Back to school season is upon us, with sharpened pencils, fresh notebooks, and textbook fees you could take a mortgage out on. School can be a major dysregulation trigger for many of us – raise your hand if you’ve had a gone-to-school-with-no-pants nightmare, or randomly felt a clench in your stomach because you didn’t study for a quiz assigned fifteen years ago. Good news: your intuitive healing transformation is never contingent on memorizing information. Still, knowing a few key phrases can help give some context to our experience of regulation and dysregulation to aid your healing:
+ healing (n.) – the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again
This one seems like a great place to start for two reasons. First, this process of making or becoming sound or healthy again has no deadline, and no arbitrary criteria. Healing is deeply personal. It does not require everyone take up throat singing on a mountain top, and it does not exclude it, either. The interior or physiological process is similar for most people, which we’ll get into; the exterior, on the other hand, is a blank slate. Second, again. It is so important to remember in healing that you are healthy first, and you can be once more.
+ intuition (n.) – the faculty of direct knowledge or cognition
You know those gut feelings you get, the ones that have no rational explanation but you just know? That feeling is a taste of your intuitive capacity. The intuition isn’t an organ or an organ system like your liver or lungs, but it isn’t simply a dismissible woo-woo concept, either. If you want to think of your intuition as a sixth sense, rather than the five senses that are sensitive to the outside world, the intuition communicates your inside world. Rather than present the future, it can helpfully indicate what you need to seek or avoid for balance or restoration. Intuitive healing relies on this faculty for our increased well-being.
+ parasympathetic nervous system (n.) – collection of nerves that relax the body for rest and digestion
So here’s a fun little grammar lesson: the prefix para- comes from the Greek for ‘beside.’ This collection of nerves is the counterbalance to the sympathetic nervous system. It is not simply no sympathetic response; it is its own active response to safety. It controls our rest and digestion, which is crucial for our recovery, repair, and healing. These vital functions are beside the functions of our sympathetic nervous system, not above or below, better or worse, but equally necessary. If we have endured extreme or chronic stress, we want to prioritize these functions for balance.
+ regulate (v.) – control or maintain the rate or speed of (a machine or process) so that it operates properly.
Interesting body fact: many of the functions of our nervous system, particularly where our organs are concerned, are involuntary. We cannot make our heart stop beating by itself, or stop ourselves from sweating with willpower. We can, however, control our breathing; mostly we breathe automatically, but we can hold our breath, elongate and deepen our breath at will. Similarly, we cannot control the reaction of our sympathetic nervous system to threats: a car coming too close might make our heart race, an intense workout will make us sweat. We can, however, actively regulate ourselves – most powerfully in fact with our breathing itself. Regulation is an active and mindful, not passive or automatic process. In other words, we cannot always control the presence of stressors in our lives, but we can actively mitigate the stress response – this mitigation is regulation.
+ sympathetic nervous system (n.) – collection of nerves that stimulate the fight or flight response in the body
If you have lived with the effects of chronic dysregulation, it is so easy and so tempting to think of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight nervous system, as the bad nervous system. All our nervous system ever does, however, is send signals in attempt to keep us alive. These signals are a lot like traffic lights. We have red lights and green lights. If every driver on the road only ever had red lights, we would have a lot of anger, frustration, and noise – a lot like nervous system dysregulation. If every driver on the road only ever had green lights, we would have sheer chaos – and a lot of fatal accidents. Our nervous systems aren’t good or bad, they just need to be balanced.
+ stress (n.) – a state of pressure, strain, or tension
So hear me out with this one, because it can be a hard pill to swallow: stress is not what happens in your life. What we call stressful events – moving, weddings, work deadlines – are not bad events; they are usually good and voluntary events (even work). The stress is not the thing that happens, but the internal state in response to the thing happening. Because of this, stress is always subjective, often unavoidable, and depending on the person, addictive. Accepting that stress is within and not without is important, however, because it encourages us to cultivate the most powerful skill in our lives, the ability to cultivate peace within, not simply manage stressors without. For this reason intuitive healing will always look inward first.
+ vagal tone (n.) – the ability to return to or engage in baseline parasympathetic activity
Last but not least, a major anatomical point: the collection of nerves in our parasympathetic nervous system contains a super-highway of a nerve called the vagus nerve. This nerve travels from our brain down our upper body touching every single major organ along the way (interestingly, all the organs corresponding to the seven chakras). The vagus nerve is stimulated by a number of things, including breathing, posture, and meditation, to activate rest and digestion. Our ability to engage and sustain this response is called vagal tone. Similar to muscle tone, it is a strength that can be cultivated with intention, time, and practice, for life changing results.
Intuitive Healing with Glenna 