More about the relationship between body, brain and behaviour

More about the relationship between body, brain and behaviour

by | Mar 4, 2026 | Ignite your sparkle, Nervous System Health

How do you attend to yourself and your body?

In the previous two blog posts, I discussed the law of reciprocity, the social principle whereby an action is repaid in kind, and how this also exists internally between our mind and body. And how 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.

How you think about yourself and what you tell yourself about your body, your wellbeing, your needs and how you take care of yourself is largely reflected in the way you pay attention to your body’s messages, the way you move, eat, rest and the daily structure and routines you create for yourself. How you do anything is how you do everything.

When your body and nervous system often feel not heard in their feedback, your biology responds with a protective reaction, a defence mechanism. It may happen that the increase in intensity exceeds the bandwidth of your nervous system and body to process, resulting in your system becoming stuck in its defense mechanism. It does not feel safe with the incoming information arising from your movements, actions, and efforts. It reacts by shielding itself, closing itself off, contracting, freezing its capacity for moving…

This has a direct effect on how your system subsequently interprets signals from your external environment. Your movements influence the perceptions of your senses and your interaction with your environment. This can be experienced as feelings of tension, heaviness, or through increasing hyper vigilance, shadow breathing and emotions of fear, frustration, anger, sadness, a harsh inner critic chattering, limiting beliefs surfacing, and feelings of fatigue, low energy, and even sadness. Overtime this tension patterns can lead to little capacity to digest life, anxiety, chronic physical tension, immune disorders, tightness, gut stress, and low energy. Not cool! Happily you can help your system un-freeze.

We can help heal our neurobiology from habits of fear and hypervigilance by changing how we move and attend to sensations.

Here is what you need to know…

Your nervous system will only tell your muscles to release their contractions when it feels safe. Less is more here. It’s like talking to an animal or a baby. Instead of yelling at a little one, we whisper little messages in a soft, friendly, calm, rhythmic, and gentle tone. Your conscious movements are like that tone of voice. Small, gentle, slow, and smooth movements tell the autonomic nervous system that the body is safe, that it will not be hurt. They tell the nervous system that it is being listened to and that its pace, rhythm, and capacity are being honored. They evoke sensations of pleasure and ease that are sent to the central nervous system, inviting it to give the signal to let go. And when the tension in the body is released, our emotional inner landscape and mental landscapes also change, as does our perception of the outside world.  A softer body and a relaxed nervous system look out into the world with openness, trust, and curiosity instead of hypervigilance, distrust, and fear.

Changing the response of our neurobiology does not happen through forcing ourselves or taking big leaps. It happens in the subtle interaction between intention and action. The moments when we pause and listen to the impulses our system gives us to feel better.

It comes down to moving slowly and attentively, while listening to the feedback from our body. This includes the way you eat and engage in daily action. And as you explore the roadmap of movement choices, you help your nervous system by paying attention to the sensory and emotional signals of pleasure and ease. Because through combining our actions with sensations of pleasure, and ease, we do exactly what our nervous system needs to rewire deep-rooted patterns of tension, vigilance, overwhelm, and fear. That is, we help it to change its attention pattern to sensations of pleasure, ease, and expansion so that it can rebuild trust in spontaneous interactions with its environment. This way you will soon no longer move through life with the brakes on, but can truly enjoy the experience of aliveness. That is what I call rekindling your inner Sparkle.

How about your inner Sparkle?

In the retreats from “Freeze to Flow” and “Pause, Listen, Reconnect with your Body”, I guide you to help your system feel safe again and meet life with trust and joy.

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.

Help your brain come home by using your visual sense, your eyes

Help your brain come home by using your visual sense, your eyes

by | Apr 9, 2025 | Nervous System Health, Video

In this video, I talk about using the visual sense as a way to regulate the nervous system and help the brain map itself into the here-and-now physical- and human environment.

Did you know that our eyes play a big role in our social engagement? In this video, I will tell you about it.

I introduce you to a few minutes of orientation in your physical environment by letting your eyes off the leash of thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations inside. And to invite your mind to be a passenger of the eyes that wander.

When there is not enough energy for what you need

When there is not enough energy for what you need

by | Feb 2, 2025 | Body Intelligence, Nervous System Health

What does your internal energy consumption look like?

There is a lot going on about energy efficiency and how to minimise high energy bills. We all have households with many energy-consuming appliances like smartphones, refrigerators, washing machines, lighting, and computers. We subscribe to an energy supplier for X amount of energy. Often, we don’t have to think about this because we only see the effects of our usage reflected in our bill. But every now and then we may face a shortage of power. The capacity has been reached and the power system says Nope. The demand for energy exceeds the amount of energy that can be supplied at that time.

Often it is quickly resolved by turning off a device. But what if we constantly run out of energy for the appliances we need to keep us warm, give us light, keep our food fresh? If a power outage lasted a long time, it would be disastrous for the food we keep in our fridge, for example.
We all have things that need to be permanently on like a fridge, things that only need electricity when we use them like lights and there are things we put on standby in case we need them like the television or an electric toothbrush. They may use a little energy instead of full power but they still take from the power net.

If our power grid capacity is exceeded, we need to look at what is really needed and where we can cut back by turning off appliances or using them at other times of the day. So outside, so inside!

What about the cost of your internal energy usage?

As living beings, we also consume internal energy generated by the energy supplier of our system. And it pretty much works the same as in our outside world. There are body systems that run in the background and need energy 24/7 to keep us alive: like our respiratory system, nervous system and brain, heart, immune system, digestive system, part of our motor system, and so on. There are body parts’ that we use consciously and often, such as our muscles that need energy to generate power to move, hold us upright, hold us together, speak, look around, hear, smell, eat, and express our emotional states. Like our mind that needs energy to think, and so on. And all these physical energy processes have to stay within a certain range for us to be on the safe end of survival.

One thing is certain, we cannot buy more capacity for our internal energy system. Each of us has a certain capacity available. So our system has to manage its capacity well to keep everything within a safe bandwidth. If we exceed that bandwidth, we risk an energy outage. And as you can imagine, that can be disastrous. Fortunately, our system then has a preservation system that kicks in as a measure of first aid. It is called the Freeze response and it preserves our energy currency ‘Oxygen’ by turning off all systems that do not pose an immediate threat to our survival when they are more or less de-activated, so that our heart and brain can continue to do their work. But the freezing system is not a solution for long-term excessive use because it uses precious energy blocking all body systems that cost energy and it does so without generating energy.

Ideally, our system should not need to resort to a freeze response on a daily basis. And ideally, we should not use large amounts of energy every day to fight or flee. Or do we? For many of us, the reality is that we live in a fast-paced, mind-oriented society with little regard for our nervous system and biological needs, resulting in chronic stress, mental pressure, and overwhelm. A day to day world where there is less and less time to nurture our soul, to rest, or for a warm-hearted, meaningful moment together, a refreshing walk in nature, or a dance, simply because it is so much fun to let loose for a bit.

How energy efficient is your system?

That said, imagine if an energy consultant came to your “home” to check your internal energy meter and look at the efficiency and sustainability of your internal energy consumption patterns? How high would your consumption be? Maybe just look at your movement habits, your attention habits and your emotional and thinking habits…

Are you working harder than you need to?
Are you constantly overthinking or worrying?
Do you experience a lot of intense emotions on a daily basis?
Do you experience a lot of stress in your day-to-day life?
Does the world feel like a dangerous place?
Do you rush through your days?
Do you spend hours sitting and looking at your screen?
Do you often tighten your shoulders and clench your jaw to hold yourself together? 
Or do you tighten your muscles to keep yourself upright?
Do you squeeze your buttocks and abdominal muscles together when you speak out? Or perhaps to look a certain way?
Do you metaphorically walk on eggshells and hold your breath to avoid conflict with others?
Do you try to push your physical limits when you exercise or do yoga? 
Do you often have muscle pain after working out?
Are you hard on yourself? Maybe a perfectionist?

Some of these questions may be easy to answer. Some may be about unconscious stress- and tension habits. Nevertheless, all of these habits and patterns in perceiving, moving, acting, thinking, and feeling lead to the depletion of your system’s energy budget. This can eventually make you feel stuck, flat, disconnected, fatigued, overwhelmed, and anxious in your daily life.

In the next blog, I’ll reflect a bit more on how our brain takes care of our internal energy budget and the ways it can become disorganised in the process.