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The Nature Of Our Nervous Systems
What is our relationship to nature?
Our nervous system is an ancient technology that has existed across generations of our ancestry, for millions of years. We share many similarities in this technology with the animal kingdom, because in fact we evolved out of the animal kingdom, that’s easy to forget. Many mammals have a nervous system of this type.
A good example of this is the gazelle, an example that Peter Levine uses in his exploration of the states that the human body exists in, during and after trauma. Levine’s book: In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness explores how the nervous system naturally reacts to threat.
When the gazelle is being chased by a cheetah, it floods it’s system with adrenaline and can operate at 100% energy for a certain period of time. By the way, coffee stimulates the adrenal system. If this doesn’t shake the cheetah off quickly it may resort to a fight reaction, turning to face the cheetah to try to protect itself with it’s horns. If neither of these operations work then it will resort to a third mode of freeze. Freeze is a mode of the nervous system that quitens almost all of our functional systems apart from the gut. Hence the noises that often come from the gut and intestinal system in moments of discomfort.
