Your Nervous System is Not a Machine
Why Regulation Should Never Replace Resistance
We talk a lot about “nervous system regulation” these days.
The language has been lifted from somatic psychology, filtered through wellness culture, and offered back to us as a kind of “emotional hygiene.”
Breathe deeply.
Ground yourself.
Feel your feet on the earth.
These are beautiful practices, but often the promise is left unspoken: regulate yourself out of pain.
Stay calm enough, long enough, and you can meet every discomfort, every grief, every injustice with a deep inhale and a steady exhale.
This is not what somatics was meant to do.
This is not its original purpose.
Somatic work is not about making us better at enduring the unendurable.
It is not about creating bodies that can be placid in the face of cruelty.
It is about coming back into our bodies so that we can feel deeply enough to know when something is intolerable.
So that we can reclaim the instinct to say, “no.”
To push back.
To protect what matters.
I remember sitting in a somatic workshop once. At the end of the session, a participant raised their hand and said, “but we haven’t actually solved anything. We just made ourselves feel better. What about the world?”
The question hung in the air.
I wanted to push back, to say that maybe this work, this return to our own felt sense, is part of the solution.
Because are we not part of the world?
Is regulating ourselves not part of sustaining the longevity and power of our resistance?
Are we not more effective when we are more present?
What are you thinking about after reading this? Feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear.
The heart of somatic work as resistance is not about numbing the body or quieting the mind so that we can tolerate injustice.
It is about becoming awake enough, and embodied enough, to see the water we are swimming in and act on that recognition.
In martial arts, the body is trained not just to strike, but to sense, to respond, to flow around obstacles rather than crash against them.
In the natural world, animals regulate not to become docile, but to sharpen their senses for the moment when resistance is required.
…
A healthy nervous system is not one that feels no fear or anger.
It is one that feels fear and anger fully and uses them wisely.
It is not a system that can endure anything, but one that knows when to resist, when to refuse, and when to rise up.
What if our nervous systems could teach us to respond to the world as forests respond to fire?
Not with passive endurance, but with fierce aliveness. With the capacity to regenerate, to send out seeds in the heat. To refuse extinction.
The world does not need more people who can quietly bear the unbearable.
It needs nervous systems capable of staying present not only to pain, but to possibility.
It needs bodies that can recognize when survival is no longer enough, and choose aliveness instead.
The real promise of somatic work is not that we become endlessly calm.
It is that we become awake enough to refuse anything that asks us to abandon ourselves, or the earth we all share.
Want to share your thoughts? I’d genuinely love to hear them. This space is a conversation, not just a monologue. Hit 'reply' or send me a message below.
I wonder if another component of this--feeling one's emotions and reacting appropriately to or with them--is time management. So many of us are readers or viewers of material on how to manage our time better because we seem to be going 24/7 and still falling behind. Rather than a new system for managing our time, though, I wonder if we need to cut back on what we're trying to do. Rather than trying to find a way to cram everything in, perhaps we need to figure out what to let go of, even if it's something we enjoy. It's hard to really be present, even at a wonderful activity or event, if you're tired or feeling something else is being neglected.
Yes!!! This is powerful 💪... It's a coming home to our bodies & our truth and then acting on it like it matters right! 💚