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Note that simplification means there are a lot more "Gods of the Gaps". Also, this is primarily a biological and somatic (body-based) viewpoint, so it substantially reframes psychological ways of thinking; but does not directly address the spiritual - such as - questions about the soul.
Your body is comprised of almost countless living entities (including cells and functional agglomerations of cells) that each have a consciousness, and collective consciousnesses. At the top end of this sits your identity and your cognitive (fully conscious) mind. Its specific function (in the living biological organism that is a human being) is to make meaning of the world and therefore to make non-reactive, more nuanced choices, and particularly to inform the rest of the body-mind what is actually happening. It does this by attending to (receiving information from) the body-mind. So the cognitive mind is something of an intermediary that on the one hand can exert its will, but on the other hand is an integral and equal part of a whole. The biological wholeness naturally extends out into communuity and ecosystem - whether we engage with that or not.
There is a vast ocean of information constantly passing between all of these layers and sub-entities; and one major function of the various parts of the body is to transmit, receive and transduce information from one form to another.
No single part, including the mind or brain can handle the quantity of information available, so each "part" focuses on a small number of information channels that are most useful to it - that it is most able to directly engage with, make sense of and respond to.
This compartmentalisation of information flow means that all "parts" of the body-mind are only loosely coupled (being autonomous to varyong degrees), and this loose coupling is actively used by the body as a means to modulate its internal organisation. The quasi-autonomy is only possible because each "part" is conscious and intelligent in its own way and in its own sphere of influence. Loose coupling also allows a vast range of adaptation - whereas rigid organisational coupling tends to break outside a very narrow window of activity.
When all is safe enough, then there is a lot of communication between the whole body-mind because this optimises sensory systems, energy management, adaptive capacity; and the balance between internal maintenance/repair and internal symbioses vs living in the external world and external relationality.
When there is danger at any level (be that external threat or an internal metabolic emergency) then communication is reduced and "parts" become even more loosely coupled, or even temporarily de-coupled. Jut one (though major) example of this is the Vagus Nerve, which maintains communication between the visceral brain and the central nervous system - and whose activity significantly reduces during threat. De-coupling is an adaptive response that allows energy to be conserved and attention to be focussed on the immediate issue (just like you would hopefully stop looking at a mobile phone when crossing a busy road).
There must be natural well developed means by which this temporary de-coupling is reversed. I think of this process as re-calibration. We are supposed to be constantly re-calibrating to the reality of the present moment (this "moment" being spread over a couple of minutes) - instead of being stuck adapting to something that is no longer happening. Then the body returns to a more integrated (but still loosely coupled) state.
However, the ways we culturally use our attention, the ways we conceptualise the body and mind, and the environmental noise and business and information overload of a typical space in a modern urban environment prevent this re-normalisation from happening. Therefore hyperarousal and overwhelm due to almost any kind of event tend to be cumulative, because some "part" of us remains adapt-ed, this reducing total available adapt-ive capacity. As the cumulative load of unnecessary adaptations grows, the tolerance for and adaptive capacity to meet new stressors gets smaller and smaller.
This loss of adaptive capacity affects homeostasis, the immune system and mental stability and causes further secondary problems. Loss of adaptive capacity through fragmentation leaves behind a total body-mind with a reduced range of adaptation - so (to give just a few of many possible examples) (a) loud noise may become intolerable, or (b) disturbance to the normal routine of the day might cause acute distress, or (c) muscles might be too tight or unable to fully engage, causing musculoskeletal pain, (d) the immune system may be overactive (leading to autoimmune problems) or overwhelmed (leading to poor resolution of infections).
We call this "trauma", but it could more accurately be thought of as a loss of calibration due to retained overwhelm. As such, all that is necessary is to help your body-mind re-calibrate - something that is simultaneously both simple and non-trivial. The general idea has to be translated into specifics in order to work - just as the general idea of carpentry has to be translated into specifics for you to be able to make a chippendale-style table.
This re-calibration in principle takes a very small time, and it requires that we use our attention, our senses, our body on the same way that a hunter-gatherer would - because the fine details of the human nervous system evolved from about two million years living in a human-like body, with an associated "specied-typical behaviour"
Re-calibrating the body-mind such that fragments begin to re-integrate (bringing back adaptive capacity) is primarily enabled by "right attention" – i.e. using attention to enter a feedback loop such that the body’s innate intelligence uses the new information. This kind of attention must meet the body-mind on its own ground as an intelligent organism and apply the rules by which the body-mind lives. This includes using attention – the internal and external senses – as they evolved to be used, having a particular regard to the internal and external worlds, and fully inhabiting the timeframes (>2 seconds, >40 seconds) that the body-mind operates in. Useful states of regard that help re-calibrate the bodymind are genuine unaffected appreciation, gratitude, spacious curiosity, kindness, exploration, and non-forcefulness - an allowing things to be exactly as they are. The body loves to be communicated with in this way, and responds rapidly when the conscious attention actively engages with interoceptive feedback loops.
The main way that this positive effect comes about is by working with natural feedback loops. A very general way to describe this would be to say that:
The timeframe necessary then becomes a few minutes (maybe ten or twenty minutes at most) to "arrive", then about two minutes to recognise sufficient safety such that the body-mind begins to respond and take in "new" information about your safety status, then about another five or ten minutes for this to process and deepen and consolidate.
The main obstacle to what is essentially a very simple and natural process - is to temporarily put aside the mindset and culturally habitual ways of being in the environment and relating to the body. In particular the tendency to try to make things happen and force a result - to believe that we can rationally know what changes should be made and then to (attempt to) make that happen.
Usually there are several or many layers, but a surprising amount of past overwhelm can sometimes be processed all at once - with no need to re-live the event. The body then re-organises itself by reducing its degree of fragmentation and increasing the level of internal communication, thus freeing-off more adaptive capacity.
