Today I am grateful for the support of friends.  We gathered together to celebrate a friendsgiving and my husband’s 40^th birthday this weekend.  It was wonderful to see people show up and celebrate and have a good time.  It was great to see people connect as well.  My family met some of my friends for the first time and it was great to see them connect.  Some of our friends met other friends for the first time and they got along really well also.  It’s a beautiful thing to see people connect with each other.  I used to get nervous about letting friends connect with friends because I was scared of being left out but it was a nice reminder to see that connection is expansive as well.

Today I am grateful for courage.  There’s a lot of change happening in my life on the professional and personal front.  It has been scary because it’s a reminder how much is out of my control.  It really takes a lot to let go and trust that everything will fall into place especially when it feels like everything is falling apart.  In spite of that type of fear, it has been nice to remember what it means to step up and that no matter what happens, I’m capable.  Even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment, I have always gotten through whatever was thrown my way.  Sometimes we just have to have a little courage to step forward and a little faith that we will be fine on the other side.

Today I am grateful for decisions.  I had two references to decisions this past week and it helped put things in perspective—and to have some courage.  The lives we live are a direct result of the decisions we make.  I made the choice to wait a few things out on the professional front but that has led to a different result than I anticipated.  The situation has taken a turn so to speak, so now a different decision needs to be made.  At first it felt like I was being swept along and carried for someone else’s ride, but sometimes there are things that come out of left field and shift our perception or explain what was actually happening.  That new understanding makes it even easier to make another decision.  The ability to decide puts us firmly in control of what we can control in our lives.  We can always adjust the sails to get where we need to go.

Today I am grateful for time.  As I type this it’s snowing.  I feel like this entire second half of the year has flown by.  We’ve been blessedly busy and surrounded by people and supported.  But that doesn’t change how quickly it seems time has passed.  I’m grateful that the time we have spent together this year has been productive, joyful, fun, and connecting.  I’m grateful to witness the changing of the seasons with as much attentiveness as I have.  I’m grateful to notice the small details in life that keep us moving.  I’m grateful to spend my time with family, friends and loved ones and to experience life together.  Time does indeed move quickly—but we get to choose how we spend it.  I am happy with how we’ve spent our time this year and I’m proud of the decisions we’ve made to move forward. 

Today I am grateful to trust again.  I’ve always wanted to be able to trust people no matter what.  I wanted to feel close enough to someone that I knew they would never betray me and that I had someone to confide in.  I made several wrong choices with people and it burned me and then it took a long time to even find someone that I felt close enough to that I wanted to share with them.  We have been blessed with the gift of finding people who genuinely care and who we connect with.  Sharing things has been challenging but it has also been worth it.  Finding that connection  means the world to me because there are things I didn’t want to carry any longer.  It’s a relief to know that there are people who will help me carry that weight.  Or they will help me put it down.

Today I am grateful for weekend morning chats.  My husband has taken to joining me in my office in the morning on the weekends.  It’s nice to have that little bit of time together before our son wakes up and before we really have to start the day.  It’s been another exercise in connection as we go over whatever is on our minds or planning the day.  We never used to do that, we’d kind of acknowledge each other and then I’d do my work and he would do whatever he needed to do.  Now we get to look each other in the eye and have a conversation.  Intimacy is about more than just physical things—it’s about the emotional and psychological elements of safety and being seen.  I appreciate the time my husband takes to come in my office and share things.  I’ve told him this as well so he knows it’s something productive and supportive to our relationship. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead. 

I’ve been doing some deep work on confidence for myself and there were two references to different percentages that stood out to me.  I mentioned yesterday about the little bit of faith that things will unfold as they are meant to and I came across a quote from Michael Todd talking about only needing 51% faith to move forward.  There is no way for us to know every single thing that will happen in every moment of our lives.  We need to be content to make decisions with the information and experiences we have.  Sometimes it seems crazy to move forward knowing nothing other than we think it will work, but Todd suggests that all we need is enough belief to take that step.  51% faith is still the majority percentage on the belief that we will be taken care of, prayers answered, and have the ability to solve our problems. 

As I think over my life, I’m sorry for so many of the decisions I made when I didn’t have enough faith that I would be able to make it through or that I would be cared for. I regret a lot of those decisions mainly for the loss of what could have been had I done the other thing.  I’m sorry that I didn’t see enough signs in the world to trust that there was something there to pick me up if I fell when I went for it—so I sat on the sidelines.  I’m sorry that I didn’t feel secure enough in who I am that I was worth help, forgiveness, and that I didn’t have to know it all to be worthy of anything.  I had spent so much time in survival and figuring it out on my own that I really didn’t even consider faith an option. I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious setting but I did go to church with my grandmother and while many of the lessons focused on love, it was also a proving/punitive thing.  You do anything out of line or in the vein of being a human and we must seek repentance.  The relationship I had with faith wasn’t healthy.  I’m learning to lean in more and to try and trust again. 

The other percentage I want to talk about is 10%.  In the middle of hearing about this concept of only needing 51% faith to move forward, I came across Jess Eckstrom and her percentage.  She discussed how it isn’t our job to be the expert in everything in our fields.  We aren’t meant to be lightyears ahead of people so they think we are an authority on it.  She says the secret is to be 10% ahead.  If we give ourselves that little edge, we find we have answers waiting for us already and we can still give guidance.  The reason this number stood out to me is because I’ve often equated my worth to what I know.  I thought I had to know EVERYTHING about everything in order to be respected.  This concept of 10% is enough to keep us moving, not from a place of power, but from a place of understanding and learning what’s next.  10% is enough to get us started.  Coupled with 51% faith that we can get through, and those odds are starting to swing in our favor if we muster enough belief in ourselves to give ourselves the edge.  The point is that we don’t need to overwhelm ourselves with perfection.  We just need to give ourselves a little boost.  Any one of us can do that. So what are we waiting for?  Find that faith to get to 10% and move forward. 

You can’t rush your timing, it will happen when it’s our time.  Just a reminder to have patience.  Things have an amazing way of turning out, so often in ways we don’t expect or see coming.  I wanted to add this on the day after Thanksgiving so we could all appreciate ourselves.  Not to be egoic or narcissistic, but I don’t think we appreciate ourselves enough.  We put all of this pressure to achieve certain things by certain times, we hinge our worth on others’ opinions, our monetary/material possessions, and our ability to accomplish everything (burnout).  But we have to look at the purpose of life—as I discussed yesterday it is in the joy of the daily living and appreciating what we have.  That means accepting the season we are in while we are in it and knowing that every season has its time and purpose.  I know patience isn’t easy.  I mean, I am naturally driven to move, and I don’t often understand the need to wait for anything we can have now.  Not to mention we are all so spoiled with near instant access to anything we want.  But when it comes to developing who we are and how we are received and perceived in the world, when it comes to creating a life of meaning and value, we can’t rush that.

Our value comes from the work we do, the impact we have on people’s lives and that can’t be done overnight.  Sometimes it takes people longer to see what we do when it comes to the value of what we offer.  Some never see it the same way—and that is ok.  We need to remember our own worth and appreciate who we are and know that what is meant for us will always find us.  We get in the nasty habit of comparison and think we should be at a certain point because we see other people there.  We can’t compare our timing because we don’t know how long or what they had to go through to get there.  It’s a matter of learning to lean in and enjoy the moment and truly feel what it’s telling us.  All the answers we need are there.  All the pressure falls away.  We aren’t meant to drive ourselves crazy proving who we are: we are meant to simply be who we are.

That’s the last point of timing I want to add here: the sooner we know ourselves and deeply connect with that person, the sooner our path unfolds for us.  Then we stay in the magic as long as we can.  There are absolutely things about this universe and even this planet we still don’t understand, but I am 100% certain there is a reason for all of it.  Having that little bit of faith is enough to make me trust that it’s time to give over and stop trying to make things happen in any other way than they are meant to.  If we think about all the time we try to make things happen, we realize that it’s a waste of energy.  We need to spend our time connecting.  Clearing what doesn’t serve and aligning.  Once we do that, the rest follows naturally.  All we have to do is accept and believe because this world has always made things turn out.  Even if we felt the world was ending, we are still here.  That means we still have purpose.  Breathe, believe, and allow—it will bloom when it’s meant to.  

I take the time every week to share things that I am grateful for.  More often than not I find they are the common, every day occurrences.  The miracles of life and the things that keep us moving on the regular.  It’s the simple things we need, the simple things the soul craves.  Not to say our life isn’t incredibly layered and complex, just that the roots of what we seek are not in anything bigger than love, hope, faith, and purpose.  The purpose of life is joy and remembering the worth in our existence because the fact that we exist and are conscious of it and able to make things out of nothing in this world is a miracle that goes far too underrated.  There are obviously the big things to be grateful for as well, but there are times we need to see how the little things create the big things. It always starts at the beginning. 

There are things I have accomplished this year that I never imagined I would be able to.  There are fears I began releasing that I have carried with me for so many years that I believed they were who I was.  I have created wonderful experiences this year, I have seen that there is joy in so much.  Joy in connection with source, self, and others.  I have taken the leap and set things in motion that I would have waited to be invited to before.  This isn’t about a power play, it’s a reminder of the power of embracing who we are and that we are able to create anything we want in this world.  We are meant to create what we want. 

I am grateful to be alive and to work with this universe and to learn to trust again.  I am grateful for the people I have brought into my life, the love and support that I truly never thought was possible.  I am grateful to give back and to have fun and to be open to experiences.  I am grateful to shed the things that didn’t serve like fear and control (not that they are totally absent, but they come from different places now) and to understand the importance and necessity of allowing.  Of letting life to breathe.  I am grateful to see what comes of doing the work we are meant to do and the endless, beautiful opportunities and abundance that is in this world. 

I am grateful seeing the sunrise and sunset every day, the turning of life, feeling the wind, being outside. I am grateful to take care of myself and my family and learn what loving self really looks like.  I am grateful to break the patterns of perceived selfishness for believing in self and taking care of self.  I am grateful to honor who I am and to understand the roots of where I come from.  I am grateful to forgive the past, the people before me, the things that were done to me, the things I did to myself.  I am grateful to understand what is mine to reconcile from the past and to see the truth of who people are—we sometimes believe just because we are family that things are easy and we get along, but there is massive healing that needs to take place.  I am grateful for that healing and acceptance. 

I am grateful for all of the joy I have brought into my life, to feel good about the choices I make and to let go of insecurity regarding loss and not having enough.  I am grateful, endlessly grateful to my husband and son.  There were many times I literally didn’t think we would make it together—and I mean together in a relationship and quite frankly that we would both be alive if we stayed together.  But I am grateful to have shifted the perspective of what the relationship needed to look like and to have opened up to what is.  I am grateful to move forward together.  I am so blessed with my son and I am forever grateful for the joy I see in him, his curiosity, his exuberance, his joy at living.  I am grateful for his compassion and love and I see so much hope in him.  I am grateful for his constant reminders to be in touch with the childlike side of me.  To remember what it is like to be curious and create without fear or abandon or even logic sometimes.  I am grateful for creativity and health and living. This is what life is about.  The real power of gratitude is understanding the absolute miracle that is life and to live it fully, every day. 

Life has this beautiful, natural flow to it.  When we listen to it and we do what we know we are called to do, it simply IS.  There is nothing to fight, nothing to change, nothing to fix.  We just have to be.  We spend so much time trying to become something when all we need to do is acknowledge and be who we are.  The universe truly does support us.  The universe wants us to thrive because it thrives when we do.  We are meant to cocreate with this existence and make it something more.  I’ve spoken often about the expansiveness of the universe and that means we are ever evolving and growing.  We are meant to create.  There are infinite resources out there—I will say it again: there are infinite resources out there.  We are only lead to believe there is a shortage of anything because the systems that be rely on us thinking we are meant to do and be the same thing.  There is a shortage of resources in that avenue: we aren’t all meant to be the same.  This is where flow comes in—it tells us what we need for US.

We all know what feels right to us.  The energy that consumes us from head to toe, the idea we can’t stop thinking about, the thing that excites us to get our hands on it.  We know what it feels like to be in a state of productive flow where we don’t even notice the time passing.  The truth is all of life can be like that.  Life is meant to be a dance with giving and receiving and producing and consuming and sharing.  Our days are meant to look how we want them to.  We aren’t meant to focus on entire lives focusing on someone else’s dreams.  While a traditional role may help us get by, it isn’t what makes the soul thrive.  We are looking for more than survival.  We are worth more than just getting by.  We are meant to ignite the passion in our soul and share it with the world.  We can only find that if we go with who we are—even when it feels scary or like we won’t be able to see it through.  Even, and especially when, it doesn’t make sense.

There is a joy felt in flow that I wish for everyone.  Everyone should know what this feels like, the ease, the satisfaction of creation, the way time seems to stand still, the way the energy feels like it will never run out, like we can always do more.  When we start living life on all cylinders, that’s when the magic happens and things open for us that are beyond our wildest imaginations.  It’s always funny how sometimes these things happen in the ways we least expect.  The universe has a way of getting us on the right path.  Sometimes the light is just around the corner and all we need to do is keep walking forward.  We always get where we need to be and all we need to do is allow.  There are times it seems scary to be who we are—we feel vulnerable or alone.  Maybe both.  But the more we can shine light on who we are, the more we see we are not alone.  There are many more people waiting to follow our example and become who they are meant to be.  Feel it, step into it and allow ourselves to be who we are meant to be.

I just want to give a brief reminder today: Sometimes folks, the only way to get it done is to do it.  I’ve felt a beautiful surge of creative energy lately and I felt compelled to put my feelers out there for several things to see if something takes hold.  Every once in a while we get crazy ideas—or ideas that seem crazy—and we have no choice but to follow it.  I recently had such an experience and it was something I never would have acted on previously.  I went for another float and a business idea came to me.  I would have normally shied away and not said anything, but something came over me.  The idea would not stop playing in my mind.  This wasn’t like an obsessive fixation—it was just a persistent thought that I needed to do it.  I spoke to one of the employees about it and they gave me a contact and I reached out.  I honestly figured the worst that can happen is no outreach or someone will say no.  I got a reply back and it was a beautiful exchange that is going to lead to a wonderful business relationship. 

I put a few things out there like I said, and as I was doing it, I literally told the universe that whatever is meant to happen will happen.  The things that are meant to take root will take root.  I am actively working on two of them and I am waiting to hear on the third.  Amazing things happen when you put in the work.  Amazing things happen when we take that 20 seconds of insane courage and ask the question or put the information out there.  It doesn’t happen without the action—so just do it.  We all have a message that we can share with the world and we need to believe that what we share can have an impact—because it all does have an impact.  The only way we can do that, however, is to do the work.  Like I said, the only way to get it done is to do it.  There is also a surge of power that comes from making a decision and seeing it through.  We make our lives happen.  Embrace the power of action and belief.  Know that whatever comes our way we are capable of it because we wouldn’t have the idea if it weren’t meant for us. 

These discussions on optimal function wouldn’t be complete without addressing the mind a bit more.  We need ways to address some of the mental causes of our physical manifestations.  I was always intimidated by meditation because my ADHD doesn’t let me focus much on a good day, let alone when I want to try to intentionally slow down my thought process.  I also had this vision that meditation required sitting quietly with absolutely no thought going through my mind.  That’s an impossibility even on a day when I’m focused—I’m not exaggerating when I say I have at least 10 trains of thought going at different speeds in different directions, sometimes on the same track at all times.  Doing this work of finding who I am and becoming a the version of myself that I want to be, who I am meant to be has meant redefining a lot of what I considered normal for myself.  That includes definitions of how to take care of myself.  I knew for a long time that I needed to do something to get in touch with my body and to be able to slow down the thoughts that ran out of control through my mind.  I was recently told that meditation is anything—and that became a game changer for me.

Meditation is a matter of how we connect with ourselves in the present. It doesn’t have to be this imagined state of anything, we just need to be.  Now, anxiety, ADHD, people-pleasing, and any other response that involves reacting to the outside world keeps us as far from “being” anything as we can be.  So “being” ourselves can seem a pretty lofty goal.  That’s why I liked the first part of this new definition: meditation is a matter of how we connect with ourselves in the present.  Even if it’s only for a few seconds, we all have the ability to pause and at least take a deeper breath than what we have.  We all have the ability to stand up from our desks and stretch.  Yes, it’s even those simple moments that are meditative—we’ve felt our body in the present moment and we address the need.  It can be getting up and going for a walk.  It’s listening to the desire to put our bare feet on the ground outside or the desire for a nourishing meal. It can be reading a particular book we’ve been wanting to.  It can be writing a thought as it comes to mind.  The idea that all of these things were meditative took an immense load of pressure off of me.

There needs to be a willingness to see how we can change and a willingness to actually change.  It’s like I said yesterday: it can’t be done on thought alone. Thought and feeling are the impetus but they mean nothing without action and follow through.  Change can be as simple as learning to slow down and connect with self. It can be as grand as altering our entire physical being.  It can be as freeing as stepping up and taking charge of our futures, deciding to become who we want to be.  I mention this because it is important to have a sense of connection and control with the mind because that is the biggest determining factor in how we feel.  The mind sets the tone for what we bring into our lives and what we put out in the world—and they are 100% related.  If we take away anything from these pieces over the last few days it’s this: take the time to connect with self.  It doesn’t have to be with the intention of doing anything other than checking in to see where we are actually at.  To get an honest feeling.  Taking that small step can set things in motion in ways that will impact us forever.  Take the time to simply connect.    

Today I am grateful timing.  I’ve never held in in that I have a difficult relationship with time.  I always feared that time was running out somehow, that I would never have enough.  But I see how in the rush to have more time and fit more in, we deplete the energy we have and we ultimately expending more time than we would have had we just done the thing.  This isn’t about control—thinking things need to be done in a certain way at a certain time is a human control thing, wanting it to go our way.  When we simply align and do, the universe reveals over and over again how easy things can be.  Our relationship with time doesn’t need to be anything other than what it is: living in the moment.  When we live aligned with who we are meant to be, we see that moment extends infinitely.  We can do a lot with infinity as long as we embrace the power of being with joy, peace, and gratitude.  I am grateful to let go and allow.

Today I am grateful for bravery.  I’m working on a large project and I’ve hit a patch where I have decisions to make.  This project is about me and my work, fulfilling my purpose but it involved digging in the trenches of some truly difficult moments in my life, not just my own but the people closest to me.  I think I have some underlying fears about how this will shift people’s perceptions of me.  I know I have fears about how it will shift my relationships.  I also know that for my purposes, I need to share these stories.  I’ve gotten to the point of simply breaking them out and writing them down.  The truth is they happened.  I can’t change that and they had a profound impact on my life and this work is about how those moments change us.  It wouldn’t be my story without sharing all of it.  I’m proud of myself for being able to at least take the first step.

Today I am grateful for guidance.  I wouldn’t have taken the steps forward on sharing that story (albeit in private for now) had I not had a dream.  All of my grandparents are gone and I haven’t had a dream about them in some time.  The other day as I worked through deciding how to move forward with my work, I realized that it was sitting on me.  The energy was heavy and I couldn’t do more in that moment.  That night, I dreamt of 3 of my 4 grandparents.  Grandparents are a symbol of protection.  In this dream we ended up in some sort of basement/warehouse where things were leaking.  I took it to mean that it’s safe to go into the depths, things are leaky anyway.  Maybe getting to the full truth will shift things in a better way.  I will write more about that particular experience this week.

Today I am grateful for joy.  I am proud of myself for shifting and recognizing how much joy there is in the world.  This is a major part of my work regardless, so transitioning to feeling it on the regular is amazing.  It really can be as simple as a mindset shift.  I will be the broken record: I know simple isn’t easy.  But what we focus on is what we attract in our lives and that is 100% truth.  When we look for something we will find it.  So choose to look for joy.  Find it in the smallest of moments because life is made up of that recurring series of small moments.  They go fast.  I am joyful in finding moments to connect with now and appreciate what is.  I am joyful to embrace and bask in love.  I am joyful to take care of myself and understand how good it feels to be honored at the deepest level.  I am joyful to trust myself to follow this path.  I am joyful for everything that has come into my life.  I am joyful for all that is in my life.  I am joyful and open to all that is coming into my life. 

Today I am grateful to embrace who I am.  Part of the joy I feel is from discarding what doesn’t work for me.  I was afraid to do it for a long time because I didn’t know how to survive in the in-between: needing parts of the life I was living all while equally needing the parts that were trying to come in.  I’ve been dealing with an intense bout of bronchitis.  I have honestly felt fine for the most part, but it was lingering.  By the time the second week rolled around, I was at the doctors a second time for a new medicine regimen.  I started to struggle and I knew I needed to take some time off to heal.  Even though I felt mentally fine and even physically sound (except the breathing), I was still not right.  So I took the time.  I found so much of who I am.  The work I did flowed in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.  I was able to achieve so much I wanted to with what felt like no effort.  I cleaned and organized my office—it feels even more magical to me now.  I cleaned and organized my living room and the kitchen.  I feel so much more settled.  And I still had an immense amount of time to write, take short walks, do the laundry. There was not one moment that I wasn’t aligned and happy.  More will come on this as well.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

Gary Brecka discusses optimal body function often (listen to his podcast, The Ultimate Human).  He recently stated he thought 60% to 70% of people are walking around at about 50% of what their true norm should be.  What they feel on a daily basis is what they consider normal or even their best.  Most people don’t know what being optimal feels like.  Brecka further discusses that there are so many simple panels we can run to find and address the minor things that might be missing that keep us from our optimal level.  Once we find those missing pieces and start supplementing with something simple, we often say we feel amazing. In reality, on a chemical level, we are just at baseline—it’s not amazing, we feel normal.  Rather, we feel how we should feel when our bodies are functioning properly.  We live in deficiency for so long that we have accepted sub-performance as normal. This is key in following up on the idea that physical changes aren’t always a cognitive process.   

Now, I want to caveat that everyone’s baseline is a bit different.  We aren’t all meant to be at the exact same level all the time—there are sex, age, monthly, circadian, dietary requirements that will vary for each of us.  The point is that the levels that are explained as normal by our current medical field are often below what they should be.  Also, many of the tests that we need to determine the accurate levels in our system aren’t offered in regular lab panels so what we actually need to look at isn’t tested.  Current medical practice looks at averages and norms across people based on the most common illnesses and they create ranges based on the most typical levels seen in people with these conditions.  The tests don’t take into account the necessary individuality of people’s chemical composition.  For example, I know my TSH falls within accepted ranges but I still show symptoms with my thyroid.  That happens more often than not with a wide variety of illnesses.  The same deficiency or disease can look different in people.  We have to learn to recognize how we feel, what is normal for us, and most importantly, we need to be our own advocates.

I want to wrap this up by saying that the work of feeling better is layered and complex.  Social, interpersonal, spiritual, physical, emotional, environmental, financial, and personal responsibility all impact how we feel—and so much more.  If we choose to undertake any type of journey to improving how we feel and the results we get in life, we need to understand that there will never be one answer.  I strongly feel, however, that most of these things stem from one place: the feeling that something is off or that there is something more out there.  To feel better, we must be prepared to dive into all of these facets of our lives and do the work when we find something that doesn’t align.  These discussions on physical function the last few days are all reminders that feelings and thoughts manifest in the body.  We need to tap into our physical senses more, give up distraction, and do the work.  Most importantly, we need to learn to trust ourselves enough to follow our instincts and our feelings.  We need to trust the guidance we receive from our body and from our intuition.  The better we get at that, the better we feel.  It isn’t about being the best according to someone else or what comes back on paper—it’s about feeling and functioning the best we possibly can. 

I ended yesterday discussing the idea that we need body awareness to recognize when we are in a dysregulated state.  There is a slight misconception that those with anxiety are constantly high energy and unable to focus or that they wander aimlessly.  The truth is there is an entire array of behaviors that accompany anxiety.  Sometimes anxiety looks like hyperfixation on a task or it looks like laying on the couch.  It has nothing to do with focus—it’s making sure we get it perfect.  It has nothing to do with laziness—it’s that we are afraid to move or unsure what to do next.  Sometimes overwhelm manifests in being unable to respond instead of an exaggerated response.  As we address our body’s responses to this type of stimuli, it’s important to know what side we fall on and what our tendencies are.  The bottom line is that nervous system regulation is not a cognitive process.  It isn’t something we can think ourselves into.  That isn’t to say that our thought process isn’t vital to it, but it is to say that we can’t simply force ourselves to think better if we don’t actually feel better.

The beautiful thing about these exercises is that it does start with a thought/feeling that something isn’t quite right or that we want to feel different much like everything we’ve discussed about self-improvement.  They body tells us all the information we need to know about what we really feel.  We can say we are fine all we want to but the body feels and displays what we truly feel inside.  With that being said, when we see the disconnect between thought and feeling, that’s when we can begin the work of regulating the nervous system.  There are different ways we can address this: is there a physical component where we need to move our body more?  Is there a nutritional component where we need to nourish our body properly?  Is it a physical environmental thing with exposure to something we are sensitive to?  Or is it an environmental thing with the type of people around us?  Again, our body tells us exactly what we feel—we often feel the energy in an environment before we even engage with it.  I can’t emphasize enough the importance of being in touch with our bodies for that reason alone.  We have a biological computer/barometer that truly tells us everything we need to know about our health, healing, relationships, purpose, function, etc.  Taking care of that is the single most important thing we can do. Learning to tap into what it’s telling us is the next.

I don’t want people to walk away with the misconception that this is all about control.  Nervous system regulation is about understanding what we feel and how we want to feel so we are better able to function—and hopefully function at the optimal level.  Life is about joy, expression, purpose, and expansion and in order to all of those things we need to be at our best.  Being at our best requires honesty and awareness.  If we aren’t where we need to be, then we need to know how to adjust it.  And we can apply that to anything in our lives.  As I said earlier, we can’t simply force ourselves to feel better if we don’t actually feel better.  The fact that all of our systems are dependent on each other is a greater indicator of why we need to be in touch with ourselves physically.  We need to know our limits, when to push them, when to develop them, and when to respect them.  Managing anxiety isn’t about pretending it doesn’t exist, it’s about understanding how we respond to the world and if any of those responses are necessary.  Allow the work of regulating ourselves to come naturally.  Follow what the body is saying it needs—quite literally get out of the mind and into the body.  That’s when things start to change.