week in review 8-6-26
Round up of this week in body-led healing
Happy Monday fellow human,
Here we are, another week, and counting down the days to the football World Cup. Best of luck to your nation!
Let’s get into the most shared videos of the week, of course, excerpts from program 1 in the Somatic Academy: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’
The most shared video of the week was the relationship between ADHD/ASD and glymphatic clearance. Personally, I view this as one of the clearest examples of cultural abuse we have available for the experiments in ‘neurodiversity’ over the past decade. We tell humans, inside a bodily vessel with a brain atop it, swimming in neurotoxins, to stay where they are, enjoy where they are, and self-identify with where they are. Behaviour with consequences. What consequences are there more than those we already experience? Well, this is one pathway for the frequently observed 3-6 times higher risk for dementia in people diagnosed with ADHD/ASD. These are not actions of a serious species. These are not actions of a culture in a state of abundance. We seek to alleviate human suffering using data, or we worship dogma and perpetuate it. The choice is ours.
Speaking of dogma over data. This very same era has attempted to pretend gender doesn’t exist, which requires putting a padlock on the species library and getting very drunk. One example to free ourselves from such self-sabotage is hormones. Elevated testosterone in women frequently shows associations with anxiety, depression, panic attack frequency and irritable bowel syndrome. Uncomfortable situations, but situations that also have spillover effects. Testosterone in females is inversely associated with attention to infant faces, a problem because eye gaze is critical for neural synchrony, which is itself critical for child brain development. However, nature is clever (when we allow it to do its thing). Testosterone levels in women fall after caring for children. Who experiences the greatest falls? Women with the highest cortisol levels, which, of course, reveals again that testosterone is only there because the body is trying to save us, it rises in women along with perceived stress scores (it falls in men under the same conditions). Again, we choose to be curious about our experience, or we choose to be ignorant of it.
The third most-shared video was the one posted today, which touched on the relationship between breathing rate and body temperature. Why should we be interested in body temperature? Because it is a marker of immune activation. What does sustained immune activation do? It makes us sensory sensitive. That’s anybody. People without autism in lockstep with trauma exposure, and people with an autism diagnosis in lockstep with trauma exposure. Why bring up breath rate in regard to this? Because it’s trainable and has a bidirectional relationship with inflammation. That means, if we use breathwork, something mass market approaches strangely exclude from the software installed in frontline defenders, we regain sovereignty over our experience, surely a goal we all seek?
Our meditation for the coming week, which has just been sent out to those signed up for Monday meditation, is an exercise in attention regulation. A skill every cultural thumbdrive around the world encourages us to elevate, a skill today we are struggling to maintain.
Regarding work in progress, I am very pleased to share that filming for program two of the Somatic Academy is currently underway. Program 1 is our first step. We understand how any bodily vessel moves from safety to shutdown, which helps us understand where we are on the defense cascade. Program 2 is our second step. We understand how to take that bodily vessel down the cascade, which can only be achieved by learning to feel safe in the body, learning to resolve trauma in the body, and learning how our environment can influence our chances of achieving both goals.
I’ll leave it there for now.
Here’s to your healing 💙,
Jas