Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Very, very scatterbrain today because I've been writing and writing. And when you write and write,

your brain slowly oozes out through your ears. And then when you go to read what you've written, you can't

comprehend it. And then you try to do anything else. You have no abilities and you feel I really,

Kirk Vonnegut used to say that when he wrote, he felt like an armless, legless man with a crayon

in his mouth. Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel. Only I still feel

basically female, even just lying there with a crayon in my mouth. And I'm thinking probably

some of you all out there are feeling equally sort of, today. It all works out really well, but in the middle of things,

it can get difficult. But what I'm writing about right now, I've talked about it recently

before, and that is the, um, the polyvagal system is a theory about how our nervous systems

adapt to stress and to environment. So I'm going to run it past you

really fast and then tell you what I've been thinking today. The first thing is that the polyvagal

nerve is its circuit is like a bundle of nerves. It comes down from both sides of the brain

and wanders all around your body. And the part that connects with your gut

is what evolved first.

And it gives you, you know, when you get bad news

or you're afraid, you get this punched in the gut feeling.

And if that part of your nervous system is afraid,

it actually shuts everything down.

So you've heard of the fight or flight reflex. Well, this is

not fight or flight, it's flop or faint. You just lie there. You have no will and no ability to

to drum up motivation. So then if you go up ways in your nervous system, there's the fight or

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