Your Biology Speaks: Are You Listening?

Your Biology Speaks: Are You Listening?

by | Apr 5, 2026 | Blog, Body Intelligence, Somatic Wisdom

Your body is always communicating—through sensation, emotion, energy, and perception. It is constantly giving you information about safety, capacity, and overwhelm within your system.

During menopause, this communication becomes harder to ignore. As ovarian hormone production begins to shift, the body enters a phase of deep physiological adaptation. The nervous system, stress regulation, and hormonal rhythms all begin to re-organize around a new internal baseline.

This is a whole-system transition—where your biology is constantly adjusting how it maintains balance, energy, and resilience in response to both internal shifts and external demands.

When life is already shaped by ongoing stress, pressure, and without enough time for the system to really rest, restore, and reset, this transition can feel more intense. The system has less room to adapt and therefore becomes more sensitive, signalling overwhelm, fatigue, or activation more quickly.

Hormones & Stress Regulation

Estrogen and progesterone, beyond their reproductive roles, also play an important role in regulating the stress system. They support hormonal regulation of the central stress-response system (HPA axis), helping to soften the body’s response to stress and support recovery afterwards, creating more room for regulation and rest

Estrogen influences how the nervous system interprets and responds to stress signals, while progesterone has a naturally soothing and regulating effect on the body. Together, they support emotional regulation, flexibility, and a natural return to balance after activation.

As these hormones shift during menopause, this internal support changes. The stress system itself is not impaired, it just has less hormonal support around it. Everyday stressors may therefore feel more intense, and it can take longer for your system to settle again.

Stress, the HPA Axis & Hyperalertness

In this context, the body’s stress system—the HPA axis, which coordinates cortisol and adrenaline responses—can become more easily activated.

When this system has been under long-term pressure, cortisol may remain more consistently elevated. This can lead to higher states of arousal, experienced as internal activation, hyperalertness, emotional sensitivity, or a sense of being “on edge.”

There is nothing wrong here. This is an intelligent survival adaptation of your system—designed to keep you safe in demanding environments.

However, when this state continues for too long, and as hormonal regulation shifts during menopause, the system has less capacity to return to rest. Patterns that were once helpful can begin to feel like fatigue, restlessness, or emotional overwhelm.

What the body is expressing is a current limit in capacity.

A need for more regulation. More recovery. More space.

A Whole-System Re-organization

In this way, menopause is not only something the body undergoes—it is something the body actively responds to, moment by moment, in an ongoing attempt to find a new equilibrium.

It is a re-organization across systems: hormonal, nervous, metabolic, and emotional. A shift toward a new balance as the body continues to adapt.

An intelligent, ongoing process of change—where the system is continuously exploring how it meets life, moment by moment…

A nourishing touch for mind and nervous system

by | Mar 8, 2026 | Video

In this video, I show a very simple and easy little practice that you can do at any moment of the day in almost any situation. It is a practice, using touch to calm the brain and mind, create more space for thinking, release tension in the skin around your skull, and bring awareness to sensation and breathing.

This touch practice was originally developed by Linda Tellington to help calm and regulate the (nervous) system of traumatized animals. It works with the intelligence of the cells in your skin.

How does it work? Touch your skull with your fingertips in a gentle, non-pushing manner. As you inhale, begin to move the skin gently in circular motions for 1 and 1/4 circles, then slowly release the skin as you exhale. I explain more in the video. Enjoy!

Mirror, mirror on the wall 

Mirror, mirror on the wall 

by | Mar 4, 2026 | Body Intelligence, Changing the story, Nervous System Health

Your body reflects your beliefs and images about yourself and the world.

The law of reciprocity, the social principle whereby an action is repaid in kind, also exists internally between our mind and body. The body mirrors the way we treat it, how we care for it, and how we think about ourselves through specialized brain cells called mirror neurons. Those neurons fire when we perform an action related to ourselves or our environment, and when we observe someone else´s action. They connect action to sensation and emotion, the language of your biology. Your brain does not distinguish between someone else’s actions and your own actions. Your brain ‘mirrors’ those actions as if they come from a force outside yourself.

If you are often hard on your body, speak harsh words to yourself, neglect the needs of your body and soul, or if you do not understand your body’s way and overburden it, your mirror neurons mimic that stress.
On the other hand, being kind to your body through care, appreciation, good nutrition, compassionate thoughts, and moving in tune with your body’s natural pace, rhythm, and capacity can create a “mirror” that reflects a self-organizing system that radiates joy, vitality, inner peace, self-confidence, and self-compassion.

Here is the thing. We are often unaware that we are unkind to our bodies and behave in ways that are not in tune with them. We have unconscious beliefs and expectations, embedded in our culture, that we have grown up with and that have conditioned us not only in how and who we have to be but also in how we use and perceive our bodies and their rich language of emotions, sensations, and movement.  We may have internalised cultural beliefs that we are not good enough, that we must prove our worth by working hard, sacrificing our needs for others, dimming our light, or suppressing undesired emotions. Our body keeps that score. And here is the catch. This internal cycle of expectations and perceptions in your brain defines selfhood. How you “see” yourself in your mind determines how your body tries to look and organise itself to match your mental image.

What do you tell yourself?

Would you like to move those inner stories that are not serving your body and life?

My 7 Day dance healing retreat “Reclaim your Inner Freedom” is designed to help you move those stories that dim your sparkle and experience a lasting sense of wholeness and well-being again.

Our brain’s need for our physical antennae

Our brain’s need for our physical antennae

by | Apr 10, 2025 | Blog, Nervous System Health, Video

In this video, I talk about becoming more aware of how you use your senses – the physical antennae that monitor the physical world around you. They help the nervous system organise itself and they give the brain the right information to map itself in the here and now.

An important task for our brains, as the incoming information helps the brain create a predictable outcome to face the situations life brings us as efficiently and energy–savingly as possible.

When our brain does this successfully, we experience it as having the energy to do the things that are meaningful to us, and to have a sense of ease, peace, and joy as we move through our daily lives.

Rooting in yourself

Rooting in yourself

by | May 11, 2024 | Blog, Chakradance, Changing the story, Movement as Medicine

In my retreats at Jardin de Luz, I often include one or more Chakradance sessions.

While dancing through the base chakra myself, I came upon the themes of belonging and birthright. I know that there are many people who struggle with a deep feeling and belief of not being welcome, not being wanted, or feeling that they have no right to be there, to exist. There often is a fear of feeling the intense emotions that these deep experiences and beliefs bring into the body.

I struggled with it myself. And it caused me to feel deeply insecure and anxious about who I was. I worked hard to feel accepted by others, and to avoid pain. I used to have a strong inner voice constantly alerting me to possible signs that no one was waiting for me, and that I was not wanted. I was hyper-vigilant and sensitive. I was constantly aware of my surroundings, other people’s emotions, the energy around me, and another person’s slightest (inner) movement. At the slightest thing, I shot out of my body like you might jump up from a chair startled when stung by a wasp.

Thankfully, this lonely, fearful time has long passed. I have found a warm home within myself, within my body. Six months after I moved to Spain and a few months after I completed the Chakradance facilitator training, I wrote a few lines about it that you can read below.

For me, connecting and working with the archetypal energies that flow through my body and circulate in my energy field helped me find peace within myself and grounding in my body. From this safe base in my body, I can feel myself, be myself in new encounters and relationships. And in challenging moments, I now also feel the inner support and safety of my body.

Why can it be so powerful to work with archetypes creatively as we do in Chakradance?

Archetypes are the basis of all the underlying, unlearned, instinctual patterns in our behavior. They exist in our human collective consciousness and are embedded in our psyche from which they influence how we move through life and perceive, feel, think, and act.

Dance is like a mirror in which we see the archetypal energies at work in our energy system. We can clearly feel where they bring imbalance and distortion to our energetic make-up. It offers us a conscious way to connect with these archetypal energies and change how and where they affect us.

In this way, deep instinctual patterns in our behavior get a chance to transform. This changes not only our perceptions for the better, but also how we feel, think, and move in relation to others and our environment.

“I can only belong when I allow myself to belong to me”

Dancing with your base chakra ‘Muladhara’, helps you dissolve deep beliefs of not fitting in, of being alienated from your body, and feelings of fear, overwhelm, and insecurity. In fact, even longstanding patterns of physical tension and e.g. back pain can be released when the energy of the base chakra is better balanced. It also changes the vibration in your energy field and therefore the way other people perceive you.