Strengthening the Brain-Body Connection | Nervous System Regulation

When was the last time you truly felt at home in your body? We often treat physical symptoms and emotional struggles as separate battles, but true healing happens when we recognize they are deeply intertwined. If you’ve been feeling stuck in "fight or flight," dealing with unexplainable gut issues, or finding yourself disassociating to get through the day, this episode is for you.

Join me for a special, slower-paced session where we move beyond just talking and start doing. I will guide you through gentle exercises designed to release held tension—from your jaw to your pelvic floor—and help you reconnect with your physical self. It is time to stop treating your body like a machine and start treating it like the temple it is. Tune in to discover how softening into safety can be the missing piece to your healing journey.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Welcome back to the Find Your Peace podcast. I'm so grateful that you're with me here today. Today we're going to be talking about the brain-body connection. And I talk about this subject a lot because it's so important to heal the whole body. Oftentimes we're taught physical issues are just physical issues, you know, emotional issues or just emotional issues. Pelvic pain is just pelvic pain. A nervous system that's stuck in fight or flight or anxiety is just anxiety. And what we forget is how interconnected the body is, and how so many areas of our body or our nervous system or our mind can affect the others. They're all so intricately interwoven. And if you are on a journey where you have not gotten an answer as you've been going round and round, like I did for years and years and years, you're going to want to listen to this episode. Now, we're going to go through some things in this episode that are not going to be conducive to be driving or if you're working out or doing something else. This is going to be a little bit slower episode where I'm going to take you through some exercises to help strengthen that brain-body connection and really tune into your body. So that's just a little bit of a warning ahead of time that this is going to be a little bit different of an episode. So do with that what you will. So wherever you are, as long as you're safe, I just invite you to close your eyes and just tune into your body. Obviously, if you're driving or working out somewhere like that, that's not appropriate. But if you are, feel free to just tune in and just take a couple deep breaths. And just ask yourself, when was the last time you truly felt at home or safe in your body? And if that question elicits any amount of emotion, I just invite you to take a couple calming, slow breaths and allow whatever emotion that needs to come to the surface to come. Because emotions are just our body's way of speaking to us. And we've been trained by society as a whole that emotions are bad or make us weak. But really, it's a release and a response of the body that something needs attention. Whether it's our emotions, our physical health, our spiritual health, or all three. It's just a sign. So as you take a couple deep breaths and just allow whatever needs to wash over you to wash over you. I just allow you, I just invite you to sink a little bit deeper into yourself. Unclench anywhere that you're holding on to. Try not to fight your body from just allowing it to relax. And invite the Lord's peace in. But while I'm speaking, I just invite you to just be aware of where you're holding on in your body and just allow it to sink into the chair or the bed or wherever you are that's safe. Just allow it to let go. So if we have physical health problems, or if we're having some mental health problems, or if we're having physical pain, or we're stuck in anxiety, all of those can be related to the nervous system, especially if we've been trying to make big changes in our life. Maybe you're going to therapy, maybe you've gone to some inner healing or prayer ministry, and you just feel like you're going in circles. And that's when we need to involve the body and the nervous system because the body remembers. So if there's been any trauma, if there's been any chronic stress, if there's been a habit of overthinking, over worrying, over-analyzing, all of that needs to be addressed with this brain-body connection. When we are in fight or flight and are in survival mode, cortisol and adrenaline are being released in our body all of the time. That is very helpful if we're being chased by a tiger. However, if we're trying to sit at our desk or we're trying to function in our home and take care of our family, and we have exorbit amounts of adrenaline and cortisol pumping through our body, that becomes a huge issue because it's like being in overdrive all of the time. And so, in order to survive, the body has to develop survival mechanisms. And one of them is disassociation. And we are all guilty of disassociation. The biggest contender is scrolling on your phone, just disappearing, forgetting about everything that's going on in the world and scrolling on your phone or pulling up Netflix or whatever streaming service of choice and you know binging all day. And now I'm not saying that everything is wrong with that, right? We all need downtime. However, when we're doing that to avoid life, that's called disassociation. And that can be a dangerous place to live because returning from that place uh requires effort and it requires dealing with some things we maybe don't want to deal with. But that's when chronic illness starts to show up. That's when anxiety that can't be have a root issue begins to show up because our brain starts functioning as separate entities from our body, our nervous system starts functioning separately. In order to have harmony and health within our body, they need to be functioning as a unit. So as you're continuing to melt into whatever chair or bed or comfy place that you are, I just invite you to let go. Right? Notice where your shoulders are. If they're up by your ears, allow them to drop. If your jaws clench, I just invite you to let that go. And allow your tongue to drop from the roof of your mouth. If you notice yourself clenching in your pelvic floor or your hips, just allow that to relax. And I want you to ask yourself, instead of how many things can I get done today, I want you to ask yourself, how what level of peace can I achieve while achieving these tacks? So the goal isn't to check all the things off your to-do list, which is very satisfying. Don't misunderstand me. Of course, I like to check things off my to-do list. It feels very good. Feels good to complete things, but my new goal instead of how much can I check off is how much peace can I have while I'm doing all these tasks. So allow yourself to take a couple more deep breaths and just continue to allow yourself to sink into whatever chair or bed or comfortable spot you're in, and allow yourself to let go. Notice if you've clenched your jaw again, or just allowed that cycle to return where you're feeling like I haven't done enough, I'm not enough, all those pesky things that can come into play. And we're just gonna tune into our bodies for a second and we're just gonna ask ourselves, where are we holding back? A lot of times when we're bracing, we are trying to control something, whether it's we're holding back our words, we're holding back our thoughts, we're holding back our stress, we're trying to hold the whole family together, that's where we get trapped in our physiology and we need a release for it. Our whole body is connected, our jaw is neurologically connected and physically connected to our pelvic floor. So if we are clenching our pelvic floor, if we're just holding all of that in our hips, we're automatically going to be clenching our jaw. So letting it all go is step number one. And I'm not saying that this is the key to the whole puzzle because there's incredible physical therapists out there, there's chiropractors out there that are neurologically trained, there's myself that does body work that's neurologically trained, and we get to the deep wounding issues or the deep physiological issues that are causing you to be disconnected. But this podcast is illustrating the fact that we can think our way there, we can have habits, thoughts, and behaviors that continue to allow us to complete that cycle over and over again. So part of the healing process that's involved is recognizing the things that we're doing that allow us to continue to go back to fight or flight or continue to go back to fight or flight. When we intrinsically believe that we are unsafe, that's when we're going to be bracing. And I don't always mean physically unsafe. Sometimes we don't feel safe to be ourselves, sometimes we don't feel safe to be heard, sometimes we don't feel safe to be seen or just show up as we are, whether that's from wounds that we carry or boundaries that we need to set with people in areas of our lives. And both of those can be true. So let's talk about the breath a little bit more. And I'm just gonna invite you to slow your breathing down. We're gonna inhale for four counts. And then we're gonna pause, and we're gonna exhale for six. And as we discussed, when we are running a thousand miles per hour, adrenaline is pumping through our body all the time, and we tend to breathe more shallow. We trend to breathe in our upper chest. And what the brain hears here when we're doing this is run, danger, fight or flight. Because when we switch into fight or flight, our body is poised for survival. That is not optimal to live there for our best health. Our brain is trying to protect us, right? Because if we're in a fight or we're fighting off a tiger, we obviously want those survival modes to kick in. That's why when you hear of people doing insane things like lifting a car off a child, they're able to, is because that adrenaline is pumping. Great for when those life events happened. Not so great for living there. So let's talk about our digestion in this process. So if we are stuck in fight or flight, our digestion turns off because it is not a priority. We're in survival. So if we live in that space, then our nervous system is telling our body and our digestion turn off. And so that if that's happening all of the time, that's when we start to get those gut health issues: bloating, discomfort, irregularity. So we can do all the cleanses and supplements and detoxes and clean up our diet, all we want. But if you have a body that's still stuck in fight or flight, you have your brain telling your body not to digest. And that's gonna cause continued issues, right? So healing your gut isn't always about the perfect supplement or the strictest diet. Yes, those play a role. But until we get that nervous system regulated, it's not gonna do much good. And then now let's talk about incontinence, which can affect men, it can affect women. It typically is much more common in women after childbirth, where that pelvic floor has been in a state of stress for so long that as it releases, those muscles start to weaken. Okay, and that can cause all kinds of problems. And most people aren't realizing that that brain-body connection, when it's disconnected like that, you can do all the physical therapy in the world, you can do all the chiropractic in the world, but if you're disconnected, it's never going to heal. And so when I start talking about incontinence in terms of a nervous system issue, people look at me like I'm crazy, but it's all connected. So, how do we start? How do we start rebuilding this connection between the brain and the body? Well, I've given you a couple of things here, um, but the biggest thing to understand is that healing the nervous system in any capacity is not like hitting a light switch, right? We do kind of live in a side society where everybody wants a pill or a quick fix or they want everything fixed in one session. But healing the nervous system is like this unfolding and softening that needs to happen. It starts with noticing, it starts with those habits, behaviors, and actions that start to unfold, unclenching your jaw, putting your shoulders down, realizing when you're walking, running, performing at 100 miles per hour, and slowing down and softening those areas. It starts with being kind and graceful to yourself. If you make a mistake, do you sit in shame for months, weeks, or years afterwards? Or do you understand that you're a human being and allow yourself to have some grace with it? We have to stop treating our bodies like they're machines. The body, your body is the only one that you get. We don't get another one while we're here on earth, right? And so if we're mistreating it, if we're treating it like it's a pain rather than a temple, which is what scripture tells us it is, that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. So if any of this episode is resonating with you, I just invite you to join the group mentoring program. It's a space where every other week, excuse me, two times a month, we hop on and we're learning tools to release tension from our nervous system, to release trauma from our nervous system, to change our thinking, actions, behaviors, to align with peace, unlearning some of those things that have kept us stuck or sick or in a state of anxiety for years and years and years, fighting our own bodies instead of connecting with it. It creates space within your schedule to make this a priority. I didn't know these tools for most of my life, and I lived in a state of chronic health issues for over 40 years. I lived in a state of anxiety for over 40 years, and the Lord's really blessed me with so many of these tools and bringing it together, and now I've gotten to help thousands and thousands of women heal from nervous system dysregulation. And I'm not saying it's the answer to everything that's out there, but for me, it was the big missing piece, so all the other things started to work. Because you can do all the supplements, you can do all the healthcare, you can do all the perfect diets. If your nervous system is still dysregulated, you're gonna just find a new issue that's taken its place. So remember that healing starts with peace. You are loved by the Father in Heaven more than you can ever ask or imagine. You have a whole community waiting to support you if you'll join us. And you are capable of such amazing things. So until next time, be kind to yourself.