Neuroception: The Wise Elder Inside
Hello beautiful human animal!
Back with another share about your beautiful and intelligent nervous system. Today we get to the root of it, this part of your autonomic nervous system where everything begins: Neuroception.
Let’s dive deeper.
First, another installment in The Soft Animal and the Soul Series.
Neuroception
Our brains have an ancient intelligence system designed to keep us alive and safe. This wise old system starts in the brain stem, below the level of conscious awareness, with a process called Neuroception.
Neuroception is as devoted + loving of YOU as your heart or lungs. It has your back every millisecond of every day from your first baby breath until your last. It is utterly devoted to YOU.
Every moment of your life, neuroception is scanning your experience and deciding if it is safe, dangerous, or life-threatening.
How does it decide?
It looks to a database of your past experiences (this can even include familial or ancestral experiences).
This database is like a ginormous library that has stored information on all the things you've ever experienced. Things you don't even remember experiencing, it remembers.
Genius Librarians.
Because the system is wired to look to the past to make sense of our present AND because this whole process is happening below the level of our conscious rational minds, just thinking you're safe or a "type" of experience is different now because you rationally decided it is so doesn't really create the change we might desire.
This is why you can affirmate all day long + tell yourself all sorts of things about what you desire + want to step toward, but your experiences stay the same.
Good news is that the database is always being updated. And we can have reparative experiences that can change how our ancient intelligence system responds to our environments over time.
Key is, we have to SHOW our systems, not TELL them. We have to have EXPERIENCES not just thoughts.
This is why deep imagery + somatic healing work are essential to creating lasting change. We need a Whole Self process for building toward the things we want that aren't currently in our database as safe for us. This process can take time but is totally possible.
In some future post, I'll share what Team Safety does with these perceptions of "safe, dangerous, or life-threatening" + how that affects our bodies, our minds, and our lives.
You are so loved.
Want to learn more?
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