To Navigate the Portal, Regulate Your Nervous System
Happy Sunday, Soothers. Welcome back to my series of teaching essays on Navigating the Portal.
Here's where we are so far in the essay series:
Navigating The Portal by Looking to the Stars (using the North Node of astrology)
Today we'll talk about the importance of the nervous system, regulating and grounding it, as you navigate the years of the Portal.
I write about the nervous system consistently and constantly, for good reason. I wrote about it in my Living a Surrendered, Intuitive Life series last year (read the nervous system essay here for more info).
But it's always worth a re-visit, because it's so critical.
And because the Portal will take place THROUGH your body.
You see, when we go through the Portal, we need to begin thinking of our bodies, and their command centers, the nervous system, as containers.
Having a steady (or, occasionally steady, anyways!) container to experience the Portal is one of the most important things you can do.
I like to think of humans, and their capacity for healthy emotional experiences, as containers. Let’s picture you when you were born as the container of a glass vase. Your own unique shape, your own unique size, but crystal clear and ready to be filled with beautiful and meaningful things and experiences.
But along the path of life some of your crystal clear parts get filled up by others. Perhaps handles or weird designs are added to the vase; maybe somebody who was supposed to be taking care of you, cleaning, you cherishing you, keeping you in a safe place, instead let you get really dusty and filled with crud, or even cracked. Or maybe you were filled with lovely things… they just weren’t the kind of things you’d fill your own vase with, given the chance.
By the time you get to The Portal, you’re not sure what’s yours, what’s not yours, how to get yourself back to clear and whole again, and then, what you might like to put in your own vase, aka, your own container. And your container may be filled to the brim, with no space to tolerate anything else, let alone all the Portal is going to ask you to go through.
And this is so important: The rocky Portal that wants to transform you, you have to remember: The transformation will be birthed THROUGH your body.
The Portal is like its own pregnancy, in a way, except you are re-birthing yourself.
So we look to our nervous system, and our container, to help us learn to steady ourselves so we can hold what the Portal is asking of us.
This article from therapist Andrea Bell beautifully and practically explains the concepts of containers in emotional experiences, so I'll excerpt from it here:
Somatic psychotherapists often use the informal metaphor of a “container” in describing a person’s state of overwhelm or resilience.
It’s a simple concept: If Janelle is experiencing a lot of stress, and/or her system isn’t very resilient, then one can say her container is overflowing, or close to it. On the other hand, if she successfully deals with her feelings and the external situations that cause them, she would create more “room” in her figurative container and she wouldn’t be so vulnerable to becoming stressed out. She could also work with a therapist in order to develop affect tolerance and self-regulation. She would then be making her container larger and less brittle, increasing her resilience across many life situations.
The container can be filled by our response to events earlier in our lives that we’ve repressed and not dealt with. Researchers and clinicians working with intergenerational trauma believe our containers hold the trauma passed down to us from the experiences of earlier generations. Such experience includes but is not limited to systemic racism and oppression. The field of epigenetics looks at changes in gene expression (which pieces of our DNA strands are being expressed, and which aren’t). These changes are thought to be responses to the environment, either current or historical. On the other hand, our containers can also be filled by present-day, acute stressors that we’re all too aware of. In practice, it’s usually a mix of both, and they can be interrelated.
Sometimes it isn’t immediately evident how full the container is becoming, because we are experts at hiding this from ourselves and the world. When talking about this with a person in therapy, I’ll often use the metaphor of my coffee cup. It’s a metallic travel mug, and when I hold it up, you can’t immediately tell how full it is. It could be nearly empty, or it could be close to overflowing. (It’s just a visual example. No fair trying to gauge my mood in order to figure out how much coffee is inside me rather than still in the cup!)
If the level inside the cup gets too close to the top, it overflows easily. This overflow would represent having a “meltdown”: panic attack, relapse into addictive behavior, major depressive episode, etc. Sometimes this surprises the person, as they hadn’t been consciously aware of the rising level in their container.
So, by the time we get to the Portal, a few things to be aware of:
I find that if we haven't processed past woundings, particularly childhood trauma and resulting Complex PTSD (which I find almost everybody, especially HSPs, has, to some extent), it's going to rear its full strength during the Portal to make sure you address and face it.
And because of that, and the stressors of daily life, we may have an already pretty full container by the time we get to the threshold of the Portal, and the sometimes stressful or triggering experiences of what the Portal will ask of us can overwhelm us.
But the good news is is that we can increase our container's capacity for expansion and resilience through some practices that will help us engage the nervous system.
So what can we do?
Well, go back to my original nervous system post, the tips are pretty much the same:
First is to simply gain some basic nervous system awareness. Get familiar with the standard four Fs, which are the protective, automatic defense mechanisms of the nervous system:
Fight: This looks like guarding yourself, getting defensive, lashing out, having fights in your head, having actual fights, saying things you regret
Flight: Racing around, never being able to slow down and relax, creating 1 million to-do lists, going from racing around doing the laundry to typing 500 emails to googling recipes to creating plans
Freeze: Shame, depression, numbing out on social media live here, as do avoidance, procrastination, feeling in a fog
Fawn: Massive people-pleasing, saying yes to stay safe or liked, acquiescing in order to stay safe or liked, terrified of conflict, setting boundaries, etc.
You may experience all of these at any given time, or a combo of 2-3 too, but likely there is one here that is predominant for you.
(I also highly recommend reading Pete Walker's book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, during this time in the Portal, to see if any of it resonates with you, and how to address triggers that come up.)
After some awareness, the next step I recommend is choosing a regular and daily, under 5 minute grounding practice you can commit to. You do it rain or shine, on days when you're feeling awful and days when you're flying high. It is the teeth brushing of the nervous system; you must begin to practice preventative nervous system hygiene. We are all in this for the long game, and the Portal — well, it can be long!
My favorite practices:
EFT tapping (Brad Yates on YouTube is my fave and here is a playlist of some of my fave EFT videos)
Simply lying down on the floor doing nothing for 5 minutes
Humming/gargling
Being in nature without any devices
Stretching
Yoga (I particularly find this lower back/hips video helpful)
And for anybody who has a bit of capacity to do a 10-minute practice, try out this Instagram reel I created for you showing you my 10-minute nervous system routine.
Go little by little, day by day, and as you continue to practice this grounding and internal safety, the more capacity your nervous system, your container has to handle the transformation of the Portal.
I'm here, rooting for you.