What I Felt Before 25 People Flew In — And What It Taught Me About Nervous System Wisdom

Last month, before the retreat, I felt it.

Twenty-five people flying in from everywhere. The preparation, the responsibility, the love that goes into holding a space like that. And somewhere in my chest, that familiar charge — is it all going to come together? Will they receive what they need? Will this be what I hoped it would be?

A part of me was nervous. Activated. That aliveness that hums just underneath the surface before something that matters.

And I didn’t try to make it go away.

I recognized it for what it was — not a warning, not a problem to solve, not anxiety to manage. It was there because this has deep meaning to me. Because I care. Because showing up for people in that way — fully, with everything I have — means something.

And that feeling? It’s allowed to be there.

Nervous System Regulation Is Only Part of the Picture

We talk a lot about regulating the nervous system — settling it, finding calm, coming back to baseline. And that work is real and necessary and beautiful. I teach it. I practice it. I believe in it deeply.

But I want to offer something a little wider than regulation.

Nervous system wisdom.

Because wisdom isn’t just about quieting the charge — it’s about learning to be in relationship with it. To feel what’s actually happening in the soma, in the body’s lived experience, and to respond to what’s true rather than what’s familiar. Sometimes that means finding calm. And sometimes — more often than we expect — it means recognizing that the charge is there for a reason.

The nervous system is not just something to manage. It’s something to listen to.

Anxiety and Activation Feel Almost the Same in the Body

Here’s something most of us were never taught: anxiety and activation feel almost identical in the body. Elevated heart rate. Heightened sensation. A kind of aliveness that can tip either way. The difference isn’t always in the feeling itself — it’s in what we make it mean, and whether we’ve learned to work with that energy or against it.

Around the same time as the retreat, two very different groups of people reached out to me. The first were overwhelmed — dysregulated, anxious, needing to find their way back to ground. The second were stuck in a different way. They had dreams they wanted to move toward, actions they wanted to take, changes they were ready to make — but something in the body just wouldn’t follow through.

Both groups were describing sensations that felt almost identical. A charge in the chest. Restlessness. A feeling of something needs to happen.

For the first group, that charge was distress. For the second, it was energy that had nowhere to go.

When we’ve spent a long time managing anxiety, it’s easy to treat every charge in the body as something to calm down. But sometimes that charge is your system gearing up — for courage, for action, for something you actually want. For something that means a lot to you.

The Practice: Getting Curious Instead of Reaching for Calm

Real somatic intelligence is about being in relationship with your body’s signals, not just trying to quiet them. It’s about learning to feel what’s actually happening underneath — in the lived experience of being in a body — and responding to what’s true rather than what’s familiar.

Most of us were taught, consciously or not, to treat the body’s charge as a problem. Something to fix, to calm, to push through or make disappear. But the nervous system is not just a regulation machine. It’s an instrument. And part of learning to listen to it is learning to tell the difference between I need to settle and I need to move.

So here’s an invitation for this week:

The next time you feel that charge — that restlessness, that aliveness, that hum of something beneath the surface — just pause before you reach for calm. Get curious. Ask yourself gently:

Is this distress? Or is this my body getting ready?

Is this anxiety? Or is this activation in service of something that matters to me?

You might be surprised by what it’s actually saying. And in that pause — in that moment of genuine curiosity rather than immediate management — that’s where nervous system wisdom begins.

A Note on Working With This More Deeply

If this resonates with you and you’d like to explore it further, this is exactly the kind of work we do inside The Practice — my online membership for meditation, yoga, breathwork, and embodied living. This month there’s a specific energy and activation practice in the library, created for the moments when what you need isn’t more calm, but more courage.

There’s also a growing library of over 300 practices, live sessions each month, and a private community of people genuinely doing this work alongside each other.

If you’ve been feeling that pull toward a steadier, more embodied way of living — you’re warmly welcome. You can learn more at sandravanatko.com.

And if you’d like to explore working together more personally, I offer a small number of private somatic mentoring spots through Hakomi-informed coaching. You can learn more about that here.