The Long Journey of Rewilding

I have been thinking today about the cyclical nature of life, and about the strange patience of the body.

This is also a reminder to myself and all my fellow humans who are walking your way back from extreme bodily stress disorder. Just by starting, you will enventually find yourself beyond domestication, beyond terror and dysregulation.

Ten years ago, I was living in the deepest layers of post traumatic stress disorder. My whole organism was oriented toward survival. I was ill and mental. Looking back, the first five years were largely about waking up to the realization of just how intensely my body was fighting. Everything was on high alert, and yet somewhere underneath it there was still a small thread of hope that another way of being might be possible.

Years later, when I began studying the nervous system more deeply, I realized how little time I actually spent in a balanced state of social connection. My nervous system moved constantly between different forms of activation and collapse. I had learned many ways of surviving, but very little about simply being here.

And although these changes rarely happen in ways we can immediately see, there are countless small ways of cultivating safety along the way. Tiny practices of returning to the body, working gently with the vagus nerve, breathing, shaking, resting, orienting to the surroundings, spending time in nature, or simply learning how to soften and let go. None of these moments may seem particularly significant on their own, but repeated over months and years, they begin to teach the nervous system a different way of being.

And I don’t think this journey happens only on the physiological level. There are many layers moving together. Learning to relax the body is intertwined with learning to trust ourselves, to trust life, and gradually to loosen the need to anticipate and control everything. The physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions begin to support one another. A little more safety allows a little more surrender; a little more surrender allows the body to soften; and a softer body becomes increasingly capable of experiencing the world as a place in which it can actually live rather than merely survive.

This is the beauty of microhabits. We are not forcing ourselves into balance. We are cultivating the conditions in which balance can slowly become our body’s own remembered way of being.

And this is where the slowness of the journey matters. A nervous system cannot be forced into safety. Trust cannot be commanded into existence. The body learns through repetition, through thousands of small experiences that say: this is safe enough; I can soften here; I can move and come back; I can rest without disappearing; I can feel without being overwhelmed.

Over the last few days, I have noticed something that feels almost astonishing in its simplicity. My body naturally wants to dance, shake, stretch, write, become excited, eat certain foods, move, create. And when it wants complete stillness, I lie down in savasana and rest. There is very little searching involved anymore. No pushing myself toward some idea of what would be good for me.

The movement simply arises.

This made me think about the idea of a psychosocial asana: the postures we learn to inhabit through our histories, relationships and cultures. Chronic stress is also a posture. Hypervigilance is a posture. Collapse is a posture. Constant doing can become a posture, just as withdrawal can.

Maybe the deeper art of yoga is not finding the perfect posture, but recovering the freedom to move between them.

A healthy nervous system is not necessarily a calm nervous system. It is a responsive one. It can become intensely alive, excited and active, and then return to rest. It can move between go and flow without either becoming a prison. There can be effort without pushing, stillness without collapse, movement without escape.

This is what rewilding has slowly come to mean to me.

Not becoming more primitive or rejecting civilization, but returning to the intelligence of the organism. Learning to notice when the body wants movement and when it wants stillness, when it wants nourishment, solitude, connection, expression or play. Eventually, even the practices that once helped us regulate may become less necessary as deliberate practices, because the body begins doing naturally what we once had to consciously teach it.

My relationship with trust seems to have followed the same movement. First came the slow rebuilding of trust in life. Then trust in myself. And now I notice that trust beginning to extend toward other people, and even toward humanity itself.

Maybe this is one of the deepest forms of trust: not believing that nothing difficult will happen, but knowing that I do not need to anticipate everything in order to be safe.

I don’t have to know beforehand what I will need. I can trust myself to know when the moment comes.

After all these years, rewilding feels less like something I am doing and more like something that happens when I stop interfering.

The organism remembers. This is my investigation: What is human nature? And in which environments does it thrive?