed during the covid lockdowns. Out and about in my mask, I am so aware of the importance of friendly eye contact that I always approach strangers with a big smile, one that they cannot actually see except for its reflection in my eyes – I am enjoying learning to communicate my essential friendliness with only my eyes to work with. Early on, during the first lockdown, I recognised that we were all now in the position of those who wear facial coverings as part of their religious observance, and found a way to bond immediately with a radiantly beautiful Muslim woman on the till in Sainsbury’s!
Our detection system for reading these signals is generally well-developed and highly-nuanced (my militantly autistic friend would instantly point out that this is only true of the “neurotypical” – a category of human being I do not believe actually exists! I will expand on this in another article). To offer a common example, most of us can usually tell if someone is only acting in a friendly manner out of a sense of duty or obligation, some inner voice lets us know they are not being genuine.
Discussions of stress that focus on ‘fight or flight’ responses have not been complex enough to explain the state of ‘freeze’, or shut-down, that accompanies severe experiences of life-threatening situations such as persistent abuse; rape and other violent attacks, and military action. When we feel that our life is threatened and that we can neither escape, nor battle our way out of danger, we have a third, eons-old, reptilian response in our armoury; we can go into a state of dissociation – a more persistent state of disconnection that makes it very hard to function, and from which it is very difficult to recover. These more severely stressed states are harder to treat, and are collected under the term post traumatic stress disorder/syndrome (PTSD/PTSS). The therapeutic community has latched onto Porges’ work, as it provides strategies for dealing with people whose alienation from normal human social engagement is making them miserable, ill, very difficult to communicate with, and sometimes even suicidal – returning war veterans in the US can suffer from severe forms of PTSD and can be in need of a lot of therapeutic support if there is any hope of a full recovery
Personal Interjection#!
I found my way to these concepts only slowly. My own persistent health problems seemed to naturally fit into theories of introversion and hypersensitivity, and after many years of allergies, including asthma and food sensitivities, I came down with a form of chronic fatigue. I had realised that many alternative health practitioners linked my health picture to an abusive childhood environment, but that made no sense to me, as my mother was particularly loving and caring. I looked into the work of Oliver James and realised that my symptoms might relate instead to my mother’s depressive state both before and after my birth. Her state of depression continued for several years, and James was very clear about the effects on a baby’s nervous system of a mother in emotional difficulties.
The next piece of the puzzle came when a colleague introduced me to the concept of hypermobility syndrome, but still the picture did not seem complete. At a meeting for the hyper-mobile I noticed just how many of the children present were hyper-mobile, but also on the autistic spectrum, and/or experiencing symptoms of ADHD – I started to wonder just how big this particular iceberg might be… Many very able people are finding ways to organise these ideas into various frameworks, but at the moment the full picture still looks like an illustration of the blind folk and the elephant, as imagined by Picasso!
Back to Porges; he highlights the evolutionary aspect of his observations. This behavioural shift is not triggered by our conscious awareness – it is not a cognitive response or a perception response, so he coined a new term – a term that I feel is perfectly suited to the Feldenkrais teaching process – neuroception.
Neuroception is a physiological ‘knowing’ – a reading of the immediate situation that triggers responses in our nervous system directly; we do not like the “feeling” of a place, we are sensing an atmosphere, picking up ‘bad vibes’, we know we are uncomfortable but we do not always know why. These feelings put us on our guard, we become less able to relax and “be ourselves”.
Neuroceptive discomfort can lead to seemingly ‘unnecessary’ anxieties such as stage fright – in the video above, Porges is clearly uncomfortable to be speaking publically in a room lit in such a way that he cannot see the faces of his audience, and, after he drops several hints the lighting is improved – he then comments that, without the friendly faces of the audience looking up at him, he is less at ease and “could have sent a video” instead!
Porges uses very clear charts to clarify his ideas so I strongly recommend watching his talk.
When we feel safe it is natural to also be playful, creative, spontaneous, and to generate bold new ideas. These “neuroceptive” bodily “felt/senses” influence how we behave in social situations, so that we will either be in a compassionate, friendly, open, listening and responsive state, or a defensive, unwelcoming, judgemental, critical, territorial state. And of course, being complex, sophisticated creatures we can experience both these modes in the same social environment, but not at the same time – if someone at a party “sets your teeth on edge” you escape and find more pleasurable company as soon as you can extricate yourself.
It is also useful to mention that our stress response is very finely tuned, and we can have a rush of stress hormones from something as momentary as a colleague turning away from us as we are speaking – so you can imagine the negative effect all these distracting smart phones are having on our everyday interactions.
Personal Interjection#!
Picture how unpleasant life as a London bus driver might already have been, even before the lockdown, and communication-muffling plastic barriers, and then factor in technology that means that not a word need pass between you and your passengers as they get on and off your bus – why not make an effort to thank your driver, and lengthen her or his life; it will be good for your health as well!
Dr Stephen Porges summarises that “compassion is a manifestation of our biological need to engage and to bond with others. Compassion is a component of our biological quest for ‘safety’ [when we are] in [the] proximity of another”.
Further reading:
Books:
The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, by Stephen Porges
Reframe Your Thinking Around Autism, by Holly Bridges (I have not read this yet, but it is clearly relevant to my “thesis”!)
A Guide to Living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (Hypermobility Type), by Isobel Knight (she has written several books so I am mentioning the one with a short section on Feldenkrais written by me!)
Oxytocin – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183515/