returning to softness
Hello blog 🙂 Today I am writing about slowing down. Returning to softness, and returning to the self… and also my recent fascination with the nervous system.
This past year has been the most exhilarating and magical of my life. I… with no knowledge, awareness, or experience … competed in my first bodybuilding competition. The lifestyle and overall experience has brought me closer to myself and in such a pleasant peaceful way. But the last few weeks, the last month or so… I have been feeling so slower.
I feel like a culmination of years of passion, desire, anger, and drive all manifested into one powerful wave that took me so far. It was like everything… all my dreams, the realities I wanted to manifest… literally everything had aligned. My mind, body, and soul were flowing unified and coherently… and I was being guided clearly and directly to where I was meant to go. It wasn’t just how I wanted to look, it was the mindset I wanted to have, the people I wanted to be accepted by, the lifestyle I desired. And I’m here! After everything. All the energy, all the learning, … I manifested it! And so now, like everything in life, I have been observant of the duality that comes with powerful waves of momentum… which is a calmer and steadier flow. And so what I have been thinking about is this: How I can “return to safety, return to slowness, and calm” in elevated places. How can we make these new manifested realties feel natural and safe for our subconscious?
I have been really fascinated with the nervous system recently, and have been reading a lot about nervous system regulation as it correlates to massive change or influxes of success. Something particularly interesting to me has been reading about how often multi-millionaire or billionaire lottery winners will often after winning immediately spend it all or seemingly find themselves in a worse financial situation then they did previously. One podcast I was listening to was bringing this phenomenon up as it relates to an unregulated nervous system and habit. *Don’t quote me on any of this and I am no doctor*… but the crux of what they were saying was to bring awareness back to your nervous system, to *especially* in times when you have gained momentum, when you are seeing the things you had been working towards manifest in the physical.. to continuously assure your body that it is safe via the nervous system reset/triggering rest and digest.
All this to say… that for these lottery winners… despite physically being in no danger… their nervous systems were in such a state of distressed fight or flight (from never having that amount of money before, not believing they actually had this much money, etc) that to regulate, to assure “safety” to their bodies… they habitually spent all their winnings to return to what was familiar to them. This was so interesting to me, and this is not to say that this phenomenon is directly linked to the nervous system (of course there are many reasons why someone -when aligning with success- would spend it all) but more to say that two things are reciprocally correlated.
We know our subconscious mind runs on programming, on habit… and I think if you want to “keep” or “hold” or “return to safety” in a more evolved place, rather then “returning to safety” in debt (like for these lottery winners for example) then you need to assure safety through conscious nervous system reset in these “elevated” places. What I mean to say is, when something is enforced through habit.. our minds and bodies feel safety in that routine. I think the key to “succeeding” in slowness, in safety, in the “baseline routine of our lives” is making those newly achieved states… a physical level up, a social level up, a financial level up… “safe” by conscious assurance to your mind and body. To assure that: this is calm, this is normal, this place is what I return to.
This safety can be relaxed into physically through nervous system reset like slow and controlled breathing etc, as well as curating simple predictable routine. I know for myself, when my conscious mind feels safely in routine, my subconscious mind and body follow. But on the other hand, a state of safety in elevated places can also be enforced subconsciously through programming. Repeatedly writing, saying, or listening to yourself say “I am safe, I am protected here” etc. It’s like you kind of dually program yourself from both the physical AND subconscious. Anyways, thats what I am circling back to here… returning to calm, to soft, to slow… a relaxed and safe nervous system in an evolved environment. 🙂
I think it’s worth noting from a spiritual perspective how intricate our mind, body, soul connection is. How amazing is it that we can reciprocally use our bodies (through nervous system reset) to signal safety to our minds, and we can also use our minds (through subconscious programming) to signal safety to our bodies. And I like to think the guiding and watchful overseer to both mind and body is our spirit. And also! That in observing your reality from multiple viewpoints … combining the understanding and intelligence from psychology, physiology, philosophy and spirituality … you are able to see, question and create with no bounds, and in an immensely powerful way.
Anyways, thats all for today, thank you for reading!