Hello lovelies,
Last week due to client needs I found myself leaning more into the trauma therapist side of my work than the yoga teaching side of it.
The part of me that listens for what’s underneath the words.
That understands nervous systems, survival patterns, and the discreet intelligence of the human body.
And it reminded me how I got here in the first place.
I spent years believing uncomfortable feelings were a problem to solve.
Anxiety? Fix it.
Sadness? Fix it.
Fear? Fix it.
A physical sensation in my body? Definitely fix it.
What I couldn't understand was why I seemed to spend so much of my life trying to manage, improve, control, basically - figure myself out.
Part of the answer lies in how I grew up.
My childhood was loud, chaotic, and wildly unpredictable.
There was inconsistency. There was violence. Lots of moments that felt unsafe, and plenty mixed messages.
When a nervous system develops in an environment like that, it learns to stay alert and continuously scan. It learns that safety can disappear without warning.
And when you're living in that kind of activation, you don't spend much time getting curious about your feelings. You're just there surviving them. And in my case, having a childhood.
In many ways, that survival intelligence later shaped my path. It’s also what eventually guided me into the field of somatic work. Thus, a trauma therapist was born - not from theory, but from lived experience and a deep familiarity with what it feels like to try to find safety inside a dysregulated system.
For years, my nervous system operated at a level of intensity that felt normal to me.
I didn't know there was another way to feel.
Then I found healing work.
Somatic practices. Yoga. Breathwork. Recovery. Therapy.
Years of learning how to help my body recognize safety.
I thought that once I regulated my nervous system, I would finally arrive.
Peace would be mine!
But no, instead
The feelings got louder.
Not because they increased, but because I could finally hear them.
When your nervous system has spent years operating at a ten, sadness can feel like background noise.
Fear gets buried under hypervigilance.
Grief gets swallowed by busyness.
Loneliness hides beneath constant motion.
But when your body begins to settle, and when you begin to feel safe, those emotions don't disappear.
They introduce themselves.
Younger me was not prepared for that part.
It was almost easier living at a ten.
At least I knew how to navigate chaos.
What I didn't know how to navigate was a regulated nervous system that suddenly experienced anxiety.
Or sadness, disappointment, or uncertainty.
Without all the noise, those feelings felt enormous.
I found myself wanting to fix them.
Because surely if I was “healed,” I wouldn't feel this way anymore.
Which then brought me back to my yogic path, and the knowing that peace (or healing) isn't found by avoiding difficult emotions.
It's found in our willingness to remain present with them.
Peace doesn't come from finally fixing yourself.
It comes from ending the war with yourself.
And if I could share one thing with my community, it would be this:
Nothing inside you is asking to be repaired. It is asking to be met.
Because my friends, the work was never to fix yourself.
It was to stop abandoning yourself.
You are not something to fix - you are someone to come home to.