16/11/2025
What’s fascinating is not just that somatics and polyvagal theory echo Indigenous Knowledge it’s the unexpected places where science is finally catching up.
Here are some lesser-known intersections:
🌿 The nervous system responds to micro-movements, not only big rhythms.
Somatic research shows that tiny, repetitive hand movements, weaving, knot-tying, beading, rolling fibres activate fine motor pathways linked to ventral vagal calm.
Our old people have known this forever weaving pandanus, twining plant fibres, tying fishing nets, carving message sticks, threading shells, mapping stories in sand.
Indigenous fibre arts are not just craft they are regulation, memory and medicine.
🔥 Heat is a vagal regulator.
Warmth on the skin is one of the strongest signals of safety, it lifts vagal tone and softens defensive states.
Indigenous practice has always held this truth...fire ceremony, sun-warmed sand, warm ochre on the body, smoking ceremony and sitting close in story.
Warmth is medicine. Country knows how to settle the nervous system long before science named it.
🌬️The vagus nerve is about 80% sensory, it listens far more than it speaks.
Science shows it carries the body’s stories up to the brain.
Indigenous Knowledge has always known this...wisdom rises from gut, heart, feet and Country, not just from the thinking mind.
🌱 Plants speak directly to the nervous system.
Scent travels straight into the limbic system...the emotional brain without passing through thought.
This is why lemon myrtle, eucalyptus smoke, wattle blossom, native mint, crushed gum leaves, warm resins and flowering plants (and other scented plants) are so regulating.
Our old people have always known that plant kin calm the body before the mind even catches up.
🌊 Water sound tunes the nervous system.
The low, rhythmic frequencies of flowing water sit in the same range as alpha brainwaves...the patterns of calm presence and creative insight.
Our people have always known this...sitting at creeks, rivers, rockholes, billabongs and ocean edges to listen, to cleanse, to let Country regulate the body.
Water changes the brain before the mind even realises it.
👣 Walking on soft terrain changes the whole stress response.
Sand, soil and leaf litter increase proprioceptive input.... the deep-body sense that calms the limbic system and steadies mood.
Our people have always known this...healing happens barefoot, in motion, on earth that yields gently beneath you...dunes, bush tracks, riverbanks, mangroves, desert soils and the soft ground around fire.
Country regulates the body with every step.
✨ These aren’t just beautiful overlaps they’re reminders.
The body remembers.
Country speaks.
And science, slowly, is learning the language our Ancestors never forgot.
