There’s something I’ve been sitting with lately that I can’t stop thinking about.
Healing has become strangely performative.
Track your sleep. Track your symptoms. Track your nervous system. Wake up earlier. Take the supplements. Do the practices. Optimize your morning routine.
And before we know it, what started as support slowly becomes another thing we’re trying to get right. Another quiet pressure sitting on our chest.
I understand why this happens. Many of us came into this work because something inside us genuinely wanted relief: more connection, more peace, more access to ourselves. We wanted to stop feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, disconnected, anxious, numb, reactive. Like we were always holding ourselves together with duct tape and caffeine.
So naturally we begin gathering new skills. And those skills can be beautiful.
But somewhere along the way, healing culture quietly started teaching us that if we just found the right routine, the right protocol, the right therapist, the right morning ritual, the right stack of habits, we would finally arrive.
As if healing is a destination where you become permanently calm. Never activated. Never overwhelmed. Never struggling. Never human.
But the body does not work that way. The nervous system is not a machine that responds best to pressure, perfection, and constant tweaking. It is a living, adaptive, relational system that responds to safety.
And sometimes the most dysregulating thing happening isn’t the anxiety, the fatigue, the shutdown, or the overwhelm. Sometimes it’s the constant attempt to manage ourselves into being okay.
When Healing Quietly Becomes Self-Abandonment
I want to gently name something I’m watching happen more and more.
Nervous system language is being repackaged as something that looks like healing, but sometimes functions like silencing.
Regulate yourself. Calm down. Become less reactive. Get grounded. Be softer. Take a breath.
None of those things are inherently bad. But underneath them can sometimes be an unspoken message: become easier.
Become less disruptive. Less emotional. Less inconvenient. Less…much.
And many people have already spent a lifetime learning how to do exactly that – shrinking to make others comfortable, flattening their aliveness to stay safe. Now healing spaces sometimes accidentally hand us a prettier version of the same thing. Only now we call it regulation.
Your Nervous System Is Not a Product Category
The wellness industry has learned how to monetize nervous system work beautifully.
Nervous system reset. Learn to stay calm. Take this supplement. Hack your vagus nerve. Fix your stress response.
And suddenly something as sacred, complex, and intelligent as your nervous system becomes another problem to solve. Another thing to outsource. Another quiet pressure sitting on your chest.
But your nervous system is not a product category. And you cannot purchase your way into safety.
As a somatic practitioner, I’m not interested in teaching people how to hack themselves into calm. I’m interested in helping people stay.
Stay with sensation. Stay with grief. Stay with fear. Stay with anger.
Stay with yourself.
Because what gets pushed down does not disappear. It simply gets quieter and starts running things from underneath.
Calm Is Not the Goal
Your nervous system was never designed for constant calm. It was designed for response.
For protection. For mobilization. For withdrawal. For connection. For life.
When we reduce regulation down to “stay calm,” we strip away much of its intelligence and call that healing.
But calm isn’t the goal. Capacity is.
The ability to feel activation without becoming overwhelmed by it. The ability to move through anger without abandoning yourself. The ability to feel grief without shutting down. The ability to feel discomfort and stay connected to yourself.
That flexibility is where regulation lives. Not in feeling less, but in being able to feel more without losing yourself in it.
What I Forgot on My Own Healing Journey
For those of you who’ve been around for a while, you may know that I spent much of my thirties healing from a long list of things: Lyme disease, SIBO, heavy metal toxicity, parasites, chronic fatigue, hormonal imbalances. The list goes on.
Because of the nature of what I do, I might have appeared to have it together on the outside. My energy kept moving through life. But underneath it was the constant hum of work in response to fixing something. A body I was always trying to manage back to baseline.
What I didn’t realize until much later was that I had drifted into something I now recognize as functional freeze.
I was checking all the boxes. Doing all the right things. On paper, things looked good. But I wasn’t living. I wasn’t fully here. I was optimizing my way through a life I had quietly stopped inhabiting.
The signs were subtle, but real. I’d turn down an invitation from a friend because staying home felt more responsible – I had to function the next day, after all. Hobbies went on the back burner because the time and energy required to maintain my baseline consumed everything else. I thought I was being disciplined. I thought I was being wise about my limits.
What I was actually doing was shrinking my life to protect my capacity for a moment of aliveness that never quite arrived.
The cruelest part? I knew connection mattered. I knew joy mattered. But in a body that felt perpetually behind, rest always won. Even when I wasn’t truly exhausted anymore, even when my system had more capacity than I was giving it credit for, I kept choosing the safe option.
I had healed enough to function. And I had completely forgotten to live.
At Some Point We Have to Remember to Live
After spending twenty years in the healing arts, this is one of the things I see most often: people get stuck in healing and quietly forget how to live.
Because healing, at its best, teaches us to pay close attention to ourselves…and sometimes that lesson overstays its welcome. Especially in the beginning, there’s a season where we’re learning the language of our bodies for the first time. An awakening happens. And awakening matters.
But eventually something else has to happen.
In the Rhythm of Engagement, we’re moving now into the Increasing phase, and I think it’s worth naming what that actually means. It doesn’t mean increasing productivity, or optimization, or the number of practices we’re doing.
It means increasing life.
Increasing the capacity to stay with joy. Increasing the ability to leave open space in the calendar for spontaneous moments. Increasing the capacity to feel excitement without immediately filling it with another task, another protocol, another way to work on ourselves.
What Awakening asks is that we notice what’s around us: our bodies, our patterns, what’s here. But what Increasing asks is something more demanding: can you stay with it? Can you let the joy actually land? Can you let the sensation of aliveness move through you instead of immediately reaching for something to do with it?
Because I’ve caught myself there too, many times. That quiet assumption underneath it all: when I finally heal enough, then I’ll live.
But what if you’re already further along than you think? What if life isn’t waiting for you at the end of healing? What if life is the thing practicing you right now?
When I work with clients, one of the first things we establish together is the big agreement: Why are we doing this? What actually matters to you? Not to your nervous system in theory – to you, in the life you’re actually living.
Because healing can become its own hamster wheel. The goal was never healing for healing’s sake. The goal is to get clear on what’s important and start removing what’s in the way of us living that. Healing helps clear the path. But you still have to walk down it.
💛 Somatic Reflection
Where in your life are you trying to force yourself into being okay?
And where might life be asking for a little more room instead?
Maybe your body already knows.
