Lesson Summary

Your nervous system integrates what you feel with what you do or vice versa. Organizing this system into it's parts can help us better understand our habits and what we often call "personality."

The autonomic nervous system regulates involuntary physiological processes like heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion and can be further broken down into the sympathetic (aka
"fight or flight") and the parasympathetic (aka "rest and digest"). These systems constantly sends signals through your body in response to your environment, and learning to tune into this network can help better understand our thoughts, emotions, memories and even physical experiences such as pain, posture or health.

Just a few decades ago, the traditional view of the nervous system was linear where we recognized that stress shifts a person from parasympathetic to sympathetic. The challenge of the linear system, however, implied the need to remove any given stressor to return to a parasympathetic state. The Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges of the early 1990's changed this perception by recognizing two distinct branches within the parasympathetic nervous system, ultimately allowing us to see the nervous system as a cyclical process and reconciling what we know about "good" stress from a scientific perspective.

Your nervous system plays a significant role in decision-making and emotional cycles, and learning to move through stress, recognize opportunities for growth, and surrender is vital in navigating challenges.

In this video we bring together the concepts of the nervous system and what we've reviewed about Ruach/Pneuma in the "4 A's" earlier in this course. The way that our nervous system is designed to function is a mirror the process of how we experience can experience the Holy Spirit in our lives.