Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Attending is the ability to track autonomic states, see the movement between states, and create a moment-to-moment habit of noticing both large shifts and nuanced changes. For your clients, having an autonomic sense of where they are and where they are heading is the first step to finding their way home to autonomic regulation. Autonomic awareness can be thought of as a “protective factor for psychological well-being” (Fustos, Gramann, Herbert, & Pollatos, 2012, p. 915). The more skilled your clients are at autonomic attending, the more flexible they can be in their autonomic responding. The more attuned they are to their own physiology, the greater their ability to attune and be compassionate to others (Halifax, 2012).
Over a century ago William James described a “continuous cooperation between the body and emotions” (1890, p. 192). More recently research has underscored the importance of the body-mind connection, noting that the “orientation of our emotional compass” is directly connected to our physiology (Furman, Waugh, Bhattacharjee, Thompson, & Gotlib, 2013, p. 780). The ongoing flow of information from the body to the brain influences the experience and intensity of emotion (Critchley & Harrison, 2013). Studies show that a reduced awareness of autonomic state results in decreased experiences of positive moments and more difficulty with decision making (Furman, Waugh, Bhattacharjee, Thompson, & Gotlib, 2013). Posttraumatic response limits awareness of autonomic responses and fosters a biological bias toward looking for cues of danger (Rabellino et al., 2017). Research on resilience shows that low resilience corresponds with less awareness of physiological signals, and an inability to monitor and use moment-to-moment autonomic information to guide decision making (Haase et al., 2015).
The experience and awareness of who you are is shaped by your physiology (Critchley & Harrison, 2013). You know yourself through your autonomic state, or as Internal Family Systems (Schwartz, 2001) might say, you know your “selves” through your autonomic state shifts. Chapter 5 is divided into five sections, offering your clients a variety of different ways to follow their nervous systems: Attending to the Nervous System, Attending to Autonomic Pathways, Playfulness, Rethinking Solitude, and Moments to Savor. Narrative writing has been shown to be an emotional regulator (Herbert, Sfärlea, & Blumenthal, 2013), and the exercises in Attending to the Nervous System use writing as a way to bring clarity to the many flavors of autonomic states and track moment-to-moment changes. Attending to Autonomic Pathways offers three exercises designed to move into awareness of how multiple pathways join to create a larger perspective. With an understanding that play and stillness are challenging for many clients, the Playfulness and Rethinking Solitude sections present exercises that help your clients explore how to create conditions that support safe engagement with these experiences. Finally, Moments to Savor provides three exercises that bring into practice ways to connect with and deepen moments of ventral vagal regulation. Each of the exercises in these sections will help your clients begin to know where they are and how they are and help them get to know who they are.
ATTENDING TO THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
Autonomic state shifts sometimes activate a move down or up the hierarchy and other times bring subtle changes in the way a state is experienced and expressed. Your clients feel the shifts between states as their body systems respond, their behaviors change, and their stories reshape. The nuanced changes that happen within a state are more difficult to track and may go unnoticed. Helping your clients learn to first notice and then follow the changes that happen as they move within a state and between states brings attention to the ways the autonomic nervous system responds to meet their individual needs.
In this exercise, clients are asked to use the letters of the alphabet to move beyond the broad category descriptions of states and attend to the variety of experiences each state offers.
BACKGROUND
Looking beyond the primary description of a state creates an expanded understanding of the ways each of your states can be experienced. Finding the variety of flavors of each state encourages you to become aware of the subtle ways your states shift.
STEPS TO CREATING YOUR ALPHABET:
1. Find a word that begins with each letter of the alphabet to describe the qualities of your three autonomic states. (You may have to get creative with the letter X.)
2. Begin by creating your dorsal vagal alphabet.
3. Move up the hierarchy and create your sympathetic alphabet.
4. Continue to the top of the hierarchy and create your ventral vagal alphabet.
5. Use your alphabets. When you notice a familiar feeling, a quality you identified in one of your alphabets, stop and name the state. When you notice you are in a state, go to your alphabet and find the quality.
TIPS
Creating an alphabet is a way to look at the qualities of the three states from a safe distance. Once your clients have created their alphabets, you can then use them in sessions to attend to the nuance of states and shifts.
You may want to create your own alphabets to use with your clients, but samples are included here as examples to share.
Dorsal: Absent, Blank, Collapsed, Despairing, Exhausted, Foggy, Grim, Hopeless, Impenetrable, Judged, Knocked out, Lost, Missing, Numb, Overwhelmed, Pathetic, Queasy, Retracted, Shutdown, Terrified, Unloved, Void, Without, eXpressionless, Young, Zoned out.
Sympathetic: Alarmed, Buzzing, Claustrophobic, Deranged, Envious, Frightened, Grasping, Harried, Irrational, Judgmental, Knotted, Looping, Manic, Nasty, Overdoing, Pressured, Quick, Raging, Stuck, Troubled, Unwanted, Vibrating, Worried, eXtreme, Yearning, Zigzagging.
Ventral: Awesome, Benevolent, Courageous, Devoted, Eloquent, Free, Grateful, Happy, Joyful, Kind, Loving, Mellow, Nice, Open, Playful, Quiet, Relaxed, Skilled, Trusting, Uplifted, Vibrant, Whole, eXtraordinary, YES, in the Zone.
In this exercise, clients are asked to use the letters of their name to move beyond the broad category descriptions of states and attend to the variety of experiences each state offers.
BACKGROUND
In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet asks “What’s in a name?” In fact, your name is often the first label you are given, and is an important way you identify who you are. Looking at your name through the qualities of autonomic states invites you to experience who you are in different ways.
STEPS TO WRITING YOUR NAME:
1. Use the letters of your name to describe who you are in a dorsal, sympathetic, and ventral state.
2. Create several autonomic name descriptions for each state and compare the effects.
TIPS
When your clients write their names using autonomic state descriptors, the exercise feels very personal and often brings connection to a larger story. Different words evoke particular flavors of a state. Invite your clients to write several variations of their names for each state and see what stories emerge. You can use your own name if you choose or here is my name as an example to share.
Name: DEB.
Dorsal = Disconnected, Empty, Broken
Sympathetic = Distracted, Erratic, Battling
Ventral = Delighted, Excited, Benevolent
This exercise is a way for clients to intentionally add narrative to an autonomic experience. The five prompts offer a structure for clients to connect body and brain, create an integrated story, and reflect on the ways autonomic activation begins the story-creation process.
BACKGROUND
Adding language to autonomic events is a way to become acquainted with states and state changes. The plots of your short stories illustrate a slice of an autonomic experience. This is a quick writing exercise designed to bring attention to a specific autonomic point in time and spend a moment getting to know it.
STEPS
1. Use these five prompts to write your autonomic short story. Spend no more than a minute or so on each.
•My autonomic state is . . .
•My system is responding to . . .
•My body wants to . . .
•My brain makes up the story that . . .
•When I review my short story, I notice . . .
2. When you feel a state change, take a couple of minutes to listen in and follow the five prompts.
3. When you want to appreciate where your autonomic nervous system has taken you, follow the prompts and write a short story.
4. Track how your stories change as your autonomic responses begin to reshape.
TIPS
This is a good exercise to have your clients use regularly. The short stories offer your clients a way to notice both the impact of state to story and the ways their stories change as therapy progresses and their autonomic patterns begin to reshape. It is often a good idea to have your clients write their first stories with you during a session. After that, invite your clients write stories at home and share them with you in their sessions. Remind your clients this is a quick dip into listening to their autonomic experience; they should spend no more than a minute or so with each prompt.
An example of an autonomic short story is included here:
My autonomic state is moving into sympathetic.
My system is responding to the people around me who are arguing about how to meet the deadline for our project.
My body wants to get up and run away.
My brain makes up the story that it’s all my fault. I’m a total failure and I’m going to be fired.
When I review my short story, I notice how quickly I lose control and think about the worst-case scenario. As I look back now, I recognize the familiar, childhood pattern of my sympathetic state being triggered by raised voices. I can reflect on the ways that in my adult life raised voices are not the same sign of danger.
The first exercise creates skill in following autonomic movement and feeling the ways autonomic states shift in nuanced and large-scale ways in short periods of time. The second exercise uses a longer period of time to notice how patterns evolve and consider whether to continue or interrupt a response.
BACKGROUND
While atomic clocks measure time with precision and accuracy, it seems your personal experience of time is changed by your state of engagement with it. Time sometimes seems to stand still and other times fly by. You can feel stuck in a state of dysregulation or unable to hold onto a state of regulation. Using increments of time to attend to state changes adds chronology to your understanding of how you move through daily experiences. Attending over time, both in short and long intervals, invites you to see the ongoing ebb and flow of your autonomic nervous system and the ways it responds both in moment-to-moment shifts and in patterns over time.
SHORT-DURATION ATTENDING STEPS
1. Decide on a 5- or 10-minute increment as your measure of time. Use the following series of prompts to check in three times over that span of time.
•In this moment my autonomic state is . . .
•And I am feeling . . .
•Now my autonomic state is . . .
•And I am feeling . . .
•And now my autonomic state is . . .
•And I am feeling . . .
2. Repeat this exercise a few times a day for several weeks.
3. Look for any patterns that emerge. When are the times you respond flexibly and when are the times you get stuck? Are any changes happening over the course of tracking?
LONG-DURATION ATTENDING STEPS
1. Longer time periods offer an expanded, bird’s eye view of your experience. Decide on a timeframe to use. You can experiment with doing the exercise in the morning, at the end of the day, or even once a week.
2. Answer the following four questions.
•Where am I? The starting point is where you are right now. Begin with noticing your current state.
•Where have I been? From your present reference point, reflect back and notice any state changes.
•What does this mean for where I might be heading? With an understanding of your movement from past to present, bring curiosity to the trajectory you have found. Is there a pattern? Does it make sense to you when you see it clearly?
•What do I want to do now? Is this a path you want to follow or a pattern you want to interrupt?
3. Repeat this exercise over successive days or weeks and track emerging patterns.
TIPS
Your clients often see their autonomic state changes as individual moments in time not connected to a larger experience. Autonomic shifts are interconnected experiences that lead your clients deeper into or out of a state. By adding the dimension of time to track autonomic change, your clients can begin to notice the flow of their experience. The two Attending Over Time exercises help your clients bring attention to moment-to-moment change and build their awareness of how moments combine to create patterns.
Included here is an example of the first exercise.
At the first minute:
In this moment my autonomic state is . . .
In this moment my autonomic state is slightly dorsal vagal
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling a little collapsed
Now my autonomic state is . . .
Now my autonomic state is a bit more dorsal
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling some disconnection
And now my autonomic state is . . .
And now my autonomic state is moving just a fraction toward sympathetic
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling as if I might be able to move
At 3 minutes:
In this moment my autonomic state is . . .
In this moment my autonomic state is becoming more sympathetic
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling the need to get going
Now my autonomic state is . . .
Now my autonomic state is heading to ventral
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling that I can look at my list for the day
And now my autonomic state is . . .
And now my autonomic state is much more ventral
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling that the day might be ok
At 5 minutes:
In this moment my autonomic state is . . .
In this moment my autonomic state is a bit sympathetic
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling some anxiety about getting ready to go to work
Now my autonomic state is . . .
Now my autonomic state is moving into ventral
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling organized
And now my autonomic state is . . .
And now my autonomic state is fully ventral
and I am feeling . . .
and I am feeling ready to meet the day
ATTENDING TO AUTONOMIC PATHWAYS
Reflection invites awareness of where clients are and where they have been and often leads to thinking about where they might be heading. Making time to slow down and become curious leads to an awareness of the many states and state changes that clients naturally experience while navigating the demands of the day and an appreciation of the autonomic pathways that they have traveled.
This exercise uses the visual design of a pie chart to tune into the ways a day is comprised of a blend of dorsal vagal, sympathetic, and ventral vagal states and the relationship between states during the day. As soon as clients can predictably name their three states, this exercise becomes a useful tool.
BACKGROUND
We tend to give our days a label—this was a good day or a difficult day, a quiet day or a busy day—based on one particularly intense moment or on a string of related experiences. When you name your days in this way, you often miss the moments that didn’t fit the pattern. When considering the day through an autonomic lens, looking at the relationship between states and the relative amount of time spent in each gives a more complete picture of your daily experience. With a pie chart, ventral vagal, sympathetic, and dorsal vagal experiences are seen as part of an integrated autonomic system. The global flavor of your day is a result of the contributions of each. The design of a pie chart (Figure 5.1) offers an uncomplicated image of the overall sense of a day and brings the feeling of the day alive in shape and color. What name would you use to describe each of the days illustrated here?
FIGURE 5.1. Daily Pie Charts
STEPS
1. What does your autonomic pie chart look like? Use a blank circle each evening to review your day.
2. Choose the colors you want to represent each state and divide your pie into ventral vagal, sympathetic, and dorsal vagal pieces.
3. Name your day.
4. Make a collection of your daily charts. Use your collection of daily charts to get a sense of your autonomic experience over a period of time. With a series of charts, you can look at the ebb and flow of states and the impact on your autonomic experience.
•Is there a day of the week that repeatedly brings the same autonomic responses?
•What is the overall tone of a week?
•Is there a pattern to your weekends?
•If you are in a time of transition, use your pie charts to see how your autonomic nervous system is responding.
TIPS
Many clients identify with a specific state and miss the everyday mixture of states that make up their day. A pie chart is an easy way for your clients to bring attention to their combinations of states and notice how much time they actually spend in each state during a day. Invite your clients to periodically bring their pie charts to a session. Look for patterns and track change over time.
Daily Tracker—Three Different Things
This exercise brings explicit awareness to the ways a client’s autonomic patterns are shifting. In the midst the therapy process, it’s easy to miss the small moments that mark the beginning of change. This exercise is an easy way to create a habit of recognizing and naming the hopeful signs of a system that is reorganizing.
BACKGROUND
An end-of-the-day reflection during which you listen to the subtleties of autonomic change is a good way to look back at the autonomic path you’ve traveled. With a habit of autonomic reflection, implicit knowing and explicit awareness combine to bring you into a deeper understanding of the ways the autonomic nervous system shapes your days. Remembering that the autonomic response is always considered an adaptive one, don’t look for what is better, but instead look for what is different. A regular tracking practice brings attention to the small shifts in patterns that highlight the ways your system is reorganizing.
STEPS
1. Review the day and identify three different ways your autonomic nervous system responded.
2. Bring attention to what happened. You might notice a slightly less intense response to an event or an easier recovery into regulation. Or maybe you recognize a different kind of response—sympathetic mobilization in place of a dorsal vagal collapse or a moment of ventral vagal connection instead of fight or flight.
3. It’s equally important to attend to what didn’t happen. The absence of a reaction is also a good measure that a response pattern is changing and that your system is moving toward regulation.
4. Keep a journal of your daily “three different things” experiences. As small changes begin to add up, new autonomic patterns take root.
5. Review your daily journal periodically to see how your responses are changing. Look back over the range of autonomic responses and consider the larger picture of change that is happening. Is there a shift? If so, in what direction? Consider the intensity, frequency, and duration of your states and state changes in your reflection.
TIPS
Because clients are used to naming responses as good and bad, it is important to remind them that this exercise is about noticing difference. Some clients resonate with asking what happened while others find asking what didn’t happen to be a more useful question. Encourage your clients to use both. Seeing the small changes that are tracked with this exercise keeps the focus on the fact that autonomic patterns are shifting.
The Autonomic Request for Connection
This exercise brings explicit attention to the implicit signals being sent between autonomic nervous systems. By focusing on the pathways of the social engagement system, clients learn to discern signs of welcome and warning and use that knowledge in making decisions about connection.
BACKGROUND
The autonomic nervous system is a relational system. Through your biology you are wired for connection. Eyes, voices, faces, and gestures telegraph cues that it is safe to explore a relationship. The elements of the social engagement system are essential to assessing safety and danger. Yet, through the ways the nervous system has been shaped by your personal experiences, you might miss or misread those invitations.
An ongoing stream of signals of welcome and warning are received and sent through the pathways of the social engagement system. The muscle around the eyes (the orbiculares oculi) opens and closes the eyelid and contributes to the wrinkles around the eyes that express emotions. This is where the nervous system looks for signs of warmth and an invitation to connect. Prosody (patterns of rhythm, tone, frequency in the voice) is an important nonverbal signal and sends messages of welcome or warning to another nervous system. Facial expressions convey social information. An unmoving face is seen as sign of danger, while a mobile face is experienced as alive and sending social information. Finally, turning and tilting the head signals availability and interest.
You can begin to understand the conversation that is taking place between two nervous systems when you are aware of the cues you are sending and can accurately interpret the cues you are receiving. As you become familiar with this way of listening, you’ll find you are able to navigate relationships more skillfully.
STEPS
1. Make a practice of looking at eyes, listening to voices, seeing facial expressions, and watching for social gestures. Bring explicit awareness to your present-moment experiences with another social engagement system. Use the following prompts to build skill in noticing:
•Their eyes are signaling . . .
•Their tone of voice sounds . . .
•Their face is expressing . . .
•Their gestures convey . . .
2. Identify the specific characteristics that invite connection or prompt a move into disconnection. Exactly what is it about the other person’s eyes, voice, face, and movements that sends cues of safety or danger to your nervous system?
3. Ask yourself if your response is a match for the present-moment situation or linked to a prior experience.
4. As you get to know your responses to another social engagement system, bring attention to your own end of the interaction using the same questions.
•My eyes are signaling . . .
•My tone of voice sounds . . .
•My face is expressing . . .
•My gestures convey . . .
TIPS
This is a good exercise to practice during sessions before asking your clients to try it in their daily environments. Clients are often unaware of both their responses and of the cues they are sending. Experiment with sending different signals via your eyes, tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures to help your clients find the matches and mismatches in their neuroceptive response to your signals. Reverse the process and give your clients feedback about the signals they are sending.
“Playfulness occurs in a protected context and is easily disrupted by stress” (Bateson, 2014, p. R13). Playfulness is a state of mind supported by the autonomic state of ventral vagal regulation and a great way to exercise the vagal brake (Porges, 2015b). Studies suggest playfulness is a quality that is not set but can be enhanced and invited into daily living (Neyfakh, 2014).
While we are serious beings, problem solvers wanting to make sense of the world, we are also playful beings wanting to let go of our problems for a moment in time.
To play is a challenging experience and is especially difficult for many clients. In order to play, clients have to stay in the safety of a ventral vagal state while feeling the mobilizing energy of the sympathetic nervous system. This exercise explores building a capacity for playfulness.
BACKGROUND
You can be playful both by yourself and with others. Playfulness and a sense of well-being go together. A playful attitude supports seeing new perspectives and being able to cope with adversity. As Dr. Seuss (1960) said, fun is good.
STEPS
1. Get to know yourself as a playful person. Look at the conditions that support your sense of playfulness:
•Identify where, when, and with whom you feel your sense of playfulness emerge.
2. Identify where, when, and with whom you feel your sense of playfulness disappear.
3. Track your experiences of the different kinds of playfulness. Identify where you find yourself on your autonomic hierarchy when you engage in, or think about engaging in, these kinds of playfulness:
•playing with others
•playing with thoughts and ideas
•spontaneous play
•daydreaming
TIPS
Your clients may be occupied by the serious issues that bring them to treatment and think they’ve lost the ability for playfulness. They may think there’s no place in their lives for being playful, that it’s a luxury rather than an everyday experience, something to look at once therapy has ended. Playfulness is an important part of well-being and emerges when there is a neuroception of safety and an active ventral vagal state. Help your clients discover who they are as playful people.
As clients begin to understand how they play, the next step is to create time to play. This exercise helps clients find moments to play and expand their repertoire of playful experiences.
BACKGROUND
Playfulness is an important quality that contributes to well-being. As you find ways to create opportunities for moments of playfulness, you can become a more playful person and experience the joy and creativity that accompanies that.
STEPS
1. Notice how often, easily, and intensely you engage in a playful experience.
2. Increase your playful experiences. Find the ones that bring a smile and the ones that bring energy and play in those ways a little bit more.
3. Expand your playfulness. Experiment with experiences in the kinds of play that aren’t in your play repertoire.
TIPS
Play is often a missing experience in your clients’ lives. When an environment is filled with cues of danger, the autonomic nervous system remains on guard, focused on protection, making play a nonessential and even unsafe choice. Many of your clients have had limited opportunities to engage in play. With the clinical focus on the challenges that bring your clients to therapy, play is often overlooked in the therapy process. Yet, play is an essential element of healing. Find ways to routinely bring moments of play into your sessions. Play can be as simple as sharing a moment of laughter and friendly banter. Introduce play early in therapy as a reminder that even in the midst of complicated trauma work, the autonomic nervous system has the capacity to engage in moments of play.
Humans are inherently social beings, yet also have a desire for moments of solitude to “cultivate the inner word of the self and experience self-discovery, self-realization, meaning, wholeness, and an enhanced awareness of one’s deepest feelings and impulses” (Hollenshorst & Jones as cited in More, Long, & Averill, 2004 p. 224). Solitude has been shown to have a deactivating effect on the intensity of high-arousal responses, such as excitement and anger, and to be activating of low arousal responses, such as calm and ease (Nguyen, Ryan, & Deci, 2018). In experiences of solitude, many people report feelings of intimacy and a stronger feeling of closeness to another person while others feel a religious or secular spiritual connection (Long & Averill, 2003). Creativity often blossoms in solitude, as does self-reflection that can lead to self-transformation (Long & Averill, 2003).
“Unique among the species, we have the ability to sit and mentally detach ourselves from our surroundings and travel inward . . .” (Wilson et al., 2014, p. 75). “Stillness is the moment when the buried, the discarded, and the forgotten escape to the social surface of awareness . . .” (Seremetakis as cited in Lepecki, 2001). Stillness is a joining of the ventral and dorsal vagal circuits that allows you to sit alone in silence and feel restored or share a moment of quiet with a friend. As these two pathways come into connection, with the sympathetic nervous system quiet in the background, you feel immobilization from the dorsal vagus joined with the experience of safety from the ventral vagus and can enter into the state of being safely still (Porges 2017c).
Personal Preferences Around Solitude
This exercise brings attention to the autonomic experience of solitude and helps clients identify where and when they look for solitude and how much solitude they need. When clients understand the concrete elements that support their ability to safely find moments of solitude, they are more likely to attend to their needs for time alone.
BACKGROUND
Distinct from loneliness, which has been shown to have a multitude of negative physical and psychological outcomes, entering into moments of solitude has positive benefits for well-being. Practicing a moment of solitude is an autonomic exercise that creates an experience of feeling centered and peaceful.
STEPS
1. Locate the experiences of solitude and loneliness on your autonomic hierarchy. Feel the difference between them.
2. Explore where in your daily environment you find solitude.
Nature is often where people go to find a private place to escape to when they are surrounded by the demands of the day and the autonomic nervous system is needing room to breathe.
•Reflect on your daily experiences to discover where you choose to find solitude.
•Identify what kind of natural habitat are you drawn to.
•Notice where in your everyday natural environment are the places you can predictably visit and feel the benefits of solitude.
Solitude is a state of being and doesn’t have to take place in isolation. Solitude is also found in spaces where there are other people.
•Identify the places and spaces you visit every day that include other people and also offer you an opportunity for a moment of solitude.
3. Notice when you reach for solitude.
Consider what is happening in your life that prompts you to seek quiet.
•Look at your physical environment.
•Consider the actions of people around you.
•Reflect on the number, frequency, and kinds of requests for your time and attention.
4. Identify how much solitude you need.
Focus on your moments of solitude and the length of time that brings a sense of nourishment.
•Consider when a few moments of solitude meet your need.
•Compare that to when you need a longer experience of solitude to feel nurtured.
•Notice how you know when your system has taken in enough solitude and you’re ready to rejoin the world outside yourself.
TIPS
Solitude is often confused with loneliness. Solitude is an experience of feeling safe while loneliness activates a survival response. Use the autonomic hierarchy to help your clients understand the difference between these two states.
This exercise continues the exploration of autonomic experiences of quiet with attention to exploring the conditions that support a client’s ability to rest.
BACKGROUND
Over the course of evolution, humans developed the ability to become still as a way to rest and renew. Sometimes, instead of feeling nurtured by stillness, the beginning of calm can bring cues of danger and a sense of vulnerability. As your autonomic nervous system begins to move from action to quiet, you might feel your sympathetic nervous system reacting with mobilizing energy or you might feel pulled into dorsal vagal collapse. Bring curiosity to identifying the elements that add safety to your experiences of rest so you can find your way to the places where you can receive the benefits of moments of quiet.
STEPS
1. Identify restful and restless environments.
Many people label environments with lots of people, activity, sound, and movement as restless. Workplaces and the daily commute are two environments that are often cited as mobilizing and not restorative. In comparison, the natural environment and at home are often identified as places to rest and renew.
•Identify environments at the two ends of your experience—places that bring you a feeling of restlessness and places that offer you the opportunity to rest.
2. Attend to the qualities of the spaces that bring you a rhythm of rest.
• location
• size and shape of the space
• colors, sounds, and textures
3. Consider when you want to be by yourself and when you want to be with others (people or pets).
4. Make a list of the combination of qualities you’ve identified. Go out and find places that offer those.
5. Create a plan to regularly visit the places you identified as offering the opportunity for rest.
6. Create your own space, incorporating qualities you identified that support you in resting in a moment of stillness.
TIPS
Stillness is a complicated autonomic experience and many clients find sympathetic mobilization interrupts their ability to rest, or they get pulled into dorsal vagal collapse when they begin to become quiet. By helping your clients attend to the qualities of places that support safety in quiet, this exercise helps them first identify where they can safely experience stillness and then experiment with entering those places.
Savoring is a process of attending to and appreciating positive life events (Bryant as cited in Geiger, Morey, & Segerstrom, 2016). Trauma can disrupt the ability to savor. Feeling negative emotions in a normally positive moment and an inability to experience positive affect can create secondary guilt and shame at the inability to experience joy (DePierro, D’Andrea, & Frewen, 2014). These experiences then set up a pattern of ongoing dysregulation. The practice of savoring is an active strategy to build ventral vagal resources. Savoring is linked to psychological resilience, positive health outcomes, and a sense of well-being (Geiger, Morey, & Segerstrom, 2016; Phillipe et al., 2009; Speer, Bhanji, & Delgado, 2014). Momentary savoring enhances positive mood, while an ongoing practice of savoring maintain levels of happiness (Jose, Lim, & Bryant, 2012).
This exercise helps clients recognize moments or micro-moments of ventral vagal experience. It is a way to remember that the autonomic nervous system regularly moves into moments of regulation and a way to capture those moments and bring them into explicit awareness. This exercise is applicable both in times of relative ease and in a time of ongoing challenge.
BACKGROUND
To savor is to take a moment of ventral vagal regulation and the feeling of a sense of safety and experience a story of connection to self, to another, or to nature. Because savoring is a quick practice whereby you capture a ventral vagal moment and hold it in your conscious attention for just a short time. Moments to savor routinely happen in the course of everyday living. Because a 20- to 30-second snapshot is all that is needed to benefit from the practice, it is easy to savor during the natural flow of your day.
STEPS
1. Look for a ventral vagal moment to savor, bring it into conscious awareness, and place your attention on it for 20–30 seconds. In the beginning, if the experience of savoring is challenging, start with micro-moments of savoring (5–10 seconds). Each micro-moment shapes your system. Over time, your ability to savor will build to the 20–30 second maximum that defines a savoring experience.
2. Practice savoring each day. Begin with finding one moment to savor each day. As savoring becomes easier, increase the number.
3. Track your savoring moments.
•Keep a savoring notebook or a joy journal.
•Reflect at the end of the day to find and savor moments you may have missed.
•Create an agreement to share savoring moments with a friend using technology or in person.
•Organize a savoring circle—online, in person, or a combination of the two.
•Create a savoring album using simple illustrations of your savoring moments and adding captions.
4. Establish a habit of savoring.
•Remind yourself that moments to savor are common occurrences in everyday life.
•Be on the lookout for the small moments that bring you into a ventral vagal state.
•Set a goal to see and savor a certain number of moments each day.
•Invite a friend to savor with you.
TIPS
In addition to the routine appearance of moments to savor in daily life, opportunities to savor also happen regularly during therapy sessions. The essence of savoring is the 20–30 second timeframe, making it easy to incorporate into the therapy session. Introduce this skill to your clients and then stop and notice moments during your session. Help your clients build confidence in their ability to savor so they can create a successful everyday practice.
EXPANDING OUTWARD—CONNECTING TO ART AND NATURE
Connecting inward to attend to the challenges of sympathetic and dorsal vagal survival responses along with the resources of the ventral vagal system is a foundational skill. Expanding outward to identify ways you are resourced through connecting to art and nature is also important. Each offers connection to the ventral vagal state of regulation through easy to access experiences.
Art can move you to tears with its beauty, prompt a moment of transformation, and change your self-image or world view (Pelowski, Markey, Lauring, & Leder, 2016). Viewing art is a complex experience that engages the body and mind in a process that unfolds over time (Brieber, Nadal, Leder, & Rosenberg, 2014). “Art viewing engenders myriad emotions, evokes evaluations, physiological reactions, and in some cases can mark or alter lives” (Pelowski et al., 2016, p. 1).
Your ability to return to autonomic regulation following a stressful event is supported through connection with nature (Brown, Barton, & Gladwell, 2013). Nature scenes are autonomically regulating and restorative. Technology that simulates the natural world brings an autonomically regulating effect (Kahn, Severson, & Ruckert, 2009), while listening to the sounds of nature brings an increase in autonomic regulation (Gould van Praag et al., 2017). Another way to connect with nature is through fractals—the simple patterns in nature that repeat over and over with increasing complexity (e.g., the nautilus shell, a leaf, a pinecone, broccoli buds, dandelions, ice crystals, clouds). Viewing fractals reduces physiological stress levels (Taylor & Spehar, 2016). The regulating autonomic response to fractals appears to be universal and is elicited in periods of time as short as 10 seconds (Taylor, 2006).
Intentionally bringing experiences of art and a connection with nature into daily life is an uncomplicated, easily accessible way to enter into moments of ventral vagal regulation.
Viewing art opens up possibilities for seeing the world in new ways. Both the body and the mind are involved in the experience. Engaging with forms of art that bring a ventral vagal response can change the way clients think and feel. This exercise invites clients to investigate their autonomic response to different kinds of art and make art a part of their everyday lives.
BACKGROUND
Art comes in many forms and no special training is necessary to benefit from seeing it. Art speaks to the body through your autonomic pathways and brings responses that can lead to new ways of thinking about yourself and the world. Finding ways to invite art into your life is an act of listening to your autonomic nervous system and discovering the particular ways you connect.
STEPS
1. Explore the ways that are easily available to you to see and be with art. Museums, artists’ workshops, public art spaces, arts festivals, and an illustrated art book are just some of the options.
2. Identify the kinds of art you are drawn to. View different kinds of artwork (photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, ceramic, mosaic, textiles, and other forms of art) and notice how you respond.
3. Decide how and how often you need to connect to art in order to feel as if you have enough art in your life.
TIPS
Clients may feel that art is a luxury they don’t have time for or that it doesn’t fit in their lives. Help them understand that art is all around, comes in many forms, and has an impact that can easily evoke the positive qualities of the ventral vagal regulating activity.
This exercise brings attention to the naturally occurring autonomic benefits found in nature. With the recognition that nature is nourishing both in live experiences and through images, attending to a connection with nature becomes an easily accessible regulating activity.
BACKGROUND
Nature, both in real life and through viewing images, offers relaxing and restorative opportunities. Abundant in the natural world are fractals, simple patterns that repeat over and over creating increasing complexity (the nautilus shell, a leaf, a pinecone, broccoli buds, dandelions, ice crystals, clouds). Viewing fractals for just a few moments brings a regulating autonomic response. Find the particular places and ways to connect with nature that bring your ventral vagal system alive.
STEPS
1. Attend to the natural environment around you and track your responses. Identify the places that bring you into ventral vagal regulation, sympathetic mobilization, and dorsal vagal disconnection.
2. Visit the places that are regulating for you either in person, through images, or in a combination of both.
3. Look for fractals as you move through your day. Stop for a just a few seconds to take them in.
4. Find images of fractals or objects that have the characteristics of fractals and notice the ones that bring an intense ventral vagal response. An internet search will bring up a wealth of images, and the plants and trees around you offer living examples.
5. Display fractal images or objects in a way that you can easily return to them. (A screen saver, photos on your phone, or a flowering plant or cactus in your home or office are some suggestions.)
TIPS
Clients are exposed to the regulating influences of the natural world as they move through their daily lives. By bringing attention to these experiences nature becomes an active resource. Helping your clients learn to intentionally connect with nature is a way to build, their ventral vagal capacities.
CHAPTER 5 SUMMARY
If there is a feeling change, there is an autonomic change.
—STEPHEN PORGES
Each autonomic state holds within it a multitude of flavors. The practice of attending creates skill in discerning these micro-states. Ventral vagal is more than regulated and calm. It also brings joy, passion, excitement, celebration, interest, alertness, ease, and rest. Sympathetic is sometimes fight and other times flight, and dorsal vagal can feel collapsed, foggy, numb, or invisible. The three autonomic states are always moving in relationship with each other. As ventral, sympathetic, and dorsal energies ebb and flow how your clients experience the world changes. By engaging in attending, your clients create moments of mindfulness. These small practices interrupt the automaticity of habitual patterns and make space to see autonomic responses in a new way. Making intentional choices about what to attend to offers opportunities to use everyday experiences to build ventral vagal capacity.