9. Create Authenticity in Your Wellness
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the body breaking free podcast!
EPISODE 9: Jenn Solomon talks all about Yoga Therapy, Nervous System, Stress, Trauma, Ayurveda.
Jenn Solomon is a yoga therapist, trauma yoga specialist, ayurvedic health counselor and the owner of PC Yoga Collective.
AUTHENTIC WELLNESS PLAN: INTRO
Do you ever feel like you have a wellness plan – But then something doesn’t feel right
It just doesn’t feel authentic to you. You might be doing everything right = your program, diet, whatever you are following, workout schedule - but it might feel hard, like you have to keep motivating yourself. It doesn’t feel centered, peaceful joyful. The problem isn’t if you are doing it right. It is not about right vs wrong. The problem is something isn’t authentic to you and what you need in your life right now.
So what do you do? How do you figure out what isn’t working, and what would be more authentic to you. The best place to start = new perspectives = new insights = more options = more choices. So you can have the options to CHOOSE and try out new tools and also look at things through a new lense.
Jenn is such a gift because she does that so beautifully in today’s episode. She offers us choice, she opens the space, she gets into a lot of topics where we can look at things through a new lense = Yoga Ayurveda, mind-body connection, nervous system
What Jenn does is open the space for us to come to this conversation – fully being ourselves, allowing us to look at our wellness & body through difference lens. Gaining new perspectives, looking all these topics through a new lense – so you can create your authentic wellness.
MAIN TAKEAWAY #1 = YOGA
First we talked about PCYOGA collective. A place we can elimate thoughts = emotional bathroom. I love this analogy – because if you can get over the fact we are talking about poop and having an emotional bathroom – really take a minute to think about how much sensory input we get throughout the day….now we don’t have a place we can let go of this. We don’t have a place we can have a mental & physical release of all the stuff we are holding onto that we really don’t need.
It is a place you can come that is safe, to be yourself, to get to know yourself on a different level of compassion authenticity.
LOVE LOVE LOVE!
“bad thoughts we all have, you know, low moments turning into those seeing those opens the door to understanding, understanding opens the door to self forgiveness, forgiveness opens the door to compassion, compassion opens the door to acceptance, right” – Jenn Solomon
MAIN TAKEAWAY #2 = YOGA THERAPY
(1)Trauma informed Yoga = is a style of teaching
It's just it's a way that you teach that offers a lot of options, choices, non hierarchical cueing
(2) Trauma sensitive yoga and trauma yoga therapy
Trauma disorder or PTSD
Yoga therapy classes as utilizing yoga to regulate the body to regulate the nervous system.
Bottom – Up Process: Bringing the body into practice is a bottom up processing tool
MAIN TAKEAWAY #3 = Nervous System
Sympathetic nervous system = fight flight
Para-sympathetic nervous system = rest & digest
Vagus Nerve: What connects the brain to the body is the cranial nerve called the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve has three branches, that go down into your body
Jenn did an incredible job at explaining all of the interactions. Below is the conversation transcribed to get all the details!
Relating Nervous System to Health Goals: How do we take this knowledge with us to our health goals? It just gives us another perspective to look at with our wellness. If you are in a state of stress, if you are out of balance – you can see how everything else is out of wak. Carrying stress in your body, your gut and processing food your diet connected to your hormones. So that’s why I asked Jenn how we relate this information to our health goals. Because most of us – we just want the journey to be enjoyable, we want our wellness to feel good, and easy – not a state of control and stress. How do we approach our goals differently from a place of calm and centered, and how do we make some small changes to bring the body back into the balance? – so that we can be successful from a place of balance. SO much to unpack – and if it feels overwhelming – the first thing is knowledge is power. You are taking one step to understanding the systems in your body. And that’s a pretty powerful step = just trying to learn something new.
TRANSCRIBE - JENN & NERVOUS SYSTEM
Nervous System: your nervous system first divides into two, your central nervous system, which is your brain and your spinal cord, and your peripheral nervous system is everything else. Your peripheral nervous system divides into two, your autonomic nervous system and your somatic nervous system, your somatic nervous system is the nervous system that you can control. If I said, Katie, raise your right arm, you would be able to do that. You can speak to those muscles, you can make those muscles fire you can lift your arm and bring it down. Your autonomic nervous system is automatic. You can't control it. You can't change it. I can't say to you, Katie, could you please turn off your spleen for the next 10 minutes. You can't do that, right? The autonomic nervous system then branches yet again, into the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, your sympathetic nervous system, fight flight, freeze fond submit, all five of those fall under your sympathetic nervous system. Your parasympathetic nervous system is rest and digest and then freeze. We keep it in a sympathetic nervous system because of where it outputs in the body. But it really is what we know now a dorsal vagal response. That's what we call it now. So in addition, we've got autonomic nervous system sympathetic, parasympathetic, then the question is, how does the nervous system get to the body? So when your brain you've got three brains, I know we're going down a path, right? You've got your lizard brain, your basal ganglia or your brainstem. And inside of that brain is your HPA axis hypothalamus, pituitary adrenal, right? Your vagus nerve connects to that part of your brain, then a little bit above because the brain is a bottom up development organ, it starts developing with the brainstem, then the emotional brain develops, that's your limbic brain that's got your hippocampus and your amygdala and your insular cortex in it. So that is your I receive sensories. And I'm categorizing it. Is this a bad thing? Is this a good thing? Have I seen this before? Do I know what this is? Is it new, it's how we learn that if we touch a stove, it's hot is right is the emotional brain, the limbic system, and then really unique to humans, and some more evolved great apes is the neocortex, which is the top layer of your brain that's executive functioning of your brain. That's how we're able to speak. It's how we're able to process whether people are saying to us, that's our logic and rational thinking brain. It is our time keeper brain, right? So what connects the brain to the body is the cranial nerve called the vagus nerve. It's your 10th cranial nerve, the wandering nerve, vagus nerve has three branches, the first branch comes forward into the face and down into the chest, and it's called your ventral vagal branch. And it is the branch when we are like, right now we're making eye contact, we're speaking we're connected, we are both in ventral vagal. Second part is your sympathetic nervous system. That's your fight or flight that goes all the way down into your gut. And it comes out on the front side of the vagus nerve, low branch. And then the backside of that same branch is called your dorsal Vegas system. Your dorsal Vegas system is your freeze system. Many, not many people, but people often think that the freeze is just a pass out, like I'm just oh, I fainted, right? What the freeze actually is, the freeze response is where we are unable to escape the threat. So this happens in a hierarchy. So we're in ventral vagal, we're connected, right? We're talking, we get a stimulus, the stimulus goes to your emotional brain, it goes to your limbic system, to the part of your brain called the amygdala. And the amygdala is like, do I ever seen this before? Do we know what this is? And let's say that this stimulus was something like a bear like all of a sudden we look up and there's a bear right there, right? The amygdala would be like, ah, bear, and would send information down to the brainstem to say to the vagus nerve, freak out, right? freak out. So the vagus nerve would then send information to the adrenals. Right? That's it right back here on your back and say, do you know get ready shits going? Right? And that comes out of the front of the biggest nerve? That's your sympathetic nervous system that your fight or flight? Well, let's say that we can't get away from this bear. Right? We can't fly it away. We can't fight it away. The dorsal vagal system is where we essentially lose consciousness is our body's way of protecting us from pain. Also, so we can go limp because right often animals won't hunt if the animal is and you know, running right? We see this a lot in nature videos like Like a hyena will get a deer, but the deer will pass out and the hyena will let go, and then the deer will just take right off. Yeah, that's a dorsal vagal response, your foot is still on the gas, right, your foot is still on sympathetic nervous system. But now the other foots on the brake. So you've stopped everything, you've cut off all the connection, we have essentially, you know, passed out, we're not feeling pain. The second that thread has passed, though, the brake lifts off, and the sympathetic nervous system is still going right. And that's how that deer is able to shoot off and run away. Because the sympathetic nervous system we see this with people coming out of anesthesia, right when they come out of anesthesia and there's swinging, punching, shaking, jumping, right, like that is coming back from a dorsal vagal. state.
Dissociation. So dissociation comes from the dorsal vagal. Sometimes dissociation will come in the fight response, you'll see that if you've ever said boo to someone who has some sort of fight PTSD, trauma, and they'll raise up, you know, and it's, it's just a response. And so the work, the nervous system is not broken, right? It's not that the parasympathetic nervous system is weak, and we have to make it stronger, or the sympathetic nervous system is too strong, we have to make it weaker, it's that the transfer switch isn't firing, right? Like the light switch, imagine that like, your your light bulb is fine. But when you go to turn your light on, you won't turn on because there's something in the wiring. So the vagus nerve is kind of the wiring. The vagus nerve is made up of 85% afferent nerve fibers. So what that means is that 80 to 85%, of the vagus nerve is waiting for information from the body to come back up to the brain. Yeah, so we like to think the brain has eyes. And we like to think the brain understands the brain does not have eyes, brain doesn't have a nose brain doesn't have a mouth brain doesn't have an ear, right? The brain has these nerve endings that pick up on vibrations, again, sensory information that goes to the amygdala. And then the amygdala has to make this decision like is as bad as it's good. What should I do with it, right? And then the amygdala basically calls down to the brainstem, and is like, Hey, is it all good down there, and the brainstem is waiting for the body to come back up and say threats passed, the threat has passed, we're safe. So as long as the body is staying in a state of heightened stress, the brain thinks the stress is still happening. So why I think we're seeing so much more PTSD recently is we are so connected with our devices with, you know, the news with work with everything, that we're getting so much more sensory input than we were getting 60 years ago, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, that our nervous system is just an overdrive, so we're never really relaxing, and then add on to that, you know, a more severe traumatic event. And that's just a recipe for disaster. So we have to in yoga therapy for trauma, we work on relaxing the body. Relaxing is a dangerous word. And I'll come back to why that is, but we work on allowing the body to send signals up the vagus nerve to the brainstem, because remember that the brainstem holds the nervous system, through the chemicals that it sends down the vagus nerve. And then the vagus nerve waits. Once the body can tell the vagus nerve, hey, the threat has passed, we are safe. That signal travels up the vagus nerve to the brainstem and the brainstem goes, Okay, cool. Well, we will turn off the sympathetic nervous system, and we will re engage the parasympathetic nervous system. And this is why in people who experience a small traumatic event little t right big t who don't develop PTSD, what we see is a decrease in cortisol after the traumatic event. People who have PTSD or chronic PTSD, sorry, we see an increase in cortisol after the traumatic event. People who have PTSD, chronic PTSD, complex trauma have depleted levels of cortisol, because they're not accessing their parasympathetic nervous system to allow their body to remake that stress hormone. They've just depleted it all out.
Vagus Nerve. Where the vagus nerve outputs in the gut, so remember, it's called the wandering nerve. It carries our nervous system. The vagus nerve carries the autonomic nervous system, from the brainstem down to the body, it comes forward into the chest. But it really dumps out in the guts, right is where it comes out. your gut is a bigger brain than the brain in your head. More serotonin and more dopamine are created in the gut than anywhere else in the body. And there's more serotonin receptors in the gut than there are in the entire body put together. your gut is a very smart there's, you know, my gut feeling my gut says my gut is saying right, we deeply know in our tissues on a cellular level that our gut is smart, right. So oftentimes the gut will receive information before the brain even does because the body is a somatic body, right. So the gut then connects to an organ called the so as so the basal ganglia of the gut, which just means the nerve brain of the gut, connects and runs through and around the psoas. So the so as is the muscle that connects your upper half of your body to the lower half of your body. It starts in thoracic spine 12, and it comes all the way down to lumbar spine five, so t 12 and 12345. All the way on the left side and the right side it goes through your pelvis and it inserts in your lesser trochanter which is the inside of your hip bones. This muscle is exceptionally important 95% of this muscle is made of sympathetic nervous system fibers. Yeah. Now the purpose of this muscle is to run and to kick your right ladies, you couldn't walk if you didn't have a so as your body couldn't move if you didn't have a so as So following our pattern of what we know sensory input comes in the amygdala goes out, freak out, sends it down to the brainstem. The brainstem says got this we're gonna send a signal to the adrenals to turn on and start pumping adrenaline into the body that comes down through the vagus nerve hits the adrenals, then that goes straight to the so as 95% of the so as sympathetic nervous system fibers and the psoas goes and tightens up. Yeah. And then the so as is connected to the diaphragm, so the diaphragm and so as talk to each other, they're right against each other, they share nerve fibers right there. So that's why our breath changes when we're in sympathetic nervous system because it's so as goes, Hey, you know, breathe different, right? And the diaphragm goes, Okay, we're going to breathe with much longer inhales and much more shallow exhales. So it's like, if you have seen someone who's very upset, and you're like, What's wrong, and they're like, I just right, that kind of breath is a sympathetic nervous system in gauging breath. So all of this stuff is working together in your body. And then the brain is just like, Good, right. And so as just stays tight, until we get a signal until we do something, usually what happens in the animal kingdom is the threat passes. And then the breathing returns to normal, which sends a signal to the so as to relax, which sends a signal to the gut that everything's okay, which then tells the Vegas nerve that life is good, that travels up to the brainstem and the brainstem goes, great, let's turn on the parasympathetic nervous system, or let's at least turn off the adrenals at this point, as long as we are breathing, in a way that engages a sympathetic nervous system will stay in a state of stress.
MAIN TAKEAWAY #4 = Ayurveda
How do we bring ourselves back into a state of balance (mind, body & spirit).
Prakriti = born constitution (natural state) & Vick=riti = where you are now = Looking at what is presenting out of balance
Ayurveda allows us to look at emotions, depression, anxiety, body, diet – differently.
Jenn talks about how Ayruveda celebrates the individuality – and this can be really beneficial to get out of the comparison – the judgement of “should” – I should be doing this, I should look like that. INSTEAD the individuality is about what is authentic to you and that beautiful blend of what makes you YOU. Finding that – and then using that as your North Star – to find balance in everything else. Its centered around your unqiue make-up. Its another tool to look at things different. To gain new perspective – and then take what resonates with you and leave the rest.
