Your Nervous System Was Never Meant to Be "Fixed"

If you’ve ever felt like nervous system work became another thing to “get right”, this is for you.

Most of us were never taught how to be in relationship with our nervous system, or how nervous system regulation can emerge through attention and noticing rather than control.

Instead, we learned how to manage symptoms. To push through stress. To override exhaustion. To search for techniques that promise calm or balance when things feel off.

Even the recent surge of nervous system language, while helpful, often stays rooted in a fixing framework. We are encouraged to identify whether we are dysregulated, activated, shut down. Then we are pointed toward strategies meant to correct the problem.

That framing assumes something subtle but powerful: that the body is a system that has gone wrong.

My own work with somatic practices has slowly undone that assumption. What I have seen, both personally and in practice, is that regulation does not come from trying to fix the nervous system. It comes from learning how to stay in relationship with it.

That shift begins with a different question.

Not What is wrong with me?

But What am I noticing?

Embodiment Is Not a Technique

Somatic embodiment is often presented as a set of practices designed to produce a particular internal state. Calm. Grounding. Presence.

In that framing, embodiment becomes something we do to ourselves in order to arrive somewhere else.

A relational understanding asks something more foundational.

Somatic embodiment can be understood as the practice of cultivating attuned presence within the body, a presence that necessarily extends into relationship with the world the body inhabits. To be embodied is not only to feel sensation internally, but to participate consciously in the ongoing exchange between body, environment, and others.

This matters because the body is not an isolated object. It is a living system that evolved in constant relationship with its surroundings.

When embodiment is reduced to a technique, the nervous system is often treated the same way. As something to regulate, manage, or optimize. When embodiment is understood as relationship, the nervous system becomes something to listen to.

Nervous System Regulation Through Relationship

The nervous system is not designed to remain calm at all times. Nor is it meant to avoid activation.

Health emerges from flexibility. From the ability to move between states of activation and rest in response to changing conditions.

At its core, the nervous system is oriented toward safety, connection, and rhythm. It is always tracking what is happening inside the body and around it, adjusting moment by moment.

Stress, fatigue, and emotional intensity are not signs of failure. They are forms of information.

When we approach the nervous system with a fixing mindset, we often override these signals in pursuit of an outcome. When we approach it relationally, we allow those signals to guide us.

This is where embodiment becomes less about control and more about conversation.

Why Small Moments Matter More Than Big Efforts

There is a common belief that nervous system regulation requires long or intensive practices. Extended meditation sessions. Elaborate routines. Major lifestyle overhauls.

In practice, nervous systems tend to learn differently.

Small, consistent moments of regulation are often more effective than long, infrequent interventions. Brief pauses of grounding or orienting teach the nervous system that it is safe to settle. Over time, these moments accumulate. The system learns through repetition and experience, not through force.

This is why relational embodiment emphasizes returning rather than achieving.

Returning to sensation.

Returning to breath.

Returning to the body in the middle of ordinary life.

These returns do not need to be dramatic to be meaningful. They only need to be honest.

From Self-Surveillance to Curiosity

Many people approach somatic practices with an internal stance of monitoring.

Am I doing this correctly?

Am I calm enough yet?

Why is this not working?

This posture mirrors broader cultural patterns of productivity and self-optimization. It can quietly keep the nervous system in a state of vigilance, even while attempting to relax.

A relational approach invites a different orientation. Curiosity without demand.

Rather than evaluating experience, we learn to notice it. Rather than labeling sensations as good or bad, we allow them to inform us. The question What am I noticing? shifts attention away from judgment and toward presence.

In my own practice, this question has become a steady companion. It interrupts urgency. It creates space. It allows the nervous system to reveal its rhythms instead of being pushed toward a predetermined state.

Embodiment Happens in Real Life

A relational approach to the nervous system is not confined to quiet rooms or formal practice spaces.

It is meant to meet us in real life. In moments of stress, transition, fatigue, or uncertainty.

Embodiment might look like pausing to feel your feet on the ground before responding to a message. Noticing your breath change during a difficult conversation. Choosing rest after sustained activation. Stopping a practice when it no longer feels supportive.

Nervous system regulation builds gradually, through respectful attention and repetition.

A Gentle Place to Begin

If you feel drawn to explore this relational approach in a more tangible way, we at Pneuma Center have created a free guide - RESET: 3 Evidence-Based Somatic Practices to Reset Your Nervous System.

This guide was designed to meet you where you are. In the midst of ordinary days, subtle stress, moments of fatigue, or quiet longing to return to yourself. The practices are intentionally simple and accessible, offering small points of return that can be woven into daily life without pressure or performance.

The path forward is not about doing more, but about learning how to stay with what is already here.

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Written by Emma Grace

Emma is a writer and steward at Pneuma Center, offering grounded insight shaped by lived experience, close work with others, and sustained inquiry into relational participation with body, earth, and cosmos.

M.A. Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness
California Institute of Integral Studies