The Kind of Animal We Are

I am starting to wonder if what all the priests, prophets, and 12-steppers are really talking about when they speak of God is actually embedded in a regulated nervous system. I don’t know if it’s possible to prove whether our intertwined neurons create the sensation of a vast, benevolent universal force, or whether that transpersonal presence simply reaches us through them. Either way, it’s changing the way  I think about how to connect with the Divine and what Ego is.

The qualities associated with the ego and addictive states mirror manifestations of our fight / flight / freeze response: stuckness, paralysis, negativity, picking fights, numbing out, self-harm, compulsion, arrogance, withdrawal. And what core spiritual practices, recovery tools and selfcare routines have in common is that they help us regulate our nervous system. They uncouple our thoughts from our feelings. They provide the comfort of ritual space and language. They bring connection with others into moments of deep vulnerability.

They also remind us to trust in and seek to emulate patience, compassion, relaxation, wellbeing, warmth, acceptance, faith. Many of us associate these qualities with being in the presence of the divine. And they are certainly hall marks of a nervous system in rest and digest. What 12-step ultimately appears to do is rewire our brains to support our down-regulation, and in that state, there’s no reason to act out or use. We already have what those substances and behaviors used to provide, and we have them in a way that is more sustainable.

As I’ve started to pay closer attention to the state of my nervous system and practice tools for staying more regulated, I’ve started to notice that the power in it isn’t just about how I benefit physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I also feel like it plugs me into what feels like the neural network of the planet. I feel safer and more resourced, so I naturally start to listen more closely to everything around me, to get curious, to want to get involved without ambition. Projects flow more easily, people open up more to me, and synchronicities start to unfold.

I begin to feel everything more intensely – the beauty and the heart-break of my own life, those around me, and everything on the planet. In one memorable moment, I felt myself swim up to the great eye of a massive whale, my heart pierced by its gentle intelligence, and then torn open by the realization that she was starving. I felt the suffering and confusion of a network of whales spread across the earth’s oceans as the numbers of plankton plummet. As I settle, I hear, see, and feel more. I feel buoyed by my connection to the diverse and wonderous forms of life unfolding, exploring, and reaching out all around me. I sense that they are wanting to comfort and encourage me, and also to show me something, ask me for something.

As Thomas Hubl says, what’s key to facilitating collective trauma healing is running light – being personally connected to it in both a deeply spiritual and very practical way. Our nervous system is electricity. Electricity is light. When we are stuck, it is dark. We do not flow. There is no judgment to that, it’s just physics. And when the energy flows, we are exchanging nutrients and inspiration with what Chellis Glendinning refers to as our Primal Matrix: the interconnected ecosystem our species evolved in. When we get connected, we have the container we need to literally digest our food and to digest our trauma – to be with our suffering and let it do what it must do: transmute into something new through a mythological alchemical process.

Those things I hold as failures, wounds, and regrets each offered me their seed before they passed. As they decay, they become the prima materia, lying in the dark of my womb as one year births another. I create a space to incubate through these new expansions and contractions. I tend the ember so that what wasn’t suitable can burn away. I trust that what is truly mine can be left as an ingot, tucked securely into a chamber in my heart to keep it warm, to serve as a compass by vibrating as what is resonant draws near. “Yes, this is safe. This is food for my Soul. This is a solid foundation.”

Sometimes what we digest is trauma is from our personal histories. But very often, it is shared trauma from our families, our culture, our species, and even the earth itself. We are, after all, part of its body – its opposable thumbs, its limber tongues, its exposed skin, its consciousness. Why would it not be speaking to and acting through us?

All my life I’ve been weaving threads of nature, trauma, grief, addiction, and spiritual practice. I have been hurt by parents who weren’t present, tormented by bullies, and punished by teachers, and while I felt hurt and defensive, I mostly felt bewildered and misunderstood. I didn’t understand what was happening to me and why. What has always felt most alive to me, and made the most sense, are other creatures. I can follow their rhythms and reason their motives. I’ve been able to keep my heart open to them when it had closed to everything else – and today a conversation with the Wild is the quickest way to for me to access comfort, outrage, grief, and hope.

As a child, my heart broke when I accidentally squished a daddy longlegs hanging out on a tree. As a young adult, I would dig graves whenever I found a dead animal. I could never volunteer in an animal shelter because I couldn’t bare the cats in cages, let alone enjoy a trip to the zoo. I greet crows out loud and cringe when I trim the bushes. The forests and the hills harvested and strip-mined leave a gash through my torso. And on several occasions, I’ve charged up to complete strangers to confront them for whacking a tree or a rose bush. My empathy is physical, instinctual, and volcanic.

Is my explosive grief for the creatures of the earth being brutalized with such cruelty and apathy really the root of all my other trauma? Because if people were incapable of brutalizing the Others, they certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it to me. Or my parents or the indigenous people their ancestors colonized. What scares me more than anything are those times I feel a shadow of that coldness in me – when I turn my back on the feral cats on our porch or refuse to visit the hills. I know that if I cannot open my heart to them, there is no hope for connection with the humans in my life. It signifies to me a chilling of my soul, a trauma, a call to unearth why I am shutting out what I love most for what feels like a safe, but deadened survival.

For me, staying warm, aware, and responsive to what comes to and through me is not just a way for me to choose life, it’s a way for me to begin to make reparations to all the Others for what I, my fellow humans, and our ancestors have done. It’s a way for me to step back into the primal matrix that will heal us and give us the energy and inspiration to start in a new way. It’s a way to start remembering how to listen to my instinctive, intuitive, animal body, to other humans, and to Other creatures as I find myself in them and them in me. Nature is both the lost Beloved and the Healer. The wildness we have lost is both in our environment and in the flesh of our bodies.

I am slowly coming to understand that what matters most is knowing what kind of animal I am. Then I can trust my instincts to show me what to do. There is no place to get to, nothing to prove, nothing to do but reconnect inward right here and now. As Joanna Macy says, “Once we know who we are, we are already home.”

I am an alder. I am a marsh tree. I root deep, I am soggy with grief and decomposition. I give off unsettling tendrils of fog and uncertain foot holds. I have misleading depths. I smell of ancient things. And I am teaming with life, in constant motion between the stagnant pools. I am a place of birth, death, and visitation. I boast protective tangles, concealed burrows. I am a larder, a nest, and a passage way. I am ancient and fragile. And I only reveal my secrets to quiet, consistent presence.

Nancy