Sarah 0:10
Hi y'all welcome back. It's co regulation conversation time. I'm recording today from my couch inside with a cozy blanket and watching the snow fall out my window, it just felt like I wanted to be more comfortable and supported today as I talk to you about nervous system support for intense times and what it means that calm is not the goal for our nervous system work. I'm like intentionally bringing myself into a calm place right now to speak about this from and I wonder if you might want to join me. I mean, I think like calm is really nice. I'm guessing most of us want more of it in our lives, so I'm not dissing calm. In fact, I think it might be useful to intentionally try to access a little bit of whether it's calm or even just a downshift in activation. Let's see what happens if we just together, take a moment and slow ourselves down a little bit if you're doing something, maybe you can just take the speed of it down to a little bit of a slower pace, and do a bit of orienting, letting your eyes look around. Ears listen. You. And just give your body enough time through the senses to recognize where you are in time and space right now.
Sarah 2:22
And you know, noticing while you're looking around the way that your body's participating within it, the neck turns, maybe the torso turns, if you're looking behind you, the eyeballs mobilize to see different parts of your space.
Sarah 2:51
And as you're doing this, we're looking to see what changes might happen in the body. So I noticed I just took a deeper breath, not because I tried to, but just my body breathed a little deeper. So that feels like a nice little signal that there's some deactivation happening.
Sarah 3:18
Feel like my thoughts might be slowing down slightly too, which feels nice to notice, yeah, just kind of collecting any observations about deactivation or settling that that might be happening. Of course, it's, this is subtle work. So whatever you happen to notice great and then, of course, as you know, if you've been here for a while, you know that, like sometimes, what happens when we tune in is that we're we move out of like a disembodied place to a more maybe present experience with our bodies, and end up finding that there's maybe quite a bit there, if you're not really finding the backside of the deactivation wave right now, or noticing a downshift that is a sign that you might need some mobilization, you might actually physically need to move your body before the settling can happen. So if that's what you're running into, maybe this is a good one to listen to while you go on a walk or do some chores around the house, cook some dinner, shovel, some snow. You know, like doing doing something physical might be something that helps support that energy that might need to move before the body's really available for settling. And I'll just mention too because I'm also tracking. Saying that we can't always move our bodies the way we want to, because of human bodies, and the fact that you know we're we don't always get to move in the ways that we want. And so if the type of movement that you want to do is not available to you right now, on a nervous system level, you can access a lot of the same experience inside of the what we call the image channel. So you could just imagine doing what you want to do, and feel your body while you're imagining it, and notice the waves that pass through as you're experiencing the experience, but through your imagination. It's actually really cool how that can work. Maybe a note for a future podcast topic, but yeah, what we're here to talk about today, inside of January 2026, and the intensity that we're living inside of right now, particularly, I'm talking about the way that ice is inside of a really big push right now in Minnesota and Minneapolis. And I don't know when you're going to be listening to this in the future, and where things are going to be with that, but there have been, over the weekend, they shot and killed another US citizen, of course, they've been doing lots of damaging things to lots of people inside of this. You know, probably since they began, to be honest, I haven't been tracking it, until this year, when Trump put all this funding behind this effort. So there's been many people hurt and killed alongside in the detention centers and and now on the streets as well. And so, you know, it's a huge problem, and we're just, we're seeing it very, very obviously these days, with the effectiveness of the way that the local Minnesota population has been mobilized to get out and protest and show up as legal observers and film and I mean, I'm so Inspired by watching those folks be out on the streets and and helping make be a presence at school, school pickups and drop off so that those experiences can be safer, and bringing people food and standing up for their neighbors. It's, it's really, really powerful to witness that side of things as it is, like equally disturbing to watch the brutality of the ICE agents that we're seeing these days. So, you know that's this is a this is a moment I don't know where it's going from here, I expect that we'll have more moments like this where we need these skills, like, very desperately we like we need to figure out how to operate inside of these times where the temperature is hot, and the feelings are high, and the things we're witnessing are intense and hard to witness. I mean, yeah, this is just one of many atrocities going on around the world right now. So, yeah, this feels like a skill for living inside of these times that we find ourselves in where systems are collapsing and people are on different sides of the like seeing things so differently, and we're having to learn really quickly if we don't know already, which, you know, I think some communities know this better than the like upper middle class white folks that are A lot, many of us inside of the like outdoor rec community, maybe like having to really skill up here really fast, both in an interpersonal way and also on a nervous system way. So these feel like the skills of the moment. For me, I. I'm hoping here to share them out so that we all can have access to them in the times that we are living through and the times when we need them. So okay, so here's my foundational hypothesis for you today, nervous system work. The goal of nervous system work is not calm. Calm is a state that we sometimes get when we're in situations that are also calm, and that's like a coherent type of calm where, like my body's calm because and the situation is calm, if the situation is not calm, which is at least part of the reality of what's going on right now, you the thing that is hard about this is that there is A bigger cultural lack of calm, right? That's also that's happening. And then there also might be in your real personal life. For those of us that aren't in Minnesota right now, or who aren't like actively engaging with these threats in real life at the moment, we actually might have a lot of calm in our actual present day life. So that's a weird reality to hold at the same time. It's another one of those things that our nervous system isn't really evolved for yet. The way that we can be aware of this like significant threat and challenge and have it be also so distant from our actual, tangible reality right now.
Sarah 11:52
So all that to say that we are we are trying to both figure out how to hold the complexity of of of that reality and help our nervous systems relate to what they're engaging with. And if calm isn't the goal, sometimes what I say, one of the goals you might think about is coherence. Like what I mean by that is that the response that the body has, the biochemical nervous system response that the body shows up with, is the appropriate amount for the situation at hand. I it like the body's giving you the activation that you need to respond in the in the situation, not that it's staying calm when there's a stressful situation around but when there is a stressful situation, it gives you the mobilization energy, the cortisol and adrenaline and the energy in your body to go and respond to that, to that stressor, so also that it's not going to, like, overreact and in a moderately stressful situation is it hopefully doesn't dump, like, it whole, a whole bunch of those stress chemicals in so we're like learning how to right size our responses here, maybe even before you get to the right sized response, which is, again, this is physiological, so the work of helping your nervous system shift away from either it's under responding or over responding is that's like slow, body based somatic work to help, like, untangle the patterns that it might have developed over time in your life. So far, very possible and very worthwhile. And in the meantime, one of the early skills is to recognize, to have be able to keep enough self awareness online so that when the when you are over or under reacting, you're you're noticing it. So we're not just like so much in the swept away in the experience that our body's having, that that we're reading like what the body is telling us is as actual reality, like sometimes our body responses are, I mean, they're always valid And they're always really important to listen to and tend to. And also sometimes they are not only reacting to the moment, sometimes they're also reacting to the moment, plus the whole history of moments that you're you've had over your lifetime that are somewhat similar. To that. So you know, that's where that over or under response often comes from.
Sarah 15:16
So if you're in an intense time, which, in some ways we all are, I mean, waves, hands around like there's a lot of intensity going on inside of political systems, and then we have our own individual life dramas and crises and chaos that are also playing out and continue to play out inside of these big systems doing what they are doing right now. So if you're in an intense time and you're feeling activated, that makes sense, that's coherent, that is valid and important, we those body responses are there for a reason, that fight response is what helps keep you safe. The flight response is what helps you get out of bad situation and hopefully not go back. You know the these responses are important, necessary, and it's so easy to shame ourselves for experiencing them when we haven't learned or have been taught how to be with them in a way that is also tethered to safety and presence and and support, and so the body can learn how to like Be with the intensity of those strong feelings, strong sensations, and not be overwhelmed by them, and know that they're that they have a place, and they have value, and they often have important messages for us, and they're here for a Reason, and when they show up, we have to figure out how to be with them. Your anger right now is so valid, your grief and heartbreak, oh my gosh, so important, so valid. I
Sarah 17:26
it, the deep concern that you might be feeling about where this is going, and what it means about where we'll be in down the road. I mean, there's so many unknowns. It's it's really a lot. I mean, yeah, I am right there with you. And, yeah, really working fairly hard here in my own like individual nervous system work, which isn't actually individual at all, because it's often involves calling in support and doing a lot of active work to help my nervous system recognize that it's not alone, both like in this very moment, in attuning to the experience that my body's having right now of being supported really well physically by a very comfortable couch and a cozy blanket. I have a stuffed animal here. I mean, these are tangible ways that I'm often bringing in to help this animal body. Remember that there's intensity going on out there and and there's also support.
Sarah 18:49
And you know, if we're saying that calm isn't the goal, what I am hoping inside of this, these practices of CO regulating and building out this skill set is that inside of intense moments, if we're able to access the feeling of support of we're not alone, connection between the feet and the earth, if you're out and about at a protest. You know, I have a friend who talked about being at a protest earlier. It was maybe last year or something, and she was noticing the way that there were some like plant allies around some trees and and, yeah, I don't know if they were wildflowers or planted flowers, but like, the sense that there were some allies there in plant form was one of the ways that that helped her animal body recognize. That she's not alone inside of this effort that was requiring some activation and mobilization and risk, because that that skill of bringing in support, attuning to support, looking for opportunities to co regulate, even if it is with the more than human world. These plants and animals or or the stuffed animals you know, like these are ways we know we have available to us to access a bit of CO regulation, and that opportunity as the body learns to access that the CO regulation might help the intensity of the moment come down a notch or two. Great. You know, I would, I'm not expecting it to drop down to zero in these moments, because that just wouldn't match the moment. But if there is a little bit of a downshift that is remarkable and really important to notice and be aware of, that's what helps us get the space that we need inside of the nervous system container to be able to like be with what's going on and not be overwhelmed by it. So if we're just experiencing our activation without any sort of support, then often we're filling up and overwhelming our nervous system container with all of this charge, and then we're more likely to be in a an overreactive place, because we have so much of that charge, so maybe we'll, like, say stuff we don't mean, or do stuff that later was like, regrettable, you know, we've all been there, right? Or the other thing that happens is, with all that charge, sometimes it like tips over nervous system capacity, and we move into a freeze state or a shutdown because it's too much for the body to be with and and then too we, you know, super important state. We need those freeze states for survival and also inside of moments where we need mobilization and presence, and if we want to be able to be with the charge that our bodies are navigating, we need to like learn how to support our systems and try to keep ourselves as present as we can with the experience that we're having. And also, you know, I just like I mentioned earlier, it's also like, maybe before we get there, the skill is to notice when I am in an overreactive state or when I'm in a shutdown state. Even that is, like, a really important clue for giving context to what you're experiencing, because the state that you're in informs the way you see the world. So if you some before we gain this awareness, we're just living through our the state that we're in and seeing the world in that way, and that influences so much. Let me think of an example. Okay, I've got one. I was on one of our Brooks Range trips on the we were walking along the base of the mountains on the North Slope, and we had a we had a long ways to go. We had done, like, we had the section of the trip. We had decided we were gonna try to, like, do a pretty long loop, because we wanted to cover as much of this area as we could, and wanted to see as much as we could. But in making that decision, I we were going to have to, like, work pretty hard each of these days. And so this is the first of a multi day loop that we were doing. And I was it was like, maybe it was part of the way through the day. We'd made some ground, but we had a long ways to go. And it was the part of the day that often, for me, gets wobbly, where I'm like, we've done a lot already. I'm tired, and I'm also aware there's, like, so much more to go. And that's intimidating. And often inside of those situations, this is when I was just beginning in this work, my nervous system would go into an overwhelm, collapse place. It's like too, too much to try to keep going, and I'm tired and I, like, would rather not, and so, but we have to keep going so there, so there would be a freeze response, collapse. Apps that came into my system. I'm remembering this, and I'm remembering feeling really sad, overwhelmed, regretful of deciding to do this longer loop. We could have done a shorter loop, you know, but then we came around a corner and there was Yeah. So I'm just like, why are we doing this? This sucks, like I don't want to be here, like I should have picked an easier loop, okay, in that, that kind of collapses, shut down place. And we were continued walking, and we came around a corner and saw like a new view on on a ridge line that we were approaching. And there were these three dots on the ridge line, and it couldn't really tell what it was. You know, it was like as we approached. It was still kind of weird, these three kind of brown lumps. And we got a little bit closer, and they seemed like they were maybe fur, you know, it started to look like this. Seems like, maybe, kind of like animal situation. Maybe there's three, like, I don't know what. Okay, we get a little bit closer, and it looked, started to look more animal like, and we thought, like, there's a potential that there's, like, bears there. Again, couldn't get a very good read on it, but like, for sure, the minute that it's like, okay, there's animals and there's bears, I'm out of that collapse state. And now my instead of being overwhelmed, I'm at now, my attention is fully focused, and I've got some adrenaline in my body, like some energy with focused vision and problem solving, and what are we going to do? And very like clear thinking and motivated. So there's already a nervous system shift there, right? So in this story, what? I can't remember how this ended up happening exactly, but it's but somehow, I don't think we made it. We like made noise, but I think it maybe hurt us. It was a bear. Turns out that the top lump was the bear's head and like its nose, because it was laying on its back on this slope, and the three lumps we were seeing was its head, its belly and its feet. I mean, come on, that's like, so cute. It feels like it's out of a cartoon. You know, it shouldn't be that cartoony. So this bear is laying on its back on the slope, and it's the first movement it does is it picks up its head. So we see its head move, picks it up, it rotates it over, kind of, I don't know if it saw us. If it saw us, it decided we weren't a threat. It like, was like, meh, and turns his head back and lays back down again. It was amazing. It was this is, it was like, far enough away we could tell what was happening, but, but like, weren't really
Sarah 28:21
feeling like it was close enough to feel really nerve wracking at this point, especially because it's like so chilled out and lay like relaxing on its back, sunbathing, basically. And it that movement that the bear had done with its head was so human. It just It looked just like all of us look when we, like, are taking a nap, hear a weird sound, or the alarm goes off, or whatever. You get up with your head. You look around, you're like, meh, turn off the alarm, hit snooze and go right back down. You know, that's exactly what the bear did. I I don't know. Are we not supposed to, like, humanize animals? Probably, I know, like inside of science, that's something you're supposed to avoid. But this was so relatable and and cute and so then, right away, I'm like, delighted. Now. I'm like, smiling. That's hilarious. We're laughing together. We're like, oh my gosh, I I feel you, you know I'd like to do take a nap too. That sounds great. So, so now I've got alertness and also playfulness around so the like, the shot of adrenaline that showed up when it was like, Oh, that's a bear snapped me out of that free state and the delight in seeing this like great situation play out. Now I'm in like, this playful place, and that bear continued to sleep there. I need to verify the ending of this story. Because I can't remember now if it just stayed there sleeping. We were going up a different drainage, so we, like walked basically right past it. I can't remember if it stayed there, if it got up and and moved along at some point. But it was a happy ending. The bear didn't bother us, and we went off on our own way. And I was in such a different state after this bear encounter, I like the freeze, collapse, overwhelm, place shifted to feeling very present, very awake and alert and in like, in love with this area, like that was the coolest bear sighting and and all of a sudden the experience that I'm having, like the miles we had to go, felt so much less overwhelming and way way more doable. And I'm like, glad to be there again. You know, what else are we going to find? Basically a what felt like a like 180 degree flip inside of my mental, emotional place and inside of nervous system work. Now I can see that as a state change from a Freezy, collapsing state to a more alert, awake and activated state. And the way that my perception changed with the state change is what I wanted to speak about here, because it went from feeling like there's no way we're going to do this loop. It's going to be horrible and exhausting. And I like too much to this. Like, okay, this is so cool. Like, there's amazing stuff out here. We can definitely do this. I'm excited to see what's around the next corner. The sense of, like, presence and and availability for what can is is related to the state. So this is all to say that it's a very important foundational nervous system skill to be able to read your states, to get the clues from your body about what is happening inside your nervous system and and from that place, then be able to read your perceptions in a Freezy state. I kind of know now, because I have a pretty Freezy nervous system and it's it's less strong these days than it was when I started working with it, but that kind of overwhelm, collapse thing is very familiar and common, and now I know that when I'm in that place, things feel bigger and more intimidating, and I feel smaller in relationship to them than is accurate. So I know to take my perception with a grain of salt when I'm in that state. So that's the skill of being able to read your states well. And we can't always shift them right away, but we can know to maybe tend to our selves in a in a way that helps care for the state that we're in, and then also to not necessarily take the information that we're Receiving while we're in that state as 100% true. I
Sarah 33:44
Hmm, so inside of an intense time when there's political turmoil and personal life stuff like when there's lots of stressors going on, we will likely be in having some activation inside our own bodies, and it can be really, really helpful to build the skills of sorting out what, what happens inside your nervous system when you go into those states. Do you end often end up in that like, high activation, maybe over like, there's more activation in my body than I need right now, kind of place? Or does that collapse come in where it's like overwhelming and feels like too much? Or sometimes that like a flight response is, is there, which is the like, I gotta, I can't do this. I gotta get be anywhere but here, or like, I'm never engaging with that again. Like, get me out of here.
Sarah 34:57
So those are kind of the default when. When we're when we're learning to interpret what happens with the body inside of activation, activating times, we might have these kind of different directions that the body tends to go to, and building awareness about what yours is is really one foundational place I'd have you start, and then inside of that, recognizing that sometimes we have, like, one major default that that happens in multiple scenarios. But then sometimes we have, sometimes people have different kinds of default responses that happen in so maybe they're like, default toward, say, freeze inside of a work situation, but it's more like a fight response inside of a outdoor recreation situation, or or vice versa. Or maybe there's a way that power and position positionality plays into it too. Like if you're if you're like, often, someone who's pretty like, gets in there and like, likes to advocate and and use your words and problem solve and make things happen when you're around people of your same gender. But if you end up in like, a mixed gender situation, maybe there's, like, a more of a freeze response that comes in, maybe because you've had bad experiences with people of that other gender, you know, like that. These kind of patterns are usually there for a reason. And also maybe they're outdated, so, you know, they might need updating. That's like, kind of a big part of what we're here doing. So one of the pathways that I want to speak really clearly about, toward the untangling of these patterns, especially inside of intense times, is coming into relationship with our body's experience inside of activation and intensity. I spoke about the sum in last episode, when I was talking about the ways that we have been practicing this inside of the ski babes workouts that are somatic focused that I'm teaching now live because inside of that work, we're playing with the physical intensity of an hard interval and uncoupling that from the experience of being feeling unsafe in your body. Can we both be experiencing intensity and know we're safe at the same time? Because intensity does not mean threat. They often, they often overlap, but not always. Stress does not mean threat. Sometimes we just have to really, like, get a work project done. But we're actually really physically safe, but our body might not know that that's like one of the ways that we can most easily start to untangle these over couplings that the body has is figure out how to bring in safety into these more intense moments bring in some co regulation, feeling your feet on the ground, noticing the trees or the plant allies, or maybe it's actually recognizing that there's other people in this fight alongside me, and I care, and they care, and there's Many of us that care so I'm not the only one. We're gonna do like all of our care together can make something happen here? Can things be intense and you also recognize safety cues that are available at the time when I'm working on, like, a work project that feels like it's got some charge to it, that's, that's, this is one of the ways I use this is, is to find ways to help my body notice that my feet are on the ground, even while I'm, Like, working hard at something. Or in this moment, talking about this and feeling the challenge of speaking well to the nuances of the times that we're living in and the way this work can help us. It helps me to feel comfortable and to be supported and to have my stuffies alongside me.
Sarah 39:46
Yeah, so so that like layering on safety, that's going to be one of the places where we're always going to want to start layering and safety and then seeing what it's like to be inside of an activating experience. But I. Are also aware of safety at the same time. Doesn't mean that, like everything's safe, there's probably some some challenge, but we're trying to help our awareness be big enough to notice the challenge and the resource at the same time, and maybe pendulate between the two, maybe notice one and then the other, if not noticing them both together, and then this. This is like super important inside of this conversation, because if calm is not the goal, but instead coherence is and the right sized amount of activation for the situation is the ability to move in to activation right sized and also back out of it as the situation completes. We're what we're not doing here is using that as a way to disengage from the stressors to come out of our activation cycles, come into more comfort or safety or stability or deactivation, and then go, go along with our lives without engaging with the thing that's hard right now, that that's more of like a disassociation kind of thing, like a strategic use of nervous system skills to not actually be present with the moment and just to provide comfort for your for yourself. But that's not what we're here to do. What we're here to do is to use these skills to help our bodies feel safe enough supported, enough access, to access the present moment, awareness of the reality of the situations that we're in, both the good and the bad. So not just the bad, but not just the good, either. These skills help our nervous system container be big enough to hold all of it, and then on the backside of these waves to find the places for intervention to have space for our intuition to come through, for our clarity to come through, and to with that information, decide what it is that needs to be done. What is our work here? What do I have capacity for what is a right sized amount of stretch or a right sized amount of discomfort for me to move into in this situation, because some of these situations are not comfortable, and sometimes building the world that we want requires our discomfort, our action, our skills to grow, which maybe that's uncomfortable, you know, maybe that involves making mistakes or being awkward or weird, or, you know, doing something you've never done before. I have some friends who are calling reps for the first time this week. I'm so proud of them. That's a new and scary thing, if you haven't done it before, and it's actually not a threat. You know, there's there's a stress there, there's activation there, potentially, especially when it's new. But that is not going to actually like cause life threat. You know those those that's like one of the places where learning to differentiate between a perceived stressor and an actual threat is an important place. I have a conversation planned on this for next week, so I'm not going to get too deep into that, but it relates to the outdoor rec conversation. And yeah, there's, there's some good stuff to say around that, but we one of the skills that we're talking about here, inside of moving into things that are new and uncomfortable, is that the body perceives discomfort as a potential threat. So if we're going to ask ourselves to do things that are new and different and challenging, one of the ways to help that not be overwhelming, and something that brings on either these like overreactive stress responses or the freeze responses, where it's too much, is to help our bodies recognize safety cues along the way. Yeah, I'm doing something new and stressful. I'm you. My voice in a way that I haven't before that's not super pleasant or super fun, but look, look around orient like this might be hard, but it's not threatening, but I'm actually safe right now. I'm experiencing the activation of novelty, of being stretched, and that can be okay, that that can be a coherent response. So I wonder if this isn't something that we'll just be more and more practiced at and and need to be able to to be able to show up in the way that the world needs us these days. We need the ability to do things that require some activation, some discomfort. But I don't want to do those things in ways that are just like, just deal with it. Just go be uncomfortable. Like, that's we can also do this in ways that tend to our nervous systems along the way. So it might not be calm, but that might not be a problem. It might be okay that it's not calm, especially as we learn and practice, over time, being with the experience of activation of charge in the body, and learning to befriend it, to learning that it doesn't mean there's a problem that that we're actually okay here, Even if there's some some discomfort along, but it's not the kind of discomfort that's going to take me out. It's like the kind of discomfort I can handle for this temporary period of time, and then I know when it's over, I'll be able to come out of it and get back to the comfort zone, get back onto the couch, bring the stuff used back in, get some co regulation support and and counterbalance that stretchy expansion discomfort time with some relaxation and some physical comfort and some good food and warm tea. You know, the creature comforts are some of how we help anchor ourselves after those stretchy moments, and hopefully then there is some calm after, after the challenge, or after we've gotten ourselves out of the stressor. So there's, there is room for calm, and we want to harness those moments and notice them when they're here, but we don't need to hold on to them like they're the only thing or like they need to be there all the time, and we definitely don't need to judge ourselves when we're having moments that aren't calm but are well matched for the situation at hand. Okay, it's been really fun talking with you about this today. I'm feeling complete for now. I look forward to getting into next week's conversation when it comes around, but until then, I hope you take really good care of yourself. Get some good support, take care of each other and know that you're not alone. Okay, until next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
