Be An Animal Again
Everything you need to heal yourself, you were already given
I know a man who clips a small device to his ear to tone his vagus nerve.
He is otherwise intelligent. He means well. He has, I’m sure, read the research.
And yet.
The vagus nerve - that extraordinary wandering intelligence that runs from your brainstem through your heart and lungs and gut, that ancient biological peacekeeper that has been quietly regulating the human nervous system for hundreds of thousands of years - apparently needs a gadget now.
I find this both very funny and very telling.
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We live in an age of solutions looking for problems that were never quite the problem.
People cold plunge in expensive tubs to get the benefits their ancestors received from swimming in rivers and working outside on bitter winter mornings. We spend small fortunes on red light lamps to replicate something our forebears got simply by sitting around a fire. We buy devices to tone our vagus nerves when what it’s actually asking for is a slow exhale, a hum, a hand on the chest, a walk in the cold air. We take supplements to synthesise what the sun has been offering freely, every single morning, since before we were human.
None of this is entirely wrong, you understand. I’m not here to shame anyone for their cold plunge or their red lamp. Sometimes these things help. Sometimes the modern world has made such a mess of our baseline that we need a stepping stone back to what’s natural.
But can we just acknowledge the shape of what’s happened?
We moved so far from nature that we forgot what we were made of. And then, when the forgetting made us unwell - anxious, inflamed, exhausted, disconnected - we invented technologies to replicate what nature was offering all along. We built an industry out of it. A very, very profitable one.
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Here is what I keep coming back to: it is not nature’s failing that created the need for all this technology. Nature has not become less nourishing. The sun has not become less generous. The breath has not become less powerful. Plants have not stopped being medicine.
The problem is the distance we put between ourselves and all of it.
We live indoors under artificial light and wonder why our circadian rhythms are broken — when blue light from the morning sun has been calibrating the human body clock since long before alarm clocks existed. We avoid the sun entirely, slathering on SPF before we’ve even had five minutes of its light on our skin — when UVB synthesises vitamin D in the body, when sunlight makes serotonin and dopamine, when it strengthens immunity and supports our bones and lifts the fog that descends in its absence. The sun is not the enemy. It is one of our oldest medicines. We just forgot how to receive it.
Plants are another. The original pharmacy, growing quietly in gardens and hedgerows and forests, available to anyone who learns to look. Every meal is an opportunity for medicine - not in some earnest, joyless way, but in the way your grandmother understood: that rosemary is not just flavour, that ginger settles and warms, that the bitter green your body craves in spring is asking for something specific.
This is what Ayurveda understood long before it became a wellness trend. The body is not broken. It is in conversation with the natural world - with light and dark, with season and weather, with warmth and cold and the turning of the year. When that conversation is interrupted, we feel it. And when we restore it, even in small ways, something in us exhales.
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We are children of nature. Literally made of the same matter - the same carbon, the same minerals, the same ancient chemistry that makes flowers open and rivers run. When we remember that, something shifts. The healing stops feeling like a project and starts feeling like a return.
You don’t need to optimise your nervous system. You need to take your shoes off and stand on grass. You need to open the window in the morning and let the light land on your face. You need to eat something that grew in the ground. You need to breathe out for longer than you breathe in, and let your body remember that it knows how to do this.
You don’t need the gadget.
You need to be an animal again - just for a moment. Just enough to remember what you’re made of.
She’s been here the whole time, waiting for you to come back.
If you'd like to begin, I've made a free guided audio practice - A Descent Into Sleep - that asks nothing more than this.
Your body already knows the way home. Sometimes it just needs someone to walk beside it.