HIDDEN Messages from Your Dysregulated Nervous System

Lots of people have had great success with regulating their nervous system, and if that’s you, congratulations! That’s a huge step and an important one.

Others of you may be wondering if this is going to be a struggle that never ends, where you’re constantly reacting in a fear state to too many things and then having to breath, ground, and convince yourself that you’re safe even though it doesn’t feel like it.

If you’ve been doing your best to regulate your nervous system and feel safe in your own skin, only to get tired of the constant struggle and perhaps also self-judgment, you may be interested to put things into a larger perspective that includes your spiritual awakening and your beautiful human body, and start to pay attention to the messages that your dysregulated nervous system is trying to tell you.

A SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE

This post today is for those of you who are versed in the art of nervous system regulation and who are realizing that there may be a few more pieces to the puzzle, especially in the context of a spiritual path. Being a highly sensitive person myself, my nervous system is wired to be wide open and take everything in, so I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed and even shut down, as I’m sure you do as well.

Nervous system regulation has been trending for the last few years, and I know some of you really swear by it and have benefitted greatly from those practices. That’s amazing. The current focus on regulating the nervous system has done wonders for people’s awareness of the mind-body connection and has increased their understanding of and sensitivity to their inner own physical and emotional states, which is a crucial first step toward healing. It’s helped them to feel better in their bodies, it’s helped them to feel safe and calm in difficult moments, and that’s priceless... especially in today’s world where fear seems to be the common currency.

Another of the great benefits of this trend is the awareness around overstimulation, which also is rampant these days with the endless hustling and scrolling on social media. So we’ve come to understand the value of slowing down, taking a deep breath, detoxing from the technology, getting into nature, putting our bare feet on the ground and enjoying the sunrise and the stillness of our own company – so that our minds and bodies can heal on their own.

Science has brought us that far. But we’re going to go further today and approach this from a holistic perspective of embodied spiritual awakening to also not reduce you to a nervous system. It’s great that all this awareness around how to rewire our nervous system helps us to dis-identify from the body and mind and become present of our greater, more expansive beingness and oneness with the Absolute. But your beautiful, unique, separate human self is much more than a nervous system.

It’s great to expand your nervous system’s capacity to hold “activation” and tolerate “stimulation” but I suggest a broader focus on expanding our consciousness as a whole (not just our nervous system) to increase our full bandwidth to observe more of ourselves, our thoughts and emotions, and more of reality and the energies around us, all the way to realizing our true enlightened state of oneness with all things – why not?

Basically, in my work of emotional alchemy and somatic processing and entering meditative states, we’re already incorporating nervous system regulation through placing our awareness in the body, because fight-or-flight is always concentrated on the external world looking for threats. Our breathing and grounding practices also incorporate NSR and that calms you down enough to be able to feel the deeper emotions that are there, and then heal them, because they’re not being suppressed by the fight-or-flight response.

However, there’s a bit more to the story.

RESISTING THE MESSAGE?

The reason you still may be struggling to relax and soothe your nervous system may just come down to resistance. If you’re using NSR as a tactic to breathe away your feelings or avoid accepting the truth of your situation, you’re still in that constant war against yourself and against life that no one has ever won.

Hear me out. If you’re understanding your “dysregulated” nervous system as sort of a buildup of static electricity that needs to be “discharged,” there is a place for doing that but there’s much more to it than that. Yes, if you’re overwhelmed with emotion and can’t get away to a quiet place to process your emotions, sure — you can send out both external energies, as I’ve talked about in other posts, AND your own emotional energies into your outer auric field UNTIL you have time and space to process them (because they will come back). And if you’ve got so much fear that you can’t function in your daily tasks, yes, focus on regulating and helping yourself feel safe. That’s a beautiful gift of presence and attention you can give yourself.

I’m saying this specifically to people on a path of awakening, because if you’re on a spiritual path, and a lot of people with sensitive nervous systems are, you want to be careful not to use NSR as a bandaid, like popping a pill so that you can ignore your body’s messages and just get rid of whatever you’re feeling. That’s resistance, my friend, and in that case you’d be missing out on your body’s important messages. After all, your sensitivity is a gift, it is allowing you to perceive energies both inside and outside of you that are relevant and important for you.

Looking inside the body, firstly, you can understand the fears and other emotions that come up as parts of you that need and deserve your attention. They’ve been stored in your subconscious as trauma because you didn’t feel safe enough to feel them when that difficult experience happened.

So, after you’ve regulated your system into a calm state, don’t stop there. Take advantage of that calm state you’re in to feel into the body, and really feel all the sensations that arise. You didn’t “regulate” because you don’t want to feel. You regulated because you want to be able to feel more.

Do a body scan not only to calm down, but to identify what hurting part of yourself needs your attention. Once you identify a trauma stuck in your body based on the sensation that pops up in your awareness, welcome the wisdom in that trauma, let the understanding and compassion come in, and then let yourself feel the emotion fully, purely out of curiosity because you truly love and accept yourself and want to know yourself better.

That is the spiritual alchemizing of emotion through the light of your loving awareness. Let it burn through you until you’ve merged with it completely – it’s only energy. In feeling it fully, you don’t increase the trauma, it’s actually the opposite: That subconscious part can finally join your conscious mind again, that hidden shadow can finally dissolve into the light of your awareness.

The result is not only that you feel well enough to go on tolerating life a while more. You have now permanently healed a layer of trauma that will never control you again, will never press the panic button in your psyche again and cause you to be hypervigilant or “overreact” in what used to be triggering situations. There will be fewer times in the future when you’ll need to regulate your nervous system.

You now have all of that power, wisdom and energy that was compacted down and stored in that trauma at your disposal to now create something beautiful in your life. Your awareness has expanded to include more of yourself, and this helps you further on your path of true self-realization.

And that’s not even the full extent of what your body is trying to tell you by “dysregulating” your nervous system and bringing up these “negative” emotions:

Consider, please, that, instead of trying to regulate your nervous system to feel good in a difficult situation, maybe you should instead change your situation. If you’re in a toxic or abusive situation or even society, your nervous system is “dysregulated” for a reason. Instead of only trying to regulate, maybe listen to your body’s message and take steps to get out of that toxic situation or even to change society to whatever extent you’re able.

I know it’s easier said than done. And you don’t want to run around trying to fix your environment when all you need to do is heal the trauma in your body, but my point is: regulating your nervous system is great, but don’t forget to address what’s causing your emotions in the first place. There is immense wisdom there.

I’ve pulled myself out of multiple periods of depression that lasted years by identifying and fixing the underlying problem, not by masking the symptoms or coping. It was excruciatingly difficult to change my situation – and incredibly empowering. That empowerment is what I want for you.

If you’re in a toxic situation, go ahead and regulate so that you can quiet the noise and feel safe enough to hear the deeper cries of your heart and the longing in your soul. Listen to your body’s messages, integrate your traumatized parts, and take action if you need to. Your nervous system is just one part of a much larger picture. You’ve made a great start. Now get ready for more – there’s a whole universe out there – and inside – for you to explore, and the more wisdom, self-love and empowerment you have cultivated, the more fun this journey will be.

If you need more support, enquire about booking a private session HERE. I am here for you and I want you to succeed.

Be brave. Be the light that you are.

Namaste, my friend.

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