The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

If you sing with a group, then you’re social referencing—you’re engaging others. So singing, especially singing in a group, is an amazing neural exercise of the social engagement system.

“Do you mean fear as in when we run away? Or fear as in when we pass out?”

I want to emphasize that understanding the response, not the traumatic event, is more critical to the successful treatment of trauma.

To me, when we use the word “stress,” what we’re really talking about is mobilization—and mobilization isn’t always bad.

Pranayama yoga, functionally, is yoga of the social engagement system—

The two components of our vagus are mirroring the extreme features of vertebrate evolution of the autonomic nervous system. Serge Prengel: And the fight/flight is in between. Dr. Porges: Yes, with the sympathetic nervous system supporting fight/flight behaviors.

We see this on a playground, where there are children with whom no one wants to play—frequently these children have state regulation problems. They mobilize, when others socially engage, and miss critical cues of social interaction.

We live in a world that has a cognitive bias and assumes that our actions are voluntary. We are confronted with questions related to motivation and outcome.

We need to realize is that when people get triggered into either mobilization defenses or shutting down, they are going to develop elaborate narratives to make sense of what their body is doing.

the singer Johnny Mathis?