THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF CONNECTION: RE-WILDING YOUR DEEP NERVOUS SYSTEM FOR WELLBEING
Learn to grasp and move the deepest levers that govern our moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing.
“Truly a masterwork, this is a rare combination of scientific insight, spiritual wisdom, and practical tools for daily life. Beautifully written, it’s warm and inviting, like a clear path through green forest groves. Poetic, personal, compre-hensive, and endlessly useful, in these pages you’re in the company of a brilliant and warm-hearted guide to lasting well-being, love, and inner peace.”
“A marvelous text, filled with brilliant trans-disciplinary insights.”
“A perfect bridge between neuroscience and the wisdom traditions”
A brief conversation with Gabriel about The Neurobiology of Connection
Who is this book for?
The Neurobiology of Connection is an encyclopedic guide to turning on your Connection System, which is the biological root of wellbeing. This is a book relevant for any human who wishes to have agency over their wellness in a modern culture whose entire mode of operation puts people into defensive stress responses.
Why did you write this?
I have been working in the direction of this book for thirty years. Most of the health outcomes in your life will be determined by a part of your nervous system that most people know nothing about. The Autonomic Nervous System is the neurological architecture of the mind-body connection and has the strongest shaping force of any biological system over our lived felt experience. Through coordinated activity of three primary neural systems (Connection, Movement, Grounding) combined with neurochemistries produced by our embodied detection of safety, danger, or lifethreat, it governs how our attention works, shapes our embodied experience, our sense of self, our emotional range, the way we think, the way we perceive the world around us, and how we behave. Because modernity has deviated so far from our ancestral baseline in safety and connection, we have, as a society, totally lost the neurologically ancestral recipe for flourishing, and find ourselves exiled in a landscape of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection.
I wrote this book to help people find their way home to this ancestral recipe for thriving.
How is the book organized?
In the book I walk people through what I call the five doorways. This is sort of a sequence for turning on our wellbeing. It goes like this: Safety opens the door to connection, connection opens the door to interoception, interoception opens the door to intuition, intuition opens the door to relatedness, and relatedness opens the door to wellbeing. I am presenting a detailed ancestral recipe for turning on the deep roots of wellbeing.
What will surprise readers the most in this book?
We spend several hundred pages in the book walking people through an exploration of all of the physiological systems in the body that provide portals to the Connection System, which is to say the neural architectures that undergird thriving. A lot of the focus of the book is in bringing our sense of the living nervous system down out of the head and into the body. And I spend a lot of time detailing for people how different bodily systems– the face, the voice, the hands, the skin, gesture, posture, et cetera, can really be harnessed as portals to wellbeing.
My experience is that most modern people really do not understand the degree to which our experience of connection, both inwardly and outwardly, is the actual substrate of wellbeing, so we really focus in the book on what this means, and on the practical ways that we can turn this on.
Anything else you’d like to tell us about the book?
The Neurobiology of Connection is the first book in the Autonomics Trilogy, which I regard as the primary expression of my lifework. This is a real deep-dive; it is not for the faint of heart. The book is 552 pages, and it goes really deep into these systems. If you are just wanting to learn the basics of Autonomics, you should start with something simpler, like Autonomic Compass, which is our first handbook about Autonomics.
The hardcover comes with a dustjacket that converts to a poster. We put a huge amount of effort into the look and feel of the book; everything is designed by hand. There are well over a hundred illustrations, all in full color. This is truly the culmination of thirty years of work on the living nervous system, created with the help of over 150 mentors.
