Hello Reader,
It has been almost a month since I last wrote, which was... not exactly my plan.
At first, I thought I was taking a short break. I needed a little space to catch up with myself, to absorb some life changes, and — even though I often share from my personal life — I didn’t want to write from a place that was too raw. But then the pause became longer, because sometimes life does not reorganize itself according to the rhythm of a newsletter, a calendar, or whatever plan we had made for ourselves.
There are moments when we can choose change, and moments when change chooses us. Something shifts in our life, in a relationship, in our body, our work, or our sense of who we are, and the old way of moving in the world no longer works. We may keep functioning for a while, doing the things that need to be done. But underneath, something in us knows that life is asking for a different kind of attention: at the very least, a more honest meeting with reality.
That is where I have been these past weeks. Inside a process that needed my full attention ❤️.
Musings
Some changes are easy. We're equipped to handle them, we almost expect them. But others arrive with the feeling that even if we do not like them, even if we did not choose them, even if we are grieving what they are taking from us, we cannot return to who we were before.
You know me, I don’t romanticize pain. I don’t believe that every painful thing is secretly a gift, and I don’t think we need to turn loss, fear, uncertainty, or heartbreak into a spiritual lesson in order to make it meaningful. But I do think that some painful transitions carry a call to betterment.
Not betterment in the shiny, pop culture self-help sense. Not becoming more productive, more optimized, more acceptable, or more performant. I mean it as a return to something deeply internal and more true to ourselves that allows us to unfurl, and to evolve, like a new plant.
A call to finally acknowledge what we have been tolerating, or what we have been avoiding. To notice where we have been abandoning ourselves. A call to stop organizing our lives around an old fear, an old injury, or a trauma.
But - of course, when life changes, when we are faced with these crossroads, the nervous system can become very loud. Anxiety and fear are not subtle. They don't arrive with a balanced assessment of reality. They bombard us with urgency. They tell us that we need to fix this right now, that we already know how this will end, that if we do not say the thing, make the decision, prevent the loss, or control the outcome, everything will fall apart.
And because they speak through the body, they feel convincing. The tight chest, the pinch in the lungs, the heat, the nausea, the pressure in the throat, the racing thoughts, the collapse in the belly, the sudden certainty that something terrible is about to happen, they all feel like truth. But a thought that comes with a strong body sensation is not automatically more accurate.
This is one of the things I keep coming back to lately: don’t believe everything you think. This is the brain trying to predict, explain, brace, and protect you from uncertainty. It takes fragments of information and fills in the blanks very quickly, using old templates.
And this is where the pause matters. Where slowing down becomes imperative. The pause before the explanation, the defence or the decision. The pause before the old pattern takes the wheel and calls itself clarity. That pause gives us just enough room to ask a different question.
Who is reacting right now, and to what? Is this the adult thinking part of me that is seeing the situation clearly, or is this a younger, more frightened part of me that has been here before? Am I reacting to what is actually happening, or to what my nervous system believes is about to happen? Am I responding to the present moment, or to an old prediction about loss, rejection, failure, danger, abandonment, or not being enough?
This does not mean we dismiss the reaction. Often the reaction is important. It tells us that something in us feels threatened. It tells us that a need, a boundary, a grief, or a fear has been touched. But the reaction is not always the whole truth, and it does not always need to be the part of us that acts first.
🎁 NeuroSomatic Practice of the Week
🧠 NeuroMinute...
From a brain perspective, a pause actually changes the sequence of events.
When something unexpected happens, the brain does not simply receive the information and then calmly decide what it means. Sensory information, including internal sensation, is routed through networks that include the thalamus, cortical pathways, and subcortical structures that help the brain interpret what is happening and prepare the body to respond.
The thalamus is often described as a relay station, but it is not just passing information along like a neutral switchboard. It helps regulate what becomes salient, what gets amplified, and what becomes available to conscious perception.
The amygdala is also involved, especially when the brain detects threat, uncertainty, loss, or emotional salience. But the amygdala is not a simple fear button. It is part of a broader network linking sensory information, past learning, body state, memory, prediction, and action preparation.
The insula matters here too, because it helps integrate internal body signals into conscious feeling states. The brain is not separating “what happened” from “how my body feels about what happened” as neatly as we might imagine. The felt body is part of how the brain constructs emotional meaning.
This is why anxiety, fear, and pain can become so convincing. The brain is predictive. It does not only register the present; it projects forward, using past experience, current body signals, emotional memory, and partial sensory information to anticipate what may happen next. Under stress, those projections can become biased toward danger.
A thought may be real because you are having it, and a sensation may be real because your body is living it, but the meaning your nervous system attaches to that sensation may still be incomplete.
Pausing allows enough time for more of the brain to enter the picture. Not so we can override the body, but so perception has a chance to update before the first protective impulse becomes the whole story.
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Warmly,
Joana
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