Are We There Yet?!

“Are we there yet?” 

Chances are pretty good that you’ve experienced being a driver and hearing this question from the back seat. 

Now imagine if you heard this not as a question, but as a statement. 

“Are we there yet?”

Oh no! We’re not there yet. Shit! I thought we’d be there by now. Oh god. How much longer. This is taking soooo long. We really aren’t there yet. I’ve been sitting in this car for a long time and I want to get out. Help! This sucks. 

The question from the back seat can be annoying if it’s taken at face value, and an opportunity to connect if it’s heard at a deeper level. How much more disruptive is it if we interpret it as a statement and jump on board with it?

But this is what we do all the time with our nervous system if we don’t understand it and make friends with it. 

The oldest, most primitive part of our brain is like the little kid in the back seat. It’s constantly asking 

Am I safe?

Am I okay?

How ’bout now. Am I safe?

Am I okay?

Any threats out there?

This part of our brain is constantly scanning for danger or threat. And if there is uncertainty, then the question pops up from the metaphorical back seat.

The question, though, doesn’t come in those literal words. It speaks primarily in the language of the body. A slight feeling of being agitated or worked up. A stomach ache. Shoulders getting tense. Thoughts racing. Attention shifting from thing to thing. Or maybe it’s feeling super lethargic. Can’t get out of bed. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. 

And here is where our nervous system responds, whether we’re aware of it or not. And it responds with how our body speaks back to the lizard brain.

If the question is experienced as a statement, then we interpret that we aren’t safe, and the nervous system gets the cues to go into fight or flight mode. Our heart rate increases, our lungs open up to get more oxygen into our system, our digestion slows so energy can be used by our body to run or fight if we need to, and our sleep suffers because we’re on a heightened sense of alert. 

But if it’s a question, we have choices. We can assess the situation, and if we are not currently in actual danger in the present moment, we can respond with reassurance and give our nervous system signs that we are safe (with, for example, how we breathe, what our eyes focus on, feeling our feet or our backs making contact with something solid). 

Without a bit of practice, we can miss the question, and all of a sudden it’s a statement – “I AM NOT SAFE!” and off we go into our patterns of defensiveness (fight, flight, or freeze).

When I see how unproductive it looks to interpret “are we there yet?” as a statement, it feels like there ought to be a better way to interpret “am I safe?”  

Jonny Miller, the creator of the Nervous System Mastery course, has a great acronym for how to RISE out of reactivity, or how to escape being hijacked by our subconscious or primitive mind. 

The R stands for Reactivity 

The I stands for Interoception – which is our capacity to sense, track and feel our internal landscape

The S stands for Self-Regulation – which is the art of skilfully using the levers of our body to shift our state (think breath, eyes, embodiment, touch, movement).

And the E stands for Emotional Mastery – which is the skill of recognizing, feeling, and expressing emotions in a healthy way without getting stuck or kinked.

What I love about this is the multifaceted and personalized roadmap it offers to lead us out of reactivity to responsiveness; from muddy-headedness to clarity; from disconnection to connection; from habitual thinking to creativity. 

And the first step is hearing the question that is arising.

Listening in this way to my own body has really changed my experience of my nervous system (and my life). For example, my headaches that used to be proof that something was wrong are now a question. “Are you stressed? concerned? worried? holding something in?”  And I can answer in the language of my nervous system, using my body and my breath. I can reassure my own system that I’m okay. And the pain recedes. 

After a while of seeing the questions in my nervous system, I started to notice something else that felt kinda huge and went really deep for me. 

The feelings that we have once in a while, in times of transition or change, or even get stuck in – the feelings of being unmoored, lost, disconnected, without meaning. What if these are really just questions from that little place in ourselves that’s asking

“What am I essentially?”   And what would it be like not to hear this as a statement, (“You’re essentially never enough, dude.”) but rather to drop into this question with curiosity and wonder?