Building Nervous System Resilience:

Scientific perspectives like the polyvagal theory provide us with ways of understanding how trauma can be released and transformed by encouraging fluidity between - and blending of nervous system states. When we're operating from a fully resilient nervous system, our body easily, naturally flows through a menu of nervous system options to meet each moment - choosing with nuance a combination of calm, assertiveness, gentleness, caution and so on. These choices are embodied by smoothly mixing and matching nervous system states. Great martial arts masters show us one version of a healthy nervous system: balancing deep, rooted calm with the ability to defend themselves with precise impementation of the "fight" side of the sympathetic nervous system. This blend of calm and fight would change as their circumstances change: more calm strolling through a grocery store, more alertness and fight when someone steps out of the shadows in a back alley.

Survivors of trauma tend to lose some of their natural ability to respond appropriately to our circumstances. Our bodies may stay "stuck" as if someone is jumping out at us in a back alley when we're at home under the covers, far from danger. So our work in somatic sessions is to restore this ability for nuanced, moment to moment instinctive choices - ones that match the moment and circumstance we're in. In the language of somatics, this is called "building resilience".