090 – Resourced: How to Cultivate Nervous System Resilience

Sarah Tacy [00:00:00]:
Did you know our decision making and ability to connect with others, including our kids, is influenced by the state of our nervous system? When our nervous system feels well resourced, we are more likely to make heart based decisions instead of falling into protective trauma patterning. We will be more likely to connect with loved ones in creative and generative ways because we’ve met the hard emotions in ourselves first. And please hear what I’m saying too is that we can then meet our kids in their wide range of emotions in more fun and generative ways when we have resource ourselves to meet ourselves in these places as well. After feeling like I nearly disappeared postpartum, nervous system resourcing brought me back to life to fully experience joy, build meaningful relationships, strengthen my marriage, and embrace vulnerability. I would love to invite you and or someone you love to resource, a 4 month program designed for women who have navigated matrescence, that transformative threshold of caring for tiny humans, a threshold that can bring immense joy, but also make it challenging to recognize your own existence, let alone your preferences. My dream is to help us become well resourced, alive mothers, because this is the basis of familial and generational healing, but also because feeling embodied and alive is our birthright. The program starts January 6th. But I want to offer this opportunity to you before the holiday season, so you can invest in yourself first.

Sarah Tacy [00:01:46]:
When you sign up by Black Friday, you’ll save $270 The early bird price being 693. Check the link for more details. It would be a total honor to meet you in this journey. Hello. Welcome. I’m Sara Taseke, and this is Threshold Moments, a podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of dating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown, and the pull feels real. Together, we share our grief, laughter, love, and life saving tools.

Sarah Tacy [00:02:31]:
Join us. Hello, and welcome to Threshold Moments. This is so interesting. I have attempted to record this episode on the nervous system at least 5 times. And perhaps because I have 20 years of varied experiences of working with the nervous system for the purpose of transformation and support and healing. It’s hard for me to figure out what to say in one podcast episode, which is why actually over November December, I will be doing multiple parts. Threshold moments generally has on guests that are here to share with you their stories of shedding what no longer works, what no longer fits, and moving into new skins, its death, birth, life cycles of those brave enough to live at the edge of what is known and unknown. It is for the purpose of accompaniment.

Sarah Tacy [00:03:38]:
And so why would I then veer off just a bit to share with you more about the nervous system? In all the episodes, you will most likely hear me using languaging to help orient a story into the maps of the nervous system, of nervous system health, of trauma physiology, of cycles of living. But I thought it would be really great if I gave you consistent nervous system sessions that may be wildly useful when you’re navigating the holiday season that comes up in November, December, the beginning of January, for many people, at least here in the United States. Additionally, I will be leading a 4 month program that will have daily 5 to 10 minute nervous system support, nervous system regulation recordings, along with live information, and q and a, and experiential sessions. So if you are interested in what you hear, and you want to learn more, you can join the wait list that you can be sure to have a spot if it’s something that speaks to you. So although you may have listened to my podcast over the last 2 years, I realized I haven’t really told much about my story. And I am going to tell you first why I think the nervous system is useful. And then, I’m gonna go back and tell you a bit about my story. In the upcoming episodes, we’ll go through piece by piece, through polyvagal theory, through why bringing the body along makes a difference, through small doable pieces, through a few nervous system mats, through the ways we can create conditions to help us through greater levels of activation.

Sarah Tacy [00:05:33]:
And we’ll take small chunks at a time so that it isn’t an overwhelm of information, but pieces that feel digestible. So first, why might the nervous system be of interest to you? The way that I see the nervous system is it means as we’re dealing and working with our life transformations, we move from taking ideas, mental constructs, theories, and we include our body. We look at where we feel those stories in our bodies, how we can resource our bodies As we unwind old stories, as we update into new ways of being. As we work with a nervous system, it’s not unusual that you may expand your capacity more slow, or your desire for fast health, which is very different than sprinting around in a way that feels overwhelming. We expand your capacity possibly for pleasure and for solitude, for adventure and meaningful connection, and authentic boundaries that help you shore up any leaky energy so that you can reinvigorate yourself and your knowing of you. If I were to go back on my timeline, I would say that I grew up being so psyched to make other people happy. I would be curious, is this a trauma response or is this just who I am? I remember sweeping our basement, our house’s foundation, and it was from the 1700. So like real basement, not like finished basement, like, rocks and dirt and still just trying to, like, clean it up or our garage.

Sarah Tacy [00:07:43]:
So my parents would come home and be so psyched or like making them breakfast in bed. I love to, like, help my teachers out, and this was so annoying for my brother. Can you imagine 2nd sibling comes along and was like, mom, dad, what can I do to make you happy? And I’m sure anyone listening who has a background on developmental psychology can, you know, clearly see that there are elements of me looking for belonging through being a good girl, through helping people out and when they are stressed. It is most likely how I got into so much of the work that I’m in. And I loved sports, and I also wanted to do really well in school. And so I joined all the teams and made all of the advanced travel teams and Seacoast United. So it’s like multiple states coming together for 1 team and multiple sports, you know, lacrosse, basketball, soccer, and music, and dance, and and then trying to get the best grades I could while school is not easy for me. And so that meant extra hours studying and less and less time sleeping.

Sarah Tacy [00:09:04]:
And what I found moving into high school was kind of injury after injury. And I throw in a panic attack here where they’re not knowing that that’s what it was. And eventually, one of those injuries was so severe that I couldn’t play through it. I couldn’t be the most tenacious, and I couldn’t feel strong because I played even when the doctor said not to. This was completely debilitating. And everything that I knew, being a good friend, good student, great athlete. I didn’t have access to it anymore. Everything was too painful to sit through a class, to do homework, to lay in a bed that wasn’t my own.

Sarah Tacy [00:09:57]:
So meaning no sleepovers, no being in places that I didn’t have a comfortable reclining position, no playing sports that I had been recruited to universities and colleges for everything felt gone. And here I recognize the mind body condition. I felt my pain, and I felt the pain draining my energy and changing my perspective. And for the first time, I experienced depression and I just realized how close the mind body connection is. And I knew that in my healing, the body needed to come along. And in my journey with my back, I realized that my body was not just there to get me from place A to place B, C, or D. My body is here as a wise friend and ally. And so every time it got injured, it felt to me like it was getting in the way of me getting my work done, of doing the thing I wanted.

Sarah Tacy [00:11:10]:
But in fact, it was saying over and over again, slow down. Less, less, less, less. Our bodies, the way I understand them, don’t have egos to say, your worthiness is dependent on doing more. And so our bodies will often tell us less. And it may be through sickness and it may be through injury less. And as I do nervous system here over 20 years later, I also know that less can still feel like, will I die if I do less? Will I die if I go slower? Will my business survive? Is this possible? Because I was so highly rewarded for doing more. Can anybody connect with that? There’s this place on the nervous system map called the global high intensity activation. And this would mean that we move fast all the time and it feels normal.

Sarah Tacy [00:12:28]:
And if we were to slow down, it would feel like we were going to die. Don’t tell me to take a bath. There’s no room for a bath in my life. Don’t tell me to take a walk. I will sprint or run. I have things to do. This is very much the Girlboss model. This is the hustle culture.

Sarah Tacy [00:12:57]:
It is told, it is how we are told we will succeed and we generally do until our bodies give us the hard stop after they have been whispering. Eventually, it’s nudges and then a yell. I will talk more about this when we get into the body as a no BS GPS in another episode. I may share clips from various episodes where people share their story of their body is saying no more. And so I got into yoga, and it was like the first thing that I was really bad at physically and wanted to keep with. I just could not do the things. I was so tight. And when I would reach and kind of cheat by rounding my back, a teacher would come.

Sarah Tacy [00:14:00]:
And if I’m seated, she’d put me up on extra blankets and lengthen out my lower spine. And now, suddenly, I am just upright at a 90 degrees, getting a full stretch in my hamstrings. And in this class that I’m imagining, I was in 18 and the people in the class were in their sixties seventies, and they could just do things I couldn’t do. And we did the lion’s breath where you stick your tongue out and go, And I was like, this is really good for my ego. This stuff is crazy. This was the beginnings of my mind body spirit integration, my way of finding peace and worthiness and love when my body could not perform. This ended up being my sports psychology when I was able to actually play lacrosse in college, to come back again and again. Why am I here? Am I here to prove something? Am I here for love? And every time we include the body, we give the body a chance to emote, to make sounds, to move.

Sarah Tacy [00:15:17]:
So in current nervous system work, somatic exploration, There are often these times that we say, oh, the body has in it stuck responsive of fight or flight. And so you have opportunities to push into a wall or push into a therapist to finish and complete an activation that your body was unable to do when it did not feel safe enough to push something away, or to run away from something, or to yell and use your voice. And so nervous system support and somatic experiencing uses modalities to get the body involved in completing incomplete nervous system patterns of the sympathetic modalities. And then alchemical alignment would say, hey. And can we include yin? And can we include free? I won’t go into those details just yet. But I will say that yoga with the twisting and the expansion and the contraction and the breath were a way for me to see that as I move my body and I breathe and I make sounds and there’s music, that things that I could not process mentally would get processed through my body. And when I would learn things, and this will be a separate podcast episode about why we bring the body with us, but when I would learn things or be tempted by the teacher, why are you doing this? Are you doing this for ego or out of love? When I could be with that question in the moment in my body and adjust in the moment in my body. Then when I went into real life off the mat, it wasn’t just a mental construct.

Sarah Tacy [00:17:16]:
I had already practiced it in my body. So on the lacrosse field, when I get so upset with myself over missing a goal, I could feel into it. Am I doing this out of love or to prove something? And what does it feel like to do it out of love? And I would feel the breeze, and I would look at the blade of grass, and I would find my breath, and I would remember what it feels like to do something out of love and to choose again to be here out of love. When we do somatic work and nervous system work, we are in real time including the body in the transformation. Instead of suggesting that we should feel a different way, we learn how to resource ourselves in the moment so that when it happens again, it’s easier to have a new pattern. I built a really beautiful business. I did research and development first for somebody else’s company for two and a half years, 80 hours a week because, hey, I still had that hustle in me. But I was also so sure I’m going to keep with my passion.

Sarah Tacy [00:18:27]:
And I learned so much about training the nervous system to up regulate patterns that we wanted, and the time it took for other patterns to disintegrate. I learned that we can’t learn patterns in a state of fatigue. I learned about repetition and time for feedback and present time. When I left, I had already had my 5 out 100 hours of yoga teacher training. So grateful for that. And I started working with professional athletes because I really thought I understood the mind body connection and the sports psychology. I was the psychology major in world religion minor. But then I found that was 2,008, and the CEOs I was working with who were feeling quite a bit of anxiety when the market broke and their companies were falling apart, where they would have to re release many of their employees and knowing what that would mean for their employees’ lives, that I got to meet them and their nervous systems.

Sarah Tacy [00:19:37]:
And we got to use breath, and we got to use movement, and did not have all the tools that I have now, but it was enough. And then I got to working with people who were told, you will always have this pain, this nerve pain, you have this hip pain, you have this back pain, you have. And we got to imagine into a different future and ask questions. And I was an anatomy geek. I taught anatomy trainings around the world and taught them in multidimensional ways. And I got to see these people’s lives shift. And I got to see these yoga teachers who are taking these trainings feel even more empowered to work with a diverse group of people. Becoming a mother was the ultimate threshold for me.

Sarah Tacy [00:20:36]:
There were no tools that would prepare me for the level of sleep deprivation that I experienced for 7 years. Also, the loss, the loss of a little one. Nothing could quite prepare me for the grief, or what it really felt like and what it really does to physiology and mindset. If I’m up every 45 minutes and then another night, it’s every 90 minutes and then it’s, you know, every hour, but then you’re up for 3 hours straight. And but it’s night after night after week after week after month after month after year after year. And although no tool by itself would fix us, the exhaustion cut to a point where it’s like, you want me to do a breath practice? I don’t have energy to do a breath practice. That I actually did. I was with alchemical alignment for 5 of those 7 years, and it was a lifeline to have moments to connect in practices that were simple, and to be working with somebody 1 on 1, once a month, or every other week, depending on what was available, to have a lifeline, to have a stable other when we go through periods of instability.

Sarah Tacy [00:22:11]:
It is guaranteed in life that we will go through stages of instability and we’re not meant to nail it. This is a hard one for me to get that it wasn’t meant to nail it. I could look for the lessons of really getting to understand how people feel when they say they’re exhausted and their resources are slim when people talk to me about different depths of their despair. But what is really helpful for me to know is that there are lifelines and we can find that in stable others, although everybody only has limited resources at points. So it will not be the same, stable, other, most likely for the whole way through. And finding resources like the trees and the land and simple things like sensations of the sight of a candle, certain textures, the feeling of lying in bed, we start to look for these little resources. One quote that I love from Jerry Mueller is that stress is when we have more demands than resources. So this nervous system work and the series that will be coming up and the course that I will be leading will largely be about finding resources that are other than or separate from needing to have more finances.

Sarah Tacy [00:23:56]:
Because one great resource would be possibly having a babysitter or someone to cook for you or someone to mow your lawn. And some of those things aren’t available. The other thing I will say, and this is actually the part. Now I can feel like the excitement coming it’s like yeah. That’s coming online. Thank you. The excitement comes is that as my resources started coming back, I’m like, oh, yeah. And then I had someone avoiding my lawn, and then I had some nanny help, And then I had some help with cooking.

Sarah Tacy [00:24:29]:
My husband loves to cook too. As these resources started coming back on and I started getting a little more sleep, I realized that life is also not just about resourcing yourself so that you can be okay, so that you can be neutral. Nervous system healing is not to neutralize or dull life, but to open up the opportunity to ask bigger questions. Show me a life that has pleasure. What do I even like? We start tapping into the reticular activating system. What do I even like? Show me. And for me, adventure started coming in and coming back to playing with my edge at the known and the unknown, and becoming parts of healthy friend circles, and relational repair that has brought more joy and more connection and more safety and more risk. So as we go through these sessions together, let me say that it is my greatest desire that that part of the embodiment of spirit, that that part where we are resourcing ourselves so that we may come alive and experience the range of life, not to just be good at life.

Sarah Tacy [00:26:03]:
Part of life is messy when we’re playing with the unknown and when we start playing in areas that we’re not highly skilled in. Thank you so much for listening in. I look forward to this series with you. Please reach out via my website, saratasey.com. If you have any questions or like, oh, please touch on this topic, then I would love to respond to what it is you’re interested in hearing more about. And then, also, there’s a link for the wait list of people who are like, heck yes, small doable pieces of nervous system support daily, which you have so much choice as to whether you do it daily or not with live experiential sessions and Q and A? Heck yeah. It begins January 6th. Don’t wait.

Sarah Tacy [00:27:05]:
Invest in yourself today before the holidays. The price is $693 which is a $270 discount through Black Friday. Join now, if this speaks to your heart, if this speaks to your deepest desires but what you want to move into in this next phase of your life. Until next time.