When Calm Becomes the New Colonizer…

(A somatic love letter to the misunderstood nervous system)

Now if you want, I invite you to take a collective exhale with me.

Yes, I know — I’m being provocative.

It’s on purpose.

Not to dismiss the importance of regulation, but to slice through the tidal wave of “just regulate” messaging flooding the healing, therapy, and spiritual world right now.

Because while I’m genuinely thrilled that the body and the nervous system are finally being recognized as essential to healing — we also need to name what’s being lost in translation.

Regulation matters.

But it’s not one-size-fits-all.

And it’s not always what your system needs.

Let’s get honest about when regulation supports healing — and when it becomes a bandaid.

When it soothes, and when it silences.

When it’s an act of love — and when it’s just another way to gaslight our own aliveness back into “acceptable” shapes.

When Calm Becomes Compliance

In the age of self-optimization, “regulate your nervous system” has become the new gospel.

It sounds empowering — but regulate into what, and for whose comfort?

Because when we tell people to “be calm” without naming oppression, relational trauma, or collective grief and rage — what we’re really saying is:

please make yourself easier to be around.

We’re asking bodies to conform, not transform.

To appease, not to express.

To endure the systems that made them “dysregulated” in the first place.

The Weaponization of ‘Dysregulation’

“Take a deep breath.”

“Be calm.”

“You’re just dysregulated.”

Helpful? Sometimes.

But when those are the only tools in the box, they start to function like a muzzle.

Not every raised voice is dysregulation.

Not every trembling body is trauma.

Sometimes it’s truth trying to move through — the body remembering the instinctual, wild, fierce, power or the animal body.

When “regulation” becomes code for repression, we lose touch with the wild intelligence of the nervous system — its impulse to shake, cry, roar, run, rest, push, hug, stomp,  and love.

Regulation isn’t liberation.

It’s management.

And management isn’t healing.

We’ve Started Worshipping Calm

Somewhere along the way, “regulated” became synonymous with “calm.”

We’ve started worshipping the parasympathetic and banishing the sympathetic — like it’s a naughty child.

But safety isn’t stillness.

Aliveness is movement.

The body is rhythm, expansion, contraction, pulse.

Our nervous system  was never meant to stay calm —  we are meant to move. 

Movement and sensation are our first language, until we are socialised to sit still and be quiet.

Real regulation is not the absence of charge; it’s the capacity to flow between activation and rest without losing connection to Self, to others, and the world around us. It’s being IN RELATIONSHIP, not numb and seperate.

Our Parts Don’t Like Being Told What to Do

And neither does our nervous system.

When someone says “just regulate,” the parts of us that may still  hold pain, anger, grief, or terror — they don’t feel seen.

It’s like re-enacting the original trauma: the moment we learned our bigness was too much, our sadness too sensitive, our rage unsafe.

These parts are not problems to fix — they’re intelligent protectors and vulnerable younger parts  that adapted and  shaped themselves to keep us alive, to stay safe, conencted, to belong.

As one of my mentors, Frank Anderson, teaches — healing isn’t about managing or calming parts, but embodying their shape.

Letting them move, sound, tremble, breathe, and be witnessed.

Sometimes that means letting the inner child cry, the inner protector stomp, the inner warrior roar.

It can feel terrifying, especially for therapists, practitioners, coaches, or healers whose own protector parts equate control with safety and the unknown as “dangerous” or big emotions as “dysregualtion” that can be destabilizing. But continuing to suppress, avoid, and “regualte” these parts doesn’t make them go away, they are still there waiting to be heard, felt and witnessed.

Our freedom doesn’t live in calm and stillness — it lives in range.

In letting the full ecosystem of the body — every part, every impulse and emotion — be met with curiosity and compassion.

Because when our parts are allowed to express authentically, our nervous system remembers how to flow. It knows how to complete what never got to.

The Stress Response Cycle

Every stress follows a natural arc:

activation → mobilization → deactivation → restoration.

When that cycle completes, we return to connection.

When it doesn’t, the charge of stress becomes chronic.

What interrupts completion?

Cognitive override.

Cultural conditioning.

Lack of safety.

No time, no support.

Tools used to manage instead of release.

We start coping instead of completing.

Calming instead of connecting.

When Healing Tools Become Avoidance

Meditation can deepen dissociation when stillness feels unsafe.

Yoga can suppress discharge when driven by perfectionism.

Talk therapy can circle in story without releasing physiology.

Massage can soothe tissues while the charge remains.

These aren’t “bad.” They’re just incomplete when used to control rather than listen.

Stillness before completion is suppression.

Calmness before movement is control.

True Regulation Is Flow

Like nature, we pulse. We rise and fall.

True wellness isn’t control — it’s capacity.

Regulation is not about staying calm while the world burns.

It’s about expanding your capacity to be with what’s real.

To rest.

To rage.

To cry.

To create.

To move energy through without getting stuck.

The goal isn’t calm.

It’s connection, being able to receive and express, and having safe enough spaces and faces to do so.

The Body’s Innate Intelligence

When the body trembles, shakes, or cries — it’s not broken.

It’s completing.

This is somatic stress release — the body finishing what it never had time, safety, or permission to process before.

Your body knows what to do.

Your nervous system is not malfunctioning — it’s magnificent.

It remembers how to return to balance, when we stop interrupting it with control and start listening to its impulses: crying, laughing, sighing, shaking, and finding true rest and restoration.

Because healing isn’t about doing something to the body.

It’s about remembering that the body already knows.

Regulation as Embodied Activism

When calmness is demanded by oppressive systems —

capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, extractive spirituality —

nervous system work becomes activism.

Because your rage is wisdom.

Your tears are sacred.

Your trembling is truth.

Your movement is medicine.

This is somatic liberation —

the body reclaiming its right to feel, express, and belong.

Healing is not compliance.

It’s rebellion through reconnection

Reconnection to your body intelligence

to your hearts desires and what matters most to you

to your inner power, passion, pleasure and purpose

to community and people who share the same values where you can belong 

to nature as our original mama

to the truth that we are all inter-connected and no one is free until we are all free, the wellbeing of all living beings.

The Resilience Toolkit: A Somatic Ritual by Nkem Ndefo

One of my mentors, Nkem Ndefo, creator of The Resilience Toolkit, offers a simple yet powerful way to restore somatic agency:

Pause and check in:

• How strong is your state right now?

• How do you know?

• Is your response proportionate to the moment?

• Are you carrying more than you need?

Then, connect to your body.

Try gentle self-touch, soft rocking, or orienting your gaze.

Notice if you feel more ease or spaciousness.

If you do — it’s not because you “calmed down.”

It’s because you reconnected.

This is the essence of true regulation: relationship, not control.

The Nervous System Doesn’t Need to Be Regulated — It Needs to Be Trusted

Your body is auto-regulating, self- organising, intelligent.

It doesn’t need to be managed — it needs permission to do its thing.

this is somatic intelligence, you dont need to tell your lungs to breath or blood to flow.

Homeostasis, neuroplasticity, healing of cuts — these aren’t things you make happen.

They are what life does when it’s trusted.

Life wants to move towards life.

When you plant an acorn into the soil and nurture it, give it all it’s inherent needs it will grow into a marvellous oak tree on it’s own – the same is for us. 

We are the medicine, your body has all it needs inside to heal, grow, and transform – when we have enough support and the right conditions, and unfortunately our modern life and everything happening in the world isnt natural or supportive. Luckily when we understand and start to trust our body again we can reclaim our inner felt safety so the system can finally exhale .

Your organism knows how to complete what it never had the time, space, or safety to process.

When we stop trying to fix it and start listening — the body reorganizes itself.

Not into perfection.

But into presence.

Into relationship.

Into flow.

Because regulation isn’t the goal.

Reconnection, fluidity, and authenticity is.

And that — that pulse of aliveness returning through your body —

is the revolution your nervous system has been waiting for.