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Show Notes

In this final episode of the Summer Somatic Skills series, we explore the practice of letting it be enough—the nervous system skill of recognizing when it's time to settle, even when there's still more we could do. 

Summer has a way of inviting us into endless possibility, long to-do lists, and the feeling that we should squeeze in just one more adventure, one more project, or one more mile. In this conversation, we explore how choosing "enough" isn't giving up—it's creating space for our nervous systems to complete a cycle and truly rest.

Along the way, I share stories from a recent Arctic backpacking trip, reflections on cultural conditioning around productivity, and practical ways to help the body feel safe when stepping away from something that isn't perfectly finished.

This episode is an invitation to practice enoughness—to trust that sometimes stopping before everything is complete is exactly what allows us to keep showing up for what matters most.

Timestamps

00:00 — Closing the Summer Somatic Skills series
01:30 — Sending rain, coolness, and co-regulation across distance
03:00 — Reviewing the first three summer skills
05:00 — The backside of the nervous system wave
07:00 — Why summer never feels "finished"
09:00 — Skills that transfer beyond the season
10:30 — Cultural conditioning around productivity and achievement
12:30 — Why "enough" can feel unsafe in the body
14:30 — Supporting ourselves through the discomfort of slowing down
16:00 — An Arctic backpacking story: choosing camp before the goal
19:00 — Letting a beautiful campsite be enough
21:00 — Settling the nervous system after effort
22:30 — Perfectionism, completion, and the myth of "done"
25:00 — Practicing "enough for now"
26:30 — Orienting toward safety and support
28:00 — The joy of missing out instead of the fear of missing out
29:30 — Closing reflections + listener questions welcome

Submit your questions for the Q&A [here]

Photos and links from this episode:
www.mindandmountain.co/podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01
Hello, co-regulation conversations. Welcome back. It's good to be back here with you. Curious how much of the rainy sounds you can hear on your end, I'm out for a walk in the rain. It's been raining here for the last week or more, and continues to trend in that direction. So. We get to have a rainy, wet podcast walk and talk together. I am curious if thinking, especially about those of you who are in the like really hot and dry places, and maybe even impacted by like what the wildfires and smoke and air quality issues that so much of the world is feeling right now in real time, so thinking especially about you all, and and yeah, just wondering if there's a way that connecting with the wet and the rain and the cool temperatures that I am walking here with might be something that your body, your nervous system could attune to in a way, feel into the possibility of even if it's not happening for you right now, it is happening over here right now, and this is like one of the ideas of co-regulation being a way that different states can touch into each other and then maybe come into relationship or harmony. Yeah, and just you know, really thinking about everyone who's impacted by the extreme weather and the firefighters doing such good and important work out there, and all of the land protectors too. So, yeah, sending some of our cool wetness your direction as well. Yeah, may it be of support. Our topic today, inside of this episode, is to close out the summer somatic skill series. This is now part four, and now our topic is about letting it be enough. So, guessing most of you who are listening here have been around for the earlier episodes, we talked about pleasure as an anchor, and then about the skill of downshifting, slowing things down a little bit, or taking breaks when they're available, and then the third episode in this series was about the expansion side of the cycle and different strategies for allowing more room into those phases, so that they're more supported and hopefully less overwhelming. May it be so. And now, now I want to land this with what I think of. You know, I think of this. I have this kind of visual mind with this stuff, trying to put words to these concepts that are so felt in the body and experienced somatically, but there's there is the the wave pattern of the nervous system cycle, where the those first two episodes in this series were about building this container. Out so there's a spaciousness in which the wave can happen, the activation can happen, and the bigness of our summer has some space to move in. And then this this one feels like now talking about the backside of that same wave, and it has some theoretical overlaps with the downshifting part of what we've talked about here too. Because really, it's all similar. Okay, just had to take a little pause there because ran into a mama moose and two calves that were incredible and also right on the trail, so had to take a little slide. side quest to change where I'm walking and give them some space, and it was also a really neat encounter. So they're so cool. I took a little video and I'll put it on the episode page. Should you want to see a couple. moves here in the Raine in Anchorage. Okay, so we're back to talking about this fourth skill in our summer series around this one, letting it be enough, and how this is how this relates to summer for for me at least, and for like why I built this part into our somatic skills series for the summer is that there is a way that summer can be so fast and so urgent feeling. feeling that the pace and the to-do list and the goals and all the things and the abundance of light and the gosh at least since Alaska here it is also related to the brevity of the season and how few months we actually have to be able to be outside without boots on and winter gear and snow on the ground, so there really is a pressure.

Speaker 1 8:02
to the season, which can set us up into like a dynamic where there's just way more than we actually have time and energy to make happen in inside the season. So you know, I think this skill is kind of forced on us. This like let it be enough kind of idea, because I don't know that it's ever possible to get everything done that you might want to do. Just like logistically, there's just like not time for everything, so we're always falling short, and is that maybe always the case inside of modern life? It it feels like it to me that there's a degree of that of always having a bigger goals and ideas list than. actually have ability or time or energy to make happen. So, you know, as with all of these skills that we're talking about here in this series, they do. Hopefully, we get a chance. We're practicing them here inside of one. cycle, one season, one example for them. But then, the idea being that if the body, if the physiology learns how to access them, if on a body, on a physiological level, our nervous system can come into a relationship with that skill, then we can apply it in all sorts of different environments. So you know, similar to a workout, we're doing this kind of similarly. Like if you build up the muscular strength to do a step up. Then you'll be able to use that same strength to get up the stairs, but then you'll also be able to use it to climb up a mountain, and then you'll also be able to use it to what? Like get yourself up. Let's say get yourself up onto a fence if you needed to to get around a mama moose and her calves. Should that situation show itself to you? So yeah, skills that are transferable because they're body based. So. So, trying to, I mean, I also kind of zoom out on this one and think about the macro level deconditioning work that's inside of this type of exploration too, where in you know these overcultures that we find ourselves in-the capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy-a lot of that, those cultural conditioning examples, are ones that teach us to just go, go, go, and and that we're there's there's always more that needs to happen, and more that needs to be done, and oh gosh, do we always need to be working hard and proving ourselves inside of all of the system? So, if you relate to that, welcome to. living in this culture, and to the deconditioning work of helping our bodies feel safe enough to choose something different, which is big work. It might sound simple, you know. It might sound like a simple cognitive choice to be like, okay, I realize I'm working too hard and I need a break. So it's enough. Let's let that be enough, and let's slow down and rest instead of overachieving or doing another draft on this thing. But what happens in those processes is that our cognitive mind might help us make a different choice, but then the physiology, the body, as it shifts into a different a different choice, it flags that as less safe because it's breaking the rules of the culture that we're in by doing. less or letting it be enough, like deciding we're not going to finish all of our lists for the summer, or that we're going to miss out on something that other people are doing. doing and breaking the rules of culture has a on a physiological body level has a survival in impulse inside it to to conform to the rest of the people around us to conform to our cultural rules. So when we're stepping out on that, there is a like red flags on the on that survival level of the body. So yeah, it's um all this is is big work, and it all intertwines with our conditioning and with our somatic need, like body need for safety, for safe enough. Oh, so how do we support that? Well, we're going to be leaning on anything that we have been knowing and practicing that helps the body remember that it actually is safe right now, even if it's feeling weird, and this is what I've noticed with like conditioning level change on a somatic sense.

Speaker 1 14:40
It's like it doesn't usually flag as I'm not feeling safe. It doesn't usually flag even. Sometimes it doesn't even flag as like I'm stressed when you're working on a like social condition. Level thing, it is more like low level weird, weird feeling. I guess might be one way to say that a low level distress or like noise or something's something's weird, uncomfortable. I don't like this, and it might be a bit confusing because generally, part of us does like it. Like, in this example, for this practice, if we're like really working on letting it be enough, okay. Here's let's give like a tangible example behind this. So, yeah, on a on this backing trip I was just on in the Arctic, we had some days where we like could have gone a little further, and it would have maybe set ourselves up a little bit better for the future next days if we would go a little further and get a couple more miles under our belt. And but then we were maybe we like came across a really yeah I'm thinking of like one night where we came across a really nice place to hike to camp, a really nice campsite after having like worked pretty hard throughout the day through some tough conditions. All right. Let me get more details for you. Paint the picture. So we we had incredible weather for this trip almost the whole time. Hot sun and lots of swimming in beautiful mountain pools and everything. But during the day I'm thinking about right now, the weather had turned and started raining, and flipped to from like the kind of heat stroke type of weather conditions to borderline hypothermia type conditions, where it's like we're quite wet and cold, and up in like clouds in a cloud for a while, very, very cold conditions, and then walking down from a pass that had some like just like a ton of loose rock down a drainage and brush, wet brush that pinched us in. So, anyways, all of this-it's kind of only one place you can walk here, and so we're seeing a lot of bear tracks, and we're sort of pinned in from brush. So, all that to say, it's like kind of challenging walking, challenging temperatures, and cold with the wet, and a little bit stressful because of the potential animal encounters, which we never saw any, but we saw a lot of sign. So we'd covered quite a ways that day, but we had an idea of where we wanted to go, and before we got to that point on the map that was kind of our goal for the day. I saw a tundra bench that was up above the river, and we hadn't seen any flat, open places that would make good campsites all the whole day. So it felt like really amazing to see a tundra bench that would make a good campsite and get us up out of that river corridor where all the animals were going, and and yet it was like a little bit, I don't know, maybe like half a mile or a mile short of where we'd wanted to get to, and this is a place where this practice of letting it be enough really came through and won the day for us. And I felt really proud to have been able to notice that this was a moment where we had done a lot of effort. We had pushed a really big day, and it was a lot harder going than we'd expected, but we hadn't made it to our quote-unquote goal. And in deciding to camp at this spot, which I got to say was just very cool spot, like this very really neat, squishy. I love the type of tundra that grows in that area. So, and sleeping on tundra is one of my favorite things because of the like the softness of it and the way I feel like my body can kind of mold itself into the. Into that soft bed, and yeah, it's just very resourcing for me on a lot of levels. So I'm always excited to find a good tender bench. But I noticed that there was this potential in me, which is something like a nervous system response that I'm familiar with, and I'm curious if you are too.

Speaker 1 20:21
You know, of of feeling like we probably shouldn't stop because we haven't actually made it to our destination, and and we have we had energy and like capacity. We could have kept going, but instead, it did feel like the right choice for that moment, to let it be enough, and to, in that, trust that this was a good enough place to get for the day, and that the miles were going to work themselves out down the road, which they really did, and and they even you know when when we the next day got going and started making our way down the river again, and had kind of some curiosity about if we were gonna find other good campsites, and and wish we had pressed on a little bit more, we actually didn't find any more good campsites. So, in that instance, at least, it felt like a good choice to let have let it that it be enough, and to let our nervous systems come down out of that cycle that they were in of working hard and doing a lot, and to like rest back in the beauty of a very cool campsite, and the ability to get inside your tent and get dry and warm up and eat some food, and. And settle the day. Yeah, so that settle word, you know, that's one of the words that I kind of keywords for this somatic skill too. The backside of a nervous system wave. We're looking for the chance for the system to move out of activation, and for that that pace, that activation that's in the body to settle and slow down, and let us close out the cycle and rest. But the thing that I notice happening, especially in the summer, is that if we don't have this practice around letting it be enough, that there is always more that we can be doing inside of summer, or oh my gosh, inside of entrepreneurial life, or so many things, advocacy. Oh my gosh, always. So, if we're not what we're playing with here with this idea, at least is that after we do something significant, and it's actually really important that it not be not need to be perfect or not need to be all the way done to be enough, because I mean, what is what is done? What is perfect? Like there is there actually an actual thing there, or is it always that we might have to be able to let it be enough, and that is what establishes the end of something, because you could theoretically always revise something more and more and more. So. So, yeah. So there's, and I don't know. I I grapple a little bit here. Maybe you do too, with like wanting things to be high quality and wanting to produce meaningful work, and on trips like wanting to get to where we're going, so it is you know there is a tension there between what is perfectionism and and what is enough or what is too little, and then also maybe the idea of. Well, I actually lost my train of thought on that one, so maybe that is enough. Maybe there isn't another thing that needed to be said there.

Speaker 2 24:58
Okay.

Speaker 1 25:00
Let's pause together and just notice our feet and their breath and the sound of the rain. Okay, okay. So, yeah. To wrap this one up, I would say we're looking for what helps our bodies recognize safety, safe enough when we are stepping away from something that may not be 100% completed, may not be all the way to the vision that we had for it, and can we come in somewhere even short of the vision, even like not all the way what we thought it might be, and and at least like let that be enough for now. Does that change anything if we say for now? Does that help at it all feel a little bit safer, a little bit more comfortable? We might need to reach for some of our somatic tools for helping our bodies remember safety, like orienting around and looking for pleasure and comfort, bringing attention to those things, and then I would invite you to you know whenever we're doing work around this or this is an area that's a challenge for you to see about that conditioning level work, where it's like not very conscious most of the time, just this kind of like subtle itch that might read as like this doesn't feel as safe, doesn't feel as good, and if there, if we can bring some conscious awareness to those that low level noise. noise in the body when we're breaking out of a cultural rule, and layer on some support during those times, layer on some comfort, some pleasure, some orienting to reality right now in this real actual moment, and then the other thing that will help with this is just getting some reps, getting some reps in of letting things be enough for now, and letting them settle, recognizing that you know falling short of our high goals for the summer or high goals for ourselves is part of it, and there's maybe even a pleasure in it. Maybe there's a way to find even that like, ooh, I did good enough, and now I get to shift into something else. There probably is a little bit of something that even that can even bring some like intentional pleasure into the experience of breaking the rules, or of doing a little bit less inside of the summer season. I mean, maybe you're getting the sense of the joy of missing out of something, rather than it always needing to be fear of missing out. It's a fun, fun thing to be pursuing, to be tapping into when it comes around. Okay, in the tune of letting it be enough, I am absolutely aware that there is a lot more that I could be offering as a part of connecting with some somatic skills for the summer, but we are calling with enough for now, and it's really been a pleasure. Okay, I hope these have been useful. Feel free to send questions over. We'll link that up in the show notes if you have any questions or situations you'd love to hear some thoughts on how to tackle with all of this, and I just really appreciate your presence and your listening ear here. I hope there's been something useful in these. Chats. Okay. Until next time.