Host Leslie is joined by Rachel Hardy, intuitive coach and mentor, to explore the profound impact our nervous systems have on mental health and overall wellbeing. Rachel shares how her journey to becoming a nervous system regulation expert was influenced by both her professional experience in injury recovery and chronic pain management, and her personal health struggles with autoimmune conditions and depression.
Host Leslie is joined by Rachel Hardy, intuitive coach and mentor, to explore the profound impact our nervous systems have on mental health and overall wellbeing. Rachel shares how her journey to becoming a nervous system regulation expert was influenced by both her professional experience in injury recovery and chronic pain management, and her personal health struggles with autoimmune conditions and depression.
Rachel explains how our bodies store trauma, and how our nervous systems evolve through social engagement, particularly during infancy. Leslie and Rachel also discuss the often-overlooked connection between nervous system dysregulation and common mental health challenges, such as anxiety and depression.
They challenge traditional cognitive-only approaches to healing, advocating for a more holistic method that incorporates body awareness and physical manifestations of emotions. Rachel also emphasizes the significance of how understanding and regulating our nervous systems can transform our lives and enable us to live on our own terms.
Links mentioned in the episode:
Show Credits:
Leslie: Welcome to The Nature of Nurture with Dr. Leslie Carr, a podcast for your mental health. I'm your host, Leslie. If you're watching this podcast right now, you can find the audio version in any podcast app, and if you're listening, you can also watch this episode on YouTube at TheNatureofNurture. You can find that link in the show notes.
Today we're here to talk about the role that the nervous system plays in mental health, and the conversation is with Rachel Hardy. Rachel is a coach, mentor, astrologer and somatic practitioner who works with conscious entrepreneurs and creatives. She uses cutting edge nervous system and body-based trauma release work with her clients, and she is a real expert in this stuff, so I'm very excited to have her on the show. Her personal story is pretty compelling too.
This interview is held in my home office, so in a moment you'll hear us jump right in. Rachel and I love talking about this stuff with each other, and I can't wait to hear your thoughts Without any further delay. Here we are with Rachel Hardy. You know, I know that you and I have so much that we're excited to talk about with each other today, and I want to give everybody a chance to get to know you a little bit as a person, as we sort of wade into this very juicy and delicious material. So will you start us off by just telling people a little bit about you and your journey and how you got into nervous system regulation work?
Rachel: Absolutely, and thank you so much, Leslie, and I am so happy to be here with you, so fun.
Leslie: I am so happy to be here with you too.
Rachel: Awesome, yeah. So how I got into nervous system work, there were two different pathways in the first was on a professional level, I was running a body work practice in Los Angeles. I was a myofascial release practitioner and doing a lot of work with injury recovery, with chronic pain conditions, fibromyalgia, and what I was doing was working with fascia and stuck fascia in the body, and this is interesting because the fascia actually holds trauma, actually holds trauma, right. So, yeah, so I was really interested in the healing process from this level, from observing what was happening with bodies and especially why some bodies didn't seem to heal as well and others did, and what was going on beneath the surface and what all the pieces were. So there was that interest. And then, of course, the other and maybe bigger path was my own personal journey, which I know is part of what you've invited me to share about Absolutely yeah, absolutely spiraled out into a whole lot of other chronic health symptoms that I wound up dealing with for decades.
I also dealt with pretty severe clinical depression and, basically, as brilliant as Western medicine is for certain types of things, there were no answers ultimately for the stuff I was dealing with.
Answers ultimately for the stuff I was dealing with. So, basically, my life since I was 14 has been one huge exploration into the worlds of holistic health and what we once called alternative medicine and all of the ways of supporting our bodies from the most holistic and complete ways that we can, and so I was doing all of the things and creating a lot of good results for myself. I was able to improve a lot of symptoms. Eventually, I was able to get off of a lot of the medications that I was on, get off of a lot of the medications that I was on, and basically to come to like 2016-17 was when all of this started to come together, which is when I went off of the antidepressant meds that I'd been on, and this was basically the last piece of medication that I was still on was kind of keeping things functioning, and this piece of going off the meds triggered what I can only describe as just an epic spiraling out into extreme withdrawal symptoms, resurgence of all the old health conditions.
My nervous system was activated to crazy levels 24-7, and I did not have any way to come out of it, as, in all, the things I'd been doing for decades weren't working. So this was a really intense period, and it was during this time that I was first introduced to nervous system healing and regulation work. And this first thing about Right on time, right.
Leslie: Like in some ways, like thank God that piece came in because I'm sure it just was like vitally necessary for what you were grappling with.
Rachel: I will say it was life-saving. It was definitely. There were a lot of pieces and it was also a missing piece that was needed to bring all of the work together that I had been doing. So this was huge and that was my path into this work. So I basically went through. It was about a two, three year period of working very intensely on myself and during that time I completely cleared the autoimmune condition. All of the health symptoms that I'd lived with got off. All the medications that I'd lived with got off all the medications. This work led me into the world of somatic experiencing Dr Peter Levine's work, which is a big piece of what I was doing and of course, that led me into training as a somatic experiencing practitioner so that I could support other people in this kind of work and basically move us back to the wisdom and regulation that our nervous systems really do hold, and that's the goal here.
Yeah it's incredible.
Leslie: Yeah, thank you so much for all of that.
There are a couple of things in there that I want to follow up with you about, but I think first things first.
One of the things that really has my attention is the experience that you had of trying to get off of antidepressant medication, because I think that one of the things that happens for a lot of people in this world of either taking antidepressant medication, trying to get off of antidepressant medication is that the withdrawal symptoms can be so severe that it leads a lot of people to think that they really need to be taking the antidepressant medication, because it's almost as if it's like it tricks people into thinking that the medication itself is working, when in reality, just getting off of those medications can create side effects that are so severe that, like that is sort of syndromal in and of itself. And so one of the things that, yeah, one of the things that I just kind of want to like call out and emphasize about what you're saying, is that today I happen to know about you that you don't take, you know you never went back on them, you still don't take antidepressant medication and you don't need them now, even though the process of getting off of them was brutal.
Rachel: It was brutal and I don't need them now. And it's been what's it been eight years now.
It was May 2016 was the last, so whatever that's been, what happens in a physical body when there is stored trauma in our tissues. Like you mentioned the idea of trauma being stored in our fascia, you know it also just can be stored in our nervous system in varying ways, and a lot of what this nervous system regulation work is about is sort of getting the trauma out of our physical body so that our nervous systems can start to work more optimally again and can this might sound like a bold statement, but I'm going to go there can start to operate as if the system was never traumatized at all. Right, like it's like, there is this way in which we can be left with like a shiny new nervous system right.
So yeah. So there's this kind of like...
Leslie: Yeah, okay, good, there's this sort of big amorphous kind of how do we start to sort of pull at the threads of this, which is basically just how do we explain to people sort of what this process is all about. So I don't know let's figure this out together how we begin to kind of wade into that.
Rachel: We can think about our autonomic nervous system. It is designed to respond to threats or perceived threats. It activates when it needs to take care of you in some way. If you need to fight back in a dangerous situation, if you need to flee a situation, when there's a threat or a perceived threat, our bodies will mobilize a response and a huge charge of energy, and ideally, that energy will go somewhere, will go into either some kind of action or fleeing, or mobilize you in some way to do what needs to happen, especially in our modern world where a lot of our impulses are not I don't want to say this we operate from our heads a lot.
We don't operate from our bodies and what they are instinctively knowing and doing and knowing they need to do, and so a lot of our impulses and physical responses get shut down. And one thing that can happen in various ways and for different reasons, is that that charge of energy that gets mobilized under a threat response can get shut down or turned back inward or held in. Yeah, and that's when energy can literally get stuck.
Leslie: You know, I just can't help but feel like there's this, there's a paradigm shift in here that I think could be really useful for people. Because as we talk about what happens when trauma gets stored in the body, or just the stress response sort of gets stored in the body, I want to talk to you a little bit about how that shows up on a practical level. And I know that that's a big, it's a big question and it's a question with sort of a big answer. But if we think about things like you know, just sort of depression and anxiety and the nervous system, what are actually the practical implications for trauma getting stored in the body in this way?
Rachel: Yeah. So I think what we're talking about is to go back to what we were saying about that charge of energy needing to move through and be completed, and another piece that we almost, but not quite, touched on is that there is an additional response that our nervous systems have, which is a freeze or a shutdown response.
If, for various reasons, this charge of energy can't be completed, the body may respond by going into a freeze and all of that energy gets shut down. So we can absolutely think about this as correlating to states that we would call anxiety and depression. We could look at a nervous system being stuck in an activated state, or stuck on high, as we might say, could look like so much sympathetic charge running through the system that is not able to come down, running through the system that is not able to come down, that the experience is kind of constantly stuck on the thoughts, the emotions, the possibly emotional flooding, the loops of thoughts, the anxious energy. All of that could be seen through the lens of a nervous system that is not able to come down out of a stress response. We could also talk about depression, the other piece of that, a nervous system that is, we might say, stuck on low, where it is chronically stuck in a state of not to get too technical, but a dorsal, vagal response, where the nervous system is in this shutdown state. I don't know how.
Leslie: I don't know if we need to go more into that right now, but I think we should actually, because it's so funny it's actually just where I was going to go. One of the things I think is really interesting about this is there is an element of thinking about anxiety as a nervous system regulation issue that feels somewhat intuitive, right, because the idea that there is an excess of sort of sympathetic energy is from in the sense of a sympathetic state of arousal. The idea that there is sort of too much energy stuck in the system is something that I think is actually quite intuitive to anyone who has ever struggled with anxiety. The idea that depression can also be a matter of nervous system dysregulation might not feel quite as intuitive to a lot of people, so I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit further. How do you understand, you know, this thing that we call depression as an issue of there being stored energy stuck in the body in this way?
Rachel: Yeah, the real short answer, without kind of unpacking all the technical pieces, is that a nervous system can not only get stuck on high, it can get stuck in a shutdown response. There's basically a freeze response and then, when this goes on chronically, the nervous system can go into like a collapsed state where the energy is just chronically shut down. And we could, you know, go into the branches of how and why, but I'm not sure if that's necessary.
Leslie: There's a part of me that almost wants to, at the level of really like making this sort of simple for people. It's like, yeah, a lot of people are accustomed to, you know, we used to say fight or flight. Then eventually we started saying fight, flight or freeze. Now these days we even say, you know for those who are sophisticated enough to know all the terms, which is many, many people these days you know fight, flight, freeze or fawn, and so, to sort of to your point, there's a way of looking at depression as being sort of like a stock freeze state. We could say that, yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting because I think that depression and anxiety are in some ways an almost like meat and potatoes way of looking at this stuff. And I'm also thinking about other things. You can tell me if you feel like you don't kind of want to go out of out over your skis and talking about this stuff, although I'm happy to. I can't help but think about also like things like attention deficit disorder is being sort of a nervous system dysregulation issue. Do you think about it that way too? I do yeah. Yeah, there's a part of me that kind of feels like almost not not quite all mental health phenomena. But almost all mental health phenomena can be sort of just, you know, sort of explained by looking at what is happening in one's nervous system as a result of things that they've experienced over the course of their lives various like traumas, stresses, all that stuff.
Rachel: Yeah, I think it absolutely can, and I mean, like you and I have said, leslie, and shared you know, both on and off this recording, we're not saying that it's the only factor or the only thing going on, but I think it absolutely brings a way of understanding what's going on, to look at it as energy that is not regulated, that is not optimally able to, at its most simple level, go into a stress-activated response and come down and then from there things can get kind of so wacky and dysregulated.
I mean, we could talk about how systems can actually get stuck on high and stuck on low at the same time, and that is likely what we have going on in a lot of the syndromal complexes we talk about, including a lot of the health issues that I was dealing with. We're actually talking about a likely piece of this being the nervous system is both stuck on and shut down. Gas on, brakes on, can't go, can't stop all of this energy in kind of a discombobulated way, fighting each other, and I think we can absolutely look at that as the heart of so many things without saying this is the only thing happening, but the lens is helpful to understand it.
Leslie: Like it feels like attunement is a really big piece of this. Like how do we sort of explain this through the lens of, like, early childhood development?
Rachel: What's really important to think about is that as infants, we come into this world without fully developed nervous systems yet, and there's a really important key branch of our nervous system. It's the social engagement branch, or the ventral vagal state, which is actually and this is important the ventral vagal state, which is actually and this is important the ventral vagal or social engagement state is actually what brings us down out of a stress response in a very gentle, relaxed, helpful way. And that branch of the nervous system is not actually online when we're born. It's developed by being mirrored and met and absorbed through our caregivers, and so that true connected meeting, feeling, sensing face-to-face or skin-to-skin or heart-to-heart contact is actually what turns on and brings that ventral vagal state online. And so there's a way, as infants, we actually kind of borrow that ventral vagal state from our caregivers. We, before it's fully developed, we rely on their regulation to regulate us as an infant, because an infant can't self-regulate the capacity is just not there.
Leslie: Yeah, it really is. It's such a beautiful and wild thing to sort of pause on and think about, and I'm just so grateful that I have you here to speak to this piece, because it's something that is often, it is sort of present in the work that I do and the way that I talk about mental health and it's not always the easiest thing to kind of unpack and explain for people. But something that I find myself saying again and again as I do just sort of general mental health advocacy work, is just the idea that humans are profoundly wired for social relationships. You know that in from our earliest days.
We are learning to. You know, as we're learning to walk and talk, we're also learning kind of how to exist in the world and how we exist with other people, sort of in relationship with them, and that kind of stuff. And to your point, you know, yeah, our very nervous systems, you know, all the way down to our like fight or flight response. I mean it's that is sort of inborn.
I'm not trying to say that it isn't, but there is a way in which we quite literally become who we are through a process of co-regulation with our caregivers, and it's I want to try to sort of explain to people a little bit more how this works. And I know we're in really delicate territory here. But it's amazing to think about even something like eye gazing as being something that you know. The way that, I'll say a mother, just to sort of be archetypal about it the way that, like, a mother might be making eye contact with her infant, let's say while she's nursing, or something like that, is quite literally how human beings kind of come to learn who they are in relation to another Right. And so, to your point, there is this um, our nervous systems were kind of coming online through that action.
Rachel: Absolutely yeah, a hundred percent. And, like you, slight flight responses. There that part is, and yet we need the co-regulation piece to bring in that piece that helps us to soothe, that helps us learn to self-soothe and self-settle. So that's why it's so key and so important.
Leslie: So there's a question that I want to ask you that that might feel a little big, and if it does, I'm going to help you unpack this, but can you help people to understand? I kind of want to bridge something for people, which is understanding how someone could feel depressed as an adult and not know why, and actually have it be something that relates to this early childhood development piece. Could you possibly walk people through that? How do we help people to understand how they could feel depressed or anxious as an adult because of something that happened in their infancy or early childhood development that they don't even remember?
Rachel: Yeah, yeah, well, if that piece that we were just talking about. So if there's this piece of the nervous system that we need to get from other people, from our caregivers, like that ventral vagal system, it literally does come online through that co-regulation. If that doesn't happen, what that means is that our nervous system is left with less optimal ways to deal with stress. Specifically, it can go into a stress response and shoot up really high and get really activated and then, if that ventral vagal state is not really functioning optimally, to help come down out of that activated response, the option that's left is basically the shutdown or the freeze response. This is another branch of the nervous system, the dorsal vagal state.
Not bad, it's another key piece of how we function. But it's not the optimal way for us to come down out of a stress response. But if we don't have any other way, that's what we've got and that's where it can look like a nervous system that tends to get stuck on high, stuck on low, bounce up and down, maybe between extremes of feeling, for example, just to make something up super wired and overactivated and then crash down with no energy or maybe even depressed or feeling really flat. We could think about a nervous system bouncing between those extremes because it doesn't have the ability to come down out of stress in a healthy way through that ventral vagal state. That should have gotten wired in early as an infant through that attunement. But if it's not there or not, it's not that it's not there but if it's not optimally fully functioning, the nervous system is going to be left with the other options.
Leslie: Yeah, beautiful. Not in the sense I mean, this is sort of tricky territory that we're in, it's not easy stuff to talk about, but it's beautiful in the sense, that sort of like. I know exactly what you mean and there's one piece that I want to like, just a little gap I want to bridge for people, which is that the ventral vagal response and the dorsal vagal response are parasympathetic states, right. So if fight or flight is a sympathetic state, the opposite of that, our parasympathetic nervous system, is like rest and digest. But it's not always so easy as resting and digesting Like. Sometimes it's sort of a frozen, dysregulated like. The dorsal vagal is sort of an kind of an extreme shutdown state. Right, where you know you hear rest and digest. It sounds so relaxing, like you're on vacation, right, but it's not always.
Rachel: Thank you for bringing this piece in yeah thanks for bringing this piece in.
We kind of went out of order a little. Probably would have been good to put some basics in, but that's absolutely it and problem at all. A lot of listeners will be familiar. Yes, the fight-flight is the sympathetic state where we get activated and then we have the parasympathetic state that takes us down out of the activation. But this is where it's helpful to understand that there are different operating systems of that parasympathetic state. And, as we mentioned, there's the ventral vagal state, which is also the social engagement channel and this helps us to calm down out of stress in an easy, relaxed way.
The dorsal vagal state is another important branch. It actually has really important functions. When we sleep, when we digest, we are in this, this deep state. But the key here is is not so much about like being in one state or other, but about how they are working together and how the whole nervous system is communicating and functioning. Because what we need is for the ventral vagal state to kick in at an appropriate time and bring us gently down out of stress, and then we need the dorsal vagal state to come in when it's appropriate. When we've got this dysregulation, they're all just kind of mixed up. They're firing at the wrong times, we're getting stuck on, stuck off, crashing up, crashing down, and it's this discombobulated thing.
Leslie: Yes, thank you for that. You know it's really interesting. I'm sort of thinking about the just sort of safety as a fundamental thing within our nervous systems in terms of you know, there is this question in here which is just what does it feel like to feel safe within our nervous systems? Because the thing that's interesting is that it's not like it's bad to be in a state of sympathetic arousal. We need to be in a state of sympathetic arousal sometimes. We need to be able to sort of be up when we need to be up. We need to be able to kind of come down when we need to come down.
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this stuff, but there is a question that a person could ask themselves at any given moment.
They might even want to ask themselves, as they're listening to this right now, like, do I actually feel safe within my body and do I feel safe within the environment that I find myself in right now?
Right, and so just to tee you up with a question because you know it's really interesting, I feel so aware, as we're having this conversation, that I know that there are a lot of people that can relate to this, because, whether they think of themselves as being depressed or not.
There is a phenomenon that I think has kind of picked up a little bit of a head of steam, where there's a lot of chatter on the internet and amongst sort of like Gen Z age folks, where a lot of people are like needing to spend whole days in bed not doing anything, and there's all sorts of different like language that's been used to describe this.
It's interesting because I, on some level, I think that we're talking about something that is profoundly human, which is to say that if people need to do this now, on some level it stands to reason that perhaps our ancestors needed to do it too. But it feels to me like there is something about the level of stress that a lot of people are operating with right now, that they are probably living a lot of their lives in a state of sympathetic nervous system arousal and then, like the evening will come around or that the weekend will come around and they'll like get into bed and not get out for like 24 to 48 straight hours and I wonder if you can speak to anyone who might be listening to this right now that can relate to that.
Rachel: The first thing. I want to go back to something you said, that is such an important piece of all of this, because often when we hear our nervous systems talked about, it's in the context of oh, we need to settle, we need to calm all the energy down and the first thing like sometimes we do, and sometimes we actually need to activate what's there?
Maybe there's actually a fight response that has been shut down, that needs to be felt and present and allowed. And I think this is a piece of bringing in the answer to what you're asking how can we speak to someone who is maybe in a state where maybe life's not terrible, but they have a sense like, yeah, something's resonating here, something feels a little bit off? And one of the really important first pieces I'd want to bring in is that thing you just said of the sympathetic energy is not bad. It's not always about calming, it's about energy is not bad. It's not always about calming.
It's about, I would say, first of all, coming into the body, which is a journey of its own, and connecting to and feeling and owning and holding space for all of the experiences and sensations and even impulses that our system holds, which is going to be a key piece of helping things move into regulation. We've got to allow everything that's here to be here before we can start working with oh, let's settle and calm or try to do something with the energy. We've got to allow it to be here first, actually be present to and feel all of the energy and experiences and emotions and sensations that our bodies hold. And this relates really strongly to trusting ourselves and trusting our own experience of what I'm in, what is happening, what I am feeling and honoring and giving space to that. So that's a starting point. I'll pause there because I don't know if you want to.
Leslie: Yeah, I think you're saying something really important and it's making me want to just start to dive a tiny bit deeper into helping people to understand what it really means to be present with the feelings and the energy in their body, because it feels to me like part and parcel of what we're talking about right now is it is a coping mechanism for a lot of people in our culture, and it's a very good, hardworking coping mechanism to really be in our heads with whatever we've got going on right.
You know, we learn from an early age how to sort of think our way out of things and how to perhaps overly rely on the, you know, the prefrontal cortex that we humans are so proud of, and I think one of the things that is really beautiful about this work, and sort of challenging about this work in all the good and right ways, is that it really encourages people to get out of their heads and into their bodies a little bit more. Someone who coaches people on this stuff how, how can you start by maybe telling us a little bit about how you think about this issue of this sort of like avoidance of being in our bodies, or how do we help people to? How do we invite people to sort of get a little bit more into their bodies in ways that feel safe?
Rachel: Yeah, great question and it's honestly it's a challenging one to put words around, because there's a uniqueness to every journey and there's a doing it and a following what's happening in the moment that guides us in the how to do this. But I think that recognizing what's happening is usually got to be a starting point, like even coming to an awareness that, yeah, I'm living kind of neck up and maybe not so in touch here. And I think an important thing is honoring whatever's happening and the journey that a person has been on, which may include trauma that's been stored in the body, which means, like you just said, it might be scary to dive in and all of the energy that's stored there might actually be really intense to feel right away. And we can honor that. And one of the first things to know is that it's not about making ourselves feel stuff and it's not about, I mean, on a like, pushing into, like oh, I just got to feel it.
Sometimes we want to go that route, Like if I could just make myself feel it, then I'll be better. It's not so much that, it's actually an allowance of where things literally are and honoring the gentle, loving process of coming in and feeling, sensing, creating goodness, creating safety, partly by. Here's a way to make it practical. When something does feel good, when I do feel in a safe space, in a place that feels connected and I'm like, oh, I'm good right now, Can I drop my attention in and notice what does good right now actually feel like in my body? Yeah, that's a beautiful question.
Yeah, really like hard to get the head around if that's new, and that's okay too. And a lot of people, when they are, you know, new to this, in my experience they'll go well, I feel nothing, or it's not in my body, it's somewhere else and that's okay. Like, whatever is my experience in this moment is my experience and the coming into that, maybe gently seeing if I can direct the tension into the body, to what sensations might be there, what I might be able to notice.
Leslie: What sensations might be there, what I might be able to notice, can help me to bring the consciousness in in a way that feels safe, that feels right, that feels at a pace that I feel good with and that doesn't freak out my nervous system and re-traumatize things. What's coming to mind for me right now is the sort of the way in which emotion, if we actually check in with it and if we feel it and pay attention to it, actually really shows up as like energy quite literally in our body, and this is sort of a little bit of a cheesy phrase people sometimes use, but the idea that emotion is energy and motion.
You know that it's like when you so corny, but it's like when you really drop into your body. It's amazing how you can really feel it as an energy that exists somewhere. And something that I have found to be super powerful in doing this work is that sometimes it can be scary at first. When we're so accustomed to living in our heads, it can feel sort of scary to drop into our bodies and to actually be sort of physically present and emotionally present with the sensations and in its own funny way, once you start to get used to it, it is almost easier or more pleasant oftentimes than being with the thoughts.
Sometimes it's actually the thoughts that are more than the more problematic part. Right, totally, completely. It's the attitudes, the beliefs, the stories that we tell ourselves, the narratives that you know, all of these things we carry in our heads. But if you're actually sort of in your body with the energy, it's just kind of like oh, there's a physical sensation, oh, there's another physical sensation. You know, it's like sometimes it feels like my own little personal amusement ride to just be like in my body with whatever it's feeling.
Rachel: Well, and to go back to like when that energy just gets to be present and felt, that's when it can shake off in the way we were talking about the animals doing, and this emotion can actually just move through, which emotion is meant to do. And what is so funny is sometimes I think we think we are feeling emotion. We think we are feeling emotion. Let's say, if I'm used to living in my head, I might think I'm feeling emotion and I'm actually more kind of thinking about the emotion, if that makes sense.
Or I'm up here in my head in this thought loop and there's some kind of you know, uncomfortable experience. But to your point, if I can actually allow myself to simply drop in and feel what is happening, in many cases, that energy just gets to move because emotion is energy and it does move. That's what it does when we can be present to it in our bodies and let it just move through the way it's designed to do.
Leslie: It's so funny for me as someone who is, you know, a psychologist and a classically trained talk therapist, because, you know, I got into this work because I had gone to therapy at a really early age and I have spent the better part of my life prizing and prioritizing, you know, like the notion of insight.
And it's funny because it's not to make that stuff wrong. You know, we can, you know, to use the expression that sometimes used we can walk and chew gum, right, like we can, we can sort of, um, we can prioritize our insights and also we can do this other work which is just being present with the body and the energy and that kind of stuff. But I think what I will offer to people and I would love to hear anything you want to say in response to this is that it is wild how much more productive it actually can be sometimes to just be in our bodies with the energy that is present, like, let the story go go, feel the feeling. Sometimes even the issue itself can be resolved just by actually fully feeling the feeling and letting it process. Can you maybe speak to that a little bit, like, do you, do you have any thoughts or beliefs or understandings of like what that even is. Do we sort of understand how we can sometimes solve a problem by just literally feeling the feeling all the way through?
Rachel: Oh, that's a great question, magic.
I don't know if I have an explanation of it other than to totally agree with what you're saying. Other than to totally agree with what you're saying. I know that. I have absolutely seen it so many times and I'm a thousand percent with you in support of the talk therapy and the insights and the processing. It is so helpful. And yes, there is a piece that happens when we can drop into allowing the body to just move the energy that it needs to move. It's in my understanding and experience it's like the mind has been doing all these things to try to put meaning around what's happening in all of this energy in the body. And when the energy in the body can just move and discharge and release as it needs and knows how to do, the mind gets to relax and it doesn't. Sometimes it is just solved that quickly and I've seen it over and over again. Yeah.
Leslie: Yeah, there's actually like an answer that is coming to me for my own question. It's sort of coming to me in real time because it's a fascinating thing to think about. It's something I just feel so aware of, just as a psychologist and a therapist and that kind of stuff. Is that so often, anything that we are up against in our modern lives as adults let's say, just speak to adults, the adults in the room for a moment is actually predicated upon the things that happened to us when we were children. Right, it's like the idea of a button getting pushed right, that you might get into a fight with somebody.
And the fight never would have happened if it weren't for the fact that some old button was getting pushed and if we can actually feel the feeling all the way through of like whatever effectively the button getting pushed, feel it all the way through. You're actually sort of unwinding whatever the thing is that you know you're sort of unwinding the button. You know you're like dismantling the equipment that's in there, sort of getting activated.
Rachel: Totally, totally, yep, yep, yep, yeah and yeah.
Leslie: Yeah, so I have a sort of like a last question slash set of questions for you just to sort of bring all of this home for people. But I'm thinking about the role that all of this plays in people getting to live lives on their own terms. You know, it's like for anybody out there listening to this they have a sense of, maybe like what it is that they want for their lives. You know, and we can use phrases like manifesting I don't even think that we have to, although we certainly can. It's like I just think about I'm holding space for what it is that we want for ourselves and I'm thinking about the role that the nervous system plays in that, the role that nervous system regulation plays in that. And as someone who coaches people in this space to sort of generate more of what they want by kind of clearing out all of this old stuff, can you speak to that a little bit, just like the relationship between doing this work and actually creating the life that we want for ourselves on our own terms?
Rachel: Totally. I think it's about that. Clearing out the energy like we were just talking about, and your button pushing way of describing it is perfect. When we're walking around in these systems that are dysregulated, we're walking around managing the buttons all day, like that's where all the energy goes. If I've got 20 buttons on me that are getting pushed and triggered every time I turn a corner, that's going to take a lot of my attention and focus just to be okay, to be okay, whatever that may look like.
And when we discharge all those buttons and allow all of that energy to be felt, to move that needs to be felt and move, and the buttons are either like 80% less or gone. All of a sudden, I've got a whole lot more energy here in the moment to choose to consciously create, to be who I'm being, to experience and enjoy everything that I'm taking in, because that's another thing our nervous systems can't enjoy and take in life if they're focused on putting out fires and threats all day long. So if I have cleared and regulated this energy, I'm able to be present, I'm able to be here and I can consciously choose and create at the level that I know I can, because I'm here to do it, and I'm here in this moment and this is a key thing of a regulated nervous system we were talking about. Activation isn't bad right. So what does it mean to be regulated? And one really important key of a regulated nervous system is responding appropriately and flexibly in the moment. Responding appropriately and flexibly in the moment so if there's a threat or a maybe threat, I'm not just reacting in like a pattern that my nervous system has been used to doing, because that's what it knows how to do. I'm actually able to be here in the moment and my nervous system can feel and flexibly and appropriately respond. And that means I'm not wasting all the energy getting stuck on high, stuck on low. I'm able to be here, a present I can create.
Leslie: That is so beautiful and perfectly put. So you know, in the interest of your time and other people's time, I want to draw this to a close. But is there anything that you want to add?
Rachel: I think we already covered it but...is the individualness and the uniqueness of the journey and of getting to know your own nervous system as the key to all of this. And one piece of that is that we often hear about like this practice or this thing that is supposed to regulate your nervous system or supposed to do this or that, and it might, but so much of the heart of this work is about you knowing you and knowing your nervous system and its journey, and it might not respond to this or that practice the way everybody else's system does, and the journey is in you, feeling and connecting to what is happening, and that's actually what's going to allow the energy to move for you. If that made sense.
In other words it's not about like you're supposed to do this thing and get this result. You can do that thing, cool, and what happens for you? What does that spark in your system? And then going with that and moving with that energy is what's key.
Leslie: Yes that there's nothing cookie cutter about this. It's not like we can go out and buy some sort of prefab nervous system off an assembly line. We're going to have to work with our own nervous systems and all of their unique quirks and gifts, so how can people find you?
Rachel: I'm at rachelhardycom and I am on Facebook. I have a Facebook group where we do some of this work together and I'm on Instagram a bit and if we can pop those links in, I would love to share 100%.
Leslie: They will be in the show notes and all that good stuff, but thank you so much for doing this with me, Rachel. It's brilliant work.
Rachel: Thank you so much, Leslie.
Leslie: It's been awesome.
You've been watching or listening to The Nature of Nurture with me, Dr. Leslie Carr, and I want to thank you for joining us. You can find Rachel at rachelhardycom and you can find the show at thenatureofnurturecom.
Many thanks to Rachel for having this conversation with me and to all the people who worked behind the scenes to make it happen. Full credits can be found in the show notes.
If you found this conversation valuable, please let me know by leaving a review or rating or by sharing the episode with at least one person who you think might enjoy it too. You can also like or subscribe on YouTube or in any podcast app that you can get your hands on.
Thanks again for tuning in. I'll see you next time.