How to Access Deeper Joy of Being - Create a Foundation for Lasting Change & Transformation in Your Life.
Transformation and healing is never about just one thing. It’s important to merge a holistic blend of modalities, perspectives and practices that truly serve you, your uniqueness and your specific situation to access your full joy of being.
This is why I love to offer tailored holistic transformative support that blends many different modalities ranging from scientific evidence-based to intuitive to spiritual and back, to support you on your journey home to your true self.
That said, there is one important common core factor in all of these different approaches and modalities, which is vital to take into account if you are on a path to your most expansive inner wellbeing. All healing and positive growth touches on this in one way or another - explicitly or implicitly, regardless of the path that you are on on your way home to yourself and the themes that you are dealing with.
Of course, the body, mind, heart and soul, your ancestors, feelings and energy all play crucial roles in your expansive inner wellbeing, and we can’t separate them - together they form a whole.
BUT let’s say, theoretically, if you had to choose: what would the root thing be you would attend to, to maximise your inner wellbeing, fully come home to yourself and enjoy life being you?
It's at the foundation of our human experience here on earth
- and informs everything we do and receive -
It enables
positive change & transformation to occur in its fullest potential.
It drives the show, night and day, minute by minute, millisecond by millisecond.
It’s your autonomic nervous system.
Your autonomic nervous system’s job is to keep you safe, functioning and alive. It has its own automatic ways of ‘understanding, seeing and perceiving’ the world and is deeply anchored in your subconscious. It is constantly taking in cues of safety in your body and in your environment to gauge your safety. These cues are based on your past experiences, your biology, the experiences you inherited from your ancestors and your environment. All of this happens outside of your conscious awareness.
It does a great job at keeping you safe, functioning and alive - a miracle of a job.
Polyvagal Theory describes how the autonomic nervous system works. This theory was developed by the renowned researcher Dr. Stephen Porges, who has written several books about it and also founded the Polyvagal Institute.
Polyvagal Theory describes the autonomic nervous system as having three primary states, each with unique qualities that exist along a continuum. We often experience blended states where a pattern of response is influenced by more than one state.
So it helps to know about this in order to better understand your own patterns, and empower yourself to shift into more wellbeing whenever possible.
The three primary states of the autonomic nervous system:
1. Ventral vagal (‘safe mode’)
2. Sympathetic (‘mobilized’ or active fight or flight mode)
3. Dorsal vagal (‘immobilized’ or shut down mode)
1. Ventral Vagal:
When your autonomic nervous system is in ventral vagal energy it is in ‘safe’ mode. In this state, you can easily connect with yourself and others, and are available for health, inner growth and inner wellbeing. Being connected to your true self allows you to fully tap into your creativity, joy of being, self-confidence, inner calm, expansive inner wellbeing, spirituality, and much more.
I love to call this state ‘inner sunshine’.
2. Sympathetic:
When your autonomic nervous system becomes mobilized or senses danger, it will shift you more into sympathetic energy or ‘active’ mode, mobilizing you to ensure your immediate survival. It makes sense that sympathetic energy will put you on high alert to fight or flee, and it will disconnect you from your true self in order to ensure your survival.
3. Dorsal Vagal:
When your autonomic nervous system senses that the sympathetic state is ineffective for self-defense, it will shift into a suppressed state of shut down or collapse as a last attempt for survival. In this state we become disconnected, collapsed and experience feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
What is regulation?
We often experience blended states of these primary states
Here, a pattern of response is influenced by more than one state.
These states happen along a continuum and when well-regulated, your nervous system
shifts flexibly and smoothly between the states as needed. This is called regulation.
However, your autonomic nervous system can also become chronically dysregulated and get stuck in patterns which may be active even in times when you don’t need them.
These patterns can show up in your life as ‘habitual survival mode patterns’. What this means, alongside a myriad of chronic signs and symptoms, is that you won’t be able to fully access your true self and immerse in its expansive qualities as often as you could.
Many people who notice this about themselves feel a sense of loss or failure at not managing their life better and try to push harder and harder to make it work and run the risk of burnout, overwhelm and withdrawal - especially true in our performance-driven competitive world. Below are a few
examples of how ‘habitual survival mode patterns’ can show up:
1. Chronically activated patterns (more sympathetic or ‘activated’ energy), for example:
- always being on the go and do-do-doing,
- overwhelm & inability to relax completely,
- not being able to access your creative ideas when you sit down to them,
- feeling like you have to control things,
- chronic muscle tension,
- inability to engage with others
2. Chronically suppressed patterns (more dorsal vagal or shutdown energy), for example:
- feeling sluggish & inability to concentrate,
- driving with the handbrakes on.
- feelings of helplessness & hopelessness,
- fatigue, emotional drain & stuck feelings
- task procrastination,
- inability to connect with your desires,
- lack of self-confidence,
- feelings of loneliness.
Automatic Response Patterns
So if you tend to keep finding yourself in repetitive behavioural or feeling patterns that seem to happen as if on autopilot or you are having trouble self-connecting, accessing your creativity and coming home to yourself, you can be pretty sure that your autonomic nervous system is dysregulated and playing a role in this in some way.
It’s important to acknowledge and understand that this is your biology doing its work, and that its not your fault. These responses run outside of your conscious awareness.
The great news is you CAN do something about it.
You CAN re-attune your autonomic nervous system to move out of habituated survival mode patterns and shift more flexibly and smoothly between the states and access
sunny ventral vagal ‘safe’ energy more easily whenever possible.
Re-attuning your nervous system can help you change your life in many ways.
Access Deeper Joy of BEING
If you would like to learn more about how you can work with your autonomic nervous system and how you can access more of the sunny ventral vagal ‘true self’ energy whenever possible & shift out of habitual survival response patterns, check out my new programme called SerenityBEING.
A special & powerful package that uses the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) combined with tailored-to-you Embodiment & Transformational Coaching
You can book it in various formats to suit you specific needs.
.
Warmly,
Julia
Medical doctor turned Embodiment Coach & Transformational Guide
I’m here to support you on your inner journey, to help you find your way home to your true self. I have walked my own journey home to myself for decades, during which I learned and trained in a wide range of approaches to help me get there. My body has played a central role in helping me transform, heal and embrace a new more fulfilling ways of being - and find my way home. I now weave all I have learnt together to help others find their way home, without having to take the long way I did to get there. I believe that working with your body and your nervous system is key in creating a strong foundation from which you can access your full potential. I hope you’ll love this blog in which I share much of what I have learnt.
More about Julia
This blog uses information from:
Dr. Stephen Porges and his Polyvagal Theory
Deb Dana and her Clinical Applications of Polyvagal Theory to Psychotherapy
Other teachings blended & assimilated from my own trainings in (somatic) psychotherapy, medicine, trauma therapy, spiritual life coaching and family constellations.
Experiences from my own healing journey from autonomic nervous system dysregulation.