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Meaning tends to flow outwards from the biggest "noise", the biggest volume (of body) and from the biggest priorities (i.e. immediate survival meanings).
All levels of your psychological and organic being are continuously making meaning of the "world" they are aware of. This meaning-making then passes on to the next processes in the feedback chain, who in turn make their own meaning according to their particular scope of and capacity for response. The "natural" flow of certain meanings tends to have a certain direction. So for instance, you do not "tell" your bladder that it is full – rather your full bladder makes itself known to you by a very recognisable set of sensations accompanied by a mental-emotional state not unlike anxiety. This is a one-directional flow of meaning.
Meaning-making about the external world carries the potential for more nuance, subtlety, ambiguity and variation than your bladder’s fluid level, and demands a vast range of possible responses. Whenever those responses are conditioned by expectation, there is always the possibility that the expectation is not properly calibrated to reality, so meaning can potentially flow in either direction. In the case of a full bladder, anxiety about bodily functions can create a need to pee – either by confusing the cognitive perception of what a full bladder feels like, or (if the anxiety lies at a deeper physiological level) influencing the sacral plexus and the action of the bladder sphincter. Your biology does not expect as of itself, and can only be caused to expect through the imprint of past experience or through expectation at a cognitive level.
Past experiences are" software" and are re-programmable. They are most easily and quickly assimilated and re-calibrated according to present reality through activity at a cognitive level. Cognitive experience must be embodied – i.e. include sufficient qualitative attention as part of an ongoing conversation with the body mind – for its meaning-making to easily enter deeper, more physiological feedback loops. It is also possible – but far less direct and far less reliably – for re-calibration to occur without this kind of habitual embodied reflection. In which case deeper process may be affected through a persistent saturation of experience that contradicts the expectation and eventually overcomes it. So a loving non-judgemental, supportive social environment may after months or years pervade deeply enough such that "something happens" – and also it may not. This is visible in the fate of rescue dogs, some of whom eventually realise they are safe, and others continue to be neurotic, nervous, reactive and sometimes dangerous because they continue to expect maltreatment. The idea of "exposure therapy" – such as placing a spider on someone who has a fear of spiders – is contrary to the normal processes of recalibration. I saw a story recently about someone who had lost his lifelong fear of dogs when (to cut a long story short) he adopted cared for the very dog that had bitten him when he was four years old. So there are (also) transcendent states that might be confused for "exposure", but which actually begin as profound empathic compassion – heart-centred changes in relationality that alter the way "reality" is perceived.
If two parts of the body are feeling and/or expressing different "meanings" then, all other things being equal, meaning will tend to flow from the biggest volume to the smallest one. The sensory platform of the face tends to dominate the sense of how the whole body is – simply because it has more neurological connections – so it is perceptually "bigger" than its actual volume. Wherever your attention focuses on is also given priority and also becomes "big" in terms of how your nervous system processes meaning. So your attention and the meaning-making that your enter into (whether you are in control of it or not) tends to magnify anything it rests on. As a general (and universal) rule information flows from the largest to the smallest – unless there is some kind of cognitively managed interception. So "loud" sensory stimuli (such as pain or distress) tend to take over when they pass a certain threshold.
Survival messages (i.e. meanings that are associated with survival emotions) tend to override and co-opt other information streams. If a survival-meaning emanates from any part of the body, the parts and systems in direct communication with it will then tend to pick up the message and join in, leading to activation "flooding" rapidly through the body and nervous system. This is, of course, a good arrangement for survival. However, if the message is coming from a poorly-calibrated part, then the whole body-mind can accidentally enter a survival-danger mode for no particularly good reason because that message has flooded. Imagine one fire alarm going off in one room of a huge building. The people running out tell everyone they meet that there is a fire, and within a short space of time everybody is running out of the building. If someone asked "why just one alarm?", and "what’s going on here?", they might find that the smoke detector in one room was too sensitive and was detecting (say) exhaust fumes from the car park. So at some point in any automatic and reactive emergency response there may be space to check that the response is properly calibrated to the real world.
An example of this kind of calibration from my personal experience…
I was cycling round the lake at Damazin in Sudan. The sand on the "track" had become very fine and deep, so to get the bicycle up a small hill I had to almost carry it. Suddenly about 100 soldiers in camouflage gear ran over a hill maybe 200 yards to my right, firing their guns. A light machine gun also opened fire. I froze. Wherever I looked there was nowhere to run. I considered hiding behind a small clump of grass about a foot high, but after a ridiculously long time weighing up the pros and cons (an overwhelm shut-down state) I realised it wouldn’t really help, and my legs were starting to feel weak (another overwhelm response). Then an old Sudani man riding a donkey appeared over the crest of the hill, and despite the shooting wasn’t paying the troops any notice at all. I spent about a minute (that felt like a lifetime) looking to-and-fro, at his unconcerned almost bored body language, then back to the soldiers, unable to reconcile the two. Then I realised I had wandered into the middle of an army training exercise, and the guns were firing blanks.
Re-calibration almost always involves a period of discomfort and even confusion, because it sometimes depends on awareness of apparently irreconcilable and contradictory messages. The truth is in the detail – and to find the detail that reconciles the apparently paradoxical, one has to slow down. More on this topic in the section on "Left-brain, Right-brain.
