Light Your Inner Fire Campaign: Part III
We have been discussing the topic of “the gap” (that place where there is a space between things, thoughts & events) for many days now, and the magic that is held inside the gap is this: they are quite literally where our opportunities for nervous system regulation live.
If you don’t know what that means, but are dying to find out, read on!If you don’t know what that means, let’s have a quickie overview of the impact of stress on the body’s nervous system.
In a simplistic way our body’s central nervous system is your body’s command center that takes controls all body functions and makes sense of all that we do, feel, and experience. EVERYDAY AND EVERY MOMENT.
The autonomic nervous system has two pathways, sympathetic and parasympathetic. When a stimulus comes in, the nervous system asks, “are you friend or foe?” It can be a tree branch moving in the corner of your eye, a dog barking, meeting someone new, reading the news or getting ready to fly for the first time. Absolutely everything that happens to us and around us is being noted and sorted into these 2 categories, “all is well” or “run for your life.” When we determine that all is well, we are relaxed and living in the parasympathetic zone of our nervous system. Here we can rest, repair and digest. When we feel we are unsafe and need to run for our lives, we are living in our sympathetic response zone.
For many of us, we live in a near constant state of sympathetic dysregulation. And its not that our lives are literally threatened, but it’s that thing called STRESS that makes our bodies believe we are under threat of life and limb. And this stressed out, freaked out, overwhelmed state is called, dysregulation. You may be on the edge of breakdown all the time, unable to sleep through the night—tired all the time, irritable, tense, unable to make simple decisions.
So the gap, or the mindful moment of pause, is your chance to reconnect, drop into stillness, do whatever it is you do technique wise, to self-soothe and find CALM. This calm or reconnection brings the nervous system into a state called regulation. Yep you guessed it, this regulated state of harmony, is what we are aiming for. But because I have given up the drive for perfection, acknowledging it doesn’t actually exist in real life, what most of us can work to cultivate, one gap at a time, is to increase the zone of “I’ve got this” where we can skillfully respond to stress and volley between dysregulation & regulation.
Why do we need to be concerned with nervous system regulation and finding moments to do so through our “magical gaps?” Because in the long run being in a dysregulated body and nervous system, where stress and overwhelm rule the day, wears down the machine that we call “me” and disease of all kinds of chronicity set in.
Yes some stress is good and we could do an entire campaign on stress physiology, but suffice it to say, our relationship to stress and our stress response system is one of the most important health factors you have control over in your life. Which is why, my friends, I call the gap, MAGIC. Because in this space we have the opportunity to find calm, to return the nervous system to rest mode—even if for a minute. The most important thing is feeling and noticing in your own system, what it feels like to be “stressed or dysregulated and conversely what it feels like to be relaxed or regulated. Getting familiar with your own switch IS MAGIC.
Over time turning in here will inform you about everything you do, how you do it, at what pace, and more. If you continue to invest in the study of your own nervous system now—the pay off will be literally life giving.
All of this is to say, we don’t know what inner fire needs lighting, this season, if we don’t know what’s happening—on the inside. Let’s gap together and find stillness.
Take 2-min here, put everything down and follow your breath. Let the life that is inside you be felt, seen and heard. (audio version has mini mindfulness practice here!)