Three Conditions That Make Embodiment Stick
(part 2) how your nervous system learns a new way through neural rehearsal, environmental design, and a practice you can return to. Grab your journal.
Last week, you felt the fork.
This week, we build the ground beneath it, and this is where transformation literacy moves from concept into practice.
While I enjoy sharing practical health tips (and have plenty more to come so stick around!), my foundational calling is teaching you how to read your own patterns.
Why?
Well, after years of practice, I’ve watched people (including myself) collect tips and protocols without embodiment. Nothing sticks that way. The change feels temporary at best, and the frustration lingers with all the mixed messaging out there. I’ve been at this long enough, over two decades, to see the pendulum swing and strike the masses into a dizzy spell. I don’t want you to get caught in that any longer than you need to.
This is why these deeper, more excavative essays matter.
Without the ability to read your patterns and root with intention, every protocol becomes noise. Every tip becomes just another thing you should be doing. You stay overwhelmed by contradictory advice instead of trusting what your body already knows and drawing from deeper Wisdom.
So here’s what comes next: first, the conditions your nervous system needs. Then, the mapping and practice that turns insight into ground you can stand on.
Come along!
💙 If you haven’t already, I invite you to upgrade to access a gift resource, Winter Reset Workbook, featuring the SPIRAL method I developed over the years. It’s a more practical tool you can use today, and I’ll be diving deeper into the clinical lens of the central section in this essay. Keep reading either way; there will be value at any tier. 🫖
Continuing from the last essay (part 1)…
over time, the designed path can become the default path. The groove you consciously and repeatedly choose becomes the one you walk without thinking. That’s the best part when this is done with discernment.
This is a side effect of repeated intention.
Your Designed Self carves deep enough that your nervous system recognizes it as home. Then you design again from that new ground, maintaining or upleveling as capacity allows.
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
Response from Michelangelo Buonarotti when asked about how he came to create the sculpture David.
This is a form return.
The word for human in Arabic is insan ~ it shares its root with nasiya, which means to forget. We are forgetful by nature. You don’t have to tell me twice :) (or maybe you do)
This is why the practice loops (L). I designed the SPIRAL path to be revisited often; it fits quarterly, monthly, and momentarily. We return at every threshold.
I am reminding you and I am reminding myself.
The more you practice this, the easier it’ll be to see and understand the areas you want to improve. From a space of compassion and your wonderful-enoughness, you get to make choices that feel even better than before or sustain.
After working with women for so long, I've noticed most of us are carrying strategies that worked beautifully (or survival-worthy) once but have begun to cost us. We keep walking them because they feel like who we are. The groove is so worn, we forget we carved it ourselves. Re-evaluation and editing with intention is critical for living a life with intention.
“Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all.” – Nathan W. Morris
Why Change Feels Impossible (And What Works Better)
Before we step into the practice, let’s get into what’s probably already happening.
Your brain rewards planning the exercise routine. Action tightens the stride.
Change registers as unpredictable, and unpredictable used to mean dangerous. Your brain loves thinking about change because the thinking itself feels productive.
Then you try to head to your workout, and your nervous system pulls back. The old groove calls.
If you fail to take action, your confidence tanks because once again, you couldn’t keep your promise to yourself.
You can’t blame this unfolding. This is nervous system architecture doing what it was designed to do. Understanding this though, is part of making the pivots that’ll save you lots of heartache in the long run.
So here’s what your nervous system needs instead. 1, 2, 3…
What Your Nervous System Needs
To rewire the grooves, your nervous system needs three conditions most of us skip, largely because they’re not fancy at all. Think of these as the ground you’re standing on as you begin.
Each of these deserves its own essay, but for now, just naming them helps you understand why past attempts didn’t stick and how this work is different.
01. Safety
Your brain won’t move easily toward what feels unsurvivable.
This has protected you your whole life, but sometimes it’s on overdrive, blocking changes that would help you.
Safety sounds abstract until you test it in your mouth. Say: “From now on, I wake at 5am, run 5 miles, never touch sugar.” Notice the clench. Then say: “For the next month, I’ll be in bed 30 minutes earlier three nights a week.” Different body. That second one has met you before. Your nervous system relaxes because it has evidence.
Morning Pages TAW fans: this is why Julia Cameron made Week 1 "Recovering a Sense of Safety" (even before Identity) because creativity can't breathe without safety.
And that’s why you start mapping your Designed Self as your highest proven capacity ~ not some unreachable ideal your nervous system would reject.
Map who shows up on your best days (rested, clear, and breathing easy). Your amygdala knows her: real and appeared before, easy to imagine, and she can appear again.
That's safety.
02. Capacity
You can’t maintain new patterns on days when your system is already fried.
You already know capacity in your bones. Think of the day you snapped at someone you love ~ it wasn’t like they did something unforgivable, but because your system was already at a ten. Same request on a resourced day lands completely differently. Same stimulus, different capacity.
Building capacity means noticing what drains you, choosing where to spend your finite bandwidth, and building intentional recovery into your design. It’s a form of resilience: being anchored through the winds of life instead of blown around by them.
This is why consistency matters more than intensity. The workbook includes tiered practices for the same goal so you always have an option that matches your capacity that day.
High energy days get the full practice. Low energy days get the version that keeps the pathway active without demanding more than you have even in teeny steps.
Examples:
One-hour walk → Five-minute walk after dinner
Full facial massage sequence → One point between the eyebrows
30 minutes of morning sunlight → Cracking the car window while dropping kids at school
No sugar all month → Fruit > candy swap (one conscious choice daily)
Gym 5x/week → 10 squats while brushing teeth (yes, really; in fact this 4 minute exercise keeps my workout streak consistent on many low days)
Deep work 4-hour block → 3 minutes clearing email drafts first
Gratitude practice 10 items → Notice one thing warm against your skin
The bare minimum still registers. The pattern still activates. Your confidence is restored because the promise is kept. Momentum has steady fuel.
^ because you’re adjusting intensity without abandoning the pattern.
Days when your capacity is high, you stretch a little beyond what you can do. Days when you’re sick, exhausted, or triggered, you reach for the minimum ~ even a millimeter.
Learn quickly what drains your capacity and adjust. This builds the resilience that makes change sustainable.
03. Repetition the Brain Registers as Real
Plastic surgeon, Dr. Maxwell Maltz, working with patients in the 1960s, found that self-image made the difference between transformation and stagnation.
Your nervous system doesn’t really tell the difference between vividly imagined experience and lived experience. Both create neural pathways + shape future behavior.
When you walk through an ordinary Tuesday in vivid sensory detail as your Designed Self ~ feeling how your shoulders rest differently, noticing the light quality, tasting your lunch, feeling into your decisions, sensing the pace your body feels safe in, etc, you’re teaching your brain what aligned feels like.
In his book Psycho-Cybernetics, Maltz prescribed this: 3-5 minutes daily, for 21-30 days. Short enough to avoid fatigue. Long enough for the subconscious to accept the new pattern as real.
Repetition turns imagination into embodied memory. Embodied memory becomes a new groove your nervous system recognizes as survivable, as possible, as you.
Repetition is why you can drive home without thinking and still not remember the turns you took. Your nervous system loves efficiency. Once a path is rehearsed enough, it files it under “autopilot” and frees your attention for other things. The work here is to make alignment the efficient option, not the heroic one.
This is what Viktor Frankl pointed to when he wrote: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”
Neural rehearsal lets you live that “second time” in advance ~ feeling the path in your body while you walk it again tomorrow.
Why These Three (Not Willpower)
Willpower lives in your prefrontal cortex; it depletes by lunch.
True change lives in your basal ganglia (the part that runs while you sleep) and your amygdala (the part that clears threats).
Safety unlocks the rehearsal.
Capacity sustains it.
Repetition encodes it.
Skip any one, and you’re back to Default Self (and this is why most resolutions fade by Feb.)
Stack all three, and your Designed Self becomes autopilot soon enough.
What Comes Next: The Journey Through IMAGINE
IMAGINE, the I part of the SPIRAL method, is where this stops being an insight you nod along to and becomes something your regular-old-day-self can feel.
If you’ve ever felt like you understand yourself but still default the same way, this is where the gap closes.
📘 The IMAGINE part of the Winter Reset Workbook (the center of the SPIRAL) walks you through the 5 stages of this mapping. Access it with the annual upgrade and it lands in your inbox immediately. 🌀 Doing this alongside you is such an honor + the feedback has been beyond heartwarming! Just read what lovely Hadil shared 💙 Join us :)
🍵 For paid subscribers, what follows is the complete IMAGINE walkthrough with masterclass depth: how to approach each stage, the clinical patterns I’ve witnessed that reveal when this work transforms versus when it stays at the surface, and something vulnerable I haven’t shared elsewhere about what this mapping revealed in my own life. One clearly seen pattern begins reorganizing everything around it. Have your workbook beside you/opened in a tab.
If you’re ready to move from recognizing the fork to building new ground beneath your feet, I’ll see you below. 🦋
