Embodied anatomy - Cranial nerves
The most important nerve cluster in the peripheral nervous system is the cluster of cranial nerves.
Take your three fingers and put them at the back of your head, the ridge where your neck meets your head. Notice the two bumps below your earlobes your mastoid processes.
Everything you see, taste, smell, hear involves a small set of nerves that enter your brain stem there.
These are the 12 CRANIAL NERVES.
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Here’s another experiment.
Using your fingers, probe just below your eyebrow at the center, around the bridge of your nose. Press around and in towards the little notch and see if you can feel that at some point there’s a light buzzing (maybe slightly uncomfortable sensation). It feels different from pushing on your facial bone.
If you can feel that slight buzzing, you’re pushing on part of your trigeminal nerve. This is a series of sensory (as opposed to motor) nerves that innervate your face.
Now let’s try a more soothing version: trigeminal tapping.
Find the small indentation just in front of your ear where the top of the ear meets the skull — this is your resting place, where the trigeminal nerve divides. Using alternating fingers, tap gently along six pathways: across the eyebrows up to the hairline and back; along the cheekbone in to the nose and around its edge; along the upper jaw toward the center and back; along the lower jaw to the chin and back; around the back of the ear; and up the side of the skull and back down. After each pathway, return to the resting place and pause to feel the resonance. The alternation is what matters — it stimulates the trigeminal nerve roots across the whole face and head.
EFT tapping is a popular technique people use to address headaches, allergies, stress in general. Though I haven’t seen them talk about it like this, it seems like the whole thing involves tapping the trigeminal and vagus nerves while saying soothing things. Even though it initially triggered my ‘woo’ detector, it ends up being quite soothing and a nice easy downregulation tool
If you want a guided version, here is a nice youtube guided video.