✨ Welcome to Tiny Teachings, a twice-monthly newsletter where I share a letter to my daughters about living intentionally in transitional times + a roundup with inspiration and ideas to try.
This month’s letter reflects on learning to reset my nervous system in the face of uncertainty.
June letter, 2025
Dear girls,
I've been feeling out of sorts, on and off, for a few weeks. I've experienced this feeling before, and I'm always reminded of its strangeness when it appears. If I could describe it, it would be the feeling of trying to burst out of my own skin. Or feeling like a bud on the brink of exploding into bloom but never quite making it. It's like having a tremendous amount of energy with nowhere to direct it - an intense, unrequited love kind of feeling. A high-energy restlessness. Is there a word for this feeling? Maybe this is just…stress?
I've been thinking a lot lately about my nervous system. I've thought more about it since learning what being stressed does to us; we're less compassionate, less collaborative, less creative, less innovative, less wise. We lose touch with our better nature.
Yet, modern life keeps many of us in a steady state of stress. Life inside the machine is a constant juggle of one (if you're lucky) task to the next, the constant context switching, the precarity of…well, everything.
We live in times where we need the maximum amount of creativity and compassion to solve our way out of the global crises we face. Chronically stressed humans can't get us where we need to be. So a paradox emerges…to speed up, we must slow down. I feel this keenly in my own life; still, the invisible pulse of life-as-usual maintains its grip on me.
In the face of things I can't control, something I'm working to manage better is my nervous system. But even this, I must come at from the side, like approaching a wild animal. I can't simply will my body to react differently, but I can become aware of my reactions and, over time, nurture a different response. Like all acts of nurturing, this requires care, attention, and loving patience. It is closer to parenting than it is "managing".
For me, it begins by trying to adopt a radical trust in life. Not that life will go my way (that's a fast track to misery…trust me, I've been there), but that life’s way is yet to show itself.
I have practices that I can return to for structure and support. I am less good at sticking to these than I would like to admit, so I remind myself to prioritise them even when culture considers them "unproductive" or peripheral. To choose relaxation over getting something crossed off the to-do list feels like an act of rebellion in this day and age. No one has ever praised me for relaxing hard.
I'm also learning to return to my body. In times of stress, more thinking does not always lead to more solutions. Instead, I'm leaning on my other human intelligences - the heart (emotional/spiritual), body (somatic) and gut (intuitive). It is an exercise in self-trust. Returning to the body again and again to ask, 'What do you most need right now?'. Lately, the answer is rest. I've learnt that honouring the answer is the real practice.
Love, Mama
*For more on these ideas see Regenerative Leadership by Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm.