The Unseen Systems Shaping Your Nervous System
As we move through life, we don’t do so as blank slates. We inherit beliefs, values, and systems that quietly tell us who we should be, how we should act, and what parts of ourselves are acceptable. These scripts shape us long before we ever get the chance to question them - shaping how we move, how we relate, and how we experience our own bodies.
Many of us were raised in a culture that prizes productivity, efficiency, and constant forward motion. A capitalist culture where worth is measured by output. A patriarchal culture that centres certain bodies and voices. A colonial legacy that built hierarchies - of race, gender, value and “rightness” - and told us where we belong within them.
None of these are personal failures. They are stories we inherited. Stories we learned to make room for inside our bodies.
How These Scripts Live in the Body
These systems don’t just inform our ideas, they shape our nervous systems, our breath, our posture, the way we take up (or minimise) space. Over time, we internalise restriction: hold your emotion, tighten your belly, don’t be too loud, don’t be too soft, don’t take up too much room, don’t offend, don’t rest.
But internalised restriction comes at a cost. When we habitually contract, suppress, or override our impulses, we begin to disconnect from our own inner signals. We become fluent in managing ourselves rather than meeting ourselves. And this is where the work of liberation begins.
Because learning to accept restriction in your life, to name it, feel it, and understand where it came from, is not about tolerating it. It’s about becoming conscious of the invisible boundaries shaping you. When you feel restriction somatically (in the body), not just intellectually, something shifts. Your nervous system starts to recognise what safety, spaciousness, and authenticity actually feel like. Your comfort zone expands. You begin to sense where the script ends and you begin.
And once your body has experienced that truth (even for a moment) it becomes much harder to move through the world in old, inherited ways. Something in you refuses to shrink. Refuses to abide by scripts that ask you to be less. That somatic knowing becomes a compass.
This, to me, is liberation: the embodied capacity to move, choose, and live beyond the systems that shaped you. And once you know (through/in the body) that kind of freedom in your own nervous system, you naturally want it for others.
Why This Matters in My Work
This is why my offerings, whether 1:1 sessions, group classes, workshops, or seasonal gatherings , are not designed to be an escape from the world. They are not little pockets of perfection where we momentarily forget.
They are spaces to understand, feel, and alchemise the world we actually live in. Spaces where we get curious about how culture lives in the body. Spaces where we recognise what we’ve inherited, and choose what we want to continue. Spaces where we loosen the old scripts and allow something honest to emerge.
Because if yoga is liberation, and embodiment is truth, then the work is not to transcend the world, but to navigate it consciously, compassionately, and in connection with our own (and ultimately others) aliveness.
This is the heart of what I teach. Not perfection. Not performance. But reclamation.