The Autonomic Mandala synthesizes thirty years of research on the living dynamics of autonomic physiology into a single visual symbol. It is the visual concretization of a living physiological foundation model field-tested with over 10,000 people in 50 countries.

I am an ancestral neuroscience pioneer, connection phenomenologist, neural cartographer, writer, teacher, and maker, educated at Yale and Stanford Universities, and mentored by more than a hundred mentors and advisors in 25 disciplines of wellbeing from 24 cultures, including a dozen of the world's leading experts in connection and wellbeing. I am Founder of Hearth Science (http://www.hearthscience.io), a global translation research firm pioneering the intersection of neuroscience, awareness traditions, and Indigenous lifeways in support of human and planetary flourishing.

In June of 2024 Hearth Science's research team successfully completed a new foundation model of autonomic physiology that dramatically revises our understanding of the in vivo neurophysiology and coordination of autonomic systems in the body, and their affiliated neurochemistries.

The Autonomic Nervous system is the biological system with the strongest shaping force over your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing. It can collaborate and or co-opt all of your sensory systems, your visceral organs, and nearly every bodily system. It has two primary functions. The first, of which many people are aware, is to regulate your internal milieu, maintaining homeostatic balance in the body. The second, which is understood only in very specialist circles (somatic trauma healing, certain mental health domains, etc.) is that it governs and modulates the regulation of your bodily systems and your attention in response to moment-to-moment detections of safety, danger, or lifethreat. In plain language, it is the sound engineer that runs the control room of the deepest and most powerful levers that govern your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing.

Becoming fluent in this system gives you novel agency in shaping the deepest drivers of your own wellbeing.

I have built the visual on the metaphor of a color theory model, and other conceptual architectures, including sacred geometry. While it is aesthetically pleasing, there is a deep architecture to the symbol, which is a map that you can learn to read.

This mandala accompanies my most recent book, The Neurobiology of Connection, where you can learn about these systems in detail. This is our first collaboration with Metalabel to bring this work to a new audience, because we like the spirit of collaboration it represents, and are attracted to the notion of provenance as we launch these ideas out into the world. Our work thrives in call-and-response. We want to know what you make of this.

This is the LAUNCH EDITION of this print, in a limited run of 50 copies.