Meet Your Nervous System

Has the concept of Nervous System work filtered into the wellness circles of your orbit?

When I was rocking the restaurant life, and immersed in the local wellness scene in Boulder, no one was openly dropping nervous system awareness buzz words in conversation. I left for a year and half and upon reentry into the larger world, it is a concept being more openly embraced, with nervous system awareness lingo being casually dropped. With good reason, as the Nervous System modulates our sense of safety - both in our external environment and within our own body. It feels like a wellness zeitgeist and awakening as more of us are starting to feel into the health of our own nervous system. Given the fragile state of our own physical health and mental well being, combined with the stress of the uncertain future of the world at large, the timing feels ripe.

I find there is a continuum in this regard. From people saying they don’t feel safe or triggered in various ways at one end, to others aiming for nervous system manipulation via polyvagal theory, trauma release, breathwork and other externally applied modalities at the other end of the sprectum of recognition. Becoming “trauma aware” is also trending.

I find the shift super interesting and timely. When I landed by the sea, I entered into a professional and healing container that would be a deep experiential mentorship to learn the subtle but powerful art of “Holding Space”. I knew I wanted to help people on their healing path, and given my experiences in the plant medicine realm, where “space holders” are vital to the process, I was riveted by the practice, though space holding is by no means exclusive to the plant medicine world. The mentorship would also support me in coming to terms with the consequences of the extreme life altering choices I was accepting personal responsibility for. I had a great deal of grieving to do. I didn’t know where to begin and felt suffocated by the immense sorrow I was carrying.

I immediately trusted these two healers, my mentors. Female masters in the craft of guiding other healing professionals in learning to become highly integrous Space Holders within their professional practice. My physical and energetic immersion into space holding began to unfold. Evidently, in learning to hold my own emotions, actually learning to hold ALL of myself, I was creating space and building the capacity to hold another’s healing journey. Often, healers subconsciously or unknowingly force their own expectations, outcomes or judgement onto another’s inherent, deeply personal, emergent and evolving healing journey.

Fully engaged in the process, fascinatingly, my nervous system truly began to build the capacity I needed. Subsequently, the process of unwinding my nervous system so I could learn to hold space for others, ended up changing my entire life. And surprisingly, my own health along with it.

As someone naturally inclined toward pattern recognition, I attuned to the subtle yet powerful language of the nervous system. How to meet it, how to hold it, how to nurture it, how to support its needs. How to be in harmony with it. As I witnessed my own health transformation, I knew this would be the foundation and cornerstone in my process of helping others come home to their innate healing potential.

The process of releasing past trauma within my system came to me serendipitously. I was beginning to understand much of the undoing of the life I had built was rooted in held and suppressed past trauma that was never seen, released or healed. My own trauma release began in the plant medicine space, taking me by surprise. For the better part of most of my initial experiences, those journeys were all somatic and trauma liberating (I’ve written about this in previous posts in the Meet Your Inner Wilderness series). I share that again here, because for three years I’ve been immersed at all levels in the unwinding of my own nervous system. Forever your own witness, I experienced how liberating trauma from my system not only changed my health, but also my body, my diet, my choices, my relationships, and my entire life. Consequently, this became my foundation for caring for others in their own healing journey.

The depth of my personal nervous system restoration is unique to me, my life and journey. This extreme path was perfect, saturating me in the infinite wisdom of the nervous system and how it actually guides our life. As such, I unwittingly became a “nervous system specialist”, among others that permeate the wellness space today.

This is the wisdom your nervous system wants you to understand. What you should know as you begin to make connections with the state of your own nervous system and perceive how it affects your health and the way you move through the world.

1. The nervous system is primarily relational.

That means it learns, regulates and restores in a safe relationship, as it was meant to in our childhood, by attuning and co-regulating with our caregivers. We can cognitively learn about the nervous system, and try to apply external “modalities”, but that does not restore balance in the long term. We unwittingly keep our own nervous system dysregulated by making choices that feel safe in our mind, but are ultimately to our detriment.

2. The nervous system wants to be met and nurtured like a new-born infant.

That is, with patience, softness, love, gentleness, awareness, allowance and presence. Your system rebels against rigidity, imposed structure, tightness, force_, mentally abstract rules and cognitive manipulation to obtain a desired outcome, such as a “regulated system”. It is also held back from optimal performance by the energetic burden of interrupted or unprocessed emotional experiences of the past. This is where we stuff down our feelings, or bypass them in fear of fully feeling them, sitting with them, or rather, not being able to fully “hold them”.

3. Your system already knows how to balance.

It knows what it wants to release. It knows what no longer serves it. It is a self-regulating, infinitely wise, divine technology intricately intertwined with consciousness, soul and spirit. It just needs the space, allowance, trust, validation and safety to do so.

4. Regulation emerges by using your emotions as the portal.

We begin by building emotional capacity. Learning to hold your emotions without labeling, reacting or bypassing, etc. The simple practice of “Sitting With” your emotions with full allowance, begun in very small increments that you learn to “hold” or “handle” while also being held in a co-regulated relationship (mimicking the missed attunement of your childhood) with your Guide (ME!!) teaches your system internal trust and safety. When you learn to meet yourself for even small moments, the process organically builds on itself. You begin to move from reacting to responding.

5. The most important perhaps is this: You are not broken.

There is nothing wrong with you and there is nothing to “fix”. You are already whole. All that is a perception we hold within due to our lack of being able to hold ourselves, or witness ourselves. It is also the conditioned way we abandon ourselves. This process begins to shift the windows of perception. And when you create the space and allowance for that…. Everything changes and authentic healing emerges.

This is a truly magical process. I look forward to sharing deeper ways to meet ourselves and how unconscious dysregulation shows up in our lives, exacerbating our health challenges.

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Meet Your Nervous System online Webinar: Wednesday, May 20. 12pm MST. 90 minute free community offering. Details and link forthcoming.

An experiential, somatic, embodied attunement practice of meeting yourself, sitting with emotion, learning how the nervous system heals and its connection to chronic illness.

Three Month Nervous System Immersion: Thursday, June 4. Time TBD An experiential embodied attunement practice evolving over 12 weeks. Moving from cognitive knowledge to somatic, embodied practice and awareness.

Weekly group meetings, ongoing one:one personalized support, and group communication channel.

This Immersion will be shared with an intimate group of people. Healing in community is incredibly powerful and allows for the building of co-relational trust. Being seen and witnessed as well as seeing and witnessing others in their healing process is deeply gratifying and a catalyst of its own. In this age of disconnectedness, relational healing is a balm for the times.

I would be honored for you to join one or both of these experiences. More details will be shared soon.

Please share the insights, intuitions and connections you’ve created with your own nervous system. I look forward to hearing from you.

With love and in health,

Christine