The Tanmatras and the Nervous System
A deepening for the second year, anchored in the Second Gateway: the Mother and the Lover, the Sustaining Light.
Another view of One Body
The second year of the inner pilgrimage of the embodied feminine is an immersion through the senses. This is a work of raising awareness: awareness of how we perceive, and of what perceives in us before we ever think.
Notice it for yourself. Before you name a thing, you have already sensed it. Before the mind says danger or home, the body is already there. Perhaps this is the layer we are entering now, the perception that comes before thought.
We will hold two maps. The first comes through the ancient voice of Samkhya yoga: the tanmatras, the subtle senses, named by the yogis long ago. The second is recent: the nervous system, in the language of polyvagal theory.
The tanmatras offer a map that may show us how to deepen. Polyvagal theory is a rich and useful map, still being debated, and not a settled fact. We will lean on both, gently, to support a deeper immersion through the inner pilgrimage.
Why the Second Gateway
We come to this teaching at the Second Gateway: the Mother and the Lover, the sustaining light. This is the gateway of the body at home in itself, of nourishment, of relationship. Its sacred twin is the throat, the voice, and her affirmation, She who speaks her truth.
Remember the wound of this gateway. It lives in the body, the body that learned, somewhere, that it was not safe, and so tightened, or went numb, or went silent. This can be the gateway of trauma, and alchemically the medicine. Through presencing our pelvic floor, we shift from the thinking, logic-driven, fixing, self-help mind into feeling, sensing, knowing. (Second year, guided by jnana shakti.) Until what was frozen can soften and the body can feel again.
The aspiration, in bringing in these systems of thought and practice, is to reveal what both maps point to: the body must feel safe before it can open.
The Tanmatras: The Subtle Senses
Tanmatra (Sanskrit: "that-only") is the bare essence of a thing, before the mind adds anything to it. There are five, one for each sense:
- Shabda — sound, born of ether.
- Sparsha — touch, born of air.
- Rupa — sight, born of fire.
- Rasa — taste, born of water.
- Gandha — smell, born of earth.
The eyes and the ears were made to receive. Awareness is redirected through a conscious participation, through the senses, inward, using the senses as a carrier, a vehicle of consciousness, consciously directed inward, as if the world is touching us, and awareness meeting that touch, before a single thought is formed.
This is why the senses are sacred sites of the work. Each gateway of the cross holds one: smell at Earth, sight at Fire, touch at Air, taste at Water. And the subtlest of them, sound, lives here, at the throat, the voice, the place where the Mother speaks her truth.
The Nervous System: The Body's Own Knowing
Research suggests the nervous system is always perceiving, far beneath our thinking. Stephen Porges gave this a name, neuroception: a knowing that arrives before we know we are knowing, beneath conscious perception. The body seems to sense whether this room, this voice, this face is safe, long before the mind has an opinion.
Notice how near this is to the subtle sense. Both name a perception that comes before thought. Both seem to be saying the same thing: the body knows first.
The theory describes three states the body moves through:
- Safety and connection. The body at ease. It can rest, digest, create, love, be with others. The state of the open heart.
- Mobilisation. Fight or flight. The heat rises, the body readies to act or to run.
- Shutdown. When the threat is too great to escape, the oldest response takes over: collapse, numbness, freeze, the body playing dead.
These may be seen as the body's ancient intelligence, keeping us alive. When a woman goes numb, her body is protecting her, doing its oldest work. To shame it would be to misunderstand it.
Where the Two Maps Meet
The senses are the channels of safety
How does the body decide that it is safe? Through the senses. Through a soft voice, a gentle gaze, or a warm and welcome touch. The very senses the yogis named seem to be the channels through which the body reads safety. A kind voice tells the body, you may rest now. Perhaps this is why a mother's voice can calm a child before a single word is understood.
The two breaths, the two branches
Yogic philosophy speaks of two channels. Pingala, the solar channel on the right: heating, activating, outward. Ida, the lunar channel on the left: cooling, calming, inward. They seem to correspond, almost exactly, to the two branches of the nervous system:
- Pingala is the sympathetic. The sun, the fire, the rising heat. Fight, flight, doing.
- Ida is the parasympathetic. The moon, the water, the cooling rest. Digest, restore, soften, receive.
When the two come into balance, the central channel opens. Sushumna. The still column at the centre. This is the old name for what the body might call homeostasis: the balanced state, the settled nervous system, the open heart at rest. Where the two poles breathe as one, the third arises. Spanda.
The Mother is the state of safety
And here, something begins to come into focus. Could this state of safety, of being held, of a body that can nourish and digest and connect and create, be the Mother's own state? It feels so. What the new language is calling safety, the body has perhaps always known as her sustaining light. To come into the Mother might be to come into that safety; to rest in the central channel, to rest in her. And as the sun and the moon energies find their balance, the third opens, the path, the ecliptic or sushumna nadi individual, all of it held in Gaia, the Great Mother.
The thread to the womb
Here is a thread held more in contemplation than in science. The vagus, the longest nerve in the body, wanders from the brainstem down through the throat, the heart, the lungs, the belly, suggesting the body's intelligence carries the news upward, from the body to the brain, far more than the brain sends orders down, generating an interesting contemplation connected to these metaphysical principles explored thus far through this immersion. This opens an inquiry into the feminine pathway: a knowing that informs from below upward, from our roots up. From a sensorial lens, the feet move through subconscious pathways; they do not wait for a mental command, whilst the hands hold the conscious. And there is evidence of a fine thread of this nerve reaching as far as the cervix and the womb, a line of sensation running from the very centre of a woman to her brain, bypassing the spine.
The Practice: Coming Into the Mother
The practice is simple, and it is the work of a lifetime. We are raising the body into safety, through the senses, so that it can feel again.
The breath. Begin with Nadi Shodhana, the alternate nostril breath you met at the Sixth Gateway in the first year. Close the right nostril, the sun, and breathe slowly through the left, the moon. Let the cooling channel quiet the fire. Then even the breath until you can no longer feel which side is which. This is the doorway to the middle channel, to rest. If you would like a guided demonstration, you may follow one here.
The sound. Then tone the gateway. Sound is the first of the senses, and the voice is the very throat of this gate. Sound its mantra, OON-AH, low and slow, and feel it vibrate in the chest and the throat. It is prayer, and it may also be medicine. The long, sounded breath, the hum, the tone, seems to soothe the body from the inside and calm the very nerve that runs from the throat to the heart to the belly. To tone is to speak safety to yourself in a language older than words. And when a circle tones together, each voice steadies the others.
The senses. Then soften the eyes, until the gaze rests and receives. Soften the voice, until even your inner speech is gentle, a voice a frightened animal would trust. And where there is another, offer touch, slow and warm, the touch that comes with love, the medicine for the touch that once came without it. You may like to print the cross and keep it before you, as a focus point.
The circle. A nervous system seems to find safety fastest in the presence of another already at rest. This is co-regulation, among the oldest medicines of the women's circle. When the guardian rests in her own safety, the circle may borrow it from her. She transmits safety. (a note to the guardians ;) )
And naturally the question of the Second Gateway can be asked by the body that at last feels safe enough to answer:
What am I sustaining? Who am I nurturing? What is mine to receive?
Perhaps the nervous system heals through safety. And this is what the Mother has always offered: a body to rest inside.
The Threads We Draw From
- The tanmatras — the five subtle senses of Samkhya and yoga (sound, touch, sight, taste, smell); perception before the thinking mind.
- The nadis — ida, pingala, and sushumna of the Hatha Yoga tradition, the lunar and solar channels and the central column where they meet. Nadi Shodhana, the alternate nostril breath, balances the two.
- Polyvagal theory — Stephen Porges: neuroception, and the three states of safety, mobilisation, and shutdown. An influential and useful theory, still debated among scientists, held here as a living map and not as proven fact. Humming, toning, and the long exhale are known to soothe the vagus.
- The window of tolerance — Dan Siegel: the band of arousal within which we can stay present and connected.
- The vagus and the womb — the vagus as a chiefly listening, sensing nerve, and the evidence (Komisaruk and Whipple) of a vagal pathway from the cervix and uterus that bypasses the spine. The anatomy is real and narrow; the Mother metaphor is ours, and we keep the two distinct.