All about activation ⚡︎
Let’s talk about activation today! 🔥💡💥⚡
When I say “activation” energy, I don’t only mean stress or emotional triggers. Activation is anytime your body experiences an upward tick of energy.
Endorphins rising, stress hormones mobilizing, life force awakening.
Excitement, arousal, joy, creativity, motivation… these are all forms of activation energy.
And so are anger, stress, shock, and anxiety.
It could be the spark that rises before a big event, the rush of motivation that gets you moving on a project, the flutter of joy when something unimaginably beautiful happens, or the build of arousal in your system. Every inhale is activation. Even the simple act of waking up in the morning is, in itself, activation energy.
The difficulty comes when our bodies haven’t learned how to hold, use, or metabolize this energy.
What does your body do with activation?
Does it know how to hold it, witness it, wield it, even use it for good? And then complete the cycle into deactivation? Or does it get stuck somewhere along the way?
In Somatic Experiencing, one of the core principles is teaching the body how to reliably move through cycles of activation and deactivation. This isn’t just something to “know” with the mind. It’s something the body has to learn, experience, and imprint somatically.
When you give your body the lived experience of moving through activation followed by reliable deactivation, you restore a natural rhythm. The organic flow of life. You begin to instinctually trust that what rises will also settle (what comes up must come down!) And this builds nervous system capacity, so you can hold larger and larger waves of activation without getting stuck ON in hypervigilance, or stuck OFF in collapse and shutdown.
From this place, life feels more manageable. You can meet challenges with more grace, compassion, and spaciousness, and respond from authenticity rather than react from overwhelm.
Without the capacity to move through cycles of activation and deactivation, life force energy itself can feel overwhelming!!
For me personally, this used to show up even around the “good” feelings associated with activation. Too much excitement, joy, or motivation, and my body would tip into overwhelm. I had never learned how to reliably hold and channel that kind of energy, so even “good” activation landed as a threat in my nervous system. My system would either collapse into freeze or get stuck ON in hypervigilance. This would also land as tension and physical pain in my back and neck.
My brain didn't understand this.
My brain would continuously try to logically convince my body (top-down) that it was safe to feel excited or motivated… but my body wasn't receiving the message. This is because I needed a bottom-up approach! The body “thinks” in feels.
Words and reasoning are the language of the mind.
Sensations and feeling are the language of the body.
I needed to somatically feel and experience that it truly was safe enough to hold the activation of excitement or joy or motivation, or even anger (because feeling anger needs to be less taboo! But that’s a newsletter for another day). Not just cognitively, but somatically.
Both embodied dance practices and Somatic Experiencing (SE) helped me feel this, and have slowly expanded my capacity to hold charge ⚡ in my system.
A big part of what we do in this work is uncouple fear from activation.
In SE, we work through gently changing your body's relationship with activation altogether so that when it arises, in the form of motivation or even anxiety, it doesn't feel so scary and threatening anymore.
We work through teaching your body to not only be able to hold this energy, but also know how to WIELD it. To alchemize it into something you can use for GOOD. Because activation energy is life force energy, and life force energy is not to be wasted!
And, as always, I want to be real with you here! When I say talk about my body becoming overwhelmed by activation in the past tense, I want to be clear that this still happens sometimes. I’m human. And nervous system capacity isn’t static! It shifts with what’s happening in life: grief, caretaking, stress, transition.
When multiple stressors converge, our tolerance and capacity changes. This isn’t something to shame ourselves for, it’s simply part of being human. Sometimes just having a name for the experience, and remembering we’re not alone in it, can bring a sense of relief and soften the weight of it.
And still, we can be proactive! We can support our nervous systems by learning, bottom-up, how to move through activation and deactivation. This is the heart of my 1x1 work: creating a supportive, co-created space where your nervous system can practice these cycles in real time. Together, we hold what’s alive in your emotions, sensations, and inner world. We teach the body that activation always carries the possibility of deactivation. We reclaim life force as something you can hold, channel, and use with wisdom and clarity.