The Balm Week One: Listening

Welcome to four weeks of tending to your nervous system

Welcome to an immersive journey for you, your body and your nervous system. Created for bodies and souls walking the realms of fertility. Together, we’ll explore what anxiety is - and how we might reframe our relationship with it.

These classes originally aired in January 2023 as live sessions. If you would like to discuss any of the content with me, I welcome emails or comments below.

ONE: Listening

When we are knee deep into our fertility story, anxiety is so often there with us for the journey. How could it not be? The mental workload of each cycle we plan for, we try, the endless loop of hope and disappointment, the medical onslaught - it all stacks up layer by layer. Sometimes there are meteor hits of traumatic experiences, of loss, of catastrophic news.

Our body is walking but it is braced to fight or flee. It freezes. And yet. So much of our process is cognitive as we try to think our way through this, as if we can work out this equation if only we try harder, do better. So we can’t hear the calls of our body to rest, to process, to be. But it will speak to us anyway through physical anxiety and other bodily manifestations, digestive problems, skin changes, headaches, exhaustions.

So how do we listen to our body, really listen?

There is a moment when I say this in my classes; notice how you feel.

But, how often do we really know, in a moment like that, how we really really feel? We try and find the word, the language. And we can do that sometimes. If we spent time, perhaps with an emotion wheel and outside of the constraints of the few seconds where we’re asked….we might hone down that our sadness was actually jealousy or disppointment or shame. 

But we don’t actually need the word or the semantics. 

And this is where we start to think about this word SOMA, somatics simply put, the body. Which is the second reason I wrote The Balm; to demystify somatics, somatic work, perhaps simplify it and open up the doors for self enquiry.

I’d love to hear how this session lands with you. Session Two: Rewilding will be sent our next Monday.