Somatic not semantic
I have no desire to enter into a semantic conversation, ending inevitably in a right or wrong debate, about the definition of the words. What follows are somatic experiences before they are cognitive confirmations. What I call trust one may well be calling hope. In this conversation, the cognitive is a trap.
We are talking about three main things here: fear, hope and trust.
And before we have given a name to these experiences, they are a body sensation. Let’s visualize it for a more embodied approach.
Hope is a pull, it shifts the center of gravity forward. The body leans into a future that isn’t here yet. Fear does the opposite, the weight moves back, it is a recoil. They look like opposites but they’re the same mechanism running in opposite directions. Hope and fear are the carrot and the stick. The same hand is holding both.
Hope is often just a movement to avoid fear. That is when I call it hopium.
Forget the names. The body doesn’t lie about the experience. Both states activate the sympathetic nervous system. Ask your IG algorithm if you doubt it. The stress response doesn’t distinguish between dread and anticipation. It just registers: not here, not now, not safe yet.
Trust is different in kind. Trust is parasympathetic. In the above visualization, trust stand in balance without push or pull. The body stops bracing. And something becomes available when the nervous system fully releases its defense. External noise reduces. Perception sharpens. Now we can have a clear signal.
“What is” is already complete.
When in trust the body is “undefended”.
The Meter
Imagine a device that measures the degree of activation of the nervous system (ANS). Zero is the absolute state of relaxation. At this level we connect with what the vedantic tradition calls sat-chit-ananda, pure being, pure awareness, pure joy.
Ten is maximum activation, fight, flee, freeze, collapse.
Most people in the modern world live between three and seven. We never experience zero.
The relaxed baseline we call normal is already a stress response.
The hormonal system runs the same story at a slower speed.
The ANS is electrical, milliseconds, immediate.
Hormones are chemical, they travel through the bloodstream, slower to rise, much slower to clear. Cortisol from a morning stress response is still present in the afternoon. The body is still living in the experience the mind left hours ago.
The chemistry of hope and fear has names.
Dopamine is the anticipation hormone. The central pillar of social-media. It fires hardest in the reaching. Hope runs on dopamine, which is why hopium is chemically accurate. The system rewards the reaching and keeps you reaching. Cortisol meanwhile keeps the threat alive, real or imagined. Together they create a loop the body learns to depend on.
Trust runs on different chemistry. Serotonin, the felt sense that things are fundamentally okay. Oxytocin, safety, connection. DHEA, the vitality hormone, which rises when cortisol finally drops.
The sympathetic / parasympathetic state are completely different biological environment.
And we have no direct lever on any of it. No switch for cortisol, no dial for serotonin. The only access is indirect, through behavior, environment, movement, breath, relationship. We change the inputs and wait for the system to adjust.
We want you activated
We would regulate naturally if we’d live in a neutral system, but we don’t.
The civilization we have built runs on sympathetic activation.
Fear is the engine of consumerism, buy this and you will be safe, loved, enough. Fear is the engine of compliance, step out of line and see what happens. Fear is the engine of politics, of media, of most of what passes for motivation in modern life. A population living between five and seven on the meter is manageable, productive, and predictable. Dare I say, servile.
Even the antidotes have been colonized. Yoga, originally a technology for moving the nervous system toward zero, has become another performance metric. Another thing to do better, achieve faster, be proud of and post about.
We did not adopt yoga, we turned it upside down to serve another purpose.
We are the products of a system whose natural logic feeds on sympathetic activation.
Broken Cycle
I have been challenged for promoting a monk like attitude. Something not realistic at scale. I am not naive enough to think humans can avoid fear and hope altogether. Almost everything humans have built came from necessity, suffering, urgency. Creating from trust is philosophically coherent yet historically thin.
It want to simplify my point by borrowing an image from Daniel Quinn’s gorilla “Ishmael”.
Imagine three species A, B and C.
A eats B. B eats C. C eats A.
The cycle is complete. Balanced. Each species keeps the others in check.
Let’s say A is self-aware, gifted with the capacity to reflect. It becomes very hard for A to accept being eaten. So A killed C. Removed the predator. No more fear, no more threat, no more being prey. Quite an understandable response.
By killing C, B ran out of food and died. Hence A also ran out of food.
Break the cycle at one point, it collapses everywhere.
A feared C. A hoped B would show up for lunch. Asking for trust is asking A to see the whole cycle and be at peace with all its part. Including being eaten by C. Not outside the cycle nor above it. Is that even a possible ask?
I know moving from trust is possible.
That is the shaman way: always giving more than we take.
Fear and hope drove us to the capitalistic way: always taking more than we give.
The shaman way was never for everyone, yet everyone respected the shaman.
The shaman restore. Our current leadership extract. We lost the shaman and replaced them by those the most committed to breaking the cycle.
Creativity
Creativity born from fear tends to reproduce the very thing it’s trying to escape. It’s structured around avoidance. Creativity born from hope is the same mechanism, just aimed forward, still outcome-attached, still reactive, still answering to an external imperative.
Necessity is not the mother of invention, it is the father, but in an unhealthy patriarchal way. Trust, or receptivity, is the mother of invention.
The seeds of creativity born from trust are not rooted in a problem to solve. At level zero on our meter, there are no problems to solve, the perfection of the universe is obvious. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to escape, nothing to reach.
Creativity continues to move freely because moving is its nature.
In yin/yang terms: yang is the action principle, yin is the listening principle. When yang acts from fear or hope, the action carries its origin with it. It’s tied to the wound, the wish. The action is trying to bridge the gap between what is and what “should be”.
When yin listens deeply enough to perceive the perfection of what already is, the actual recognition, then yang moves freely. Not in response. Not toward anything. Pure expression without trigger.
The Taoists called this wu wei.
Action that arises from stillness, not from effort. Not passivity. The most alive kind of doing, because it isn’t driven by a filter.
The Door
No one taught me this. My body did.
A few month back I had a bad back injury (inflamed intervertebral disk). Bed ridden for weeks. I started rehabilitation by painfully walking ten minutes around my house with crutches.
I promised myself this would never happen again.
My back healed slowly. My chiropractor told me walking was my best friend for the next months. Six months later I am hiking every day in the canyons nearby. Yes, everyday day. I do not decide how far of how long. My body does. If the body wants to walk, we walk. When the body is tired, we stop.
No target means no cortisol spike around performance. No disappointment mechanism either. The result came fast. The body found its way when the mind stopped managing it.
Science told me that thirty minutes in nature produces the steepest cortisol reduction per time spent. Sustained daily practice over months shifts the baseline, the body stops defending the stress state and starts generating the parasympathetic one. Missing the practice begins to feel like missing something vital. There is no discipline, just listening. Biology driving itself towards a new baseline.
I feel better than I have felt in a long time. I experience a deep inner stability. And my best writing ideas come during the hike. I record them, and transcribe them later, further time stolen from screen time.
Results became consequence, not objectives.
Broken Civilization
Now, take this dynamic to a larger scale.
Our civilization is broken. Ecologically, socially, politically, spiritually. The systems that are supposed to support us have been corrupted by greed. This is not a story, it is visible, measurable, and accelerating.
The question is not whether the collapse is coming. It is.
But what are we doing about it?
We can reach for the painkiller, suppress the signal, stay in denial, work harder, faster, do more of what brought us here, defer the reckoning.
Or we can listen to what the injury is revealing.
The crisis is neutral. The response we chose is an expression of our maturity.
Collapse is not a theory. For North Americans it may be a new experience, but for large segment of the world population it has been a daily experience for decades.
We can respond using the dynamics of hope and fear. Or we can search for the quiet inside, find ways to the zero degree of activation, listen to the message, find the balance, the trust and act from there. It is not detachment or isolation. It is not inaction. Quite the opposite.
The Tao say it this way:
When nothing is done, nothing remains undone.
In trust we are not doing, we are allowing a larger intelligence to work through us.
The collapse is not the catastrophe. It is not to be feared. It is the door to a better functioning world. But better measured not on human thriving terms alone. That is the shift. It is enormous. And it is uncomfortable.
Bandwidth
I am aware of my position. Single, no mortgage or school runs, living in the canyons of southern California with enough freedom to walk hours everyday in nature. This was not served to me on a silver platter, it is a cultivated privilege. It came at significant cost, and it took decades, but it is still a privilege. I will not pretend otherwise.
Some people hold everything at once. The mortgage, the kids, the difficult ex, the job, poor health, the bills. For them, even thirty minutes in nature three times a week feels like a fantasy. I get it. The bandwidth required to begin the practice is exactly what modern life has stolen from us.
For years I have heard my clients say “I don’t have the time to meditate”. Now I am hearing the reader’s mind saying: “I don’t have time to regulate my nervous system”. And this is how the sympathetic system protects itself from the one thing that would change it. This is how the addiction sustain itself. I never hear someone saying “I don’t have time to scroll on Instagram” “I don’t have time to binge watch Netflix” we choose our distractions because they keep the system activated. That’s the loop. The busyness is the symptom, the excuse, the curse we impose on ourselves.
There is a way out. A shortcut. Manage the ANS and the hormonal system follows. But the shortcut still requires a door. Usually the door is a crisis, something that removes the old option and makes the practice non-negotiable.
My door was a back injury. The civilization’s door is collapse, and it is open now.
Let’s remember:
Pain is unavoidable.
Growth is optional.
Small Maps
I am not preaching from a mountain cave. I am not the monk with the tea.
I have bills, groceries, car maintenance, rent. I keep my fingers crossed because I have no health insurance. I spend hours writing these messages and make no money of it. I am single. Lonely at times. I count many heartbreaks in the last decade. And I don’t stay on margins of life. I always step in fully.
I have lost friends to war. My parents died while I was away helping people in a different country. I buried the mother of my child. I have loved people I couldn’t keep. I tried anyway. I have watched things I built dissolve more times than I can remember.
I don’t write from detachment. I have been broken open enough that I have stopped being surprised. I just watch what comes through the crack. I trust there is enough gold left in me to make a decent kintsugi.
I am an optimist. If I wasn’t, would I bother writing? I have seen enough darkness to not see another option. The light at the end is not guaranteed. But I choose it anyway, because it is the only thing that makes sense.
My posts are small maps, drawn for a friend, on a paper napkin after a good meal and a few glasses of wine. Little maps of what I have found, how to live heartbreak and also trust the present, all at once. How to jump from the cliff without a parachute and still trust my ability to fly.
Not without fear. Without fear driving the chariot.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
When you have existed between three and seven, almost your entire life, the resistance to slow down, or to attempt to reach zero is strong. The body has become addicted to the chemicals/peptides of fear, anxiety, stress. My favorite work on this is by the woman who discovered these peptides, who didn’t even get the credit, Candice Pert. The molecules of motion is a very interesting and profound work.
I would say, however, that, at least the way I read it in your essay, and I may have misunderstood you, is that zero stillness. The way I understand it is there is no stillness. There are levels of frequency, because we are always moving. In order to balance one must be able to move the body in different directions, even if it’s noticeable so even in zero there is a push and a pull. Both required in a beautiful little dance of agreement.
Love this Gabriel. No arguments or debates, word studies or philosophical rabbit holes to chase.
The body speaks what it speaks. We listen or not to our own healing or demise.
I love the word for peace in Guarani, “settled stomach.”