Organismic Regulation - The Art of Returning to Self
I used to live at a pace that left no room for anything.
High arousal was my normal. Boom and bust was my rhythm - or rather, my lack of it. Working at high intensity, using more energy than I had in my tank, and then collapsing. Fatigue. Waking up tired. Never enough time. Always late.
I didn't listen to my body. I didn't hear the signals that I was hungry, thirsty, tired, or simply needed a break. I was on overdrive - living very far from what I would now call my primary self. Locked into my thinking, my head, my habits. Living entirely in the world of now, of what was next, of what still needed to be done.
I didn't know, then, that this was a state. That there were other states, other ways of being available to me. That my nervous system was doing exactly what a chronically overwhelmed nervous system does - burning through its resources, never fully recovering, mistaking urgency for aliveness.
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I remember a moment of insight. A lovely sunny day. I had time - genuinely, enough time - to get from where I was to where I needed to be. And yet I was marching down the road.
And then I caught myself.
In that moment I came out of my head. I connected with my feet on the ground. Then into my whole body, from the ground up. And then I felt the warmth of the sun on my face, a slight cooling breeze, the colours around me, the world that had been there all along. Suddenly it felt good to be alive.
It was simple. And profound. Coming into and fully feeling myself on the inside.
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In body psychotherapy we talk about the vasomotoric cycle - the body's natural movement from rest through activation and back to rest again. The sympathetic nervous system rises to meet a demand: we focus, we mobilise, we act. Then the parasympathetic brings us back down: we recover, we integrate, we return to equilibrium.
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Gerda Boyesen, the Norwegian clinical psychologist who developed biodynamic psychology, understood the body as a self-regulating organism - one that, given the right conditions, knows how to return to balance. Not through effort or discipline or willpower. But through the simple restoration of conditions in which the natural cycle can complete.
This cycle is not a therapeutic concept. It is a biological reality. It is what living systems do - what we are designed to do. The breath rises and falls. Energy moves through the body and returns to stillness. We are meant to oscillate - not to sustain a single high pitch indefinitely.
The vasomotoric cycle gets interrupted when the basic rhythms of life are distorted - particularly in early life, when we are most dependent on others to help regulate our nervous systems before we can do it for ourselves. We learn, or don't, the felt sense of coming back. Of the downswing. Of rest that is genuinely restorative rather than simply collapse
When life becomes what mine had become - permanently activated, permanently urgent, the downswing never quite arriving - the cycle breaks. The body stops trusting that rest will come, so it stops fully activating. Or it activates and cannot stop. The natural rhythm that should move through us like breathing becomes rigid, interrupted, stuck.
For many of us - and I include my marching, urgent, always-late self in this - what was never learned, or was learned and then lost, can be found again. Not all at once. Not through a single insight on a sunny street, however significant that moment was. But through practice. Through repetition. Through gradually, patiently, building a new relationship with the body's own wisdom.
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What I was missing, in those years of boom and bust, was rhythm. Not in a metaphorical sense - in a literal, biological, embodied sense. The rhythm of activation and return. Of effort and recovery. Of moving toward and coming back. When we lose our biological rhythm we gradually lose our felt sense of connection with who we are.
My body had signals for all of this. It always does. Hunger, thirst, tiredness, the need to pause - the body speaks constantly, in a language that is entirely available to us if we are willing to slow down enough to hear it.
Learning to hear it again - has been one of the central projects of my life. And it remains, I think, one of the most important things I can offer the people I work with. A quality of listening. An understanding, hard won and personally lived, that the body is not the enemy of the life we want. It is the ground of it.
The moment on the sunny street was not an achievement. It was a return. To something that had always been there - the felt sense of being fully alive in a body, in a world, in a moment that was actually happening.