Week in Review 25-5-26
Round up of this week in body-led healing
Happy Monday fellow human,
Wishing you a wonderful start to the new week. Here is a recap of our last week in body-led healing, which hopefully injects a heavy dose of motivation for the ‘reclaiming our emotional sovereignty’ column of life. Let’s get into it.
First up, the three most shared videos, all of course excerpts from the Somatic Academy program: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’
The most-shared video of the week featured findings from a multi-decade longitudinal study on infant attachment and brain development. Adults, aged 22 years old, were found to have significantly larger amygdala sizes if they were classified as insecurely attached to their mother at 18 months old. What happens when we have a large amygdala? This is associated with low oxytocin, high anxiety, high depression, high PTSD symptoms, and high autism symptoms. How can our brain development be predicted two decades later? Because attachment representations rarely change. We can check in on you at 18 months, at 6 years, at 16 years and then even swap parent for partner, and continue the experiments throughout your life, and what tends to be revealed is that insecure attachment is a lost script of giving and receiving love, likely starting way before the parents of that child were graded as being insecurely attached to their infant. How do we fix it? Starting with shrinking the amygdala, yoga has consistently been shown to reduce amygdala volumes, and compassionate meditation reduces amygdala activity (on a per minute of practice basis). Sex hormones have also shown a relationship where low estrogen in women and low testosterone in men is associated with higher amygdala volumes. Preventing amygdala volumes from growing in the first place requires us to admit that children don’t raise themselves, and love is our highest expression. The latter also requires us to remember that it is not a word. It's an action of dissolving the illusion that we are separate, which is only possible when distress scores are low.
The second most shared video relates to the last line we wrote for the first. When examining cortisol levels in infants and their mothers, differences were observed across days of the week. What days? Work days versus home days. Shock, horror. Of course, we don’t wake up on Sunday like we wake up on Monday. But what is surprising (for our species that has thrown out its membership card to our library of data on ourselves), is that a child’s nervous system walks in lock-step. Of course, they do. Children are designed to be mirrors unto us. That is a gift when we are willing to move towards our truth, because they reveal where we are not whole. In today’s culture, however, we don’t prioritise downregulation, having not done so for so long, we don’t even know how to anymore, and then we pretend a child’s disorganised state is their own (assisted by front-line defenders installed with software to simply diagnose and dispense).
The third most shared video involved a comparison between 12 weeks of yoga, CBT or magic beans on hippocampal volumes. 12 weeks of yoga increase it, CBT and magic beans, decrease it. Why? Because cortisol atrophies the hippocampus. Which is to say, stress atrophies the hippocampus. A smaller hippocampus, noted as our personality mediator, is associated with perceived stress, PTSD, anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism, dissociation, OCD, substance abuse, eating disorders, low socioeconomic status and insecure attachment. Otherwise said as: every disorganised state. But, importantly, that is not our fate. The hippocampus is quite capable of restoring itself when we take the body to safety. There is a per-hour, per-week association with hippocampus volumes in yoga practitioners.
Right, so stress = separation. That separation is the root of our suffering and puts holes in our bodily vessel. For our update on work in progress, we ask: What would our ancestors have done, having likely felt these same circumstances long ago? Dragging carts with triangular wheels is exhausting. Instead, we found round ones. What was that? Culture. Within that culture was a goal and many tools to achieve it. Of course, we didn’t call it culture, we called it everyday life. But today, we call it culture, because we ejected the thumb drive and patted ourselves on the back for doing so. What happened? We objectively become more stupid:
Genetic expression of what we classify as intelligent today had been steadily increasing for the last 10,000 years, until it recently began not just to decelerate but to decline. When? When the boomers were born. The generation that swapped miracles for magic beans.
This isn’t a debate on higher powers. This is a debate about the behaviour we engaged in surrounding those beliefs. It doesn’t mean you need to follow your grandparents’ way of life. It does mean we have to ask what new level we are working from, and what new tools we will use to take ourselves back up when we don’t.
For example, if you sit next to someone and compassionately think about them (prayer/loving-kindness meditations), your heart rate begins to synchronise.
What outside of compassion helps? Being able to regulate your attention, using that attention to be engaged in the consumption of a shared story, a shared story that you and those around you are familiar with. Boom, doesn’t matter if the story is real or not, many hearts become one.
What also helps? Having an exemplar. That is, a hero within this shared story of compassion we are hearing. When we appropriate that role, rather than acting as ourselves, we dedicate ourselves more to what is in front of us. It's a legal performance enhancer. Another such enhancer is the degree to which our hearts just synchronised, which predicts, with 70% accuracy, whether a group can reach consensus on a problem.
What do we do today?
We pretend attention dysregulation is a form of diversity, which allows us to (1) not train it, (2) yell at people who tell us we should because they aren’t accepting our lowest expression, (3) take magic beans (that shrink the hippocampus).
We decided after that we would wave a flag of ‘acceptance’ and ‘diversity,’ as we used these displays of lowest expressions as exemplars, and then popped those people in front of our children in schools to make sure our trauma is definitely intergenerational, and those genes related to intelligence, absolutely will keep falling.
We chose autonomy over attachment, which means we don’t even tell or consume stories with others anymore. Firstly, because we can’t understand they were meant to reveal truth to us, rather than always be truthful. Secondly, because we put our brains through a shredder of infinite scrolling, individually. Thirdly, because we no longer strive for consensus, we defend any random thought that pops into our mind on Thursday, no matter where on the defense cascade it was born.
These are not abundant times, my friends. We have work to do, but the best part of committing to that new version of us is that we firmly set a basement level of dysregulation. Each day we commit to love as our highest expression, acknowledge that safety in the body is the gateway towards that, and build new floors to stand upon that take us towards what we can be, not ring fence what we can fall to.
One such way we can do that is through breathwork, one such tool of breathwork is the lion’s breath, which is also the focus of this weeks monday meditation.
Finishing up, we go to our country scorecard. The land of the free has taken top spot as we move towards the final week of May. Behind, in second place, is the land of the POMS, happy Empire Day to you for yesterday (cheers for sending me to the sunshine). In third place, the land of the friendly. Thanks to all who have taken an interest in the Somatic Academy project. I certainly hope it serves you well.
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I’ll leave it there for now.
Here’s to your healing 💙,
Jas