S4-E3: Creating Life with a Regulated Nervous System, V The Excruciating Effort That Life Was Before.

I would use words like alignment, allowing, and endless access to everything to describe life with a regulated nervous system.  It's being able to meet and greet conflict with compassion and self awareness, not the absence of conflict. It's being met with direct confrontation and feeling neutral in your body. The need to defend, retaliate, or set the record straight becomes less important than having compassion for miscommunication, blindspots and stepping on toes that you didn't mean to step on.  

In this episode I take a candid look at the version of excruciating I have left behind, and what life is like at this part of the river. What I get to do now, who I get to be, along with the choices, the capacity and the curiosity I have now where there was once so much anger. 

Creating Life with a Regulated Nervous System

• Suddenly, there's space to breathe, to choose, to feel without being drowned.

• You begin to design days rich with purpose and meaning, not just merely survive them.

• Relationships feel safer. Rest becomes real. You move from defense to design.

• Life becomes co-creative — with your body, with others, with the world.

• There’s ease, hum, alignment — not because life is easy, but because you’re no longer at war with your own system.

The Excruciating Effort That Life Was Before

• Everything took ten times the energy, if you could even be bothered then.

• Joy was fleeting, or suspicious.

• Restless nights. Tight jaw. The constant edge of collapse or explosion.

• The body was not a home — it was a battlefield that I avoided, or drank to numb.

• Stability was a performance but inside, it was a flood, a fire, or a freeze.

 

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Shannon Eastman

Shannon Eastman  is a business growth strategist fluent in both boardroom dynamics and nervous system regulation.

With 25 years of experience scaling businesses across tech, finance, and regulated industries worldwide, she brings a systems-thinking approach to performance, leadership, and wellbeing.

After five years studying the neurobiology of trauma, Jungian psychology, and polyvagal theory, Shannon now integrates nervous system intelligence into the way business gets done—through corporate pilots, strategic partnerships, and a global network of inno