Wandering into Wellness
An Embodied Tour of Your Nervous System & The Vagus Nerve
For women who want to learn how to work in harmony with their nervous system’s responses and reactions, we offer you the resources and capacity to befriend the tremendously powerful ally of your nervous system in your quest for more pleasure and presence.
About the Course
Throughout our various Verdant Collective programs, we have worked with countless women who have done all the right things. They’ve done therapy to end their angry outbursts or curb their bottomless despair. They’ve become devotees of yoga to help them finally take a deep breath…and keep breathing. They’ve tried radical dietary regimens, hoping to support an unhappy digestive tract or the loss of weight that just won’t budge. They’ve tried numerous personal growth programs promising to change the way they think, how they think, what they believe, and how they behave...and still, a sense of balance and wellbeing remains elusive.
In all the above endeavors, there is missing information. Critical information that provides the context for our daily experience. And when you learn it, it can revolutionize your everyday experience of being in a body.
The missing piece is working
with the Nervous System
Within all humans, operating just under our conscious awareness, is a highly evolved, complex navigational system, unique to our species. The result of more than 2.8 million years of adaptation, this navigational system controls not only how we feel about any given moment, it also controls how we respond – or react – to that moment.
This sophisticated system, called (by science and medicine) our Autonomic Nervous System, has two hierarchical directives. First and foremost, it is designed to keep us alive; to move us away from danger and toward opportunity. Yet, in its most recent evolution, the ANS also attends to and enables our thriving. Beyond merely orienting us to our safety, the ANS enables us to seek, move toward, and develop nourishing and complex social, spiritual, and physical connections -–- ones that encourage and embolden us to risk even deeper vulnerability and trust in and with the world.
In this deeper relational terrain of trust and risk, we have the opportunity to experience our belonging. In our belonging, we experience ourselves embedded in a web of autonomous yet interconnected beings, whose wellbeing is inextricably tied to ours. Our sense of responsibility weaves us into deeper relationships which feeds our deeper sense of our belonging. This positive feedback loop is possible when a person feels safe(enough) in, and with, the world starting with their earliest experiences in life.
But there is also a negative feedback loop. Particularly in Westernized cultures, it is commonplace for children to be raised in environments that are neither safe nor consistent. In these
environments – where the child does not feel safe or cared for – the vulnerable nervous system responds and adapts to create complex narratives singularly focused on keeping the child safe. This nervous system does not seek connection, it protects and defends against rejection and violation. It does not seek nourishment, it shields itself from possible toxicity. These children grow up into adults who do not seek connection or nourishment, and who actively – but unconsciously – work to avoid both.
Thanks to innovative pioneers in the science of human wellness, we now understand the intricate and direct relationship between the health and resilience of our ANS and the health and resilience of our bodies. Many recent studies identify a direct link between the level of nervous system stress an infant experiences in its environment and the development of childhood asthma and other debilitating chronic illness. Other studies demonstrate a link between nervous system stress in an infant to addiction and learning challenges.
As adults who grew up in unstable or unsafe environments we might experience:
Chronic sleep issues and anxiety
Difficulty relaxing or receiving pleasure
A feeling that we must handle our problems ourselves – that it's not okay or safe to ask for help
Chronic illness including autoimmune issues, thyroid imbalance and other endocrine weakness
Persistent gut trouble
and so much more.....
There is a way to THRIVE beyond trauma
Because the ANS operates just under our conscious awareness, unless we take the time to educate ourselves about its function, clues, and cues, beginning with the early environment within which our ANS developed (including our in-utero, peri and post-natal environments), we are often unaware of its powerful, moment-to-moment influence on our literal every move, feeling and thought. As a result, we often end up feeling confused, betrayed, out of control, and helpless as to why we are feeling and behaving the way we are.
Despite how dire this may sound, there is a clear path out of this cycle. And it begins by simply bringing consciousness to your nervous system’s perceptions, responses and reactions.
What you get
Wandering Into Wellness: An Embodied Tour of Your ANS and Vagus Nerve, will help you learn your nervous system patterns and how to work with them to bring you more ease, pleasure, and presence.
In this course we are offering an intimate exploration of, and a wander through, the terrain of our autonomic nervous system. We guide you in this exploration by inviting contemplation of past and current behavior and awareness of present-moment embodied experiences as we introduce you to the complex neural network that is /your/ nervous system and Vagus nerve. This is the very first step in identifying, understanding and then healing the mechanisms of trauma as they come to live and operate within our bodies and psyches. We bring awareness to and invite compassion for the behaviors that can seem like they happen for no reason and out of nowhere. We help you understand that there is always a reason, and that these behaviors come from specific places in our bodies designed to do specific things for us in our process of survival and thriving. You will finally receive the support and guidance you ought to have received as a young adult.
This course will introduce you to the design and function of your ANS in stress, safety, and in thriving, with the most up-to-date information on the Vagus Nerve, carefully designed to walk you through your unique embodied experience.
Important Note
However, this course does not offer itself as a treatment for trauma. Nor do we teach about the processes by which we, as families, communities, and cultures become locked in trauma vortexes and their rigid pathways of perception and behavior as a result of generations of endemic violence and injustice. We do not discuss how certain bodies that have undergone specific kinds of othering and discrimination (based on sex, gender, cultural heritage, spiritual practices and so much more) have intimate experiences of the trauma body of the entire group. We do help you, as the student of your own unique nervous system, begin to notice the very specific ways your nervous system has been patterned to predetermine where your attention will go. And we offer guidance for how you can build the muscles of compassion and curiosity as you begin to put the puzzle pieces together.
Come away with the capacity to speak to – and listen to – your unique nervous system, for greater (and greater!) intimacy and well-being with the world around and within you.
In these 6 audios we will introduce the structure of the miraculous ANS and its basic functioning, branch by branch. We offer you specific guidance to understand your nervous system’s adaptive structure and its patterned responses and reactions.
Do you tend toward a sense of ease and harmony, moving toward the unknown with curiosity and intrigue? Or, do you primarily track for safety, moving with fear away from things that are unfamiliar?
Do you feel trust in moments of intimacy and vulnerability with a beloved other? Or do you tend to keep yourself at a distance, leaning in only when you can predict the outcome and emotionally hightailing it when you feel scared?
Do you honor your emotional states by acknowledging and expressing them? Or do you tend to suppress certain emotions to avoid discomfort – others and your own?
Do you find yourself mysteriously foggy and confused in certain conversations or situations?
Do you get angry, even enraged, toward other motorists while driving on the highway?
No matter which scenarios you identify with, your experiences are the result of your nervous system’s moment-to-moment subconscious physical and emotional narrative, which create a cascade of response and reactions in your outer world experience.
Wandering into Wellness will help you not only decode these responses and reactions, it will support you to create new pathways of behavior, ones that will nourish an intimate experience of wellness and belonging with yourself, your relationships, and in the world at large.
How the course is delivered and the content you’ll receive
Who this is for
Wandering Into Wellness is for everyone. We all have nervous systems! This course is also well-suited for parents, teachers, counselors, guides, mentors and all others who are in a position to tend to the nervous systems of others.
Wandering Into Wellness is offered in 6 audio teaching files and a final audio practice. The files are no longer than 15 minutes, to give you the opportunity to go slow, absorbing this foundational material at your own pace.
When you sign up, you will get access to all of the audio on a page on our website. You can listen right on the page, or download them so you have them whenever and wherever you need them.
$27 includes access to the Wandering Into Wellness, a 6-audio file, self-paced course with an additional audio practice that guides you to ‘Surf The Waves’ of your nervous system.
