Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, and Autism

by Stanley D. Rosenberg

Tai chi is unparalleled as a source of knowledge about natural ways of moving the body. Practicing the tai chi form every day is the kung fu of knowing yourself, similar to deeper forms of meditation in other traditions.

The movements of tai chi are continuous, spiraling, and “soft” compared with those of “hard” styles of self-defense such as karate, where the movements are in straight lines, fast, and with definite beginning and ending points. The goal of tai chi as a martial art is not to become stronger and faster than your opponent but to use your own body awareness, flexibility, and kinesthetic sense to find where your opponents are tense—and then “help” the opponents use their own force against themselves.

in Rolfing we work to release the typical physical characteristics and habitual emotional patterns that limit our clients, restrict their movements, and cause pain and discomfort. The focus is on balancing tensions in the connective tissues of the body rather than “relaxing” the muscles, which is the usual approach to body therapy. The result is that they can move in new ways and have greater emotional flexibility.

The idea of the two-state (stress and relaxation) function of the autonomic nervous system played a prominent role in our curriculum. I taught about it in my classes on craniosacral therapy, visceral massage, and connective-tissue release. Together with an American neurologist, Ronald Lawrence, MD, I even wrote a book, Pain Relief with Osteomassage,6 about pain relief and hands-on treatment, based on this interpretation of the autonomic nervous system.

Porges’s Polyvagal Theory brought about a revolutionary advancement in my understanding of the autonomic nervous system. According to this theory, five cranial nerves (CNs) must function adequately in order to attain the desirable state of social engagement. These five nerves are CN V, VII, IX, X, and XI, and they all originate in the brainstem.

The mythical Hydra is a metaphor for the frustration of treating one symptom only to have one or more others crop up in its place. Like the multiple heads of Hydra, multiple health issues plague many of us, and chasing symptoms one at a time with a medicine or an operation for each may give temporary relief but does not necessarily root out the source.