The Divine Nervous System

‘Be still’ – engage the parasympathetic portion of the nervous system[1] – ‘and know’ – internally, through your embodied felt sense[2] – ‘that I am’ – that the truth of who you are – ‘God’ – is Divine. What if the Divine is the resolution of trauma and the flow of a regulated nervous system? What if making love with the Divine is living as fully human and fully divine, moving in and out of activation and deactivation, sympathetic and parasympathetic, nervous system states[3]?

I have travelled a long way on my spiritual path. I have journeyed up and down, above and below, outside and finally, very firmly back inside my body. As a seeker, and in many ways a doubting Thomas(ina), I have needed to feel, see, touch, smell and hear the Divine to believe in it genuinely. As an embodied mystic, the more contact I make with embodied sacred states, the more I move toward my physiology and start to ‘merge’ with spirit at an ever-deeper level within mind, body, and heart.

There came a time when I recognised that mindfulness, meditation, prayer, and even breathwork and yoga, were supportive blissful experiences but in a dissociated and disembodied way. I finished my practice and felt disconnected, going about my day-to-day embodied, human life. I started to no longer feel satisfied with ‘being’ with the Divine in a fragmented and unintegrated way.

Energy medicine training introduced me to the concept of cosmic and earthly energetics moving through the body and I started to make connections with electromagnetic fields, basic physics, and religious and spiritual concepts. Angels became rays of the rainbow light spectrum; eros became the pulsating energy of the earth; and the Divine became magnetic and electric forces. I liked the harmonising of different disciplines and paths coming together, uniting, and complementing each other. It felt good in my body and my mind.

Over the last couple of years, understanding and working with trauma and its resolution, somatics, and nervous system regulation, has brought me into expansive states of embodied flow and wellness. A sudden expansion of perception, working by my embodied knowing, resulted in a comprehension and felt sense of the imminence of the Divine.

Goddess-God-Spirit and the ideals I had sought, such as peace, clarity, connection, love, and just anger, were the internal experiences of a regulated nervous system. Living as a Divine Human, the embodiment of Goddess-God-Spirit and as the ‘I am,’ for me, is being within a body which activates and moves through its day with regulated sympathetic activation, and which comes regularly into rest and communion in the parasympathetic state.

I discover that all I seek and ‘petition’ the Divine for, including oneness, acceptance, gratitude, protection, safety, companionship, and belonging, are natural states of nervous system health and trauma resolution.

I am not a nervous system specialist. What I do know, through embodied experience, is that I have experienced deeply sacred, erotic, and ecstatic experiences within a variety of nervous system states. As I explain in my book, Making Love with the Divine:  Sacred, Ecstatic and Erotic Experiences [4], the Divine is within sympathetic activation, the get-up and go state as well as within parasympathetic deactivation, the rest and digest state.

The Divine inhabits, with ease, the rhythmic and cyclical flow of regulation, the ebb and flow of my breathing and the rise and fall of my chest. I make love with the Divine through my mammalian animal form and its physiological functions. I breathe in and come into the felt sense of readiness for action – sharp, precise, strong, stable, protective – what some may call my ‘masculine energy’ – aspect of God’s state. I breathe out, coming into the felt sense of beingness – releasing, resting, nurturing, wisdom, receiving – what some may call my ‘feminine energy’ – aspect of Goddess state. I breathe in, feeling expansion, sacred rage, protection of the innocence, activism ignited – my warrioress state – aspect of Goddess. I breathe out, feeling contained, sacred guardianship, the path, logical structure clarified – my warrior state – aspect of God.

And so, this enquiry goes on as I track my nervous system and the symbiosis of mind, body, energy – weaving. Soon it all becomes non-gendered and an ecstatic symphony. There are no boundaries or classifications, no labels, rules or spiritual practices, no teachers, gurus, or books, no doctrine, dogma, or priests – it all becomes a flowing stream of ‘isness’ of lifeforce (the erotic perhaps) or spirit flowing through me, which I observe, feel, and experience. And in this being alive, an incarnated human, deeply embodied and ecstatic, simultaneously within a sacred and mundane process, I have a direct experience of the Divine, in my nervous system.

The Divine Nervous System, our extra sensory perception, and our felt sense, is an embodied process in which the unity of animal and spirit is evidenced, human and divine, within our flesh as we experience through its regulatory movement the sacred, erotic, and ecstatic. The haven – the still small voice – is in the centre of making love with the Divine, in stillness and nervous system regulation. Love-making with the Divine starts within us, relating to ourselves internally in our body – we then take the love made and make love with the Divine externally, in our relating and exchanging.

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[1] The parasympathetic portion of the human autonomic nervous system allows us to access the ‘rest and digest’ state of being – as opposed to the sympathetic portion, which is characterised by fight and flight. 

[2] Our felt sense is awareness and knowledge arising from our body and senses via mind-body connection.

[3] More about nervous system states here https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org/whatispolyvagaltheory

[4] https://thegirlgod.com/making_love.php

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© Kay Aldred, 2024.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: Provided by the author. Sculpture from the Himalayan Garden near Masham, in North Yorkshire.