I was happy to receive this from a lovely client today:
Hi Rachel,
Just wanted to share that I had an important realization related to our work together. Right now, I have more business than ever — I’m booked for 3 solid weeks and requests for sessions are still coming in. I just sat down outside in the yard and realized that something has happened with my nervous system because it is now allowing me to receive all of these clients, bookings, and ATTENTION from others. It still feels a bit dangerous and uncomfortable, but I’m taking it one day at a time and reminding myself that I can regulate what I receive.
One of the most rewarding parts of nervous system healing for me is that as we work with the stress physiology – helping our bodies be more present and regulated – our capacity to contain bigger surges and flows of energy increases.
A nervous system that has been through trauma will go into fixed patterns, rather than flexibly responding to stimuli in the present moment. As we teach the body how to move comfortably and organically through those surges of up and downs, we help the nervous system to come out of it’s stuck fight/ flight or freeze patterning and into more calm, ease, and energy flow.
Because the body is very smart about protecting itself, when we go through trauma, it develops an array of strategies to keep the stimulation/ overwhelm/ stress from being too much.
One of the ways is to keep the amount of energy going through the system at a certain, predictable, manageable amount. Big surges are going to trigger an unregulated system into either a shutdown, some kind of management strategy, or extreme uncomfortableness… and so the nervous system learns to avoid having “too much” energy go through.
As the stress physiology regulates, the nervous system becomes more flexible and more present. It’s able to deal with stimuli in an appropriate way (activate/ release) rather than a habitual fixated response from the past.
That means that, yes: more and more energy is going to be able to safely move through, which includes good things like major uplevels, playing bigger, BEING bigger… all of that and the stimuli that accompanies it (which could have triggered an overwhelm/ crash/ shutdown in the past) becomes much more okay. It’s just energy; and your body knows how to surf the waves of activation and down-regulation. As more energy becomes familiar to the nervous system, it’s able to move through all of the goodness with greater ease and flow.
