Polyvagal Theory is the science of feeling safe enough to fall in love with life and take the risk of living.

~ Deb Dana

Introduction

March 15, 2023 is the day I learned about polyvagal theory, and in that moment I experienced the very powerful feeling that it would change my life. It started a journey which led me to absorbing the words and wisdom of Dr.Stephen Porges and Deb Dana. I am quite proud of this analogy, which I feel describes my initial intuition well : life is like being handed a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box. Discovering polyvagal theory felt like finally receiving the box and seeing what the whole picture looks like. This post is my current iteration of that jigsaw puzzle, which will never be truly finished.

The main goal of this long post is very simple : to clearly define seven specific words. These words are dorsal, sympathetic, ventral, safety, habit, survival and trust. I did my best to describe what the experience behind these words is, and how their underlying mechanisms all work together. Another reason for this post is that all my future writing will rely heavily on this vocabulary.

I was also motivated by a strong desire to break polyvagal theory free from the limitations imposed on it by its clinical background and scientific straight jacket. Freedom in safety is also the name of an in-person course I developed, where I go deeper into all the points covered in this post, but also teach specific techniques, exercises and practices, new and ancient, that can be ritualized for daily usage.

Before we get things rolling, the usual reading suggestions. This is a long-ass post, so a good strategy would be to just steamroll through, skipping the side notes on your first readthrough, just to get a feel for the thing. There’s a lot of information and even more connections to take in, so it might require several reads.

That being said, vamonos!

The Nervous System

In recent years, name-dropping the nervous system has become very popular in the worlds of self-development and the spirituality industry. The term is being thrown around a lot, but a clear definition or context is often lacking. As a starting point, let us first take a very cursory look at the traditional scientific definition.

Technically, a nervous system is the sum of all nerve cells in a multi-cellular organism. Conventional neuroscience sees the nervous system as a bio-electrical system that is comprised of the sense organs, the wires connecting the sense organs to the metabolic and muscular system and brain, and the central processing unit of the brain itself. It divides the nervous system into subsystems in the following way.

The whole of the nervous system is divided into the central nervous system, which is comprised of the brain and most of the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, which is everything else. The peripheral nervous system is then divided into the somatic nervous system, which is responsible for voluntary muscle movement and sending sensory information to the brain, and the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for involuntary muscle movement and governing metabolic functioning.

Conventional science tells us that the autonomic nervous system keeps the metabolic systems working without requiring conscious thought. It divides the autonomic nervous system into two subsystems : the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These are often linked to the concepts of fight and flight, and rest and digest, respectively. The sympathetic nervous system springs from several openings along the spinal column, while the parasympathetic nervous system is a single but very large nerve that exists outside of the spinal column. The parasympathetic nerve is better known by its now popular name of vagus nerve.

Dr. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory came into being when he discovered that the vagus nerve is actually comprised of two separate nerves : the dorsal and the ventral vagus nerve. What the distinction is between these nerves, and what the hell all this even means will be clarified in the next chapter.

I just wanted us to take a quick stroll through this academic approach to the nervous system, as to introduce the names of the three branches of the autonomic nervous system : the sympathetic nervous system, the dorsal vagus nerve and the ventral vagus nerve – sympathetic, dorsal and ventral for short.

To find out how these three specific nervous system branches came to be, and what purpose they serve, we need to dive into some evolutionary neuroscience. Much excite.

Evolution

To preface this chapter : evolutionary timeframes are not very precise. Trying to decipher when what happened in the evolution of life on planet Earth is much like trying to read a newspaper that’s at the bottom of a swimming pool by looking through a keyhole. In the dark. That being said…

The central nervous system appeared on planet Earth approximately 560 million years ago in a creature that’s been dubbed urbilaterian. This is the name of a hypothetical primitive marine worm, theorized to be the common ancestor to almost all of vertebrate life on earth since that point in time. Which of course includes humans.

To get a better idea of just how long ago this is : around that time there was no multi-cellular life on land, plant or animal, and everything lived under water. All land mass was centered around the south pole and was mostly covered in ice and snow. Worms were the most advanced form of life. Good times.

The autonomic nervous system developed as a parallel system to the central nervous system around 500 million years ago. This new evolutionary development was also the start of the differentiation between the voluntary and the involuntary nervous system. These two parallel systems have first been documented in a primitive lamprey-like wormfish – an animal that was somewhere halfway between primordial worms and modern-day fish.

One-half of this new system – the vagus nerve – grew as an offshoot out of the back of the brainstem and evolved to grow completely outside of the spinal column to innervate the metabolic organs. It became responsible for the conservation of energy and survival through immobility. As we’ll see later on, this also marked the birth of the emotional intelligence system.

The other half of this new system – the sympathetic nervous system – differentiated from the central nervous system in the spinal cord, in conjunction with the newly developed vagus nerve. It evolved to grow out of openings along the spinal column, to reach roughly the same organs the vagus nerve connected to.

It became responsible for survival through mobility, but also a more active participation in the environment. Together with its twin half, the vagus nerve, it marked the birth of the predator-prey dynamic. Before the arrival of the autonomic nervous system, feeding was mostly a passive affair.

The sympathetic nervous system is also one of the main drivers that made fish evolve into animals that could crawl on land, around 400 million years ago. There is some important symbolism contained in this idea, which we’ll come back to later as well. In this period of Earth’s history, these proto-reptiles were the most evolved creatures on the planet. Primitive and very unfamiliar-looking plant life enveloped most of the land surface, since there was nothing to eat it yet.

Around 200 million years ago, the facial part of the vagus nerve started to differentiate from the lower part. It became insulated, which allowed for more accurate functioning, and its entry point migrated to the front of the brain stem. This new nervous system situation coincided with the appearance of the first mammals, since caring for young and managing social structures is the original function of the ventral vagus nerve.

In this period of Earth’s history, dinosaurs still ruled the land, and for the first time, the skies. However, the most advanced and evolved creatures alive were small rodents – the first mammals. Plant life started to look more like what we see now, even though there were still no pine trees or flowers.

For reference and completeness, homo sapiens appeared around 300 thousand years ago. This of course coincides with the advent of the human brain, which marked the birth of mental narration. To put these numbers into perspective : 200 million years minus 300 thousand years is still pretty much 200 million years.

All this to illustrate that the basic building blocks of your nervous system, the one you have in your body right now, and which determines most of your life, came into being over half a billion years ago, in a time when our planet was completely different from what it is today.

The reason we still have these ancient nervous systems in us, is because they have proven to be exquisite survival mechanisms, throughout the hundreds of millions of years of evolution and change that planet earth, and of the lifeforms it hosts, went through.

The central nervous system, specifically the brain, and the autonomic nervous system operate in parallel. They each have a specific task when it comes to survival, but they are not independent. Both these systems are aware of each other, and are influenced by each other. In traditional terms, our brain function is influenced by our metabolism, and our metabolism is influenced by our brain function.

To get a little ahead of things, another way to say this, is that abstract thought is influenced by emotion, and that emotion is influenced by abstract thought – the latter being one of the main differences between humans and other social animals on our planet.

Before we end our lesson in evolutionary history, I want to emphasize three crucial details. Firstly, it is important to grasp the implication of having two nervous systems that work in parallel. Again in traditional terms, one system is voluntary, the other is involuntary. In this vocabulary, voluntary means to be conscious of actions and choices, whereas involuntary means that actions and choices are seemingly made outside of conscious awareness.

Our metabolism, endocrine and organ function may not be governed by conscious thought, but they do have their own intelligence system that manages these aspects of our physicality. Again, these two systems, each with their own intelligence, work side by side, but also work together.

Secondly, and for future reference, the word safety will be used extensively throughout everything that follows. The definition of safety in the context of the autonomic nervous system differs greatly from the commonly used intellectual definition. Our mind has a logical set of parameters and prerequisites for ensuring the physical safety of ourselves and others. The autonomic nervous system’s definition of safety is entirely based on emotion.

The felt sense of inner safety – an experience that might actually be foreign to you – is very different from the intellectual notion of safety. Here, the word safety will always be used in the context of the autonomic nervous system only, unless specified otherwise.

Lastly, an important detail that has already been somewhat alluded to : in humans, emotional unsafety can elicit the same bodily survival response as physical unsafety. In other words, our metabolism can respond to our mental narration as it would to actual external threat.

Beyond Convention

As I mentioned in the introduction, from the moment I learned about polyvagal theory, my desire has been to break it free from its very Western clinical and scientific limitations. Here is where that breaking free – and the fun – begins. Both modern conventional science, as well as the older traditional sciences will be referenced, since both these systems bring valid knowledge to the table, just as both systems have their flaws.

The Eastern energy-based sciences, which often have their roots in oral tradition and purely subjective exploration, have been developed, handed down and refined over millennia. In contrast, the Western sciences, based on so-called objective observation, are often mechanistic, material and reductionist in nature. These sciences are also much younger. Although this scientific ideal has been around for millennia as well, it really only started to become popular at the same time as the Industrial Revolution began, around 200 years ago.

Coming back to the topic at hand, in the space where these two scientific systems overlap, the nervous system can be seen as the body’s multi-dimensional energy processing system. It registers, translates and creates changes in various energetic fields – from the coarsest to the subtlest. This also makes the nervous system much more than just a bio-electrical or bio-chemical system.

The nervous system detects and manages chemical and hormonal changes inside and outside the physical body, organ function and dysfunction, spatial awareness, the seeming passing of time, pressure and temperature, light and sounds and various other frequency ranges in different electromagnetic spectra. It also detects and manages the movement of emotional and mental energy in the body, and can deal with even higher frequency and more subtle energy fields not yet understood or acknowledged by modern conventional science.

The nervous system also acts as a bridge between these different dimensions, translating energy changes and movements, and distributing this information between the physical, mental, emotional and other energetic worlds. And last but not least, it can store the information it gathers from all these different dimensions in different ways.

With this in mind, when we zoom in on the autonomic nervous system, it can be seen as the system that governs the awareness, movement and expression of emotional energy. It thinks in emotions, feelings and sensations just as the brain thinks in thoughts, concepts and images.

Another way of saying the same thing is that the metabolism is governed by emotional intelligence through the autonomic nervous system. In multi-cellular organisms, but especially in mammals, this emotional intelligence system is a highly effective survival tool, both physically and socially. This is because social bonds have proven to drastically increase an individual animal’s chances of survival.

The first side note of the day on the illusion of happiness : The autonomic nervous system is a survival system that drives us toward feeling safe. Its non-verbal mantra is : if I feel safe, I will have the most chance of survival. This system is the unconscious driver behind humanity’s incessant quest for so-called happiness. The underlying mechanism here is that human beings require the feeling of inner safety to be fully human. Underneath all the mental noise and emotional turmoil, there is always the formless knowing that feeling safe equals being at home in yourself, as yourself.

This is the reason for humanity’s relentless search for “Happiness” – or rather, inner safety – in external circumstances, connections and possessions. Ironically, relinquishing your hunger for happinness, and instead focusing on nurturing inner safety directly, is what will bring you lasting contentment in life.

In nature, a survival response arises when an environmental stressor is perceived. In humans, however, stressors can, and almost always do, become mentally internalized, mostly during childhood. Over time, these internalized stressors encode habits of unsafety into the nervous system. This very human ability is not without consequences, because the nervous system operates following an evolutionary hierarchy.

Autonomic Lenses

In utero, the evolutionary oldest nervous systems develop first, and the newer systems differentiate from the older branches. This creates a two-way street between these old and new systems. Their internal connection and communication follow a developmental hierarchy, the older systems governing the newer ones, or vice versa. The reason for this hierarchy mechanism is yet again survival, and which direction the hierarchy follows is decided by inner safety.

Simply put : when you feel safe, the system works top-down. When you feel threatened, the system works bottom-up. Here’s what that looks like in humans.

Top-down is the ideal situation. The older nervous systems serve the higher human potential of the newer systems. The autonomic nervous system is not on high alert, or feigning death, which ensures optimal metabolic efficiency. This frees valuable resources for the human brain to be able to learn, explore and enjoy. The biological physicality becomes the foundation for the expansion of consciousness through the higher brain functions.

In bottom-up, however, the autonomic nervous system prepares the body to deal with imminent threat or death. The higher brain functions are repurposed for the task of survival and serve the older nervous system’s survival priorities. As a side effect, this distorts sensory perception by the human brain. Another way to put this : in these moments of unsafety, how you experience life is determined by emotion.

A side note on the chronic disease pandemic : It is only in top-down mode, when the body feels safe, that it is capable of natural self-healing. In bottom-up mode the resources required for the body’s maintenance and self-healing capabilities are reallocated to the requirements of survival. This is not a problem in case of acute short-lived unsafety, as it would occur in the natural world. But since humans are stuck in chronic unsafety by design, the continuous reallocation of resources leads to a chronic impairment of the body’s self-healing capabilities. Over time, this inevitably expresses itself as chronic disease in the physical body.

Acute and short-term bottom-up is the natural way the nervous system operates, as can be seen in animals in their natural environment. As soon as the threat has passed, the system quickly reverts to top-down. A good example of this are domesticated cats. When they are in a known environment and are startled, for a few seconds their entire being switches to mortal danger mode.

As soon as they see that the source of their survival response doesn’t pose a threat, they return to their usual goofy and lazy self, leaving no trace of the extreme physical response. In nature, emotional intelligence is a fast-acting and very effective survival system.

Chronic bottom-up, however, is a complex survival mechanism only seen in humans. In fact, the natural acute and short-lived survival response is no longer available to human beings as soon as they reach the age of self-awareness. Why this is the case will be explained in later chapters. For now, let’s stick to this simple conclusion : in a chronic state of survival, the higher human brain functions are systematically impaired and serve survival continuously, to varying degrees, whether that response is appropriate or not.

A sad side note on messed up mammals : This unnatural and chronic survival response can be elicited in social animals. When these animals are placed in a human environment, they often display symptoms comparable with human “mental illness.” This can be clearly seen in mistreated pets or wild animals that are locked up in restrictive cages. The simple and sad implication of this phenomenon is that human environments are often bad for your nervous system.

This impairment of higher brain functioning creates specific distortions in mental perception, interpretation and narration. I call these distortions the autonomic lenses. As per the three branches of the autonomic nervous system, I identify three main lenses : the dorsal, the sympathetic and the ventral lens.

The dorsal lens, which I named Defeat & Disconnect, occurs when the chronic survival response is governed by the oldest of three branches of the autonomic nervous system, the dorsal vagus nerve. In nature, the acute dorsal response expresses itself as immobility and death feigning, in order to become invisible or uninteresting to predators.

The effect this response has on the human mental and emotional system expresses this original functioning. It brings about stories of inadequacy, self-doubt, self-loathing and in its extreme form, desires for self-mutilation and self-destruction. It also drives comfort-seeking, with the caveat that the comfort is sought in the familiarity of one’s own suffering and worthlessness.

The emotions associated with the chronic dorsal survival response range from mild sadness and fear to deep despair and immobilizing terror. What characterizes all the dorsal emotions is that they feel sticky and dense, like moving through a swamp. Not surprisingly, the name I gave to this emotional landscape is the dorsal swamp. It’s a dark and damp place, where every form of effort feels heavy and pointless. Just like a real swamp, getting out of the dorsal swamp feels very difficult and slow.

I named the sympathetic lens the 5 Cs, which is short for Conflict, Competition, Comparison, Compensation and Correction. In nature, the acute sympathetic response expresses itself as heightened mobility and aggressive behavior, whether it’s predatorial or territorial.

Again, the effect this response has on the human mental and emotional system expresses this original functioning. It brings about the urge of seeking and finding conflict and enemies, and subsequent punishment or annihilation. It brings about stories of problem and solution, of better-or-worse than. It is also the source of the ubiquitous winner/loser dynamic.

The emotions associated with the chronic sympathetic survival response range from mild anxiety and frustration to overpowering aggression. The sympathetic emotions are volatile, highly charged, explosive and fiery. They are also the engine that drives the need to excel and prove yourself in the world, which mostly means proving you are better than.

Depending on how one or more branches of the autonomic nervous system are resisted, in-between lenses can be experienced. The autonomic nervous system is not a binary system – there is no clear delineation between the different states of survival, and all its parts always work together. Their effects and expressions present themselves on a spectrum. What follows is only a very short description of these in-between lenses.

In chronic survival we can come to experience a sort of limbo state I named Stuck & Stubborn. This is the place you get stuck in when neither the dorsal nor the sympathetic response is allowed expression. When this happens, you end up in an autonomic no man’s land, where you are either unable to exert physical effort or are unable to access or express your emotions. These two phenomena are also known by their more popular names of procrastination and freeze state, respectively.

A second in-between lens I named Please & Persuade. This is the very human mechanism of using social manipulation to ensure a false sense of safety. Again there are two sides to this coin : there is either social manipulation through compulsive victimhood, or through forceful persuasion, either physically, emotionally or intellectually. The perception distortions caused by Please & Persuade mechanism are responsible for the various perpetrator/victim dynamics in humans. And many novels, love songs, movies and TV shows. And divorces.

False safety is yet another social survival strategy. Seeking false safety refers to the unconscious drive to create or find external conditions or connections that induce the illusion of inner safety. Illusion, because it only serves to remove or obscure the mental and emotional symptoms of chronic unsafety.

A short side note rant on fight or flight : The phrase fight and/or flight, still commonly used when talking about the sympathetic nervous system, was coined in 1915 by a scientist trying to take x-ray photos of cats eating. Unsurprisingly, the cats did not approve of his methods, and he labeled the survival response his shenanigans evoked as fight or flight.

This little story illustrates many things, one being that the Western scientific mind has often been one of blind arrogance, severely lacking in compassion. And the fact that the term, based on a mechanistic oversimplification (and animal torture) is still in use today, should also raise an eyebrow. (Missing from this side note, but worth mentioning, is the concept of tend and befriend.)

The third main lens, the ventral lens, I named Open & Caring. This is the top-down lens, where the metabolic systems work as nature intended. This frees up resources for our higher humanity to express itself freely, for our consciousness to grow and expand, and for co-creating strong social connections and structures that are always mutually beneficial. When the ventral vagus nerve runs the show, it allows the governing principles of the human brain to express themselves, and its capabilities beyond mere survival become accessible.

I call these expressions and capabilities the ventral truths, as they are universal truths that get obscured and distorted by the survival lenses. The fact that they are universally true can only be experienced and acknowledged from a place of inner safety. Ventral truth means objectivity, the ability to see things as they are, inside and outside, without the distortions induced by survival consciousness.

In a natural setting, when the ventral vagus nerve is in charge, animals find strength in numbers and value social harmony on an emotional level. This can be clearly seen in herd animals, and of course, primates. In humans, the ventral system expresses itself in even more complex ways, but always in a social context. The easiest way to illustrate this is by looking at the two sub-lenses specific to ventral : the lens of Play and the lens of Peace.

Play is universally seen as the state conducive to creativity and building connection. Emotionally speaking, Play is about joy, celebration, adventure, friendship and closeness. Play occurs when there is sympathetic activation governed by ventral openness and caring.

Peace is the same openness and caring expressing itself in physical, emotional and mental rest. Peace is about contentment, gratitude, intimacy and a deep sense that all is well in the world. Peace occurs when there is dorsal immobility governed by ventral wisdom and inner safety.

A side note on meditation : Most meditative practices aim to evoke the Peace state, but rarely take into account the safety requirement for this state to emerge naturally. This can often make these practices frustrating, inefficient and in certain cases even counterproductive, as they can produce or reinforce a feeling of inner unsafety. Instead, focusing exclusively on nurturing inner safety will, over time, inevitably evoke the Peace state in a most spontaneous way, in moments when it is required and appropriate.

The Habit Field

And now for something completely different. All physical matter, including biological entities, are expressions of energetic blueprints, on a micro and a macro scale. A good example on the micro-scale is the human zygote. Upon so-called fertilization, this single cell already contains the energetic blueprint of the adult human form.

This includes the physical body, its muscle, organ and nervous systems, but also many innate emotional, mental and behavioral tendencies, and even potentialities of capabilities beyond what is commonly seen or known in present-day humans. Physical maturity is the body growing and unfolding until it matches the original blueprint. Conventional Western science attributes this process to DNA mechanisms, but these mechanisms are in themselves expressions of this blueprint system.

On the macro scale, there are energetic blueprints that govern much larger systems, going all the way up to astronomical sizes. Keeping it closer to home, there are blueprints that cover our planet like an energetic blanket, and that govern all aspects of biological life. This includes collective mental and emotional tendencies, both locally and globally, both positive and negative. Individual humans are born into this blanket and absorb and assimilate the tendencies it holds to varying degrees.

The existence and functioning of this energetic blueprint system has been studied and documented throughout human history, but modern Western science hasn’t gotten the memo yet. Knowing, and more importantly, feeling the existence of this system is necessary to accurately understand the habit mechanism. This is because the conventional definition of habit is limited to recurring behavior or mental narratives.

A habit is best seen as the expression of a specific energetic blueprint. This includes collective and individual mental and emotional blueprints. Donna Eden calls the energetic plane on which these blueprints exist the habit field. And who am I to argue with Donna Eden.

A side note on pseudoscience : The concept of pseudoscience is based on the need for objective proof, which is also its biggest flaw. Modern Western science relies heavily on devices that act as superhuman senses for its proof, but having no device to consistently measure something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s a lazy sympathetic argument, and the term pseudoscience is often used mockingly, to protect an identification with, and reliance on a very personal, subjective and often fragile and rigid worldview. Throughout history, every important scientific advancement started in subjectivity, and was almost always met with initial resistance, ridicule or even lethal violence.

Yet our most advanced device for scientific exploration is still the human nervous system. Invalidating subjective proof is often based in sympathetic closedmindedness, which in itself goes against the universal scientific ideal of curiosity. Being open to seeing the value in both objective and subjective knowledge, as well as trust in the extraordinary capabilities of the human nervous system, are required for humanity to evolve beyond its current limitations.

The human habit field can be seen as an energetic information processing and storage system, designed not only for survival, but also for the exploration and expansion of consciousness. And it is the nervous system that serves as a bridge between the energetic habit field and the physical body and world. This bridge includes the autonomic nervous system, our emotional intelligence system.

From the standpoint of survival, habit field mechanisms work much faster and much more efficiently than conscious thought to deal with threat. Because physical and emotional habits, taught or innate, don’t rely on the slow process of mentally processing sensory data, they can act almost immediately on threat cues.

As you are well aware, the habit field can be altered, but this is a slow process for two reasons. Firstly, the habit field only allows slow change to its structure, in small increments. This is how it functions, as it is designed to keep its integrity intact over time, for survival’s sake. In this context, it acts as an energetic reference system that regulates and balances the biological systems of the physical body. For example, the mechanism of homeostasis is an expression of this function of the individual habit field.

Secondly, creating habits happens through the nervous system, and it takes time for the physical structure of the nervous system to change and adapt to be able to express a new habit. An important detail : the deliberate and conscious altering of the nervous system structure, through habit formation, is an ability exclusive to humans.

For example, it takes years of study and practice to become fluent in a new language. To be able to express complex ideas and emotions accurately and smoothly in a new language, many parts of the nervous system will have to be reshaped, and not just in the brain. This doesn’t happen overnight, as both the body and the habit field only allow slow changes to take place.

This also illustrates very well that what you do daily, you become good at. This includes resisting emotional energy and compensating for the imbalances this creates – a skill set that all humans start learning in early childhood and often keep getting better at for the rest of their lives.

But this is also good news, as it implies that, as a human being, you are not directly responsible for your superficial behavior or your mental and emotional patterns, as these are merely the expressions of your individual habit field. Your real responsibility then lies in becoming more aware of the survival tendencies in your habit field, and how these shape your experience of reality. And to then consciously adopt and nurture habits of safety.

A side note on pattern recognition : A pattern is a mental interpretation of recurring behavior – behavior that is an expression of a specific habit field program. A pattern is a thought form – a story – that lives in a different energetic dimension than the actual habit it tries to describe. This is why trying to directly change your patterns, which are in effect only stories in your head, without taking the habit field into account doesn’t work.

Making your individual habit field your enemy will only lead to frustration and disappointment, and often ends up reinforcing the underlying habit. The best example of this is the New Year’s resolution, where a mental effort is made to change superficial behavior, so it fits into a seemingly new and better story. This works for a few weeks, after which the superficial behavior reverts to what the unchanged habit field dictates.

Altering the habit field requires consistent and informed daily effort, as habits follow the use-it-or-lose-it principle. This also means that when you consistently nurture new habits aligned with inner safety, your old habits of unsafety get used less, which will over time make them less prone to run the show in your everyday life. But learning new habits of inner safety is just like learning a new language : it will take years of consistent and conscious effort before you get any good at it.

Without this effort, your old survival habits will stay alive and active. There is comfort and ease in living from old and unquestioned habits, but this strategy also keeps you stuck in survival consciousness, and prevents your individual human gifts from truly unfolding.

This also explains why, when an old survival habit ceases to be part of your identity, it will leave a hole. Just like losing a friend, even if their friendship was unhealthy, losing a habit of survival will require mourning. Consider yourself warned.

How you live your day is how you live your life. Life consists mostly of habit, and without making the effort to choose and nurture your habits consciously, the habits that determine the shape of your life will be inherited ones, not your own.

A side note on tending your inner garden : When you are stuck in survival consciousness, you live life from your mental narration. You will always be chasing the next thing, always on the lookout for the quick fix, and constantly struggle with your own habit field, which will resist change at every turn. Living from mental narration is an exhausting and anxiety-riddled way of moving through life.

When you live your life prioritizing the tempo and rhythms of your habit field, you will come to deeply realize the truth behind the saying “slow and steady wins the race.” Living from habit means honoring and living by the natural rhythms of life. Just like a real garden, sow and nurture the right seeds, so the undesirable weeds no longer have a place to grow.

Survival Heritage

To understand how old our survival habits really are, we need to go back in time again. When we look at the natural human habitat of about 100 thousand years ago, a few relevant details stand out.

The first one is that any child younger than 6 years old had zero chance of survival if it wasn’t cared for. Back then, human puppies were completely dependent on their social family, not just for food and connection, but also for physical survival. Of note here is that this dependency required passivity and surrender, which is a dorsal survival mechanism that can be seen in most mammals, including present-day human puppies.

In the same environment, any child that was older than 12, and was still dependent on their caregivers for survival, also had a greatly reduced chance of survival. Starting puberty, children had to start gaining independence when it came to ensuring their physical safety. This drive towards independence emerges at around age 3, and can be seen, in part, as a sympathetic survival mechanism. This drive can also be seen in most mammals, where it usually occurs much earlier in life.

Around the same age, they also had to start contributing to the tribe’s workload, to ensure the survival of the group. This is the human ventral survival mechanism that started to come online. This made it possible for cooperation and new and more complex social structures to develop, for the first time in the history of planet Earth. Some mammals – mostly primates – also exhibit this tendency towards cooperation, but not to the degree of the then-new species of homo sapiens.

This new survival mechanism of cooperation started a positive feedback loop, where the strengthening of social bonds created a slow increase in the safety of living conditions for humans. This increased outer safety allowed for a more efficient access to the abilities of the human neocortex. This then expressed itself in an increase in individual specialization, which led to the first micro-societies that made it possible for groups of humans to create something greater than the sum of their parts. This was the birth of the first human civilizations.

However, human behavior was still dominated by a bottom-up use of the higher brain functions. Even though some level of external safety was guaranteed by this new form of cooperation, surviving day by day in harsh circumstances was still every human’s reality. From the start, human civilization has been built on this bottom-up dominance, which soon expressed itself as hierarchies and class structures based on violence and power. For this reason, war, destruction, greed and exploitation are the common thread throughout human history, up to this day.

All this is to say that human beings are the ultimate survival machine. Since the birth of homo sapiens, the entire human system, individual and collective, has operated and evolved in the context of survival. First adapting to survive in the most harsh environments, often very foreign to the ones our original ancestors knew, and later on, after the birth of human civilization, adapting to survive human cruelty – itself an expression of human survival consciousness.

The chronic state of survival is engrained in human culture, and has become firmly cemented into the human DNA – and thus also in your nervous system – through natural selection. It is also imprinted on every newborn by the individual habit fields of its caregivers, as well as the collective planetary habit field which is still predominantly survival-centered. Again, this includes you.

It is this survival-centric consciousness that made our modern world increasingly physically safe. Even though the human brain is still mostly running in survival mode, it was able to create better, safer and more comfortable living conditions than ever before in the history of our species. But at the same time, our modern world has become increasingly unsafe on the emotional and social level. The ever-increasing population density and artificial environments, especially in cities, and the unending proliferation of information overload, often negative in nature, wreaks havoc on our nervous system on a daily basis.

A side note on social and news media : Both these sources of information are unconsciously designed to speak from and to the collective unsafety. Just like Doritos, they are designed to act on addiction mechanisms. And just like any addiction, the result is usually a solidifying and exacerbating of the already present survival habits. And there’s a lot of money in unsafety.

Most human technological advancements end up being used to compensate for, distract from, eradicate or exploit the symptoms of living in chronic unsafety. This includes the core mechanisms on which the modern medical and mental health industries are built.

The Healing Fallacy

Fast forward to the 19th century, so we can witness the birth of modern medicine, and how it is rooted in viewing the human body as a machine – a mechanical device just like any other. Many current-day medical concepts and procedures originated in this time. This includes many current-day mental health practices, which makes this little trip relevant to our conversation.

The modern medical industry is built on a sympathetic foundation : fixing or fighting a problem by removing or hiding its symptoms, and then calling it healing. This implies that, most of the time, this so-called healing doesn’t address underlying causes. Likewise, the mental health industry is primarily focused on fighting the symptoms of chronic survival consciousness without addressing, or even being aware of, its underlying causes.

A side note on healing trauma : To keep this very short, the word trauma, in the context of mental health, was a 20th-century attempt to pigeonhole war veterans and their post-war mental and emotional troubles so “the government” could shirk from their responsibility to these people. The initial intentions were good, and by the end of the century, veterans whose lives and minds had been destroyed by war got increased recognition and financial aid – if they lived in the right country. But the way the word trauma is now used in popular culture only serves to keep people stuck. The concept is based on an inaccurate and incomplete understanding of the nervous system, again, as seen through the sympathetic lens. In most cases, this label is way too heavy and serious, and lightheartedness is required instead.

Trauma is not your personal problem or flaw, but the expression of the collective survival habit field, through you. Using sympathetic tactics to fight and fix so-called trauma is mostly counterproductive. Its root cause are the inherited habits of unsafety, that, when not approached skillfully and well-informed, can take on debilitating forms and persist for a lifetime. But this doesn’t have to be the case.

It is no surprise that modern forms of psychotherapy have their roots in the 19th century. Mechanistic thinking was all the rage, which also expressed itself as the compulsion to fix the human mind and emotions, which were both considered inherently flawed.

When the human brain is under the spell of survival consciousness it is constantly looking for problems. As a result, it will often use all of its resources to come up with the ultimate singular solution to a very specific and often imaginary problem. Once again, unaware that both the description of the problem, as well as the concept of the solution to said problem, are merely intellectual constructs, most often with zero correlation with the actual reality or experience of the people on which they are applied. This is the great blind arrogance of the self-absorbed Western scientific mind.

This mechanism can still be seen at work in our current-day world, in the unending rise in popularity of pathologizing just about everything – behavior, thought, emotion – preferably using acronyms. AD, ASPD, ADD, ADHD, BEB, BDD, BPD, CD, and so on – with a pill to go with each letter combination. A label can be empowering in certain situations, but more often it is limiting and only serves to solidify survival habits. And sell pills.

And then there are the cases where a psycho-pathology is invented and tailored to fit the effects of a new drug or synthetic neuro-active compound, instead of the other way round. Because it needs to make money. Speaking of money, there’s also the whole DSM medical insurance not-so-conspiracy, but that’s a whole nother can of worms…

A side note on psycho-active drugs : Whether legal or illegal, modern or traditional, chemical or natural, they are all products of “fight and fix” thinking. They are rooted in reductionism and arbitrary definitions of normalcy – almost always defined by old men. And in the case of modern drugs, trying to reduce the complex human system to a singular biochemical mechanism usually causes more imbalances than it can solve. And they have weird side effects. And are often addictive.

These substances have been used fairly indiscriminately throughout human history, to treat or eradicate ill-understood or misinterpreted symptoms. This is yet another example of sympathetic thinking : short-term, narrow field of view problem solving, that is in no way rooted in compassion or a holistic approach to the human system. Instead, it is almost always rooted in intellectual hubris and stubbornness. The concept of fast-acting symptom removal generally does not take into account the slow pace required for the habit field to change, which often results in harmful outcomes in the long run.

To come to the point, most modern notions of mental unhealth are only based on fighting superficial symptoms of chronic unsafety, completely unaware of the actual cause of these symptoms. This powerful habit of thinking in terms of healing and fixing, as well as giving names to the symptoms it is trying to heal or fix, are both expressions of chronic survival consciousness – our collective human heritage.

This implies that the modern and widespread notion of mental health is in many ways an illusion, based on a gross misunderstanding of the human condition. True healing is a natural process that occurs spontaneously, when it is required, and when it is allowed to take place.

Unfortunately, the artificial and invasive “healing” interventions that are used and sold by the medical industry often serve to suppress the symptoms of actual natural healing mechanisms. Again, this includes the “healing” interventions used and sold by the mental health industry.

True mental health is in itself nothing more than the natural consequence of emotional skill. A skill that grows out of the contemplation and understanding of the mechanisms that underlie your survival heritage, and how these mechanisms have shaped your life experience. The human condition it not a mystery nor a lifelong sentence.

Focusing exclusively on creating and nurturing a sense of inner safety will allow natural healing and balancing to occur, in the physical, emotional, mental and all other energetic dimensions of your being, when allowed. Which brings us one step closer to the actual obstacle.

The Self-Protective Personality

Our habits of survival are most obvious in our mental narration. Chronic unsafety expresses itself in our higher brain functions. The stories in our heads are constantly narrating life as seen through the autonomic lenses. It’s important to realize that we only entertain and listen to these survival stories. We don’t consciously create these stories, we inherited them, just as we inherited the very powerful habit of identifying with them.

A meta side note on thought : Just like the cerebral cortex is only the outer layer of the brain, so is mental narration only the outer layer of the thought process. It concerns itself only with creating stories and explanations about the perception of your inner and outer world. Most of the actual and voluntary decision-making and action-taking arises on levels below this mental narration.

All humans inherit a strong tendency towards confusing this mental narration with actual reality, and confusing self-narration with identity. These tendencies are deeply embedded in our collective human habit field and are so normalized that questioning them is often perceived as a threat in itself. An analogy to illustrate this idea : living from identification with self-narration is like only reading the subtitles when watching a movie. And when reading them through lenses of unsafety, the subtitles aren’t even accurate. The unwanted elephant in the room here is the implication that your personal problems only exist in your mental narration. Which is a fancy way of saying that, yes, it’s all in your head. Which is more true than you want it to be.

A few years after a human puppy is born, the conglomeration of inherited habits of unsafety, habits of resistance and the identification with mental narration this produces, inevitably lead to the birth of the Self-Protective Personality. Capitalization for ironic effect.

When people refer to the ego, another vague and outdated 19th-century concept, they are actually talking about the Self-Protective Personality. It is the reason there’s a Me at the center of your stories of unsafety. It’s what makes your experience of life personal.

The Self-Protective Personality is the product of your higher brain functions trying to make intellectual sense of the confusing and often contradictory experience of living a life of chronic unsafety, rooted in self-hate and in distrust of the intelligent emotional energy alive in your body.

A quick side note on ego death and enlightenment : In theory, enlightenment is the dissolving of the Self-Protective Personality, as this is what keeps us from experiencing our true nature. In practice, however, chasing ego death is a dorsal fantasy and superstition, as it holds the promise of being free from living as a physical human being. In reality, identification with the Self-Protective Personality only exists as a habit, and only because of a lack of conscious access to inner safety. Cultivating this inner safety will result in the growing awareness that your Self-Protective Personality is only an illusion, and eventually grant you a choice in the matter.

The Self-Protective Personality is separative and selfish. Its MO is pretense and acting like it’s safe. Its role is to portray false safety, in order to hide resisted dorsal or sympathetic energies, all the while pretending it’s something else than these resisted sides of your complete being.

The dorsal Self-Protective Personality hides sympathetic expressions – it pretends to never be angry or aggressive, and always nice and smiling. The sympathetic Self-Protective Personality hides dorsal expressions – it pretends to never have feelings of not-deserving, not-belonging or self-hate, and always tries to look tough and not weak. In short, the Self-Protective Personality is a false identity that obscures, limits and distorts your actual human individuality.

Inner safety is what makes the difference between individuality and personality. In safety, the full potential of your humanity can blossom through your unique expression. In unsafety, you only have access to very mechanical expressions of self-protection, through pretense and identification with distorted mental narration. Individuality can deepen and expand indefinitely. In contrast, the Self-Protective Personality is a very rudimentary system, driven by mostly pre-human survival mechanisms, which severely limit your potential for growth and expansion.

The Self-Protective Personality is part of your human survival heritage and the human condition. Its mere existence keeps chronic unsafety alive – or rather, it protects it from dying. The thing that actually keeps chronic unsafety alive is habitual and excessive muscular contraction and relaxation.

Resistance & Surrender

In the context of popular spirituality, the word resistance has a bad reputation, mostly because it is misunderstood. The very WooWoo adage that says that what you resist persists is an incomplete and one-sided view. Resistance is a natural and very necessary mechanism, and there is such a thing as too little resistance. Similarly, the idealization of the word surrender, touted as being a prerequisite for spiritual growth (whatever that even means) is only telling half of the story. Surrender is also a natural and necessary mechanism, and there is such a thing as too much surrender.

Both resistance and surrender are an inherent part of life on the physical plane, and one of nature’s most basic mechanisms of self-protection and survival. Many single-cell organisms have the ability to use contraction of their outer membrane to armor themselves against environmental threat, and can relax this membrane when in a nutrient rich environment. The important implication of this fact is that these mechanisms predate the nervous system.

When we take the evolutionary hierarchy into account, this also implies that the nervous system will be geared towards expressing this most basic survival mechanism when under threat. To keep it short, when the nervous system is functioning in bottom-up mode, the autonomic nervous system serves and expresses the older mechanism of resistance and surrender, and the brain serves and expresses both these systems. But where single-cell organisms use their cell membrane to express resistance and surrender, most multi-cellular life forms, including humans, use muscle cells to express this mechanism.

Looking at vertebrates, and specifically mammals, resistance can be observed in moments of acute sympathetic response – an animal resisting a predatorial or territorial threat is usually exhibiting excessive muscular contraction, at least as long as the situation requires it. Likewise, an animal that is feigning death to evade or escape a predatorial threat – an extreme dorsal response – is exhibiting excessive muscle relaxation, as long as the situation requires it. As a reminder, these are autonomic responses that occur mostly involuntarily.

In humans, these mechanisms operate outside of their natural functioning, since humans have the ability to internalize threat. This is especially true for emotional threat, and when emotional threat is internalized, the mechanisms for resistance and surrender express themselves as habitual muscular contraction and relaxation.

This is because the central nervous system has the power to override behavior – which is basically muscle activation – that is driven by the autonomic nervous system. If you recall the last time you were angry or sad, but didn’t allow yourself to express these emotions, you will also recall that this took effort, mostly in the form of muscle contraction.

Both the ability and the tendency to overuse muscle contraction or relaxation to resist or surrender to emotional energy is a big part of our human survival heritage. All this to make the point that resistance and surrender aren’t the problem, the lack of conscious choice in the matter is.

Human puppies learn very early on that certain emotional energies are deemed socially unsafe, and as a result, they learn to resist these energies, in themselves and others, through muscle contraction. This is the birth of the sympathetic stance.

On the other side of the same coin, human puppies also learn that non-resistance can be a better strategy to ensure social safety, and so they learn to avoid resistance, in themselves and others, through surrender. This is the birth of the dorsal stance.

But because these skills are learned so early on, and on the level of emotional intelligence, most grown-up humans remain unconscious of them intellectually, and only experience their habits of resistance and surrender indirectly, through their mental self-narration. Most of the stories in our heads are an expression of the underlying emotional state of unsafety, a state that often lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, and which is sustained in time by habits of chronic and excessive muscle contraction or relaxation.

A side note on talk therapy (and affirmations) : As mentioned in the side note on pattern recognition, trying to change your habit field by talking about the stories it produces, trying to change or replace these stories, or using words or thoughts to convince your nervous system to stop resisting and start trusting life just doesn’t work. At least not directly. What actually happens during talk therapy with a talented therapist, is that they intuitively show and teach you to provide yourself with a sense of inner safety, whether they are aware of this process or not. The same applies to repeating affirmations ad nauseam, as they can provide a temporary sense of inner safety, which can then potentially provide the proof for the affirmation. But tricking yourself is not a viable long-term strategy.

Learning to come to a solid sense of inner safety is relatively easy and does not require expensive therapy, coaching, programs or retreats. Through learning to balance out the habits of resistance and surrender that are alive in your body, and by learning to truly feel the emotional energy that you’ve been resisting or indulging in for so long, your worries, anxieties and other symptoms of chronic unsafety will slowly lose their power over you. And as an indirect result of this skill, over time, the content of the stories in your head will change to reflect your newfound sense of inner safety, effortlessly.

In their natural form, both resistance and surrender are short-lived and appropriate survival responses to a present-moment threat. When they are no longer required, the muscular system comes back to a balanced state of relaxed vitality. As an example, let’s startle our cat again. If you do it well, you will see its fur come to stand on end. This is a specific muscular contraction that serves an important survival purpose : to look bigger and scarier.

As soon as the threat is seen to be non-existent, the cat’s fur will slowly come back to normal. The same idea applies to death feigning. When a mouse caught by a cat plays dead long enough, the cat will hopefully lose enough interest and excitement for the mouse to find the right moment to come back to life and make a run for it. Both of these short-lived reactions save lives, and have done so for hundreds of millions of years.

In humans, however, the resistance and surrender mechanisms are pretty much always on, in varying degrees. Parts of the muscle system are chronically and excessively contracted or relaxed. Compare it to a cat that always has her hair on end, because it has internalized a threat. Or a mouse that plays dead most of the time, for the same reason. They would go extinct within a few generations.

This is obviously not the case for humans. Ironically, it is our big brain that is both responsible for internalizing threat, and for compensating for the unnatural resistance and surrender this internalization causes. In fact, this compensation can be seen as a survival mechanism on its own, and looking at the exponentially increasing human population, it seems to be a very effective one.

One of the main reasons why this strategy has proven so effective, is because most people tend to adopt either the dorsal or the sympathetic stance. These individual differences in resistance and surrender are the root cause of the long-standing leader/follower dynamic, which has made cooperation possible, despite the chronic survival state humanity’s been in since its birth.

There’s Two Kinds Of People

Every human seems to be born with a tendency to resist either dorsal or sympathetic energy, and I’m guessing there has always been about a 50-50 distribution in the human population. Another way of saying the same thing : humans are born with a preference to resist either incoming or outgoing energy. Which brings us to the human boundary system.

The saloon door provides the perfect analogy to visualize this concept. Saloon doors open both ways, and in its natural state, our boundary system regulates both incoming and outgoing energy. Not surprisingly, this regulation is balanced in all animals when they live in their natural environment, but this isn’t the case for humans. The human boundary system is always imbalanced and dysregulated, because all humans are born into the human world of unsafety – their survival heritage.

In chronic unsafety, the tendency to resist either dorsal or sympathetic energies causes rigid or weak boundaries. To go back to the saloon door, this means that the door only opens one way. There is a lot of resistance one way and way too little resistance the other way. Bringing this all together, we get this simple idea : there’s two kinds of people, sympathetic and dorsal people. Let’s start by dissecting a sympathetic person. But first…

A simple side note on simplicity : The sympathetic lens makes us look for difficulty and struggle. Simple and elegant answers and explanations can be perceived as too simplistic, too good to be true. When the brain is under the spell of the sympathetic lens, it will find countless reasons why the simple answer can’t be right. Because, you know… resistance!

Sympathetic people are born with the tendency to resist dorsal emotional energy, and their autonomic nervous system favors sympathetic dominance when under threat. These people live most of their life looking through the sympathetic lens. They are looking for outside enemies and problems, and for short-term fixes and solutions with little consideration for long-term consequences or social and emotional repercussions. The saloon door only wants to open outward.

Sympathetic people have weak outgoing boundaries, and exhibit compulsory expression of outward moving energies, often aggressive in nature, based on their distorted view of reality, as seen through the sympathetic lens. They also have excessively strong incoming boundaries, and exhibit the compulsion to resist, fight and find fault with any incoming information, especially when this information is tinged with dorsal emotional energy.

They often act and express themselves without consideration of the emotional impact of their actions or words, because going inward to feel is considered weakness, and this is not allowed. Dorsal emotions are an impediment to worldly success, whether the source of these emotions is internal or external.

Sympathetic people are always looking outward and forward, always running in front of the urge to create false safety in the outer world and defending themselves against any apparent personal attack. Unconsciously this urge is actually a running away from experiencing their own internal dorsal shades of unsafety – feeling powerless, undeserving, unwanted and unloveable.

Because much of their emotional inner world is forcefully locked out of their awareness (mostly through habitual muscle contraction) they rarely have access to their own sense of humanity and compassion.

A long overdue side note on the sympathetic ideal : We are born and live in a human world that idealizes control and blind competition. Our current human civilization is built on the destruction, poisoning and exploitation of life – all life, including human – on our planet, all for the sake of the illusion of false safety that external comfort, wealth and power seem to provide. This old and outdated superiority/inferiority dynamic is still very much alive today, and it’s holding back the evolution of our species.

There is some good news, though. This outdated form of human consciousness is fighting for its life right now, since it is increasingly threatened by the emergence of interdependence consciousness, which is slowly but surely reaching critical mass on planet earth.

To end this side note, a side note on the side note : There is no such thing as an HSP, there are only HIPs. The normalcy of repressing our natural human sensitivity that is required to conform to the sympathetic ideal, is yet another outdated model that is ready for change.

Dorsal people are born with the tendency to resist sympathetic emotional energy, and their autonomic nervous system favors dorsal dominance when under threat. These people live most of their lives looking through the dorsal lens. For them, life as a human is a struggle to be avoided, and they tend to “fix” their problems through avoidance and denial. They are constantly looking for ways to retreat from the physical world, self-blame is their habitual stance, and they feel very much at home in their compulsory victimhood. The saloon doors only want to open inward.

Dorsal people have weak incoming boundaries, and as such have very little defense against physical, verbal or emotional attack. In fact, as they live their life looking through the dorsal lens, everything feels like a personal and very warranted attack, since these prove their habitual dorsal stance. This is the same stance sympathetic people are running away from : I am powerless, undeserving, unwanted and unloveable. Self-hate is the dorsal person’s desktop background.

Dorsal people also have excessively strong outgoing boundaries. Expressions of outward going energies are blocked – mostly by habitual muscle contraction – at the expense of expressing needs and realizing worldly achievement or individual independence. Stepping into the world and distinguishing themselves as individuals is deemed impossible. This sense of impossibility is a symptom of resisting sympathetic energy, which is required for the symbolic “crawling out of the water,” and to claim their place in the physical world.

To boil all of this down to a simple idea : the human boundary system deals with responsibility. When this system is under the spell of a survival lens, our sense of personal responsibility becomes distorted. In the case of sympathetic people, this means that their overarching theme is that the outer world, and specifically other people, are responsible for their personal problems. Similarly, the overarching theme for dorsal people is that they themselves are personally responsible for the problems in their outer world, and specifically those of the people in it. Fuck you versus Woe is me.

This is of course painting a very binary picture, and it is important to note that no person lives exclusively on one of these extremes, at least never for very long, nor in all circumstances. But it is equally important to understand that there is no choice when you are stuck in chronic survival mode. These two extremes are social survival strategies informed by the autonomic nervous system, and a tendency towards one or the other is inevitable, as long as you are living from survival consciousness. The goal here is to gain awareness and understanding of how you operate, not pigeonholing yourself.

A side note on the introvert and extravert labels : This is yet another misconception based on an outdated and distorted concept. Jung was close, but his original ideas got the Instagram treatment, and are now diluted beyond recognition. To cut to the chase, introverts are just dorsal people and extroverts are just sympathetic people. Learning to consciously relinquish excessive resistance or surrender, and learning what the state of relaxed vitality feels like, will over time smooth out many (but luckily not all) of the so-called introvert or extravert tendencies.

When you are stuck in survival consciousness, you suffer from autonomic blind spots. Since you are only able to look at life through the dorsal or the sympathetic lens, it will be very hard for you to see beyond the lens itself, and experience just how much it distorts your perception of your inner and outer life.

The sympathetic blind spot makes us unable to experience, or even acknowledge, the deep feelings of self-hate, unwantedness and powerlessness that our outer struggle is trying to disprove, which in effect keeps us locked out of our own humanity. The dorsal blind spot makes it impossible to believe in a world beyond the swamp of self-hate and perpetual defeat, which in turn keeps us locked out of actualizing the possibilities that await us in the outside world.

A side note on self-hate : Self-hate, the way I use the term, goes beyond the mental stories of how and why someone might hate themselves. In my understanding, self-hate points to the deeply rooted existential distrust all human beings inherit, oftentimes before birth. It is this powerful distrust in self that gives rise to the stories and feelings of powerlessness, unwantedness and being undeserving of life, love or success. And it is the identification with this distrust, or the identification with the resistance against this distrust, that forms the root of emotional survival consciousness and the Self-Protective Personality. This is only a short and incomplete side note because this topic requires an entire long-ass post on its own.

As we grow older, we find and learn coping mechanisms for our innate resistance preferences. Over time, we might indirectly learn to loosen our habitual resistances or strengthen our flabby boundaries. But often we also end up resisting the other side as well. In the end, these coping mechanisms usually only serve to provide us with a false sense of safety. This can make life more manageable, and may even lead to worldly success, but it is all still just a mirage built on a foundation of unsafety, self-hate and unconscious habits of internal resistance.

Becoming Whole

To dispel another misconception, humans aren’t born whole. Being broken from the start is intrinsic to being human. We are all born with the internal tendency and the external motivation to adopt survival consciousness, and to resist key aspects of our humanity. Wholeness is not something you have lost along the way, wholeness is something you need to consciously choose and work towards. This is part of the contract of being born human on planet Earth.

Wholeness equals outgrowing your unsafety inheritance, and waking up from the illusions imposed on you by survival consciousness. And it all starts with becoming aware of your individual flavor of brokenness. And even though you were born broken into a broken world, you were also born with everything that is required to outgrow these externally imposed limitations. In a very practical sense, wholeness is realizing your capacity to fully contain and govern your emotional energy, including those energies that are habitually resisted.

Both dorsal and sympathetic people reject an important part of their humanity, and because of this rejection go through life as incomplete humans. To stick with the simple generalization, the fact that there’s two kinds of people means that there’s two kinds of brokenness, and also two paths to wholeness.

A handy little side note on dorsal and sympathetic cultures – Just like individual autonomic blind spots, there are societal autonomic blind spots as well. A good example is the difference between the USA and Japan. The former is probably the leading nation in embracing the sympathetic ideal, while the latter has made the dorsal stance a cornerstone of their national culture. Exploring what the dominant resistance tendency in your culture or country is can greatly help you in becoming more aware of your own individual survival inheritance, and in working towards wholeness in a world that is still very fragmented.

The path for dorsal people lies in finding the courage to explore the external physical human world by relinquishing resistance to sympathetic energies – their own and the world’s. They need to find ways to strengthen their incoming boundaries and relax their outgoing boundaries. Similarly, the path for sympathetic people lies in finding the courage to explore the internal emotional world, in themselves and others, by relinquishing resistance to dorsal energies. They need to strengthen their outgoing boundaries and relax their incoming boundaries.

In both cases, the path forward is one of emancipating yourself from a victim/blame relationship with your own emotional world. This is done by taking full responsibility for your own emotional energy instead of repressing or over-indulging in it through survival habits.

A side note on triggers : The seemingly logical idea that emotions are triggered by outside events, or other people, is widely accepted as accurate. This idea is false, however, and a good example of the victim/blame tendencies born from survival consciousness. Emotional energy is an intelligence system that is always alive in you. Emotions arise simultaneously with the perception of outside events, whether that perception is accurate or distorted by survival lenses.

Situations or people that seem to trigger a specific emotion are actually called into being by this emotion, if it is being habitually repressed or indulged in, so it can be fully felt and digested. This is because your emotions are more often the cause of your outside world than they are a reaction to it – an idea that will get its own long-ass post in the future. Living by the habitual view that emotions are only reactions means you are giving your power of creation away to your life’s circumstances, including the people in it. You are fully responsible for the flow and shape of your emotional intelligence, and believing otherwise will only serve to keep you stuck in survival mode.

Feeling safe enough to allow dorsal or sympathetic energies to be experienced, where before they were habitually and unconsciously resisted, allows us to zoom out and gain a more complete and accurate awareness of how we function as human beings. This zooming out is one of the many ventral superpowers.

When our nervous system operates in top-down mode, it allows our consciousness to expand beyond the limitations of bottom-up survival consciousness. It allows us to clearly see the victim/blame mechanisms in ourselves, from an internal distance, and to see how satisfying these mechanisms have been. This new awareness will eventually allow us to stop investing time and energy in these mechanisms.

Zooming out brings true objectivity to our inner experience, which will over time dissolve the personal identification with both our mental narration and our emotions of unsafety. This is the beginning of the end of the Self-Protective Personality. Which then creates the space to ask, who are you without the Self-Protective Personality? Who are you without your habits of pretense?

Trust

Coming back to the title of this post, freedom in safety means that, when we become free from our inherited survival habits, we are free to become all we can be, beyond the limitations of the Self-Protective Personality. The key requirement for stepping into this freedom is trust.

First of all, there needs to be trust in the accuracy of your intellectual understanding, of both how you operate, and what your place in the world is. The blog post you’re reading right now attempts to provide this accurate intellectual framework. Having an applicable and trustworthy understanding of how your inner and outer world are distorted by the survival habits that are alive in you, and how they shape your life on a daily basis, is the first requirement for this journey toward freedom.

This includes having an understanding of the mechanisms behind the healing fallacy. The goal is not to find fault and fix yourself, but to outgrow the limitations of your inherited survival consciousness, of which the fault and fix mechanism is but an expression.

Intellectual knowledge that doesn’t align with your actual emotional experience is false, inaccurate or incomplete knowledge, which only serves to keep the distrust between your thoughts, feelings and body in place. My goal and hope is that, through testing and exploration, you will come to see that this intellectual framework does in fact align with your own personal experience of your inner and outer world. And that it can become the foundation for building trust and mutual understanding between your stories, feelings and physical body.

Another kind of trust needs to be cultivated through adopting, and then consistently nurturing right habits. This pertains to all habits – physical, mental, emotional and autonomic – that evoke, enhance and solidify the inner sense of safety. But this is especially true for habits of the body, since the physical body is often reduced to an afterthought in this conversation, or only seen as a vehicle that has to obey and conform.

Since survival consciousness and the Self-Protective Personality are kept alive by habitual tension in the body, it is only by creating a loving and trusting relationship with our physical body that we can begin to truly sever their roots. Loving, because love is the opposite of resistance. At its core, resistance opposes love.

A second side note on chronic disease : The main victim of the Self-Protective Personality, and of living in a chronic state of survival, is your body. Finding and deepening freedom in safety will inevitably and effortlessly express itself in an increase in health of your physical body.

Balancing out excessive resistance and surrender in the body brings about another form of trust : when we create the conditions in our body for emotional energy to flow more freely, this increased flow of energy needs to be held and digested, so that its inherent intelligence can be acknowledged, used and eventually trusted. Learning to approach the natural and intelligent flow of emotional energy, without the mental narration of victimhood and blaming, is a crucial skill that over time will build a stronger relationship and a deeper trust between thought and feeling.

This is the other side of the same coin : accurate intellectual understanding goes hand in hand with skillful consideration of the guidance that emotional intelligence provides. Very practically, this means you need to learn to feel your feelings. Allowing all emotional energy to exist in your awareness, creating an inner safe space for emotions to exist in, without indulging in the habit of resisting, overindulging or changing the content of this space.

This in turn will prove that you can trust your capacity and capability to create a space that can contain all of your emotional energies. This is taking full responsibility for your individual emotional landscape, a skill which over time will lead to spontaneous expression of your dorsal and sympathetic gifts.

So far I have mostly written how these two branches of the autonomic nervous system express themselves from a place of chronic unsafety. From a place of solid inner safety however, their expressions take on very different roles.

When self-hate and the emotions at the bottom of the dorsal swamp are fully allowed, deeply felt and eventually trusted, they are alchemized into true compassion, humility and humanity. These are your dorsal gifts to the world. And when the indiscriminate power and aggression that are inherent in the sympathetic fire are fully allowed, deeply felt and eventually trusted, they become rocket fuel for powerful and decisive action towards the uplifting of human consciousness, both individually and collectively. These are your sympathetic gifts to the world.

A side note on spirituality : In the Wonderful World of WooWoo, popular spirituality idealizes the dorsal stance as an unconscious expression of counterbalancing the sympathetic ideal that governs or world. This can be excused as a natural reaction, since the sympathetic drive has been killing off life on planet Earth for millennia, and has become very efficient at it since the Industrial Revolution. However, resisting sympathetic energies, individually or collectively, is not the way forward, and is actually the root cause of spiritual bypassing.

The passive stance of dorsal spirituality that proclaims that the universe will save me is only a half-truth. The sympathetic and very opposite stance that proclaims that nothing will happen unless I make it happen is also a half-truth. The whole truth lies in the middle, and the universe will most definitely support you when you decide to be an active participant in the physical world AND when you start taking full responsibility for your inner world. Time to get your hands dirty AND embrace your self-hate.

Trust is what binds all of this together, since trust is the antithesis of survival consciousness, which is born from a deep existential distrust. A distrust in life, and fueling that distrust, a deep distrust in self. Coming to a genuine and complete trust in self takes time and effort, because it goes against everything the entire human world is built on, including much of yourself. Our habitual survival consciousness is so prevalent and normalized that almost nobody is truly aware of it. Yes, yes, the path of exploring and becoming aware of your survival heritage is indeed walking the wrong way.

Finally, there will come the trust that the process of developing conscious habits of inner safety will take you to wholeness and contentment, without forceful effort or problem-fixing. This is conscious evolution : learning to understand and see through the lie that is your survival heritage, both intellectually and emotionally, and then actively choosing to grow beyond its limitations, into higher expressions of your human potential, through habits of inner safety, aligned with the ventral truths.

Coming Together

Our human ventral system is our mammalian social bonding system. It is designed to create and nurture connection with other beings – to express the fundamental oneness of all of life – and to create and nurture mutual safety. But this system rarely gets the chance to come to full expression in humans, due to the prevailing dominance of survival consciousness that is enveloping planet Earth.

As you actively deepen your awareness of the many ways in which survival consciousness is alive in you, the realization will come that every person you’ll ever meet in your life is carrying their own individual flavor of survival consciousness as well, and suffering in their own way because of it. It is from this realization that the actual experience of oneness with life will emerge. This is true compassion, devoid of pretense, born from a consciously nurtured sense of inner safety.

This goes both ways : the most efficient way to nurture a solid sense of inner safety is through community and connection. Specifically, community and connection that is committed to outgrowing survival consciousness, and to actualizing the human potential and interdependence consciousness – in ourself and each other, together. A rising tide lifts all boats.

And to close the loop, cultivating interdependence consciousness on planet Earth requires your inner safety. True cooperation cannot coexist with bottom-up survival consciousness. Dependence and independence are both expressions of survival consciousness, and are both rooted in selfishness. It is time for humanity’s individual and collective consciousness to grow beyond survival, through prioritizing inner safety, and through consciously and actively nurturing interdependence consciousness on our planet, for the first time in history.

A last little side note on joy : Chronic survival consciousness also implies a habitual resistance to childlike joy, not to be confused with pleasure or happiness. Pleasure and happiness are survival emotions and are inherently selfish. True and mature joy can only be experienced from conscious inner safety, as it is a natural emotional expression of the ventral system.

By the time most people reach adult age, they have forgotten what joy feels like, because they have learned very early on that immature joy is highly unsafe. As resistance to dorsal and sympathetic emotional energies begins to dissolve, resistance to joy – and in fact all ventral emotional expressions – will be next in line to be relinquished. This part of the process will prove to be much harder than it sounds. But it will also be its ultimate reward.

An important consequence of developing inner safety, and taking full responsibility for your inner world, is the growing awareness that your words and actions can spark and nurture the sense of inner safety in other beings. Through acquiring the skill of inner safety and self-trust, you become a source of conscious safety for the world. You become a keeper and protector of a new and better way of being human.

But for this next chapter in human evolution to truly begin will require these skills – in any form that actually works – to be adopted by a critical mass of human beings.

Do you want to be one of them?