The Nervous System as Relational Fabric

Polyvagal Theory and the Nervous System: A Thread of Connection

Within REC we are inviting an understanding of the nervous system as a continuous network of communication between what we conceptualize as the human body, mind, and the rest of nature. While modern frameworks often treat these domains as separate, we see them as deeply intertwined, forming a dynamic whole. Our nervous system reflects and interacts with relational and ecological systems, serving as a thread that weaves together the personal, collective, and planetary dimensions of our existence.

Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges, offers a nuanced lens for understanding how our autonomic nervous system responds to stress, safety, and connection. It identifies three intertwined circuits:

Dorsal Vagal Complex: Governs immobilization responses like fainting or shutdown.
Sympathetic Nervous System: Drives mobilization responses such as fight or flight.
Ventral Vagal Complex: Facilitates social engagement, calm, and connection.

These circuits help us map how our nervous systems react to stress and regulate states of being, whether through retreating, defending, or connecting. However, Polyvagal Theory often reflects modernity’s emphasis on individual regulation, overlooking the ways our nervous systems are entangled with broader relational and ecological networks. Expanding this perspective is essential for addressing the polycrisis.

Mapping Individual Survival and Resilience Responses

This chart illustrates how these circuits influence individual survival and resilience responses, highlighting the interplay between physiology, emotional states, and cognitive capacities. However, this framework often centers individual regulation, reflecting modernity’s orientation toward separability. Expanding this lens requires reimagining the nervous system as entangled—not just within the individual body but also with the collective, ecological, and temporal webs of life.
The polycrisis triggers nervous system responses rooted in survival, often cycling through fight, flight, freeze, faint, or fix. These reactions are shaped by modernity’s emphasis on control, consumption, and disconnection, leading to patterns of avoidance or oversimplified solutions. The chart below illustrates how these survival states manifest in societal responses:

Our nervous systems within the metacrisis

Neuro-Colonization & Neuro-Decolonization:

Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, an Indigenous leader from the Huni Kui community in the Amazon and co-researcher in the GTDF collective, describes separability as a "metabolic dis-ease"—a condition that fractures our sense of identity and leaves us insecure, seeking superiority to mask this insecurity. This dis-ease operates at the level of neurobiology, shaping our fears, desires, and relational patterns. It drives the systems of cultural supremacy, ecological destruction, and exploitation that are at the root of our crises. Colonial-modern systems have conditioned our nervous systems to prioritize separability, shaping physiological, emotional, and relational patterns that perpetuate harm. This phenomenon, which we call neuro-colonization, systematically wires our nervous systems to favor control, fear, and disconnection. It reinforces survival-based responses like fight, flight, freeze, and faint, making us less capable of engaging with complexity and interdependence.Neuro-decolonization is a concept developed by Cree elder Dr. Cash Ahenakew that refers to unwiring these harmful attachments and reclaiming an entangled nervous system—one attuned to and guided by collective and metabolic processes. This involves reactivating capacities for relational intelligence, intergenerational accountability, and ecological attunement. It is a shift from survival-based, individualistic regulation toward a relational embodiment of shared rhythms and responsibilities.

Relationality does only operate in spatial dimensions, it is also temporal. In the practice of REC we invite a meta-scalar awareness: How do the traumas and wisdoms of past generations shape the present? How might today’s choices ripple through future generations and ecosystems? Can the future be pulling us toward it, guiding us into repair? And perhaps most provocatively—Can our actions in the present reverberate backward, altering the motion of the past—not to erase it, but to transform its resonance?

Mapping Polyvagal Theory to an Entangled Paradigm

To address the limitations of Polyvagal Theory when applied to the polycrisis, REC proposes an expanded view—one that acknowledges our nervous systems as entangled with the relational, ecological, and temporal processes that sustain life. It also invites a meta-affective disposition. To engage meta-affectively is to hold space for pain—not as something to escape or fix, but as a teacher. Pain reveals the threads of connection that have been strained or broken. Modernity isolates us in these wounds, framing them as private failures rather than collective fractures. Meta-affective awareness invites us to re-enter the fullness of feeling without fear or shame, so that pain may be metabolized rather than suppressed. This reimagining moves us beyond survival responses rooted in individualism toward collective and systemic resilience.

The approach we are suggesting is one where the nervous system is not just a site of individual regulation but a relational and collective thread that connects us to the larger web of life. In this context, the capacity for meta-regulation emerges as a vital yet largely exiled capacity. Meta-regulation involves three interconnected layers: self-regulation, co-regulation, and meta-regulation, each expanding the nervous system’s capacity to engage with complexity, ambiguity, and interdependence.

Shifting Toward Responsible and Relational Responses

Self-Regulation: Cultivating Attuned Presence

Self-regulation is the foundation of these capacities, encompassing the ability to stabilize one’s nervous system in the face of stress or uncertainty. In its healthiest form, self-regulation is a practice of noticing when we are in reactive states (like fight, flight, or freeze) and then shifting into more sober, curious, present, and responsible states of being. However, modernity has often co-opted self-regulation into a product for managing stress and optimizing productivity in ways that reinforce isolation and avoidance. These problematic manifestations of self-regulation isolate the individual as the primary site of intervention, disregarding the collective and systemic roots of grief, distress, and dis-ease. In this context, self-regulation becomes the first step in reconnecting to broader relational and ecological fields, preparing the nervous system to engage in co-regulation and meta-regulation.

Co-Regulation: Entering the Shared Field

Co-regulation is the capacity to synchronize one’s nervous system with others in ways that foster safety and connection. For mammals, co-regulation is the strongest safety cue, as the nervous system subconsciously "reads" signals of safety or danger in relational contexts—a process Polyvagal Theory calls neuroception. This capacity is essential for building trust, facilitating relational repair, and creating the conditions for collective resilience.

However, under modernity, co-regulation has often been distorted to serve systems of superficial connection, or exclusionary belonging rather than genuine relational attunement.

Superficial Belonging: Co-regulation is sometimes reduced to transactional or performative gestures of connection, emphasizing surface-level safety without addressing deeper relational wounds or systemic harm. This dynamic is often used as a tactic to maintain the status quo of white supremacy, creating a false sense of harmony to placate conversations about systemic racism and injustice. It can also manifest as in-group attunement that excludes or scapegoats those deemed "other." This dynamic is a hallmark of fascism, where shared rhythms create a sense of belonging for some while alienating others through practices of dehumanization and blame. Additionally, such exclusion often reinforces anthropocentrism, failing to extend co-regulation to the more-than-human world.

The invitation here is to reimagine co-regulation as a practice rooted in multi-directional reciprocity, vulnerability, and accountability. This includes tuning into the needs and rhythms of more-than-human entities, and recognizing that co-regulation extends beyond human relationships to include ecosystems and planetary processes. True co-regulation also involves creating spaces where discomfort and complexity can be held collectively, fostering deeper trust and repair without rushing to resolution. When practiced with these commitments, co-regulation becomes a pathway for restoring relational depth and attuning to the expansive rhythms of shared life.

Meta-Regulation: Navigating Complexity and Deep Time

Meta-regulation invites us to expand our understanding of resilience by attuning to the vast, interconnected web of life. It is not simply a capacity of the individual but a way of navigating the shared rhythms of existence—personal, collective, ecological, and ancestral. At its heart, meta-regulation is an embodied connection to the metaphysical and metabolic processes that sustain us, reminding us of a visceral responsibility that precedes individual will. This responsibility is not a burden; it is an alignment with what is needed, rather than what we desire or find comfortable. It is the vitality to act in service of the whole out of love for the entangled web we belong to.

Neuro-Decolonization is essential to reactivating this capacity. It requires engaging with practices that unwire the colonial attachments to control and separability, restoring our ability to attune to collective and planetary rhythms. Ceremony and entheogenic practices have long been vital to this process. Indigenous communities around the world have long safeguarded the relational technologies that nurture this embodiment of an entangled metabolism.

Meta-regulation also involves attuning to the multi-scalar rhythms of existence, recognizing how daily actions ripple across ecological and generational timelines. Practices like spatio-temporal attunement—meditations that evoke the presence of land and lineage—or threshold practices that explore liminal spaces can help us inhabit this expansive relationality. By weaving self-regulation and co-regulation into this broader framework, meta-regulation transforms individual tools into collective threads, reconnecting us to the living systems that sustain life.

Quorum Sensing & Cascades of Transformation

In the midst of the meta-, poly-, and permacrisis, one might be thinking, “Why would I stand here and engage in somatic and artistic experiments while the world burns? Why not protest, tear something down, or create an enterprise with ‘green solutions’?” These are urgent questions, and they deserve serious reflection. The stakes are undeniably high, and action feels imperative. But not all actions lead to meaningful change, and some—despite ‘good intentions’—can perpetuate the very patterns of harm they seek to dismantle.

To consider an alternative, we turn to a metaphor from microbiology: Quorum Sensing. In bacterial communities, quorum sensing describes how cells release and detect chemical signals to coordinate collective action. This process determines when the population has reached a threshold to trigger behaviours like bioluminescence, biofilm formation, or gene expression. Remarkably, quorum sensing doesn’t just occur in isolated bacterial colonies; it’s happening inside your body, particularly in your gut. This micro-level coordination is vital for human survival, enabling bacterial communities to function in ways that sustain health and life.

What if, as humankind, we also engage in quorum sensing at the macro-level? Just as bacteria rely on attunement and signaling to coordinate survival, so do we need relational fields that amplify the signals of collective responsibility, repair, and transformation. This is not about inaction; it’s about cultivating the kind of action that resonates across systems, sustaining gradual epigenetic shifts in the resonant fabric.

Imagine humanity as being on the brink of quorum sensing. Like bacteria in the gut, sensing when their collective has reached a tipping point, we too are in a moment where relational attunment could cascade into coordinated transformation. But this requires attention to who and what amplifies the field. Not everyone will respond at once, and that’s okay. The early adopters—the sensitive receivers of relational signals—are those who engage first, broadcasting the shift to others who, in turn, amplify it further.

This cascading effect doesn’t happen through individual action alone. It emerges from relational networks where signals are amplified, mirrored, and deepened. These fields are not static; they evolve as more people tune in, creating a resonance that moves beyond reaction and into sustained transformation.

By engaging in practices that cultivate these fields, we are not retreating from action—we are amplifying the relational signals that make meaningful, enduring change possible. This is the work of building cascades, not collisions, of fostering the conditions for transformation to flow through networks of connection, care, and accountability.