Business and The Nervous System

The journey of the nervous system in sacred business and sacred creation is a journey of cultivating safety in the body.

It's a journey of grounding into regulated safety, to be able to expand and grow into your full potential, your fullness. It's a journey of healing and connecting deeply to your own nervous system through the current capacity you have and moving through that in a sensory and somatic way.

Often on the journey of sacred business and sacred creation artistry, we find ourselves arriving at certain areas of business: creating, marketing, selling, messaging, expressing, voicing, sharing, and offerings. These are all essential and very potent parts of the journey of entrepreneurship.

You create a product and offer a service; you market it, and you sell it. This offer is rooted and grounded in the message that you and your brand are here to offer the world.

All of that is you sharing yourself.

Sharing something that you are connected to, that you're passionate about, that you believe in and stand for. Something that you've created is sure to mean something very deep in your heart and soul.

On paper, all those areas in those realms of sacred business are potentially easeful…. but what lies beneath them in your body and in your nervous system are the beliefs and stories that have been conceived, imprinted, and locked into your nervous system throughout your life experience.

These stories are held into your body and imprint falsely conceived narratives.

• I am not good enough

• What I have to say is not important

• I am not creative

• No one will buy my product or service.

This story lives as this woven story in the tapestry of your body.

The selling, marketing, and messaging are about sharing and selling an offer that you have created. But it goes deeper than that.

It is sharing who you are.

For some, we have been conditioned, traumatised, violated, and suppressed throughout childhood and family systems as well as our education system and the collective system as a whole.

‘Don’t be you’ ‘Be somebody else’

‘Be like this, not like you’.

If you speak more like this, or more like that then you will be accepted.

These subliminal messages are woven into every part of our existence.

Women step into this journey with me and say, ‘I've got all of these great ideas, I've got it all there, but I'm terrified to press the share button on my Instagram’ or ‘I've written the post, I've got the picture, but I'm absolutely terrified’.

Does this resonate? 

I hear you absolutely, tell me how old that part of you is that's scared.

What happened to her? What is the belief, what's the deepest fear that that part of you holds around sharing and sending your message to the world? What's the worst thing she believes could happen? Can we explore what's the greatest thing that could happen?

What can happen is that we go into past historical experiences that are planted, rooted, and embedded in the body and the nervous system.

Past fears or worries, pains, traumas from historical moments in our lives, a need, or a want to be seen, to be more visible, to be noticed, have been met with a historic traumatic or painful experience.

Maybe we've been shut down, denied, rejected, disowned, disapproved, and told that we can't be like that.

So, when we arrive at those moments in the present-day experience, our body is still existing in the history of the moment.

It's never about present-day you, sending out an email or sharing a photograph of yourself or your work or your art on a social media platform. It's about that younger part of you. 

That part is locked in and trapped inside the nervous system as a responsive, reactive energy. 

So, in childhood when we have wanted to express ourselves, and our true selves to the world, and it's been met with contraction, discomfort, pain, disconnect, and emotional neglect, we often create a story that is not safe for us to be ourselves. 

It isn't safe for you to be you, to express yourself, to share yourself with the world, to voice your opinions and what matters to you. The story deepens into not only is it not okay or safe or good or right to be you, but you need to be something else.

There's layer upon layer of story and narratives woven, in and in.

So, the nervous system has a few expressions that you may already know (Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn). The nervous system responds within the business, sacred business, creativity, and creation.

If you are in nervous system dysregulation fight response, you may be experiencing self-judgment and pushing beyond your own energetic capacity. You may be pushing beyond your own emotional capacity pushing even when the body is saying no. You may be seeing others as competition and comparing yourself to others. We are in survival when we are in fight mode.

Flight is the energy of escaping. Probably feeling like you need to escape or disassociate from your body and your feelings.

It may be in those times when you share in your business, your creativity, and your offerings with the world, they are uncomfortable feelings, so you disassociate from them. Maybe you still share anyway, but there's a disassociation or a complete disconnect from the reality of the moment leaving the body.

There could be a journey or an expression within the flight response in business. Over committing and then just needing to run away, hide, and pack everything up. You may even consider moving countries. It's that run as fast as you can because what's happening in my business is telling me I'm in danger. So, I need to flight.

Another expression of this energy, the flight response, is not completing tasks or deadlines. So, feeling unable to complete tasks because that is in the energy of committing. We can then move into freeze.  

Freeze response in creation and business is potentially an energy of hiding, staying in poor visibility, and not taking the next aligned steps to grow or expand your visibility in the world.

You may appear to be quite rigid or stuck in your approach to your business. No fluidity to the changes in the landscape of social media, emails, community, your own shifts, and changes that happen within.

You may be unable to flow with that creative pulse that comes and possibly feel trapped or stuck in your body or in your experience. You may also be indecisive, unable to make decisions, you may blank out or just go completely numb and you're frozen in time and again.

Wanting to please others or be liked is often what we see in a fawn response. You could be downplaying your power and creative expansion. You may often keep yourself quiet, and hidden and not use your voice. You may be lacking in directing or passive non-action (actionless action or effortless action). 

Wherever this could potentially be happening in the many facets of your business and your creations, it's never about the present-day moment.

It's about an old experience resurfacing.

An old trauma or feeling have you frozen in time, locked, and trapped. So, when you experience these feelings, threats, or potential danger – you are on high alert.

The journey of your business, and the nervous system first is about journeying into embodying the present day.

You. In these moments. In your expression. In your creativity.

If you recognize that you are in a dysregulated nervous system state of expression, the first key piece to identify is:

·       ‘Am I in the present-day moment?’

·       ‘Is this experience in my body?’

·       ‘Am I experiencing a past historical moment?’

This first stage of differentiation is crucial for us to bring some space between what is true now and what was true then. The space offers an understanding, it may not be true now, but most likely it isn't true in this present-day moment. It was true when I was three or five or seven or ten.

The experience I had was very true. The stories that I made up around it are possibly not true, but we can explore them. This is the journey that I guide so many women on.

There are many different practices that I share within my containers with women in how we are able to embody through practices and embodied alchemy release the fight, the flight, the freeze, and the fawn from the nervous system.

In doing so, we arrive back at a regulated, grounded, soothed, and nurtured place inside of ourselves.

It is from that place that you are better able to make a decision, plan and move forward.

It's in that place that you begin to build trust in your body and her wisdom. It's from that place that you begin to live and express from the present-day moment.

Now, this journey of reforming and recoding the nervous system can often feel uncomfortable. We are meeting very deep edges as we reform old beliefs and patterns and narratives into new energies.

Often, these experiences or the stories that we find within, do not begin with us. They began many, many nervous systems ago, generations ago. They are threads that have been somehow woven through the family system, through the constellation of the family.

This is very deep, powerful work, but so worth the transformation that arrives in that rooted and regulated state.

With deep love,

Rebecca x