Episode Details

SYNOPSIS:
What if the autonomic nervous system is more than a mechanism to regulate – and part of the extraordinary way our bodies are in relationship with one another?

In this expansive conversation, dance/movement therapist, human rights psychotherapist and author Dr. Amber Elizabeth Gray joins Ali Mezey to explore the autonomic nervous system through the lenses of Polyvagal Theory, movement, trauma, relationship and the lived intelligence of the body. Drawing on nearly three decades of work with survivors of torture, war and human rights abuses – as well as her long collaboration and exchange of ideas with Stephen Porges – Amber takes the conversation beyond simplified notions of sympathetic “bad,” parasympathetic “good,” and regulation as the goal. Instead, she invites listeners into a nervous system that protects, mobilizes, settles, connects, plays, dances, loves – and continually responds to the bodies and world around it. 

Ali and Amber explore the vagus nerve and the promises and controversies of Polyvagal Theory; why “safety” isn’t equally available to every body; the danger of privileging particular nervous-system states; and what changes when survival responses are understood not as failures, but as expressions of an organism doing its best to remain whole. Amber also shares how movement became central to her work with profoundly traumatized people, and how her own embodied inquiry has led her toward a practice of restoration, reclamation and resistance. Along the way, the conversation wanders – as bodies do – through whales and dolphins, evolution, intuition, pattern recognition, the natural world, and the possibility that our nervous systems may be far less individual than we imagine. 

Ultimately, this is a conversation about relationship: within our bodies, between bodies, and between ourselves and the larger living world. What becomes possible when we stop trying simply to “regulate” the nervous system and begin listening to the complexity, creativity and intelligence of what it is already doing?

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FOR MORE ALI MEZEY:

Website: https://www.alimezey.com

Personal Geometry® and the Magic of Mat Work Course information:
FREE Guided Body Mapping Taster: Heart/Sexuality Split
Five-films series (made by Ali Mezey) on renowned Family Constellation Facilitator, Stephan Hausner’s work with transgenerational influences on illness

FOR MORE DR AMBER ELIZABETH GRAY:
BIO: Dr. Amber Elizabeth Gray is an award-winning dance movement therapist, human rights psychotherapist, and Continuum teacher. She has worked for 29 years with survivors of human rights abuses, war, torture, natural disasters,  and historical and intergenerational trauma. Equally artist, advocate, author, educator, poet, mystic and therapist, she, her clients, A