27: What Does It Actually Mean to “Expand Your Capacity”?

What does it actually mean to “expand your capacity”… and why is everyone talking about it in manifestation and nervous system work?

In this episode, I break down the truth behind this buzzword and show you what expanding your capacity really looks like — not conceptually, but physically, emotionally, and neurologically. 

We dive into:

✨ Why manifestation alone doesn’t work without nervous system integration
 ✨ The real reason you keep self-sabotaging (it’s not lack of willpower)
 ✨ How your subconscious and nervous system override your desires
 ✨ What “capacity” actually means in your body
 ✨ The difference between regulation, dysregulation, and expansion
 ✨ How to stop spiraling into old patterns when you move toward growth
 ✨ The concept of “edging” and expanding your window of tolerance

This episode bridges the gap between manifestation and the nervous system — revealing why you can know exactly what you want and still feel stuck.

Because the truth is:

You don’t receive what you want.
 You receive what your body feels safe holding.

And if your nervous system isn’t on board… your reality won’t change.

If you’re ready to stop forcing, stop spiraling, and start creating from true internal safety and alignment — this episode will change how you approach growth forever.

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

Your Six-Figure Nervous System Private Podcast - https://www.gabriellemartorana.com/programs 

The Art of Creation & The Nervous System - Coming Soon!

Want to go deeper? Apply for The School of Expansion - www.gabriellemartorana.com/TSOE

Send me a DM & let me know you tuned into the episode, I would love to hear from you - www.instagram.com/expandwithgabrielle

Transcript

Gabrielle Martorana (00:02.818)
Hello, hello. So what is capacity? What is this buzzword we're hearing around manifestation, around the nervous system, that everybody keeps saying, if you wanna be able to manifest what you desire, if you wanna be able to create your reality, you need to expand your capacity to hold. Have you heard that? If you've been in this healing space, in this spiritual space, in this manifest.

manifestation space for a while. am sure you must have heard people talk about expanding your capacity. Now I want to dive into what does that actually mean? What are the tangible real steps that that involves? And

Gabrielle Martorana (00:49.922)
How can you understand this on not only an intellectual level, but a physical level? Okay, so let's dive in. The first thing I want to say about this is that I feel like a lot of people have made this seem very elusive, very foggy, very convoluted, very hard to understand. And it's probably because they don't understand it themselves. Something that I've noticed that happens in all industries, but definitely in the spiritual industry, is that people just echo what other people say.

without actually understanding what the heck it means or how to do it. And so when people say, I need to expand my capacity to hold more money, more success, being seen, the good that I desire, I don't think they actually know what that means. But the good thing is, is that we're gonna dive into what that means today, and we're gonna dive into the nitty gritty details of it so that way it's not foggy, it's not elusive, and it's not confusing.

because it is a very profound concept, but it is simplistic in the nature of understanding, at least cognitive understanding. So you're gonna be able to wrap your arms around this pretty quickly, which is great. So the first thing that I wanna talk about is this merging of the concept of manifestation and the nervous system. This has been a huge hole that...

previously is responsible for I think a lot of people thinking that manifestation doesn't actually work. I think a lot of people try to quote unquote manifest things in their lives and didn't get the results that they were trying to get spiraled into different forms of self-sabotage and chalked it up to the fact that maybe manifestation doesn't work or maybe this just doesn't work for me. But the truth is is that in order to manifest

which just means being in frequency or energetic harmony with what it is that you do desire and then attracting those circumstances, opportunities and things into your life. That is the process of manifestation, which does require action as well. I don't want you to think it's just thinking happy thoughts and moving through the world and holding those happy thoughts in your mind as much as possible. Cause I think that was the biggest

Gabrielle Martorana (03:10.89)
mixed messaging that people receive, especially from the movie The Secret and from a lot of other spiritual books and narratives that stemmed off of that was you just need to think about what you want, get clear on what you want, and that will attract it to you. But that is just one piece of the puzzle. Yes, it is true that you need to know what you want. You need to have a very clear image of it. You need to feel it.

and experience it before it shows up in your physical reality. These are some fundamental principles of manifestation, but there's another piece to the puzzle. And this is where this capacity comes into play. And it does have to do with your nervous system. And capacity is the right term, but the process of building your capacity does not mean using willpower, force.

Gabrielle Martorana (04:07.862)
or discipline to think about the good things you desire more, to meditate and visualize what you desire more often, to just do those other things more. That is not the process of building capacity. Building capacity is a more physiological process related to your nervous system. So what does that mean? It means when you go through phase one,

of manifestation, getting clear on what you desire, telling yourself that you have it, envisioning you have it, embodying the feeling of having it being it. We know you receive what you are, not what you want. When you start working through this process, what's going to happen is your body is going to react because these are new concepts. These are new ways of being. These are new vibrations, new sensations in the body.

And some of those may pass through your system just fine, but some of them may be triggers. And when you get triggered, if you trigger yourself quite intensely, then you can pop off into a dysregulated state. And when you pop off into this dysregulated state, you can start to perform actions, think thoughts, feel feelings that not only are not in harmony with whatever it is that you're trying to manifest and desire.

but that could very well completely sabotage that from coming into fruition at all. So this could look like popping off into fight, flight, or freeze. you're not nerd,

Gabrielle Martorana (05:52.736)
If you're not well versed in nervous system lingo, there are basically different states that you experience when you are dysregulated. And these can be described as fight, flight, freeze. And there is another one called fawn. It's debated how deeply into this.

Gabrielle Martorana (06:20.278)
And so when you find yourself in one of these states, you are operating completely out of your subconscious mind. What does that mean? You are not in conscious control, depending on how deeply dysregulated you are. You're not in conscious control of your thoughts, feelings, actions, things like this. So this explains why you can be trying to manifest more money, let's say, and you need to take these action steps in your business. You're starting to walk down that path.

And then you find yourself on the couch eight hours later, having been watched the show all day, not taking any action on your business and eating three bags of Cheetos. And you're like, how does this keep happening? When you kind of wake up, you know that feeling when you kind of wake up from the fog after have done doing one of these coping mechanisms? When you wake up, you realize, my gosh, why did I do that? I don't understand why I keep doing that. And what most people think is that it's something to do with willpower.

It's something to do with shame, something to do with like a flaw or you being broken. But all that just occurred there was you started to embody a new frequency, a new system of beliefs, and that was not in alignment with your current nervous system. So your capacity was low. You may have stepped a little bit too aggressively in that direction. Your body reacted.

based on all the information stored in your subconscious mind. So not necessarily based on what you're consciously telling yourself, which is I'm an amazing businesswoman, I make over 100K a year, I'm abundant, opportunities are always coming to me, I believe in myself. That's what you're consciously telling yourself, right? But what your body believes is more work equals pain and suffering, more responsibility equals more stress.

all these other counter beliefs. So your body is then stepping in to protect you. And I say body loosely here. This is information stored in your subconscious mind that then manifests in the body as emotions, emotional reactions, and it triggers neural pathways. So imagine that there's this path, well-worn path in the forest. And when you tip over that first domino, you walk that whole path in the forest automatically without even thinking about it.

Gabrielle Martorana (08:48.502)
You have popped out of your conscious thought. You are no longer aware and present and able to make decisions based on what you desire. You are currently making decisions and taking actions based on the information stored in your subconscious body, which completely counteracts the thing you actually want because it's telling you that more money's not safe. More clients are not safe. This process is not safe. Let me do things that I know are going to stop that. And I did another podcast episode on the ego.

and how people talk about the ego is always sabotaging you and it's this elusive shadowy like evil demonic figure that I don't know just out to get you. That's not what's happening at all. What's happening is that the information stored in your subconscious body in your subconscious field is not in harmony with what you desire. And so it is counteracting each other. And when you become when you find yourself in a dysregulated state, the information stored in the body is the instruction manual writing the show.

So if the information stored in the body is not in harmony with what you desire, you are going to be chronically facing issues on manifesting your dreams, creating your reality and getting what you want. Your results are going to directly mirror what is stored in your subconscious mind, not what is being impressed into your conscious mind, not what you are visualizing, not what you are telling yourself.

not what you were the direction you're trying to move in. The other information outweighs it when you are in these dysregulated nervous system states. So there's a multi-step approach here. We need to build your capacity, which I'll explain that more, build your capacity. So work on the nervous system side as well as continue to

implant these new ideas, new thoughts, new belief systems into the subconscious mind. It's a two prong approach. And so when we're working on the nervous system side, when I say build capacity, what that literally means is that when you experience a trigger and you get dysregulated, what is happening in the body is that there has been an increase

Gabrielle Martorana (11:16.03)
in sensory experience, an increase in intensity of emotion. So let's say that you're trying to take action on your business and you start to feel the intensity of anxiety or fear because of the thoughts and the core belief systems that are stored in your subconscious mind. Your body is going to recognize

the intensity of those emotions. And at some point it's going to decide that's enough, I'm taking over control from here, shoo, we're out. And that's when you pop off into fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. And so expanding your capacity means, like let's say it's the energy of fear, fear in the body, like panic. Expanding your capacity means allowing yourself to feel the frequency

the intensity of the vibration of panic because panic is just a frequency. All these emotions are vibrations that we've put names to. We put sadness, we put happiness, we put elation, we put panic. We have all these names that we've connected to frequencies. So the frequency of panic has a certain rhythm to it that we recognize and we say, that's panic. So when we feel the sensation of panic in the body, there's a certain amount

that you can feel until your protection mechanism, aka your nervous system, takes over. And you have to edge open that slowly so that way you stay not in the comfort zone, not in the dysregulated zone, but in between what people call the learning zone, the processing zone, the expansion zone.

And we want to hover right in there. It's called titration. Peter Levine talks about it. It's called edging. And basically what you're doing is you are gently expanding your body's physical ability to hold the intensity of this frequency without disassociating, without moving into fight, fight, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Because then your cognitive ability

Gabrielle Martorana (13:43.532)
most of the time leaves. So your ability to make conscious, aware decisions shifts. And you stop start operating out of this old data, this old information stored in your subconscious body, which usually is not aligned with what you want at all. So that's what it truly means to build capacity is it is your capacity to hold the intensity of an emotion in your physical body while staying regulating.

regulated and feeling safe.

And there's a lot of ways to do this. There's a lot of different methodologies, practices. I mean, just to become a certified practitioner in the methodology of Peter Levine, it takes three years. So it's not small, this process of understanding, but they do exist. They are very effective. And it is a requirement to manifest your desires. You are going to

have to expand your capacity in whatever areas are in alignment with your desires. It's a requirement. You won't be able to get to the next stage, the next level, experience the next thing until you do this. And there's different ways to do this. I'm not saying you have to go do a three year long course or even necessarily work with a professional. There's ways that I've even done this without even realizing I was doing it. And then I look back in hindsight, I was like,

I was edging. So it can be intuitive. It could definitely be intuitive. But that's the mysterious concept of capacity. So circling this all back around to manifestation, creating your desires, and the nervous systems role in it, you can see here how important it would be to have the whole process of

Gabrielle Martorana (15:43.054)
conscious thought, visualization, embodying the experience of living what you desire now. That's one whole piece of it and how you go about doing that. But the other piece is to then make sure that your nervous system and physical body are evolving at the same rate. So that way you're not chronically flooding your system, dysregulating yourself, and maybe even deepening old trauma loops because that's not the goal.

The goal is to be creating new neural pathways from a state of regulation and safety so that way you can continue to take action, inspired action, towards your desires, not using grit and grip and willpower to force yourself and then not shaming yourself for when things...

feel like they spiral back out of control or you repeat old patterns or you just don't understand why you can't do the thing. You've told yourself a million times and somehow you keep finding yourself back here. It's not because you're broken. It's not because you're wrong. It's just because the information stored in your subconscious mind is dictating those patterns. That's it. It's just stored data that is an instruction manual that your body follows when you pop off into a dysregulated state to keep you safe.

And the thing is there was a point in your life or in your ancestors lives when that neuro pathway worked, when it did keep you safe. But the thing is, is that it's not in harmony with whoever you're evolving into now. And so the next step for you is to learn this process on how to weave in manifestation with this deeper somatic nervous system subconscious work.

because it is in fact the missing piece and it is in fact a requirement to get what you want, which is so cool. So if you want to learn more about this, I am in the process of creating or maybe by the time you listen to this have created a private podcast called your six figure nervous system, where I dive much deeper into the practices and process of how to go about doing that.

Gabrielle Martorana (17:58.648)
And I also have a workshop coming out about creation and the nervous system. So I'll put links to those in the show notes below. If you want to go deeper, if you love this topic, if you're curious about it, if you have questions, please send me a message. I'm expand with Gabrielle on Instagram. And as you can tell, I love this stuff. It is so cool. I love to nerd out on it. I just find it so, so exhilarating. So please send me a message. I'd love to hear from you and I'll see you next time.