Ways of being
On rewiring my nervous system, book recommendations & an urgent appeal
Hi friends,
I took a 6 month hiatus from broadcasting/writing in public. Pretty much every area of life has seen a change over the last few months. Change I know is ever ongoing, and my tendency to want to predict and control have really been given a big shake up. I said to a friend the other day, that my art school mentor (yes I started art school!) has asked me to slow down, and she said “when has anyone not been asking you to slow down”. There is nowhere to hide in art.
What’s funny is that having quit the corporate life and set up my own art and coaching practice, I was convinced that I WAS in fact slowing down; and its true that change was happening starting on the outside, but not yet on the inside. What has become evident over the last few months through my art and my physical health is that actually, I never really did slow down at the deep level of my nervous system. I applied the same worker bee mentality to every new endeavour, exhausting myself, and keeping myself in a place of overwhelm.
In truth my nervous system had not yet learnt that it was safe to slow down. In order to stop treating everything I did as a job, and to stop bypassing my own limits, an inner sense of safety has to be established. This is not something our societal structures are set up for.
As it stands it is still a daily struggle to slow down, but one I am slowly learning to create the scaffolding for, scheduling in moments of rest, discerning how to engage with playfulness and stillness and when to create. Receiving a health diagnosis that has clarified years of mystery symptoms, has also distilled the sheer necessity of true and honest acknowledgement of my limits.
This year, I am committed to moving more with intention and care. To letting go of old ways of being that have been keeping me stuck, running on real or imaginary hamster wheels.
I am learning to rewire my nervous system
I have been sewing, repairing, embroidering, napping(!!), experimenting with vegetable dyes, foraging for dyestuff and stones on my daily walks, spending time in the British Library, making gifts by hand, learning to recognise local birds by their song. All things that diffuse a sense of time and bring me back to a sense of place instead. Combined with parts work (Internal Family Systems), EMDR and hypnotherapy, I am confident that new neural pathways are forming with every small moment of un-doing.
I leave you with 9 books that have been fuelling and nourishing me and an appeal to support a beloved creative institution below before you go.
An appeal
Those who have been reading this newsletter will know that it was conceived at Arvon, Lumb Bank. In many ways a lot of the life I am living now started there, a place where after months of recovering from burnout, I felt completely free to imagine what a more creatively fulfilled life would look like. Spending my week in the former home of Ted Hughes, with a handful of other poets, I felt for the first time in years the pull towards the life of an artist. I met my partner there, and it was this place that showed me what I was capable of outside the confines of rigid daily life. I remember the tutor and poet Rebecca Goss even remarked on how I couldn’t stop smiling the whole week.
Arvon is an institution that has run creative workshops for fifty years and each year, over 40 of their courses are with vulnerable groups and schools, from young people who have experienced bullying to adults recovering from an addiction. In order to make their courses more accessible and reach a broader group of folks, they are fundraising to help with expansion.
🙏 Please consider donating to help them reach their final fundraising goal here 🙏
x
sana