Nervous System Healing and My Journey to Wholeness

On healing amphetamine addiction, the confronting reveals of motherhood, leaving a successful academic career, and aligning my life with the gentle whisper of my soul.

My own healing journey began in 2014 when I began to heal my brain and body from an 8-year long amphetamine addiction. Although prescribed, my dependence on stimulants was severe - maxing out on a daily dosage of 70mg Vyvanse plus an extra 20-40mg of Adderall daily. It was all so deeply wrapped in shame and a belief I couldn’t successfully function in the world without the drugs. I finally had the will to make a change when I began experiencing frightening symptoms like persistent numbness in my arms and hands and frequent fainting. I began to feel scared of the long-term affects to my brain. I was also hardly eating, and my body was undernourished and over-stressed.

My life fell apart when I got off the stimulants - I went through a major breakup, moved back home, gained almost 50lbs and fell into a depression. My entire way of being in the world had shattered as I was rediscovering who I was without the drugs. Who was I when I wasn’t operating at hyper-speed in total numbness and disconnection from my body?

The greatest gift of my recovery process was that it lead me to meditation. Not only did I feel my brain begin to turn back on, I also began to meet and love myself in new ways. Within the first 6 months of beginning to meditate I had pulled myself out of depression and felt my brain begin to turn on again. I’d also created an exciting career opportunity and began to take action in creating my life from the inside out.

From 2013 to 2022 I spent my life in academia, immersed in my own studies at New York University and then working as Teaching Faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder. I studied and worked at the intersection of art and engineering in the fields of human-computer interaction, design research, and experience design. I was inspired by this work, which ultimately centered around crafting meaningful experiences for people. My greatest motivation has always been to build experiences that create a feeling of safety, connection and joy.

Throughout this time my meditation practice deepened. My understanding and felt sense of reality expanded in profound ways as I both witnessed and personally experienced mystical moments and powerful healings. I was beginning to tap into my unique soul gifts and capacity to support transformation, which has been my guiding light ever since.

In this state of spiritual expansion and blissful connection to the divine, my husband and I conceived our first child, welcoming her to the world a few months before the world shut down in 2020. I stopped traveling and my attention shifted to focus on the day-to-day needs of our family. And even though I could feel myself growing out of my academic role, I invested more attention there as I tightly held the belief that I wouldn’t be secure without it.

Despite my successful and well respected academic career, as time went on I found myself yearning to be of greater service in the world - tending to our collective healing in a way that I did not find enough access to in my role as a University educator. When I took the bold leap to resign from my academic teaching position, I was finally able to create a life where my outer world work was in complete harmony and an outer reflection of my inner values.

Coming from academia where status, prestige and recognition are the game, it was a humbling shift and quite messy identity disillusion to let go of who I had been. My ego has been deeply uncomfortable through this transition, but as deeper truths began to gently guide my life I could feel my capacity growing to compassionately hold all parts of me. When I stopped working and stepped into the identity of full-time mom, I became aware of all the ways I’d used my work as an escape from motherhood - to get away from the things that were too hard, and the parts of me that felt too wounded to show up as a mature Mother.

My journey of early motherhood revealed many things about our culture that were deeply unsettling for me. Above all, it made me aware of my own nervous system disregulation and the maladaptive generational patterns I was continuing to play out. Triggers often arise at very specific periods in parenthood - when our children reach the an age when WE went through something difficult as children. My daughter turned 2 and I found myself just wanting to run away, struggling to hold the energy and emotion that she was processing. What I understand now is that it was my own imprints rising to the surface, my own deep discomfort. When we were not held as children through difficult moments, it's so hard for us to hold our own children.

As I tired of my own reactive state, I started to get curious. What would it be like to thrive in motherhood? And I started to take responsibility. How do I create and perpetuate this situation? And what do I get from it? And to be clear - I didn’t start from this place of self-responsibility. For a long time my favorite place to put blame was on our culture that is harmfully unsupportive to mothers and families. And while I believe that is still true, I no longer choose to be a victim. Instead, I went deep within myself to heal my own early traumas, ultimately transforming my relationship to motherhood.

I deeply believe in the body’s capacity to heal. There is an innate intelligence that is alive in our soma - hundreds of thousands of years of wisdom within us. Tending to the nervous system is the most powerful way that I have found to live sensuously IN our wild animal bodies and be in a harmonious relationship with the divine energy that informs all of life.

I’m now in my second year of the Somatic Experiencing™ (SE) Practitioner training program, which has given me a much deeper understanding of the nervous system and how to work with many different systems and traumas. I have witnessed and supported many people through altered states of consciousness when their nervous system is discharging a tremendous amount of stored trauma. This recalibration can look differently for everyone, but often involves involuntary shaking and/or many new and sometimes suturing sensations in the body. SE has given me a lens through which to understand how our physical bodies have evolved to process activation, how they adapt to keep us safe, and how to support the release of traumas from the body. Brining SE into my life and practice has given language to many of the most important experiences I’ve had and witnessed in transformational spaces, and it’s provided a framework to work with people 1:1 to move into greater harmony and resilience in their lives.

Tending to my own nervous system as given me a resilience and aliveness that I’d been unable to access for much of my life. There were many difficult things that happened in my childhood that were simply too big for my system to process, and my nervous system went into freeze. Through my SE Practice I’ve worked with my nervous system’s capacity to hold extremely high levels of activation - both pleasant and unpleasant - eyes open, throughout my waking day and as triggers arise in real-time. I can remain functionally present in my life - feeling ALL of my feelings all the way through. And I’ve learned how to allow my body to discharge - to release stored energy and begin to operate at a baseline of ease - no longer numbed out in a nervous system freeze or operating at hyper-speed in constant sympathetic arousal.

Initially when I left academia I had the intention of continuing to work with young adults. From the time I began teaching in 2015 to 8 years later when I resigned, I witnessed a heartbreaking rise in mental illness and concerning dis-ease / lack of wellness in my students. As an educator I felt like I could only do so much, and wanted to find ways to more deeply support this vulnerable population in integrating trauma and finding purpose in their lives. The more I sat with this and tracked what was happening, I found myself tracing it back to childhood and early life experiences. As I tracked back, it became so clear to me that the greatest place to make an impact on someone’s life (and on our culture) is by addressing the earliest moments and years of life. Our nervous system patterns are laid down in infancy and childhood, deeply informed by the nervous systems of our caregivers - our mothers in particular. And if we could support mothers and families to be nourished and resourced through the childbearing continuum, our world could transform in a generations.

Through my own inner work and study of the nervous system, my deepest yearning is to support mothers and fathers in healing and building resiliency, so that they can raise children who feel safe, who feel a deep sense of belonging, and who can be in their full aliveness. Children and families who can be a full embodiment and living example of Thriving Life.

My commitment to maternal and family care is grounded in the understanding that when we as parents engage in our own healing work, our children heal too. And that our children can only be as well as we are well. Our children can only be as whole as we are whole. I believe that healthy mothers and families are the base for thriving life and healthy communities. And centering the health of Mothers is the most effective ripple - to create the change that our world so deeply needs.

Thank you for being here and following my journey <3