I wrote those words when I first set out to chip away at this piece back in February. I had thought it would be a nice Dad joke to get a few chuckles, or more realistically little snorts of air coming out of the nostrils for something that’s not quite funny. I had no idea how badly I had jinxed myself by writing those words.

Soon after, I was officially welcomed into a PhD program, with Dr. Ruth Lanius and her team no less. I needed to renew a passport, and hire a moving truck, and arrange paperwork to get a study permit, and find storage, and pack up a house, and find places for the horses to live while we moved, and this brings us up to about April. It continued on at about this same pace until the present. I am happy to report that we are all well, four-legged family members included, and all eight of us are now living in the same country for the first time in four months. I haven’t craved being bored this much in quite a while. It is a year for the Fire Hose indeed.

In that time I have continued to write. The rough draft for this present piece tallies over 20,000 words. That has been refined down, of course, but with that number in mind you might get the sense that there have been a few different paths I could have taken in how I presented this information. It is still not polished. Perhaps it is getting close to being presentable, though. I hope you do enjoy it. As always, please pass this along if you find the information might be helpful, or at least entertaining for someone to read. I think we can all use excuses to unplug from the news cycle from time to time. I also hope you can forgive the many grammatical issues. I am refusing to use AI for writing, for better or worse.

I also want to mention that I intend this to be a chapter in the book I’ve been working on. Even still, there are a few things that will change when I put that all together. I might, for instance, edit out the bit using singular second person (“you”, a nod to the great NK Jemisin). I’ll try to hang onto the plural second person, for aren’t “we” all in this together? I am starting to include citations for my scientific information. Very little of anything I put forward is ever an original assertion, and if you become curious to learn more yourself you’d be welcome to follow down some of the information I’ve found to be helpful.

And finally, thank you!

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Winter.

This is a pigmented place. The land here is an absurdity of texture. Everywhere there is a sky of endless, almost black

blue, rimmed by the jagged, deep red of the land. There are sheer walls and domes worn smooth, rounded like shoulders and thighs. Cracks splinter vertically like lightning bolts between stone faces shimmering in the sun, with millions of glimmering facets of sand grains per square foot. It is disorienting, enough so that you forget which way you came from to get here. Enough so that you cannot really see where to go next.

Many places have consistently abysmal weather afflicting them. In some places, rain comes down in soaking buckets. In others there is a steady, inescapable drizzle that chills the bone, that the Scotts call dreich, uttered both as a description and a guttural curse. Some climates are too humid to want to venture far outside, and in others there can be a fierce, dark cold.

Here, among the deep red, there is the Wind. It blankets the broken land like a scab: it is dry and unrelenting. It blows strong, and you would think it would move on, but it clings and it craves. You want to scream and throw up your hands, and it still isn’t enough. The scream gets lost, so you bear it, and you hide.

First the wind comes like a Whisper. Smoke from the neighbor’s trash fire streams your way and fills your nostrils, and you cannot keep all of the candles lit on your child’s birthday cake, though many tiny hands shield the flames from the whispering wind.

Then it is a Statement. Loose garbage slides around. The horses’ ears prick up, and the softness of their necks begins to turn to cement as they brace to hear and smell. All extra resources are now poured into senses straining to know what is out there in the abraded air. The tall stalks of grass up on the mesa start to draw sharp arcs of ancient calligraphy from the looseness of their bases like brushes on wiry wrists.

Then the wind comes as a Demand. The hard air slams into bare skin. Grit burrows into the sunworn creases of your face, and suddenly you realize that everyone around you who has been here for more than a few years is too sandblown to look young. Huddling inside, you might count the shingles as they rip off the roof, and wonder when it will be safe to go out on a ladder to tack them back onto the house.

Wind that Demands turns to blades that whistle and dart, seeking exposed corners. It makes a kite of anything flat enough to create lift. It can lift sheet metal and send it flying. One time driving back home from a trek in the desert, you saw the sharp edges of roofing panels flying across the road and into a pen of horses. You pulled over and hopped the fence, careful to avoid the electric wire, and scurried around in a crouch to avoid being pummeled with blasts of sand and wind. You couldn’t hold onto the metal without being sliced or without sailing away yourself, so you looked for rocks to weigh down the loose sheets, trying to save the horses. They found whatever shelter they could in their pens. They were too frozen and too vigilant to be aware you were trying to help. You get back into the car, and are pummeled with the stillness of suddenly being in shelter.

It was on a rather normal day when I was out with the dogs that the Wind quickly picked up into a Demand. It was a receding breath of winter. It fell on the mountains, combed its way down the slopes, and poured over the mesa edge. It ravaged the red rim of the canyon where I stood, and if its fingers could just grab hold of the bare rock it would be sure to throw boulders into the abyss of the canyon.

I was partaking in the peculiar desert activity of Rim-walking. It is the pursuit of walking along the bony edge of a canyon that forms as a causeway between the lush living skin of biocrusts on the mesa top and the impossible void of the canyon below. Doing so, a vestibular queasiness sets in, that somehow gravity is missing on one side of the body. It is one part ritual, and one part escape, this Rim Walking. It is a good way to unburden oneself from the doldrums of living in civilization by stepping into something Wild. The dogs get to romp in the open sands and spines of the earth, and the wanderer gets to revel in the Wandering.

It also happened that this was the year of my wedding, and I had set a goal for myself of learning the saxophone in time to play on stage at the celebration. I hadn’t played a reed instrument before, and in order to avoid completely annoying my fiancée (and to ensure the wedding would indeed go on) I took to bringing the instrument with me into the remote desert, where only the occasional raven could possibly mind my strange honking sounds.

That day, the demanding Wind stole the warmth out of my hands, and out of the metal of the musical instrument I held and occasionally squawked away on. This cold was not simply the absence of heat, but it was a force unto itself. It was a cold that had mass. It bit into my naked nose, and my eyes stung from being peppered with grains of sand.

My body progressively curled around the instrument I was holding, shielding me from the infuriated blasts of Wind. A shimmer down in the canyon flashed in the periphery of one of my eyes. I could perceive a white dome of sandstone next to a stream, hundreds of feet down, amid cottonwood trees that strung along the canyon bottom. While I was barraged by the Demanding wind, the trees stood still and indifferent. They were sheltered. A call formed somewhere in the background of awareness: to descend to that stillness on the white dome.

Rounding a corner on the rim I saw a notch in the steep walls. I stowed the brass saxophone in a snarl of juniper and then appraised my route. In this landscape of impossibilities, there always seems to be a way to go, as if humans evolved to be just the right size to squeeze through the gaps and scramble down the ledges of this terrain. Here it seemed I would just be able to get off of the rim and down the slope of debris to the water. I descended into the notch, pushing outwards to stabilize my body. A large handhold here, a jamming of my leg across a gap there, and I was basically down.

After I descended the rock notch, the first dog found her way down easily enough. She was the champion of ledges, and this was no problem for her. Or rather, this was a joy to her. That dog would often wait until her companions had fully navigated a difficult section of rim rock before taking the whole line in one shot. The second, though, was much more timid, and he whimpered from his perch up on the rim, before he raced back and forth looking for another way down. I sighed, and then labored back up the notch. He was grateful to be lifted into my arms. But I remembered why he is affectionately known as “Chunk” by those who know him best. I hefted all 70 pounds of him like a furry sack of potatoes and descended the notch with him in one arm.

The notch cut through the cliff rim and fed onto a slope that was steep, but navigable. The safety of firm ground was met with relief by both Chunk and I, and we continued down the sloping debris to the canyon bottom, seeking the glint of stone and water.

With each step we dropped in elevation, and with each step we noticed first the slowing, then the stilling of the wind that ravaged the rim from which we descended. Cottonwoods began to spring up around us, and eventually we made it to the bottom where red willows hugged the watercourse. The dogs scattered out into the undergrowth, weaving, digging, snorting, and darting off.

Then I started to notice horse droppings. There were a lot in fact, and I began to imagine that some sort of trail riding operation must have come up from a larger fork down-canyon in order to leave so many. They mostly seemed dried and withered, and I wrote them off as being vestiges of the last season at the most recent.

Where the rim was a blistering, dry coldness that turned one to leather, the canyon bottom was cool, still, and riparian. It was even humid amongst the shade and shadow. It had the faintest whisper of spring, and in the protected coveys of the canyon, leaves were beginning to sprout from the canopy overhead. I made my way down the canyon, looking for that glint of stone and water.

The path I followed was an old game trail, and as it paralleled the creek running somewhere to my left, it turned and descended into a thick stand of cottonwoods, where I had to step over logs or crouch through tunnels of overhanging willows. The line between stone and sky was now hundreds of feet above my head, and the Demand of wind had not reached its icy fingers here. The relief of quiet soothed, and I slowly felt the hardness in my ears and face dissolving as I meandered deeper into the canopied depths. The rhythmicity of wayfinding had me drifting into daydreams. I was feeling quite relaxed in my body, when several things happened in less than the blink of an eye.

First I heard the sudden crack of a tree branch to my left, immediately followed by a heavy thud. My eyes snapped to the source of this sound to see the form of a large, brown mass coming toward me. Before a thought could occur, my body stopped.

For a moment, sounds seemed louder, light seemed brighter. Chills climbed up my scalp. My breathing stopped, and my chest seemed to be arrested mid-breath, as an electric cold hit the ends of my fingers and toes. My heart seemed to accelerate and slow at the same time, resulting in a pounding beat in my chest. I was locked in place, as if moving, or even breathing would expose me to this threat, and any sound I made would interrupt my hearing, which strained for more information. The light and shadow of the underbrush swirled together as my mind grappled with the moment, and a picture formed. It was not of a bear, nor of an elk, nor even of a burro. Like a figure emerging from the fog, the brown mass coming toward me sharpened into the gestalt of a riderless horse. Way out in the desert, this was something quite unexpected.

As surprised as I was to stumble upon her, she seemed equally shocked to see a two-legged creature down here. I happened to be standing in the clearest exit point from the dell in which she had been grazing. In her flight, she crashed through the brush running straight toward me, before veering to my right, passing just by me and heading down the trail.

My eyes followed her as she traveled, and in the moments after the initial shock I noticed myself struggling to reorient.

Details started to fill in after she passed by me, as if my mind had been on pause, and thoughts were slowly catching back up to speed. Visual detail seemed to come first, that she was a pinto of some sort, and that she had been munching on a branch of cottonwood when I must have scared her. Having been startled, her jaw had clamped down on the branch and she carried it down-canyon with her like some stylistic accessory.

After she had gone crashing through the brush and down the trail, her footfalls, and those of what sounded like several other horses in the woods, faded into the canyon. Gradually, my awareness of the stillness of the trees overhead returned to me. The air felt cool against my heated skin. It was clear that any chance of harm had passed. At least, I could cognitively understand that it was so. My body, still planted where I had been startled, remained unconvinced, and I grasped that I was living out some form of a survival and defense response: my chest was tight, my thoughts were disorganized, and my vision and hearing were somewhat altered, allowing in light and sound slightly differently than just a few moments before.

To say the least, I had been startled. The effect on me persisted for some time, and as I gradually organized, I found some capacity to recover in the form of tools.

……………………………………….

It is important to note here that this experience was not a trauma in and of itself. I was essentially on a nice walk in the wild, and was surprised by the sudden emergence of one of my favorite animals in an unexpected place. This could have been an experience of wonder, or even delight, were it not for the cost of engaging with such a nearby surprise. I suppose it’s possible this kind of occurrence could form into chronic stress of sorts if I experienced this level of surprise on a daily basis: If I never truly knew when an animal the size of a small automobile would come crashing towards me, my body, including my brain and entire nervous system, would inevitably change from the impact of this chronic stress and become vigilant to the smallest sounds that would cue me to have a reaction toward safety.

As a standalone experience, however, it was simply enough. It was enough of a stimulus for my nervous system to have a reaction. The experience of a reaction is incredibly quick. The horse stepped on a stick and narrowly missed trampling over me in the span of about two seconds. There were many parts within me operating together in those two seconds, however.

Reaction is the integration of sensory information and how the body perceives it.

Understanding the architecture of a reaction in the nervous system is useful for several reasons. Knowing how reactions occur can help someone make sense of their day-to-day life and experiences. Knowing how life experiences can impact the architecture of reactions and cause them to become amplified or outsized for the event that occurs can tremendously help someone feel a bit more like they are a normal human being and mammal acting as they should, given what they have been through. Having a sense of how quickly this occurs and at what level of the nervous system it is happening can help in developing a strategy to recover from a reaction, and even to change the architecture of the reaction in the first place. Often this is in the form of treatment. It also helps to recognize that this reaction architecture unfolds well before thoughts form, and so thinking your way through a situation might have a limited effect on the reaction occurring in the first place or of preventing it in the future.

Dr. Ed Hamlin, the venerated neuroscientist, once said at a conference that “consciousness is the flow of energy through the brain.” This is a good starting point for understanding reactions. The concept of a reaction having an “architecture” means that there is a passage of information through structures within the brain. This starts from sensory input, and results in full cognitive awareness and behaviors as a result. Along the way, there are many, extremely complex interactions of structures of the brain that progressively affect the next parts of the nervous system as energy flows downstream from the headwaters in the first sensory integration at the level of the brainstem all the way through to the cortex of the upper brain. We have an experience of how that flow downstream occurs, and the passage of this flow will change based on experiences in one’s life.

I will name a few parts of this architecture of reaction here, but please note that any suggestion that these are isolated modules knocking into each other like dominos is misleading. There are many interactions anchoring into these parts, and information passes back and forth incredibly quickly. Perhaps the best metaphor for this sequence of interaction is as with a choir of individual voices singing together, starting with one voice, and then another, and then another. The rhythms and pitches of each voice only take on their meaning once the companion parts are played with it, creating a network of interlocking pieces.

Here are five parts in the sequence of reaction:

1. Hearing the stick crack: Much of the energy and mass of the brain is involved in creating a picture of what is happening around it. It is enormously expensive energetically to take in every sensory detail and appraise it given how many things we can sense in a given moment. Just now, sitting at this desk, I can see musical instruments, art hanging on the walls, and dozens of different shapes and colors and textures. There are things I might sense through touch or hearing, as well as things happening within my body. It would be increasingly difficult to pay attention to all of these things, and decide for every single item whether I need to keep paying attention to it or not. It would be exhausting, and so the brain forms a model of the world around it, and screens out information that is not important. It does this through sensory gating, which is a phenomenon occurring at the cortical level, and there are ways the brain does this on a deeper, brainstem and cerebellum level. In the short version, the brain essentially forms a prediction model of what is happening around it. Any deviation from this model, any sign that there is a prediction error, becomes a signal radiating out from the brainstem. I walked along the bottom of the canyon, taking in the stillness and smells of the air, imagining I was completely alone, save for the dogs trotting along ahead of me. To suddenly hear a branch break, when I had no inkling of an idea there would be an additional large animal in the canyon with me, counts as this prediction error. This can happen in many different situations. Most obviously, experiencing a rocket hitting a building and exploding while on the way to work is a prediction error that someone in Kyiv may unfortunately experience. But this can happen in very subtle ways. The template we have for connecting as mammals is to reach toward an attachment figure and find that they are right there and available. This is practically hardwired in. To reach, expecting connection, and instead experiencing hostility, or humiliation, or perhaps even worse, absence, is devastating. If you are feeling curious, and feel that you have capacity to see what I mean, you might take a look at the still-face experiment here, and see a young child reacting to sudden, unexpected emotional absence from her mother. Even with well-intentioned parents, the very nature of parenting within societal norms creates many, many opportunities for misattunement to occur, whether it’s with screens, or child care difficulties, or the stress of being expected to do it all on one’s own. On that day in the canyon, the clash of how my brain was expecting to encounter the world with its actual sensory input activated in a region known as the colliculi, where primary senses are first processed.

   

   The black box of processing is what we are curious about here. The language of “Event vs. Emergency” comes from Dr. Corrigan. In some conditions, a person might feel the freedom to “Ignore or Explore” things they encounter: sounds, smells, other people, challenges, etc. When the processing at the sensory integration level decides there may be an emergency at hand, the body takes on an air of “Necessity” to attend to things. A person may still choose to engage in these things, but lost is the sense of ease of a nervous system that is encountering the world as a series of “Events”, rather than of “Emergencies.”

2. Before I could possibly think, the colliculi of the brainstem, motivated by the sudden sound of the stick breaking, engaged specific muscle groups that helped me turn my eyes to the source of the sound in an orienting response. This happens before voluntary muscle movement is possible. I turned to my left and saw the brown mass coming at me. At this stage, I couldn’t tell what it was, but could make out its size (very big) and its direction of travel (right at me). These elements of sound and vision in steps 1 and 2 here occur very quickly, as quickly as 10 milliseconds. The colliculi may be the seat of deciding whether sensory information is fine and able to be ignored or explored, or whether sensory information should cue an active response. This choice point has been called “Event vs. Emergency” by Dr. Corrigan. This is the deciding factor in whether a person remains truly unperturbed, or if an entire sequence of events comes to be that a person then needs to address.

3. If an emergency is cued here, a region dealing with arousal will chime in. This region, named the Locus Coeruleus, meaning “blue spot”, is tiny, but it has tremendous responsibility. For one, it serves a priming function. When activated, norepinephrine shatters through the nervous system, altering large scale networks and getting regions ready to act. In high doses, this becomes what is known as “shock” in significant events. Eyes feel like they bulge. Hair stands on end. The head recoils, or the back tightens. Sensations of chills or heat or jolts of electricity flow through the body, recruiting and rallying an activated, ready sense. It should be noted that this happens incredibly quickly, that this all occurs before the heart beat can even change. It is also important to note that when the Locus Coeruleus is in full form, the body will not forget what happens next. It will not, for example, discard experiences of fear, as if the Locus Coeruleus, this shock effect, crystallizes a playlist of feelings and actions, so that what might start as a brief startle can shift the entire body.

4. Breathing, heartbeat, and the building blocks of emotions, core affects, start to change as the Periaqueductal Gray (PAG) is activated, and here is where the Autonomic Nervous System may come into play. I have witnessed very capable, very widely read presenters still say that the body will either go into a sympathetic, “Fight or Flight” response, or it will be at a parasympathetic, “Rest” state. It can follow that we assume this means “sympathetic equals bad” and “parasympathetic equals good” or desirable, or that we can have only one of these responses happening in any given situation. This is often given over to the amygdala and the cortex, and addressing it comes down to challenging these beliefs and thoughts. As always seems to be the case with the brain, we are learning the situation is much more complex than this. I share more detail about the Autonomic Nervous System in another chapter, but as a brief review, it is composed of several channels that are independent at the same time they are interconnected with the others: the enteric, the sympathetic, and the parasympathetic. Of these, the last two get heaps of attention in mental health literature. All have to do with the rhythmicity of aliveness. There seem to be many stops along the distributed nervous system that influence how the basic bodily rhythms of living will change depending on the needs of the moment. Not only breath, but the volume of the lungs can change, and not only heartbeat, but the patterns of miniscule changes in the space between each heartbeat are subject to change. Even the amount of water held in the cells of skin will ebb and flow depending on the complex tapestry of the branchings of the Autonomic Nervous System. Presence and fluidity of both of these branchings, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, are necessary for a being to function well, even in moments of complete calm or desired focus or rest, and especially in moments of alarm. Where the Autonomic Nervous System intersects with the Periaqueductal Gray, there are several branchings (dorsolateral and lateral) that when activated, create sympathetically dominant activation responses, including increased heart rate, increased lung volume, increased blood flow and muscle tone to the limbs (arms for fight, legs for flight), and some of the core basic affects begin to emerge: sadness, fear, anger, etc. There are also branchings here at the PAG, that when activated, create parasympathetically dominant passive responses, including a decrease in heart rate, decrease in lung capacity, and loss of muscle tone. All of these branchings can be activated in isolation, creating a solitary “fight” response, “flight” response, or “collapse” response. Very often, however, there are mixed responses, where active and passive responses are layered on top of each other. The body tenses, but won’t move. The heart pounds as it wants to accelerate and slow at the same time. A person might check their smartwatch when they’re anxious and be surprised to see their heart rate isn’t changing, even while their insides scream. Many times, this is given the name “freeze response”, and from the outside this often seems accurate. Often the freeze results in the stopping of all movement and speech, as if the goal were to disappear altogether, and shift attention away from oneself. That would be a handy way to survive. In relationships, this is sometimes given the name “stonewalling”, but rather than being a willful response, the internal electricity of the person is one of turmoil: words cannot get out, any more than they are coming in. People might be moved to placate from this place as well, where they are moved to action, but the action is to figuratively, or sometimes literally, lower one’s head to carve out a sense of safety around someone perceived to be more powerful. Where experiencing emotions fluidly so they pass through may be a major goal in a lot of therapy, this becomes challenging in mixed active and passive response. Tears may come up, the throat might get tight, but there doesn’t seem to be a passing of the energy of the emotion. Words like “stuck” start to become used. This complex landscape of the PAG becomes complicated by the network created with the Locus Coeruleus. These large, obvious, emotive responses become choreographed and do not extinguish themselves as long as there is shock in the system. An example might be someone receiving a severe, unexpected dog bite. Dog interactions after this might be fairly stressful for a while, but with repeat exposures, the initial stress of being near a dog comes down quite a bit. It probably doesn’t fully go away though. Dog interaction from then on comes with a mild bump of activation, and this persists, even after one hundred dog interactions. The body doesn’t forget because of the architecture of reaction. I do try to avoid casting any amount of shade on alternate perspectives of issues, but I am compelled to say that this is where trauma work really diverges from strict behaviorism. A fear response at the PAG level cannot be unlearned while the issue of the Locus Coeruleus firing off remains unaddressed. If this is the case, then the approach of repeated exposure to a threat to try and quiet the reaction might not work as well as theorized. It can possibly get to the point of being manageable, but there will always be a tinge of emergency in the background. Attempting to treat this way might put a person (or a horse) through quite a bit of distress along the way.

   

   A way of looking at what is termed the “defense cascade”, where an individual will select through a menu of options depending on what will work best for the situation. With a sudden threat, a body may wish to act quickly, jumping or running away suddenly. But in many situations stopping, becoming invisible, or becoming death-like may be better options. These become choreographed and selected, as if experience creates grooves for future situations. Because there are different columns of the Periaqueductal Gray that deal with active and passive defenses, they can coactivate, making for a venn diagram of experiences. Along with “Tonic Immobility”, there should be a label of “Immobilized Vigilance” in this middle category, where words aren’t coming out, and there may be little movement or expression, but there is quite a bit of internal activity.

5. Less than 50 milliseconds have elapsed by this point. The sound of the stick breaking has echoed off the canyon wall about 50 feet from me, but it hasn’t returned yet. My eye has just barely been able to blink. The choir of brainstem interactions now reaches the cortex, and large scale networks are beginning to change in relation to how the brainstem has been experiencing this fraction of time. I will write in more depth about large scale networks in another chapter, but as I go forward, let us consider the Default Mode Network. It is a constellation among many in the galaxy of the larger brain, but is unique in that it can emerge when we can tap into a sense of our Self, as an individual, right here and now, with a past, present, and future, as well as within a body and sense of relationships. For this moment, imagine a nervous system that experiences the aforementioned orienting, shock, and defensive responses. Imagine if that nervous system experiences these things regularly. Now imagine if that nervous system experienced this kind of distress regularly at developmentally crucial times of life, when the cortex, and especially the Default Mode Network, was growing and organizing itself. That full person would be growing, but would be growing in a way that is organized around the sense of emergency, rather than the sense of okayness. These experiences are reflected in a shift in the way the Default Mode Network forms. Consequently, a person feels different in themself, in their life and relationships, in their world as a result.

6. Thankfully, there are more and more signs that intentional approaches can help restore a Default Mode Network, that individuals can find themselves vertically integrated into an existence of peace and rest in themselves. I would argue, as I think many would, that horses can be a big part of this equation.

On the canyon bottom that day, I stood in the vacuum of energy after the passing of the big mare. I was safe, but I had a pounding heart, and thoughts that just couldn’t seem to come into focus. When dealing with a reaction, there are a few strategies to try out. If one is purely activated with fight and/or flight, it can help take breaths that have the potential to downregulate the whole system. This is done by inhaling for three seconds, and doing so deeply enough that the ribs and belly expand slightly, followed by a soft exhale drawn out over six seconds. You may wish to try a few of these right now. It almost always has the potential to help things feel like they are slowing down. In my case, I knew that my body was in a mixed state, with both a gas pedal and brake pedal fully pushed to the floor. For many people, when this is the state of affairs, it almost never really works to only downregulate the system. In some situations it can feel worse, and then the person has the additional burden of feeling like an outsider for whom the normal tools just don’t work. I had found that one effective way out of this was to first upregulate, in other words, activate, and then to downregulate if the nervous system felt a need. There are a few ways to do this. Standing up and walking a bit, or doing a few free squats or pushups, are all ways that can help a body lift out of a mixed state. I recall hearing from a client, who was a physician, that when she was at the hospital she would develop an increasing sense of anxiety over the day, and the only relief was to sneak into a cleaning closet and do a round of jumping jacks.

That day in the canyon, I elected to take five breaths, quick, but deep, as if I had just sprinted up a steep slope. To my joy, my nervous system calmed, and I was able to then take a few deep breaths with slower exhales to fully come back to myself. My heartbeat quieted, my hearing regulated, and my thoughts and feelings started to become more congruent. I knew, as well as felt, like I was safe.

Disarming a reaction by directing attention to the Periaqueductal Gray in this way can be useful, or even crucial for some people. It can be far more effective than trying to work with the thoughts that are the output of this sequence. However, it is often a bit harsh. There are many for whom this is simply a bit too much. If a person has little in the way of internal stability to return to, nudging the nervous system this suddenly can even bring on a secondary defensive cascade.

As a result, it seems more useful to use a gentler, and somehow more profound tool as an approach to grounding. That is activating the vestibular sense. It is thought that there are eight main senses. There are the classic five of exteroception - seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling - as well as proprioception (the sense of our body’s dimensions in space) interoception (the internal sense of the body) and the vestibular system (the sense of gravity). One can activate their vestibular sense by locating an internal sense of the center of gravity, and noticing how it shifts through slowly using three different head movements. You might try this now, making note of any shift that occurs as you do so. Tilt your head from side to side, noting how your center of gravity shifts as your left ear tilts to your left shoulder, and then switching to tilt the right ear to the right shoulder. This axis of movement is called roll. Try repeating this movement several times. Then explore centering your head and rocking your head forward and backward, again noticing your center of gravity as it shifts. This movement is called pitch. Again, do this several times, slowly enough that you can notice weight shifting internally. Then with your head balanced along roll and pitch axes, turn your head left and right, where your center of gravity does not shift, but instead rotates in space. This axis of movement is called yaw. After doing this several times, notice if one of these axes was more appealing than the others for some reason, and take some more time with it.

Now notice if there is a shift in your internal sense of yourself. Again, the goal is to engage the vestibular system, which is foundational to all of our other senses and processing. There is a huge range in how people experience this activity. It can be neutral, but very often it is profound, especially when situations and emotions cause a person to begin to become untethered.

I’d invite you to try this down the road. Tools are only useful if we remember to use them. In the cataclysm of defense responses and impacted networks, the part of us that can take enough perspective to remember to use a tool is often disconnected and inaccessible. Remembering to even try something itself then becomes a tool needing practice.

As a side note, I believe that this vestibular engagement is a very large part of what happens when a human sits on a horse and allows their body to be moved by a horse being led by another human. That rider is not actively riding in that moment. They are held in space, and in gravity.

Even incredibly effective tools cannot be the final answer for addressing a reaction, because they do not touch the original issue at the orienting level. They can only pick up the pieces after the PAG is in full form. Getting to the core of things means going deeper than breath. Thankfully, that is possible.

…………………………………………………

The mare had taken off down the path, which was a loose game trail that wound to the left before ducking under a partially fallen tree and then disappearing into the undergrowth. I helped my system regulate, and noticed stillness around me once again. I collected myself for a time, then slowly followed. Ahead of her out of my sight I could hear the thundering of more hooves.

“How many could there be?” I said to myself in a whisper. The dogs were no help here. Hearing the fall of hooves they had circled back behind me and peered warily up the trail, seeming very optimistic about my role as a shield.

Eventually the game trail led to a large clearing and I emerged into a sunlit open space created by a rounded dome of white sandstone that had seemed to thrust itself through the vegetation from below. Faces of the individual grains of quartz sand that composed it sparkled in the sun. Standing on top of it were six horses with white and brown pinto coats, all facing me with all twelve ears pointed at me. The one with whom I had shared a moment of startle stood out in the front. She snorted out a call of sorts. It was not a warning, but it was intended for the strange two-legged beast emerging from the undergrowth. Her companions stayed with her, finding comfort in her taking the lead.

I have some experience with mustangs, those feral horses of the North American steppe and savannah. My wife has brought a couple of them home in the last few years, and she worked with them from being truly wild beings that hadn’t known the gentleness of people to being not only tolerant towards humans, but interested in them. One had even become our best trail horse to ride until he had a very puzzling setback that we still don’t fully understand.

I approached them as I had watched my wife do with her mustangs when they were still learning about being around humans. I breathed and softened what I could in what my body projected. Either by pure body language or by some felt sense detectable by the horses in other ways, I wanted to signal curiosity, not threat. I approached, and noticed the limits of their comfort by the subtleties of their weight shifts, whether they were centered or leaning back slightly. I would approach, pause, notice, and breathe. They would breathe and blink, and once again center their weight. I then would be able to approach them more, pausing again when it felt like it was time to do so. We danced this way for some fifteen minutes, up until I was within an arms reach of the one I had startled. I softly extended an arm to allow her to smell my hand. She leaned forward and smelled me. Having watched my wife do this a couple of times, I had known this stage of relationship to take days and weeks, and not minutes. This was not a mustang, I thought.

A moment later I softly touched her cheek, then moved my hand down her neck, and touched her shoulder. She shifted her weight and allowed me to pick up her front right foot.

Well that confirmed it, I thought. This was definitely not a mustang.

Picking up her foot, I noticed some of the hallmarks of tool use that showed this was a horse whose feet had been trimmed by a human. I set her foot down on the sandstone. We stood, contemplating the rich sensory tapestry of the canyon. Alive with stillness, the sound of wind still whipping the canyon rim far above was barely audible. A single exhalation of that wind, and the canyon breathed ever so slightly through the cottonwoods all around us.

Next to us, the creek ran, as it has for millions of years, probably since the plateau was first thrust into the air, around when the early horse first evolved. The glint on the water and stone was beautiful.

To this day, I have no idea whose horses they were, or what they were doing there.

References:

Battaglia, S., Nazzi, C., & Thayer, J. F. (2023). Fear-induced bradycardia in mental disorders: Foundations, current advances, future perspectives. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 149, 105163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105163

Giustino, T. F., Ramanathan, K. R., Totty, M. S., Miles, O. W., & Maren, S. (2020). Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine Drives Stress-Induced Increases in Basolateral Amygdala Firing and Impairs Extinction Learning. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 40(4), 907–916. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1092-19.2019

Brand, B. L., Schielke, H., Schiavone, F., & Lanius, R. A. (2022). Finding solid ground: Overcoming obstacles in trauma treatment. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/med-psych/9780190636081.001.0001

Corrigan, F. M., & Christie-Sands, J. (2020). An innate brainstem self-other system involving orienting, affective responding, and polyvalent relational seeking: Some clinical implications for a “Deep Brain Reorienting” trauma psychotherapy approach. Medical hypotheses, 136, 109502. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2019.109502

Corrigan, F. M., Young, H., & Christie-Sands, J. (2024). Deep brain reorienting: Understanding the neuroscience of trauma, attachment wounding, and DBR psychotherapy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003431695 [1, 2, 3, 4]

Hamlin, E. (2025, March 21). The quantum leap in neurofeedback: Quantum mechanics in the brain, mind, and consciousness [Conference presentation]. Attuned Neurofeedback Summit 2025, Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia.

Kozlowska, K., Walker, P., McLean, L., & Carrive, P. (2015). Fear and the Defense Cascade: Clinical Implications and Management. Harvard review of psychiatry, 23(4), 263–287. https://doi.org/10.1097/HRP.0000000000000065

Lanius, R., Harricharan, S., Kearney, B. E., & Pandev-Girard, B. (2025). Sensory pathways to healing from trauma: Harnessing the brain’s capacity for change. The Guilford Press. [1, 2, 3]

Lanius, U. F., Paulsen, S. L., & Corrigan, F. M. (Eds.). (2014). Neurobiology and treatment of traumatic dissociation: Toward an embodied self. Springer Publishing Company. Neurobiology and Treatment of Traumatic Dissociation

Lettieri G. (2026). Integrating neural, physiological, and interoceptive measures in social interaction. Frontiers in neuroscience, 20, 1771470. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2026.1771470

Palumbo, R. V., Marraccini, M. E., Weyandt, L. L., Wilder-Smith, O., McGee, H. A., Liu, S., & Goodwin, M. S. (2017). Interpersonal Autonomic Physiology: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 21(2), 99–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868316628405

Rodberg E. (2020). Stress-Induced Increases in Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine Underlie Extinction Learning Deficits. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 40(29), 5512–5514. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0677-20.2020

Warner, E., Finn, H., Westcott, A., & Cook, A. (2020). Transforming trauma in children and adolescents: An embodied approach to somatic regulation, trauma processing, and attachment-building. North Atlantic Books. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

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