Top Highlights

• Our bodies are programmed to automatically respond to physical threats by fighting or fleeing.
• An experience becomes traumatic when this natural flight/flight defense is aborted. When you are assaulted and realize that there is nothing you can do to stave off the inevitable, this self-protective system may break down, resulting in the inappropriate activation of fight/flight reactions in response to minor subsequent irritations, and an inabi...
• In trauma, the body’s alarm systems turn on and then never quite turn off. And we experience the intense suffering of never truly feeling relaxed, at ease in life, always intensely on guard, with the primitive brain constantly scanning for threat or opportunity. Our inner sentry is always on watch. We cannot sleep. Our trust in the rightness of thi...
• Yogis discovered that there are two primary roots to physical suffering. One is craving and its many effects: greed, grasping, clinging, addiction. The other is aversion: fear, terror, hatred, avoidance, anger, resentment. Trauma is an aversive state par excellence—a hardwired, persistent aversive state. Yogis—practicing intensively over the course...
• heart rate variability (HRV). HRV had recently been discovered to be a good way to measure the integrity of one of the brain’s arousal systems, the one located in the oldest part of the brain: the brain stem.