Immune Function, Stress, Trauma - Being Calm During the Storm
Stress and distress diminish immune function via the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal axis. (search: stress & HPA axis - LINK ) to allow more of our energy to flow toward survival. When we believe our life is threatened, survival is a higher priority than immune function. When we are stressed and distressed, we also tend to lose higher brain functions such as verbal communication, cognition – including memory, speech, language, perception, orientation, attention judgement, planning and decision making, as blood flows out of the higher centers in our brain. When it seems survival is at stake, blood flows away from the skin and digestion and into the heart and lungs and the muscles of the arms and legs to prepare us to flee or, fight if necessary; if this highly activated state is prolonged the organism spontaneously collapses into a freeze – anything from pulling back through depression to catatonia. Traumas of any kind, including witnessing trauma – even, sometimes, watching a graphic video – further compromises our organism including our capacity for immune response. Add in a few Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs, LINK ) and we’ve got a person/organism who has been rather seriously impaired in their potential to fully be the one they most naturally would be.
This scenario gets darker as we recognize how our families transmit trauma and relational wounding down through the generations, unconsciously. (well documented in Family Systems & Sociology research). Later, we parents often wish we’d been smarter and wiser.
The capacity to self-regulate, interact and function as a human being is compromised in all of us to some degree because, at this point, pretty much all of us have more stress than we can comfortably tolerate. In fact, I don’t think there is a single lineage of culture, sect, community or peoples that has not suffered trauma, which affects the descendants’ for generations until someone has the wisdom and skill to clear it from their nervous system and restore their organism to its natural, optimal functioning. That’d be few among us at this point, I’d wager.
Most essentially, truly optimal functioning of each one of us has been compromised by the simple reason that we have all adopted a persona composed of a cluster of personalities which, more or less, fit within this world of separation and reification that we each entered when we arrived here. We each adapted to this world which is grounded in a false idea and so, even though the sea of awareness has been willing to animate the projections of our mis-understanding for us to experience and learn from, our experience of ourself and our world has never been true and real.
This mistaken mind-world/dream-body of separation, dualization, polarization and reification we have been living within has been named in the wisdom traditions of our species - The Tower of Babble, Mammon, our Human Karmic Vision of Samsara. Our shared, mind-made, realm of experience and participation is inherently dissatisfying because it is not fully aligned with the resonances of the One which is All-That-Is. Our, often misplaced, reactive dissatisfaction is the result of this dissonance.
Awakening together involves both noticing and releasing ourselves out of this mind-made distortion, which our consciousness has been living within and also recognizing the open, inclusive presence of awareness/being which underlies and animates every moment of our incessant mind-stream. This clear, alert sense of being is available and accessible any and every time we turn our attention toward it. The more we do this individually, the more we quicken it for others. The more we do this with others, the more we recognize the are no others; there is only us - you are my other-self. In this manner we release ourselves and each other from within our representation of 3-d separation and reification.
The key to getting the most out of each short moment is to give our whole attention to what is here once we’ve interrupted thought for a moment. The experience is not conceptual, and neither is it verbal. Rather, it is a direct, immediate felt-sense of just being this alert presence in this moment; there is a sense of wholeness, a singularity about it.
As the underlying experience of being reveals itself into our consciousness through the moment-to-moment sensations within and around our body, often labels and descriptions of its stillness, silence, the sense of boundlessness, the clarity, our sense of compassion, wonder and awe, etc. will arise as conceptual mirroring of what is being experienced. These insights can either be a distraction and an on ramp to being engaged with our narrative or they can remind us to appreciate our natural intelligence and return our attention to the non-verbal, non-conceptual felt-sense of our moment. Practice makes permanent.
Finally, as we are learning to consciously re-focus our attention in this way, we begin to notice the discomforts in our relationships and our lives, differently. We are beginning to learn to redirect out focus toward experiencing the living sensations in our body, underlying our habitual narrative rather than only being aware of our incessant story. In this way we become lucid in the dream/body of our conditioned mind/world. Each moment this occurs, it is a big deal!
These sensations may be rather uncomfortable but, as we allow them space to be just as they are and we relax and stay present with them, they morph and change and dissipate; often revealing and redeeming a part of ourselves we had somehow lost track of some time ago.
In my experience and according to the practice traditions handed down through the lineages, this is the fastest way to digest these things, but it is certainly not always easy. Again, this kind of process can benefit greatly from safe, skilled support from someone who has done their own work; this is especially true, if what we are working on involves relational wounding. Relational wounds are best and most quickly healed in the context of a safe relationship with a skilled person.
Speaking now from my own early experience, if we have been traumatized; if we have been chronically, or even acutely, stressed; if we have been pushed to become somebody else’s version of who we are supposed to be, rather than supported to discover and express who we naturally are; our nervous system/organism may be so deeply dysregulated that it is virtually impossible to quiet the mind for more than the briefest moment in order to notice the alert presence that is always here. It can seem to take forever – an incalculable number of such brief, short moments - for us to begin immersing ourselves in the peace, ease, well-being and wisdom that are the spontaneous effluence of our natural state. It is wise to get support for processing through these old, conditioned distortions.
While stress, trauma, ACEs have all been shown to affect our minds, our emotions, our health, our relationships, energy and mood, our ability to focus and follow through, etc., all of these aspects of our aliveness are the “surface features” of the complex and interactive processes of our brain and nervous system which underlies their various, temporarily stabilized, forms.
Because our mind, emotions, focus, relating, energy, etc., each express the current patterns of the nervous system within our organisms, each such avenue can be skillfully utilized to help the brain/nervous system/organism re-organize aspects of itself at a higher level of functionality, satisfaction and well-being.
These avenues of repatterning our consciousness usually involve different forms of skillful support. Various practices, therapies, body work, energy work, etc. can be very helpful along the way. I am also aware of a patented technology which, rather quickly, allows the underlying nervous system to repattern itself into a more harmonious, balanced and enjoyable adaptation to our lives.
If you are like me in this process, you may benefit from any number of practices, practitioners, techniques and technologies which support our organism releasing its mis-attunements and re-tuning itself, re-tuning us to our natural state. With the internet everything seems to be available in a few clicks. If you’d like support in sorting through the possibilities, if I can help you find help for your process, call or text, 510 301 8578. I am one of us; I am John.