Primitive Reflexes, Sinew Channels, and Eight Extraordinary Vessels

 Primitive Reflexes, Sinew Channels, and Eight Extraordinary Vessels

🪷 The Great Doubt and the Return of Self-Initiated Presence

Across many spiritual and trauma therapy frameworks, there arises a state in terms of processing or spiritual seeking referred to in Zen traditions as the Great Doubt (大疑, dai-gi). It describes a state in which all conceptual frameworks collapse, including spiritual certainty and self-definition. It is not confusion—it is a radical suspension of known reference points. In this terrain, the practitioner does not seek answers. Instead, the inquiry itself becomes a living presence:

·         Who am I? What is this? What is really true?”

The Neurology of Being

What does it actually mean to be? In clinical practice and daily life, we often speak about the need to “just be” or to “stop doing so much”—but the state of being is rarely defined in physiological terms. Is it rest? Is it stillness? Is it the absence of threat?

Neurosomatic Mapping of the “Great Doubt” State

This analysis focuses on the neurochemical, structural, and developmental disintegration process that occurs when long-term trauma-based identity scaffolding collapses—commonly misread as depression, but functionally distinct. This collapse may follow the completion of a major life task, existential awakening, or the cessation of over-adaptive striving, and is particularly common in individuals with schizoid or spiritualized defenses rooted in early relational trauma.

🧠 Developmental Trauma, Dopaminergic Collapse, and the Schizoid-Seeker Loop

 A Clinical Narrative Synthesizing Heller, Lowen, and Dopaminergic Physiology

In patients with early relational trauma—especially those with perinatal rupture, adoption, or spiritualized abuse—we frequently observe the emergence of schizoid character structure as defined by Alexander Lowen: a core split between the physical body and the organizing self. When paired with early threat to attachment and survival, this structural split often lays the foundation for a lifelong pursuit of safety through abstraction.

Heller’s developmental trauma framework identifies that rupture in the earliest stages (birth to three months) tends not to produce emotional dysregulation in the classic sense, but rather a failure to develop embodied contact with existence itself. In these cases, the infant may form a basic impression: “It is not safe to be here,” or even more primally, “I do not belong in a body.”

Reestablishing Agency After Collapse: A body-based framework for trauma resolution

  A body-based framework for trauma resolution

In trauma recovery—particularly following early developmental rupture, existential collapse, or the dismantling of long-held spiritual or identity frameworks—there often arises a stage where the nervous system enters a profound stillness. In this space, previous forms of motivation (fear, seeking, performance, survival) no longer drive action. But neither has something new emerged.

This in-between state is not regression. It is the liminal space where agency is being restructured—not as a defense, but as a real, body-based capacity.