Notes from Within:
REFLECTIONS ON HEALING, SPIRIT, AND THE BODY
The Autonomic Nervous System: your body’s internal smoke alarm
Your nervous system is a beautifully complex thing—broken down into two main branches, then more branches within those branches, and so on. But when we talk about nervous system healing, we are focusing in on a “sub-branch” called the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
Its job? To constantly scan your environment for cues of safety or danger (remember that smoke detector I talked about last week)? And depending on what it detects, it activates one of two modes. Cue…your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
trauma is my jam
Last week I shared some thoughts on a word that gets thrown around often—healing. But let’s pause for a moment and ask: healing from what? To really understand what healing means, we have to look at the root of the pain. And for many of us, that root is trauma.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be reflecting on trauma—specifically the how and why of its imprint on the body. Because trauma doesn’t just live in our stories or our minds. It lives in our bodies.