The Nervous System Doesn’t Care How Much Insight You Have

The nervous system doesn’t care how much insight you have. 

It’s not interested in the stacks of books you’ve read, the courses you’ve taken, the teachers you’ve studied under, or even the revelations you’ve had during meditation.

Show it your certifications, your degrees, and your years of self-study, and it will gaze back at you with utter boredom. Narrate all the epiphanies you’ve had since the beginning of time, and it will probably be dead asleep before you can even finish. 

You see, the nervous system is an ancient, wild creature.

It doesn’t speak the language of the mind. Its wisdom is earthy, concrete, felt, lived, and anchored in the here and now. 

No matter how much insight you have, your nervous system determines how safe, grounded, and connected you feel at the end of the day to yourself, others, and life.

If it’s dysregulated and in a state of chronic fight, flight, or freeze/shutdown, no level of mental processing is going to get you out of that.

Sure, the mind can help you make sense of your pain and suffering. But the deeply rooted changes only happen when you anchor them to your emotional and physical reality.  

How to Move From Dissociation to Embodiment

Being someone prone to intellectualizing everything to death, one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned through the years on my inner work journey of healing is that the body must be brought into all forms of healing. 

Keeping everything in your brain creates a weak, dissociated basis of healing. But working with the body helps to ground that work into something tangible, felt, and lived. 

Getting back our connection to ourselves, recovering our souls, requires embodiment, first and foremost. Because there’s no use being a floating head in this world, always reading and learning about healing, but never actually feeling it in the body. 

How do we move from this dissociated state to being more embodied? Through (1) learning to establish safety in our bodies, and (2) getting more grounded in the felt experience of our bodies.

The Nervous System Cares About Safety and Connection

We might do all the inner work in the world, but still be operating from a nervous system that is stuck in a fight, flight, or freeze/shutdown mode.

When I learned that I was in a chronic flight/freeze mode a few years ago, I knew that I needed to prioritize safety and connection.

For me, that meant setting stronger boundaries, getting better sleep, connecting more with nature and safe people, and designing a life that felt grounded.

Reiki as a Way of Soothing the Nervous System

One of my favorite daily practices for creating more safety and spaciousness in the body is self-applied Reiki. The beauty of this energy healing path is that it is both deeply grounding and expanding. It anchors the body in the present moment while also clearing it of energetic blockages.

Translated to “universal life force energy” or “spiritual energy,” Reiki is a healing technique used all throughout the world, which originated in Japan 100+ years ago. After having a surprising heart-opening experience with this practice back in 2016 (you can read more about that here), I’ve been using it almost every day since.

Techniques like Reiki are wonderful ways of calming the nervous system and restoring a sense of peace and balance within us. I’ve found it to be a beautiful way of anchoring myself in the here-and-now, clearing out old stagnant energy, and finding a deeper spiritual connection to life as a whole.

I’ve never liked breathwork much (it often increases my anxiety rather than decreasing it), yoga is excellent for doing this work (but I have injured myself a few times with it), and vagus nerve exercises are fine (but they have only got me so far). So Reiki has been one of the only practices I’ve kept doing, purely due to how gentle but profound it is. 

Regardless of what energy or body-based technique you use, the principle is still the same: your nervous system craves safety and connection. Be sure to offer yourself that on a regular basis, because true healing work is based on that foundation. 

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The older I get, the more I realize that we need to work with the body, rather than fighting against it, judging it, or trying to transcend it into higher realms of consciousness.

Your body is your sacred vehicle and your nervous system is the electrical system that determines how fast or slow it’s moving – and whether it can easily turn on or off, or get stalled in one place.

Befriend your nervous system, learn its language, discover how to regulate it, and all other healing forms of inner work and soul recovery become easier.

Tell me, what is your default nervous system state: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or have you found a way of bringing equilibrium to your body-mind? I’d love to hear!