Your Nervous System Has Its Own Language
It has been communicating to you your entire life, even if no one ever taught you how to read the signals.
In April of 2014, my life crumbled under its own weight, and I was left to dig out of the rubble.
I had tried to do everything right, everything I thought I was supposed to do. But no matter how hard I worked, how much money I made, or how beautiful my life looked from the outside, I was still left with the same sinking feeling that had followed me since childhood. That six-year-old voice refused to stay silent any longer, and I began a quest to save the rest of my life.
This midlife crisis is hardly a new story. We all know people who have reached a point where they turned their lives upside down. What makes my story different is where it led me. For the past twelve years, and still counting, I have applied the same curiosity and systems thinking that served me as an executive supply chain leader to understanding what was happening inside me, and whether there was another way to live.
That journey took me through many areas of human development. I don't claim to be an expert in any of them. But I do know what it feels like to stand in a room full of people you love and feel completely alone. I know what it feels like to carry so much buried shame that if anyone discovered who I really was, I believed I would die. I know what it feels like to need to be perfect at every step, to struggle in relationships, and to never quite feel safe in the company of other people.
For much of my life, I didn't understand what was happening inside me. No one had ever taught me how to read the signals my nervous system was sending or why my body responded the way it did when it perceived a threat. I didn't know there was a stress cycle that needed to be completed or that, without resolution, stress could accumulate until it became unmanageable.
I did know there were things that brought immediate relief. Alcohol became my regulator, and eventually my life became so heavy that alcohol no longer quieted the noise. I turned to harder drugs. Thankfully, I am now twelve years sober and able to look back on that experience with far less shame and blame. Today, I am more interested in biology than in judgment, in understanding what happens when our nervous system shifts into survival mode.
As I stripped my life back to its essentials, I began to hear myself again. I also came to realize that, like all of us, my nervous system evolved for a very different world than the one I now inhabit. It wasn't failing me; it was trying to protect me with the tools it had.
That realization changed everything.
This publication grew from that understanding.
It is a place to explore what I call Nervous System Literacy, learning to recognize the language your nervous system has been speaking your whole life, even if no one ever taught you how to read its signals.
Together we'll explore that language through stories, movement, breath, meditation, reflection, research, and practice. I don't have all the answers, but I have spent the last twelve years learning to recognize the patterns of my own nervous system. Along the way, I discovered that many of the things I believed were character flaws were, in fact, protective adaptations.
My hope is that as you learn to recognize your own patterns, you'll discover what I did: that understanding yourself is often the beginning of treating yourself with compassion and grace, and of gaining greater freedom to find joy in your life.
Welcome. I'm glad you're here.
Joan Mudget
