Krista Tippett: Hello, again. A strange thing about us humans is that when we ask what’s happening, when we look at what’s happening, when we try to take in what’s happening — whether that’s out there in the world or inside us — we’re inclined to focus on extremes, on what is alarming. And we’re also inclined to see symptoms, rather than root causes; to see what is obvious, but not necessarily see and probe what is important.

In the winter of 2021, I had a feeling that I had powered through 2020 and all the changes and uncertainty and fault lines, and also all the learning and waking up that it had brought. But I had come to a point where it felt like every last drop of adrenaline had left my body. I was out of stamina. I was out of perspective. My brain wasn’t working well. I had sudden drops into what felt frighteningly like full-blown depression. And my productivity was fractured in ways that puzzled and shamed me.

It was not easy to find people speaking deeply about this, analyzing this deeply, even though I was also hearing similar stories from other people. I decided that I needed to be exploring this, and I wasn’t even sure whom I was looking for or what I was looking for.

But as I dug around, I discovered Dr. Christine Runyan. And there she was, talking about the human stress response, talking about what’s been happening to us, individually and civilizationally, in terms of what is happening in our nervous systems; and pointing out that the human nervous system is the literal mind-body-spirit connection.

To summarize very briefly, the whole new context she gave me for thinking about this time we inhabit is that with the very first news — for most of us, in March 2020 — of the threat of a new virus loose in the world, below the level of consciousness — absolutely, automatically, and silently — our stress responses in our bodies were instantaneously activated, put on high alert. She said to me, our nervous system is a beautiful evolutionary adaptation that if we were ever to lose, we would become extinct. It is a cascade of neurotransmitters and hormones, processes that go off in our bodies to prepare us to fight or to flee, if we estimate that this threat is bigger than we can manage.

The extraordinary thing we’ve been living through is that our nervous systems went into this high alert, and then they went into overdrive, and they have never really returned to normal.

That, too, has a cascade of effects on us, neurologically, physiologically. There’s normally a process by which our parasympathetic nervous system — which is sometimes called the “rest and digest” or relaxation system — also innate in us, clicks in. We have a balance. Christine Runyan and physicians will speak of this as “homeostasis,” and that’s a physiological manifestation of what Sharon Salzberg calls “equanimity.” So if you want to hear more about the details of that stress response and nervous system response, there’s a section from my conversation with Christine Runyan in part three, in the Delve section, that illuminates that.

What I want to offer right here, as part of the Wisdom Practice, are strategies that she offered through what she knows about our bodies — befriending our bodies — about metabolizing what is happening, what continues to happen. “Metabolizing” is a way to talk about what is possible, in terms of productive coping and the health that we can offer ourselves right now, even as we continue to live in a very stressful, uncertain world.

Here’s a little bit of the conversation with her, where she offers a series of strategies. Some of them are so simple — simple techniques. But what she offers that helps apprehend them in a new way is the scientific basis that she understands of what these things are working in us. And that is really increasing the power with which I’ve been able to use these simple techniques. And it starts with the elemental reality of our breath.

Christine Runyan: There are various techniques you can do with the breath, but if you’re going to do one thing: a long exhale, because that’s part of our sympathetic nervous system, the dorsal part of our sympathetic nervous system that activates our calming. So, a long exhale. The inhale can have an activation part. A long exhale can — that alone can actually be quite calming, although there are some other breath techniques that one can use, as well.

The other things that, again, sound — if you don’t understand this at the nervous system, they sound almost New Age-y or kind of froufrou. But scents — I always work, now, with a candle in my office.

Tippett: And why is that? What does that do for us?

Runyan: That’s really this information source of our nervous system, is through our senses. And so a scent that I like, that I enjoy, bypasses that thinking brain and goes right to that part of my nervous system. I’m creating a space where my senses can intercept safety and pleasantness.

That may be music, for some people, background music or — we all know this experience of, you hear a song, and you’re immediately taken back to someplace, some point in your life, some point in time, not because you thought about that memory; it’s like that memory spontaneously emerged.

Tippett: You’re in experience, and you’re in a suite of emotions.

Runyan: Yeah. So scent and sound can be really pretty accessible tools to just send those messages of comfort or safety. And then we can work with the body, too, the body quite directly, to send messages of safety and of calming to our nervous system. Our body is this incredibly rich, textured source of data for us.

We can also intentionally be in postures, be in ways that the nervous system senses safety. A very simple one is just putting your feet on the floor so that your legs are uncrossed. And your feet are fully making contact with the Earth, maybe pressing down through the heel, pressing through the balls of the feet. You’re feeling a little of that sensation coming up through the legs, and feeling yourself in your seat, being held.

Fight or flight has a body posture of being on the toes; as like, I gotta move here, somewhere, toward or away from. Feet flat on the floor is like, OK, I’m here. It’s OK to stay here. It’s OK to be here. So we can work with the body directly in those ways, to send messages of safety.

One of my common go-to’s is around this affiliative stress response, “tend-and-befriend”: particularly, if I don’t have people around me, is to just make contact with myself. I put my hand on my heart, on my chest —

Tippett: Oh, you mean literally.

Runyan: Literally. This incredible brain we have doesn’t know much between imagination and reality.

I will sometimes say to people, I want you to imagine cutting open a lemon, a juicy lemon, and bringing that half of the lemon onto your tongue. And just let it rest there. What do you notice?

Tippett: I’d notice the tart; almost I would pucker up from the thought.

Runyan: Pucker up, and maybe even a little saliva in the mouth?

Tippett: Yeah.

Runyan: And I trust there’s no lemon in your …

Tippett: No.

Runyan: … we’re not together, but there’s no lemon in your studio.

We can create a physiological response through our imagination, which is — it’s a double edge. It’s a gift and a curse, because that is worry, right?

Tippett: Right, but you’re saying we can also activate that to comfort ourselves, if we take it seriously enough.

Runyan: Exactly. Exactly

[music: “VK Mendl” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: I so appreciate the reverence that Christine Runyan has, and offers me, for our bodies and our nervous systems. Somehow, just even taking that in defuses a bit the panic that’s in me, when I ask what is happening — what is happening to me, what is happening to us — to remember that our bodies are doing their best to take care of us. And that there’s brilliance in them, there’s intelligence in that, even if it’s out of control.

And of course, the invitation on the flipside of that is taking in that we have more power than we realize to actively reorient that intelligence and tap into those same powers to help ourselves. Through the senses, the body, we can incline the mind.

This has all helped me a great deal in both being more compassionate to myself, but also getting a more compassionate perspective on others, on some of the things that feel most frightening and upsetting in our public life — the divisions at the human level. If I see, if I take in that every single person has had this primal, fiercely protective, threat-centric nervous system response, in these last years, and that that was the shaky foundation on which everyone had to carry all the events and losses and traumas that have followed, that gives me a way to soften my perspective; to feel compassion, where previously I might have felt frustrated bewilderment.

I can look at our political life, I can look at our societal fracture, and I can see that as a manifestation of what’s happened in our nervous systems all around, because these symptoms that I had, that maybe you’ve had, of being impulsive and moody and depressed and rigid in thinking and irritable and lashing out — Christine Runyan says there’s something called “low frustration tolerance” that comes with nervous system stress, fear that becomes aggressive — you can almost see all of that embodied and playing out in our life together.

I’ll give you a final gift from Christine Runyan: that the neurotransmitter of curiosity is dopamine, so that actually taking a turn and a breath, and getting curious about what you see happening in yourself or in someone else — you give yourself a little hit of dopamine, and you have an entryway to compassion.

The Pause for this session is contemplating a meditative practice, for the days to come, to reflect on this different kind of invitation to change our relationship to what’s happening through the scientific and therapeutic perspective of Christine Runyan.

Some words of hers which can contribute, can be part of that meditation, and which even take the word “pause” — which we use in this course, which we use at On Being — giving the language of pause a new depth and nuance for me, too. She said to me: “There’s a quote that’s attributed to Viktor Frankl. He says, ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our power to choose. And in our choice lies our growth and our freedom.’”

I will be with you in the Pause, and again when you are ready to continue with next week’s Wisdom Practice.