Polyvagal theory is the American neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s account of how the autonomic nervous system responds to safety and danger: through the vagus nerve, a body that senses it is safe can rest, connect with others and engage, and a body that senses danger moves first into fight or flight and then, under extreme threat, into shutdown. It has become hugely influential in trauma therapy and body psychotherapy, and is also sharply disputed by many physiologists. In shamanic work its themes meet a long-standing emphasis on safety, groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this and the body, though Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on these does not rest on the theory.
What is polyvagal theory? #
A theory of the nervous system built around safety. Porges first set it out in 1995, and has restated and developed it many times since.1 The vagus nerve is the long nerve running from the brainstem to the heart, lungs and gut, and it is a major part of the parasympathetic, or calming, nervous system. Porges holds that it has two branches with different evolutionary histories, and that together with the sympathetic nervous system they give us three broad states, used in a set order. When we feel safe, the newer, ‘ventral vagal’ branch supports calm, social engagement and connection. When that fails, the sympathetic system mobilises us for fight or flight. When that fails too, under extreme threat, the older, ‘dorsal vagal’ branch brings shutdown: immobility, collapse and dissociation.1
Two further ideas carry much of its appeal. One is ‘neuroception’, which Porges defines as “the neural process by which safety and threat are detected without conscious awareness”. In other words, the body judges whether it is safe before the mind has had any say.1 The other is the ‘social engagement system’, which in his account ties the muscles of the face, the voice, the middle ear and the heart into one unit, so that a calm, warm face and voice can help settle another person’s nervous system, and an agitated one can unsettle it.2
Who is Stephen Porges? #
An American neuroscientist whose research on the heart, the breath and the nervous system goes back more than fifty years, to his graduate-school observation in the late 1960s that heart-rate variability drops during sustained attention. He is based at the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, and the department of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.3 He also co-developed commercial listening programmes based on the theory, such as the Safe and Sound Protocol, from which he declares he receives royalties. He describes the theory himself as turning an intuitive truth about safety into “a plausible neuroscience with testable hypotheses”.
Why has it become so popular? #
Because it gives therapists and their clients a simple, physical way to talk about what trauma does. It explains why a person may freeze or go numb instead of fighting back, without any suggestion that they chose to; why someone can feel unsafe in a room where nothing is wrong; and why feeling safe with another person can itself be healing. Porges insists that feeling safe is something other than the removal of threat, and reaches for the psychologist Eugene Gendlin’s term to describe it: “Feeling safe is more akin to a felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer”.4 He calls social connection a “biological imperative”, something humans need in order to survive, not a pleasant extra.4 The theory has been taken up in trauma therapy, body psychotherapy and somatic therapies, and in yoga therapy and the creative arts therapies.5 See Who was Eugene Gendlin? and What can somatic and body-centred therapies offer shamanic work?
How does polyvagal theory relate to shamanic work? #
Mostly through safety. In Therapeutic Shamanism, the real Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is a place of absolute safety and healing, which always feels deeply safe, safer than the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer ever feels.6 Experiencing that safety, and knowing that it can be reached at will, calms and regulates the nervous system and grounds and centres a person. Porges, for his part, distinguishes being safe from feeling safe; the Lower-World’s safety, too, is described as something felt, not simply the absence of danger. See How do embodiment, grounding and the nervous system support healing?
It also meets the teaching on early wounding. A child who has no healthy attachment learns that other people cannot be depended on and that the world is a frightening and dangerous place, and so becomes hyper-vigilant, often withdrawing or pushing people away.7 Children who are held too loosely by their mothers can feel anxious and ungrounded, never quite arriving in their bodies.8 Polyvagal theory describes that same watchfulness from the side of the nervous system, a body set to scan for threat because, early on, safety could not be counted on. And because such early memories are held in the body, not in words, journeying, which is largely non-verbal and can be very somatic and embodied, can reach them where talking often cannot.8
And it meets the emphasis on the body as anchor. Grounding is the bedrock of shamanic practice, and of any spiritual practice really;9 at the end of a journey there is no need to retrace one’s steps, because the physical body is the anchor and is already here.10 Polyvagal theory, for its part, puts the body’s sense of safety at the root of everything else.
Where does shamanic work see things differently? #
In what safety finally rests on. Polyvagal theory is a theory of the nervous system, and everything it says happens inside a human body and between human bodies. In Therapeutic Shamanism the Lower-World is not only a state the nervous system can be brought into; it is a realm, with Power AnimalsPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this and the other Peoples, and the healing done there is done by them, not produced by our physiology. Porges himself, in passing, allows that “it could be argued” that even single-celled organisms and plants have a primordial way of responding to threat, but he offers it as a possibility, not a finding.11 In Therapeutic Shamanism, as an experience rather than a theory, everything is alive and conscious, and a human being’s sense of safety includes relationship with the other-than-human world, not only with other humans. See Is shamanic journeying safe?
Is polyvagal theory disputed? #
Yes, strongly. The psychophysiologist Paul Grossman has long said that the theory’s physiology does not hold up. In 2023 he set out its five basic premises and argued that each is “untenable or highly implausible” on the existing evidence, adding that almost all of them rest on a single measure, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the rise and fall of heart rate with the breath, which in his view cannot carry the weight the theory puts on it.12 In 2026 he and thirty-eight other researchers from several countries published “Why The Polyvagal Theory Is Untenable”, concluding that its claims about the vagal nuclei of the brainstem, about heart-rate measures and about how the vagus evolved conflict with neurophysiological and evolutionary evidence. They add that the theory’s psychological ideas, such as the importance of safety and social connection, were known before it and do not depend on its physiology.13
Porges has replied each time. In his 2025 restatement he set out the main criticisms one by one with his answers, arguing that critics misdescribe what the theory says, for example by claiming it holds a brainstem nucleus to be unique to mammals when it does not.14 Answering the 2026 paper, he wrote that it tests “a reconstructed proxy of the theory” marred by category errors, that the remaining disagreements are about methods and levels of analysis, and that “the charge of scientific untenability does not apply to Polyvagal Theory as formulated”.15
Does the dispute matter for shamanic work? #
Mostly, the dispute is about the anatomy, the measurements and the evolutionary story, not about whether people need to feel safe, or whether trauma lives in the body. Even the theory’s strongest critics accept that safety and social connection matter; they question whether Porges’s account of the vagus nerve is the right explanation. Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on grounding, the body and the safety of the Lower-World is set out in its own terms, without reference to polyvagal theory.
