Maxine to add / edit intro…
Welcome to Nervous System Notes; Norwich Yoga Festival Part Five.
Yay! We made it to the final part of
‘What I Wish Everyone Knew about their Nervous System’
As always, lets do a brief recap of where we left off in Part Four:
Why signalling safety to your nervous system, via the inputs, matters so very much.
Your nervous system health sits at the centre of the health and vitality of ALL the other systems of your body.
A nervous system stuck in chronic survival, deprioritises all the other systems of the body, All your life force energy is directed to survival.
If I had to sum up what Nervous System regulation really means, in two words, I'd say nervous system regulation is Emotional Regulation, the ability to feel your emotions (all of them, not just your favourites) without overwhelm.
But what does it mean to have the nervous system capacity to feel your emotions? It if were as simple as ‘just feel it bruh’ we'd all be healed by now!
You've probably heard the popular phrase ‘Feel it to Heal it’ It's cute, it's catchy, BUT the problem with the simplification is, you cannot feel an emotion that your nervous system is defended against feeling.
If expressing anger or fear was not acceptable when you were a child, your nervous system learns this. It'll push that emotion down because your nervous system will remember at one point in time expressing that emotion was not safe. Expressing that emotion caused a rupture in connection with your caregivers. As children we cannot survive without our caregivers, so our young nervous system learns what emotions are okay to express and what emotions are not safe to express.
Ruptures with our caregivers are not inherently bad, parenting without rupture is kinda impossible. But if the ruptures (ie; your caregiver getting cross when you express anger for example) do not come with repair, our nervous system becomes defended against feeling those emotions. All these childhood adaptations come along with us into adulthood if we do not tend to our nervous system and let it know that it is safe now to express that emotion.
This impacts our experience, but it also impacts our relationships. As a mother, as a wife, as a sister, an auntie and a nan - if I cannot be with my own grief, my own fear, my own anger, I am going to feel dysregulated and overwhelmed by my children's, my husbands, my grandsons fear or anger.
We can only be with the experiences of other peoples grief, fear, or anger, if we can be with our own experience of grief, of fear, of anger, without overwhelm.
The most precious gift I believe we can offer ourselves, our children, our family, our community, is a regulated nervous system.
And if that's not enough of a reason, research now shows that the more capacity you have to feel, experience and digest your emotions, the greater your cognitive capacity.
Cognition is improved when you have the nervous system capacity to sit with your grief, your fear, your anger, whatever it is, without overwhelm.
I think world leaders who do not demonstrate the ability to be with emotion without overwhelm, are evidence of the connection between emotional capacity and cognitive capacity. The world leaders who are making questionable decisions, are supplying plentiful evidence of that!
I hope you've enjoyed this series and learning about your nervous system. I'd love to hear any reflections from you if you'd like to share - hit reply and tell me about your experience of reading this series.
Maxine to add / edit ending and sign off here
