This article is part of the Nervous System hub, a single thread within the broader practice of inner work.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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It resonated with me when you said that thinking about emotional issues, to try to sidestep them or to step over them with ideas or self talk doesn’t work and that it needs a working on the level of the body. The emotions are somehow stored in the body, in the muscles and heart. I have experienced that movement and expressing emotion through movement is powerful enough to touch the deep feelings. I guess it’s in the name, e-motion :)
Yes, I love that Franush. E-motion = energy in motion!
I certainly freeze. Cannot move.
Thank you for your wonderful newsletters. They help so much. I’ve just reserved my spot with your online Reiki healing session. Big love and all my best xo
I can relate, Karen.
And that’s wonderful to hear. See you there 💜
its always been fight or flight if I feel some kinda way poof I’m gone or I’ll run off people at the slightest blink of an eye if my body n mind is telling me that’s something wrong with the situation.
Life is a continuing journey. At 75 I have achieved a level of resolution and inner peace. The critical practice that I have developed to deepen this is called ‘Twleve sacred Breaths’. It is a dynamic MBS system for Parasympathetic NS awakening. It is available in PDF for anyone who would like to try it. Here is a quote from the PDF. ‘”Most meditation traditions address mental drift by training the meditator to notice drift and return. 12SB addresses it architecturally — by
designing a practice in which there is nowhere for the mind to drift to. The structure itself is the discipline. The mind is fully employed at
every moment — and because it is fully employed in something coherent and ascending, it cannot simultaneously be somewhere else.”
’12SB is a full mind-body dynamic system — physical, mental, neurological, and cosmological simultaneously. What makes it uniquely
effective is not the individual elements but their synchronisation in continuous unbroken flow’.
It is so true that we have to learn our nervous system’s language. I’m a freezer. I become paralyzed when I’m deregulated. I was first drawn to Reiki, trained and studied all three levels of the program to become a guide. While it is a beautiful source of healing, I wasn’t able to connect to the practice like I connected to Kundalini yoga. This yoga is a combination of breathwork and gentle postures and with my first practice I could feel myself working the stagnant energy out of my body. It was and still is quite profound for me as a healing practice. I feel like being a person whose nervous system gets stuck in freeze, that active movement of release works best for me. Although I do love a calming Reiki session when I am open to receive. So definitely find what connects you to your body!
Yes, I also find that different practices resonate with us depending on what part of our life journeys we’re entering. For busy periods, we need more rest. For quiet periods, we need more active experiences. It’s the yin and yang at work. :)
Definitely flight or fright. My massage therapist says working on me is like petting a board, LOL.
Childhood trauma left me in a permanent state of hypervigilance. Loss of 40 year soulmate didn’t help. Also negatively impacts digestion.
Ah yes, the muscle tension is a big source of strain. This is why I use about 50 different body massage tools every night (okay, maybe not that many, but at least two). Big hugs to you Sue ♡
I keep hammering on the same point: we’re body, mind, and spirit, period. In the performance world, looking like someone who’s reached some transcendent level or “enlightenment” sounds amazing — but at the end of the day, you’re still far from yourself. If I put it in more “alchemical” terms, our essence needs a vessel that matches both our potential and our limits — that’s the crucible where we can actually reach our Self. And yeah, sometimes we need to empty ourselves; that means accepting that besides goals, there are obstacles, and those obstacles also demand something from us.
I used to pressure myself a lot to hit goals, thinking they defined my sense of purpose. But when I realized that most of my perfectionism came from anxiety — worsened by rigid upbringing, self-demand, and an intense sensitivity — I started to see that my struggles were tied to the weight I gave to goals I didn’t reach, instead of celebrating who I was. Feeling like I wasn’t like other people — couldn’t hold a casual conversation, didn’t feel interesting — I thought I had to be extraordinary to be liked.
After so much pain, disappointment, and even hitting rock bottom, I finally understood the problem was me — I didn’t know how to like myself and expected others to do it for me. Now I see I need to put myself first — my body and brain aren’t machines, and even if they were, machines break down when pushed too far. So today I get that we should challenge ourselves, sure, but sometimes “overcoming” has to give way to simply accepting what is — and letting that be enough.
It’s a fine balance, isn’t it? Doing and being, challenging and accepting, body and mind. Your comment reminds me that usually the middle way is the wisest.
Thank you for sharing, Hans ♡