Neuroception: How the Autonomic Nervous System Keeps Us Regulated with John Eli Guray

Neuroception: How the Autonomic Nervous System Keeps Us Regulated with John Eli Garay

Jeffrey Besecker: This is The Light Inside, I'm Jeffrey Besecker.

Pain, our emotional reactivity, frequently causes it to surface as the emotional turmoil we feel. You've perhaps heard this cliche and often-worn phrase. We can't grow without pain, or maybe it's discomfort. But what if we can and do frequently grow in states that exist free of this existentially created and self-inflicted pain and suffering? If you're feeling helpless, frustrated, and overwhelmed as you try to navigate the complexities of your autonomic nervous system, despite trying various therapies, medications, and lifestyle changes, then this episode is for you. It's not uncommon for us to feel that life, the world, other people, and even ourselves are getting on our nerves. A very specific nerve located in our autonomic central nervous system, to be exact. We may or may not be able to eliminate all existential pain and suffering from our lives, yet some of it can certainly serve a valid and healthy purpose. In spite of this, when we navigate through our fleeting emotions and conditioned beliefs, we frequently find ourselves emotionally triggered and activated, with a drive to only react. It all starts to feel like we're playing a childish game of emotional chutes and ladders. Our guest today, self-awareness coach, John Eli Gurray, shows us how to more effectively understand and navigate our autonomic ladder. We also learn an effective insight that might alleviate much of the pain and discomfort we frequently feel, as we ease on down our paths of both growth and evolution. Discover your naturally aspired power to self-regulate and confidently embrace security with Neuroception, the foundation of all feeling. Tune in to find out more when we return to The Light Inside. We'd like to offer a shout out to our affiliate matching partner, Podmatch.com. Podmatch is the revolutionary podcasting matching system driven by AI. As an industry leader in podcast guesting and hosting, they are a go-to solution for creating meaningful podcast interactions. Podmatch.com makes finding the ideal guest or host effortless. Stop by and visit our affiliate link today at www.thelightinside.us. Humans, existing as infinitely interactive beings, are constantly scanning both our environments and relationships for valid cues that assess our present state of well-being. Yet, sometimes, we may not recognize the triggers that precede a nervous system response, even when they dramatically change our mood. such as a state shift from connected to fight or flight. It's why many people often confusedly ask, why did I react this way? From a place of calm and safety, it may seem irrational. Feelings of shame may also cloud our experience, hindering proper introspection and understanding what is really happening is the springboard for change. So, we ask ourselves, can trauma haunt the body the same way it haunts memories? According to Stephen Porges, not only does the body remember a traumatic experience, but it can actually get stuck in the trauma response mode. The senses are constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger every millisecond. Based on these signals, neurobiological mechanisms will be triggered spontaneously. either activating a calm, parasympathetic, or aroused, synthetic response. Deb Dana identifies the three places we receive signals from – outside, within, and between – as we travel up and down the progression of the process known as the autonomic ladder. Humans are ultimately social beings, and spending time in this between-social-state connection is essential to both our mental and physical health. Our guest today, John Eli Gouray, teaches us how to more effectively navigate our autonomic ladder for more successful emotional self-regulation, keeping us between that ever-present sweet spot where our inner light truly shines. So John, what is neuroception and how does this essential role function or set of processes govern our ability to self-regulate and feel safe and secure?
John Eli Garay: You asked me a loaded question. The first question you have is one that's going to require some explaining. What our autonomic nervous system does is it stores information regarding every experience that we have been through in our lives. And really what it tries to do to help protect us, it helps us to do two things. It helps us either to identify sources of safety or to make ourselves aware of danger. So the autonomic nervous system through the process of your reception, it scans the environment that you're in and it's always looking for cues of safety and cues of danger. And all of this is taking place without you even being aware of it. And it's way before your brain is understanding that there is safety or danger in the room or in your environment. Your neuroception has already scanned your environment and it is causing your body to either work in a regulated state or a dysregulated state with the whole intention of it is to keep you safe and secure.

Jeffrey Besecker: I like looking at that role of neuroception and how it tends to explain why a baby might coo at a caregiver, but cry at a stranger, or why a toddler enjoys a parent's embrace, but views a hug from a stranger as an assault or something that challenges their sense of safety. I think it's relevant to regard that that's the phase when we start to develop a lot of these patterns, habits, and tendencies. I'll frame them that way. In that regard, might we view these processes being seen as the foundation of all feeling in some regards?

John Eli Garay: Yeah, and absolutely they are. I've heard it explained, and I love this explanation, that we have a tendency to talk about our emotions and it kind of seems to be the buzz of anywhere that, you know, there's mental health circles, personal gross circles people talk about their emotions. But I heard this one therapist one time explain that emotions are the outward expression of our feelings. And so we can think of them kind of like being emojis, you know, whatever we're feeling emotes on our face, you know, or our body language. And what our feelings are, they're the interpretation of our somatic experiences. So whenever our neuroception has triggered or has detected danger in our surroundings, we may feel fearful or we may feel angry, we may feel agitated, and we interpret the feeling, our brain interprets the feeling, and then we emote either, you know, anger, fear, or whatever expression. And the same goes with safety. Whenever we feel safe, whenever our autonomic nervous system interprets that there's safety in our environment, we will feel content, we'll feel peaceful, and that will emote in our physical body as well.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you for that breakdown. I feel a lot of times we might be inclined to view those acts together, you know, mutually inclusive thinking, feeling and processing all of them into one thing. I think at times that can become that disconnect where we either have internal conflict or external conflict. I feel one way, I'm emoting another. Someone else might be feeling a certain way, but perceiving that emotion in a different regard. So I think that's an interesting area to kind of look at and parse out to maybe discern a little bit. How do we differentiate the two?

John Eli Garay: Absolutely. I want to jump back just a little bit because something came to my mind whenever we We were talking about this, and you asked the question, and that's Deb Dana. She's like my hero when it comes to polyvagal theory. But she says that story always follows state. And so our mind is always going to be interpreting our experience based on whatever our autonomic state is. Wherever we find ourselves on the polyvagal ladder, if we find ourselves in a state of flight or fight, that's the flavor of the story that it's going to influence the flavor of the story that our brain creates. And whenever we find ourselves in a place of safety, in a place of legal venture, we're going to find out that the story that our mind creates is a lot different than whenever we're in flight or flight, freeze or shut down. And so, what we tell ourselves, or what the stories that our brain creates, the interpretation begins within us. And it begins with the experience that our body is feeling. And all of this is taking place before, without our mind even being aware of it. So it can create sometimes some cognitive dissonance. That's what I was hearing whenever you were asking this last question. Sometimes our way of coping is to disconnect and to dissociate, to drop down the ladder and to, even though we're present, be in a state of shutdown.

Jeffrey Besecker: In that regard, it very often surfaces as a form of inference transference where we perceive, yet we respond from a past experience. We project those thoughts and feelings onto the situation and circumstances or people involved in many regards.

John Eli Garay: Absolutely. So a part of, you know, neuroception is that our autonomic nervous system is neurocepting every experience that we have in the lens of our prior experiences. And so let's take, for instance, let's say that someone, whenever they were a child, because usually a lot of where, um, the interpretive lens of our autonomic nervous system, it stems back to childhood. Let's say that somebody had a bad experience with someone who had a specific look to them, had a specific mannerism, a specific tone of voice. And that experience created a sense of trauma. And I want to say little t trauma because it's not a huge traumatic event, but yet it was something that was significant enough to impact that person. I'll give the example of my wife, my poor wife. I use her for examples all the time. But she had a history teacher that badgered her and it created a sense of of shame and a sense of of discomfort for her and nervousness. And my wife is a second generation of the United States. So her parents came in from Mexico before she was born. So there was a language barrier. There was all these different challenges. So her experience with this teacher now triggers her experience with males who look like him and dress like him. And so if there's a specific tone of voice, and it wasn't until I began to study polyvagal theory and we began to talk about what I was learning at dinner table, she's like, oh my gosh, my autonomic nervous system is remembering these prior experience with this history teacher. And now there's this inference, there's this transference, there's this, These poor people are getting the brunt of my experience with this past teacher and that person is no longer present. They caused an autonomic response based on that little t trauma that she experienced in the classroom.

Jeffrey Besecker: You know, in many ways throughout our lives, we're taking these little mini snapshots of our experience, our interactions, how we've fought, how we felt, the emotions involved, the people involved, the circumstances involved, storing those in our neocortex for later recall as we move up and down the autonomic ladder. Let's turn, if we can, to the autonomic ladder. What is the autonomic ladder and how does it function in regard to our ability to engage neuroception?

John Eli Garay: So whenever our autonomic nervous system is neurocepting, I don't even know if I'm saying that correctly. One of the things about being from a bilingual household is that sometimes we just invent words because it sounds good in both languages.

Jeffrey Besecker: So I wonder about the English language anyway, if we haven't done that to a large regard.

John Eli Garay: I've had people people make comments on social media before on some of my posts, and they've called me out like, yes, I'm bilingual. I may have merged two languages together with that. I apologize. But basically what our autonomic nervous system does, whenever it receives the cues, it sends signals to one of three different pathways and each one of them has a distinct response. For example, the dorsal part of our vagal nervous system, that's like centered like within, like around our stomach area. Whenever that part of the vagus nerve is triggered, it sends us into a state of shutdown. It sends us into a state of immobilization. And you usually find people whenever that part of their autonomic nervous system has been triggered, they experience like collapse, disassociation, they feel empty, they feel dark, they feel a lot of despair. Now, whenever the autonomic nervous system triggers our sympathetic nervous system, that triggers like our chest area. And that's whenever we feel it ends up triggering our extremities as well. So that's whenever we feel like mobilized, we feel like going into flight or fight. We usually want some kind of action because we feel activated, maybe uneasy, maybe anxious, maybe angry, distressed. Maybe our heart begins to pound a lot. And then the third part of the top, what we call the top of the ladder is the ventral bagel. Whenever our ventral bagel nervous system is activated, that's whenever we feel safe, whenever we feel social, that's whenever we feel connected. And that may mostly impacts our facial area. We're able to look at people in the face. We're able to interact. We feel happy. We feel peaceful. We feel regulated. We feel comfortable. We feel engaged. We feel presence. Why? Because safety is present.

Jeffrey Besecker: So let's break that down a little bit, if we might, into each of the three categories. Let's specifically zero in, what is the dorsal vagal response and how does our ANS interact with it?

John Eli Garay: Yeah, so I just want to start with a clause and that's that, well the disclaimer, and that's that we go up and down the ladder all day long. You know, and there's not one.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's our action biases, John, where we feel we have to constantly be in motion and acting upon everything.

John Eli Garay: Yes, yes, yes. You know, I'm sorry, but your autonomic nervous system is not Instagram. You know, it doesn't just produce the happy, fluffy moments that are worthy of a picture. It's the unreal human. The reality is that you have good moments. You can be happy, you know, connected, you know, kiss your wife on the way out of the house or your significant other, your pet, whatever. You just had a great morning and then you get stuck in traffic and somebody's honking behind you and then you slip into a sympathetic state where you're activated. And that doesn't make you a bad person. That state be something that is horrible. It is your nervous system telling you that there is danger in the area. And you mentioned the dorsal state. What I think is important to know before we dive into that is that it's a ladder. A person will usually go into a state of a sympathetic state first, which usually becomes so activated that there's a stepping into a dorsal state. And in a dorsal state, basically what the body is doing for us, the nervous system is doing for us, is it's saving energy so that way we can make a last minute jump for it if we need to. It detects danger in a way that is overwhelming for our energy levels to maintain a level of activation. So what's causing you to slow down to be able to save energy in case you need it for a last minute getaway?

Jeffrey Besecker: In the past, we've spoke with guests, how that action is kind of like playing maybe a game of emotional shoots and ladders where you're sliding down the shoot when you're moving into that dorsal vagal phase. Often we slide down there to that bottom run where we stay immobilized, we freeze and we shut down, as you mentioned. Yeah. Might we sometimes then view that from your perspective in some regards as some of those more avoidant behaviors we lean into where we avoid engaging those feelings and emotions?

John Eli Garay: What I find more than anything is that people are disengaged with what is People are apt to say, you know, I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm discontent, I'm fearful, I'm feeling shame. People are okay, for the most part, communicating emotion. Some aren't, but for the most part, people are aware, at least in their mind, they know how they feel. However, what people tend to disassociate with is what is taking place within their body. So whenever somebody is in a dorsal state, it's not just the emotion behind it, but there's actually physical things that are taking place. Usually the heart rate begins to slow down. Usually the breathing rate begins to slow down. Usually there's a loss of energy. And there might even be a sense of heaviness within the extremities of your body, almost feeling like you're too heavy to move. And a lot of it is somatic experiences that most people who are experiencing like even like a clinical level of depression might be feeling, even if it's only for a moment or two. And people usually attempt to try to disengage from that state because they don't know what to do with it. Typically, we're not taught polyvagal theory in elementary school.

Jeffrey Besecker: I don't feel we're maybe not given a full spectrum of emotional regulation. That's a very subjective view of it. I think some of that might derive from the fact that we're just now in our arc of human growth and evolution starting to have a more expansive understanding of these states. So how do these avoidant behaviors frequently surface in our interactions? Meaning, what typical actions do we exhibit when we're in this mode or can be viewed as some of the standard wastefulness? They vary from person to person, so whatever you like.

John Eli Garay: I talk myself to hell. Yeah, like I give example of my wife with her history teacher. I had some amazing experiences with some of my history teachers, the way that we experience people are going to be completely different because of our, our lived experiences. However, for the most part, whenever someone is in a state of shutdown, usually their behavior is a little reclusive, quiet. You're going to see that there's not a lot of movement. They're going to be sedentary and maybe not an understanding as to why and a sense of overwhelm.

Jeffrey Besecker: In short, we can look at that as that lack of purposefulness and adequate meaning that drives us to take effective action or engage in beneficial movement toward our own change, growth, and evolution. We feel stuck and unable to act.

John Eli Garay: So whenever somebody is in a state of shutdown and It's very important to help that person to understand and honor where they're at and to understand, to normalize why they are there. Yeah. Usually a person, I see it common whenever someone is in a state of shutdown, whenever they're in a dorsal vagal state is usually there's a lot of self-judgment that takes place. Like, why am I here? I should be experiencing, I should be at the top of the ladder. I should be happy. Everybody else is wrong. There's comparison that takes place. A lot of negative introspection is what I see taking place for a lot of people that I've worked with that find themselves in that state of shutdown. So usually what I see people that are overachievers being more in a state of sympathetic, in a sympathetic state, because in that state they are activated. There's energy that has to take place. That's where the energy and so they end up becoming workaholics. They end up, you know, trying to produce to win approval. They feel anxiety. They feel anxiousness. So it's usually in the sympathetic state where I see people being overachieving. Can I share one of my recent experiences? And I know I share this with you on a personal basis, but I'm currently in a state of transition in my life. I just finished grad school and I'm working on my licensing right now. And I was stuck in a soul sucking job. It was just one of those jobs where, you know, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't bringing me life. And my wife graciously asked me to step away and just to wait till my license came into the way. We have savings. Let's get this. Give you some time to focus on yourself and just get your license and your practice going. With that, The moment she told me to quit my job or asked me to quit my job and gave me permission, however you want to take a look at it, I immediately went into a sympathetic state. I'm like, why am I here? My wife just gave me permission to just relax. I should be grateful. There's a lot of shitting. But the reality is that I grew up on a farm and I hated farm work. It just wasn't my cup of tea. It's just a lot of work. It's hard. It's out in the hot sun. And in the winter, you're doing it in the cold. It's rough. And my father really struggled with me. And I wasn't as excited as he was. I wasn't as passionate about life on the farm as he was. And so in frustration, he would call me lazy. And sometimes he'd introduce me to his friends, this is my son, he's the laziest of them all. And he'd see it as a joke, but inside of me that did something. So since the age of, actually I've been consistently working since I was 15 years old. Up until this point, the biggest break I've ever taken in employment has been a month. So I have never been without working because in my autonomic nervous system stored that memory of my dad calling me lazy. So whenever my wife told me I could take a break, my body, my autonomic nervous system, when you're such a sense danger, you're going to be made fun of again.

Jeffrey Besecker: Would you say in many regards then that triggered a certain state where your self-worth is gauged by your value based on your ability to work?

John Eli Garay: Yeah. So whenever my wife told me this, the first thing that I noticed, and I've become really good at, well, it's become a discipline of noticing what takes place in my body. I noticed my heart was beating fast. I noticed that my breathing was like accelerated. And right away, I felt like I had to go to the kitchen and cook. I love cooking. And like, I have to do something. And I had to take a moment just to reflect and say, John, it's OK. Your reception, autonomic nervous system, thank you for trying to protect me. My dad did the best he could. I love him. God rest his soul. He's no longer with us. But this is nothing to be ashamed of.

Jeffrey Besecker: There again, that programmed action biases, it's a heuristic where we're programmed with that notion that we have to constantly be in motion versus honoring that place of rest. Simplify it. We may go back and touch that up later and give a bigger overview of what the action biases. How much have you studied the action biases as a heuristic?

John Eli Garay: Not to the extent that you have.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, I've gotten deep into heuristics. I kept running up into conversations. We'd mention heuristics and brush over them. So we do these things, you know, it's heuristics. We all do it. You know, that's a heuristic. So why do we all do it became my question. And I said, I'm going to find out why I discovered a great group called the decision lab that focuses specifically on discovering, outlining, and describing what heuristics are breaks down. You know, the, the key ones, there's like 188 ways in total. We, we experience it, but I forget how many is on like their site as the gateway it's breaking them down. And I've been like experimenting with that. I'm like, yes. They give me all the juice I need right there to explain the core tenants of this. So let's point out this is this heuristic and this is why we tend to do this. It's amazing how quick people will move into that shutdown phase. You know, so I'm trying to find a way to manage that in my interactions and say, how do you ease people into acknowledging that and give them that bigger picture? So I'm going to start doing that in some of my language in the podcast and pointing out, well, this is a biased response. We don't like to acknowledge that. It is a cognitive shortcut. We do. It is a heuristic. Why do we do it? Because then we move back to that story that was programmed. Not to lean into self-victimization, learned helplessness, but the reality is that become our autonomic program as we move up and down that ladder. So I think it's a great tie. Moving on. So let's look now at the sympathetic phase of our response. When are we in sympathetic mode and how do we tend to show up in this response?

John Eli Garay: But there, once again, it varies. But the biggest thing that you will see is that there is a desire for movement, that a person is activated and activated can look different for different people. For some people, it's literally physical moving from one place to the next. They want to book it. They don't want to be there. Someone feels anxiety. An example of someone that has had a bad experience in a large arena, a large event, they may get up and move to a place that is perhaps more quieter and seems to be more safe. There's other people might want to create intellectual movement, so it's not so much getting up and physically moving but distracting themselves with perhaps a video game, Sudoku puzzle, What is that big wordle that everybody's using now? You know, so you'll find people trying to do something to to create movement. And some people just flat out like to pick a fight and that and they shouldn't say like to. It's their survival pattern. It's what they've been conditioned to do.

Jeffrey Besecker: Initiating conflict. We have varying degrees of relationship with that notion of conflict itself. Are we in healthy conflict? Are we in unhealthy patterns of conflict?

John Eli Garay: And so you can see there's some people that it will be a physical conflict where there's hands involved, there's aggression, and there's some people that get on social media and become a social media warrior and fight their cause at any cost and destroy relationships and And I say that with a grain of salt because sometimes there's some healthy conversations that have to take place and boundaries that need to be set whenever it comes to the use of social media. But usually when it comes to a sympathetic state, somebody wants to move.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's an interesting one for me. We have in many regards that need to discern what the motivating factor is. Are we engaging with that hope of being genuinely and authentically sharing information or what motives might be lying under the surface? I'm going to just frame it that way and maybe preface it for another conversation. I'm going to leave that hanging out for you. How do we discern some of that where are we engaging this as a protective mechanism? Are we engaging it simply from that point of I see it, I recognize it. I'm now just sharing the knowledge.

John Eli Garay: So I will say it's always an autonomic response in a desire for safety. That is the motivator behind everything. Now, the delivery might not be aligned You might create more danger for yourself in the process. But it's whenever we begin to really take the time to identify what it is that is triggering us and what it is that we're looking to accomplish that we can take a step back and perhaps alter or change our behavior that is causing an undesirable effect.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's interesting from a certain angle to look at. Me especially, I'm going to reference this back to myself, looking at whether it's that need to be right, simply knowing and sharing, or moving into another stage where you just simply have nothing you feel you have to prove, so it's just not said.

John Eli Garay: One of the things that I have found this like polyvagal theory, super helpful for is, is helping people really to identify in each state, you know where they're at in the ladder. is to identify what that experience looks like for them. Once again, it varies from person to person. What does it look like? What does it sound like for you? What emotions are present? What changes in your world whenever you're in each state? Is there a headline? Is there a familiar theme? Is there words that you hear that take you there? And what are your needs in each state? I help people to identify the things that take them to that state. What are the triggers that take you there? But also, I want to help them identify what are the glimmers rung of the ladder to a higher rung of the ladder? Because it's not just identifying all the junk, but also what is it that brings me back to feeling safe?

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting to look at being able to acknowledge when you are in that triggered state of emotional reactivity versus just that neutral state of authentically sharing. So finally, we danced between bringing us back to, from my perspective, those notions of inference and transference. Yeah. What we intend sometimes becomes distorted, cognitively distorted in how we present it, how we're receiving it. And then also how that interaction comes from the other end. Acts in the same manner where there are other individuals, other situations, other circumstances start to reflect. Yeah. Start to be pulled forward into that interaction.

John Eli Garay: Yeah. It's super important. to develop awareness. And I know that it's not what we're the topic of today, but just what you just shared right now just reminds me of the tenets of emotional intelligence. You know, we as human beings, we desire to have a relationship, appropriate, healthy relationship with others and to have good relationship management. But emotional intelligence begins with self-awareness. Whenever you're self-aware, then you can self-regulate. Whenever you have those two in place, then you can begin to have an awareness of the experience of others.

null: You begin to understand others.

John Eli Garay: That's the third tenet of emotional intelligence. And whenever you understand others, you're finally able to have relationship management. But you can have none of those without self-awareness. It all boils down to self-awareness.

Jeffrey Besecker: From that regard, when we're sliding through those various phases, we lack that awareness per se. Sometimes we're easily drawn into hypervigilance, confrontational, easily drawn into conflict, emotional reactive states. We're acting upon anxiousness, fearful anxiety, chronic stress, you know, and then ultimately, sometimes we find ourselves when we're drawn way down into that, in those depressed states. You know, they're all essentially, from my perspective, rooted in those insecure states of being or those in-conditioned patterns of insecurity we often engage.

John Eli Garay: Absolutely. And so a lot of times, well, actually not all the time, it's all the times, Our autonomic nervous system is going to react before our brain is even aware of all of that. So understanding that we have autonomic responses and becoming aware of them is huge.

Jeffrey Besecker: So how do we start to spot some of those from that perspective?

John Eli Garay: So I reference once again the work of Deb Dana. She's pretty powerful enough. And she has created like worksheets on her website. And really the whole gist behind it is really just to give people an opportunity to describe what takes place in each state. What does it feel like whenever you're in a ventral state? What does it feel like whenever you're in a sympathetic or dorsal? And so it really, I think it's, I believe it is super empowering and important to be able to develop an awareness of how each state shows up in our life. Like what is our experience in each one of those states? Because we go up and down the ladder each and every day. But what does it look like specifically for us? Because the experience will be different, dependent on who you are.

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John Eli Garay: Yeah, so you started off talking about a child and a caregiver and the connection of a child with their caretaker that they trust. And I think that's a beautiful picture of what a ventral safety experience is like. Whenever you're in a ventral bagel state, what takes place is that you are able to assume feeling safe in the presence of a safe person. I always equate it back to a mother holding their child. And the child perhaps doesn't yet, well, they obviously don't understand language yet. But what they do understand is the sounds, the movement of the parent, the caretaker of the mother. And they regulate to that voice, to the sounds, to the voice, to the appearance, to the sights, to the smells, to the environment. Whenever you are in a state, a ventral vagal state, you will feel attuned to where you are at. And it usually involves the presence of safe people. And if it's not the presence of a person, perhaps it could be of a pet. I'll tell you what, I have two dogs. I have an Australian Shepherd and a pug. And if I'm having a dysregulated day, one of the very first things I want to do is spend time with them. because their presence and their love, their way of being, even though there's no language communicated, automatically draws me into a ventral vegal state.

Jeffrey Besecker: We've discussed our mutual pet love in our past conversations, John. I watched a great program a couple of days ago, studying our pets' behaviors in response to our actions. Our pets being able to sense our pheromones, what we're giving off hormonally in our sweat, watching our gestures, our energy, our body postures, and being able to read that. probably on a much larger degree than what we are aware of as human beings. Although, on a human level, might we be on equal ground with our abilities, but just not fully attuned? I'm going to leave that hanging out there. I don't have the direct circumstantial evidence to substantiate it. I'll frame it that way from research, but I know that we do have a lot of similar abilities we mirror.

John Eli Garay: Absolutely. As many people, 2020 through 2022, it was just rough. It was a rough couple of years and had a lot of losses. And being stuck in quarantine, there's not a lot of hugs you can get. But it seemed like I was at the right moment. Yeah, my Zoe and my little Peanut, they were always there. you know, and it seemed to always be present in the right moment. So, yeah, I'm very grateful for that.

Jeffrey Besecker: In that regard, then it draws us back into the overall theme of this conversation. Might we intuitively know when something is getting on that last nerve? Might we intuitively be attuned a lot of times as we draw into that awareness when we're sliding up and down that ladder?

John Eli Garay: Once again, I want to point out the importance of identifying what it is that takes you there. What is it that takes you to a sympathetic state, a dorsal vagal state, a ventral vagal state? What is it that draws you into feeling a certain way? Because whenever we understand our triggers and our glimmers, that is what's going to help us to develop an awareness and help us to create a plan of action. So this is going to sound kind of cold-hearted and perhaps shallow of me, but one of the things that I've done in my life is I've really taken the time to identify whose presence makes me feel in a ventral vagal state and whose presence makes me drop down the ladder. And inevitably, there's people, there's co-workers, family members that make you drop down the ladder. It's just part of life. And there's people that just bring out the best in you and that make you consistently feel safe. And I've developed that awareness so that way I'm aware if I'm going to be around a specific person, I may feel triggered. And there may be some things that I have to do. One of the things that polyvagal theory also teaches us is the need to create safety anchors and things that can help us, that we can hold on to so that way we don't drop down the ladder so quickly. We want to ask ourselves the questions of who, what, where, and when. So is there Who makes us feel safe? Whose presence can we be drawn into? And like I said, it could be your pet. It could be even holding a picture right, right above over here. I have a picture, my favorite picture of my mother. I lost my mom this past year and, uh, and I miss her greatly, but her picture, her presence reminds me of her connection to me. So there's some days that I'm like extremely dysregulated, you know, working away and, um, I look up and I have that connection. Who is it that keeps you safe? That's going to be super important. The number two is what can you do? What are some things, some actions that you can take if there's something in your environment that's triggering you? Can you go for a walk? Can you breathe? Do some breathing exercises? I'm all about different types of grounding exercises. But one of the things that I want to point out is that whenever you're feeling dysregulated, always scale it on a scale from 0 to 10. If you're feeling emotionally dysregulated, if you're feeling like from a 5 to a 10, like a high level of being dysregulated, you want to incorporate some kind of movement because you've got to discharge that energy. If you're from a zero to four, then do something like meditative, something that's relaxing.

Jeffrey Besecker: Back to Stephen Porges, the body keeps the score as we're storing it. That energetic outlet is helped along to diffuse as we move back into those states of productive movement, rather than some of that dysregulated energy and motion of anxiety that we often engage.

John Eli Garay: Absolutely. This past year, I didn't go to the gym at all because I was working 14-hour days with my internship. But I've been going back since the start of December. And that movement in my life, it hasn't been easy. Working out in your 40s is a lot different than when I was working out in my 20s. But it has brought such a relief, emotional relief in the midst of everything. But the holiday stressors that take place, and just everyday stressors, because I love the holidays, but there are some stressors that come along with that, with the planning and everything and being committed and going to the gym. That movement has brought a sense of relaxation and normalcy to my life.

Jeffrey Besecker: That brings an interesting aside to mind for me. When we witness somebody who might be an emotional cleaner, when they're feeling that activated energy and that urge to clean, household chores overtakes them as that outlet. I feel, and this is an aside and purely speculative, that sometimes we've leveraged guilt and shame in some regards towards that action, labeling people as nervous or however we might term that. I think it's interesting to look at how we've kind of culturally remained stuck in that in some regards.

John Eli Garay: It's interesting that you bring that up because there's, how can I say, like a stigma. Oh, there they go cleaning again. My stepson, whenever he's emotionally dysregulated, he cleans. Like, that was one of the things when he lived with us. Man, that guy could clean. I love whenever he was emotionally dysregulated because my household, they didn't clean.

Jeffrey Besecker: I think we might be able to observe when others might inherently consciously, unconsciously trigger those kind of things as a form of passive aggression, maybe form of maybe even looking at narcissism. I'm just venturing out on a limb and speculating today how those might be connected.

John Eli Garay: It's curious seeing is that I think that we have a tendency to like label and instead of just honoring the fact that that's the way that they obtain emotional regulation.

Jeffrey Besecker: Categorization could be a slippery slope. Yeah. Both directions. up and down that ladder.

John Eli Garay: Going for a walk and going to the gym seem to be super normalized. Someone that is cleaning, you'll find people placing labels like OCD and using that as an insult or to demean somebody without even honoring the fact that OCD is a real disorder.

Jeffrey Besecker: If we remove some of that stigma, we may also observe some of those patterns and realize that there are instances where that is the pattern that's being engaged. We look at whether it's obsessive compulsive, we look at whether it's some form of neurodivergence. potentially surfacing. So it's also not to shove those aside and discount them, but just be aware of what the pattern is and what the bigger story might be sometimes. Or if we're just creating a sense of a bigger inflated story, cognitively distorting. Absolutely.

John Eli Garay: And here's the thing with people, whenever people like label other people's behavior, I always go back to that Dana saying story follows state. And the reality is that person who's labeling the person who's cleaning or doing whatever they're doing, they have an autonomic nervous system. And sometimes the seeing and witnessing the behavior of someone cleaning or doing something that may not be their sense of normal, it may be triggering a memory from the past, such as something that's very common in Mexican households. is Saturday morning was music is turned full blast at 6 a.m. and everybody's cleaning first thing. So it may trigger, I was forced to clean. And I didn't like that growing up. I wanted to be watching cartoons on Saturday mornings.

Jeffrey Besecker: Which I'm then sure further triggers that response that mirrors back to the trauma of her father. Yeah, yeah.

John Eli Garay: There's something about me and being out in the sun. I don't enjoy swimming in the hot sun. I don't enjoy gardening in the hot sun. I usually wait till the evening. I like to go for walks in the morning or at dusk. But it's because it reminds me of working in the fields, cutting weeds and, you know, getting sunburned, picking chili, harvesting chili.

Jeffrey Besecker: So for our listeners, you grew up in New Mexico, John, correct? Yes, yes. Very hot, very real threat of overheating, overexertion. Yes. So subjectively, very honestly poses a threat to your health and well-being. Absolutely. Absolutely. Hmm, that's an interesting thing to consider then, interactions with ourselves and especially as we interact with others. What lies beyond that we don't know is guilty of that. This past week, I stepped into a circumstance where I was making some broad assumptions, thinking, hmm, I'm going to work through this as a thought processes. Started making some assumptions, started, you know, conveying, well, maybe it's this, maybe it's that. Had an individual say, yes, but I did not tell you this aspect. What is below the surface that remains unseen? You have to stop and check yourself and say, yes, we do project a lot of times. Thank you for that lesson pointing back to me where our assumptions lead us astray. Absolutely. and acknowledging it, owning it, sometimes even apologizing for your mistaken projection, discernment, and judgment.

John Eli Garay: Absolutely. I have really tried hard to develop the practice of asking. And this is the story that I'm telling myself about the situation. And I became a Brene Brown junkie for a while too. And I can't remember which of her books, but she talks about a conversation that she had with her husband regarding an incident that they had. And it really inspired me to ask that. The story I'm telling myself is that you are thinking such and such. It's really helped my wife and I open up communication, my brother. Culturally, there's not a lot of communication of feelings coming from men, expression of emotion. So I've kind of been like a I would say like a bridge builder, whenever it comes to that, uh, within my family and within some of my friends, because we're taught from a young age to not disclose self-disclosed thoughts, emotions. It's not the macho thing to do, but it's helped significantly in developing more intimate and fulfilling relationships with family and friends.

Jeffrey Besecker: John, in that regard, you mentioned in our earlier conversations how our ANS or autonomic nervous system does not define our experience and instead it serves to inform us as a messaging system. In that regard, what role do you feel both our emotional responses and our ego filters play in guiding these patterns of action?

John Eli Garay: Yeah, so once again, going back, I go back to Deb Dana's story, Follow State. You know, we will interpret what is taking place within us somatically according to our experience as well. We have information stored in our brain as well. Our first thing that we're going to do is we're going to react. The second thing is we're going to create a story about it. And I think that's the big difference between cognitive behavioral theory and polyvagal theory is cognitive behavioral theory focuses specifically on the processes of the brain, the event, the thought, the behavior, you know, the outcome. And with polyvagal theory, it is focusing on what takes place in the body and the immediate response. And then the brain catching up a few seconds later or however long later it takes, whatever length of time it takes to catch up. But yeah, we have a lot of information stored in our brain as well regarding all the experiences we've had in our life and the knowledge that we've obtained and the skills. So we're complex creatures, aren't we?

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes, we are. I think ultimately that leads us toward our quote unquote ideal or integrated state of neuroception and ultimately landing us perhaps in that state of somatic coherence, that okay and comfortable state of being that simply feel safe and secure irregardless of any uncertainties. Or as we manage and cope with any uncertainties, I will frame it that way. So it doesn't sound so definitive.

John Eli Garay: So when it comes to that, I think once again, it's super important for us to identify what okay looks like for us. And I'm just going back to the extrovert introverts. blank on the word I was going to say, but personality types. Being okay is going to look differently for an extrovert as it would for an introvert. An extrovert may be okay being in large crowds and an introvert may feel okay if it's a more intimate or perhaps spending time in solitude and being okay with it. But really defining what that looks like for you and what your experience is whenever you're feeling okay. And giving yourself permission whenever you are experiencing a state of dysregulation, you're in a sympathetic or dorsal state, to reach out and to experience you may be dysregulated is giving yourself permission to get a taste of what regulation looks like. What does it look like to be in a ventral state?

Jeffrey Besecker: Ultimately, that comes down to story. Are you writing and creating the story you truly desire? Or is that story writing and creating the meaning for you? Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to thank you. This has truly been an awesome conversation. Is there anything you feel we've missed today?

John Eli Garay: It's been a been an awesome conversation. I always enjoy speaking with you, Jeffrey. Yeah, I feel like like I learned from you and you bring out the best for me, too. So thank you for this opportunity.

Jeffrey Besecker: My friend, Namaste, the light in me acknowledges the light in you. You truly have brought out the best in me today. I thank you for that. Thank you. As we climb up that ladder of life, discovering the power of neuroception and exploring the journey to self-regulation empowers us with the ability to let our light truly shine. We are often tempted to view our emotional interactions from a surface-level view. But what if our emotional reactivity is a much more nuanced and complex interaction that extends well beyond our cognitive processes? Might we frequently discount or overlook the various other somatic experiences and systems that come into play as we engage in this interaction? Might we also discount any potential that signals our ability to channel an endless flow of conscious awareness that exists beyond our self-created boundaries? Perhaps coming to an end of our cognitive constructs signals we have simply reached the end of our pre-existing and conditioned beliefs. And it is there we release our imprinted insecurities to find our true ability to swim in the sea of all that is knowable. Our thoughts, and perhaps more significantly, our emotions, only become demonized when we create them as a monster to be unhealthily feared, rejected, controlled, and manipulated. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or loved one. And as always, we're grateful for you, our valued listening community. This has been The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker.