Challenge of the Great Self
I am no stranger to polarities. Growing up, I belonged to a fundamentalist Missionary Baptist church. Its white frame, simple steeple, and family cemetery, a picturesque setting in the foothills of North Carolina not far from my place of birth. Hellfire and damnation flared forth from the pulpit, backed up by the high mountain harmonies of the sonorous choir headlined by my aunts. To their credit, love flowed in song and my heart responded in kind, drawing me repeatedly to the center altar to kneel and pray for my young sins. Sometime in the 1950’s inside plumbing was installed in the church to replace the outhouse. Sometimes my own family lived in houses with indoor plumbing, sometimes not. We moved around a lot. My religion taught me to be suspicious, even fearful of other religions.
Like the ultra-conservative Christians say, a liberal college education ruined all that. I came late to that education. I was 26 and divorced when I arrived at the University of North Carolina in Chapel in 1977, with a five year old ready to enter kindergarten. In a few years, I had earned a bachelor’s degree, and found out I could dance. Five years went by and I abandoned house painting, waitressing, and secretary work to begin a career as a bodyworker. By age 36, I’d met my husband and been introduced to the Berry family.
I remember the first time I sat in the dining hall of Camp New Hope during the 1990 CFRSL conference, enchanted as Thomas Berry laid out his vision of the Ecozoic Story. Thomas’s sheer mental force, heartfelt passion and intellectual mastery of religious and cultural histories had me in tears, crying for what reason I did not know. Carl Jung said that crying for reasons we cannot fathom is a sign we have encountered our deepest soul force.
Thomas’s story of the Great Self affirmed my intimacy in Divine origins within the Universe Story. I sighed with joy that I could embrace this feeling free of suspicion and fear. Thomas also assured me that whatever challenges people face, within our DNA coding lives the means to respond creatively and powerfully for a solution. This resonated with a deep longing I had not been able to name or describe. He named that thing I longed to understand, the Great Work as purposeful activity that would contribute to changing who we are as a species for mutual greater good. Other Ecozoic ideas followed over the years, opening and developing my conscious awareness of myself and my interpretations of my place in the Cosmos.
With a wave of his arm and a smile he demonstrated the embrace of the Universe as benevolent, if somewhat precarious, which I understood to mean: I’m mostly safe, most of the time.
With scholarly precision he spoke of unity, diversity, and interiority as major aspects of the Universe. To me it meant my community will still love me if I am myself; and if not, I am still myself.
He gave a brilliant diagnosis of humanity’s current needs, asserting that learning to recognize and succeed with mutually sustaining action is a necessity to continue Earth’s life communities. This means for me, I can’t do much by myself. And much would be lost without my efforts in this Great Work.
Given the state of current political and cultural struggles, our own full-hearted Great Work action is urgently needed. Nonaction risks becoming objects for those who would have us act as objects. If we do not rise to our Great Work, we will condone the current stream of proclamations and governances that denigrate our Earth and its inhabitants as objects for corporate and corrupt use.
How do I know what actions are mine to do? I might describe this knowing in terms of discovering our embodiment, a word used since the 1950’s in movement and bodywork therapies, and recently in psychology. It incorporates Thomas’s vision of our dual nature, our divine and human, Great Self and Small Self and how we know our Great Work. An Embodied or lived body means having a felt sense of awareness of our parts, an innate knowing and experience of self from within that the brain registers as us. Development of this felt sense helps tremendously in recognizing and choosing what action we want to take for something as simple as eating nourishing food or as complex as climbing a steep mountain trail or speaking our truth in front of people.
When we are attuned to this inner-outer duality of embodiment without struggle, it frees us to recognize the basic goodness of our unity, our presence within, and with our environment. It frees us to allow the Great Self’s thoughts and dreams to guide feelings and beliefs into Ecozoic Great Work action.
But, being the humans we are, we cannot leave out the Small Self and its needs and how we embody those. In this last year, my Small Self has been a stalwart witness to much that it did not want to see. And some of it arose from within me.
In the immediate days after the startling election of Donald Trump, all I could feel was dread and disheartened disbelief. A kind of shutdown effect took over as the inauguration passed, and with the elation of the Women’s March over, surges of defiance and rage washed over me. I’m a writer, so I wrote fiercely about rats in the collective house, about seeing and being a racist growing up in rural North Carolina. I spat out emails and phone calls, with no satisfaction to be found. The tin can of dark emotion had opened and I would not look away. I would not escape, even if I could. The Small Self had taken control and I felt engaged in a dire struggle to not separate from trusting in my Great’s Self’s perspective.
Looking back, I suspect that I periodically entered what Stephen Porges, PhD., calls a physiological shutdown or freeze state arising from the brain stem, the oldest part of our human brain. This can happen when we perceive we have no course of action that is safe. Breathing becomes shallow and organ function slows. The gut clutches. Legs can go weak. Or it can feel like a paralysis or collapse into an isolated and depressive sense of aloneness. There is no energy for engaging in cooperative endeavors. The example in nature is of the prey, limp in the jaws of the predator. Porges’ Polyvagal Theory says that this primitive response comes from the Vagus Nerve that arises from the back side of our brain stem. Or we may feel charged up, prepared to go into battle to the degree that we can’t rest and recover. If either state is constant, the collapse or the overcharge, we are drained of our daily reserves of energy for creative efforts. Pain in shoulders and necks, blood pressure spikes, and stomach complaints follow.
Many deal with these issues by resorting to self-medication though addictions. Some use drugs, and some, the latest newsfeeds. Serious problems with prescription drugs are on the rise to alleviate the strains on our primitive nervous systems. Stand-up comedian, Christopher Titus, speaking of our US culture of overstimulation and insatiable consumerism, quipped with a dry smile, “Beware the nation that needs medication.”
My predator of choice for assaulting my nervous system this last year has been the news. It has become a central motivation in our household to arrange ourselves, Monday to Friday, glued to the television screen for the Rachel Maddow Show, awaiting, dreading, praying for a sign, any sign that Trump’s time in the White House will be short lived. Multiple times a day, I’ve checked the newsfeeds for the next installment, spending too many hours engrossed in the cycle. Rachel Maddow’s hearty laugher, and her signature parting words, “its weird folks,” a small humorous reprieve. But finding a sense of companionship from the screen is just another form of isolation. Thankfully, there are cycles for healing which can help us when we feel lost.
Thomas Berry speaks of four wisdoms as guideposts in our quest to embody an Ecozoic path: The Wisdoms of Science, of Women, of Indigenous peoples, and of the Classics. One of those guideposts from science serendipitously found me on an internet search. I came across a recent book, written by Stanley Rosenberg, Awakening the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve.[1] It’s an easy read, but with a depth of information that my bodywork trained hands has been eager to use. I’m doing the simple exercises myself and teaching them to clients on a daily basis. What so exciting about this?
It is a Wisdom from the field of neuroscience that describes more precisely how the Dorsal Vagal Shutdown and Sympathetic overdrive system functions when we experience a fearful or freeze moment. When these two systems are dominant, we are acting from the reptilian brain. It is very hard to participate in the activities of a community of subjects when you have the Dorsal Vagal feeling that everyone and everything ought to leave you alone. Or the feeling from the reptilian brain that someone outside your own tribe is to blame and you must marshal your spine into its utmost upright posture and tense all your muscles into action to react. It’s important to know why we might feel the way we do in these post-Trump election years.
The Wisdom from Neuroscience that is really new is about our DNA’s phylogenetic heritage. Stephen Porges named it the Ventral Vagal System for the nerve’s location on the front of the brain stem and says its pathways innervate our social smile, “our most evolved defense system”. The Ventral Vagal nerve connects our heart to our face muscles, eyes, and the prefrontal brain. This particular book on the Polyvagal Theory is a first. It elucidates what each of us can easily do in our daily lives to quiet our reptilian brains to engage our latest evolutionary path, our heart, brain and face wired for social interaction.
When we bring blood flow to the five nerves in this pathway, we can more easily bring our heart’s wisdom into our awareness and can show our care, our compassion on our faces. We have in this aspect of physiology a parallel to Thomas’s benevolent Universe, where a smile offers a greater likelihood of gaining trust and cooperation with others, but not certainty.
Because the Ventral Vagal Nerve pathway innervates the upper third of our throat as well as heart and lungs for relaxed respiration, it literally supports ease in creating rhythmic and resonant frequencies of harmony for voice and body movement. I, as young girl in the pews of my fundamentals church did not fail to understand this as love. It’s in our DNA and our cultural coding to understand and relate this way. We enjoy others and know we are happy when blood flows to the Ventral Vegas Nerve. I have learned that in the year after Trump’s election, this inner activity is one solid way I can contribute to the Great Work.
Understanding this highly evolved pathway and what can derail it may even be a part of reinventing ourselves at the species level. In the Ecozoic framework this newly described, highly evolved social nervous system helps the Small Self engage in self-reflection by firing the prefrontal cortex connections of our brain to our heart, thus optimally engaging our choice making abilities. From the Great Self’s perspective we are better able to recognize and choose mutually sustaining Ecozoic activities when we embody this part of ourselves into conscious awareness. Personal freedom for how we will be and what we will choose when our wisest parts are wired together arrives, alongside a recognition that others belong next to us. And we next to them. And the Earth holds and nourishes all.
[1] Stanley Rosenberg, Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, and Autism (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017).