Transforming our Autonomic Responses -- Grand Master Julie Scott: transcript

today we're going to be exploring nourishing and transforming our autonomic systems and our autonomic responses and to begin i'd like to share with you something that happened with me and introduced me to the rosicrucian order many years ago i was at a group discussion in a church in st louis missouri where i am from and there was a woman there named emma buford and emma was about my mom's age and she was an african-american woman and during our discussion she made a comment which seemed very reasonable to me and there was another woman who was in the discussion she was also about my mom's age a white woman and when emma made this contribution to our discussion

dorothy the other woman cut her off and really dismissed what she had to say and i was really taken aback by this and i was kind of like okay do i say something do i um do i let emma work this out and it didn't take long before dorothy uh not only was dismissive about emma's comment but she then said something that was um racially insensitive she made a racial statement to emma and i felt the adrenaline just rushed through my whole body and i was ready for for a fight i couldn't believe that this woman had just sent this we're at a church it's supposed to be this um very safe place for a discussion

and i noticed that emma just paused and when she responded she responded so powerfully that the confrontation was really over and i didn't really even fully understand what was going on before the whole thing was over i was so busy dealing with the first rush of adrenaline and what i wanted to say that i hadn't really heard in everything but i was ready for this fight and emma was absolutely unflappable this was a quality that i really wanted to develop in myself it was uh definitely a room room for growth for me and emma was totally in control of the situation i admired her poise and i wanted to be like emma afterwards when i asked emma how she was able to stay so

centered in such a stressful situation she asked me if i had ever heard of the rosicrucian order which i had not and later on she gave me a copy of the mastery of life booklet which introduces us to the order and i read it from cover to cover and applied for membership immediately emma had what i deeply wanted control over her autonomic responses now what is the autonomic nervous system we may be surprised to know that it shapes the way we experience our lives and it longs for connection with another autonomic nervous system it really wants to connect with others because our ancient ancestors who bonded with others

survived more than the loners plus it feels good because when we connect with others it produces oxytocin which as you may know is called the cuddle chemical and it's it encourages us to feel good or it causes us to feel good so that we will want to bond with others and the autonomic nervous system also protects us when it feels that we may be in danger most of the autonomic nervous systems functions are done unconsciously we don't even realize that our body is picking up on signals of danger or safety and the autonomic nervous system regulates bodily functions for example through the sympathetic system it regulates our heart rate and our respiration rate and through the dorsal vagal system

connected with our vagal nerve and other systems it controls our digestive system so the autonomic nervous system serves to inform us to connect us and to protect us but sometimes it continues to act to previous threats that may no longer exist in our current situation for example a threat that we experienced as a child but now we're an adult and that situation is no longer a threat to us we're born with our autonomic nervous system and it's shaped entirely by our ex it's shaped as well by our early experiences in life and then it's reshaped throughout life the autonomic nervous system listens inside the body especially through the

vagal nerve the vagus nerve which we're going to focus on today it also is scanning for threats or opportunities for connection in our environment and in our connections and relationships with other people it's content constantly scanning for ways to connect and ways to protect threats to our well-being the vagus nerve that i mentioned is the largest cranial nerve it travels from the brain down to the colon and it goes from the brain through our throat alongside the esophagus it connects with the lungs and the heart goes down into our abdomen where it connects with a digestive system and it's the main parasympathetic nerve of the body now typically there are three states

of our polyvagal system which is so influential in the autonomic nervous system there's the ventral vagal state where we feel safe and connected and that's when everything is harmonized if there are stressors though or if there are irritants our autonomic nervous system is looking and scanning to see if we need to change states and if it becomes too much for the ventral vagal system then it stops functioning and hands things over to the sympathetic system which most of us know as fight or flight so at that point we are no longer connecting we are protecting we're trying to survive and there is a flood of energy that makes it feel like we have to do something when we switch from a state

of harmony to fight our flight we are flooded with energy that makes us feel like something has to happen now if that flood of energy overwhelms us then our system the sympathetic system turns off and hands it over to the dorsal vagal system and this is commonly known as when we freeze so there's fight in flight and there's freezing this is when we're stuck with the inescapable when we're cornered we can't fight we can't flee so our only option is to freeze the national institutes of health in the united states has written a really interesting paper called the early development of the autonomic nervous system provides a neural platform for social behavior a polyvagal perspective

and it examines how we are how this changes throughout our lives so when we're a newborn we get our information about our state of being mostly from our ingestion mostly from what we eat and drink that's how we determine if we're okay in the world so if this is when we uh as an infant we'd be trying to understand am i okay or am i hungry because it's all about survival now since an infant is unable to fight or flee or get up and do anything for the little ones self then infants have two response systems one is they are amazingly cute so adults want to take care of them and two they make some noise when

they're hungry so these are the tools that newborns have but then over the next year our brains develop the ability to compute more and to develop more awareness and we begin to understand how we are in the world based on reciprocal behavior with others and so instead of knowing if i'm okay because i'm not hungry i know i'm okay because i feel safe with these adults who are feeding me and taking care of me so now instead of just wondering do i have enough food i'm wondering is it safe to connect with these adults and then as we become even older humans search for appropriate replacements for their caregivers this could be their friends and their partners

and they decide depending on that relationship if they're okay they're observing facial relate they're observing facial expressions of tone of voice and posture and what is said and we are all continually processing this information even when we don't realize it we are watching for signals to see if the other person is welcoming us or warning us if they're inviting us or discouraging us and we pick these up especially in the heart area and it's communicated through our face especially so we follow the same system from our development uh from with fight or flight deb dana who is a clinician specializing in working with people with trauma she says that the autonomic nervous

system doesn't attach moral meaning to states and state changes it simply acts in service of survival and typically without our conscious awareness now we can bring our polyvagal system changes our autonomic nervous system changes to our awareness awareness and then by doing this we eventually can transform them into new patterns so as i said when we're infants we're looking at the faces of other people to see if everything's okay to see if we're being welcomed or if we're being discouraged imagine if you are an infant in someone's arms you're about a foot away from their face and you're watching for cues our autonomic nervous system longs for connection

with another system for survival and because it feels good i mentioned this earlier oxytocin the cut of chemical is produced by the pituitary gland and it's one of its purposes is to have us do things to increase social contact it wants us to bond with other people because human beings and other beings who bond have a greater rate of survival so as an infant when we are face to face with whoever our caretakers are we experience their loving facial expressions or the comforting sounds of their voices or we experience the opposite for example if someone in our early life wasn't safe today even though we are an adult our autonomic nervous system might perceive

someone who reminds us of that threatening person might perceive someone different today as a threat and it could be because they have similar facial expressions or tone of voice and that might be enough for our autonomic nervous system to sense a threat and we begin then to move from one state to another so our autonomic nervous system we we're born with it and then it's shaped by our early experiences it's reshaped by ongoing experiences and dr steven porges who introduced polyga polyvagal theory in 1994 he said when we are able to shift our autonomic state we start to have an understanding that the personal narrative which is how we view things how we think things are

happening is not a documentary of events but is a documentary of feelings which can distort amplify or buffer the impact of events now through feeling safe and welcomed with someone else by feeling those by experiencing those welcoming or threatening systems we can create a two-way system between the brain and the heart through the vagus nerve so all of this played into my experience so many years ago which led me to join the rosicrucian order and again what i wanted was what emma had how did she stay so centered in such a stressful situation well now we're going to explore some of

the rosicrucian techniques that can help to nourish and transform our autonomic nervous system early in the monographs we're encouraged to review our day at the end of every day to look back and review what went well how we responded is that how we want to respond and it's helpful to do this later when we're calm rather than in the moment when we're feeling threatened eventually we'll be able to be aware of our state of if we're feeling threatened or welcomed in the moment but typically this is under the radar we're not aware of it by bringing perception to unconscious neuroception it mobilizes higher brain structures and stimulates awareness so if later in the day we can look back

on experiences that may have been stressful we can learn from those because we're not feeling stressed at that moment that we're reviewing them through mindfulness we can train our attention to be self-regulating so that in the moment we can consider is this really a threat or am i responding to something that's similar to a threat in my past we're also encouraged to embrace our shadow side and this is important because when our nervous system when our autonomic nervous system is fighting or fleeing or freezing there's no judgment about this it's trying to save us so if we can look at things that we may perceive as non-preferred we can then shine a light on them to see why it was we chose to behave in a

certain way deb dana who has done a lot of work with trauma victims and a lot of work with polyvagal theory wrote the simple act of labeling responses impacts autonomic activity and supports vagal function so i invite you now to think of a time when you felt especially safe connected and welcomed who was there with you what were you doing where were you

and what time of day was this you may find that certain people places times of the day etc trigger polyvagal states sometimes positive and sometimes negative you can do this for any state we just explored when we're feeling safe and connected you can also observe when you're not feeling threatened when do you go from feeling safe and connected to feeling like you need to fight or flee into the sympathetic or the dorsal systems we can have a better understanding of our perceptions and these state changes while preparing for this symposium i also happen to be watching

a series through princeton university called buddhism and modern psychology it's an online course presented by robert wright and he ponders in this course could enlightenment be a consciousness strip of all misperceptions could enlightenment be a consciousness stripped of all misperceptions i found that so interesting when considering how there are so many situations that i think i understand them but as i perceive them more clearly realize that i in many cases i'm just going back to the feelings that i had from previous experiences another rosicrucian technique that we can use to help nourish and transform our autonomic nervous system is to focus on our breath when we breathe normally

and just feel the air going in and out of our nostrils it communicates to the autonomic nervous system that everything is okay so there's no need to accelerate the heart rate or respiration this simple technique helps to calm the entire autonomic nervous system we're also encouraged to pause and reflect and this is what emma did so back to the story of what happened when when um dorothy was so inappropriate with emma i was just livid i was i was definitely in fight mode i need to do something about this and emma who was the person who these statements were directed to was extremely calm first she just paused and then i noticed that she was seated kind of

she had her hands kind of over her midsection here and she just was really going within i just remember her posture i didn't think oh she's pausing and going within because in a way i was like emma let's do something here but when emma did finally speak she had gained enough self-composure to be able to respond very powerfully and this leads to another exercise that's presented in the rosicrucian teachings which is to focus on our solar plexus and this is above the navel it's kind of it's between the heart and the navel and here's what the monographs state the solar plexus is not an endocrine gland and does not secrete hormones however it is a nerve complex that unites the cerebral spinal fibers of the spinal cord this explains how our thinking and

evening or even our decisions can affect it the solar plexus plexus reacts to our emotions and transmits a nervous impulse that either inhibits or promotes the activity of the minor glands of the body and their hormonal secretions this is part of the sympathetic nervous system the two primary nerve divisions the vagus nerve and the solar plexus modulate communication between the gut and the brain so we're going to practice this exercise now just for a couple of minutes and you can do this one of two ways either interlace your fingers and place them on the solar plexus which again is just above the navel or place your dominant hand on the solar plexus and then the non-dominant hand on that so i'm right-handed i would place my

dominant hand on the solar plexus my right hand and my left hand on top of that and then just for a couple of minutes we're going to focus on our breath and if you find that your mind goes somewhere else no problem just gently bring it back to feeling the air going in and out of your nostrils so we'll do this just for a few moments so just make a mental note of how you're

feeling of your respiration rate of your heart rate the rosicrucian order through our international research council did research on this particular meditation a number of years ago and found that the effects begin within just two minutes just two minutes of focusing on our breath going in and out of our nostrils begins to calm the autonomic nervous system this is helpful when preparing for a sanctum period or going into a rosicrucian temple or for a period that may have some conflict so it helps to to keep us centered another rosicrucian technique that affects the vagus nerve is in toning vowel sounds again the vagus nerve starts in the brain and goes uh through the larynx

and it's affected by humming singing or chanting so in toning vowel sounds is beneficial for calming the the vagal nerve as well and movement is also very helpful for harmonizing the polyvagal system and especially connecting with others being a part of our community in rosicrucian affiliated bodies during our weekly online teleconferences and right now can you feel my autonomic nervous system longing to reach yours longing to connect with you longing to touch you this is a way that through our community we can help to nourish and transform our autonomic nervous system now emma and i never discussed this incident that happened

at our church i joined the order and emma became my friend and my mentor i was so fortunate i came to know emma later and i don't believe she was perfectly calm during all of this just knowing her as i got to know her she paused and had enough self-composure to respond in a very centered and positive powerful way but i think this interaction was probably stressful for her it certainly was and would have been for me if i were in her shoes recently i watched a ted talk you might be familiar with these presentations that ted.com and this talk was called how to make stress your friend presented by um stanford university psychologist and professor kelly mcgonagall mcgonagall

and she discusses the biology of courage and points out that we are built for stress changing how you think about stress can create resilience and this is trainable through mindfulness like the practices that we just did together from the rosicrucian monographs when we experience stress and there is heavy breathing and a pounding heart these are preparing us for action this is our body rising to address the issue it's pumping blood it's providing enough oxygen and professor mcconnell states the three most helpful beliefs about stress are one to view your body's stress response as helpful not debilitating for example to view stress as energy you can use and that is exactly what emma did she

harnessed the energy of her stress and used it very powerfully in her response but she had to have enough composure to do that two to view yourself as able to handle and even learn and grow from the stress in your life and three to view stress as something that everyone deals with and not something that proves how uniquely messed up you or your life is psychologists have found that the ability to embrace stress requires a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty you have to be able to understand that two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time it can be true that we are going through something stressful and that can make you sick or depressed and it can also be true

that the same stressful experience can ultimately make you stronger more compassionate and more resilient over time now professor mcgonagall states stress is most likely to be harmful when the following conditions are present one it feels against your will well this may sound rather familiar to all of us right now two it's out of your control and three it's utterly devoid of meaning if we can change any of these conditions by finding some meaning in it we can reduce the harmful effects of stress now kelly mcgonagall stated that one of the researchers main conclusions from the study is that people with very meaningful lives worry more and have less stress than people with

less meaningful lives so if you have a meaningful life it means you're going to have more stress so the suggestion is to get involved rather than stress being a sign that something is wrong with your life feeling stress can be a barometer for how engaged you are in activities and relationships that are personally meaningful to you now this ted talk also explained that stress leaves an imprint on our brain that prepares us to handle similar stress the next time you encounter it psychologists call the process of learning and growing from a difficult experience stress inoculation stress inoculation and the experience this is going through the the experience gives your body and brain a stress vaccine this reminds me of

pilots or astronauts who are in simulators and experience worst case scenarios before they may actually be presented with them in an actual flight now what if for those of us living in the united states the stress that we are experiencing now is preparing us to handle the stress associated with uniting and moving our country forward after a very contentious and divisive election what if that is the purpose of our stress inoculation that we are preparing ourselves to unite our country going forward and what if for everyone our current stress inoculation which includes no less than a pandemic climate change and extreme weather

racial and social injustice just to name a few stressors is preparing all of us to move our species into the next step of our evolution in creating homo luminous beings of light this is going to require courage i joined the rosicrucian order because i wanted what emma had the ability to stay centered in stressful situations and not to be overwhelmed by them to be perfectly honest i'm still working on this there are times when my nervous system still switches from ventral vagal completely safe and connected and welcome to sympathetic fight or flight and sometimes even to the dorsal vagal system

where something seems inescapable and i freeze however i am much more aware of when i switch from one state to another and i've learned the value of pausing like emma did are practicing meditation techniques that help me to stay centered so that i have enough composure to be able to harness the energy that a stressful situation provides thank you you