Hello Wild Soul, in this episode of the Wild Soul Grove Podcast, I explore the powerful link between your nervous system and your subconscious, and why that connection is often the reason change feels so hard.

I begin by breaking down the autonomic nervous system in simple terms, focusing on the two main branches that constantly shape how you experience the world. The sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight response, the part that switches on when you feel under threat. When this is running the show, you are more likely to feel anxious, reactive and stuck in survival mode.

In contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system is the part of you that supports rest, digestion and healing. It is the state in which your body feels safe, your mind opens, and you can access more creativity and clarity. I talk about how an overactive sympathetic system can make it almost impossible to think clearly, make grounded decisions or connect with your deeper inner wisdom.

From there, I share how your nervous system acts as a bridge between your mind, your body and your subconscious. When your body does not feel safe, your subconscious will do everything it can to keep you in familiar patterns, even if those patterns are painful. When you learn to bring your system back into states of safety, you create the conditions for real change.

I then guide you through practical tools, including resistance breathing, to help you shift out of stress and back into a more parasympathetic state. These practices are simple but powerful ways to calm your system, reconnect with yourself, and become more available to the deeper work of transformation.

Key takeaways

1. Your nervous system is a living bridge between your mind, your body and your subconscious, and it quietly shapes how you experience each day.
2. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for fight or flight responses, and when it is overactive, it can fuel anxiety, reactivity and patterns of self-sabotage.
3. The parasympathetic nervous system supports rest, safety, and recovery, which are essential for healing, digesting life, and accessing deeper insight.
4. Real change becomes possible when you can move out of constant survival mode and into a calmer, more creative state.
5. Resistance breathing is a powerful way to support the parasympathetic system, helping your body feel safe enough to relax and open.
6. By recognising and regulating your physiological responses to stress, you create the inner conditions to work with your subconscious and invite meaningful change into your life.

Foreign.

Hello, wild soul, and welcome back to our journey into the subconscious.

I'm Joe and I'll be your host.

So last time we opened the door to the deeper mind, the vast quiet space shaping how we think, feel and behave.

Today we're exploring why some stories and patterns feel so hard to change even when we're aware of them.

To understand that, we need to talk about the nervous system.

And this is the bridge between your mind, your body and the subconscious.

So what we've got within us is the autonomic nervous system.

And this branches into two.

We've got the sympathetic nervous system and we've got the parasympathetic nervous system.

And depending on which of these systems, these nervous systems you're in, and depending on which you are dominated by really dictates how you're going to go through the day.

So looking at the sympathetic nervous system, it's seen as the fight or flight system.

So you'll know from my discussions before that the analogy of the brain, if we were to come across a lion, it would send a message through the amygdala and activate our sympathetic nervous system, our fight or flight, which means that we get ready to either fight this danger or run from it.

And so what you get when you're in your sympathetic nervous system, it's activated by stress, it's activated by threats, but it's also activated by overthinking and then also self protection.

So this can be physical from, say, the lion imagery that I mentioned before, but it can also be from situations.

So if your sympathetic nervous system is in control of how you approach a crowd of people or a public speaking instance, then self protection is going to kick in and your fight or flight model kick in.

And that obviously isn't right.

The fight or flight system, sympathetic nervous system is great for short bursts of action, but if it gets stuck, then it starts to feed things like anxiety, fear and self sabotage.

So we can become dominated by these systems.

And if we're dominated by our sympathetic nervous system, then you're going to see signs like shallow and erratic breathing or perhaps holding your breath.

You'll get increased heart rate.

You might have a tendency to overreact.

There'll be a lack of focus and self awareness.

You'll get diminished critical creative and deep thinking ability.

So it becomes very difficult to think your way out of a problem or to dream big.

You become quite pessimistic.

There's a resistance to intimacy.

You also avoid or have the inability to change.

And then also, as I mentioned about the anxiety the longer we stay dominant with this sympathetic nervous system, the more likely we are to get physical or mental health problems.

This is like digestive issues, the anxiety disorders.

PTSD is a good example.

But what's the other branch?

So the other branch is the parasympathetic nervous system.

And the parasympathetic nervous system is the rest and digest.

So this is activated by safety.

So once we've gotten away from the lion, we would revert to the parasympathetic nervous system.

But it's also activated by breathwork and presence, having a real good awareness of yourself and where you are.

And it's in this state where healing, where digestion, intuition and subconscious access can happen.

So what happens in the sympathetic nervous system or when that's activated is all of the energy goes from our body and goes to our fingertips, to our hands, to our, to our arms, to our toes, to our feet, to our legs.

And this is so that we can run or fight.

Where it definitely doesn't happen is in the digestive system.

You stop digesting food when you're anxious.

An easy thing I always recommend to people is to not stress eat.

And you may have heard that before, but now we can perhaps put some context to that.

So if we are in our sympathetic nervous system, if we're in our fight or flight brain, so if we're very riled up or angry or anxious and we're starting to eat food, the digestive system will not be working.

Even though we don't need our hands and our feet to start running or to start fighting.

The.

The body doesn't realize this and will just treat the situation as if it is one of those things, as if you are under threat, as if you are in danger.

And so it'll give all the energy to those parts.

You might find that you start getting jittery legs or that your fists are clenched.

But what you won't be doing is digesting the food that you're eating.

And that's going to cause a lot of digestive issues.

And so it's really important that we find the way back to presence and to safety and to the parasympathetic nervous system before we eat.

So a quick tip.

Breathing.

So one of the best ways to restore the parasympathetic nervous system, which I'll go into more detail a bit later, is resistance breathing.

And so this is essentially, if possible, breathing through, in and out of the nose.

If you can't breathe in and out of the nose, breathing through pursed lips so you're Essentially trying to create a little bit of resistance in that breath, work in that breathing.

So rather than just open mouthed or just sort of letting breaths go in and out, you want to control the breathing because that's the signal, that's what happens.

Now you also want to make sure that your diaphragm is getting active, so you want to make sure you're belly breathing.

And the reason for this is, if you think about it, our parasympathetic nervous system is the system that activates when we are digesting food.

So if our diaphragm, which separates our lungs from our digestive organs and the organs below, if that's moving down when we breathe, which is a belly breath, taking a big deep in breath, if that's moving down, it's going to massage the organs below.

So what you get effectively is a way of telling the body that you are digesting food, that it is time to digest food, that you're safe to digest food.

You've then got a nerve that connects down to the lower body at the bottom spine, which is the vagus nerve.

That'll go all the way up to the, to the brain.

It's.

Vagus is Latin for wandering.

And so it's, it's, it's a ambling nerve, one of the longest nerves that we've got.

It will send a signal up to the brain to say it's safe.

So you might have heard in breathwork people talk about the vagus nerve, Vagus V A G U S Vagus nerve, that, that is important to do vagus nerve breathing or activation or something like that.

This is essentially what, what's being said is that we're trying to signal the bottom of the vagus nerve to tell the top of the vagus nerve that we're safe.

And we can do that through deep breathing, deep breathing into the belly, not into the lungs.

If you feel like your shoulders are going up, that's not quite right.

Your shoulders can go up at the end of the breath because you filled the belly, then maybe filled the chest.

But to start with fill the belly, it can take practice.

But it's really important that you master this skill.

One of the best ways to do it is to, is to find a count.

So I often with my clients have a double length exhale.

So whatever number you inhale for, exhale for double that.

So if it's four seconds on the inhale.

So for example now.

So that was a 4 on the inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 8 on the exhale, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Now, with this method, we're really slowing down the body.

We're finding that presence, we're connecting to it, to that deep breath.

Now don't force the out breath.

This is one of the reasons why it's a resistance breath.

You'll find that if you breathe out quickly but count to eight or to double that, you run out of breath before the end.

So it's a slow exhale.

Breathe in as much as you can in that time and then steady, exhale very slowly.

Now this is a fast shift, so you could do that before eating gets you ready for the, for the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in, allows digestion to happen straight away.

You can also use that for any situation where you feel like you're in a bit of a panic or if you feel like you're a bit stuck in the work that you're doing, it's important to shift the body into the parasympathetic nervous system.

Now, as we, as we mentioned before, the sympathetic nervous system, if it's activated too often, you become dominant with it.

And I've mentioned the signs there.

Now we're getting activated more and more by that.

So it's not that the threats are getting worse, it's the stimulus that's increasing.

This is the problem.

So the problem isn't that there are, there are now lions where there were, or there's a bigger predator or the pathogens or, or war.

That's not the problem for most people.

And the problem for most people is that there are more of the stimulus.

So there are more people in the room that you go into.

There are more social media things that you're coming across.

There's more news that you're seeing, there's more opinions that you're seeing and all these things.

As I mentioned before, the brain doesn't tell the difference between a threat that is threats on your life and a threat that is not a threat on your life.

It sees them the same, it sees them as danger for your existence because it runs off chemicals.

So if a chemical reaction happens in your body and the same chemical reaction happens in your body to something else, it treats them the same way.

And the more of these that happen, the more likely we are to become dominant in our sympathetic nervous system.

So in terms of noticing what, or seeing what can happen with it's sympathetic versus parasympathetic dominance.

So I've mentioned some of the signs, but sympathetic dominance can, can sort of come in learned trauma and muscular rigidity.

The deep and rapid breathing, it also makes you more of an inner critic.

It reduces brain function, and it makes you very reactive.

And being very reactive is one of the.

The big problems that people have for the work that I do.

So as you're navigating life, whatever the circumstance, whether it's within yourself in a personal relationship with someone or in your career, being reactive is something that's going to be very detrimental.

Now, your parasympathetic nervous system, when that's dominant, we're talking about a chance for deep learning, athletic agility.

You get calm and steady breathing.

Instead of an inner critic, you have the inner wisdom.

Instead of reduced brain function, you actually have improved brain function.

And then most importantly, instead of being reactive, you become creative.

So you start to be able to create, not just creative in terms of like painting and writing, but actually creative in terms of your thinking.

Like how you can get out of situations, how you can manifest something bigger, how you can.

How you can move from this goal to the next.

And I think it's really important to just put a point on that.

So reactivity versus creativity, which is how we summarize this.

So if we're sns, if we're sympathetic nervous system dominant, we're reactive.

But if we're parasympathetic nervous system dominant, we're creative.

And if we're reactive, then we're.

We're kind of opinion overload.

So we're just constantly listening to people's opinions and reacting to them, not really having a beginning or an end to the thought process.

We spend a lot of time ruminating.

So there's a difference here.

We just sort of ch turning over thoughts.

It can be quite shallow thinking.

We're often overstimulated and confused, and it creates destructive feedback.

And again, it's this inner critic.

So what we end up doing is that we end up compounding the issue.

So we react, the reaction gets the response that we think we're going to get.

And so that feeds back in and we.

And we have something to negatively feedback what we're doing.

And so it's important to shift out that into the creativity space, into this parasympathetic nervous system.

And that's because we start to listen within.

So instead of getting lots of opinions, we start to listen to ourselves more.

This allows us to reflect more.

So rather than ruminate where we churn over thoughts, we can reflect on them.

We stop feeling them.

When we.

And we're able to observe them, we get deep thinking.

Instead of overstimulation, we get inner stimulation.

So we start to believe in ourself more.

The confusion turns to clarity, and then what happens is our inner wisdom allows for constructive feedback.

By taking control of these thoughts that go through, we're able to feed back in the responses and the feedback and the understanding that will help us move forward as opposed to hinder it.

Now, the subconscious doesn't open in stress.

It only opens in safety.

It only opens in the parasympathetic nervous system.

So if your nervous system feels unsafe, then your subconscious stays locked in its old programming.

And in fairness, it is just trying to protect you.

But it's not where you want to be if you want meaningful change.

Remember, 95% of everything you do in the day comes through your subconscious.

You have tens of thousands of thoughts that happen every single day, the vast majority of them from the subconscious.

And these, this means that it's using old habits, it's using old patterns.

And if you've got something programmed in there, well, then that's great, you can trust your subconscious.

But if you've experienced trauma or you've experienced limiting situations, and then those situations have turned to beliefs, and those beliefs have done this negative or destructive feedback, or even if you're just going through a really bad place at the moment, you really need to be able to get into your subconscious so you can change the thoughts that it's got in there or listen to the truth that it's got for you and rise above the situation that you're in.

Putting that into an idea.

So I mentioned there, if you've got an old memory, emotional memories, especially from childhood, we often see beliefs paired with the nervous system state.

So if you learned as a child that speaking your truth led to conflict, your body may associate truth with danger.

So whenever you try to speak your truth, it might fire up your sympathetic nervous system.

You can see that these purrings, they're not mental, but they're actually physiological.

So you may want to go and try and work on just your mindset.

So you might want to go to some talk therapy, to some counselor, to some therapist and try and overcome this issue.

And you might sit down and say, every time I try and speak my truth, I get nervous, my hands start to sweat, I get jittery.

And then because I'm expecting somebody to fire something back at me, and then they do and I crumble.

But the problem isn't in your brain as such.

I mean, it is in your brain.

Your problem isn't mental.

Your problem is physiological.

So you've got to Regulate the body.

So talking about it without changing the physiology of it isn't good enough.

And this is why I like to use immersive meditation.

Because we don't just talk about things.

Most of the talking that you do is within yourself, anywhere.

But what we do is we shift the physiology.

There's two parts to how we can change your philosophy on life.

To change your outlook, to become the person that you want to be.

And that's to shift your physiology first.

Because in shifting your physiology first, we open the door to the subconscious, which allows us to change that philosophy, allows us to overcome those problems.

So when a client tells me that they can't seem to stop worrying, it's not that they are weak or broken.

It's that their body is running a pattern it believes keeps them safe.

Once we help the nervous system relax, the story loses its grip.

So we've got to shift you from that feeling of fear and danger, the sympathetic nervous system, into the parasympathetic nervous system so that you can relax, feel safe.

And then we're able to see what's going on.

So I want you to start to notice your own body's cues.

Notice when there's tension and how that.

That is a story of threat.

Notice what thoughts have come up, what situation you're in.

Notice when you're feeling tense.

Notice how it feels in the body.

And then also notice the relaxation or the story of safety.

So notice when you're feeling at ease.

Notice the thoughts, Notice the situations.

The goal isn't to control your thoughts.

It's to create a body safe enough that your subconscious no longer needs protection stories.

So it's not about trying to grapple with every thought.

It's not about talking and processing and understanding.

It's about shifting the body so that when we get into the subconscious, we can show it that the stories that it's used in this moment aren't essential.

So in today's meditation, we're going to meet that inner storyteller again.

But this time, we'll invite the body into deep safety so it feels safe enough to let go.

Okay, so I want you to start by finding a comfortable position.

And take a slow breath in through the nose.

And slowly release.

Check in with the edges of your eyes and soften them.

Allow the jaw to be slightly open.

Let the shoulders drop.

Keeping that breath nice and steady.

Slowing it down a little bit.

Softening those eyes a little bit more.

Relax that jaw.

Relax those shoulders.

And then I want you to breathe in for a count of four.

Hold For a second.

And then exhale for eight.

Feel the exhale signal to your body.

I am safe.

And again, in for four.

Holding for a second.

And exhaling for eight.

I am safe.

Now imagine a warm, golden light at the base of your spine.

Moving upward through your body with each breath.

Soothing your nervous system.

Relaxing every muscle.

Every cell.

From this calm space.

Imagine yourself sitting beside a small campfire.

Across from you sits your inner storyteller.

The voice that narrates your life.

Ask gently.

What story have you been trying to keep me safe from?

Listen not with the mind, but with your heart.

Then say softly, thank you for protecting me, but it's safe to rest now.

See the storyteller smile.

Close the old book.

And place it in the fire.

Not in anger, but in peace.

Watch the smoke rise.

Carrying the story away.

As the fire fades.

Feel your body lighter.

Calmer.

Rewired for safety.

Take a breath and feel your body resting.

In this moment.

Your nervous system is your greatest ally.

When it feels safe.

Your subconscious becomes free to transform.

And then, with a little focus on your inhale, introduce some movement into the body.

Starting at the feet.

Through the legs.

Up into the torso.

The shoulders and down the arms, into the hands.

Maybe stretching a little bit, moves up into the head.

And when it feels right, open your eyes.

Okay.

Thank you for taking the time to connect with the parasympathetic nervous system and the subconscious.

Next week, we'll explore how to consciously rewire those thoughts, those patterns, planting new beliefs in the soil of your subconscious.

Until then, notice your breath, your body, and the stories that arise.

Remember, the more you choose calm.

The more your subconscious opens to change.

So, until next time, you'll find me in the grove.

Sam.