The Spiritual Vagus
When I talk about the vagus nerve and the human nervous system, my words nearly always veer into territory that is not typical of science as we know it in the Western world. Energy, resonance, subconscious, felt sense, flow, connection, the healing power of music… It can sound like I’m talking about something magical and mystical. I find myself clarifying, “I know this sounds woo, but it’s actually science.”
Today I want to talk about this intersection of spirituality and science and why it’s nearly impossible to talk about the function of the vagus in the sorts of concrete physical terms that are common in other scientific fields.
First, I want to clarify that I’m not talking about religion when I talk about spirituality. I think that’s important to say at the beginning because so many of us have religious trauma. Some people experience spirituality in their religion but many do not and experience harm instead. For sake of a common definition, when I refer to spirituality, I’m talking about our individual and collective search for sacred meaning and purpose in life. Things that are spiritual relate to or affect the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.
Western science has claimed to be able to study the body and the soul separately. This mind-body dualism has always been challenged by Eastern and Indigenous understandings of the interconnected nature of the body, mind, emotions, and spirit. More recently disability scholars have taken to using the term “bodymind” to describe the interdependence of mental and physical processes.
The inseparability of the human body and spirit becomes quite evident when we study trauma. Trauma is an injury or wounding of the soul that has physical effects on the entire body system. The concept of trauma demands that we explore reality beyond the physical.
In the most concrete terms, trauma can be understood as electrical energy that is trapped in a particular part of the body by the activation of the dorsal vagus as a protective measure until it receives a safe enough signal from the ventral vagus to release and integrate that energy.
When the brainstem is neurocepting safety or danger, that is not a purely physical process, it is also a spiritual one. Our nervous system is constantly scanning for threats both from our environment and from our non-physical sense of self. Trauma healing happens at the physical and energetic/emotional level either simultaneously or as a positive feedback loop (emotional connections promote physical connections which promote emotional connections, etc)
When we look at the specific functions of the vagus, the concept of it being a spiritual nerve becomes more evident. The vagus is responsible for blood flow to the brain, heart rate, breath, digestive motility, and orgasm - all physical processes that invoke a sense of experience beyond the physical.
The activation of the dorsal vagus reduces blood flow to our brains, collapses our posture, shortens our breath, and causes us to feel disconnection and shame. This felt experience is probably where our collective concepts of hell come from. If you were to take the time to read through many people’s descriptions of severe freeze/shutdown states and depression and compare those with religious depictions of hell, the commonalities might surprise you.
On the other hand, the activation of the ventral vagus increases blood flow to our brains, straightens our posture, deepens our breath, and causes us to feel connection and belonging. This felt experience is probably where our concepts of heaven come from. If you were to take the time to read through descriptions of euphoric and blissed out connective states and compare those with religious depictions of heaven, you’d see why many of us trauma survivors are so obsessed with stimulating the ventral vagus to feel better.
To clarify, I am not assigning Good/Bad morality to either branch of the vagus nerve. The dorsal is not Bad, and the ventral is not Good, although it may be comforting to think that way when stuck in the hell feels of a long term dorsal freeze response. I’m not intending to minimize the suffering experienced in deep dorsal states, but I want to recognize that descents into the underworld are an important part of the sacred journey of the soul. The two branches of the vagus are like yin and yang; they are complimentary rather than oppositional. Both “sides” are helpful for us in different ways. Their activation dance for our survival produces an effect that is bigger than the sum of their parts.
This spiritual dimension of the vagus nerve is why the vast majority of recommendations for trauma healing are not concrete protocols or saleable items but rather general activities that aim for an embodied experience of connection, either to ourselves or to others or to something bigger than ourselves. The activities that can balance the dorsal over-activation of our culture are not easily monetized. The activation of the ventral vagus produces a different kind of wealth - emotional and spiritual wealth.
Chronically imbalance towards stuckness in dorsal (which is much more painful than the temporary dips through dorsal that our nervous systems have evolved to do) seems to be a design of our current society. People stuck in dorsal are good cogs in the machine until they run out of energy to fawn. People stuck in dorsal look for a quick fix way to feel better and are willing to pay exorbitantly for promises of healing. Many ventral vagus stimulating activities are inaccessible because of poverty or lack of safe people to connect with.
The widespread lack of social support for the spiritual dimension of the vagus nerve is traumatic. It is an intergenerational and systemic form of trauma where childhood experiences of misattunement and lack of co-regulation are continually re-enacted in our adult lives. At the cultural level, healing trauma means creating more and more access to activities such as meditation, yoga, singing, humming, chanting, dancing, free movement, real friendships, conscious breathing, time in nature, bilateral stimulation, hugs, conscious sex, praying, rituals, worship, making music, creating art, and more.
Side note, there’s a few things that I don’t typically include in my lists like cold exposure and electrical stimulation. Not because they never work, but because for most people these are overwhelming ways to try to attain vagal balance. Manual stimulation of the ventral vagus without sufficient spiritual safety will flood or overwhelm the nerve, which we can neurocept as dangerous enough to provoke a stress response that entrenches the dorsal stuckness.
Feeling compassion, feeling awe, feeling connected - these subjective spiritual/emotional experiences are the common threads in the activities that bring fluidity to our stuck nervous systems. If we purely focus on the physical aspect of the vagus, we are missing a large part of the nerve’s function.
The vagus conducts physical, energetic, emotional, and spiritual information from the brain to body and vice versa. We do not completely understand all aspects of this yet, but that doesn’t make it unscientific. Where the nervous system is concerned, science and spirituality are one and the same. In many ways, nervous system science is kinda magical. After all, isn’t magic just technology that too complicated to explain yet?
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