there's more to life than just regulating your nervous system
find whole-body coherence with us in the summer 15 day practice
All Parts is a newsletter for those who no longer want to force or fix their way through life. Our community space is called All Parts Home, where you have access to dozens of breathwork and movement practices, somatic explorations, a seasonal 15-day practice, educational workshops, and more to support self-compassion and curiosity. When you sign up for a membership, you automatically get a paid subscription to the All Parts newsletter.
(This letter was originally sent on March 8, 2024. I’ve changed it a little and added some bits here and there)
In the somatic world, we talk a lot about nervous system regulation. This is when we are able to move from sympathetic (fight or flight) activation, to parasympathetic (rest and digest) energy with relative ease to meet any given situation we may find ourselves in. It means that when it’s 10pm and we’re getting into bed, your nervous system is able to relax enough so we can fall asleep easily. It means that when we have a challenging work day, we’re able to meet the challenges without going into overwhelm or the need to shutdown completely.
I’m willing to bet most of you have heard something about the importance of regulating your nervous system.
And for good reason! It’s important!
However it’s not the whole story. Many somatic practitioners (myself included) will talk ad nauseam about nervous system regulation; so much so that we’ve begun to conflate healing with nervous system regulation.
But when we think about somatic therapy as just about the nervous system, we’re forgetting about the larger whole.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines coherence as “the integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values.” Some synonyms of coherence are harmony, balance, and organization.
My grandparents used to take me and my brothers to the Boston Pop’s every year, a holiday-themed show by the Boston symphony orchestra. I would look so curiously at each section of the orchestra and marvel at how different each instrument and sound was.
Before the show began, each instrument would do their own unique warm-up, creating a chaotic, unorganized sound in the hall. It was uncomfortable to listen to. The strings were in a completely different rhythm than the winds section, which felt like a whole other world when compared to the percussion section.
It was pure chaos. Nails on a chalkboard. It felt totally incoherent.
Yet when the conductor lifted his baton and signaled the orchestra to play together, suddenly the organized chaos of so many different sounds and instruments playing at the same time settled into the creation of just one beautiful sound. Pure integration. It strikes me now that no one instrument was ever working harder than any other; they were all working as one unit. Together.
This magical feeling where all the systems are working together to create a whole larger than the sum of it’s parts is coherence.
We all live with an orchestra made up of all the bodily systems within us. The cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, skeletal, reproductive, digestion, lymphatic, immune, and more, are all various parts that - when in optimal coherence - work beautifully together to help us feel whole, well, and balanced.
Looking beyond the physical body, we also have the mental/emotional body, the subtle energy body, the spiritual body. All these parts of our selves are within the same orchestra, too. The orchestra of your whole body Self.
I’ve noticed a trend in the somatic world to prioritize the physical body. And although this might be the way into the Self in somatic therapies, it is neglecting the importance of these other bodies. They, too, are all part of the orchestra that makes you, you. When we focus too heavily on one, all the others fall out of whack.
When we experience trauma, the ability to feel optimal coherence becomes more difficult.
Trauma leads to disorganization in the various systems of the body, which causes the body to work even harder to find any semblance of coherence. For some who have experienced trauma, you might feel like an entire section of your orchestra has betrayed you and left the building; another person might feel like a few instruments are out of pitch. Either way, our bodies learn how to play the music the best we can given our situation.
We learn how to survive and cope. And this is our superpower.
Until it’s not.
Chronic illnesses like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, mental health disorders, and hashimoto’s can develop when we don’t heal from our trauma. This is usually an indication that our internal orchestra has been working hard to overcompensate for the missing pieces for far too long.
As I’m writing this I’m reminded of a past essay I wrote to you about how to know when therapy is working, and the level of openness and closedness you experience at any given moment.
What I alluded to in that piece and will say more explicitly here is that our bodies have a natural inclination to move towards coherence, always.
I’ll repeat that in a different way:
Every single one of us lives in a body that has an innate desire, wisdom, and ability to heal.
When we begin the process of being fully with ourselves, we start to create an environment for our orchestra to move towards one sound, rather than many. We begin to feel the instruments within us attune to one another. We begin to embody the harmonies unique to our own gifts and ways of being in the world.
We begin to not need to work so hard.
We become whole again.
This is so much more profound than simply regulating the nervous system, don’t you think?
xo,
The Coherent (ish) Part
Find more full-body coherence with us in the Summer 15-day practice! We begin June 11th.
(hint: If you’ve missed the June 11th start, this is an evergreen offering that will run throughout the whole summer)
In the 15 day practice, we deepen into a 30-minute movement and breath sequence to explore all the subtle and not so subtle layers of the body.
We explore with curiosity where we are feeling balanced, and where we could invite in more compassion to support any imbalances we notice.
The movement and breath sequence supports exploration in our capacity to feel activation in the body with more expansive breath patterns, as well as our capacity to settle into rest with more soothing and meditative aspects. It’s designed to support balance and coherence in all layers of the body.
I hope you’ll join us in this practice. It is $60 to join. You can learn more and sign up here:
Love the orchestra analogy!