Hi Reader,

Something funny happens to me every time I am about to go back to London.

I start walking faster.

Not because I am late for anything. Not because there is any particular urgency. But because somewhere in my nervous system, London is already loading. The city is coming online before I have even packed a bag.

If you have ever lived somewhere with a very particular energy and then moved away, you might know exactly what I mean. Where we live on the Central Coast is deliciously unhurried. Beachy. No rush. People move at a pace that says the ocean is right there and nothing is so important it cannot wait five minutes.

London is not that.

London is a pace and a vigilance and a way of moving through crowds that I apparently never fully unlearned. My spirit leaves the body a little early. My walking pace picks up. I start weaving through people more efficiently, scanning what is ahead, anticipating the gaps. The Central Coast version of me goes quiet and something older and faster and slightly more elbows wakes up.

And then the tube map appears in my brain.

Completely uninvited. Fully rendered. I start mentally plotting the most efficient routes across the city, working out which line to change on and where, thinking about who we are seeing and which direction makes the most sense. The tube map is burned into me in a way that nineteen years of Sydney geography has never quite managed to replicate. I genuinely miss it. Public transport in London is just so easy and I did not appreciate that nearly enough when I lived there.

I find all of this fascinating.

Because I did not decide to do any of it. My body just started. The nervous system, brilliant and slightly dramatic as it is, began preparing for an environment weeks before I would actually be in it.

This is what nervous systems do. They are always listening. Always anticipating. Always getting ready for what they believe is coming next.

And it made me think about how many of us are walking around with our nervous systems primed for an environment we are no longer actually in.

The high pressure job you left two years ago. The relationship that kept you on edge. The childhood home where you learned that rest was not safe. The version of your life that required you to be vigilant and fast and always three steps ahead.

Your body might still be preparing for that. Still scanning. Still bracing. Still walking like London even when you are standing in the middle of the most beautiful unhurried place in the world.

This is not a character flaw. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.

The work, the real work, is teaching it that it is allowed to update.

That the environment has changed. That you are safe to slow down. That you do not have to keep bracing for something that is no longer coming.

This is what I do with the women I work with. Not manage the symptoms of a nervous system that never got the memo. But go back to where the memo was written and change it.

If this landed somewhere in your body as you read it, I would love to talk. My Discovery Call is always a good place to start. Link here​

And I will be reporting back from London very soon.

In joy,

Alisha