#16 - the juicy window of tolerance + transformation
#16 - the juicy window of tolerance + transformation
Rewiring our nervous systems for new ways of being
Hi! I’m Hima Batavia - a writer, cultural producer, artist, and community organizer based in T’karonto and the great infinite. I’m here for justice rooted in embodiment and abolition, juicy conversations, exploring new ways of relating, contemplation and practice towards enlightenment and TikTok. Multitudes people!
You can learn more about me, my social location, and this newsletter here.
on change and embodiment
We made our way to Low, Quebec earlier this week and will be stationed here for the next month as part of the lets-be-nomadic-and-maybe-move-to-the-country-and-start-a-farm mood sweeping across city folk. You may remember, we moved on from our apartment in Tkaronto at the end of January. This extremely short-term move is the most real this abstract dream has felt, and I am pleased to report that I have panicked all week amidst the frosted forest, cavernous silence, and rolling wood fire.
As far as I can tell, some folks know when they are ready to end something and invite change. They feel it in their body and translate that feeling into words and actions. I tend to operate in the reverse.
I will:
Think through something intensely, manically, meditate a bit
At some point, when I’ve considered every angle, I will make a decision, all while humming an R&B song I call, ‘It will all be fine’
Hold my breath through change, mildly dissociate
Slowly release the valve as my body catches up…timed precisely while we are actually doing the thing
Panic, collapse, and finally…
Land into a ball pit of acceptance and sweet surprise
*Sometimes I skip step 1 and go straight to singing
What this means is that my body is catching up to a tremendous amount of change in a short period of time (home, job, city). It also means that I will blurt out unannounced and likely unappreciated, - ‘Ciaran, it’s really quiet,’ ‘Ciaran, we haven’t seen anyone in three days,’ ‘Ciaran, what are we going to do with each other for this many hours?’, ‘Ciaran, I don’t know if I can do this,’ at least three times a day during this shaky landing process.
I do not recommend this strategy! While I credit this method for traveling solo from Kenya to Uganda by bus, living in Delhi for 3 years, hiking for 5 days to a Himalayas basecamp, getting an #adults tattoo on my body, doing a 10-day Vipassana retreat, driving to Tahoe by myself for a few days, and most recently, provisionally agreeing to a backcountry portage trip (what!?), I am in remission.
Friends always tell me that I have a powerful mind (thanks friends) and it’s true, I can process an obscene amount of information, but it’s always bittersweet because overworking one engine has come at the cost of others, like honing my intuition and connection with my spirit. This pattern of overexerting one form of human intelligence over others is so rudely apparent across how our organizations, schools, systems, and cities are set up, which is to say, they are functional and compartmentalized to meet pretty pedestrian goals - growth, optimization, protecting the white and rich - but are sorely disconnected from any substantial attunement towards our spiritual, emotional and metaphysical bodies, and even more, a politic rooted in justice and equity. It’s why when Gen Y and Z bring feelings, mental health, and demands to dismantle patriarchy and white supremacy into the workplace, it feels like a west-coast earthquake to leaders socialized in the ‘old world’, shaking a foundation that simply was not built for whole integrated sovereign beings. Tear it all down!
Between capitalism being rooted in mind-work, and what Carl Jung and Chinese mythology refer to as rational masculine energies, and my nervous system and body just doing what they thought was protection, I’m not mad about the years of perilous imbalance. At least not anymore. Part of my practice towards non-attachment is knowing we are always in evolution. I may have been mind-first for parts of my life when that was necessary but that was then and this is now.
If you have learned about the ‘Window of Tolerance’, a framework that maps the nervous system against relational capacity, developed by Pat Ogden and Dan Siegal, being in our head in certain conditions makes logical sense. It’s like one of those descriptions when your right brain (the feels) and left brain (the logic) come together in holy realization.
In short, the framework depicts the impact on the nervous system when one’s material conditions simply feel like tooooo much, which is to say extreme stress and not ‘safe’ based on someone’s lived experiences and the structural realities they face on a daily basis. In these conditions, the nervous system will either heighten into a hyperaroused state, known as fight/flight/freeze, which shows up as panic, overwhelm, anxiety, reactivity, rage, desperation to flee or drop into a hyperaroused state, which generally shows up as collapse and can feel like numbing, low energy, disconnection, feeling dead. It’s not cute. It’s likely the states that many folks have bounced between over the last year of pandemic-ing.
An interesting sidenote on shame - in a lecture, I was watching by writer, performer, and somatic social worker, Kai Cheng Thom, they shared that shame is not an actual emotion, but rather, an adaptive physiological mechanism within the hyperaroused state to make the body small and therefore less of a threat to perceived danger. The body is a smart and sassy creature and how could we ever think otherwise?
In between these two states of hyper and hypo states is the Window of Tolerance, or what Kai Cheng Thom has adapted into the Window of Transformation. It’s the place where the nervous system feels calm, present, safe, and able to participate and navigate relationships where conflict is inevitable. This is where the magic happens — where we reimagine ways of being, connecting, and relating that can cut through existing paradigms where scarcity and transaction dominate. This is the place where conflict becomes pulpy material for transformation. But it’s not always available, especially for racialized, poor, transgender, and queer communities, who experience disproportionate trauma and ultimately have more narrow windows. The challenge with a mangled nervous system is that sustained long-term stressors can mean that even small stressors can throw someone into a hyper or hypo-arousal state, and that is when everyday interactions can feel overwhelming and unpredictable.
These states are not binary and like us, exist on a spectrum to varying degrees of stressors, global conditions, available tools, and support systems. We can be present and agitated, calm and spacey, tolerant one day and aroused the next - so it’s important to not pathologize ourselves and use frameworks as tools for awareness, not truth for perfection. Even within this framework, there is likely space to layer on how mental health conditions like ADD, OCD, ADHD may be a precursor or derivative of a body in constant hypo or hyperarousal, the interplay and differences between stressors in our homes, workplaces, communities, etc., and how two people with the same stressors may respond completely differently. I’m not qualified to speak on any of these particulars definitively, but I have hunches from my own experiences.
When we are asking people - our families, partners, colleagues, and friends - to change and transform, the framework invites us to consider the state of their nervous system. When we are asking states, organizations, and cities to transform, organisms in their own right, we also need to consider the pulse of their nervous system, if we want any meaningful shifts at least. One can argue that many Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies living in Canada/US - the sites of cultural genocide and deeply embedded systemic oppression - are constantly experiencing a state of hyper and hypo arousal by living here - desperately needing community for respite. In the wake of horrifying rising Anti-Asian racism that has led to burns, assaults, and the death of elder folks in the community, it is likely folks in the community are feeling it in their nervous systems. We desperately need to rebuild resilient nervous systems as part of broader systems change, where there is care, trust, safety-ish, and accountability as the pillars to stand on. It always feels so simple in writing.
Understanding my body’s response to the stressors of my life is how I have cultivated sincere gratitude for it, even if sometimes I’m like, ‘why do you have to be like that?’ I trust my body has an intelligence that is divine beyond any textbook, and that it did what it felt like it had to do to survive, to ultimately teach me something. In bouncing from hyper to hyperarousal states, often feeling so intensely that my body was not able to contain it, I overexerted my mind as a control mechanism for so many years. But I now know the body is the site where enlightenment, detachment from the body and mind, can happen. We need the body form as a counterpoint to understanding enlightenment as a possibility.
In my mind (the irony), the future is undoubtedly embodied, meaning that our body, spirit, AND mind dance together, each providing a source of information and wisdom towards a triangulated and grounded thought that gracefully holds ancestral teachings, lived experiences, systemic and political realities, and love. To me, this is true intellect. I know we are this capable, and while it is the missing link holding us from collective healing and systemic change, this shift is in motion.
I’m not sure when I will be fully embodied, but I know I feel it when I freeform dance when I practice breathwork and long-duration meditation when someone strokes my hair or rubs my back when I go for an aimless walk without my phone when I dissolve in a sauna when I make a TikTok just cause when I roleplay with my nephew and we end up in another portal when I turn chores into songs when I commune with plant-medicines like mushrooms and when I am fully present with people I love. It’s a process, and it’s been amusing to track the precise and subtle nature of sensations, whether it’s love, power, pleasure, hell yes, hell no, exhaustion, burnout, rest - each is like a note of perfume, a language unto itself. I also recently dished out for a $350 wearable called Apollo Neuro, based on a recommendation from my sister, Dr. Rhea Mehta, that sends gentle vibrations to your nervous system, to retrain it over time into the Window of Tolerance/Transformation. Some days none of these things happen. Some days I am staring at a screen for 10 hours and my body is all but a costume. These days, I am more agitated. I snap more. I feel a sea of stress rising. But fam, we’re in this for the long-haul! Intergenerational change or we’re not interested!
There is a broader shift towards body-based work and feminine energies leading the process of shaping possible futures. Just yesterday, therapist and author, Resmaa Menakem, who wrote ‘My Grandmothers Hands,’ a book about exploring the traumatic impact of racism on our bodies, posted a bestseller list from the Washington Post, which included his book, as well as ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ by Bessel van der Kolk (highly recommended) and ‘The Body is Not An Apology’ by Sonya Renee Taylor in the top 6 selections. It’s why modalities like breathwork and the practice of meditation have been positively mainstreamed. I’ve been immersing myself in these teachings and am beady-eyed about shaping a body of work around embodied and somatic design and justice practices.
Essentially, expect me to announce something new I am interested in every week until it crystallizes into some material form because after all, I am in my dark moon germinating phase. Got to respect the cycles.
See you in the window,
Hima
Reading: Thanksgiving in Mongolia by Ariel Levy - an 2013 essay that won the National Magazine Award and was recommended by Roxanne Gay in a short course she led on personal essays on SkillShare, and it turned me inside out. *Trigger warning for anyone that has experienced a miscarriage.
Creeping: Sibling or Dating? Instagram page which is a question we’ve all asked ourselves at least once.
TikTok’ing: I am unnaturally obsessed with the #dramaeffect TikTok trend and just so you know I woke up in the middle of the night laughing at this rendition specifically, followed by this one.
Full Moon: It’s the Full Moon tomorrow and the energy has been intense. I haven’t slept in three days but I’ve been enjoying Alice Sparkly Kat’s work on Post-Colonial Astrology.
‘…so much more than a fad, astrology is an intersectional, political and magickal language with a cross-cultural history that informs our relationships to the planets. According to Brooklyn-based astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat, astrology is the ideal magical lens through which we can parse the harsh neolliberal and colonial systems of power that harm marginalized people.’