Your Nervous System Holds the Blueprint
The difference between felt-sense experience and mind-based realisations in healing
Hey friends ♡
Firstly, a warm welcome to the new people who subscribed to this space- your presence here is not taken for granted ✨
Based on discussions we had together in the last week, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into what the nervous system is, how it operates and why it is worthwhile to learn how to work with it as we navigate our messy and complex lives.
A large part of my healing journey existed in the realm of the mind: thinking, analysing, making sense. It wasn’t until I discovered somatic healing and nervous system regulation, that I realised a big part of the picture was missing - involving my body.
Let me explain.
Our body is a keeper of impressions, beliefs systems and learnt patterns, much like our subconscious mind. As we come into the world as babies, we perceive and respond to our environment through feeling. We express our needs, wants, discomfort and pain through emotions.
All of our experience begins to get stored in our body, which comes in with an autonomic nervous system - a branch of our nervous system equipped with responses designed to ensure our survival. From a very early stage, our nervous system begins to develop response patterns unique to our environment and circumstances.
Fast forward to adulthood, we continue to respond to life through the filters and perceptions imprinted in us early on. To simplify, if we learnt that expressing emotions was not ok, our nervous system learns suppression as a form of protection, which comes with a feeling of unsafety. And viceversa.
As we begin to uncover patterns of behaviour that are painful to us, we fall into the trap of over-intelectualising our new realisations, which creates only that: a conscious awareness of the situation.
As Carl Jung once said:
“Intelectualism is a common cover up for fear of direct experience.”
Since the initial pain was registered at the level of the nervous system, then it becomes clear that real healing happens also in and through the body. Remember, as babies we navigate the world through felt perception, which is something that happens in the body, not in the mind.
What does that leave us with?
If you find yourself knowing all the whys of your painful tendencies, yet you struggle to create sustainable change, it might be worthwhile shifting your focus internally and beginning to build a relationship to your nervous system.
Practices that promote attuning, listening and connecting with sensations can become our allies in this process. Through this, we can restore the inner trust and safety that we lost along the way, and change our story.
If you think this newsletter can spark curiosity or be of benefit to someone you know, please share it with them.
Next week, I will share two distinct ways of working closely with the body, moving beyond theory.
I want to thank you deeply for being here, and I feel honoured to share this journey with you ✨
Would love to hear your thoughts, questions and experiences regarding this article, so we can start a conversation together.
Such an interesting and beautiful read. I'm grateful we can find ways to make our bodies feel safe, especially if we didn't get that at a young age. We can create new memories and stories for ourselves.
Nice text! I believe one of the keys to the portal of our own body&mind is to basically talk to them as if we were talking to someone we like. Gently. This way we can tell our nervous system to relax, for example, or to that body part that aches to release the pain.
Creating a true connection between our entire self is a way to deepen into our own mysteries/beliefs/truth.