THE VAGUS NERVE

Stella
Jul 22
6 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

The Vagus Nerve: Your Body’s Highway of Healing

Stella Reflecting on The Vagus Nerve

The Vagus Nerve: Your Body’s Highway of Healing🧠💓🌬

There’s a hidden healer running through your body.It’s not a pill or a practice — it’s a pathway.

In this blog, I explore the vagus nerve, the body’s built-in system for emotional healing, nervous system regulation, and trauma recovery. If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety, emotional shutdown, chronic stress, or hypersensitivity, this powerful nerve may hold the key.

The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body — a vital part of the parasympathetic nervous system (your rest, digest, and repair mode). It connects the brain, throat, heart, lungs, and gut — transmitting signals between body and mind. It’s your body’s whisper line — the place where emotion becomes sensation.

When functioning well, it helps regulate:

Heart rate
Breathing
Digestion
Mood
Voice
Immune response

But when dysregulated by emotional trauma, chronic stress, or early attachment wounds, the vagus nerve can become either overstimulated or underactive — leaving you feeling anxious, disconnected, numb, or constantly on edge.

This isn’t in your head.It’s in your nervous system.

In Emotional Recalibration Therapy, we work with the vagus nerve gently — not to fix you, but to restore a felt sense of safety in the body.We begin where the wound lives: in the breath, the belly, the throat, the chest.

Common Signs of Vagus Nerve Dysregulation:

Tight chest or throat
Panic or chronic anxiety
Digestive issues
Freeze or shutdown responses
Difficulty with boundaries or voice expression
Emotional numbness or overwhelm

If this sounds familiar — your body is asking for repair, not reprimand.

How to Soothe and Strengthen the Vagus Nerve:

There are simple, powerful practices to activate and tone the vagus nerve, including:

Slow diaphragmatic breathing (with long exhales)
Humming, chanting, or singing
Yoga (especially yin or restorative)
Cold water therapy (face or neck splash)
Gentle movement, swaying, or shaking
Safe touch and co-regulation
Guided hypnotherapy and somatic visualisation

These aren’t fads — they’re biological resets, inviting your nervous system back into

alignment.

Why This Matters for Emotional Healing

You don’t heal trauma through willpower.You heal it by creating the conditions for safety in your body.

The vagus nerve is your spiritual wiring — the golden thread between the old wound and new possibility.

This blog is for anyone seeking to understand how trauma lives in the body — and how to begin releasing it through nervous system regulation, inner child healing, and compassionate somatic practice.

Your body remembers.

But it also knows how to heal.

Let’s begin with a breath.

Listening to the Whisper Beneath the Noise

There’s a quiet truth running through your body.

A shimmering strand of intelligence, winding from brainstem to belly.It’s called the vagus nerve — and it holds the key to how you feel, how you heal, and how you come home to yourself.

This isn’t just anatomy. This is your soul’s infrastructure — a living bridge between thought and feeling, past and presence, survival and safety.

The Thread Between Mind, Body, and Soul

You feel it — that whisper in your tummy, that tightening in your throat, that ache in your chest when something is not quite right. It’s not just intuition. It’s not just “gut feeling.” It’s the language of your vagus nerve, the golden thread that connects your brain to your heart, lungs, and gut — a divine messenger carrying truth through the body.

The vagus nerve is your body's inner healing highway, responsible for regulating the nervous system, restoring calm, and reconnecting you with safety. When nurtured, it becomes a sacred instrument for healing trauma, easing anxiety, and restoring your sense of wholeness.

🧠 What is the vagus nerve?

The vagus nerve (Latin for wandering) is the longest cranial nerve in your body. It travels from your brainstem, down your throat, into your chest and heart, wrapping through your lungs and winding its way into the depths of your gut. It’s the master communicator of the parasympathetic nervous system — your rest, digest, and repair system - and plays a vital role in emotional regulation, heart rate, breath, and even voice.

When this nerve is toned and responsive, we feel connected, grounded, and safe. When it's underactive or overstimulated — as often happens in trauma — we may feel dissociated, overwhelmed, shut down, or hyper-alert.

It helps regulate:

Your heart rate
Your breathing
Your digestion
Your immune response
And your emotional state

When you get a lump in your throat, a tight chest, or “butterflies” in your stomach — that’s the vagus nerve speaking through sensation.

It’s not subtle. It’s sacred.

💔 How the vagus nerve affects emotional health

Trauma — especially emotional trauma — dysregulates the vagus nerve.When we’re repeatedly ignored, rejected, abandoned, or made to feel unsafe, the body enters a chronic state of vigilance. The vagus nerve can become either overstimulated or shut down.

That’s why people who’ve experienced heartbreak, grief, or emotional invalidation often report:

Chronic anxiety or panic
Digestive issues or gut sensitivity
Difficulty swallowing or chronic throat tension
Feeling emotionally numb or disconnected
Easily overwhelmed by sensory input
Difficulty with boundaries or emotional expression

If this feels familiar — you are not broken. Your nervous system is calling out for repair.

🫀 Vagal Tone & The Path to Recalibration

The vagus nerve doesn’t just help us rest — it helps us feel. It acts like a two-way radio between the body and brain, communicating emotional states and prompting the physiological shifts that allow us to either respond to threat or return to peace.

In trauma recovery, this becomes crucial. Many of us are stuck in survival mode: fight, flight, freeze. The vagus nerve holds the key to re-entering regulation, softness, and safety.

“Vagal tone” refers to the health and responsiveness of your vagus nerve.

Just like a muscle, it can be toned — strengthened — through gentle, body-based practices.

🪬How to Activate and Soothe the Vagus Nerve

Healing the vagus nerve doesn’t require force. It asks for rhythm, ritual, and reconnection. These simple yet powerful practices support vagal tone and invite your system to come home:

Slow diaphragmatic breathing (especially longer exhales)
Yoga (yin, restorative, or trauma-informed)
Chanting, humming, singing (vocal vibration calms the vagus)
Cold water on the face or neck (activates the dive reflex)
Safe touch and co-regulation (especially hand on heart/belly)
Hypnotherapy and guided somatic practice
Crying or laughter (both are nervous system releases)
Movement and gentle shaking (stimulates lymphatic flow)

These aren’t gimmicks. They’re how the body finds its way back to itself.

🧘‍♀️Yoga and Vagus Nerve Healing

Yoga is one of the most powerful, accessible tools for vagus nerve regulation — especially when approached slowly, somatically, and with intention.

Practices like:

Extended child’s pose with breath awareness
Cat-cow with vocalised exhale (sigh or hum)
Legs-up-the-wall to reset the nervous system

...aren’t just stretches — they’re somatic conversations with your own soul.

This is not about fixing your body.This is about coming back to your body — slowly, kindly, consistently.

🌿 In Emotional Recalibration Therapy, we begin with the body

Your vagus nerve is not just a biological wire. It’s a spiritual thread — connecting your old pain to your present possibility.

In my Emotional Recalibration work, we focus on:

Restoring safety in the nervous system
Releasing old survival patterns like hyper-independence or people-pleasing
Teaching the body that it is safe to feel again
Using breath, voice, and presence to return to the here and now

Because your healing doesn’t start with logic.

It starts with sensation.

With listening to the signals your body sends, instead of pushing them away.

At the heart of my work — Emotional Recalibration Therapy — is this truth: your body remembers. Healing begins not just by thinking differently, but by feeling differently in your skin, your breath, your being.

We work with:

Inner child reconnection
Somatic grounding and breathwork
Safe vagal activation through visualisation, voice, and ritual

This is not surface-level self-help.

This is nervous system repair through reverence.

🪷You Are Wired to Heal

You don’t need to force your healing. You just need to listen.

Your vagus nerve is the tuning fork of your inner wisdom — responding to tone, touch, rhythm, and truth. It will guide you home to yourself, gently, if you let it.

Let your body become the sanctuary. Let your breath be the bridge.

You are not too much. You are not broken. You are becoming.