Keep It Human

There’s a softness here in the Pacific Northwest of the US as winter gracefully yields to longer days. Waters lap beaches more gently, belying wild winter storms that have heaved piles of logs along the shores.

It’s a comfort to know that the seasons still know how to change and that the earth still knows what to do.

The earth does know what to do. And so do we, as to be human is to be “of the earth”.

What I have noticed however is that in the spirit of wishing to know ourselves better, there’s been an uptick in the use of clinical terms in everyday conversation that shifts us away from our humanity.

It’s become trendy to talk about “my nervous system” or to say “I am dis-regulated”. While I appreciate these terms, they tell me nothing about the human being who is having the experience. It’s jarring to me: we’ve become content to let neuroscience interpret our experience, repackage it, and sell it back to us.

I am especially puzzled by the way the term “nervous system” is used as if it’s a ghost in the machine or something separate from us. I hear people say “Oh my nervous system needs this or that…” No, the truth is: “I need this or that.” This statement is self aware and honest.

My observation is that as the pace and pressure of modern life intensify, language often struggles to keep up with the depth and texture of our inner experience.

We are losing nuance and yet we also wish to live authentically. And then along comes authenticity as the next “thing” to be packaged and sold. Or vulnerability becomes the new experience that is commodified.

We find ourselves on the hamster wheel of self improvement but we feel even more impoverished. Our human experience gets chopped up into separate little pieces, distorted, commodified, and then offered back to us as if they were never ours! The orientation is to “look out there” for validation rather than slow down and look within for what we have never lost.

When everything is optimized for efficiency — communication included — we tend to flatten subtle emotions or complex realities into quick, transactional speech. The result is a gap between what we live and how we talk about it, which can make our experiences feel strangely alien or abstract, even to ourselves. Self compassion and empathy can be hard to come by. Under these conditions we feel insufficient and confused about how to find our way back to our heart, our body, and our humanity.

I am coming up on 40 years in the therapeutic healing arts and sciences and the outer world has changed tremendously. Yet essential human needs for belonging, connection, safety, sufficiency, love, well being, etc have not changed—in fact these needs have only increased.

While a basic understanding of neuroscience is useful, it is the grounded, earthy, emotional heart where the truth of our experience arises, raw, unfiltered, often bittersweet, that humbles, nourishes, and guides us.