Finding steadiness on shaky ground

It hasn’t been easy to sit with the state of the world over these past few months. Whether you actively follow the news or receive information unsolicited, the effects of our world’s alarming developments can disrupt our routines, destabilize our functioning, and increase fear and confusion. I speak, of course, from a place of privilege—having experienced relative peace in my daily life, a degree of autonomy, and some level of predictability around what comes next. This is a privilege so many have not had throughout our lifetime and continue not to have.

Our nervous system is designed to identify threat and to mobilize the body toward protection—even when that protection takes the form of freezing, dissociating, or remaining in a state of hypervigilance. When life’s events activate our fear response, we are not responding only to the present moment—its sensations, underlying narratives, and emotional patterns—but also to the imprints of previous threats and past experiences of unsafety that live within the body.

This layering of information and activation can overwhelm our system, keeping the fear response switched on and influencing every aspect of our functioning. We are designed this way—at least for now—because survival has always taken precedence, overriding all other needs. Sensing danger and preparing to respond to it is perhaps the greatest gift our limbic brain offers, one it has been refining for millions of years.

And yet, have we truly come that far? While the frontal cortex holds an extraordinary capacity to make meaning, prioritize, and evaluate, it is often insufficient in the face of the limbic brain’s primordial, survival-driven power.

Understanding our physiological and neurological realities is a lifelong process that requires curiosity. By meeting the information the body–mind is constantly providing, and by understanding the unique conditions that shaped it, we begin to create the possibility for rewiring deeply coded responses. Inviting the parts of us that once protected against threat to experience new patterns of breath, movement, thought, and action is how lasting change becomes possible.

There are endless ways to meet our body’s reactions and the stories we carry—stories created to protect us, despite their impact. There are endless ways to ease fear, to move the body in directions that offer more freedom. And with persistence, practice, and a stubborn curiosity, it does move; it does learn.

I invite you to design tools for yourself—tools that truly resonate, that create ease and a sense of safety, even if only for half a second. Is there something you can do in your environment, for yourself, or for others that might support the experience your mind and body are seeking?

Keep at it. Each time fear rises in its many forms, meet it. Greet it. Offer it a different pattern—a different breath, thought, emotional tone, or physical wave to ride. Persist. Keep insisting, gently and lovingly. Let fear know you understand its value, and continue inviting it to experience itself in a new way, in a new pattern. Stay with it, again and again.