Homeostasis, Allostasis And The Void of Infinite Possibility

Homeostasis keeps us stuck. Stress disrupts homeostasis and calls our potential into play, and allostasis is the ability to transform stress into opportunities to learn, grow, and EVOLVE

Dear friends,

You’ve probably heard yourself or someone you love say things like:

“I just want my life back.”
“I just want to feel normal again.”
“I’d give anything to feel like I did before _______.” (the back pain, knee pain, surgery, trauma…)

Memories of who you were and what you were capable of before your current [painful] reality tempt you into a terrible delusion: that it is possible to go back in time, or find a “factory reset” button for your life, or your body.

Harsh truth: that previous version of you is GONE.

The way forward will require you to accept “what is” and embrace the great void of uncertain chaos from which your future self will emerge, transformed.

And if you’ve been in a state of chronic pain or trauma for most or all of your life, then the law of homeostasis is the very reason you’ve had such a hard time healing or finding freedom.

You’ve likely heard of homeostasis - but you may not know about allostasis.

Today, we will define both of these concepts and explore why seeking homeostasis (consciously, or impulsively) could be keeping you stuck, and how you can harness the regenerative powers of allostasis to BREAK FREE.

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Homeostasis is an automated process (and often keeps us stuck).

Homeostasis has been the dominant story told by science for the past 170 years about how the human organism functions and flourishes.

Homeostasis is derived from two greek words - homos (same or equal to) and stasis (condition, state, position). “The same condition.”

An internet search will yield quite a few different definitions related to human health, but I like this overaching one by author Brad Stulberg for its utter simplicity:

Homeostasis states that following a disorder event, [healthy] systems return to stability where they started: X to Y to X, order, disorder, order.

For example:

Let’s say you were a capable, athletic person who trail ran every week and loved to hike in the mountains. Then one weekend while hiking you see a giant black bear, fall into a river and rupture your MCL (an important knee ligament).

The excruciating pain and ruptured knee ligament represent the “disorder event.”

(This is a true story, by the way. It happened to me in 2020).

If your organism is oriented towards homeostasis, then immediately after injury you/it will attempt to revert back to the capable, athletic person with no knee ligament rupture who trail runs every week and hikes mountains.

However…

There is no going back to the body that did not have a ruptured knee ligament.

Because of this fact, and because we know it is true (even if we fight it) our organism will then resort to its automated survival strategies: the familiar thoughts and behaviors that helped us survive past pain.

For example:

Back in 2020, I stood in that icy river with a lower leg that felt like it was dangling from its knee socket and yelled “I’m so stupid!”

Within seconds of this injury occurring I saw the rest of my life flash before my mind: I would hobble around my house for the rest of my days on this earth and I’d never hike or run again; Stefan (who was my partner at the time) would have to take care of me, and I would never be able to practice or teach Kinetix again.

These fear stories were a function of the homeostatic impulse - my survival biology was kicking in, deploying a strategy that had worked really well during my childhood and early twenties: catastrophizing.

(Catastrophizing, by the way, is a form of grasping for control when we feel helpless - because if we see the worst coming, then at least we can prepare ourselves to survive it and we won’t feel blindsided).

I have good news and bad news.

First of all:

There is no going back to a past version of yourself or your body (unless you are a time traveling sorcerer 🧙‍♀️).

The good news: pain and stress are opportunities to learn, grow and become someone wiser, more adaptable and more spiritually free than the past version of yourself.

The bad news: this new version of you will cost you your old self, which can feel as terrifying as facing death itself.

Now, let’s explore another example that I hope will illuminate why so many people (maybe you) are stuck in chronic pain despite a willingness to do anything to heal.

For homeostasis to be a real phenomenon (which I believe it is), there has to be an established BASELINE.

Baseline is the homeostatic “normal” that your system is set to seek like a homing pigeon. The thing is, we are not born with a static set of GPS coordinates; they’re programmed into our organism throughout childhood, in tandem with all of our automated survival behaviors, while we are highly neuroplastic.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change itself. As infants our brains are in a theta brain state (which is a state of hypnosis), which means we are absorbing our environment like sponges in order to learn (and memorize) who we are, how we function, what this world is all about, what our place is in it, and how to survive. (The brain doesn’t care whether you thrive or not - it is programmed to automate survival strategies).

Automated neuroplasticity decreases significantly by age 7, diminishes even more throughout our teenage years, and then stops around age 21. As adults, it is up to us to consciously change our brains. This is why it’s so hard to create meaningful behavioral changes that last.

The law of homeostasis can help explain why we get so stuck.

If, during childhood, your baseline (“normal”) consisted of suppressing your emotions, being a “good” child (people pleasing), chronic pain, one illness after another, anxiety, depression, chronic gut issues, physical or emotional abuse, boundary violations or anything painful that happened consistently…

Then this painful “normal” likely became your homeostatic baseline.

And any time you veer - even slightly - from this baseline (for example, if you experience relief from chronic pain, or you start to feel GOOD in your body after a life of chronic illness), your organism will do everything in its power to revert back to normal - no matter how painful that normal is.

If your baseline is robust health and vitality, then maybe homeostasis will serve you well. But I haven’t met very many of those people.

Now, let’s explore allostasis and how this complementary law of physics can help you break free.

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Allostasis helps us develop freedom - and it can be consciously cultivated.

The word allostasis combines the Proto-Indo-European root ‘al’- to grow, flourish - and the Greek word stasis - state, position, condition.

The theory of allostasis emerged from the work of two scientists - Peter Sterling and Joseph Eyer - and it is defined as:

Following a disorder event, healthy systems return to stability somewhere NEW: X to Y to Z, order, disorder, reorder.

For example:

Let’s say you were a capable, athletic person who trail ran every week and loved to hike in the mountains. Then one weekend while hiking you see a giant black bear, fall into a river and rupture your MCL (an important knee ligament).

The excruciating pain and ruptured knee ligament represent the “disorder event.”

If your system is organized towards allostasis, then immediately following the injury you will let the pain hurt, accept that your knee ligament is ruptured, and search for ways to help your body do what it does best: regenerate.

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re-gen-er-ate
verb

• [of a living organism] regrow new tissues to replace old or injured ones

• to birth anew // be born again (in a spiritual sense)

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You would RESIST the temptation to interfere with your brilliant body’s ability to grow itself anew.

This means: NO icing the injury; no sensation and emotion numbing painkillers; no anti-inflammatory drugs; no knee braces or crutches; no babying the body or thinking you know better than she does.

Instead, you see this as a wonderful opportunity to “think with” your body and test all the theories you’ve been writing and teaching about since 2011.

And so, even though you have to hike 6 miles out of a canyon on a severely injured knee, and it is so tempting to revert back to the traumatized little girl inside who once believed she was broken and defective and doomed to be in pain forever, you resist the impulse to set your GPS coordinates for that old painful “normal.”

For several agonizing hours you hobble uphill while naming what is, and only what is (what is objectively true); and you avoid spinning out into fear stories and meanings that have no bearing on reality (“what if I never hike again?” “What if I’ll never walk normally?” “What if I need surgery?”)

The human brain is a prediction machine.

If you’ve ever found yourself feeling tentative about trying new things to heal your body and heard yourself ask fearfully “what if it doesn’t work?”…this is your brain trying to predict the future.

Your brain would rather predict (so it can feel in control) certain disappointment (or certain doom) than face the terrifying unknown where all of your potential for transformation lives. The best way to avoid the pain of disappointment is to stay exactly where you are.

Two weeks after I ruptured my MCL in 2020 I felt NO pain unless I tried to run or squat.

I could walk and live my life without pain.

I couldn’t hike up and down mountains (yet), and I couldn’t run or squat. But I had achieved something I didn’t even know was possible: I was walking around like a “normal” person even though I had a fully ruptured MCL!!!

This experience helped me understand what the human body is truly capable of when we get out of its way.

We get in the body’s way when we are in resistance to what is; when we don’t want to be in pain and reflexively reach for relief; when we go into denial, or spin out into worst case scenarios in our minds; when we start trying desperately to get back to the body we had before _______.

I am not the same woman I was before this injury.

I am wiser.

I know now, from direct experience, how to untangle emotions from sensations and subjective meanings and beliefs from the objective reality of the physical body.

And I am even more confident about the body’s ability to heal anything. Not just my body - THE body.

YOUR BODY.

ALL BODIES.

Two months after this injury I was able to hike 16 miles in the mountains of Colorado. I would not have believed this was possible; until it happened for me.

Nine months later I was trail running again.

The only pain I experienced as a result of this injury was during those first two weeks (and it was excruciating the first few days but diminished fast); after that, it was immediate pain any time I tried to squat or run during the rehab period, but the pain went away as soon as I stood up or stopped running. I didn’t make the pain mean that I shouldn’t or couldn’t squat or run; I was learning from my body that she was telling me “not yet.”

Nature is the master of transformation:

When the dinasaurs went extinct, Mother Earth didn’t revert the planet and all her creatures back to the way things were before; she used the catastrophe of mass extinction to birth millions of new and wonderful creatures into existence.

Homeostasis is the ability to stay the same.

Allostasis is the ability to evolve.

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Put this knowledge into action if you want to get unstuck and break FREE:

1️⃣ Get familiar with your homeostatic baseline, or “normal” - these are the most consistent thoughts, feelings and behaviors that occur like clockwork daily/weekly/monthly/yearly. Whatever you consistently revert back to after brief periods of change, or attempts to change - that is your baseline.

2️⃣ Realize that parts of your organism will FIGHT to keep your unique blueprint of homeostasis because it is has been programmed to do so (by you and your survival biology); ONLY YOU can re-program your organism. Your body won’t do it for you.

3️⃣ How to put allostasis into practice:

• Accept (stop resisting/fighting) “what is” - whether it is pain, injury, divorce, abuse, trauma, illness, financial loss etc. This is the hardest step.

• In case this isn’t clear, resistance to “what is” looks like: reaching for relief by any means (drugs, surgeries, avoiding activities that cause pain, pretending you’re fine when you’re not, etc); trying to get rid of or fix whatever it is you don’t want to be experiencing; the willingness to “do anything” to __________ (get out of pain, heal trauma); using addictions to cope with or distract from “what is” etc…

• After accepting what is, you must voluntarily enter the disorder that life has bestowed upon you (again, it could be pain, injury, heartbreak, death of a loved one, trauma, illness etc).

• Entering the disorder looks like: facing it, naming it, feeling it, getting curious about it, learning from it…

• The next hardest step is to enter the void, or the black abyss of infinite possibility, which will (for most people) feel like almost certain death to the nervous system. The abyss of infinite possibility is where the new you will be forged.

• Resist the temptation to predict ahead of time who will emerge from the abyss of infinite possibility (that’s your organism trying to stay the same). The only way to proceed is to let go of expectations and attachments to outcomes; and above all you must resist the temtpation to let your meaning making // prediction machine 🧠 derail you.

• Most likely, this is going to suck. A lot. During this phase you might experience terror, shaking, sweating, nausea and rapid heart beat; undoubtedly you will watch your monkey mind try desperately to turn you around, back the way you came, with all kinds of fear stories and tales of certain doom if you proceed. The goal of these thoughts is to help you return to homeostasis - the you of your childhood; or the you that survived long enough to become an adult, which is good enough for the brain.

• Engage the allostasis process: X to Y to Z, order to disorder to RE-ORDER. The void, or abyss of infinite possibility, is your opportunity to re-organize yourself; to re-generate yourself - body and soul; to birth something new. Pain is a fertile ground within which to plant the seeds of change. Within the pain itself you will find all of the necessary knowledge, skills and wisdom needed to transform the germ into the sprout 🌱of new life.
  
  This is your opportunity to:
  
  Learn something new
  Gain new skills
  Think new thoughts
  Feel new feelings
  Adopt new behaviors
  Regenerate your body
  Evolve your soul and spirit
  

There is no becoming the new you without entering the extremely uncomfortable phase of disorder.

You have to let go of X in order to pass through Y; and you have to pass through Y to become Z.

The only way out [of pain] is through [the pain].

You have to embrace the inevitable uncertainty, chaos and confusion (Y) if you want to arrive at Z - a reordered body, life, marriage, family, career…

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When I work with in person clients using Kinetix - my method of partner fascia release and mapping - I intentionally harness the potential that is waiting to be harnessed in the stress responses of the nervous system, in order to move my clients into a process of allostasis.

When a stress response occurs, we have two choices:

1. go back (homeostasis)

2. go forward (embrace the disorder and become someone new)

Kinetix offers us an incredible opportunity to harness the powers of allostasis precisely because it is intense (painful/stressful) to get stepped on; because it often (not always, but often) triggers a stress response in the nervous system; because it often (not always) triggers relationship wounds related to being hurt by other people either physically or emotionally; because the techniques are capable of actual physical regeneration, but in order to get those benefits we have to let go of our past self.

You can do this for yourself - with a friend, partner, family member…

You can do this for clients - if you’re a practitioner who works with people in pain.

Join us inside The Kinetix Academy to learn partner fascia release, body mapping, nervous system mapping and the science of human freedom.

I believe in sharing knowledge gained from direct experience (vs information distributed through books and the internet) and the most important knowledge I’ve gained about the human organism - how we function as a whole system, why pain happens and how to resolve it, how the subconscious rules our behavior from the subterranean depths of the body, and how to actualize the freedom we’re seeking, I learned by working directly with people in pain in my private practice using Kinetix.

I invite you to learn Kinetix and test these theories for yourself, if you’re inspired to study the living human being - living fascia, living blood, nerves, tissues, muscles…all animated by a unique soul and spirit.

With love,
Elisha