In this episode of The Art of Living Big, Betsy reflects on the power of nervous system healing and how it’s been showing up in her everyday life. She shares the concept of the “Thinking Chair” and how intentional reflection can help us uncover deeper truths. Betsy also introduces the idea that many of our “problems” aren’t really problems at all…just things not going as expected, and how reframing them can lead to growth. With updates on The Navigate Method, the Navigate Chronicles on YouTube, and more, this episode is full of inspiration and practical takeaways for anyone on a personal development journey. Tune in to explore how small shifts can lead to big breakthroughs.

What You’ll Learn:

Links Mentioned:

Learn more about The Navigate Method: www.betsypake.com

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Transcript:

391 Is it really a problem

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy P, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hello everyone. Welcome to The Art of Living Big. I’m excited that you’re here. If you’re new here, welcome. There’s a lot of episodes to listen to. I’ve been getting messages from people asking like, which specific episodes should I be listening to? Or, which ones would you suggest first? And I always suggest just starting from where we last left off every episode.

Is typically like a little story and then a lesson, and hopefully it applies to your life and entertains you a little bit as you listen. So. I have a bunch of little things to [00:01:00] talk about today, and one really big thing that I’m really excited about is we have someone new on our team that’s gonna be helping me.

I’m so excited to be able to show up a little bit more regularly. In fact, I’m thinking, is there a way that I can begin doing this every week again, because I really liked having episodes every week and, I still have so many things to share. If you haven’t checked out the YouTube channel, make sure you go over there.

I think if you just search my name, you’ll find me. But I’m doing the Navigate Chronicles, which is something that’s coming up every week inside the Navigate Method. And even if the Navigate method. Isn’t for you. You might find something helpful in what everybody’s talking about. You know, I think so many of our problems and concerns and all of those things are just so universal.

That there’s always something to connect with. So this week, like I said, I have a couple fun things to share with you and, a thought. So if you ever have [00:02:00] listened to my episode on the Thinking Couch, you can just search for that. It’s only a few months back.

the Thinking Couch and now I have a thinking chair is really just a place where I go to spend time to think. You might do this already. You know, you might go for walks and really think, you know, you don’t have podcasts on.

Maybe you do if you do. I celebrate that if you’re listening to me while you’re walking. But you know, you might have moments where it is meditative, it might be doing laundry or. Going for a walk or in your car, or sometimes those thoughts or deep thoughts kind of come to us when we’re in the shower.

It’s in the times where we have some space, right? And so what I like to do is create that space by sitting in my thinking chair. So I have a chair that’s in my office that I use specifically to be able to just think about the things that are on my mind. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about that.

You know, one of the things that we teach inside the Navigate [00:03:00] Method is this idea of regulating our nervous system on purpose and learning how our unique nervous system works. Understanding ourself and what shows up for us. In any instance, you may operate totally different than somebody else.

In that same instance, you may have a fight or flight response where someone else would have a freeze response. You might not be bothered at all, and then you’ll notice you’ll be bothered later. Your heart will race, or you’ll just notice you’re really tight. You might notice that in your shoulders or your neck sometimes.

That’s where I get it, where I’m really tight. I don’t even realize that I’m stressed or that my nervous system is activated until I notice those signs. So we teach how to really understand all of that inside the Navigate method and, how to. Tone your nervous system, kind of like going to the gym and how [00:04:00] to be able to move past some things so that you can regulate around the things that activated you in the past, and so that those things don’t activate you in the future.

It’s super powerful and I don’t think we can do any work on. Relationships or our lives really, without taking into consideration this component of our nervous system. You know that book, the body keeps the score. Well, that’s what it is. Like even if our brain can conceptualize things, our body.

Keeps the score. Our body knows and remembers what has happened. And so giving that some healing is just so important. One of the things that I’ve talked about, for years on the show, is going to float. Have you guys done this before? So you might know what I’m talking about, but if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is floating in a sensory deprivation tank.

So you could just Google like float tanks. Like float tanks near me. [00:05:00] And it’ll come up with some float tanks near you. There’s several in Atlanta and I think I’ve been to all of them, but I have one that I really like and I have not been in, I don’t know, maybe like about five or six months. Yeah, five or six months, maybe even a little bit longer. I had a membership for a long time and I would go a couple times a month really regularly. Floating is where you get in this pod typically. It’s dark, so it’s totally dark in the room, the air in the room and the temperature of the water is your body temperature and the water is 10 times saltier than the Dead Sea.

So you actually float. As soon as you get in the pod, you get in totally naked so there’s nothing touching your skin, and you lay down and you float and it’s totally dark and there’s no sound. Even just thinking about it, I can feel my body take a big, deep breath. It’s [00:06:00] so wonderful and relaxing. Now, about six months ago, I had this really weird interaction with the, owner.

It wasn’t even that big of a deal really looking back, but. He was not feeling well. And just said something really rude to me and I just, I couldn’t bring myself to go back, you know? So I took quite a long break and then I regulated my nervous system around it. I decided I wanted to go back.

I still had, active floats that I could take, that I’d paid for, so I went last week. And one of the things that I would tell people is when you get inside the float tank, you know it’s gonna take a little while to relax. It’s gonna take a minute for you to catch your breath and to actually remind your body that it’s safe to just relax and slow down, and it doesn’t have to have any armor up.

And typically when I would get in the float tank, I would take many big, deep breaths trying [00:07:00] to remind myself, of this safety and that I was in a place that I wanted to be and I could just float. And then I typically float for 90 minutes. So about 15 or 20 minutes before it would be time. To get out.

I could feel my body start getting ramped up. It’s like it almost knew, okay, we’ve just got 15, 20 minutes left, like we gotta get ready. Almost like this armor that was beginning to go up. Anyway, I didn’t really think all that much about it. I kind of thought that was. A process that you went through when you went to float.

Like you’d have to take some big deep breaths. It would take a little while to chill out and then before you got up, your body would kind of know and it would start, adrenaline and reactivating so that you could get up. Right? Not so, you know, as we heal our nervous system and our body begins to know that we’re safe things.

That typically you thought were normal, start to [00:08:00] feel different? They start to show up differently. And when I went to float last week, I was so shocked at how when I got in the the water, I immediately relaxed. There was no deep breaths, there was no waiting for my body to UNC Unclench. And interestingly, there was no activation at the time.

I would be getting ready to get out of the pod. In fact, I didn’t know it was time to get out until the , it’s like this French lady’s voice. She says, hello, it is time to get up. I didn’t even know till that ding happened, and she started talking and I was like, wow. I immediately went into a relaxed state, which tells me that my nervous system.

The, threat level is so much lower, right? And I say threat level, that’s a term that we use inside the navigate method to determine where [00:09:00] we are in terms of activation or our nervous system being on guard, for example. But my threat level, and we use, the, analogy of like a big bucket of water.

So if you’re always kind of stressed and the water in your bucket is really high. Then something happens at work in your relationship on the road with the road rage or whatever, and it doesn’t take long for that water in the bucket to get to the place where it’s about to overflow. And because our bodies are so amazing.

Your body does. It doesn’t allow the overflow. Instead, a spigot opens at the bottom, and that is what we see as evidence of our stress. We, clench our jaw. We can’t relax in the float tank like we feel all this tension on our shoulders maybe, or our neck, right? We feel rigid or stiff. We can’t fall asleep.

We [00:10:00] wake up at 2:00 AM Those are all indicators that our nervous system. Spigot is opening to be able to keep the threat level at a place where it doesn’t overflow. And so one of the things that I was so surprised about was that there was such evidence in doing that. There was so much evidence that my day-to-day threat level was so much lower that I could just get in the float tank.

So there’s little things that we can look for for evidence. Another piece of evidence that I’ve had is I have used a mouth guard for years. I clenched my teeth so bad. I’ve cracked my teeth. I haven’t used a mouth guard in months. I don’t even clench at night.

I don’t have any jaw issues. I’m not clenching or exhausting the muscles in my jaw anymore. And in fact, I feel like my face has gotten. Where it’s thinner ’cause that muscle isn’t being like tensed and expanded so much. And so I think we start to see evidence when we [00:11:00] continue to do the work on our nervous system, we continue to take actions that help bring us to a place where we’re surrounded and we have an atmosphere that.

Allows our nervous systems to relax. This is why we talk about like finding the people in our lives that help our nervous system relax. It impacts everything. That threat level we may not even realize is so high. We just know we’re so activated by things. And then when we begin to bring that down, all of a sudden we start to see all this evidence and all these things start to shed where we just feel so much better.

So that’s one of the things that I have been noticing recently and I was actually pretty surprised cause I’ve done so much nervous system work but as I always say, I am so much on this journey along with y’all and learning and. Healing and getting better. I posted something on Instagram, I don’t know, maybe a month ago that I think I’m like one of the [00:12:00] happiest that I’ve ever been.

I feel so much more relaxed and I have. Such good people coming into my life and good friends, and I’m doing a lot of things, and all of those things start to impact our nervous system and the threat level that we experience on a day to day. So being able to recognize who is good for my nervous system and being able to.

Seek those people out is just such a huge part of healing and showing up and being able to make big changes in your life and to be able to feel like you’re living a life that feels really good. It doesn’t mean we don’t have problems and issues don’t arise, but man, it’s so much easier to deal with those things.

I was dealing with some problems this month, and this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, and I was like, I know that these are. Issues. I know the problems. I know that these are things to solve. But it feels really fun to be able to find the [00:13:00] solution, like it feels fun to move through this problem.

It doesn’t feel like full of angst and awfulness. I have control. I can do actions differently, and they actually impact my environment and I can make changes and I can move forward, and it all just feels really fun. Which leads me to sitting on the thinking couch because I was thinking about problems, and the problems that I have been experiencing.

And the funny thing is, as I was thinking about this and I was really trying to identify, what is it I’m actually saying. So even if I say I have a problem, well, how do I know? How do I know that it’s a problem? What’s the indicator that says that’s a problem?

And when I was really breaking this down, and this is the thought that I really wanted to share, is that most of my problems, and I’m curious if this is the way for you, so message me, message me on Instagram, [00:14:00] shoot me an email. I really wanna know, if you look at the problems and I, and things that need to be solved, is it.

That things are going wrong, or is it that things are just not going the way you thought they would, and when they don’t go the way that you thought they would, you think that it’s wrong, but maybe it’s actually right. But the way you were thinking about it was wrong. So the problems that we have are actually working to move us in the place we need to go.

We just weren’t aware that we had to go there. And so if that’s true, then all of the things that happen are actually working and there isn’t a problem. There’s just a new way that we need to [00:15:00] think in order to move forward. I realized that so many of the things, when I tried to identify my definition of problem, a problem would be something that I couldn’t impact.

I’ve said before, and you’ve probably heard me say this, but if money can fix it, it’s probably not a problem. If your hot water heater breaks money can fix it. It’s not a problem. It’s just something you have to solve for. Now, if it’s something that money cannot fix, that’s a real problem, right?

Health issues or things like that are just outside of anything you can do anything about other than move forward, learn all the lessons that you can and take the next right action. So when I was looking at my problems, if that’s sort of my definition, then I didn’t really have any problems and. It was really my redirection [00:16:00] and it helped me learn things about myself.

It helped me recognize places that I needed to heal and some of the challenges that I had, opportunities that I had gave me bigger boundaries that were necessary in order for me to continue to heal and to move forward. And that is actually not a problem, it’s just not what I was expecting. So. I hope that gave you some food for thought this week.

I am looking forward to seeing you over on YouTube. If you catch me over there, drop me a comment, so I know you came from the podcast. We are doing the Navigate Chronicles every other week, and then we’ll see if I can show up here every week. You know, I like to. Have this time with you where I do this podcast.,

Thank you so much for being here. I love you so much. Keep working on yourself, keep moving forward. You got this. All right, I’ll see you next time. Thanks for joining me [00:17:00] on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger.

Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today. You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pay and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless. And your life. It’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.