As the world rushes to achieve their new year’s resolutions, I am here to speak to a different, more intimate kind of truth that I see again and again: Even the most conscious, competent, caring women feel completely exhausted and depleted.
And it’s not because there’s something wrong with them or they’re doing anything wrong.
You see, when the body is in chaos, we cannot reason with it.
Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model shows us why it doesn’t work. To start with, let’s talk about the physicality of the brain – it is built from the bottom up:
first to be formed is the survival brain (brainstem),
then the emotional/relational brain (limbic system),
then the thinking brain (cortex).
When you (or your child) is distressed, blood flow shifts toward the lower, faster survival circuits, and the reasoning part of the brain goes offline until the person feels safe again.
Dr. Perry has reversed this and created a three steps process of engaging that he defines as : regulate, relate, then reason.
You can only regulate when you feel safe. Otherwise, “reason” or “will” are really just pressure. And pressure never feels safe. Yet we keep trying to impose will on top of internal pressure. It doesn’t work.
So if you want insight to land, you have to have an open, receptive body.
The body, the one thing all human beings have in common, is not just a machine that eats, poops and senses. It is a biological processor of information distributed through energy – whether that is thoughts, emotions, or food – it’s all energy.
And energy needs to be in flow. For that, it needs to move. And in order to move, it needs Space.
How much space do you have in your body right now? Do you feel open and receptive? Or are you bracing and feeling like caving in?
Its sole purpose for existing is to allow the Life Force that you are to have a visceralexperience. Without the body, we wouldn’t know what it is like to birth, love, or enjoy hot chocolate with marshmallows.
But what happens when we forget that our body takes our instruction from us is we forget to create space for the body to do its job. So we forget to breathe and brace instead. How to know if you’re bracing: you’re in some sort of pain.
When we forget the power of the body we pay a steep price.
Despite the work that we do, the books that we read, the courses that we take, the therapists that we talk to, the gurus whose ‘wisdom’ we follow, and the yoga that we religiously commit to become yet another way to beat ourselves up.
“I should know better, why can’t I live it?!” becomes a daily frustration that we battle with. So we turn ourselves inside out trying to “figure it out”. Enter: struggle. Call it anxiety, or depression, or a low-hum agitation, but the point is: well read, well intended, deeply caring women are struggling inside their skin despite knowing better.
If you’ve been following my work for some time, you already know: I don’t sugarcoat the human experience because that’s what makes it rot.
And at the root of our problems lives a deep, unnamed insecurity that drives the bus of our existence. If we don’t become intentional about rooting it out – and no, this is not easy, painless, or “positive” – we are trapped within its limitations. That’s the thing with undercurrents – they live under the noticeable current and they pull you under. So learning to navigate your specific undercurrents is essential to improving the quality of your life.
Otherwise, you will seek to keep adding more insight to an already overloaded nervous system that is looking for integration, not information.
So this year, instead of piling on new goals or shoulds, I invite you to make a different kind of commitment, one where you let go of carrying the weight alone – it was never the path to healing.
This year, I invite you to take a quiet, internal pledge: I give myself permission to not carry the burden alone.
The moment you choose that, the burden lightens and so does your life.
In a few days, I’ll be inviting you to my membership – an intentional space for integration, when you’re ready to stop doing it all alone.
I’ll share more soon.
And if you want to hear more right now — I’m speaking at the Whole Body Health summit, a free audio event starting January 7. I’ll be talking about “The Body Never Lies: Recognizing trauma’s physical fingerprints”, and how this invisible weight we carry isn’t just in our heads — it’s in our bodies. You can sign up here to listen.
