Beyond Fight or Flight: Meeting Life As It Is for Nervous System Regulation

Elisha Lee: There is a kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. It's the exhaustion of fighting, fighting your feelings, fighting your circumstances, fighting the version of your life that wasn't supposed to look like this. And somewhere in all of that fighting, your body has been keeping score. Today, we're going to stop fighting, not because we're giving up, but because there is this power. A sacred nervous system level power and what I call meaning life as it is. I'm Elisha. Welcome to Elisha Space, where healing is real, faith is honest, and you are never alone in this. If you've been with me for a while, you already know we don't do just pray harder here. We do the real work, the somatic work, the clinical work, the spiritual work, because trauma lives in the body and healing has to meet it there. Today's episode is one I've been sitting with for a while because what I want to explore sits right at the intersection of neuroscience, acceptance-based therapy, and something with the Psalms have been teaching us for 3,000 years, we're going beyond fight or flight, that phrase we hear constantly now, and into what actually happens when you stop resisting your own existence. Here's what we'll cover. The neuroscience of why resistance keeps your nervous system locked in survival mode, a guided visualization practice to help you meet this moment in real time, and two, anonymitized client stories that show what the shift looks like in real life and how to use my rest REST framework, regulate, experience, surrender trust as a pathway back to presence. grab something warm, settle in. You are in exactly the right place. I want to start with a question I need you to actually sit with. When life hands you something painful, a diagnosis, a relationship rupture, ⁓ a season that just won't shift, what is your first instinct? For most of us, it's resistance. We argue with what is. We replay, we rehearse, we say in a hundred different ways, this just should not be happening. Here is what your nervous system hears when you do that. Now, notice right now where you carry your resistance. Is it in your shoulders, your jaw, your chest, a low hum of bracing in your belly? Just notice. Don't fix it yet, just notice. Your nervous system, is one word, danger. It does not distinguish between the perceived threat of an uncomfortable emotion and an actual threat to your physical survival. to your amygdala, the brain's alarm system. Resistance signals emergency every time. This is what polyvagal theory developed by Dr. Stephen Porges helps us understand. We have three primary nervous system states, ventral vagal, safe, connected, present. This is where healing lives. Sympathetic, fight or flight. This is where most of us are spending most of our days, and dorsal vagal. freeze, collapse, shutdown. This is where we go when fighting exhausts us. When we resist what is, we stay locked in sympathetic activation. The body cannot regulate because the mind keeps sending the signal. There is still something to fight. And the clinical truth I need you to really receive today is this. You cannot heal in a body that believes that it's still in danger. The resistance itself, the arguing with the reality of your life is the loop that keeps the alarm on. Now, I want to be careful here because this is exactly where a lot of well-meaning advice slides into what I call spiritual bypassing. The idea that if you just accept everything and let it go, the work is done. This is not what I am teaching today. Meeting life as it is does not mean agreeing that pain is okay. It does not mean silencing grief, dismissing injustice, or pretending. It means dropping the war with the present moment long enough for your body to come back online. There is a profound difference between surrender and eraser. Lamentations chapter 3 verse 20 says, my soul continually remembers these things and is bowed down within me. Even scripture holds honest grief, meaning the raw reality of pain before hope arrives. And it is a verse 21 that shifts everything. Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. You cannot get to that yet without first being honest about the this. So today we begin not by fixing anything, we begin by seeing clearly. I want to lead you through a practice. Now you can do this wherever you are in your car, at your kitchen table, in the quiet, before your family wakes up. This is not a meditation that asks you to empty your mind. We don't teach that here because that is not how a nervous system works. This is an arrival practice, a grounding practice. We are not going anywhere. We are simply coming back. Let's begin. If you're able, soften your gaze or gently close your eyes. Feel your weight. Feel the chair beneath you, the floor under your feet, the pressure of where your body is being held right now. and breathe in through your nose for a count of four. One, two, three, four. Hold gently for four. One, two, three, four. And really slowly through your mouth for six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One more, in for four. Release for 6. Now bring to whatever it is in your life right now that feels like too much. Don't dramatize it. Don't analyze it. Just let it surface. Notice where you feel it in your body. Is it pressure in your chest? A tightness in your throat? Heat across your face? Having this behind your eyes? There is no wrong answer. Your body knows exactly where it lives. Now here is the shift. Instead of pushing it away, instead of saying, I shouldn't feel this, I want you to turn towards it. Not to be overwhelmed by it, just to acknowledge that it is real and it is yours. Say to yourself this is hard. I am here. I am not in danger right now. Notice what happens when you stop running from the feeling and simply sit with it. For many people, something softens. The nervous system registers that you are no longer fighting. When the alarm quiets even by one degree, something else becomes possible. Curiosity, self-compassion, even eventually peace. One last breath in and let it go. You can gently open your eyes when you're ready. What you just practiced is the neurological foundation of acceptance. Not as passive resignation, but as an act of courageous choice to be present to your own life. That to courage, I want you to receive that. Let me share two stories from my clinical work. All identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality. I worked with a woman I'll call her Miriam, who came to me after years of ⁓ she described as waiting for her life to calm down enough to heal. She had survived spiritual abuse in a high control church. She had nervous system dysregulation that showed up as chronic migraines, fragmented sleep, and what she called just a constant sense of bracing. ⁓ I asked Miriam, What she was bracing against, she paused for a long time. Then she said, everything I think. I'm always waiting for the next bad thing. Her nervous system had learned correctly that her environment was not safe and her adaptation had been to remain in perpetual readiness, sympathetic activation as a survival strategy. Fight or flight on permanent standby. The first time we did an arrival practice together, she cried, not from pain, from relief. She said, I didn't know I was allowed to just be here. that is the tragedy ⁓ of a chronically activated nervous ⁓ It steals the present by you perpetually stationed ⁓ and a future threat. When ⁓ began the daily work ⁓ meeting life as it not fixing it, not spiritualizing it away, just inhabitating it. Something shifted. The migrants did not disappear overnight, but several weeks in she told me, I went an entire morning without bracing. I don't remember the last time that happened. That is vagal regulation. That is the ventral vagal state beginning to come back online. Not because her circumstances had changed, but because she had stopped fighting the truth of where she was. The second story is a little different because it belongs to someone who might not be the expected face of this conversation. I'll call him David. David has grown up in a family system that used shame as a primary tool of control. As an adult, he would replay conversations for hours, reconstructing arguments, rehearsing responses, trying to win outcomes that had already passed. Clinically, this is a nervous system and sympathetic overdrive. doing exactly what it was designed to do. The brain keeps running scenarios because it believes the threat is so active. It is looking for an exit that doesn't exist because the event is already over. When David began to practice meeting life as it is, acknowledging that the conversation had already happened, that his pain was legitimate, and that his body did not have to keep litigating what could not. be changed, he described it this way. It's like I finally let myself get off the hamster wheel. I didn't even know I was on it. Both Miriam and David teach us the same thing. The nervous system cannot regulate around a reality it has not yet been allowed to acknowledge. Healing does not begin with resolution. It begins with honest arrival. It begins with this is where I am before it can ever become the this is where I'm going. Now I want to give you the practical pathway because I don't just want to tell you that you can meet life as it is. I want to show you how. This is the REST framework. And I want to be clear before we start. This is not a linear checklist. It is a spiral. You may cycle through these steps multiple times within a single hard moment. That is not failure. That is exactly how healing works. R is for regulate. Regulation is a physiological first before you can think your way through something. Your body has to feel safe enough to be present. And this is where vagal toning practices come in. The 446 breathing we practice early, placing one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly and breathing slowly in both palms. Humming, which directly activates the vagus nerve through the vibration in the throat. cold water on the face, slow rocking, intentional sighing. The goal in this phase is not to feel better. It is to come down one notch on the activation scale. One notch is enough to move forward. That is all we need. So let's check ourselves with a somatic cue. If you're feeling activated right now, try the hand over heart practice with me. One hand over your heart and one on your belly. Three slow breaths. Very good. E stands for experience. Experience is once there is even a small window of regulation, we move to experience, which means somatic honesty with what is true. This is where many of us stall. We want to leap from activation straight to acceptance, skipping the feeling entirely. But the body will not allow a bypass that the mind attempts. The experience step simply asks, What is actually true for me right now? Not what you should be feeling, not what a spiritually mature woman or man should feel. What is actually, honestly, somatically true? If it's grief, let it be grief. If it's rage, let it be named. If it's numbness, name the numbness. Psalms 139.23 says, search me God and know my heart before healing. There must be an honest knowing. God is not afraid of your real. He is already in it. S stands for surrender. this is the most misunderstood step and one most vulnerable to spiritual bypassing if we not handle it with care. ⁓ Surrender here not mean that pain is acceptable. It does not mean that silence in the of injustice. It means releasing the war, unclenching the fist around the outcome you cannot control. Semantically, this is the exhale. This is the moment the body drops the protective posture. And spiritually, this is the posture of Gethsemane, not my will, but yours. Not resignation, not passivity. Surrender in the context of a relationship that is trustworthy, which is why this work cannot be done entirely alone. Community, therapy, and spiritual direction exist because surrender is most possible when we are held by something we trust. The nervous system needs a witness. It is how we were designed. And T, finally, the last letter of that acronym is trust. The anchoring phase. This is where we bring the regulated, honest, surrendered self. back into the present moment and anchor to something that holds. For many of my clients, this looks like a breath prayer, a scripture, a physical object, a stone, a ring, a piece of fabric from someone beloved, something that serves as a somatic anchor to the truth. I am here. I am being held. This moment is not the whole story. Romans 828 does not promise that everything will feel good. It promises that everything is being worked together, that it is a very different promise and a far more honest one. Trust is not certainty about outcome, it is certainty about character, the character of God, and slowly with practice the character of your own healing self. Now I want to close with the teaching portion of today with something I believe sits at the very heart of this conversation. Psalms 46 10, be still and know that I am God. In Hebrew, the word translated as be still is rafah and it means to release, to let go, to drop the tension, to cease striving, not figure it out, not pray through it harder. Rafah, release. What if that is the oldest nervous system regulation prescription in recorded human history? What if bestill is not a passive instruction, but an active physiological one? A call to the parasympathetic nervous system written 3,000 years ago before Dr. Poor just named the vagus nerve. I believe it is. And I believe that meeting life as it is, meeting this moment, with all its rawness, all its incompleteness, all its honest weight, is one of the most profound, faithless acts available to us. Not because it resolves the pain, but because it brings us back into honest contact with the God who is already present and the very moment we have been running from. He meets us in the real, not in the version of our life we wished we had. in the real. Before we close, I want to give you something to carry with you. Let's breathe in together. Breathe in for four and receive these words. I am here. One, two, three, four. Hold for four. God is here. One, two, three, four. Release for six. I do not have to fight this moment. One. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Once more in I am here hold God is here out I do not have to fight this moment That's yours, write it down. Put it on your mirror. and your challenge. I'm calling it the Rafa practice. Once a day, just once when you notice yourself bracing, replaying or resisting, pause, place one hand on your heart, take the 446 breath and say quietly, I am meeting this moment as it is. I am not in danger. I am held. That is it. You do not have to fix it. You do not have to resolve it. You do not have to feel differently by the end, just need it, be honest about it, and see what one degree of release opens up. Let's close in prayer. Father, we come to you not with tidy answers, but with honest heart. We name what is hard, the seasons that are stretched too long, the relationships that have cost more than we knew we had, the bodies that are exhausted from holding so much, the faith that is strained at the edges and still somehow here. Re-release the war today. Not because the pain isn't real, it is, but because you are real too. And you are already present in the very moment we have been running from. Teach us to be still. Teach our nervous systems what our theology already knows. That we are held. That we are safe in you. That we can exhale. Meet every person listening to this right now exactly where they are, not where they wish they were, where they are. And let that meeting be honest, tender, present. Let it be the beginning of something that they can not yet name. In the name of Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, God here, God now, amen. Thank you for being here today. If this episode landed for you, if something shifted even by one degree, I want to hear about it. Leave a comment, send me a message, or share this with someone who needs permission to stop fighting their own life for a moment. New episodes of Elisha's Space, well, we drop. If you're not yet subscribed, now is the time. And if you leave a review, it is genuinely helps. this contact reach the other people who need it most. I'll see you next week. Until then, keep meeting yourself where you are. That is not weakness. That is the bravest thing you can do. Take care of yourself. You are worth it.