Leslie Brown: Nervous System Healing

Ross Tayler: Today we welcome Leslie Brown, a trauma-informed facilitator and embodiment coach, passionate about supporting people to connect deeply with themselves through understanding what it is to be a human being in today's world and embracing all aspects of that. Through her work, she guides individuals to build the skills that bring balance and freedom into daily life. Leslie's holistic approach integrates nervous system awareness with practical tools for living authentically, making the path of personal growth not just something you think about, but something you feel and embody. Welcome, Leslie.

Leslie Brown: Thanks so much for having me, Ross.

Ross Tayler: So good to have you here. I believe you're going to start by guiding us through an embodiment exercise.

Leslie Brown: Yeah, my hope is to talk you through a closed-eye exercise that is going to give you a real visceral sense of your body, or your system, in protection or in growth.

Ross Tayler: That sounds great.

Leslie Brown: Okay, shall we dive right in?

Ross Tayler: Go for it.

Leslie Brown: Awesome. Let's start by coming into our body and into our breath. Take a couple of really intentional deep breaths. As we notice those deep, intentional breaths, scan your body, with no need to judge or fix, just noticing and tuning into sensations, temperature, tension.

Now I'd like you to take your left hand. I want you to think of something that you really value, something that's important to you. It could be a person or a relationship. It could be a belief that you hold. It could be a value. It could be an item. Just imagine that you can hold this thing of great importance in the palm of your left hand. Now close that hand and create a fist around this item that you really treasure.

Now, using your right hand, start to try to open that fist. But your left hand is going to protect this item, this person, this value, this belief. It's going to protect it. So keep that fist closed with the left hand, and try with your right to open that fist. As you're trying to open it, notice what's happening in your body. Notice what's happening to your breath as you try to open that left fist. Again, notice what sensations are present, anything that feels different or noteworthy.

Now, keeping that left fist closed, stop trying to open it with that right hand. Take a nice deep breath. Now take that right hand and use it to just hold that fist, cradling your left fist in your right hand. Again, just noticing, tuning into any sensations, tuning into your breath, noticing any changes.

Now open both of those hands. Maybe give them a little shake out, and bring them back to wherever they feel like being. Take one more nice deep breath. You can open your eyes and come back to this shared space. How was that for you, Ross?

Ross Tayler: That was great, I love that. There's an exercise I do that involves two people and making a fist, and this one I really appreciated. I went through a range of emotions, which was surprising, and part of what I noticed was just how strong my hand was holding that protection, which was interesting. There was nothing I could do to open it.

Leslie Brown: Beautiful. That's what I love about, obviously with a title like embodiment coach, my work is really to support people to get into their bodies. What I love about this really simple exercise is that even myself, I've done it literally a hundred times with varying groups and audiences, and in such a short period of time it does this beautiful job of connecting us to the visceral experience of fighting with that fist, trying to get it open, what that creates in my system, how my body responds to that, how my mind responds to that, and then seeing the stark contrast of just cradling that fist. What did you notice in terms of the difference between the two?

Ross Tayler: With the first one, I noticed how much energy was being devoted to keeping that fist closed. I noticed my shortness of breath. I wasn't breathing. I was really stuck in some ways, really focused. Then the moment that my right hand came across and was nurturing and supportive, my nervous system just regulated so quickly.

Leslie Brown: Beautiful. It's really quite phenomenal how quickly that shift can happen, isn't it? I think that's one of the really powerful pieces. It's easy to look at a quick experience like this and think, yeah, that's really interesting, a neat difference. The value is recognizing that, like you said, not only is that change able to happen at a very quick rate, but we're going through both of these experiences moment to moment. At any moment, the smallest little thing might create that protection in my system, resulting in, like you said, the shortness of breath and the tension and often strong emotions. In essence, in that moment we're activating the sympathetic nervous system, and in that brief moment of cradling, and I love the word you used, nurturing, of just nurturing that thing that I value, I'm able to start to lower that activation and come back into a parasympathetic state.

Ross Tayler: To do that for yourself is the other thing that's a little bit interesting, because there's an exercise of putting your hand on your heart, and that one for me is harder to really sense and feel, but with this one I could really feel that support and nurture in a different way.

Leslie Brown: Yeah. I think the key element there is allowing ourselves to imagine that we are protecting something, so we connect at a deeper level right away. The reality is that all of us are walking around all day, every day, protecting things, whether we're conscious of it or not.

Ross Tayler: Right. That's a perfect segue into how many of us do you think are walking around in that state without realizing it? We're in that fight or flight and have no idea that we are.

Leslie Brown: I want to say pretty much all of us. I wish I had really solid data on that, Ross, but my hunch is that most, if not all of us, and again to varying degrees. I think many of us have built the awareness, or naturally have the awareness, to recognize when we're in heightened states of sympathetic response. But I think there's a nuanced degree to which our whole societal makeup encourages some level of sympathetic activation very consistently.

Ross Tayler: Yeah. I'm thinking about listeners who may not have this grammar around the nervous system. I wonder if you could bring some clarity to that for them.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely. On the really common language that many of us are familiar with, when I'm talking about the sympathetic or parasympathetic, the sympathetic is the activation where we're in that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, whereas the parasympathetic state is when we're in that rest and digest. Those terms bring a lot of clarity in terms of what that looks like. Each state creates a whole cascade of physiological changes within our bodies and our systems. It impacts our cognitive system and our emotional system. It's driven by the nervous system, but it also impacts blood flow and cardiovascular function, how we're breathing, the hormones we're producing at the time. There's such a domino effect depending on which state we're in.

Ross Tayler: Why would it be important for someone to understand this?

Leslie Brown: I think twofold. One, the more the science of our bodies, our nervous systems, and how we operate as a species advances, the more we understand how integrated we are and how one thing affects another affects another. Really nothing happens in isolation in our whole being. I feel that our society today, and the way we navigate life, has so many elements that are conducive to being in that fight or flight state more often than we realize, and I think that undermines us in so many ways. Unfortunately, and I think things are moving in the right direction and I've seen some wonderful initiatives, but for example, you and I didn't get taught how to regulate ourselves in school, and many of us weren't even taught that by our parents. I think it's such an important skill. What I've seen in terms of patterns with the people I work with is that they reach these places of plateau, whether that's in terms of their own growth or development or evolution, or in a desire to enhance our own personal gifts, or have a more authentic expression of ourselves in daily life, or to feel like a more spiritual being. Oftentimes our nervous system is this forgotten element that is undermining the creation of our desired results in whatever area.

Ross Tayler: When I came to your talk in Parksville a few months ago, you used a metaphor that I thought was so brilliant and so powerful, which was about the white noise in our system.

Leslie Brown: Yeah. I think this was the light bulb moment for me in recognizing the value in my own personal life and the importance of understanding how my system is operating. I had a really profound, transformational experience with a one-on-one program called Prime Potential [?], which I am now a facilitator of. Early in my training, of course, I experienced it myself, and after the fact I had a really noticeable change in my level of coordination, which sounds kind of silly and irrelevant. I noticed, wow, I'm way more skilled with my hand-eye coordination than I've ever been. What is this about? The way that my mentor, Lynn Samita [?], described it to me was, Leslie, just think about all of the background noise in your nervous system that we cleared with that process. As soon as she said the words, naming the experience that I was having, it all dropped in that moment. I liken it to having the range hood on above the stove. I use it frequently when I'm cooking, and inevitably when I turn it off, I'm always shocked at how much it was impacting me without me noticing it until I stopped it. It's similar. So many of us have so much of this activation, this white noise, happening in our system, and it's bogging us down without us recognizing it.

Ross Tayler: Yes. I guess it was about 2019 when I first became aware of the nervous system, and I was studying Deb Dana, who talks about polyvagal theory in a way that is very relatable.

Leslie Brown: She's amazing. One of my favorite books.

Ross Tayler: She takes all this science from Stephen Porges and makes it so digestible and so easy to understand and so relatable to the work that we do. For me, I think it's at the core of everything. I think everything that we have a label for, in one way or another, could come back to nervous system dysregulation. There's not science fully there to prove that yet, and I think there's probably a lot of resistance to that being true because of the systems that surround some of the support that gets provided for things like anxiety. What I love about this topic, and really part of why I brought you on the podcast, is to talk this out, because I think it's such a valuable insight for anyone, no matter what they're going through.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely. When you take that body of work around polyvagal theory and combine it with the work of Bruce Lipton and his core principles of growth mode and protection mode, which really is at the effect of the nervous system, it's similar to our body. We can't flex our bicep muscle and our tricep muscle at the same time, because they are opposing forces. Our system will not perform that function. It is one or the other. Similarly, we cannot be in growth mode, in other words with presence and openness and curiosity, and protection mode at the same time. We can only be in one or the other.

Ross Tayler: Right. You described the white noise covering up our gifts. What kind of gifts can emerge when that white noise starts to disappear?

Leslie Brown: Anything. Again, I noticed it because my daughter had decided she loved volleyball, and I was helping her to practice and hone her skills. I've never been a super skilled, sporty person in any area of my life, so I felt more skilled in that sort of physical endeavor. I also personally noticed a sudden deepening in my spiritual connection. Then I started noticing other gifts. My intuition definitely became stronger, not to mention my confidence in my own intuition. My experiences, and it's still all very new and somewhat exciting slash scary for me, included recognizing that there might be some mediumship alive and well in me, which was a totally unexpected element. In working with others, I've seen them really leverage the support of their nervous system to break through barriers where they've seemingly plateaued in terms of any of their energetic or spiritual gifts, and our ability to attune and co-regulate is greatly enhanced, in my experience.

Ross Tayler: Amazing, and also not surprising, because so many of us, I believe, are living from our mind and not our body. We're literally disconnected from our body for all sorts of reasons. I don't just say that speculating, I live that, and in some ways I continue to live that. I'm still working with those pieces. But it's so clear that we can't think our way through this, because the body is the majority of the equation of how to solve the problem.

Leslie Brown: Ross, I think that's where a lot of us hit a bit of a wall, where we're unknowingly blocking ourselves. What I know and understand on an intellectual level doesn't automatically integrate or become something that I express at any deeper level. As a species we've become so comfortable living in our intellect that it's bred more and more disconnect from the rest of our body. And yet our mind is really great at lying to us. Of course it's going to tell me that if I know it, I must be doing it, and I must be skilled at it. How many of us listening today can say, yeah, I know at least one person that I see on the regular who is not aligned or congruent, who isn't walking the talk, who is saying one thing and doing another? That's a perfect example of someone who probably has a really solid intellectual understanding but hasn't moved that understanding beyond the intellect.

Ross Tayler: It makes me think of human design, which is a body of work I'm involved in. It's essentially a map of our energy, a map of who we are. One of the things in human design is that 99 percent of us make decisions from somewhere in the body, not the mind, and only 1 percent make decisions from the mind. In the different places of the body are different gifts. It really supports what you're talking about, of these gifts rising up when we start to connect with our body and reduce the noise, which a lot of is conditioning and our experiences and the patterns that we're stuck in, so many things. The moment that space starts to open up, we get things like you mentioned, intuition and clarity and motor skills, and then these deeper gifts that we had no idea were there.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely. You did a really beautiful job of a great explanation for anyone who says, I've been taking active steps toward these desired results, I've been making conscious choices to have more of this or less of that, and I'm still not getting it. That tells us that those bodily decisions that we're not connected to are running counter to our goals.

Ross Tayler: I worked in addiction treatment centers, and in the latter part of that work it was with more severe addicts. I had all this awareness of nervous system teachings, and I thought to myself, wow, that person can have all the desire to change that behavior, but their nervous system is overriding everything they can try to do. It made me a little concerned, because of the model we were working in, I couldn't fully bring in all these teachings and the knowledge that I had. Think about that moment where someone has done a six-week program and gets back home again and is presented with the opportunity to use, and their whole body is firing in all sorts of different ways and their rational brain is going offline, and they're being hijacked without knowing it, and then they make a choice that isn't really their choice because their body is making the decision. It's so complicated, and I don't feel like that's being talked about enough.

Leslie Brown: Yeah. The company that I've been fortunate enough to work with and become a partner in is called Expanding You [?], and this is really the premise of what we are teaching and empowering people with. One of the most common challenges is that what we're talking about today is likely going to make a lot of sense to a lot of people, and because it makes sense, it's tricky for us to honestly evaluate ourselves and how well we're doing with living that understanding. How do you demonstrate to someone who has done a ton of work, and is really smart and knows a lot of stuff, that, for all intents and purposes, I am encouraging people to go back to what many want to label basics? We have the understanding, but we haven't developed the skills. So how do we support the person who is putting in the time and the energy to move beyond their addiction? How do we support them to build the skills required so that they're not so easily or quickly hijacked by their nervous system when it matters most?

Ross Tayler: Right. I guess that's the other piece, that it's not necessarily a quick fix, because it's twofold. You're doing the work of re-patterning the conditioning that took place, and at the same time building resilience within the nervous system to be able to face those challenges in a different way. Traditionally most of the models being used are cognitive, whether it's CBT or other things. It's very cognitive, and that's only a part of the equation.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely. It does require constant, regular, repetitive steps. That's how we exercise neuroplasticity. That's how we learn something new, by doing it over and over again, so that we learn the skill and develop the mastery.

Ross Tayler: Back to this white noise piece, for the longest time I didn't realize that I was dysregulated, but in a low-level way, a tiny bit of noise that was always there, and I just accepted it as normal. That's the way it is. It wasn't until returning to Vancouver Island, just in March, that I got to recognize all the work that I had done, because back in 2012, when I was on the island, I was just always dysregulated. I had this experience of, this is what it's like to feel regulated in a place where I only know it as being dysregulated.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely. I had a similar experience. It's been a gradual unpacking over the last number of years of realizing how much low-level, and often not low-level, but consistent anxiety and dysregulation was happening in my system. The beautiful double-edged sword of our species is that we are highly adaptable. Our brain is only wired to survive, so whatever happens on a regular basis that doesn't kill me, my system says, okay, good enough, and we'll adjust and adapt and make that our new normal.

Ross Tayler: Then the other thing is that we're reacting to the perceived bear that is chasing us when it's not actually a bear. We're applying this level of nervous system activation to situations that aren't necessarily aligned with actual threat.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely. It's as simple as the quality of our news. There's a heightened focus on negativity and fear, which I'm not labeling as right or wrong or good or bad, and it's not overly supportive of regulated states. Similarly, there are the everyday struggles of making ends meet, and the expectations on an individual, and performance, and the shoulds and shouldn'ts, and keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak. There are so many ways we perceive we should be in order to be worthy that then create this sense of, like you say, being chased by a bear that doesn't exist.

Ross Tayler: I'd love it if you said more about the spiritual connection that can emerge, and the intuition, however you'd like to speak about that. I feel it's an important piece to flesh out a bit more, because it is a benefit of doing this work, one of the many benefits.

Leslie Brown: Definitely. If we look at our intuition, for example, many of us would label our intuition as a quiet voice. One of the ways we can differentiate between fear or anxiety and intuition is that intuition doesn't have a sense of urgency. It's a deep knowing. It's not a must do this right now. In order to tune in to a less urgent, more quiet voice, I'm not going to hear that over the range hood. I need to turn that white noise off to find that place and space of stillness within where I can connect to that inner knowing. I think that's similar in relation to our individual spiritual journeys. For me, the moments where I feel the most universal love, and experience moments of non-duality and oneness and feeling connected to all that is, don't happen when I'm running around grocery shopping and planning out my week. They happen when I'm cultivating quiet moments of stillness, both internally and externally.

The more we can cultivate this ability to regulate ourselves, recognizing that it's constantly in flux, and as it should be, because we're not meant to be in any one fixed state, the more we can build that skill to notice, okay, there's some level of sympathetic activation, I am in some version of fight, flight, freeze or fawn. When I can notice that, I'm empowered to do something about it, and I can make those choices that support the parasympathetic and allow me to come back into breath, back into body. Another great reference point is the teachings of Dan Siegel and his hand model of the brain, just understanding how disconnected we become when we are in that fight or flight mode.

Ross Tayler: Yeah, that visual is really helpful and powerful, the flipping your lid.

Leslie Brown: Yes, absolutely. That's why I really wanted to open with that felt experience of, when you were trying to open your fist, to varying degrees your lid was flipped. My lid does flip when I'm trying to fight against protection. Things like this are really helpful for us to start to tune in. My greatest skill that I learned was simply noticing. For me, as soon as I'm activated in any way, I lose my belly breath, I start breathing shallow, and I notice tension in my stomach. So I got really good at tuning into my stomach, because in a moment's notice I could assess where my nervous system was at, at least to a general understanding.

Ross Tayler: That's where so many of the nerve endings of the vagus nerve terminate, in the stomach. When we get sick to our stomach by some experience, that's partially why. I used to have so much anxiety years ago that I would get sick to my stomach, and it caused all sorts of issues at conferences I was at, and the anxiety of thinking I was going to have to speak and all sorts of things. To learn about the nervous system and make that connection, it was like, no wonder I had all those experiences.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely. It's so powerful when we reach these points of understanding, because they create a little bit of space. One of the things that could be so counter to this growth and development is when negative self-talk chimes in, as soon as I go to, dang, I'm activated again, I'm making matters worse. So it's also cultivating that loving compassion: look, there I am again. Okay, what's next? What am I looking for in this moment?

Ross Tayler: I think it's important to mention explicitly, and I think we've alluded to it, that this is a system that is designed to help us. It's there to keep us safe. It's not working against us. If we can start to align with these teachings and support ourselves and notice the signs, like the check engine light on your dashboard, we don't want to put a piece of tape over it. We want to work with it.

Leslie Brown: Exactly. And to recognize that it's a system that was designed to support us and help us survive, but it's somewhat outdated, in a sense. The ways in which we existed when it came to be are very different from today's circumstances.

Ross Tayler: Very different, so true. Circling back to that exercise at the beginning, think about all the situations in our lives that are creating that level of protection, some of which we might perceive we can't control. What I love about this teaching is that the ability to work with it is within me. It's completely in my control to regulate myself, and there are so many tools out there to help me do that.

Leslie Brown: That's the wonderful reality of today. We have so much supportive information readily available at our fingertips. There are a million different regulation exercises you can find on the internet, and all you have to do is commit the time to finding the one that really works for you, that lands well.

Ross Tayler: If you could share one important thing about these teachings that you would want someone to know, what would you say?

Leslie Brown: As much as a part of me wants to create something poetic and impactful, I think it's as simple as this: what we're talking about today, Ross, is the foundations of being a human being. They are as normal and natural as your fingers and toes. It's really about learning how to understand and work with my system, with myself, with my heart, with my mind, rather than wronging it or fighting against it.

Ross Tayler: It makes me think that if anybody hasn't seen it, look up what the vagus nerve looks like as it travels through the body and all the different pathways. It's quite spectacular. It really does connect my mind, my body and my spirit. All three of those things run through those pathways, so it is us. I don't think I said this yet, but I really get jazzed up about it because this is the one thing that we definitely all have in common. We all have a nervous system. Despite what we see on the outside, the things that are going on on the inside are all grounded in this system.

Leslie Brown: I think when we learn to understand and work with that system, we will feel the positive ripple effect in every aspect of our lives.

Ross Tayler: Right, because instead of pointing a finger, we can have the conscious awareness that I'm in front of someone who's dysregulated, who's not actually grounded in themselves as they're speaking, and we can find the compassion and care for that, perhaps.

Leslie Brown: Absolutely.

Ross Tayler: All right, this feels like a good place to wrap up. I always like to ask a question at the end, which is, what's one simple way that someone could connect with the sacred today?

Leslie Brown: I think it's as simple as cultivating a moment of presence. Close your eyes, tune into your breath, and allow even one single moment of stillness. Better yet, if I can find a spark of appreciation in that moment of stillness, to say thank you to this incredible body, this incredible nervous system that has carried me all this way.

Ross Tayler: Beautiful. Thank you.

Leslie Brown: Thank you.

Ross Tayler: I'm so grateful that you were able to join me today for this conversation and the layers that you brought to this topic. It's got lots of nuance to it. There's lots of information you can find, and I think the more we can simplify it, the more accessible it becomes, and I think you do a really great job of that, so thank you.

Leslie Brown: Thank you so much for having me. I'm always happy to share with folks like you. Thank you so much, Ross.

Ross Tayler: You're welcome. And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. Until next time, take good care.