The Art of Actually Resting - Healing a Tired Nervous System

This week has been a quiet one for me. My children and I have been home sick and moving very slowly through the days. And as you can probably hear in my voice, I am still in the process of recovering. So in today's video I'm sharing some quiet moments with you. Those moments that were a gentle way to slowly recover from a week with very little sleep and therefore very tense exhausted nervous systems as you can probably relate to if you're a parent yourself. Later in this video I'll also answer a few of your questions. But for now let me take you to our garden where there's still an abundance of ripe oranges. I wanted to try a very simple new recipe I created and let me tell you it's delicious. Before I became a mother I constantly carried this inner drive, the feeling that I always had to do something, create something, achieve something. When I made the decision to stay home with my children a completely new energy and perspective entered my life. I found an inner calm that I had never known before, born from a deep feeling of happiness. I was able to live in this inner calm during the first years of my motherhood until last year when an old trauma resurfaced and I fell back into deep states of restlessness and doubts. I'm still in the process of sorting through all of this and finding my way back to calm, this time with a very different understanding of life. But this past week reminded me once again that beyond all creativity, all ideas and everything we want to bring into this world, sometimes the only thing we truly need is rest. To rest, to retreat, to breathe and simply be. Of course this comes with many challenges when you have children and still it is so important to allow ourselves this rest again and again. Resting is just as important as being productive. Sometimes it's even more important. I've learned that slow weeks like this can be medicine. For a long time I often went beyond my limits even though I could already feel that I shouldn't keep going. It was a habit, a survival mode. Understanding that I'm valuable even when I'm not creating anything visible in the outside world has been one of the greatest learning fields of my adult life so far. Today I react much earlier to my boundaries. I try to respect and protect them whenever possible and to orient myself towards what feels right for my body and my soul. This week what was right for me was resting. I hope you can also give yourself some rest and find that inner calm if you need it right now. You are so valuable even if you're not producing in the outside world. So I just recorded all of the Q&A and realized that I don't have my microphone on. So here we are. Well let's start over. So in my last video I asked you if you had any questions for me and you did. So I'm trying to answer them. I'm sitting here with my ginger lemon tea because let's see how much my voice can handle today. So the first question was do I speak Spanish and yes I do speak Spanish. I have lived in Spain before. After finishing school I moved to Spain. It's actually been 20 years ago. I moved to Madrid to study dance there and that's where I learned Spanish. That leads me to the next question which was you are a dancer with a background in flamenco. I would love to hear more about that. So thank you for the question. Yes I am a dancer or I have been a dancer for most of my life. Actually my mother is a trained ballerina so I have been in touch with the dancing world from a very young age. And when I was about 10 I saw a flamenco dancer for the first time and heard the music and I just immediately fell in love with it and that never changed. So during my adolescence I danced a lot a lot of flamenco and then like I said after school I moved to Spain to continue with that and then I actually studied dance and have been on stage for a period in my life and before becoming a teacher. I still love it and I'm still dancing so yeah there you go. Another question was do you have a night or morning routine and the short answer is no I don't because at the moment being a mother of two young children it's just quite unrealistic for me to have a strict routine which I could follow. But what I'm trying to do and what I shared in my recent videos is I try to do everything calm and slowly and gently and that has really been life-changing for me. The same goes for morning and evening you know. I try to get up in the morning and do things in a calm and gentle way and the same goes for night routines you know. I don't have a specific night routine but I try to limit my screen time. I try to read more in the evening which has helped a lot. Sometimes I do some nervous system regulating practices or meditation or you know whatever feels right in the moment but overall I would say my routine lately has been practicing slowness. The next question was about Instagram. How do I deal with scrolling and do I have to limit myself? Yes I do have to limit myself. I think it has become something we have to be really really conscious about and it's just become so easy you know whenever you sit down to grab your phone and just stay on there for hours and that's actually been something my husband and I we've been working on together because we don't want our kids to grow up with this kind of normal you know that you grab your phone whenever possible and just stay on your phone all the time and don't look outside and don't look up. Yeah so that's really something I'm very conscious about and I would actually like to limit it more but it's also challenging when you work with this medium. The next question is what is my job in Spain? So like I said earlier I have been a teacher before becoming a mother and that's actually what I did the first two months when we came to Spain. I went back to teaching but I realized that first of all my children still need me. They really needed me to to be present with them, to adapt to the new country, to the new language and everything. I wanted to give them that you know so that was the main reason to decide not to continue with teaching. So I'm taking a break from that and the more I take a break the more I realize that I don't want to go back. So I'm basically a stayed home mom for the time being but I'm actually trying to build something here on YouTube and I also want to go back to arts, to painting and writing has become a big part of my life so that's where I want to go. There were also some questions on my diet if I'm a vegan and if I have been a vegan before changing to a rather slow and gentle lifestyle and so no I've not always been a but I have been a vegan before being very conscious about living a slow life. Yes I've had a few diet changes in my life. I've been a vegetarian for a long time and then I changed to a vegan diet and now that I'm much more in tune with my body and with my needs I don't restrict myself as much as I used to but I still feel the best when I'm on a plant-based diet so 99% of my cooking is really plant-based. I try to have a more intuitive diet than I used to have. The second question about my diet was if I do see any connection between regulating my nervous system and the foods I eat. Yes definitely. I don't drink coffee for example mostly. I'll have a coffee you know like once in a while but that's a very rare occasion. I don't drink any alcohol at all. Long before I started a rather conscious healing journey I have been very aware of my body being very sensitive to any kind of substances and also to certain foods. I just always had that intuitive feeling that certain things are not good for me. The next question is what part of life has become easier since you slowed down? The short answer is everything because slow living and trying to to be in a state of calm and doing things you know from a state of calm rather than rushing through something and being stressed about everything and that really has been life-changing for me. It has made such a big difference for me healing my nervous system so yeah it has made a very big difference in every aspect of my life basically. So this next and last question for today's video has really touched me deeply because it is something that I have a really long history with and it's about anxiety. The question is I'm curious how you manage having kids with anxiety since they demand energy and can be anxiety inducing? I am on the fence about it for these reasons especially as I also had a very stressful childhood. So firstly I want to say that I understand 100% being on the fence of becoming a mother when you are dealing with anxiety. I have had years where I really didn't know if that would ever happen for me because my thoughts were always like how can I take care of someone else if I'm not even able to take care of myself. That is a very very difficult situation to find yourself in. It's really hard. I am actually thinking about making a video about my journey with anxiety so let me know if you're interested because I've had a 25 year relationship with anxiety and a very long journey and I can honestly say that I have healed and overcome chronic anxiety. So whenever I feel anxiety nowadays I have it for a period of time you know for a short amount of time because I've learned to handle my anxiety, I've learned to deal with anxiety, I've learned to regulate my nervous system. I could talk hours about this topic because it has been such a big part of my life and it has overruled my life for so many years for so many years and actually the fact that I can live this life I'm living right now today is still sometimes mind-blowing, unbelievable for me because when I think back in what kind of stages I was in mentally and physically, it's still sometimes making me emotional to think about that because I was so lost and I didn't know that you can heal from that you know back in the 90s in the late 90s there was no one who was talking about regulating your nervous system you know so I was pretty much really alone there and it was just always this narrative well you're just too sensitive for the world you know maybe you shouldn't go on the plane maybe you shouldn't fly maybe you shouldn't do this or that in life you know because you can't handle it. Not only was there no support but it was the contrary it was you know feeding this narrative of me being just strange and that I just can't do it you know I can't do it and that's not true it is not true for me what has been really crucial is understanding my anxiety you know because for the longest time I thought well I'm just weird I'm just this very weird person that can't exist in this world and I just can't handle the world. It is so important to understand that your anxiety has a reason so understanding your trauma understanding where this anxiety comes from for me personally has been the first step of healing my chronic anxiety and then later on when I heard about nervous system regulation you know that has been life-changing for me and how do I deal with this today being a like I said I don't have chronic anxiety anymore I just have anxiety once in a while when anxiety arises nowadays I have tools to work with it you know regulating my breathing my nervous system and everything that comes with it. So when I decided to become a mother I was the healthiest and the most stable I've ever been in my life and so yes I think it's important to get to a certain point where you can say I think I can handle this now you know and where you feel safe enough so yeah motherhood is a really really challenging thing we all carry certain things you know we all have fears or you know are traumatized in a certain way and we all carry our package I think what I try to live and try to live as an example also for my children is really to do the inner work and of course you want to be a stable and reliable and healthy mother for your children but then the other side is that perfection doesn't exist so you are still human you know you still have the past you had so if I'm going through something hard like I did for example over the last year I try to be authentic with my children because I also want them to learn that mothers are human too you know and we can be sad and we can be overwhelmed and we can be stressed and you know that's just the reality of life and I want to be a mother who is real. I think above all you know perfection or doing it right or you know is being a real person and that's what I try to do so please let me know if you would be interested in a whole video on that topic. I think that's enough for today I think that's all my my voice can really handle so I'm going to be drinking my tea and I hope you have a beautiful day or night wherever you are and I'm sending you so so much love thank you so so much for being here with me and I hope I'll see you in my next video. Bye!