10:18 min
CLEAR ALL
How each of us can become a therapeutic presence in the world. Images and sounds of war, natural disasters, and human-made devastation explicitly surround us and implicitly leave their imprint in our muscles, our belly and heart, our nervous systems, and the brains in our skulls.
This practical guide to understanding the cranial nerves as the key to our psychological and physical well-being builds on Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory—one of the most important recent developments in human neurobiology.
[Porges'] widely-cited polyvagal theory contends that living creatures facing or sensing mortal danger will immobilize, even “play dead,” as a last resort.