Episode 3: Autumn Hunters Moon,Trauma and the Periaqueductal Gray Matter not the Vagus Nerve

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Part 1

The nights are drawing in earlier here in the mountains and the moon is shining brighter as we come on to the upcoming Hunter’s Moon. We were sleeping outside over 9,000 feet amongst the spruce, pine and golden orange red aspen trees. There is something about being in the mountains that is in my blood and bones. There was a femur bone in our camp site, maybe an elk. The next day we road our mountain bikes and stumbled on many tibia bones, most likely cow and found a juvenile male cow skull. The women of the Highlanders would spend their Summers in the mountains tending to the cows, caring for children and making cheese while the men went off hunting and raiding.
Part 2
There is something in being mirrored by a friend, teacher or practitioner that can be very powerful in the healing of all types of traumas. I have read all kinds of explanations by psychologists over the years into the biological, neuro, physiological and anatomical mechanisms at play. Maybe these don’t matter as we have a felt sense of when something is in resonance and feels “right” in our body. Our connective tissue or fascia has this knowingness about it. In Episode 2, I spoke of the sensory nerve endings (mechanoreceptors) that innervate the fascia as well as how they transfer information from the outside to the inside of our bodies via ANS. There are the endocannabinoids and hormone receptors in fascia too. This starts to paint a picture of the fascial complexity we have in our systems as well as a potential for plasticity or maybe what we can call “fascial-plasticity”.