Restoring Natural Resilience
By Guest Blogger: Katharine Stone Ayers
Our Natural Resilience
You’ve just arrived home from a rejuvenating meditation retreat to find a stack of bills and final notices in your mailbox. Suddenly, your composure is disrupted and stress creeps in.
You may have a burning desire to run back to the retreat or pick a fight with the bill collectors. The body is reacting with a built-in protective response to stress through the sympathetic nervous system.
What if you could restore your natural resilience so that you could respond to situations with equanimity rather than react with intensity to stressful situations?
The good news is your system is designed to move into harmony and resiliency. This means you can learn to maintain a calm attitude, be at ease, and respond appropriately despite life’s daily challenges.
Breaking an Addiction to Intensity
We’re living in a culture addicted to drama and intensity. Exceeding the nervous system’s ideal intensity thresholds can become a repetitive unconscious habit. Everyday challenges can seem insurmountable.
Imagine a situation where you are having a disagreement with a loved one. As your nervous system goes over threshold, the conversation may become heated, the tone of voice can become threatening and your heart beats faster. Your breathing can become rapid and shallow.
On the other hand, you or both parties can take a moment, lean on meditation practices and/or use your inner witness to interrupt the escalating intensity.
You can actually learn to tune into the “ideal intensity thresholds” of a naturally harmonized nervous system and can become more calm and regulated. With this built-in resilience, it becomes possible to approach a disagreement as a more open conversation without feeling stressed. You can respond from a nervous system that has become more coherent and harmonized.
It’s common to think you need to learn or “do” something in order to make your nervous system become more resilient. In reality, resilience is a naturally occurring process like breathing or digesting food. Over time, with practice, you can learn how to tune into these natural rhythms or pulsations that bring the nervous system into resilience.
Organic Intelligence: New Frontiers in Therapy
Rather than looking for what’s wrong, the Organic Intelligence practitioner employs a ‘shaping’ paradigm of positive reinforcement – a paradigm shift in trauma therapy. OI’s unique contribution to the evolution of therapy is a complete Clinical Protocol. The practitioner is trained to recognize the degree or organization or disorganization present in the client’s nervous system. By observing relevant client behaviors according to a very clear map, it is possible to make appropriate interventions that support natural systemic reorganization.
The OI practitioner learns to carefully shepherd thresholds, which gives necessary input to the brainstem. This works at the conditioning level, not primarily via the cognitive channel.
As the system comes into greater harmony, the practitioner no longer needs to intervene, but simply observes when the timing is right to allow the nervous system to come into greater and greater coherence. The client can also learn to recognize his or her naturally occurring “ideal” nervous system thresholds. Over time, the system becomes more relaxed and resilient. It becomes easier to respond appropriately.
Organic intelligence sees trauma as an unintegrated resource. As you develop resiliency, a much wider range of intensity can be handled. This happens without undue conscious effort to manage or contain the experience. There are, however, a few practices that will help enhance the process.
Orientation to Pleasure
One key practice is Orientation to Pleasure*. Learning to orient to simple pleasures is an effective way to support the nervous system.
- Watch a sunset.
- Look at a beautiful flower.
- Listen to ocean waves.
These practices encourage here and now awareness. They help rewire our nervous system towards pleasure rather than the “what’s wrong” paradigm. Freedom from suffering becomes “freedom for living an authentic, vibrant life in the here-and-now.”
Mindfulness and Meditation
OI encourages the practice of Mindfulness and Meditation for both practitioner and client. Most certified Organic Intelligence practitioners have well-developed mindfulness and meditation practices.
Mindfulness practices give you an opportunity to observe automatic conditioning and make new and more supportive choices. Meditation, such as a guided Loving Kindness Meditation** can develop a greater capacity to love others and ourselves.
Working with Organic Intelligence practitioner and utilizing the resources outlined in this article can foster a restoration of resilience in the nervous system. The therapeutic encounter as the search for “what’s wrong” or for the “root cause” of the neurosis, or the “trauma” is abandoned in favor of a naturalistic and supportive conversation whenever possible. The natural return of the oscillatory pattern invites other systems to synchronize. Systems reorganize from the nervous system up. Subjective feelings of greater ease and flow appear. As the system reorganizes, physical symptoms which reflect fundamental systemic disorganization often diminish or disappear (e.g. migraines, irritable bowel, fibromyalgia, etc.).
Our biologies love learning and growth. Over time with support and practice, our nervous systems become more resilient. The natural rhythm of an integrated biology becomes evident. Eventually, pleasure becomes prominent and both practitioner and client can sit back, relax and enjoy the flow of experience.
Free Resources
StressToStabilizationExercise.pdf
Orientation to Pleasure on YouTube with Steve Hoskinson:
** Loving Kindness meditation on YouTube with Steve Hoskinson:
Organic Intelligence Mindfulness Meditations with Steve Hoskinson:
About the Author: Katharine Stone Ayers
Katharine Stone Ayers is a certified in OI Expert who trained with Steven Hoskinson, founder of Organic Intelligence®. In a world cluttered with noise, distraction and stress, Organic Intelligence® is a tool to help us feel more relaxed and at ease, happier and experience more resiliency in our nervous system and physiology.It fosters kindness and compassion. This gives us increased capacity to handle and bounce back from everyday stresses and align with that which has deep meaning for us. This is what inspires her to offer Organic Intelligence® to others. View her website at www.returntoharmony.org.
Readers, I’d love to answer questions and hear feedback from you.
Soul Bridging, thank you for the opportunity to teach others about this new tool for bringing the nervous system into harmony.
With aloha,
Katharine Stone Ayers
Thank you Kitty! This is such an important subject right now, especially when we consider that humanity is, collectively, moving toward the first initiation. The first initiation is all about having control of the emotional body. Using its radiance, power, and influence to shape our energy, thoughts and words. So often we are used by our emotions, rather than using them to uplift and support us in our work in the world. Being used by our emotions takes us to a place where we can’t recognize or hear the small, still voice of spirit. Having skills and techniques to quiet the emotional body and regain center is so important! Thank you for your article and your work in the world!
Hey Kitty. You sure do keep aiming up, Good Job! Great article. Tate