As My Capacity Grew, So Too Did My Need for Support

For the last 3 months or so, I have been running through life...

Markets. Workshops. Networking. Projects at home. Homeschooling. Gardening. Daily household chores.

It's been a lot...

With all things though, there were multiple lessons and growth opportunities that I might not have gotten had I not given myself this opportunity to be so busy.

The biggest takeaway has been balance.

I have to create a schedule that allows me to not only balance my business and my home life, but I also have to intentionally carve out time for nature and downtime to truly refill my bucket amidst my schedule's chaos.

I felt the need for balance... felt that I was sprinting at breakneck speed... and so I intentionally carved out a few months of my summer to let my life slow down a little bit.

To give myself time to just be, to have family visits, to take a trip, all without worrying that I had a ton of work to do.

Sounds like a simple solution, right?

I saw the problem: I was overscheduled.

And I planned to answer that problem with a solution: a large chunk of time unscheduled.

So with such a clear problem and solution laid out, why was I still ending my days feeling like I had pushed my nervous system to its max?

Why could I do things that I genuinely wanted to be doing, like gardening, and still have my hips screaming at me by the end of the day, with the pain and discomfort lasting for days?

If you've been following this journey, you'll know that with all my heart, I truly believe that nutrition is the first step in solving many of our problems.

Depressed? Increase your minerals.

Inflamed? Eat gut-healing foods.

Want to hear what your body needs? Drink tea.

Want to calm down your nervous system? Nutrient-rich foods and tea.

Not sure what you need? Bone broth.

The better I ate, the more I listened, the better I felt.

I assumed that as I gave my body all that it was asking for, I wouldn't keep running into things like nervous system overwhelm or body pain.

What I didn't account for was that the better I ate, the more my capacity grew.

So instead of my nourishment filling my reserves and building resilience, my nourishment increased what I could do in a day, increased the ways my body could function, and genuinely increased my joy.

The things I do now in my life and with my business are not things I ever expected to be able to handle.

I would have never dreamed that increased capacity would expand my dreams and vision, or that there wouldn't be a goal that felt too big anymore.

Increasing my capacity instead of my reserves means that I can have a larger gas tank, but I'm going farther. At the end of my trip, my tank is still empty.

My goal is to not only eventually end my trip with gas still in the tank, but to also have a full extra gas can in the trunk.

Realizing everything about my capacity and all that nourishment has truly offered me, I came to a fork in the road.

If I want to start building reserves, I can't keep operating the way I have been.

My husband and I had had many conversations about the stress that I was putting my body through every day, and none of it clicked.

I just kept looking at him and thinking:

What do you want me to do about it?

I have this break coming up. I see the problem. I have a solution.

What else am I supposed to be doing?

And then he went on a guy's camping trip and was gone for three days.

That's when it hit me.

Even with him not home, my days felt exactly the same.

Because my roles at home and the things that I had decided were my responsibility didn't shift because he was gone.

Nothing was added to my plate.

And I realized that even though my business had rapidly expanded from what could basically be seen as a hobby into something very real and alive, something that now has me working full-time, I hadn't adjusted the roles I was playing at home.

I was still the primary caretaker of the house.

I was homeschooling.

Doing all the cooking.

Doing all the laundry.

Managing all the daily household responsibilities.

And I was also building a business.

When I realized this, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

No wonder I had been so maxed out at the end of every day.

I had essentially been working two full-time jobs.

So when my husband got home from the woods, we had a conversation about the roles within our home.

And he looked at me like:

"Yeah... this is what I've been trying to tell you."

But it didn't click until I was alone with the kids and realized how much I actually do to keep our lives running at this level.

The beautiful pergola my husband built for our garden... mirroring the support I was realizing I needed. He took over the daily task of cleaning the kitchen, and it has been life changing...

Which really brought me back to a full-circle moment, not only with my nervous system, but especially with my hips.

Our hips are our foundation.

There is a reason that the root chakra—our center of safety and trust—is located in this region.

So I really had to sit with the pain I was feeling in my hips and allow myself to hear the message:

I need more support.

I am hypermobile.

And what that means is that my connective tissues do not support my body at the level that it needs, so my fascia steps in to fill that role.

What that creates within my body is a lot of bracing.

Tight hips.

A rigid diaphragm.

Low back stiffness.

The more I learn about my body and listen to its need for support, the more I realize that my baseline is probably going to look different than someone else's baseline.

And yet, as I've seen the incredible shifts that have happened over the last year, I have no reason to doubt this path.

My support needs may look different than someone else's.

My body may ask for different things.

But I am learning that listening changes everything.

I thought that nourishment would be enough.

What I didn't anticipate was that with nourishment would come more capacity, and the support I would need in the expression of that capacity would also need to shift.

I thought the goal was no overwhelm.

No pain.

But maybe the goal is to become so fluent in my body's language that when it whispers, I no longer need it to scream.

Healing is not linear.

We spiral and revisit the layers again and again.

The difference is that each time, we return with a deeper understanding of what our bodies have been trying to say all along.