Organ Resets: Restoring Internal Communication
*Energy as Communication: A Note on Language and Perspective
Before diving deeper into organ resets and internal communication, it’s important to clarify how I use the term “energy” in this context. Modern readers may assume energy work is vague or mystical, or that everything needs a precise anatomical or biochemical explanation. Both extremes…overly scientific specificity and overly abstract “woo”….can make it hard to connect with what’s actually happening in the body.
Historically, many healing systems, from Traditional Chinese Medicine to Ayurveda, as well as Indigenous healing practices around the world, developed their approaches through careful observation of nature, the body, and behavior. Practitioners noticed patterns in how seasons, movement, breath, emotion, and lifestyle affected health. They paid attention to rhythms, responses, and relationships in the body rather than the precise molecular pathways or distinctions between lymphatic fluid, endocrine signaling, or nervous system branches. Their work was deeply functional and relational: they mapped connections, influence, and flow, not anatomy charts….well they did that too.
This is not to say these practices were “imprecise” or “less valid” than modern science. They operated at a different level of observation, one that prioritized systemic balance, responsiveness, and adaptability over reductionist details. Modern science, with its emphasis on measurement, causation, and mechanism, has brought clarity to many of these systems…but it is a very recent layer of understanding, not the only valid one.
When I use the word “energy” in this blog and future ones, it is shorthand for the living, dynamic communication that occurs in the body. It encompasses the flow of nervous system signaling, hormonal cascades, lymphatic movement, fascial tension, organ motility, and the feedback loops that connect sensation, movement, and emotion, and our brain’s perception and translation of this raw experience. Energy is what enables all these systems to move together, influence one another, and respond in real-time.
Using this term allows us to hold the complexity and interconnectedness of the body without getting lost in textbooks or jargon, while remaining grounded in the tangible, observable processes of physiology and lived experience. It’s a functional, relational lens, not a mystical one: energy is the way the body talks to itself, responds, and organizes.
With this context in mind, the following discussion of organ resets, vagal communication, and somatic integration can be understood not as abstract or esoteric but as working directly with the living intelligence of the body, its rhythms, flows, and capacities to self-regulate and restore balance.
Organ Resets Part One: Foundations of Internal Communication
Sensation is language. The organs say what?
Our organs function within a complex network of nervous system signaling, fascia, and energetic connections. When this internal communication is disrupted, whether by stress, trauma, or habitual thought patterns, it can create a sense of disconnection that affects both physical health and emotional well-being.
Organ resets are a way to help restore our internal communication process. By using breathwork, localized and directional touch, and awareness, we engage the vagus nerve and fascial system to support the natural motility and function of the organs. This helps soften stored tension, improve interoception, and reestablish a sense of homeostasis and connection in the body.
Rather than forcing change, as with all aspects of my work, organ resets create the conditions for the body to reorganize itself naturally. By inviting a recalibration of the nervous system, these resets foster adaptability, deeper integration, and a fluid connection between body and mind.
The Vagus Nerve: Your Body’s Communication Superhighway
The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in our body, running from our brainstem down through our neck, chest, and abdomen. Its name comes from the Latin word vagari, meaning “to wander,” because it branches out to almost every major organ along its path.
Here’s why it’s so important:
• Parasympathetic Regulation: The vagus nerve is a key part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes “rest-and-digest” functions. It helps counterbalance the “fight-or-flight” responses of the sympathetic nervous system.
• Two-Way Communication: About 80% of vagus nerve fibers are afferent (sensory), meaning they send information from the organs to the brain. The remaining 20% are efferent (motor), carrying signals from the brain to regulate organ function. This bidirectional communication is crucial for maintaining homeostasis.
This highlights how much our brain’s interpretation of experience depends on signals from within our bodies (bottom-up communication).
• Emotional Connection: The vagus nerve links physical sensations to emotional states. It helps regulate stress responses, inflammation, and even emotions like grief or anger.
When we influence the vagus nerve during organ resets, we’re not just working with physical processes; we’re also tapping into its role in emotional regulation and creating space for deeper healing/feeling. This happens because the elements we use come together to restore, balance, and reset our internal biofeedback loop of sensory and motor input.
This restoration of communication lines is going to be effective at addressing what led us to lose connection with ourselves in the first place. Whether through stress, trauma, habitual patterns, or life’s inevitable challenges in the most general sense, disruptions in our sensory-motor balance can affect everything from posture and coordination to focus, emotional regulation, and overall well-being. By supporting this internal communication superhighway, we reconnect with ourselves on multiple levels, reclaiming a sense of equilibrium and presence in our bodies.
The Enteric Nervous System: Our Gut’s Second Brain
The enteric nervous system (ENS), often referred to as the “second brain,” takes the vagus nerve’s role in sensory communication to an entirely new level. Embedded in the walls of the gastrointestinal tract, the ENS contains over 500 million neurons, more than the spinal cord, and operates with remarkable autonomy. While the vagus nerve acts as a communication highway between the gut and brain, the ENS can independently manage digestion, gut motility, and enzyme secretion without relying on direct input from the central nervous system (CNS).
Why Does It Matter?
• Autonomous Function: The ENS governs digestion through local reflexes without needing input from the CNS. It controls peristalsis (gut movement), enzyme secretion, blood flow, and nutrient absorption. This independence allows it to respond quickly and efficiently to changes in the gut environment.
• Gut-Brain Connection: The ENS communicates bi-directionally with your CNS via the vagus nerve as part of the gut-brain axis. This connection influences not only digestion but also mood, cognition, and immune responses. For example, disruptions in this axis have been linked to conditions like depression, anxiety, and neurodegenerative diseases.
• Neurotransmitters: The ENS produces key neurotransmitters like serotonin (95% of which is found in the gut) and dopamine. These chemicals are critical for regulating digestion and play a significant role in emotional health and mental well-being. Gut microbes also influence this process by producing neuroactive compounds that interact with the ENS and brain.
Disruptions in this system, caused by stress, inflammation, or gut microbiota imbalances, can alter vagal signaling and lead to miscommunication between body and brain. This can manifest as digestive issues, heightened emotional sensitivity, or difficulty managing stress.
As we mentioned earlier, the enteric nervous system is often called the “second brain,” but looking at it from an evolutionary lens, it could just as easily be seen as the first brain. This network of neurons in the gut evolved long before the central nervous system, giving rise to the pathways and regulatory systems we now associate with the brain and vagus nerve. In other words, it’s not just a responder or a messenger, it’s a self-contained intelligence, a master coordinator woven into the organs themselves.
Working with organ resets engages this deep, ancient network, but we also work with the stomach and the enteric nervous system more broadly. Supporting it is not limited to individual organs; it influences how the entire body, the brain, and the vagus communicate and respond.
Organ Resets Part Two: Liver, Lungs, Bladder & Spleen
Exploring vagal pathways and the Kanda (Bulbus Root)
Each organ has its unique relationship with the vagus nerve and plays a specific role in both physical regulation and emotional processing.
In Somatic Alignment, we focus primarily on the liver, lungs, bladder, and spleen because these four organs have downstream effects on the rest of the body, including organs like the kidneys, pancreas, and heart.
Here’s a look at each of these 4 organs and their Vagal connection.
1. Liver & Gallbladder – Anger, Flow & Release
• Vagal Connection: The liver and gallbladder form a team that processes toxins, filters blood, and releases bile for digestion. While the vagus nerve doesn’t directly innervate liver cells, it regulates blood flow through the hepatic portal triad (where bile ducts, veins, and arteries converge) and supports bile secretion. When we are in a parasympathetic state, these organs can detoxify efficiently. Under stress or sympathetic activation, however, their processes slow down.
• Sensory Feedback: The liver communicates its state subtly….tightness in the right shoulder or ribcage, sluggish digestion, or a general sense of heaviness can all point to stagnation in this area.
• Emotional Integration: The liver is often tied to anger and our ability to release what no longer serves us, whether that’s physical toxins or emotional frustration. Resetting this organ helps restore flow in both digestion and emotions, bringing clarity and lightness.
The Liver & Gallbladder are of the Wood Element and their season is Spring.
2. Lungs – Breath, Grief & Expansion
• Vagal Connection: The vagus nerve directly innervates the lungs, regulating their rate and depth of breathing. This connection ensures proper oxygenation while calming stress responses through parasympathetic activation.
• Sensory Feedback: Shallow breathing or tightness in the chest often reflects unresolved grief or suppressed emotions. The lungs send sensory signals through the vagus nerve to help adjust breathing patterns based on internal needs or external stressors.
• Emotional Integration: The lungs are deeply tied to grief and our capacity for expansion…both physically (through breath) and emotionally (through letting go). Resetting this organ allows for deeper breathing while releasing stored grief or emotional weight.
The Lungs are of the Metal Element and their season is Autumn.
3. Bladder – Safety, Fear & Grounding
• Vagal Connection: While the bladder isn’t directly innervated by the vagus nerve itself, it communicates with it via pelvic branches of the autonomic nervous system. This connection regulates elimination processes while influencing feelings of safety and stability.
• Sensory Feedback: Chronic tension in the bladder often mirrors emotional states like fear or urgency. Sensations like tightness or frequent urgency can reflect survival responses tied to stress.
• Emotional Integration: The bladder is associated with grounding….our sense of safety within ourselves. Resetting this organ helps release deep-seated holding patterns tied to fear or insecurity while fostering stability both physically and emotionally.
The Bladder is associated with Winter and its Element is Water
4. Spleen – Nourishment, Worry & Resilience
• Vagal Connection: The vagus nerve regulates spleen function through its anti-inflammatory pathways. By releasing acetylcholine via parasympathetic activation, it modulates immune cell activity and reduces inflammation.
• Sensory Feedback: An imbalanced spleen often manifests as overwhelm, excessive worry or mental chatter, as well as sluggish digestion due to heightened inflammatory responses.
• Emotional Integration: The spleen is tied to nourishment, both physically (through digestion) and emotionally (through feeling cared for). Resetting this organ reduces worry while promoting resilience against stressors.
The Spleen is of the Earth Element and its season is late summer.
The Umbilical Area: A Deep Reset Point
The umbilical area is central to our early development. During embryogenesis, the embryo connects to the yolk sac, which provides nutrients before the placenta fully forms. Later, the umbilical cord becomes the lifeline to maternal circulation. This region sits along the midline of the body, and while it is not literally the origin point of all organ development, it is where early structures like the gut tube form and from which the body organizes around its midline.
This area is rich in visceral fascia, which helps support organ positioning, facilitates movement, and links to the autonomic nervous system. It remains a hub for physical coordination, sensory signaling, and vagal communication.
Kanda / Bulbus Root / Lower Dantien The Origin Point
In the non-dual Śiva Tantra view, this center is the point where consciousness begins to recognize itself as embodied. Where aliveness folds into matter.
Traditions across cultures share this understanding… the Kanda in India, the Dantien in China, the Hara in Japan, the Tanjeon in Korea. Always toward the same thing: a point of inception beneath the navel, where awareness roots itself into the world.
Anatomically, it sits in the lower abdomen, within the pelvic bowl, around the umbilical line. From a modern view, it mirrors the enteric nervous system… the body’s first brain… that evolved long before thought. A field of sensing and orientation that has never stopped being.
Working with the Kanda is about remembering who we are, both as physical beings moving through a dualistic world and as nonphysical expressions of the same creative intelligence that animates everything.
In the language of quantum and astrophysics, you could think of this point as an event horizon…. the meeting place between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The place where the cosmic becomes cellular, where consciousness folds itself into the physical.
The belly already knows how to breathe and digest. It’s been doing this since before our Brain developed, and if we went brain-dead today, our belly would still function just fine without “us.” When we bring awareness here, we aren’t fixing anything or trying to do something right. We’re simply making contact with the root from which intelligence emerges. In classical Hatha and tantric texts, the Kanda is described as the bulbus root from which the 72,000 nadis flow.
Everything branches out from here: the organs, fascia, nervous system, breath, and through the enteric nervous system up the brainstem toward the brain. The Kanda, or enteric nervous system, is both a physical and subtle midline, the axis around which the body’s rhythms coordinate. In a metaphorical sense, we could see the Kanda as Śiva… the undivided root of consciousness… and the brainstem as Śakti… the dynamic, responsive force that channels life through the body. The brainstem serves as the evolutionary bridge, connecting our earliest biological regulation to the complex development of the human nervous system. When awareness flows from the Kanda through the brainstem and back again, the one that became two to manifest in the physical world becomes one again; undivided consciousness experiences itself as embodied life.
As Darryl says, suffering happens in the disconnection between the brain and body.
By restoring that connection… we regulate and integrate the nervous system while also sparking the subtle, spiritual dimension of our being, beginning the process of reconnecting with ourselves in a deeper, lived way.
The Buddha’s insight complements this: the body itself is a doorway, a temple through which we encounter reality and liberation. Our body is not a thing that carries us down the path; our body is the path itself. By bringing attention to the body, to the Kanda, to the rhythms of breath and movement, we’re literally entering that doorway.
Awareness meets form, and through that meeting, the possibility of integration and insight arises.
While the vagus nerve doesn’t anatomically innervate the Kanda, they move in parallel. When awareness is directed to the lower abdomen, it often slows the breath, engages the diaphragm, and activates vagal tone. At the same time, that attention awakens the felt sense of the Kanda…. the center of things. In this way, working with the Kanda through breath, sound, or touch engages the same interoceptive pathways that support regulation and deep embodiment.
We can think of the vagus nerve as the physical expression of what the Kanda represents in the subtle body… the line of communication between awareness and form.
Cultivating awareness in this center is about finding balance. It’s about realizing there was never anything outside it. This is where life begins to know itself as life, on a physical level… the original pulse that keeps moving through every inhale, every sensation, every time we return to the body, we return ultimately to this root.
So let’s tie this Kanda idea into the context of how this blog is about organ resets. The organs we’ve mentioned all work in relation to a central orientation of something. Without that orientation, it’s all loosey goosey, not knowing up from down. The navel area, which we can generalize to be represented by the Kanda, the belly button, and the enteric nervous system, is part of this non organ organ, this midline that everything else in us organizes around. Without it, our organs and any other thing we might try to reset would have no ground to stand on.
How Organ Resets Work
Organ resets combine physical techniques and nervous system activation/regulation to promote deep healing.
(Note: When we think about nervous system regulation, we often associate it with being relaxed, balanced, calm, or having a “healthy” nervous system. But let’s redefine “healthy” as a system whose ability to communicate is currently intact. Rather than a fixed state of calm, a truly healthy nervous system is one whose ability to communicate is intact—allowing it to adapt, respond, and restore as needed.)
1. Breathwork: Instead of just “calming” the system, we can use breathwork to create space for deeper shifts in autonomic tone. Slow, diaphragmatic, as well as conscious-connected breaths, breath retentions, or even directional breathing techniques like Breath flossing can increase vagal activation, and shift long-held tension patterns.
2. Bodywork Techniques: Specific, intentional directional touch supports the release of stored tension in and around organs. This is about relaxation and the palpation of tissue, but it’s also about reestablishing sensory clarity, restoring motility, and allowing the body to reorganize from the inside out.
3. Awareness & Interoception Practices: Directing attention to internal sensations helps reestablish lost connections between the body and mind. This isn’t just about passive observation; it’s an active process of learning how to listen to the body’s signals and respond in a way that supports communication.
4. Resonance & Vibration: Stimulating cranial nerves through resonance, whether via music, vibration, or undulating movement, shifts fascial tone, enhances vagal function, and improves organ motility. Humming, toning, rhythmic breath patterns or fluid movement create oscillations that support deep integration and realignment, reinforcing the body’s ability to self-regulate.
These techniques work together to stimulate vagal activity while creating conditions for your body to regulate (restore connection) with itself naturally.
Why This Matters
Trauma, understood as the disconnection that can result from a life event that we ended up not being able to process, doesn’t just live in our minds or bodies. It resides in the narratives we construct around those events and in the habitual ways we relate to the past. These narratives shape our sense of self in the present, often operating beneath our awareness.
The disconnection we experience, along with the procedural memories that accompany it, doesn’t exist solely in the mind or the body but in the line of communication between the two. When this communication is disrupted, it alters our perception, influences our conceptual habits, and affects how we engage with the world, and this includes our relationship we have with ourselves.
Trauma also exists on a subtler, deeper layer. From the moment we are born… or even before… There is a forgetting of the non-physical dimension of who we are, the unbounded awareness that animates life. Embodiment, duality, and the necessities of navigating form inherently create a kind of separation. This built-in forgetting is the deeper trauma: a disconnection not from a single event, but from the fullness of our own source. The tension, the tightness, the procedural patterns in the body… they echo both the accumulated life events and this primordial forgetting.
Organ resets offer a gentle, direct way to access and release these stored patterns without overwhelming the system. By integrating breathwork, touch, movement, and awareness, especially in ways that engage the vagus nerve, we restore a sense of safety and connection within the body. This process reestablishes clear communication between the mind and body, creating space for deeper healing, regulation, and integration.
Conclusion:
It all comes back to reconnecting with our body’s wisdom. When we create the conditions for safety through nervous system attunement, then de-armoring and organ resets become profound pathways to restoring balance. By releasing stored tension in both the musculoskeletal and visceral systems, we support the body’s natural capacity for regulation, healing, and flow.
The work can be about undoing layers of armor by performing fancy therapeutic techniques, but those things are only relevant to whatever degree they support the cultivation of a deeper relationship with ourselves, one where we can listen to and honor the signals our body has been trying to share all along. As we continue this journey, the invitation is to stay curious, patient, and compassionate with ourselves, trusting that every breath and every shift in sensation brings us closer to a state of embodied ease and vitality.
Even as we explore the vagus nerve, the gut-brain axis, and the organs themselves, the most profound work often comes from something simple.
The B3 Axis, a concept from my friend Sage, reminds us that what we think about while we breathe, and what our body communicates back, is always a conversation worth listening to. Darryl’s perspective breaks it down further to the basic practice of stopping to pause and notice, becoming aware that we are aware. Through this, we remember that these systems are already conspiring for us.
The real reset happens in the here and now, in noticing that we are life already, and that vitality, health, and balance are woven into us because we are intricately part of the fabric of the universe; there is no separation, no pathway or neuron that needs traversing, because we are all of it, all at once, right now.
Written by Daniel Rainwater.