“When we commit to social change, we remember that systems can perpetuate harm or foster healing and resilience. This is especially important because we can mean well, be committed, and have a vision for change, but if we are not actively attending to our own healing or practicing a healing ethic, we unnecessarily limit what we can do.”
Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal
We can’t think our way to liberation—we need to feel it, play toward it, and experience it. As we transform, our nervous systems often react by doing what’s familiar, not necessarily what’s strategic or healing. To dismantle internalized and systemic oppression, we need to reassure our nervous systems that the required extra energy to try out what is unfamiliar is worth it—that it’s safe to try new things and experience various and depths of emotions. A healthy nervous system dances nimbly, letting us engage with our emotions rather than react to them.
What Might Be Possible if We Regularly Converse with Our Nervous Systems?
Our nervous system is always communicating, but we often don’t know how to listen. Using our intellect and telling ourselves not to feel angry or doom-scrolling as numbing relief doesn’t typically work to shift habits and patterns. By learning to speak the language of our nervous system, we can access more wisdom, engage in healing, and prefigure a world rooted in love, dignity, and justice.
The practices shared here about communicating with our nervous systems are part of Neurosomatic Intelligence (NSI). I first learned about NSI from Cristy Chung of Longma Wellness, then took a course to deepen my knowledge and practice. Cristy and I are particularly interested in how traditional wisdom, play, and embodiment practices communicate with the nervous system. Intrinsically, people know that caring for our bodies and breath and engaging in play is beneficial, and many people and cultures have long-integrated these practices into their ways of being and knowing. Our nervous system is integral to creating and perpetuating our habits and patterns, how we experience life, what we’re triggered by, and how we respond. Sometimes, our nervous systems misinterpret information and signal fear out of habit rather than reacting to the current situation. These reactions don’t leave room for new possibilities, but we can teach our nervous system to stay present and interpret what is happening rather than predict danger based on previous experiences.
To experience life differently, we need different inputs and to interpret them accurately—is my nervous system signaling a paper or a real tiger? NSI tools give us one entryway to changing our patterns of being and doing. Using them, we can provide our nervous system with different inputs and guidance on interpreting them, which can create new connections and opportunities for us to experience life differently.
Our families, world, and the cultures we live in impact our nervous systems, especially through structural oppressions like racialized capitalism and patriarchy. Black, Indigenous, and people of color thrive despite these oppressions but also experience disproportionate health outcomes linked to chronic stress. Each of our nervous systems works to protect us from these real and overwhelming threats, as well as those threats that are sometimes derived from our own fears, limitations, and default ways of showing up that come from living in the very systems we are trying to transform.
While we work to dismantle these systems, it is also possible to shift the inputs our nervous systems receive to decrease overall stress and mitigate unwanted outputs like anxiety, depression, and insomnia. For good reason, we are wired to overestimate threats and underestimate other possibilities, so we may also need to rewire our brain to accurately assess threats from our environment if our nervous system has gotten stuck in a pattern of seeing paper tigers at every corner. This takes being in dynamic conversation with our nervous systems by providing specific inputs, such as sensory stimulation or exercising our eye muscles, which provide stimulation that may calm our stress response systems. In turn, we may focus on creating more easeful pathways towards liberation at individual, organizational, and societal levels rather than being in a flight or fight response from too much screen time for our eyes, for example.
Since each of our nervous systems is unique—holding and being formed and changed by our individual experiences—we need to assess which NSI tools create a positive reaction in our unique nervous system. We do an assessment before and after practicing an NSI tool. Assessments can include sensing how you feel your breath shift or assessing how long you can balance on one leg before and after using an NSI tool. The assessment I use most is assessing my shoulders’ range of motion.
Here is a quick video of me learning to have a conversation with my nervous system and assessing which NSI tools it responds to so that I can start using these tools to re-pattern myself. In the video, I check my shoulders’ range of motion, then do an NSI drill called “bouncing,” and then reassess to see how my system responds to it.
Here are a few high-level instructions on two NSI tools mentioned in this blog.
A Few NSI Practices
Gentle Foot Sensory Stimulation
- First, complete an assessment (range of motion of the shoulder, the feeling of breath, etc.).
- If possible, inhale and exhale out of your nose with a longer exhale than inhale throughout this practice.
- Using a soft cloth or while wearing a sock, give yourself a gentle foot massage.
- Divert your eyes so you can focus on the sensation. Pay attention to the shape and texture of your foot through the cloth. Take in the information as if you were getting all the details to sculpt your foot.
- Take another breath and then reassess how your nervous system reacts to this drill.
Bouncing
- First, complete an assessment (range of motion of the shoulder, the feeling of breath, etc.)
- If possible, inhale and exhale out of your nose with a longer exhale than inhale throughout this practice.
- If you’re able, stand up; otherwise, lie down on your back on the floor.
- Find a focus point for your eyes at least eight feet away.
- Bounce your body up and down about two inches.
- If standing, rise onto your toes, and keep your heels off the ground as you bounce. You can hold onto a chair or the wall for balance support.
- If lying on the ground, use your heels to bounce your body so that your head moves slightly up and down.
- Take another breath and then reassess how your nervous system reacts to this drill.
Other NSI tools include coordination charts, ear vibration, and straw breathing.
When I am sparked in a conversation with a colleague, feeling like burnt toast after six hours of back-to-back Zoom calls, or when my kid has a tantrum, I can quickly pause and reach into my NSI toolbox. Depending on my needs, I can pick a tool that recalibrates my nervous system or lets me process frustration. Then, I have more elasticity and margin to act from, and rather than respond from a place of over-expressed anxiety or exhaustion, I can show up with my emotions and wisdom and with myself intact, acting from my wholeness. When I use these tools as an ongoing practice for rewiring my system, for example, by doing foot sensory stimulation before bed, I can start to create new patterns in my brain to come out of flight mode and move into rest mode so I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with my to-do list running between my dreams.
Our Nervous Systems Together: Collective elasticity & generative tension
Our collective nervous systems are also in conversation, and tending to them can move us toward healing and interdependent relationships. For example, NSI tools can also help us engage in tension in generative ways and simultaneously stay present while a group moves towards alignment in a messy process. In a recent fellowship, we facilitated a group of social justice leaders through collective decision-making about equitably sharing money in a movement network. This brought up a lot of big feelings and immediate responses. We engaged in neurosomatic intelligence practices throughout the discussions to help people return to their own wisdom. For instance, stress and heightened emotion surfaced when discussing individual needs versus the collective. At a pause, fellows were invited to chicken stomp (stomping while flapping bent arms so that they lightly hit your side ribs with forceful exhales on each stomp) to move stuck energy, release anger, and reset. The palpable feeling in the room changed as the entire group had access to this tool and could acknowledge that more was going on than what was being shared via the words of the discussion.
It wasn’t that everyone suddenly agreed, but rather, there was more collective access to an elasticity that meant relationships could be stretched and not necessarily break. This work in our relationships and networks is essential to move through disagreements before they become irreconcilable conflicts (a nod to the current study of The Art of War with Collective Acceleration and Norma Wong). The tools may also allow us to express strong emotions like anger and anxiety safely so we can move through it and also receive the message carried by the emotion.
NSI practices alone aren’t going to move us towards deep equity and liberation, but they can help us get out of our own way, try new things, and act from a place of wholeness, all of which ease our healing and keep us on the path to collective transformation.
Join Us in Building Our Collective Neurosomatic Intelligence!
Creating new visions and worlds takes energy—we need to help our brains and bodies understand what we’re up to to make these changes from our fully aligned wisdom. Breaking out of our habits requires us to talk to our body in a way it understands. If you want to take a deeper dive into how to engage with our nervous systems and NSI, join Alison Lin and Cristy Chung (of Longma Wellness) on December 13th from 11 am – 12:15 pm PT / 2 – 3:15 pm ET for a live introductory session. RSVP here! You can also connect with Cristy or Alison for a 30-minute call to learn more.
