Your Nervous System Doesn't Need Another Cold Plunge

It needs you to actually chill the fuck out

Everything I have worked on building for the last eleven years is falling apart.

And in many ways, I am letting it.

My early life was a roller coaster of financial instability and emotional repression. When I turned sixteen I tested out of high school and started working full time because I knew I couldn’t count on anyone to provide for me. One thing about me is that I don’t just “have jobs.” I am a fully dedicated person- there is no doing things in half measures for me. It’s all or nothing.

As a corporate employee this looked like becoming the best I could possibly be at my job. I worked in retail, bouncing around shops in the mall until I settled into a “career” at Zumiez. Sales, customer service, display setting- I excelled at every aspect. Part of this is because I genuinely enjoy helping people, even if it’s just helping them find the right pair of shoes. As a sales associate, I became one of the top employees in my entire state. Got promoted to assistant manager as soon as I turned eighteen and was running my own store as a top manager within another year.

I gave myself the financial stability I needed to feel safe. It came at a cost. Years spent working overtime, having my efforts be taken advantage of, not getting the raises I felt I deserved, and all the shit that comes with having a corporate job.

Hence why I quit everything and proceeded to enter a nomadic spiritual journey.

My credit score tanked. I lost my car. Couldn’t afford rent anywhere so I stayed with family members for as long as they would have me. This period of life was incredibly beneficial to my well being on an internal level. Of course, it was unsustainable. So I went back into the retail world and tried it all over again, but this time with a deeper spiritual relationship with myself and understanding of the world.

This was also unsustainable.

So I took the last of my money and moved to the jungles of Hawai’i.

After a year of living simply (I mean in a carport tent with minimal belongings) I scraped together some cash and made some beeswax products to sell at a local market. Thus, my business was born.

From 2015 until now I have been grinding and growing and doing all the things it takes to run a business by yourself. Working until 2am, managing every single aspect. I recovered my credit, bought a nice vehicle, took out a mortgage on a beautiful home, once again turning my life around and creating a level of financial success that I had always dreamed of.

I genuinely have a hard time relating how much work this all took. Years of late nights finishing projects or packing up orders. Dealing with the 2018 lava flow in Hawai’i that took out the only road to the market I sold at. Learning how to pivot into social media and running all my sales through Instagram and Etsy. The photography, content creation, website management, customer service- it’s endless. I maneuvered through the pandemic. I worked full time for my entire pregnancy, only taking two weeks off right after my son was born and then getting right back to it. Raising a newborn on minimal sleep and still pulling late nights to get all my tasks done.

You see, the other thing about me is that I’m really fucking good at biting the bullet. And I don’t mean a little .22 you learn to shoot when you’re six years old. I can chew on a 6.5 Creedmor and laugh while my gums are bleeding. I’ll climb the tallest, most rugged mountain, back bent, legs shaking, sweat burning my eyes, and call it time well spent cultivating will power. Throw me in the ocean and I’ll find the mouth of a river to swim upstream, out of breath, arms aching, sunburnt, and call it an adventure of capability.

Size reference chart for those unfamiliar with ammo

Everything I have accomplished in my life so far has been through the sheer force of will, my stubborn inability to give up, my radical belief that I can tackle anything thrown at me with the strength born from never backing down. I am a strong, independent woman, damnit, and I’ll prove it time and time again.

Now, I am at the top of the mountain. Only it’s not a mountain, it’s a volcano. And it’s about to blow. Instead of making my way back down or figuring out a way to fly off this catastrophe waiting to happen, I am standing at the edge of a tunnel. The tunnel is dark and I have no light source. I know that it doesn’t just go into the heart of the mountain- it goes all the way to the very center of everything.

My task now is to enter the dark tunnel with nothing other than trust. To navigate the uncertainty with radical acceptance. I must seek the center and meet the gravity of who I am beyond the identity I built around my pride in my perseverance.

I am also in the ocean and a storm is coming. The waves are building and it feels like I am about to drown at any moment. Instead of fighting my way to that river mouth, I must learn to float, to let the tide carry me to a new shore. And when I land on that shore I will feel like a fish out of water. Gasping for air and unsure of what to do because I don’t have any legs.

My task is not to go back to the water, back to the roiling waves, to the fight I know all too well, but to become something entirely new. I must evolve. I must let destiny take its course and trust that I will be provided with everything I need to move in this new world I have been thrust into.

Somehow, this is so much harder than climbing the mountain or swimming upstream. To sit. To surrender. To no longer act in the pattern of survival I’ve cultivated my entire life.

This is what I mean when I say your nervous system doesn’t need another cold plunge. A regulated nervous system will never come from another retreat or sound bath. You don’t need to attend your seventeenth somatic healing session. Nobody else can do the work for you. And the work can’t be done through escaping into healing session after healing session.

What I’ve learned over the past several months is that we can only heal the survival parts of ourselves by being deeply willing to sit with fear, to make space for uncertainty at the table instead of trying to run away from it or cover it up with ice cold water.

It’s only when we become present with our patterns that we can begin to understand where they come from, how they have served us, and why they are no longer needed. This is work that is done in every moment we feel triggered, every situation that stresses us out, every sensation that makes us feel overstimulated. We have to face these moments with our breath, with awareness in our body of where we hold that tension, how our jaw clenches when a certain name is brought up, or how our palms get sweaty when we are asked about the future.

This kind of work is so subtle, so full of nuance, and we can only catch the patterns by recognizing our reactions- and no longer letting them control us.

Last night, I got some truly terrible news. It totally threw a fast curveball at me and I caught that ball right in the face. It’s a full moon week, I am on my period, and my entire emotional body flared up ready to cry and panic. I felt all of it well up inside me- frustration, despair, confusion, hurt. In that moment I knew that I was being faced with a choice that would test how much I personally understand everything I am talking about right now.

Since November of last year I have been deep in the journey of uprooting my patterns and survival mechanisms. When we are in these intense learning cycles, we will absolutely be pushed into extreme situations to give us the opportunity to truly solidify and integrate the new awareness.

When all of this happened, I paused, I took a deep breath, and I let all the feelings rise up without giving into them as a narrative about my life. My husband came home right when I was in the middle of this and instead of my old pattern of collapsing under the weight of it all, I hugged him and just explained to him all that was happening. I spoke with awareness about why I know this is all necessary. I shared the vulnerable truth that I feel like I don’t know who I am right now, and that it’s the first time in my entire life that I have ever felt this way.

I have been confident and certain and capable for longer than I can remember. There hasn’t been a time where I haven’t known who I am and where I am going and what I am working toward. Obviously, there’s been immense challenges- but none of them have surrounded my identity quite like this before. My intuition is wildly well developed. I sense things, see things, understand things in a way that’s always given me a strong foundation to operate from.

Now- now, the only thing that remains is my intuition. It tells me that all of this is serving a huge purpose for me. It reassures me that everything is going according to Divine plan and timing. The struggle lies in the fact that my external world is doing absolutely nothing to back that faith up. In fact, it’s doing the exact opposite. I am being faced with an unprecedented unraveling. While all the threads are falling apart, I am being asked to lean into the trust, to ignore the evidence of my eyes and follow the voice of my soul.

Surrendering to this process takes so much. I feel the way my mind and body want to go right into that mode of “shut up, lock in, hustle it out.” I am fighting the urge to double down, to wipe the sweat from my brow and get back in the ring for another round. That part of me is trying to hold onto control, to the idea that I’ve always gotten myself through everything- why is now any different?

It’s different because when I started this year my only intention was to become more of the person I know I can be, to live more in my power and my truth. The odd and inescapable reality is that power doesn’t only come from will and perseverance. It deepens through trust. It expands through letting go. It awakens through allowing something bigger and more mysterious to work in the background of my life, of my psyche.

All of my previous cycles have been about gaining. This one has been about releasing. I’ve released my longing for friendships, for belonging. I’ve released my chase for validation. I’ve released my desire to be understood.

What’s left is my need to feel in control. And this is the most uncomfortable thing to face because my whole life safety has been built around my ability to control the outcomes through effort and direct action.

So I am facing uncertainty with intention to be open, with trust that has no root other than the tree that grows in my heart. I am willingly putting myself in the position to watch everything fall apart around me without attachment, without the need to have answers to all the questions that are arising. It’s scary. I can’t say that I am doing this without fear, but what I can say is that I am not letting the fear control me, either.

After all, control and fear are as intimately linked as joy and gratitude. We seek control because we fear what will happen. We want certainty because we are afraid of the expansive space that trust operates from. We like the little boxes we confine ourselves to. They keep us comfortable. But comfort was never the point of living.

Living, and I mean really living, is done with your full heart, wide open and vulnerable. Love isn’t something found only between two bodies- it’s a current that can flow through you when you remove the dam built from that need to control, to hoard contentment. To be fully alive, to live with complete authenticity is to risk every thing in every moment, and trust that you’ll still be whole when the house of cards falls.

Photo by Tim Zänkert on Unsplash

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