144 - When You Come Back to Feeling
What actually changes when you stop simply learning about your nervous system and begin practicing a different way of being?
In this episode of Threshold Moments, Sarah does something a little different: she shares the words and stories of women who have gone through Resourced.
These aren't polished success stories. They're reflections from women navigating real lives—businesses, relationships, parenting, health challenges, limited bandwidth, and moments when old patterns would normally take over.
Episode Transcript:
Sarah: [00:00:00] Hello. Welcome to Threshold Moments. I am just so excited. If you listen to the, the episode called The Gap, it was the first time that I've read one of my blog posts as a Threshold Moments. Normally, I put Threshold Moment episodes at the bottom of my newsletters like, "Hey, check this out." But my blogs take me so long to write.
Sarah: They feel like I am modeling a piece of clay, which I've actually not sure I've ever done. But it's like reworking and reworking, and then I have to walk away from it and come back a day or two later, and I look at it on my phone, and then my computer, and then on the... So it's like each one, it's almost like seeing it from a different angle, and is that really describing it for me?
Sarah: Is that really real? Uh, I will also say [00:01:00] that, you know, I will use Claude for grammar, uh, and that in some of my newsletters I reach out to Amna who I'll leave a voice memo and be like, "Hey, this is what I'm working through." Because I often have so many ideas that I'll go into like paralysis analysis. Like, well, they take me so long to do and, uh, you know, AI really does not help me sort.
Sarah: It writes something that isn't me, even if I've tried to train it on all my pieces. Um, and I love co-creating when I do get to write with Amna because she'll ask me questions like, "But what happened to get you from here to there?" Or, "I wondered this." Or she'll put together like a first round, and then I'll go at it again and again.
Sarah: And so some of these are really like a group effort to take an experience and put it into form that someone [00:02:00] can really land into. So I'm hoping this is a little bit like an audible for you, where you get to just take it on a walk, take it on a drive, uh, listen to it before bed. This one came out on June 23rd, and it's called I Could Have Been on That Boat and Felt None of It.
Sarah: I told you in the last one that the opening picture is kind of like a picture book. It means something. And so it's a selfie of me, and my two girls, and my husband, and we're all kinda cuddled up in this boat that, you know, it's a boat big enough to sleep in, otherwise it is very much like camping. It's a very tight space.
Sarah: And out the window you can see a little floating home and just pine trees from all the way from east to west and the ocean. So here is what it says This was last week on a small [00:03:00] boat off the coast of Maine. My whole family was aboard, and I was finally at home in my own body and my own life. Three years ago, I could have been on that exact boat and felt none or very little of it.
Sarah: In September 2023, I went to bed in a life I had fought for years to build and felt dishearteningly flat. We had finally gotten help, new childcare. She freaking made dinner that night. I know. Steve worked one day less and got his hobbies back. I'd spent over three years deep in somatic nervous system repair and study.
Sarah: This was after years of the kids waking up four to eight times a night, ugh, of Steve grinding day in and day out with no breaks, and of me holding all of it on the back end, the night shift [00:04:00] and the day shift. We finally had a new reality. I lay there and thought, "Is this it?" I had fixed everything I believed was breaking me, and I felt nothing
Sarah: Not the relief I had worked so hard for. Not even sadness, which at least would have meant I was still there. Just flat. All that effort, and somewhere in it, I had gone missing. It made sense to feel bad when life is hard on the outside. It is completely disorienting to feel bad once you've fixed the perceived holes and life looks like one big privilege.
Sarah: The cliché of it is ironically isolating. Who could get it? Who would ever empathize? And underneath that, where do I even go from here? To be [00:05:00] scared usually comes with an activating charge. This felt frozen, exhausted. Some people might call it burnout That December, we went to Costa Rica for Steve's 40th, the place I've told everyone I feel most alive, where I studied yoga in 2005, where I felt my grandmother's spirit come back into my body and give me a message to pass on to my grandfather.
Sarah: The howler monkeys, the torrential rain, the scorpions, tarantulas, the forever waves surfers come across the world for, the place I finished my 500-hour training and stayed on to teach my own anatomy course, the scariest and most fulfilling work of my life, dancing at the discoteca, rides [00:06:00] on the back of dirt bikes, and attempts at my best Spanish.
Sarah: The edge of life. The last training I taught there was December 2013, the year before I got pregnant with Sophia. 10 years later, I went back, watching my whole family have the time of their lives, seeing the gifts and a sense of aliveness everywhere but within. I told myself it was because I was the one caring for the kids, but my parents had come along.
Sarah: I could have taken more time for myself, and it wouldn't have changed a thing. I no longer had any idea what made me feel alive, another sign of burnout, whether from work or life circumstances. Here's what I understand now. My nervous system had been running on survival and goal pursuit at the very same time.
Sarah: It's like pressing the [00:07:00] brakes and the gas still to the floor. This is called functional freeze, and freeze is not selective. My joy was frozen exactly as much as my anger and my resentment. There was nothing left to fix on the outside. The work became slow, unglamorous, and from the ground up And it all had an order.
Sarah: I wanna be honest about the order, because if I'd still been in the thick of a chronic sleep deprivation or had to be working on nervous system repair at the same time, what came later would not have happened the way it did. So first, first it was just resuscitation, pacing myself, relearning that I exist, that I have desires, and that I'm allowed to claim them out loud and say no to things I'd normally say yes to, [00:08:00] also known as boundary repair.
Sarah: Second, this is what started after Costa Rica, tracking joy. What actually brings me alive? And then follow it. It turned out it wasn't a solo hobby. Steve can walk out the back door with his mountain bike, his bow, his surfboard, his weights, and come home filled. Mine was women, rooms full of them, deep conversation, ceremony, dancing, gathering again and again.
Sarah: That was the thing that did it for me. Third was generative expression, and then came the part my body had been waiting for, even more dance. Shaking it out, wrestling in pillow fights with my girls instead of trying to control them or calm them down. The [00:09:00] calm and connection naturally flows. Lifting heavy, making funny faces and sounds, learning to send a c- a clear on signal, then a clear off signal instead of running both at once.
Sarah: This is the work of unfreezing a stuck fight response, and a lot of what we practice inside my membership, Juice. The argument I used to swallow at the dinner table found its way out of my mouth with more clarity. The family vacation that used to flatten me started to have breathing room in it And then one day, a black squirrel stops, and you stop cold.
Sarah: This happened to me in the middle of New York City, a city I've visited twice in the past year, a city that an earlier version of me didn't even think she liked, and I just stood there in complete awe over a squirrel. [00:10:00] Then I discovered sheer blouses. Who knew? I started coaching lacrosse, and I freaking love it.
Sarah: Obsessed. We got a composting machine that turns last night's dinner to dust by morning, and I lost my mind with delight. How is that even possible? The way the sun glows through the autumn leaves at sunset, how much more sky I can see in early spring before the leaves fill in, and then that absurd fluorescent green when they finally do.
Sarah: It looks like an outside game, and enough money and enough health do matter deeply. But I know in my heart of hearts it's equally, maybe more, an inside game. The inside game is specific. It's the resuscitation. It's noticing what brings you alive and actually following it, [00:11:00] and it's resourcing yourself enough to feel the full range again: rage, sadness, grief, every bit as much as joy.
Sarah: When a system comes back online, all of it comes back online. So when I look back this birthday on a whole year of small things lighting me up, it was no small thing to me. And last week, on that little boat off the coast of Maine, my family all around me, and feeling at home in my body and my life, it landed all the way down.
Sarah: These days, the ability to cry and laugh and rage, and even feel safe with neutral, is a real gift.
Sarah: Mm. Thank you so much for listening. [00:12:00] That really teared me up. Um, it's like the wildest thing, isn't it? Like, um, you know, early parenthood for me to have moments that I could really feel the love and joy, but also have so many moments where I knew in my brain that this was beautiful and that I was lucky, but I couldn't feel anything.
Sarah: And it's so scary And so I'm just so grateful to be on this side of the threshold. And here I am sharing the tools that got me to the other side of the threshold, very well knowing that thresholds come again and again and again, that no one is superior to another person. It is just where we are at in a cycle that will continue to cycle always with new [00:13:00] lessons, always teaching us new tools.
Sarah: And here we are in relationship to one another, so that possibly somebody who has gone through a similar threshold could say, "Hey, I see you. Nothing's wrong with you. There's a reason why this is hard. You're gonna get to the other side. I've been there," or, "I am there right now." And we walk each other home Thanks for listening.
Sarah: If you want more, you can go to my website. You can sign up for 21 days of untapped support. It's free, and it's a little love note in your inbox each day, much shorter than this. You can go and subscribe to my newsletter if you feel like you wanna get these right when they come out And coming up, my gosh, I'll just tell you, I'm, like, not sure when this episode will come out, but I'm having opting out of urgency that's coming up, which is just like, oh, so dear to my heart.
Sarah: [00:14:00] So much changes when we can alter our pacing, where we can move at the speed of wisdom and truth, and then actually take action, and then have the skills to resource ourselves after we take an action that may move us forward in a new direction, that may break a pattern, that may update us. And all of that leads to my program Resourced, which is a 12-week deep dive, which another beautiful thing was getting testimonials from participants last year and the year before literally saying, "This saved my life.
Sarah: This changed my life." I was able to do a, a huge presentation in front of thousands of people online where somebody started heckling me and trolling and that I could stay steady in myself, and somebody saying, "I thought I took this to be a better mother, and now I'm being able to be a clearer, more loving partner."
Sarah: Another person saying sh- you know, she is a mother, and before going [00:15:00] into her room, her kids' rooms, she did some really empowering postures that we went over and was able to go in and change the setting of the room by her own vibe, by her own nervous system setting. I am so deeply, deeply passionate about this work, about the science, and about the unseen, but deeply felt.
Sarah: If you're interested, please follow along, and thank you so much for listening.