From Fascia to Fascism: The Nervous System of the Collective

Reich’s Theory Expanded + Rohr & Non-Dual Śiva Tantra

If you haven’t read my three-part series on De-Armoring, it might help to start there.

It gives some context for what follows, especially if you’re not familiar with the work of Wilhelm Reich.

Wilhelm Reich looked at how the body armors itself against trauma, chronic tension that stifles emotions, distorts posture, and shapes our behaviors.

Armor doesn’t only appear as tension and tightness.

It also takes the form of emptiness, a kind of collapse where sensation and muscle tone are cut off.

In that sense, we can generalize the two nervous system responses behind these patterns as the sympathetic fight and flight response backing the tight, contracted kinds of armor, while freeze and dissociation are the hollow, empty kinds.

Both distort perception and cause disconnect, and both are adaptive and simply our system trying to protect itself and keep us alive.

What if entire cultures do the same?

Just as repressed emotions crystallize into rigid or numb musculature, unprocessed collective trauma can calcify into similar societal structures.

Institutions, media, and ideological thinking become the “connective tissue” of cultural armoring, defensive, reactive, and increasingly brittle.

The more a belief system feels threatened, the more it contracts into dogma.

This isn’t a metaphor.

Neuroscience shows that when a belief feels threatened, the brain can register it as a literal threat to survival.

The same pathways that activate during physical danger… amygdala firing, cortisol spikes, cognitive shutdown… come online even when nothing is actually at risk.

It’s not the belief that’s being attacked.

It’s the backlog of unprocessed material that gets stirred underneath it.

When the nervous system feels unsafe, all of that gets lumped together under the umbrella of “danger,” so the brain treats it as a single signal, even though what’s really there might be a mix of fear, shame, grief, early attachment pain, social threat, or the terror of being wrong and losing orientation and connection.

Polarization might show up in politics, but it begins in the body.

What we see as conflict out there is just the shape of what we haven’t yet felt in here.

The Paradox of Protection

Armor exists for survival, but over time, it becomes the disease.

When the aliveness in our tissue can no longer respond, whether locked in contraction or collapsed into disconnection, we lose function and become “dead.”

Reich looked at how armor distorts perception.

Tension in the jaw, diaphragm, and pelvis shapes not only movement but how the world feels, and how we interpret experience, and over time, this chronic holding forms the foundation of neurosis.

The same is true collectively.

When a society is gripped by chronic tension and repression, it loses the ability to distinguish between real threats and misfired reflexes.

It overreacts, doubling down on control, mistaking contraction for strength.

De-Armoring the Collective Nervous System

Reich’s somatic therapy principles translate eerily well to societal healing.

As a practitioner, I see firsthand how chronic tension shapes not just the body but perception itself.

Clients often describe the relief that comes from making contact with old stuck patterns and how the shifts show up perceptually.

If someone comes wanting their pain or problems fixed, it’s not that those things don’t improve, but not in the way one might initially think.

We don’t fix pain or dysfunction by treating it as if it were a mechanical implement.

It’s a holistic restoration, and in my work, it’s highlighted by how we can start to see the same pain from a different perspective.

We open ourselves to possibilities we hadn’t entertained before, and this not only begins to shift the pain patterns and struggles one might be facing, but also begins the process of retelling the very way we show up to life.

Though it might seem like a long game with no quick fix in sight, it often comes down to how willing we are to show up for ourselves and how closely we pay attention to what matters.

Pain is part of that conversation.

If we ignore it, we keep running into doors, stubbing our toes, and building more pain over time.

Pain, on a neurological level, is nothing more than a line of communication, the body’s way of saying, Hey, slow down and notice, pay closer attention.

When we do listen, there’s a strange, natural unfolding that can feel jarring at first because of the initial backlog of energies we have spent our whole lives repressing.

Little by little, things unfold.

Showing up for this unfolding gives back something truly priceless: the gift of moving through life open enough to let its beauty touch us, move us, inspire us, and guide us.

I experience this myself daily… noticing how my inner felt sense shapes the way my brain processes and deciphers the raw experience of life.

Sometimes it’s simple. A reminder to soften and feel what might be underneath the story I’m starting to tell myself, and within a moment or two, whatever it was passes on its own.

Other times it’s slower, more demanding. What surfaces isn’t just fear, but energy that’s been waiting to move for years. Before those kinds of nervous system memories can soften, the body has to feel safe enough. It can tell whether the mind has the capacity to stay with what’s rising. If it doesn’t, the body holds it under wraps until there’s enough trust to let more of us come forward.

That trust takes time. But when it does start to build, what emerges feels less like fixing and more like remembering who we actually are, and there begins an exponential level of movement towards a fuller expression of ourselves.

Each of our nervous systems is a drop in the ocean of collective perception.

Our wiring accumulates bioenergetic frequencies and radiates them outward, broadcasting to the world around us.

Collectively, our social structures become the sum of each of our inner experiences.

In the same way muscles grow stiff when they stop moving, culture grows brittle when it stops feeling.

But attempts to restore fluidity, whether through dialogue, creative expression, or institutional shifts, often fail when approached from a system that is still misfiring.

If the individual’s nervous system is dysregulated, external efforts to create safety or connection will carry that same dysregulation.

My psoas doesn’t relax just because I tell it to.

It releases when my body perceives safety from within.

The same is true on a collective scale.

Without the internal work of finding our own felt sense of safety, without re-parenting ourselves enough to know what it feels like to have our own backs, efforts at discourse become debates before anyone even opens their mouth.

Expression becomes performative, and community-building turns into another way our inner patterns play out.

When we operate from a braced state, even well-intentioned attempts to create change can reinforce contraction rather than finding resolution and balance.

Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation puts it another way: contemplation is the soil that lets action grow from the roots of loving awareness rather than from the discomfort of needing things to be different.

Their work introduces contemplative practice that inspires loving action.

When enough people engage with and attend to their inner world in the present moment, a genuine sense of safety and connection arises within themselves, and the actions that emerge take on a different quality.

Dialogue becomes possible when listening is no longer filtered through a survival response.

Art moves culture when it comes from a place of embodied truth rather than reaction.

Nervous system regulation, through breath, movement, or simply how we show up in space, becomes a quiet force that shifts the field around us.

None of this happens through force.

We soften when we feel something different, an invitation, an opening, a possibility that wasn’t there before.

And when enough people create those openings in themselves and co-create them with each other, they set the conditions for others to do the same.

Patterns and systems change not because they’re torn down, but because they no longer hold the same charge as they once did, as the energy propping them up gets redirected towards something new.

We begin to see possibilities again.

This dynamic, the way our individual armor ripples outward to create systemic disconnection, shows up in healing spaces in very obvious ways.

Healing, at its core, is an attempt to make whole what has been labeled fragmented.

However, what is whole cannot truly be fragmented; what we call fragmentation is more accurately a distortion in our perception.

Approaching healing from a lens of “brokenness” or “dysregulation” sets us off in the wrong direction from the start.

Wrong direction is fine… we notice, we course-correct… but it’s worth naming.

From the perspective of Non-Dual Śiva Tantra or Kashmiri Śaivism, all things are expressions of consciousness.

The only one who judges anything as bad or wrong is our brain when it fails to see the beauty in what it fears.

Life itself has no agenda to feel wrong.

A fragmented, transactional, or consumerist approach to healing inevitably falls short.

In a societal structure like ours, even “solutions” to problems become problems themselves.

That’s how systemic, deep, and persistent this thread is.

But our biology can’t be tricked… it knows… and eventually we catch up to it.

This is where the ontological mutiny comes in: when our inner sense rises, quietly or violently, against the misalignment and the collision between what we claim to stand for and how we are actually moving through life.

This idea of ontological mutiny comes from Nigerian philosopher Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé.

He uses it to describe a profound, often disruptive shift in how we understand and inhabit our own being, especially in the context of colonialism, modernity, and systemic oppression.

This concludes Part One.

From Fascia to Fascism Part Two: The Ecology of Rigidity

The Emotional Plague

Before continuing into Part Two and furthering the breakdown of this material as it’s understood through my own lived experience and practice, I want to pause and give context for how Reich himself saw this same phenomenon.

I didn’t even realize at first that he had mapped this out so clearly. At some point in my own process of mapping it out for myself, I read the introduction to one of his books… it was last night, actually… after spending months thinking about and watching these dynamics play out in myself and in society, and thinking back to my younger years and how deeply this thread resonates and connects me to something that I’ve always felt but never could fully articulate, partly for fear of being misunderstood.

I was up late watching Game 7 of the World Series. It was such a close, stressful game that I decided I needed to read something to distract myself from how intense the drama on the field was. I had become very invested in the Blue Jays beating the Dodgers, mostly because the Blue Jays have several players who recently played for Cleveland, and also because the Dodgers are LAME AS HELL.

It’s the bottom of the ninth. The Blue Jays are two outs away from winning the World Series. My hands are sweaty, my stomach is tight, like I know what’s about to happen. I open one of Reich’s books and read:

In the death of Wilhelm Reich, the emotional plague claimed its most formidable opponent. Throughout all of recorded history, those who had been harmed by this specifically human disease were its “innocent” victims. Reich, however, did not fall victim innocently.

Oh wow, he really had this stuff pegged.

Also, FUCK — the Dodgers just tied the game.

Reich understood how an individual’s biology and survival instincts (dis-regulated nervous system) can manifest as sickness and neurosis, and how that same biology, when scaled up collectively, becomes cultural behavior.

Reich called this the emotional plague.

In essence, it’s what happens when people, armored and cut off from their own vitality, unconsciously react destructively to the vitality of others. He saw it as a kind of social infection. People who can’t tolerate aliveness, freedom, or joy unconsciously try to suppress it wherever they see it.

It isn’t “evil” in a moral sense, but a tragic defense mechanism gone too far. The same muscular and psychological rigidity that protects the individual ends up attacking life itself when multiplied across society.

You could also say Reich was describing something we now call cognitive dissonance, that inner split between what we know to be true and what our conditioning allows us to feel or express.

When the body’s natural impulses conflict with the ideas or values of our conditioning, and of course, to the body, these beliefs aren’t just ideas. They represent survival, so the dissonance doesn’t just live in the mind. It becomes armor, disconnecting us from our body and from feeling.

And when enough people are armored in the same way, that dissonance scales into culture.

That’s the Emotional Plague, not a moral failure, but a society built around avoiding what it can’t yet tolerate feeling.

The funny part is that the term cognitive dissonance wasn’t coined until 1957, years after Reich had already mapped the same territory.

And of course, that version was widely accepted. It was the brain talking about the brain. No one had to actually feel anything.

Reich’s version, on the other hand, lived in the body. It asked people to face the discomfort directly, which is probably why it never caught on.

It would seem the Emotional Plague doesn’t appreciate being called out.

This isn’t just Reich. Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé might point to the same dynamic and call it whiteness — the subtle, pervasive structures that smother life and diversity. Leonard Orr, in his own framework, referred to it as the unconscious death wish — an inner compulsion to negate vitality. Others have noticed it, too, under different names: the social infection of fear, the epidemic of suppression, the collective armoring of spirit.

Reich believed this was the root of many cultural pathologies: authoritarianism, moral crusades, puritanism, and the general hostility toward natural, spontaneous expression. And just in case we missed it, as I mentioned in the three‑part series on de‑armoring, Reich is the only person whose books and research were burned both by Nazi Germany and later by the newly established FDA in America.

He left Europe in August 1939, on the last boat to New York before World War II broke out, after mounting concerns for his safety from increasing political backlash, and in 1956, six tons of his books and research were incinerated under court order in New York. So yes, he did not fall victim innocently; he challenged the armored defense strategies of the culture, and he was attacked, prosecuted, and died in prison.

How Cultural Armoring Manifests

In the body, chronic tension restricts movement, but that’s not the full picture; it also distorts sensory input. What came first, and does it matter?

We can pretty easily rehab our movement patterns, opening up the areas of tension that restrict us on a physical level, and reconnecting with the areas that have gone numb or empty. The reason it’s a bit more complicated than that, and why many people never see results, is because the “block” really lives just as much in our perception and sensory experience of that part of our body, so we have to attend also to nervous system sensory/motor input dysregulation too.

A nervous system without responsiveness does not know how to respond because it does not actually have the ability to perceive; therefore, we can easily mistake safety for boredom or stagnation, and movement for danger.

The same thing happens socially.

Rigid ideological structures misperceive what’s happening, seeing change as a threat and possibility as betrayal.

Even direct kindness or good intent can register as an existential threat, feeding cycles of hypervigilance and reactivity.

This is the emotional plague at work… our own armor, scaled up across culture, misreading vitality as threat.

Someone being honest? They must have a secret agenda. Their honesty must be for show. They must be trying to pull one over on us.

At a certain point, what looks like paranoia or narcissism is just the collective nervous system losing its ability to trust itself. To trust others, to trust life.

This collective mistrust is one of the signatures of the emotional plague Reich described… life-force stifled by the armor we inherit and enact.

And the harder we fight our way toward some idea of progress or the top, the more we stay trapped in the same loops of fear and suspicion.

Just as a body needs a diverse gut microbiome to function properly, culture thrives on diversity of thought, experience, and expression.

When the gut lacks diversity, it loses balance and self-recognition.

In the same way, when societies enforce monocultures of belief, factions trying to dominate or suppress competing ideas replicate the logic of industrial monocropping, where pesticides kill anything growing near the profit crop.

Fragmented and misaligned with the inherent cycles of the natural world, we collectively begin to forget who we are on a deeper and deeper level. As we get further from ourselves, it becomes more and more painful to wake up and acknowledge what we’ve lost.

The guilt, grief, and pain of that realization can feel devastating, and yet this happens because we fail to extend the same love and care we can have for others to ourselves.

So the idea that it really starts with us, with me, is true.

Our personal inquiry is how we begin to dismantle the plague from the inside out. We can call it regulating our nervous systems or simply developing a healthier relationship with fear.

Otherwise, we mistake the planet for something separate rather than our home, just as we have mistaken our bodies for not being a place of safe refuge. And in doing so, we poison it as we poison our own biology, feeding ourselves junk we wouldn’t otherwise touch, forgetting the intelligence inherent in life itself.

As the old Chinese proverb says:

“When nature makes difficulties, humanity still has the opportunity to survive. But when man himself creates disaster, it is hard for him to avoid the consequences.”

And as Jane Goodall observed, humans are the most intellectual species on the planet, but we are not intelligent.

True intelligence doesn’t destroy its only home.

What we call cleverness, the mind’s ability to solve problems in abstraction, must learn to work alongside the intelligence of our bodies.

Only when our thinking brain reconnects with the wisdom of our embodied selves does intelligence, real intelligence, arise.

As the Taoist book Changes and the Unchanging Truth reminds us:

“When one faces a new situation, the mind is often in the past. This kind of thinking creates obstacles to an accurate, intuitive response which is more important than a conceptual understanding of the situation. General education helps people become well-versed in their thinking, but destroys the correct use of intuition. As a result, tragedy can occur from an ordinary situation involving someone who is regarded as a good thinker.”

This is the story of biology trying to survive.

Of survival strategies that have become maladaptive over time.

And it is also the story of each of us personally, arriving at a point in life where our bodies demand we look more closely at the patterns we inherited, the ways we learned to protect ourselves, and how those strategies may no longer serve us.

The option and possibility to change emerges not from willpower or ideology, but from curiosity, attention, and the choice to start living in a way that actually reconnects us to who we are.

To do that, we first have to get to know ourselves.

This kind of self-inquiry doesn’t come from effort or poise, but from awareness, which requires slowing down and softening.

As Darryl says and embodies, the whole thing can be traced back to three simple words: stop, pause, and notice. Becoming aware that we are aware.

And as Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé says, “The times are urgent, let us slow down.” Slowing down is not a function of speed. It is a function of awareness — and awareness is not a mental construct. It’s a function of presence.

The Ecology of Openness

If we’re actively practicing living a de-armored life, we’re offering an invitation to those we interact with, a chance to soften, to feel something beyond their reflexive defenses.

Nervous systems co-regulate. Just like a calm presence can settle a room, an armored one can set off a chain reaction of contraction.

It all starts on the inside. It starts with getting to know ourselves, offering kindness and presence to the inner parts that are often ignored or judged.

Something Darryl says… this being my attempt to translate his words, which tend to point at a deeper sense of things that leaves the intellect confused for a while… so bear with me…

Conflict isn’t born in this or that; we don’t have conflict in us, we create conflict by choosing not to pay attention to certain parts of ourselves.

Typically, there are at least two parts that may seem to be at odds, but the struggle, the being at odds, arises from not listening to one part and ignoring or judging the other parts. In other words, we unleash the emotional plague on ourselves.

So we come back repeatedly to Darryl’s invitation: Stop, Pause, and Notice. Slowing our cleverness down enough to feel what is happening below the level of mental strategy.

Re-parenting ourselves in this way means asking the questions that really matter.

Another way to say it is re-patterning or simply developing a mature relationship with our awareness.

Again, Darryl has this to say: Who am I? What sound do I make? What do I want? What is my purpose? What am I grateful for?

These aren’t abstract or philosophical; they’re invitations to pay attention, to begin to inhabit ourselves a little more fully with honest curiosity.

Our inner narrative, our dialogue with these parts, shapes and is shaped by the body, and by the brain, and what we think about while we breathe really matters; our bodies are listening.

This includes systems that we have covered in previous articles, like the Kanda/Lower Dantien/Enteric nervous system, brain stem, gut-brain axis, vagus nerve, and immune system, and all the subtle organ signals that give us a felt sense of self.

We are these things, and these things are us, as are they each other. Darryl would say that the vagus nerve and the immune system are the same thing.

Cultural rigidity shifts when enough people are willing to lower defenses, creating a tipping point where safety is no longer outsourced to external control but generated from within.

Safety isn’t the absence of threat; it’s a process of maturing, of becoming adult enough ourselves so that we know, deep in our bones, what it feels like to have our own backs.

And for this to happen, we have to remember who we are, and this is the process of getting to know me, the sound that I make.

I asked Darryl about this idea of “the sound that I make.” He’s spoken about it in terms of getting to know ourselves, this relating to a certain part in ceremony where we’re invited to introduce ourselves to ourselves by saying who our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are.

At least that’s the general instruction.

In the context of the emotional plague, this is more than introspection… it’s a practice in reclaiming our vitality and clarity of self, softening armor, and being witnessed by the life in others and the life in ourselves as we feel into what the body is saying underneath the words. Gently refusing to buy into the collective patterns of suppression, we slow down enough to actually be present in our bodies while speaking to a sense of origin.

One time, when it was my turn, I didn’t say anything. Instead, I made a lot of very strange sounds: growls and throat-singing riffs, clicks and whistles, something I’d liken to what a massive warthog, who is in heat and also having a stroke, would sound like while actively trying to give someone directions to the nearest watering hole.

Sometimes in spaces like these, this same moment gets stuck.

Instead of softening into the absurdity or aliveness of what’s moving, it’s easy to start interpreting it, which starts a subtle kind of performing, a tiny crack opens where the emotional plague sneaks in as it tries to tidy up the raw and unbridled moment, to try to make meaning too soon.

If this happens, the charge gets moralized, contained, wrapped in reverence, or turned into teaching. That’s one way the emotional plague shows up in healing spaces. The body is trying to shake loose something real, but the mind jumps ahead to organize it, and you can feel the tightening in the body of the room — the subtle return of control, the self-imposed will of the unobserved ego/separate conditioned self.

I asked Darryl about this afterward. I felt some embarrassment, because I wanted to, of course, do it “right,” and felt like maybe I hadn’t honored my ancestors correctly by instead having some kind of cathartic outbreak of a purely primal language. And I was also self-conscious afterward, hoping that no one felt like I was being dramatic and acting out in the way I described above.

In the moment of it happening, I was fully immersed in this incredibly powerful upward rising of energy. The sounds felt passively witnessed by me as this odd kind of adrenaline surge erupted, in the moment, and also in hindsight, who am I to get in the way of this unfolding?

I felt clear in the moment that whatever had happened was nothing to be embarrassed by, and that ultimately it was a moment of such pure, authentic expression I was left with goosebumps.

But of course, the self-doubt crept in later.

Darryl said that these were all good questions to have and that next time I’d be welcome to ask questions like this in the ceremony, so everyone there could be part of the conversation that he and I were now having one-on-one, as I drove him to get hamburgers before dropping him off at the train station.

What he went on to say I can’t claim to fully understand, but it led me to ask if, in a way, what he’s saying is that everything we perceive as solid matter, as “real,” is actually, at its core, made up of different frequencies of resonant vibration.

Some part of me remembered quantum physics and wondered if this is what he means when he says it’s not really about our grandparents, but about getting to know the sound that we make.

So I asked him. Are you saying everything is vibration, so to know myself, I literally need to become familiar with my own root mode/note of vibratory resonance?

He said yes.

So there you have it…

So, if the body’s natural state is fluid, resonant, and dynamic, and nourished by diversity, why would we expect culture to function any differently?

Reich believed armor blocks and even prosecutes life force.

Today, our cultural armor stifles collective vitality.

Resilience isn’t found in fortress-building; it’s in the ability to move with change rather than against it.

Intellectually, this is perhaps “known,” or at least there is a large corner of the internet that likes to post about it. But is it known?

A muscle atrophies when immobilized.

A gut, when deprived of diversity, becomes compromised.

A culture, when rigidly repressed in the name of maladaptive attempts at preservation, becomes something that goes against life itself. Inset Reich’s language of the emotional plague.

Maturation as individuals and as a species isn’t about gaining power to eliminate struggle. It’s the slow process of living a life and developing the capacity to meet it without shutting down. Aliveness requires vulnerability, the willingness to move, adapt, and expand. Our biology is built for this.

Maturing perhaps requires re-parenting ourselves and our relationship with existence, which requires the re-patterning of experience on a biological level, meaning learning to stay.

Slowing down enough to feel ourselves and the subtle pulse of our aliveness, and developing trust in our ability to respond rather than react.

When enough of us do this, we shift the collective state towards something life-affirming and open to possibility.

Until we slow down enough to see how the mind performs its own form of armoring, even our attempts to soften harden into ideology.

We keep interfering with our attempts to feel by turning whatever it is… labels, language, techniques, or systems… into another layer of identity and protection from the raw unknowns of life.

This concludes the two-part blog “From Fascia to Fascism.”

It brings us back to the individual: if culture teaches us to outsource trust… even in spaces meant for healing… how do we reclaim it?

In the next blog, we’ll take an intimate look at how each breath offers us a choice.

Breath is a Choice: Repatterning Attention.