Wellllllll, it's Friday.

Reader, we did it. We survived another wild week of world war, eclipses and just general everyday life in hustle culture. Let's take this moment for a deeeeeeeep exhale.

Do it, the rest of this email will wait.

Okay so... Survival isn't the only goal, right?

Just getting through by the skin of our teeth doesn't feel good, and definitely isn't reason enough to keep going.

The way I see it is that there's dealing, and then there's healing.

Dealing with the chaos, stress and pain via any means necessary to just get through it.
​Healing our nervous systems in order to recalibrate ourselves towards ease and joy rather than hustle and hardship.
Both are necessary.

But healing is really flipping hard if you're stuck in fight/flight/SURVIVE mode most of the time.

When the nervous system is in survival mode (aka the sympathetic state), it's next-to impossible for us to do deeper healing work.

Healing requires us to first learn how to work with our nervous system, regulating back to a place where have the capacity to heal, change and slow down enough to feel all the good stuff that makes life worth living.

This past Wednesday I was doing my thing: working, learning, creating, organizing, caretaking. All of that generally brings me deep joy. AND, I tend to get lost in it, swept up in mobilized state (nervous system speak for doing & moving).

Even though nothing felt overtly unsafe or threatening throughout the day, my nervous system was shifting into survival mode as a result of the doing and moving at a pace without enough room for stillness, rest and connection to the present moment.

My body was loudly trying to communicate to me that it had been preparing to fight or flee: shoulders tense, anxiety high, jaw clenched, racing unfocused thoughts a plenty. Even though logically I knew I was not in a life-death situation.

It was only 4pm and I still had a client to see before the day was over. And it is CRITICALLY important to me to show up to client sessions grounded, present, creative, open and focused. Basically the opposite of how I was feeling. Cue an additional layer of worry about how to get myself back to a place where I could show up the way I wanted in that session.

What I did next was, and I'm not exaggerating here, medicine for that moment. Like hitting a complete reset button on my nervous system.

Because words can't do it justice, I'm doing something a little different today and sharing a video with y'all to demonstrate.

Give your girl some grace, as this demo and practice isn't meant to be pretty 😜

A breakdown of what's happening here ^^

• This is what I call a 2-for-1 skill. A combo of two really intentional practices, specifically to support regulating your nervous system DOWN from that sympathetic survival state, done for about 30-90 seconds.
• The first skill is obvious: the wild shaking, jumping, punching that's making you wonder WTF is going on here
• The second less obvious but just as important: breathing in a 1:2 pattern (exhale 2x as long as the inhale)
• Not captured here was a few minutes spent laying horizontal afterwards to let my breath come back to it's regular pace and integrate, just noticing any shifts or sensations in my body after that practice

Why was this 2-for-1 tool such a reset for my nervous system? This sort of intense, erratic movement of the arms & legs signals to the nervous system that you're fighting or fleeing, effectively completing the stress response cycle. The 1:2 breathing simulates our breath when we're resting, cueing the body that its safe to slow down.

So there you have it, another tool to tuck away in your toolbox for when you're feeling that heavy survival energy creep in. A tool to take you from dealing→healing

May this weekend bring you lots of space to settle, Reader.

↩️ If this video was equally helpful & entertaining and you want more, hit reply saying MORE PLEASE. At the risk of slightly embarrassing myself, I can make that happen.

XO

Holly

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