It feels productive to tackle healing with an all in energy. This is why for many years I did MORE when I felt distant from my goals. I saw myself broken, needing to be fixed. So it seemed like the best approach to keep myself trained under the whip of self-criticism, judgment and inner performance reviews. Unfortunately, this constant digging and turning over every stone to remedy myself increased the stress hormones in my body until I ran myself into the ground. The story that I’m not enough, was playing in the background, fear gripping me, my every move driven by the need to be someone other than me.

I was running away from myself. When I started doing this work, I discovered that self abandonment never leads to healing or love. And I found that when I could let go of fixing me and just be present and accept myself, my pain, my mess my limits, my desires and the way my body, heart and soul relates to the world around me…. I could begin to heal. This required me to SLOW down.

You may be familiar with the states of the nervous system. Shut down or burnout happens in dorsal, where we experience depression, shame, grief, lack of motivation, dissociation and more… and in this state we NEED a slow and gentle awakening back to self and our sense of power. But it cannot happen through brut force. It can only happen in presence, acceptance and a felt sense of safety.

My new motto after learning about this is to move with the slowest part of me. Even when I am not in shut down, I always try to acknowledge where I am genuinely at–and we can never truly be further along than the slowest part of us. In fact if we push while part of us is still stuck, we fragment ourselves deeper into stress, dissociation and coping mechanisms. To force myself into a stretch or pace that my body or heart isn’t ready for only overwhelms my system further. So I try not to draw my baseline from what I think I should be capable of. I listen to the part of me that needs presence and pause.

There is beauty, reward and great wisdom in slowing down. It’s so gracious to pause and hold the hand of the slowest part of ourselves, to create safety that actually leads to growth, resilience and capacity.

Asking questions has become a very helpful tool for me. It turns out, curiosity is incredibly powerful and healing. One of my favorite questions is “How do I feel, and what do I want?” I love this question because it helps me come back to myself, and meet the need behind whatever is going on especially when I am stuck in a stress response, where anxiety or anger is flooding my system.

Sometimes I don’t know what I want though. So I ask a second question: “How do I want to feel, and how will I accomplish it?” This question is so helpful, either as an intention or to ask in the moment when “what do I want?” feels hard to answer. It gives me confidence to move forward.

Lately I have been asking myself a third question at the end of the day, to help me savor the good moments, lean into gratitude and register when my nervous system was in receptivity mode (or rest and digest): “What is something that felt pleasant today, and how did my body tell me it was pleasant?”

This three question combo has been my ticket back to my paper, where I feel so empowered!

Resilience is not about removing or changing the things we struggle with. It is about accepting what is with compassion, and then equipping and resourcing ourselves with what we need. As we Build The New, naturally things begin to shift and heal.

It is like going to the gym and realizing that a certain muscle group has been over activated, working really hard to keep things moving and functioning to compensate for an imbalance. To correct this, we don’t just cut the over active muscles out, or turn them off. We cultivate safety by working with the weaker, shut down muscle groups to strengthen them, activate them and bring them back online, so we can restore balance and peace, and give those over-worked muscles a break. And we move forward with intentionality; knowing the patterns of over activation and shut down, we can mindfully invite new ways of engagement.

Learning how to tune into my husband’s heart message, especially when I am navigating my own triggers, emotional turmoil and insecurities, has been an absolute super power and helped me restore deep safety and connection in my marriage. It is the epitome of being a soft place to land. I truly love showing up like that, even though it is hard to do at times. It gives me this sense of dignity, grace and femininity that genuinely makes me proud to be me, and helps me cultivate the experience I want to have in my marriage.

My limiting beliefs, I’ve discovered, are not just false narratives I have to somehow shift with my mind. They are responses that point to a story that’s stuck in my body—unfelt, unprocessed and unhealed. 

One of those stories is that I have a bad memory. But in reality my memory is perfectly intact underneath a dysregulated nervous system. When I do the work to experience the sensations in my body around what shut my memory down or limited it, then resource myself and build the new, I can return to the natural and innate design of my body with a regulated nervous system where my memory is online and fully functioning.

When I feel like I have to carve out my worth in the world around me and prove to everyone that I am significant, valid and have something to contribute… then I know I’m stuck in survival or scarcity mode, an approach that will never lead to confidence, love or abundance. It will only double down on this never ending search for validation, this feeling that I must continue to carve and prove in order to survive, all while striving for a flourishing life that is forever out of reach. 

It is only when I become present in my body and with how I show up, that I can start to integrate a worthiness; the instinctual, inherit worthiness within my cells that actually always existed. When I understand that coping mechanisms tell me how to be and instincts and inherit design tells me who I am, I can find my way back to myself—to learn my original core beliefs—and actually start to thrive.

I find that 2 significant things happen when I coach my clients to meet nervous system dysfunction with acceptance and connection. 

1. We begin to heal the wound that caused the nervous system to get stuck in a dysfunctional state.

2. We begin to move into rest and digest mode, where we gain clarity and capacity to cultivate a new experience.

I’m 40 years old, and honestly, the best beauty routine I’ve discovered is one that focuses on my happiness. I know this sounds cliché or even insensitive. I get it. I have a relationship with depression, so how can I say that in order to look my best, I must focus on being happy?

Well what I’ve learned is that when I come back to myself and truly meet myself with compassion, empathy and acceptance, I start to heal the wounds of neglect and abandonment that kept me in a dark and numbing place for so long. When I sit with myself and feel what has been suppressed, and meet the needs that have gone unmet, I slowly start to feel again, and happiness returns, but not in a one dimensional way. In a layered, wholesome way. 

Rumination or intrusive memories are a sign for me to find the part of myself that got stuck in rejection and shame, so I can validate, empathize, feel the sadness, and then offer myself forgiveness and acceptance.

Nothing really clicked in a substantial way to where there was consistency and fruit, until I started doing this work truly and deeply for me. Not for my husband, or kids. Not for anyone else. But simply for me.

Being on my paper is the most empowering place to be.

When I told my husband “you don’t need to ask for permission, I trust you” I could physically see the relief all over his body. His response was full of gratitude, as he smiled and moved in close with all the adoration and affection. 

Our connection was overhauled and made new after I started healing my nervous system and implementing new skills around intimacy. And one of the greatest lessons I learned was that my sense of safety in the relationship was actually my responsibility to cultivate. That often looked like letting go of fear and trusting myself and my husband even when I felt scared.

I didn’t need to be fixed despite my deepest belief that I did. I needed to accept myself in my deepest pain. This cultivated safety for me, which led to my nervous system slowly regulating, and my brain coming back online to make better decisions, better thought patterns and learn new skills. This in turn helped me cultivate the change I always wanted but it didn’t come from forcing myself to be different.

Being self-aware has not always been productive for me, and has kept me stuck in my head, anxious, intellectualizing, dissociating and ruminating. It has definitely not lead me to regulation and connection. I guess it is like learning all the theory on how to solve a problem, only to feel completely overwhelmed and underprepared when you actually face the problem.

Being present is a different kind of awareness –where I am in tune with my body, my needs, my emotions, my thoughts, how I interact with the world, my environment, other people, and the relationship between all these different things. This is way more productive I find, and leads to connection through development of skill rather than just theory. Thinking and processing is still part of the picture but the picture is more wholesome as it integrates the whole body and how I show up in the world around me. This has allowed me to heal through experience rather than just trying to figure everything out in my mind.

Something I’ve discovered through this work:

Trying to change my own, my husband’s or my kids’ behaviour or perspective always ends in frustration and disappointment on a surface level. On a deeper level it leads to cycles of shame and judgement.

Acceptance and Building The New with intimacy skills, regulation skills, and intuitive processing is way more productive, empowering, and helps me sustain the change I want to experience on the surface. It also leads to abundance and love on that deeper level.