First, a few quick notes to help you orient within our pages:

• If you’re new, or need a review, here’s the link to the START page.

• You can find last month’s post (our 24th) on trauma and the vagus nerve here.

• Monthly & Supplementary Posts + Recordings can be accessed by topic from the navigation bar atop the Wandering Around Vagus Homepage.

• All past posts are listed in reverse chronological order on the archive page.​

THIS MONTH’S WORK

In the past years, we’ve spent a lot of quality time getting to know the vagus nerve through our body’s felt sense using body sensation, emotions and memories, as well as other aspects of embodied experince. If you’ve been in WAV for awhile, you’ve likely looked at the many branches of the long, gangly vagus nerve and wondered what each part does. Without knowing what these many tendrils do, they might as be a bunch of neural spaghetti.

This month we begin to explore the anatomy of the “wandering nerve”, starting with its main branches, how they function and which organs they attach to. Hopefully, this post will help you begin to VISUALIZE the vagus nerve in action, to begin to SEE what you’ve been feeling in our past explorations.

Mapping out the branch anatomy of the vagus nerve is the most logical place to start this anatomical exploration, in the same sense that looking at a map of a city you’ve never seen can help you begin to conceptualize it. We’ll highlight each of the main branches, from the vagus’ origin in the brainstem to its widespread connections throughout the body, and conclude with a guided practice to help integrate vagal anatomy into the experiential vagal awareness we’ve already cultivated.

By the end of this post you’ll have a better sense of:

• how the vagus nerve is organized structurally

• what each part of the structure does and which organs it attaches to

• how the vagus nerve helps you feel what’s happening in your body

• what’s happening in your body at any given time, based on the location of your organs and the corresponding vagal branches.