“… I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.”

– Marcel Proust

Have you ever noticed how alive children are to their senses? I’m visiting my nieces this weekend and when I mentioned my sense of smell (cause I’m writing this newsletter!), the younger one said: “I love how my mama smells! It’s very distinctive!” Her whole body and face expressed this feeling this bring her…and then of course, her mom was right there, so she could get a nice reminder by snuggling close.

Smell takes us quickly into a dream state, a restful and imaginative swoon. That’s because the first cranial nerve, called the olfactory nerve, goes straight to your limbic system, the “emotional” center of your brain.

The oldest of our senses, it’s a direct way into a kaleidoscope of emotions, the flavors of life. I’ve come to think of my olfactory organ as a kind of “core” part of myself that I can always rely on when I want to tap into emotional mobility. I want to let feelings flow.

You have to breath to smell, so it also cues you in to the autonomic rhythms of your body. You can access the flow of sensory experience without trying to exert control. You can let the most subtle emotions flow this way and that, catching the wave of energy and nuance that it provides.

The olfactory organ sits on top of a very small, porous, and detailed bone called the ethmoid that is basically right in the middle of your head. Look at the beautiful animation above, and you will see that this little bone sits centrally in the front of the brain pan, surrounded by all the other bigger, more famous bones of your skull. For the anatomy geeks among you this short lecture about the 3D animation will be helpful, as it shows the bone from all angles. It’s incredibly detailed and kind of looks like a space ship.

When we grip our jaw, tighten our neck, squint our eyes…all of those actions bring pressure to bear on this breathable, core place. I believe that giving delicate, internal places like this space to move affects our emotional state.

What if this beautiful bone could just float in there, right underneath your brain, nestled between all the other skull bones but separate, breathable, slightly mobile. The top of it is called the cribriform plate, which has a bunch of beautiful little holes through which the tendrils of your olfactory bulb dangle, kind of like a kid sitting at the edge of a river with their feet in the water.

This is just one of the 13 explorations that you will experience in a Cranial Nerve Sequencing package – click here to find out more!

Is it hard for you to put your awareness of your body, and your care for its needs, first?  When you try to do that, do you find yourself running up against resistance in others or even yourself? I’d like to suggest that whatever your challenges, it’s worth it. It’s the medicine we need on a personal and a societal level. 

Cranial nerve sequencing, which I’m focusing on in these newsletters, is the simplest, most direct self care program I’ve created to date. One nerve at a time, you get lovingly familiar with your own embodied brain. You can quietly care for yourself anywhere, anytime.

Why do we study embodiment anyway? In my case, it was at first selfish. I needed healing badly, and the Alexander Technique showed me that healing was possible. It was only much later that it occurred to me that I could be medicine for others through taking care of myself.

Maybe you have been there yourself. You start changing your behavior – like say, taking more time for yourself within your family, holding better boundaries. You start realizing when you are uncomfortable with other people’s behavior, and you start letting them know. When I first started doing this, my body screamed at me “this is risky!!!”

When you start putting yourself first and standing up for yourself, folks can have a range of response:

confusion

disappointment

anger

or even appreciation!

but you have to step into that risk zone to make a change, and your body needs extra support to take you there.

This past three weeks, I was asked to work with the cast of a medicinal play that does this for the audience. What To Send Up When It Goes Down was written by a black woman, for a black cast, for a black audience. While non-black folk are welcome, they are not central. 

The play expresses rage, historical bitterness, hurt, grief, but also joy, determination, and love. It is a healing celebration of blackness, brilliant and biting. This is what self-care looks like.

The actors were already familiar with The Alexander Technique from their training, so establishing a common ground for communication was easy.  Place your needs first. Take care of your back, your knees, your breath, as opposed to the needs of a the audience for example, or a larger racist society outside the theater.

This play gave me the gift of viscerally feeling the pressure of that racist society bearing down on me like a ton of bricks. So much so that when all the non-black folk are asked to leave the theater so that black people can conclude their healing ritual in safety, I was crushed. Not by being excluded, but by an embodied understanding of what that means. My heart is just broken.

And my body is the source of the medicine I need. My 600-million-year-old nervous system is right there, waiting for me to appreciate and use it wisely.  Thank god I’d been teaching the Alexander Technique for 3 hours before seeing the play!

It’s my favorite kind of problem solving to find simple ways that each individual performer can do that within a larger theatrical structure. It always serves the play, it always improves the performance, without fail.

I believe that if a performance is crafted in such a way that the performers are challenged but also deeply cared for, it will physically affect the audience and imbue the work with secret healing powers.

Right now, as you breathe through your nose, and let the air wash over the olfactory organ that lives in the space between your two eyes, allow your own attention to settle on your own body. Breath as quietly and softly as you can.

This area between your eyes is incredible expressive. If you look at other people, you’ll notice how much emotional information you get from seeing their eyes, noticing their breathing patterns, and the expressions made by the muscles around eyes and nose. 

Touching this area with your awareness right now, it may help you settle into whatever emotions are present for you, no matter how subtle. For me, as someone who lived my earlier life in a pretty shut down state, each breath and each emotional color or tone is a gift. I savor it.

I hope you hear a message from your own body – and follow it. We all need you on board the medicine train!

And if you live in the NYC area, please help these beautiful black actors sell out the fall run of Aleshea Harris’s play at Playwrights Horizons. It’s an incredible show.

Welcome to a journey through the 13 cranial nerves! This journey is designed to create balance between the sensory and motor functions of your nervous system.

You can find the playlist on my YouTube channel, and I’ll keep adding one new video per month. This month I am sharing content about the first cranial, or olfactory nerve.

You know how it is when you get all jacked up in hyper-activity mode, your nervous system is flooded with energy, and it’s literally impossible to stop “doing?” For instance, when you really get deep into something at work and feel it’s not possible to stop until you finish the project…and then you realize that’s going to mean working until midnight, but you can’t seem to stop or let go of your goal.

Or you get into an argument at a party and can’t seem to stop and breath? Your mouth just seems to keep talking, even though in your heart you want to hear what the other person might have to say.

Once I turn on my active side, I sometimes struggle find a way back down into calm receptivity. It’s like I know how to breath in and speak, but I’ve forgotten how to breath out and listen.

I personally have to have something concrete and clear that I can focus on to bring me back to a more balance, receptive state.

Maybe that’s why I love journeying through the cranial nerves so much. It has become a form of walking or sitting meditation for me. It also gives me an excuse to share with you how I’m choosing to structure the journey – the Embodied Learning Systems way.

Embodied learning (which I demonstrate in the above video) involves three kinds of inquiry:

1)    Cognitive
2)    Visual
3)    Kinesthetic/sensory
4)    Emotional

You can learn from books, you can learn from images, but when it comes to learning about “the body” I think it’s incomplete until you access the non-verbal intelligence of your specific, particular body. The part you are learning about already knows itself, basically, since it is part of you. If you use it to investigate itself, deep mysteries unfold!

Keep that in mind as we explore the first cranial nerve, which supplies your sense of smell.

The first three cranial nerves are all purely sensory, meaning that these receptive organs and nerves evolved first, and motor functions developed sequentially afterwards. This seems logical to me. If you don’t know where you are or what’s going on, why move? Yet, we often rush into activity without being aware of our surroundings, or we just assume that we know those surroundings and stop paying attention to them.

The motor activity of breathing necessary for smell, however, is way further down in the sequence of cranial and spinal nerves. Your nose does have erectile (yup!) tissue in it that expands and contracts according to need, but that is not a function of a motor nerve, it’s a function of the tissue itself. Your diaphragm is the primary muscle of breathing and its motion is activated by the phrenic nerve with roots in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th cervical nerves. This muscle/organ of lungs and diaphragm evolved much later than your sense of smell!

Air passes over the sense organ (with it’s 400 different receptors just waiting to be touched by interesting chemicals in the air) even when we breath very quietly. I experimented a lot this week and am delighted to discover that I smell just as much detail and nuance if I breath quietly, with small shallow breaths. I don’t have to “take a deep breath” or sniff/pant to perceive scent – in fact, when I do exaggerate my breathing that way, I smell less.

The takeaway is:

1) Simply tuning into your sense of smell is a great way to slow down and rebalance your nervous system.

2) Breathing quietly makes accessing smell easier. Lots of us are working too hard to breath. This small over-efforting, compared to bigger issues in our lives, might not seem like that big a deal…but it is if you consider the fact that the average person breathes over 20,000 times a day!

If you want to explore deeply how each cranial nerve affects your overall physicality, orientation, balance and coordination, check out my Cranial Nerve Sequencing offer.