But they do and it really works

You can see we’ve had some incredibly exciting stuff going on - making a dream come to life for us all. Many of you will have no doubt seen the emails and socials in full flow, and had a good old nosey at what it’s all about? I’m of course talking about Regulate & Restore, Welcome Home to You - the 3-night luxury experiential nervous system reset in Sorrento (early bird ends 23rd Mach so download brochure here for full details).

This email isn’t about that actually; it’s about, once again, recognising through lived experience how nervous system work really does change your whole experience of life (yep, it’s that big)… and why that, right there, is the whole reason Regulate & Restore came from burning desire to share a feeling in the first place, and has now become a reality.

Although it is a little holiday of course, it’s far, far more than that. It’s designed to change how you feel in the whole of your life forever more - and you do that simply by being YOU. A beautiful experiential opportunity for us all to really, truly get to know ourselves, as the person we are right now - inside - not defined by job roles or titles or external validation/markers of success. But instead by allowing ourselves a proper chance to connect back to ourselves, whilst having the most incredible lived experience in the glorious sunshine together.

Soaking it all up, feeling the support of and working with our nervous systems. Feeling that precious connection to our innate survival system that supports us every millisecond of every day, and which is the very thing that allows us to change our whole experience of the rest of our lives…

All off the back of being somewhere completely out of this world—Sorrento - (with like minded gorgeous people - I know who's already coming 😉). Big claims. And I’m right behind them…

So yes. I’m excited. And so it seems are you lot!

But the focus of this week's musings really is this next bit.

Key change

I want to be completely honest with you and let you know that this excitement sits alongside some really tough grown-up life stuff I have going on at the moment too.

I’d never want to be that person who gives the impression life is all shiny and rosy every single day in every single way. That ain’t life. My life is shiny and rosy - I LOVE it. It's a really blummin’ good one I’m creating! But there’s some really hard bits going on that form that whole life picture as well.

In fact, what I’ve come to know over the course of my life thus far, is that it’s only through going through discomfort, facing it head-on and changing what’s no longer creating inner peace for you, disrupting what’s comfortable and familiar, that we create the life that truly makes us feel all those deep feelings of true inner peace, excitement, joy, and fulfilment.

And that means we also have to fully feel, experience, and go through the pain and the hard times too. I actually think the benefits of this are huge, because when you experience these hard times deeply too, this in itself creates the conditions for us to really get to feel and appreciate the great stuff with even more magnitude and gratitude.

Pain and pleasure, grief and happiness, joy and sadness… the two can sit side by side. All at once. And life can be really gorgeous, exciting, and expansive, whilst also slightly scary and turbulent, all at the same time.

How do I know? Because for me, that’s what’s happening right now.

Turns out, you really can feel expanded, positive, joyous, and happier than ever from the inside out… whilst still experiencing pain and tough stuff in parallel.

Now, important to recognise - for you and indeed me - I didn’t used to be able to hold the two together. My nervous system literally didn’t have the capacity to hold it.

When I was living from my ‘survival’ nervous system state (the years of anxiety, not ever feeling I was ‘good enough’ and suffering the lovely panic attacks), my nervous system had, however, brilliantly developed the capacity to hold this - over years of ‘practice.’ That’s what it thought it needed to do for me - to keep me ‘safe.’ It was keeping me in ‘survival.’

Any ‘bad time’ I was going through definitely set the tone for everything else. When you’re living from this survival state, everything you do, believe, think, and see is created through this lens.

Survival = looking for what might go wrong, always on edge, worried, people are bad, you’re not good enough, fear…

But you do not have to live like this - you actually get to choose the lens through which you live. I’m living this choice right now and want you to have these tools too.

Understanding and working with my nervous system has completely changed my whole experience of life in more ways than I could ever have room to write about here. And I see and hear it day after day after day with my clients.

Some of the ways this work has changed things for me:

1. How I am with myself - the way I talk to myself, carry myself, and trust myself. No longer do I need to seek external validation before I act. I still ask advice sometimes, of course, but I can hear the right thing to do for me, because it’s what feels safe in my body.
2. How I see people - their actions, their reactions, their responses. I can see how much of it comes from the state of their nervous system, just like mine - just like all of ours. It’s so interesting!
3. How I respond instead of react - to stress, discomfort, conflict, challenge. I’m human, very much so. I do still have automatic reactions that are far from helpful, but far fewer, and I’m able to quickly recognise what’s going on and know the pathway back to regulation - to safety in my own body, and to calm.
4. The patterns I seemed to follow that I couldn’t break before - ones that were keeping me stuck, not living the life I knew I wanted to live and not living to my full potential. Nervous system work set me free, incrementally, as I move further toward those things**.**
5. How I see the past things I used to hold on to that I no longer need to. The ability to let go of things that aren’t mine to carry. This is HUGE.
6. How I feel joy now - not in tiny moments, but as a deeper, more consistent, more foundational thing. From the inside out - joy and inner peace.
7. My relationships. My ability to truly connect, to build relationships in a way that feels safe, easy, and fulfilling, and know which relationships really make me feel that.
8. How I view success - as a whole life thing. What actually matters, what I’m building, how I approach it in a way that feels good to me - not based on what others say and do. I so want this for you and know you can create this!
9. How I fully experience my emotions - not shutting them down or fearing them, but actually feeling them without being overwhelmed by them. Processing them, healing them, and moving forward in gratitude for them.

Your perspective, your relationships, your choices, your outlook, your ‘luck’… they all shift, in ways you can’t quite put into words until you’ve felt it, lived it, for yourself.

I know because I’m living it. And I guide my clients through it every single day. What a privilege and joy.

It’s quite amazing to think that the life we create really is something we have far more control over than we ever believe possible.

What if, rather than spend our whole lives worrying about ‘what if’… We choose to build the capacity to just be in the moment, thinking about what is?

Right now, while you’re reading this, let’s do it. What ‘is’ right now? Look around you, or close your eyes and feel into it - name five things that are lovely, really lovely, right in this moment.

These things are real.

They are happening right now.

Imagine if we chose to live our lives from this space - from a place of a regulated nervous system that feels safe.

When we learn to regulate our nervous system, when we learn how to actually feel safe in our own bodies, when we understand how this go-go-go, always-got-to-do, mobilised sympathetic nervous system state has come about in the first place - and realise it’s simply there because it was how we learned to cope and survive in the past…

We realise we’re not broken.

We don’t need fixing.

We don’t need to always be on high alert for what might go wrong because… we know we are safe and fine, right here, right now.

We are far nearer to being able to feel the inner peace we truly desire than we ever usually believe.

The only thing any of us has any control over is ourselves - our nervous system and the state we are living from.

And that controls how we experience everything else in our lives.

Nervous system work is gentle. It’s nurturing, giving, and feels very much in flow.

Right in this moment, we are able to show our nervous system that we are safe. How powerful is that?

And when we learn how to really show our bodies we’re safe in the moment, we build incremental capacity for our bodies and nervous system to hold that feeling.

When we go through life feeling safe from the inside out? We’re no longer living in survival. We start living from a place where we see things positively. We feel things deeply. With inner peace. We see opportunities. We feel safe to try things, to connect with people, to fully experience life.

We’re no longer living to survive.

Now? We’re living.

And we really thrive.

If this is something you want for yourself, you know where I am