Reclaim Your Superpower of Neuroception

Join Rohini for this exploration of neuroception — the nervous system's instinctive, pre-verbal sense of safety and truth that lives beneath conscious awareness.

This conversation invites you into deeper attunement with your nervous system's wild, holistic intelligence, which is also the physiological root of intuition. We dive into how trauma, including the traumas of our dominant culture, debilitate this  spidey sense superpower of neuroception.

Through vignettes from Rohini's home in the Mojave high desert, reflections on rewilding and decolonizing our sensory awareness, and an invitation to embody and live from your system's deeper knowing, Rohini guides you back to the multidimensional language of your wise, wild body — where intuition and liberation meet.

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Intro & Outro Music: Coniferous Forest by orangery on Pixabay.

Transcript

Welcome my friend, welcome to root and rise the space where we drop in to the deeper and vaster rhythms that govern life and the ways in which we experience life. So it's a really lovely autumn day here in the Mojave High Desert, and I'm recording with the door of the room open, so you may hear birds and ravens and Bodhi our dog going in and out, or digging a hole in the sand, and if so, enjoy those flavors of this land and our home as I am enjoying this autumn, lovely autumn breeze coming in through the door. So in today's episode, we are exploring something I find both fascinating and practical, neuroception, which for me, sits at the intersection of the nervous system and intuition. It's that subtle, instinctive sense that happens below the level of thought, the body's way of feeling into safety or truth, long before the thinking mind has had time to catch up. So I want to dive in today into what neuroception is, and how it shapes the stories we tell ourselves, and how attuning to this innate intelligence of our nervous systems can help us reclaim our relationship with our intuition, our sense of trust, trust in ourselves, trust in life, and our sense of belonging to the earth. I also find it a great way to practice rewilding and decolonizing our subtler sensory capacities.

So take a breath.

Feel your feet, your seat, wherever your body is resting. Right now, if it's safe to do so, maybe close your eyes for a moment and feel the subtler and finer layers of sensing the world around you and within you, like how your skin is responding to the space you're In, or how your skin and your whole system is responding to the sound and vibration of my voice beyond the words I'm saying, or the sensation of Your clothes against your skin. Do you feel relaxed or something else? How does that affect your capacity to sense and attune to your subtler sensory inputs? Just notice whatever you notice and let's begin. So you may have heard the phrase story follows state. What that means is that the state of our autonomic nervous system and the emotions and sensations running through our bodies at any given moment, those are what shape and direct the meanings that we make, whether we're responding to something, consciously or unconsciously, our state determines the story and the meaning we're making from the experience. And those meanings and stories, they become our beliefs. They become the biases and the internal narratives that guide our lives, both individually and collectively,

and this isn't one way

our stories and beliefs and biases also feed back into our nervous system. They shape how safe or unsafe we feel how we move through the world.

More often than not, we're not responding to the world as it is, but from the meanings that we've made about it and our resulting biases, which are usually unconscious or outdated or uninvestigated, or as Anaïs Nin famously put it, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are,

and this can often keep us looping inside the same old systems of meaning and experience, these closed loops that can feel hard to break out of, and meanwhile, Nature doesn't do closed loops and closed systems. If she did, it wouldn't allow for the movement of evolution in nature, a system is maintained until it's ready to evolve, which requires an openness. So within this whole story follows State Dance, there's a key player called neuroception, which is a term coined within polyvagal theory, which is a relatively new field of research exploring the nuances of how our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system, responds to the world and heals from trauma, especially through the workings of the magical vagus nerve. So you might already know about the vagus nerve. It's the longest nerve in the autonomic nervous system, like a wandering river running from brain to heart to lungs to belly, and connecting and directing all of the vital processes along the way, like heart rate and digestion and breathing, especially that rest and digest function that lets the body know you're safe. You can soften and relax now, the rest and digest state is what allows the body to process stress. The vagus nerve is essential to our ability to down regulate, to calm down after stress. And down, regulating and calming down after stress is what prevents the build up of cortisol and other stress hormones that can wreak havoc over time, leading to inflammation and burnout and hormonal imbalances, especially in women. The word vagus means wandering in Latin and the vagus nerve wanders. It meanders through the inner landscapes of our body, weaving communication between the brain and all of our vital organs and processes, much like underground mycelial networks do in Earth's ecosystems. And I'll leave it here about the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory, because what I want to talk about today is neuroception, which, like I said, is a term coined within polyvagal theory. So I wanted to contextualize it a bit. I love context. It gives us a more holistic perspective a larger picture or story or ecosystem in which something belongs. So attuning to neuroception is a central part of my own particular practice of reaching down and rising up, of presencing and centering a body and nervous system. First approach, which is essentially rewilding ourselves and reminding ourselves that we belong to nature, this organically and spontaneously, cultivates that quality of being in right relationship with the land and with all of nature through, first of all, coming into right relationship with our own incredible, wild, wise bodies, which are living extensions of the earth.

And I found that connecting with our neuroception is a powerful way to do this. So in polyvagal theory, there's a key difference between perception, which happens at the level of our conscious awareness, and neuroception, which takes place reflexively or automatically below the level of conscious awareness. It happens in response to cues that we're not consciously aware of, and those unconscious or subconscious reflexive responses create shifts in the state of our nervous system and remember story follows state. So those unconscious responses are what our stories, meanings and our beliefs are built from, even if we have no idea where they came from. There's a well known quote by Carl Jung that sums this up beautifully, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate. To me, getting to know the nuances of the nervous system, really learning its language, is the somatic path to making the unconscious conscious. So neuroception is that gut or heart based feeling happening below conscious awareness. It colors how we experience life, especially how safe or unsafe we feel. It's a non verbal cognition. It's not happening in the mind or at the level of thought. It's literally visceral, because it's processing signals from our viscera, our heart, our lungs, our intestines, as well as cues from the environment that we're not consciously aware of. Neuroception and the responses it triggers happen before the mind has had time to think and interpret and make meaning. It comes from the older parts of our neural circuitry, those that existed long before the development of conscious thought. For example, babies have neuroception way before their brains or spinal cords are fully formed. Its instinct how we know the world in its rawest form, like when our pit bull Bodhi senses coyotes in our rural desert neighborhood, and his hackles rise, and this low, rumbling growl begins to build from his belly, even though the coyotes aren't visible or howling, he's not sensing them through smell, because when that happens, He sniffs the Air first, and then the hackles and the growl happen when he's sensing them in this subtler way his body just knows. That's neuroception, pure automatic knowing from our subtler sensory inputs that are below the level of conscious perception happening subconsciously, or another very desert example is with rattlesnakes. My husband Ollie, has become something of a rattlesnake wrangler and relocator during our years here, and we've learned that adult rattlers are actually quite docile unless they sense threat, unless they neurocept fear. So when Ollie goes to relocate one from the land where you live on, he has to be in a genuinely calm state. His energy needs to say, you're safe with me, because you can't fake that. You can't deceive with nervous system and energetic communication. It has to be embodied. Otherwise it feels off. And I've come to understand neuroception as the physiological component of intuition and instinct. But if we've lived much of our lives in a state of unsafety or trauma, our neuroception gets hijacked. Our nervous system becomes anchored in the survival states of fight or flight or freeze or a combination of the three, even when there's no real threat present. When this happens, we're not able to make full and proper use of our neuroceptive abilities, because there's been no clearing and resetting of our nervous systems, which are overlaid with unprocessed stress hormones. When we're traumatized, we lose full access to ourselves. We stop trusting our inner knowing, and we start deferring to external authority and external information and doubting our instincts. We become disconnected from and mistrustful of our inner authority, our inner knowing and intuition, which doesn't feel safe to pay attention to because we're looping on an unprocessed trauma response. And this doesn't only happen from Big T traumas. Our fear based culture keeps most people in a constant drone of threat and vigilance. The world starts to feel fundamentally unsafe, and the media, including social media, algorithms, feed that loop and we don't have the capacity to question it or to feel something truer beneath the noise. And of course, the more fearful and anxious and stressed and traumatized we are, the more we mistrust our inner authority and don't have access to it, and the easier we become to control and manipulate. There's also the layer of ancestral and intergenerational trauma, those inherited survival patterns that run through our lineage, and they can unconsciously govern our lives until they're compassionately acknowledged and released. Often, when I'm working with someone, we'll discover a heavy sensation that's been looping in their nervous system that doesn't even belong to them. It's ancestral. It's been running its own story through their life, and when it's finally somatically processed and integrated, there's a clearing, there's a release, suddenly, there's more space to trust their intuition again, to attune to their neuroception. Deb Dana, who writes really excessively about polyvagal theory, says, When we receive cues of danger, we react, and when we receive cues of safety, we relax. But for many, neuroception brings a misattunement. They cannot reliably inhibit their defense systems in safe environments, or activate their defense systems when needed in risky environments. 

So this is where becoming aware of and tracking the subtleties of neuroception lets us start to clear it from layers of calcified stress and reclaim it as our inner superpower. When we start to resolve and integrate our trauma, we're no longer looping on unprocessed survival responses, and we can learn to cultivate trust in the visceral responses of our wise, wild bodies, our nervous systems and our energy bodies, and we can also learn to start attuning to and trusting our visceral responses by unhooking from the Doom scrolling or whatever it is that's hijacking our energy by keeping us stressed and anxious and instead anchor into that felt sense of safety from our present moment, lived reality in the here and now, by letting the body know and feel safety in the now. 

So where am I going with all of this? Why is it important to be properly attuned to our neuroceptive capacities? Because these are our spidey senses, our superpowers, our neuroception is that intuitive, instinctual, visceral, inner knowing that happens before the mind catches up. And unfortunately, we've had to pave over this wild, pre verbal, holistic, soul, body wisdom we've become so steeped in the mandates of a culture that's built on distortion and chronic fear and control. So most of us live with this underlying static of anxiety, and that static scrambles the signal of our neuroception and our intuition, or if we do receive clear intuitive hits or instinctual knowing, we often don't trust it. We second guess it, or we gaslight ourselves, especially if it challenges logic or cultural norms.

 And neuroception is also holistic. It emerges from the whole body, nervous system, energy field, it's the conversation that's happening between psyche and soma and spirit, these interdependent and multi dimensional aspects of who we are. And what I love about this is that it works in a both and way. It receives input from both internal and external cues beyond what our physical senses can perceive or our minds can analyze, and of course, we need both perception and neuroception working in harmony and in an integrated way to live sane and peaceful and healthy lives. When one is off balance, it affects the other. Right now, you're perceiving what I'm saying, and you're understanding through your own lens of subjective interpretation. And if your neuroception is clear and unclouded by stress or trauma, you're probably feeling relaxed and unhurried and maybe curious. You can listen, you can take what resonates, let the rest go without feeling defensive or triggered by anything I say. 

But in this dying dominant culture that we live in, most people's neuroception has become infiltrated, debilitated even, and that's dangerous, because we're going to need this superpower to navigate the profound and generative shifts that this planet is moving through At this time. So let's talk about that infiltration for a moment. The main culprit is Surprise, surprise, chronic stress, that constant background buzz of anxiety and disconnection and fatigue that we've normalized. And then you add in unprocessed trauma and the oscillation between hyper and hypo arousal and the fear driven, addictive propaganda of media and social media, and you've got a recipe for chaos in the nervous system. It makes us feel physically unsafe just because someone holds a different opinion. That's kryptonite to our superpower of neuroception, which is designed to alert us to actual danger and to anchor us into the parasympathetic rest and digest state when there's no threat, so that the body can process and repair but instead, we live in a culture where rest feels dangerous, where unplugging from the machine feels like a sort of collapse into irrelevance, where we don't feel safe, to relax, to pause, to make the space and time, to cultivate our capacity to listen inwardly, to attune to our subtler levels of feeling and sensation. 

And that's exactly what these times are asking us to do, to tune out the external noise and tune into the inner wells of our outlandishly innovative wisdom to become available for the clear cosmic downloads that are coming through. I found that attuning to our neuroception is also a pathway into getting into our non physical senses, our extra sensory capacities, and bringing them online, what's known as our clairs, clairaudience, clairentience, claircognizance, clairvoyance. We all innately have these abilities, because we all have energy bodies as well as physical bodies. Usually we have one clair that's more dominant than the others, but in our materialist culture, we've been collectively and systematically programmed and trained into dulling these senses so they're largely dormant in most of us. 

When we stay constantly stimulated, constantly consuming external information and reacting, we spin ourselves into collective chronic stress, and like I said, That's kryptonite to our neuroceptive powers when it's clear and unobstructed, neuroception can attune us to the truth behind words and appearances. It can guide us towards what's true and what's correct. And resonant for us, it's the sense that helps us discern truth from distortion, not with the thinking mind, but with the whole body, and we need that now more than ever in these ultra polarized, propagandized times. So as we decolonize and decondition and reclaim our neuroception through nervous system regulation and somatic experiencing, we start to drop deeper into our intuition. We begin to feel safe, to trust it over and above everything else, and from that trust, we can create new realities, become stewards and architects of the new emerging paradigm from wholeness and embodiment instead of fear and reactivity. When we reclaim this within ourselves, life becomes more multi dimensional. Decision making becomes playful, like a conversation with life, instead of a terrifying prospect, we start to trust ourselves again, and that trusting ourselves, that's the frequency of abundance and liberation. 

So I want to leave you with a really simple practice to start attuning to your neuroception in daily life. It's not really a practice, actually. It's more an exploration of a more embodied way of being. So as you move through your day, start paying attention to your body's visceral responses to in your interactions, both in person and online, when you meet someone new, and everything looks good on paper and they're saying all the right things, that something feels off trust, that even when there are no clear Reasons that the mind can perceive, you don't need a story or a reason to project onto them, and the mind might try to talk you out of it, to rationalize you out of it, and you can thank it, thank the mind, and return to that wordless story, free Knowing in the body, and the reverse can happen too. Someone might not look or sound like your type of person. They might fit all your stories and preconceived biases about why they're sketchy, but your body feels instantly calm or open around them. Trust that too. This is about giving yourself permission to let your visceral response be enough independent of your mind's preconceived biases and shoulds which Always disconnect us from our inner knowing you don't need to explain or rationalize it. You can simply act from it if necessary, like saying yes or no, without attaching labels or moral judgments. And that's some radical rewilding. 

Allow your somatic, non verbal cognition and response to be enough and let your actions arise from that. For example, saying no to someone without having to project labels onto them about why this also feels so liberating. There's no right way to do this. The point is to start bringing awareness to how your body communicates truth beneath thought and beneath conditioning, to what your inner knowing feels like, in contrast to mental analysis and rumination. So that's all from me for now. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for your presence and your attention. Let whatever resonated be received and whatever felt dissonant be released without story or drama, your attention and your energy are valuable. Don't offer them to what feels misaligned for you. 

And if you're interested in going deeper with this work of rewilding and decolonizing and reclaiming your superpower of neuroception and the many layers of nervous system recalibration and liberation, you can find ways to work with me one on one in the show notes below. And I'd also love to invite you to a free online gathering on December 10 called Stewarding the Emergent. It's the first of a conversation series on potential and growth and action in these rapidly changing times. And for this first conversation, we are going to be exploring the theme of what do we know when old certainties crumble? The link to register is in the show notes and until next time, stay rooted and keep attuning to the multi dimensional language of your wild, wise body.