129 - Nervous System Work Isn’t Boring: Finding the Juice in Healing
When people hear nervous system work, they often imagine something slow, dry, or even boring. But what if healing wasn't about forcing yourself to sit still—and what if regulation could actually feel alive?
In this solo episode, Sarah Tacy demystifies nervous system work and shares why slowing down isn't the opposite of vitality—it's the pathway to it. Drawing from her weekly movement class inside Juice, Sarah walks through the practices that help women move from depletion and over-functioning into greater expression, stability, and joy.
From lubrication and balance work to playful release, receiving, and community, she explains why nervous system healing doesn't have to be serious to be transformative.
Sarah also explores why many of us resist slowing down, how our default patterns lead to burnout, and why small, doable steps matter more than getting it "right."
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Threshold Moments. Today I am maybe demystifying nervous system work, even, like, what is nervous system work, which may be too big of a topic to breach. Two years ago, I was talking to my friend Sarah Janks, and she said, "Can I give you my honest feedback? I don't think you should do an online course for the nervous system."
She's like, "Nervous system work is boring." And at that point, I kind of thought, "But that's the important part," right? The overstimulated culture where we need to constantly be entertained is part of our nervous system dysregulation, and our ability [00:01:00] to slow down and get comfortable with slow would be the magic, right?
This would be when we slow down- This is where we're able to begin to feel. When we move fast, there can be a fast health. However, when we move fast, we tend towards repeating patterns. As an athlete, you practice repeating patterns on purpose so that you default to your repeating patterns, whether that is a free throw in basketball, whether it's doing wall ball for lacrosse, whether you sw- well, or you're swimming a thousand laps.
You repeat so that when you go fast, there is no thought behind it. But if we do this with everything in life, then that means someone says, "Hey, do you mind? Can you also pick this thing up for me?" [00:02:00] Or, "Could you just handle this other thing for me?" And if the repeating pattern is people-pleasing, if the repeating pattern is I feel safe when other people like me, and we move fast, then we're gonna keep doing what we've always done, and that generally leads to burnout So being able to slow down, even if it's just the pace of your voice.
Doesn't have to be for every conversation, but you might try it at the dinner table, where you could move fast for some parts, but also, like, is there any place for slow? If someone asks you, "How am I doing? How are you doing?" That you could pause before answering, maybe even feel into your body. There are so many people when I present, especially in Relax Money, that as I slow down and I speak slowly on [00:03:00] purpose, people start to say, "Why am I starting to cry?
Why am I starting to feel, uh, on edge?" Like, some of them actually need to get up and move. Some are, "Oh, why am I feeling tired? Why do I feel so relaxed and in my body?" Because when we slow down, we might move from adrenaline to noticing, "I am actually tired." There can be a few reasons why people start feeling tired, but one can be, "I am actually tired, and if I just lay on the ground for five minutes," I call this starfish, "I might reset a little bit.
And then instead of just doing my to-do list on a loop, I might get clear on what is really next, what is right for me." So what I want to say is that there's some importance in being able to be with [00:04:00] what might otherwise seem boring. However, nervous system work itself does not have to be boring. In fact, usually it's a little bit edgy, and then we have to resource ourselves, which means use a nervous system tool or get a glass of water or a blanket or phone a friend to be able to be with a new edge that we're working, which might be us saying no
These days, I'm teaching a weekly class in my membership that's called Juice, and the whole purpose of the name Juice, right, is to think nervous system work doesn't have to be dry. That the juice of life, the things that we savor, the vitality, that it's in there, and that it does usually require [00:05:00] a tidal movement of the way we pace ourselves and the way we engage in life.
So in this 45-minute movement class that is then followed with a meditation and then a check-in, but during the 45 minutes of movement, there's a part called lubrication where it is, like, just the lubrication of your fascia and your joints When we think of lubricating and we think of juice, these are all internal jobs, and they usually include some level of pleasure.
When you think of juice, many people are like, "I think of orange." But the juice originally is happening in a dark place, like, just like it's happening in our body, right? It's like the inner work that creates the vitality, that creates the fluid. So in my membership juice, we do work to, um, literally lubricate [00:06:00] the joints and fascia to awaken the energetic field, and then we move towards stability.
And stability is a part of finding our grounding. Sometimes it's squats or lunges, and sometimes it's balance and a little bit of core, but it's fun, especially the balance part for me. Because as we grow older, our nervous system when it comes to our reflexes tends to slow down. But any time we're a little bit off balance and we find our center, the stretch reflexes actually begin to upregulate, so they become more intelligent.
And any time that we create a motion with one part of our body, another part has to stabilize, which is perfect that is happening in the physical nervous system that way, and that that also happens in our nervous system with our emotions. That when we wanna make change, [00:07:00] when things feel unstable, there's another part of the practice that always says, "What can I stabilize in this moment?"
The next part that we do is what I call release, which is really about expression. So much of the tension we feel in our bodies, of the exhaustion we feel, is not just from the over-giving, but it's often... I actually just wanna say the over-giving is often a result of the hyper-social of the I'm okay when you're okay.
So this leads to exhaustion. This leads to depletion. This leads to trying to give from a dry well. So when we move into the next phase, and we practice nervous system tools that have to do with fight and flight, which might be like going up on your toes and dropping your heels, or making like a ha sound, or making funny faces, which seems ridiculous, and I sometimes feel insecure about.[00:08:00]
But every face and every facial gesture you have has a different hormonal response, has a different breath pattern. And when we are always working to stay calm, to push it down, hold it down, we again are using energy to suppress. So this whole phase, it's like throwing elbows, punching, pressing against a wall, making sounds, uh, using some practices to imagine letting other people's things pass you by.
It's all done to music, and I'm like, "This is my favorite part of the week." And I can tell that it's having an effect on my life, and then the women who are in the class are also writing in to let me know about the things they can feel and sense in their body that they've never been able to feel or sense before, the boundaries they've been able to put up, the relational repairs that they've been able to create, the right distance they've been able to create.
The list goes on [00:09:00] because so much of this, I'm like, "Wow, I wonder if this will work or how this will work," this particular sequence. And the emails and the feedback just keep coming in to say how powerful it is to do these nervous system practices that later or then help us build conditions in our lives that feel more sustainable.
And we could talk about creating conditions. In fact, I have a different podcast on that. I'll link it in the show notes. The next part we do is to receive, and sometimes... Maybe this is where I feel most silly. Sometimes it's just like put your arms out, the chest up. You can go ahead and try it now. Put your arms out either right parallel with your shoulders or all the way up to the sky.
Look up to the sky, and just for this moment, as you're doing that and the chest is lifting, try to frown. Doesn't really work, right? This is our emotional anatomy. So then just allowing the smile to come across your face, taking a nice deep [00:10:00] inhale and an exhale, and again, the music is generally playing, and sometimes this is where I'm just like walk around the room, take a spin, like literally spinning like a kid would, a skip, reaching one arm out, then the other, and then drawing it into the body and imagining what you draw in.
And then we take it to the ground, and we receive the support of the ground. We do a few stretches, and then we rest. And it's not boring. It's so fun. And doing this work, you know, whether it's the small orientation... I didn't even mention this. The small orientation we do at the beginning where we practice the looking at the walls, the things that might seem a little more boring, but looking at the walls and noticing the hard floor underneath, the figure eights with the wrist, the tongue circles in the mouth.
These little things that signal safety to the body and orientation. So we get this full range of nervous system practices in within forty-five [00:11:00] minutes, and then follow it with a coherence meditation, one that reminds us that we're not alone, one that amplifies the benefit of the practice that just happened, and then either a check-in because community matters.
It's the opposite of trauma physiology when we feel seen, heard, and connected. And or we do a journaling exercise, which is always so powerful. And none of it is boring. And if you think about taking a bath, you might be like, "That's so boring. I wanna be able to do that, but I can't." Then we get to say with the nervous system work, how could we make it fun enough that it feels safe to slow down?
And it may be that it might not even be fun. It might be like, "I can't, I can't do this until I get all my stuff done, and I have emails to respond to." So maybe it starts with you're bringing your phone with [00:12:00] you, which sounds maybe terrible, but maybe it is the way that you can get things done so your mind can relax, which allows your body to relax, and you can receive the physical benefits of a bath.
And maybe it's only 20 minutes, where you're like, "How can I be engaged enough that slowing down feels less scary?" And these are the small doable pieces to widening a range. For some people, fast is a scary thing because for some people, they were high functioning and they went into burnout where there was collapse in their body.
And the thought of going back, there's that desire of, like, wanting to do all the things, but the thought of going back is scary. So if that's the place you're in, we again get to take the smallest doable steps. I have a woman in Juice right now who told me I could share her story, and I'm just gonna share a little bit, which was a story of this incredible athlete and [00:13:00] this really smart woman who has a PhD, and, and having the feeling of everything landing on her.
And that if she were to do any physical activity, then it would lead to being up all night and an inability to sleep, and the adrenals turning on. And she has been participating in Juice and doing some privates, and the coolest thing is that she can do the full 45 minutes, and then she's sleeping better than she's slept in the longest time.
And then we've built on what are the other small doable ways to build in physical activity that is honoring exactly where she's at. And the coolest thing is that her inner child, uh, in a one-on-one session r-really gave her the directives. So I have ideas because I've trained athletes. I've trained very high-level athletes, and I know enough about rest and recovery.
The best part and the most fun part about it was [00:14:00] receiving directives from her inner child that takes the exercise, uh, which brought enough challenge and sweat and heat, but- Made it something meaningful, and again was able to sleep afterwards. So I just wanna be over here like, nervous system work can be fun.
And, and you know, the hard part is when you get enough resource to actually then stand up for something that you've not been able to stand up for, which might be a boundary with a spouse, with a friend, the thing that feels really yucky when you say it, the thing where your body just wants you to go back and do the thing you've always done to feel safe.
And this is the edge where we're like, "Okay, what are my tools? How do I resource myself? How do I reach out for help? Um, is there a tree I can lean against? Is there, um, water I can drink? [00:15:00] Is there a journaling exercise? Is there a friend I can phone? Can I do butter- butterfly taps or havening?" Or for me recently, it's just like, can I turn on the music and freaking dance so hard and not have it be beautiful, and just let it go and shake and make sounds?
And it's amazing because we get to start to move more towards I'm okay when I'm okay, and then I can attune to others. And I will do another po- podcast on moving from I'm okay when you're okay to I'm okay when I'm okay, because I've had some real rude awakenings with this one. I do feel like it's a huge cornerstone of my six-month nervous system program called Resourced, is really that transition.
Uh, but I, I'd love to get into that further in another, in another one. For now, I just wanna say nervous system work can be fun. If you're interested in learning more, I will put a link for Juice in there. [00:16:00] We will be increasing the price in October because we'll be adding Ginny Muir as the second teacher who will be doing relational, I will say relational repair, but also would just love to say that'll be the relationship corner, which can be about friendship, it can be about your relationship with an inner part of yourself, it can be a marriage, right?
She's so skilled. And so this fall the price will go up, and anyone who came in at this first part, so it's been going now for seven months, gets grandfathered in forever. So if you're interested, now's the time to check it out. It may be for you, it may not be for you. But I would say leave the light on, leave the door open for the possibility that nervous system work can be fun.
It can be confronting, but it can also be fun. It doesn't have to be boring. It can help you move towards slow while still inhabiting your body. [00:17:00] Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next week