Part II- The Hidden Battle: Calming the Nervous System Beyond Spiritual Idealism
- thereawakenednurse
- Jun 3
- 8 min read
A lot of people talk about spiritual awakening like it’s this beautiful, serene thing.
"Find your authentic self."
"Claim your abundance."
"Raise your vibration."
But those dreamy, ethereal posts online—the ones that promise peace and purpose if you just “trust the process” or “manifest better”—they leave something out.
A big part. Maybe the most important part.
It isn’t easy.
It isn’t happy.
It isn’t supposed to be.
Shedding lifelong—and often generational—conditioning feels like a kind of death. It’s disorienting. It’s exhausting. It’s tender and brutal at the same time.
And no one tells you this: The very systems designed to protect you—your ego and your nervous system—can become the biggest barriers to your growth.
The nervous system, always scanning for safety, often clings to what's familiar… even when what's familiar is toxic. It equates sameness with survival.
The ego, whose job is to protect your identity, can feel like it's under attack when that identity begins to dissolve because, well, it is a control freak. It can respond with fear, resistance, even sabotage. Not because it’s bad, but because it doesn’t yet understand that this death is not the end—it’s the beginning.
But underneath all the chaos—beneath the noise and fear—there’s a deeper current...
At first, I thought nervous system regulation was just about deep breathing, meditation, and soft music. And yes, that is part of it. But lately? It’s me, sitting in absolute stillness while a freight train of emotions barrels through my chest. It’s staring out my skylight, not thinking, not sleeping—just being while my entire system processes lifetimes of unspoken fear and emotion.
It’s silence that feels deafening. It’s grief with no name. It’s fear without a clear source.
And still—I stay.
Because somewhere in that darkness, something begins to shift.
It feels like standing face to face with the boogeyman I’ve been running from since childhood—only to realize he’s made of shadows I forgot to love.
This part? It’s not regression. It’s initiation.
Looking back, I believe this current shift—this deep unraveling and rebuilding—truly began two months ago. Not because of one sudden moment, but because I started working more intentionally with my nervous system.
Not just reading about it. Not just understanding it. But being with it. Listening. Honoring its signals. Learning how to stay with myself in the discomfort.
That changed everything.
Because after you decide to enter the river—after you leave the safety of what you’ve known—the next step isn’t swimming hard toward some new identity. It’s calming your nervous system enough to even let yourself begin. It’s being able to be in the water with the monsters and not lose yourself to them.
It’s learning how to soothe the very thing that was designed to keep you alive: your autonomic nervous system.
Let’s go deeper into that...
Your Nervous System Isn’t Broken—It’s Brilliant
Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. These are the sacred survival responses of your nervous system. They aren’t flaws. They aren’t signs that you’re weak, too sensitive, or broken. They are ancient patterns designed to protect you.
Fight is your body saying, “I can confront this.”
Flight is the instinct to run, to seek safety elsewhere.
Freeze is not failure—it’s your system slamming the brakes because the road ahead feels unclear or dangerous. It’s not a defect. It’s wisdom.
Fawn is the learned instinct to please, appease, or perform in hopes of staying safe—especially in environments where your needs weren’t met or your voice wasn’t welcomed.
None of these make you wrong. They make you human. But here’s where it gets complicated: When trauma, burnout, or chronic stress are constant companions—especially for nurses, caregivers, and those who’ve learned to override their own needs to survive—these responses can become automatic defaults. You start living in a constant state of alert. Where rest feels dangerous, and joy feels suspicious.
This is what it means to live outside your Window of Tolerance—the range where your nervous system can safely experience emotions, challenges, and stimulation without spiraling into shutdown or panic.
I like to think of the Window of Tolerance as the space where your soul gets to breathe. It’s where clarity returns. Where presence is possible.
But when your window narrows from years of self-abandonment, from enduring things that were never okay, or from pushing past the limit “because people needed you”—even little things can feel like too much.
Daily Practice, Deep Repair
This is where the work takes place. Not the shiny, aspirational work that looks good on Instagram. The real, gritty, daily devotion of coming home to your body.
Let’s get one thing straight: nervous system regulation is not just about calming down. It’s about teaching your body—over and over—that you are safe now. That the war is over. That the version of you who survived—who adapted, contorted, performed, shut down, lashed out, ran away, or froze—is not being judged here. You are being held.
Regulation begins with awareness, not analysis. Grounding, breathwork, and emotional processing aren’t just “nice to haves.”
They’re how we begin to widen our Window of Tolerance again—bit by bit, breath by breath.
The Science Beneath the Stillness
Your autonomic nervous system has two primary branches:
The sympathetic (fight or flight) and
The parasympathetic (rest, digest, and restore).
Regulation is the process of shifting out of constant sympathetic overdrive—where your body believes a threat is always present—and back into parasympathetic flow, where healing becomes possible.
Grounding practices, like pressing your feet into the earth, engaging your senses, or simply orienting yourself to your physical environment, signal to your brain that you’re not in danger.
Breathwork taps directly into the vagus nerve, which plays a key role in calming the nervous system. Slowing your exhale, breathing deep into the belly, or practicing rhythmic breathing can help reduce cortisol and activate your body’s natural relaxation response.
And perhaps most importantly—feeling what’s there without needing to label it.
Sometimes, an emotion rises in the chest like a wave, and you have no idea where it came from. A smell. A sound. A song. A moment that stirred something ancient. You don’t always need to know the “why.” Trauma lives in the body. It remembers what the mind has long forgotten—or never fully understood to begin with. That’s okay.
You don’t need to translate every feeling into a narrative. You don’t need to assign every sensation a name. You just need to notice. Acknowledge. Allow. And then begin to let it move through you.
Because here’s the thing—our nervous systems are brilliant, but they are story-driven. When trauma or stress happens, we create internal narratives around the event to survive it.
“This happened because I’m not good enough.”
“I have to be perfect or they’ll leave.”
“I must stay quiet to stay safe.”
These loops—like a bad song on repeat—aren’t random. They were built to help us remember the threat. To stay alert. To survive.
But surviving and healing are not the same.
The story was never the lesson. The loop is not the wisdom. And you don’t have to keep replaying it to prove that you’ve learned.
Repetition in the Ritual
This is where I found my entry point.
Not in trying to “think positive” or manifest a better version of myself with vision boards, wishful thinking, or using the Law of Attraction. That can have its place. But this work—the work of regulation—asks something deeper. It asks for your presence.
Your patience. Your practice.
Now, every day, I return to small rituals. Repetitions that say,
“I am safe.”
“I trust myself”
“I am more than my past.”
“I am enough.”
When my body remembers something painful—when a bad memory shows up uninvited and I feel it ripple through my chest or throat—I don’t push it down or tell it to go away. I place my hand over my heart, close my eyes, and say silently: “I love you.”
Not because I understand it all. But because love, not logic, is what the body has been waiting for.
Remember to breathe—deeply and slowly—in and out, while saying these affirmations (or others you come up with) repeatedly every day. Repeating affirmations of love and safety is more than just positive thinking—it’s a powerful way to communicate safety to your nervous system. These intentional words help activate your body’s relaxation response by engaging your brain’s calming centers and quieting the fear-driven parts. Over time, this rewires your nervous system, replacing old threat patterns with new pathways of safety and self-compassion. Through this ritual, you create a steady, grounding rhythm that helps break the cycle of chronic alarm and invites healing.
It Will Be Hard—That’s How You Know It’s Working
Let me say this clearly: this work is not easy.
Regulating your nervous system and coming home to your body after years—maybe decades—of survival mode is not a soft and glowing self-care experience. It’s often messy. It’s resistance. It’s discomfort. It’s that moment when you sit still and every cell in your body screams to do something, check something, escape something. It’s a war between your wounded ego and your awakening soul.
That fight you feel? That’s not weakness.
That friction? It is transformation in motion.
You’re interrupting patterns that have lived in your body for so long, they became your personality. You’re breaking generational cycles, survival templates, old programs that say: don’t feel, don’t trust, don’t rest.
And your ego—bless it—is just trying to keep you safe. It learned how to protect you by clinging to the story. By overthinking. By catastrophizing. By making you believe that something must be wrong, even when it’s not.
The ego and the nervous system live in a constant feedback loop. The thoughts you think—especially the self-critical ones—can keep your body stuck in a physiological state of threat. When the ego says, “You’re not safe,” “You’re not worthy,” “You’re not enough,” your nervous system listens.
This is how we get stuck in the loop. The story fuels the sensation. The sensation reinforces the story. And the loop repeats—sometimes for a lifetime.
Break the Loop with Repetition Rooted in Love
Repetition in the Ritual; Not the Loop- That’s why intentional repetition matters. Not repetition rooted in fear or striving—but repetition grounded in love, truth, and safety.
When the loop plays—when the thoughts spiral or your body tenses without explanation—you respond with breath. With stillness. With presence. With the loving discipline to return to the same grounding phrases over and over:
“I am safe.”
“I am worthy.”
“This feeling is valid, but it does not define me.”
“My story is sacred, the narrative is no longer needed.”
“I love you.”
This is how we shift the feedback loop. This is how we rewrite the code—not by force, but by devotion.
Stillness is the new survival. Love is the new safety. Presence is the new protection.
And Then—The Void
What happens when your nervous system finally stops bracing for disaster? What happens when the ego loses its grip?
You don’t feel euphoric. You don’t immediately feel “healed.” You feel... lost. Numb, even. This is the other part no one warns you about.
When the body finally begins to feel safe, and the narratives start to quiet, you might expect lightness. Joy. Expansion. And yes—those things do come. But first, many of us experience something else entirely:
The Void. The in-between. The silence after the storm. The hollowed-out space where identity, ego, pain, and purpose used to overlap and threaten you to turn around and come back. Come back to what was familiar and therefore safe. Don't listen to them.
It is disorienting. It is quite lonely. But it is so sacred.
This isn’t regression. It’s the recalibration of your entire system—body, mind, soul.
It’s the pause between the exhale and the next breath. The cocoon before the wings.
I’ll meet you there in the next post…
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