Your Nervous System Is a Portal to Your Soul
There’s a small place I often return to — a familiar space in the forest near my home, it has a special feel and the air seems to exhale its own quiet. A place where the trees speak more and more, I feel. I found myself walking there again the other day, along a small stream on a crisp sunny autumn day. The light was clear, the breeze gentle, and the forest carried that early hint of winter — the smell of cool earth, leaves drifting down from the trees like quiet little sparkles when they caught the sun, and gently settling on the ground. There was a sense of stillness that felt deeply alive, that subtle hum the forest has when nothing particular is happening, everything is quietly being in the deep rhythm of nature.
As I stood there, something simple but undeniable moved through me — a settling, a loosening, a small shift toward presence. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just… true. A quiet reciprocity between my body and the world around me.
A reminder that the nervous system is always in conversation — with the land, with the air, with the unseen, and with whatever we allow ourselves to notice.
And in that moment, it felt clear again: your nervous system isn’t just physical.
It’s a bridge — a portal — between your human experience and your soul.
More Than Biology
We often learn about the nervous system through science: fight, flight, freeze; vagus nerve pathways; safety cues; stress cycles. All of this is important and deeply valid. But it is only one layer.
Your nervous system is also the way you feel the world.
The way you sense truth.
The way you open to spirit.
The way beauty reaches you.
The way you soften into connection.
The way your soul speaks through your body.
It lives beneath the subconscious, shaping:
⟡ how safe you feel in relationship
⟡ how deeply you can listen
⟡ how easily you access intuition
⟡ how open your creativity is
⟡ how connected you feel to yourself and others
⟡ how fully you inhabit your own presence
It is both a root system and an inner universe — a biological network, and a living, sensing field. Like mycelium, it extends far beyond what we consciously perceive.
A Portal to Your Being
When your system is overwhelmed or bracing, it becomes harder to reach the places within you that speak softly — the places that guide you, the places that remember who you really are, your whole soulful self. But when your system finds even a little safety — a slower breath, a soft moment, a settling in the belly — something opens.
You reconnect with:
⟡ your intuition
⟡ your inner guidance
⟡ your natural rhythms
⟡ your soulful sensitivity
⟡ your clarity
⟡ your aliveness
You come back into conversation with your own essence. This is why nervous system work matters — not as a set of steps, but as a way of returning to yourself and feeling whole.
An Ancestral Connection
Your nervous system began forming long before your first breath, growing inside the atmosphere of your mother’s body — shaped by her heartbeat, her breath, her stress, her ease, and the way she listened to the world. Her own nervous system was shaped by her mother’s, and by the people who held her. And the egg that became part of you already lived inside your mother when she was inside your grandmother’s womb — steeping in her stories, her tenderness, her longings, her stress and the emotions she lived through. Your father’s early environment also shaped the genetic imprint of his sperm.
These early threads become part of how you attune, how you sense, how you guard, how you open, how you seek connection, and how you feel the world. Your nervous system is not just yours — it is a lineage, a thread woven through generations, a quiet, living memory. When you work with it, you also tend to something much older than yourself, I believe.
Reciprocity — The Quiet Exchange That Regulates Us
We regulate one another through presence. Through breath. Through the subtle ways our bodies listen and respond.
We also regulate through the natural world:
⟡ the steadiness of trees
⟡ the rhythm of water
⟡ the groundedness of soil
⟡ the openness of sky
⟡ the calm of early morning air
Nature doesn’t have to “teach” you how to regulate. It simply reminds your body of something ancient and familiar.
And you, too, offer something back. Every time you soften, breathe, or ground, you send a quiet signal of safety into the field around you. This reciprocity is always happening — in the seen and unseen, in the ordinary and extraordinary, across time, across bodies, across experience, just like how we exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide through our breath with plants. We are co-regulating all the time and as you regulate yourself, you are likely contributing to the world and beyond.
A Few Gentle Invitations
Take any of these into your day, in your own rhythm:
⟡ Sense the Exchange
Next time you’re outside, pause and ask:
What is this place offering my nervous system?
And what am I offering in return?
⟡ Let Breath Be Ancestral
Place a hand on your chest or belly.
Feel the breath under your palm.
Notice how many generations breathed like this before you.
⟡ Listen for the Subtle Senses
Let your attention fall beneath the obvious.
What else is here?
What else is being felt?
⟡ Follow the One-Percent Softening
Notice the exact moment something inside you loosens by the smallest amount.
Let that be enough.
⟡ Let Mystery Have a Seat at the Table
If something supports your system — imagery, intuition, ritual, energy — you don’t need to justify it.
Your body knows what resonates.
Coming Home Through the Body
Your nervous system is an integral part of your body and it’s not separate from your soul, it connects you to how you sense the world, how you attune, how you remember, how you belong and how you can communicate with the world and your soul. When you tend to your nervous system gently and uniquely, in your own rhythm, you create space for your truest self to emerge. You step into deeper connection — with yourself, with others, with the earth, and with the wider field of what you come from. And life begins to unfold from the inside out.
If you’d like to explore this topic more deeply, here are a few places you might enjoy:
For more in-depth educational explorations of the nervous system:
⟡ Coming Home to Your Nervous System — Why it Makes Sense to Work With the Vagus Nerve
A clear, compassionate introduction to the vagus nerve and why it plays such a central role in wellbeing and inner connection.
⟡ The Missing Piece: Why Your Nervous System is Key to Lasting Transformation
A foundational look at the autonomic nervous system and how it influences your patterns, safety, inner growth, and capacity for change.
More about the Safe and Sound Protocol: music that gently helps you restore balance in your nervous system:
⟡ What is the Safe and Sound Protocol — and how can it support your inner journey?
A gentle, research-backed listening programme designed to help your nervous system shift into a state of inner safety. Created by Dr. Stephen Porges, a renowned neuroscientist and founder of Polyvagal Theory, the SSP is used around the world to support emotional regulation, resilience, and a deeper sense of connection.
More about my Nervous System Programme (can includes the Safe and Sound Protocol):
⟡ Nervous System Coaching with the Safe and Sound Protocol
A soft, grounded overview of my 1:1 nervous system support — blending the SSP, somatic practices, and intuitive guidance.
(Includes a short video introduction)
Trauma-informed intuitive guide and soulful embodiment coach with a background rooted in science and spirit.
Your energy and presence are gifts to share with the world — even if they are deeply quiet. They are the very fuel that helps you transform your life and truly flourish.
You can tap into this when you ground in the essence of being you.
That’s what this blog is here to hold: reflections from my own long journey home to myself, interwoven with the insights I’ve gained through years of lived experience and training.