Wherever You Go There You Are

Jennifer Moore explores the deep connection between the nervous system, body work, and transformation. She emphasizes that true change requires bottom-up practices like breathwork, movement, and somatic awareness, especially for high achievers stuck in their patterns.

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Key Topics

• Nervous system set point and its impact on behavior
• Top-down vs bottom-up approaches to change
• The role of the gut microbiome, hormones, and nervous system
• Somatic practices for nervous system regulation
• The influence of hormones on emotional reactivity
• Rewire Your Nervous System in 30 Days: The Science and Soul of Transformation
• The Hidden Power of Body Work: Unlocking Lasting Change
• "Have you ever left a feeling unchanged?"
• "Your nervous system is running the show"
• "Thinking is activating, not calming"

Chapters

00:00
The Whack-a-Mole Life: Understanding Our Patterns

04:19
The Nervous System Set Point: A Deep Dive

07:14
Top Down vs. Bottom Up: The Path to Change

11:23
Somatic Practices: Changing the Nervous System

20:10
Practical Tools for Transformation

25:07
Taking Action: The Journey Forward

27:46
Embracing Transformation and Integration

28:10
The Power of Sharing and Community Support

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You've done the therapy. You've read all the books. You've listened to all the podcasts. And now you have the career. You've got the house. You've got the kids. You've done all of the work. You've checked all the boxes. You've done everything you were supposed to do to be happy. And you woke up one day and realized that you're not. And you started asking the question, isn't there more? Yes, there is. And I don't mean more information. We have all the information. What we need is transformation. And that is only done when we excavate that whole system and repave that superhighway. We're not skimming the surface here. We're gonna dig in deep and drink the water from a deeper well. We're telling the truth in a whole new language. You felt the nudge, then you hear the whisper. You ignore it, life gets louder, and it will manifest as burnout, exhaustion, illness, injury, anxiety, disconnection, addiction desure, and drama at every turn. There is a better way, I know, because I found it on my own journey. This story is a part of my story. And I built this toolbox for myself, and I have proven that it works with hundreds of clients over the past 28 years of being in private practice. We're gonna blend neuroscience, psychology, and timeless Eastern wisdom and show you where science meets soul work. This is where we will rewire the patterns that have kept you stuck. I'm Jennifer Moore, licensed psychotherapist and creator of the Therapeutic Coach Approach. Isn't there more? Yes, there is. Each week I'm gonna share practical tools to implement so that you can actually transform your life. Follow now wherever you listen. And if somebody popped in your mind, that's not a coincidence, that's a synchronicity. Send it to them because they're ready to hear it too, just like you are. And welcome home. She keeps running and all the same problems keep finding her. There's a quote, John Cabot Sin says, Wherever you go, there you are. Sounds familiar, right? Maybe even obvious. But I want to ask you something. Have you ever left a job, tried to escape the politics, the bureaucracy, all the BS? Then you felt like you couldn't even breathe, and then you found yourself within six months, a new job with exactly the same feeling. Ended a relationship because of a dynamic that was pushing or pulling, not being seen, not being heard, only to find yourself in the exact same relationship with a different person. Yes, my husband married the same woman twice. His ex wife has the exact same personality that I do. I have deep respect for her, but he indeed married the same woman twice. You ever moved, changed the diet, started a new morning routine, hired a therapist, done the retreat, done the breath work, journaled until your hand hurt, and underneath, guess what didn't change? Your baseline. The same low hum of anxiety, frustration, sadness, whatever that feeling is. The same short fuse that appears right on schedule every month without fail. Same feeling that life is a game of whack-a-mole. Get one thing handled, another thing pops up. You can never just be okay. But there's something that that morning routine is not gonna fix. It's your nervous system, my friend. And that's what's running the show from a set point that was calibrated long before you even had a say in it. And today that's what we're gonna talk about. Welcome back to Isn't There More? I'm Jennifer Moore, licensed psychotherapist, founder of the Therapeutic Coach Approach and creator of Calm in Command. And today we're gonna talk about that set point. This episode specifically is for the high achiever who has built the life, checked all the boxes, done all the things, and is asking, isn't there more? Yes, there is, and it's an easier way. Last week we talked about you're in a three-way and you didn't even know it. The trifecta that nobody taught you about. I talked about three systems in the body that are in constant communication: your nervous system, your hormones, and your gut microbiome, and how you cannot heal one without addressing all three. Slap an HRT patch on there, but that's like a little bit of duct tape if you don't get to the root and address all three systems. So if you haven't listened to that episode, go back because that's where we're gonna, that's the starting point for this conversation. I'll put the link in the show notes. But today we're gonna go a layer deeper. So the trifecta, the three systems, the gut, the microbiome, gut gut microbiome, your hormones, and your nervous system and that set point over and over. So we're gonna look at top down versus bottom up and how we have to do both. Top down is the cognitive work, that's the information. But the change when we have to really change is that set point. This is the bottom up, this is the body work, this is where the magic happens, and this is where we have failed to really educate ourselves and understand why this is so important and where the practices come in. So we've spent a lifetime understanding the patterns, reading the books, naming the triggers, doing the mindset work, seeing the therapist, and we wonder why we're still in the same place. It's because the nervous system does not live in the mind, it lives in the body. The body changes through experience, through repetition, not through information and insight. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So let me start with something that happened in my office this week. I call it the whack-a-mole. The whack-a-mole life is when the nervous system is running this show. So I had two clients, two different women, two totally different lifestyles, circumstances, jobs, et cetera, et cetera. But almost use the exact same language when they were describing what was going on. The whack-a-mole. Get one thing handled and something else pops up. Fix my something in my relationship and then work explodes. I stabilize with work and then something in my body feels like it's breaking down. I can never just breathe because I always feel like there's going to be another shoe that is going to drop. There's always something. So I want to ask you something. Does that sound familiar? Because what sounds like bad luck or overwhelming in your life is actually something very specific that is happening in your nervous system. When your nervous system is dysregulated, when it's running in fight, flight, or freeze or fawn for so long that that state becomes your baseline, it does not know how to tolerate calm. So it creates urgency unconsciously, automatically, not malicious intent, but it's always scanning for threats. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it finds the threat and it amplifies them. And where that genuinely happens is when life is actually going okay and things are calm. Uh-oh. It generates some anxiety. There's an absence of threat. What feels like calm is scary. That feels dangerous. Calm means something else is about to happen. This is what I call the set point. Both of these women, very high achievers, intelligent, doing all the right things, but they had a set point from their childhood that was calibrated before they were even seven years old, before they had language to even understand, before they had logic. And they didn't have a choice in that. So here's the concept that I want you to understand, because it is the single most important thing I'm going to say today. Your nervous system has a set point, a baseline state that it returns to the same way a thermostat returns to a set temperature. So if you grew up in an environment where there was any chaos, which who didn't, right? Some kind of emotional chaos, relational instability, financial unpredictable, predictability, parent who was unpredictable or dude some kind of crazy whack-a-mole thing, whatever. You learn to read the room before you learn to read a book. Your nervous system calibrated its temperature to that environment. Chaos became familiar. High alert became your baseline. And your body learned that this is what feels normal. Then you grow up, you leave, you build your life, you build your house, you get your husband, whatever, you do your thing, right? But that thermostat doesn't automatically update. So even when life is safe, you've got all the things, the home, the career, the relationship, your kids, your nervous system keeps turning the heat up because calm is suspicious and dangerous. Because somewhere in the body, in your cells, in your bones, there's a recording that says when it gets quiet, things fall apart. So you unconsciously recreate urgency. You take on more, you create drama, you pick fights, you get sick. You get sick. The body is always keeping score. You manufacture some kind of crisis. I'm not saying this should be dramatic. I'm saying this is a subconscious program that is running the show. That set point that was set in your nervous system. Not because you want chaos, but because that's where your nervous system feels at home. This is the whack-a-mole life. It's not a discipline problem, it's a nervous system problem. Okay? Both of these women that I mentioned earlier told me something else. My fuse is getting shorter and shorter, particularly around the days of the month. So I want to speak to this directly because I think it is one of the most misunderstood experiences in women's life. Not just midlife, but all of women's life. When estrogen and progesterone drop, particularly in menopause and menopause, but even before that, whenever we are in our cycles, in our hormone cycles, your nervous system becomes significantly more reactive. Not to be dramatic, not to say, oh, it's just hormonal and let's be dismissive. No, this is physiological because estrogen and progesterone are neuroprotective hormones. They literally buffer your nervous system. They dampen that reactivity and they help to regulate the amygdala, the part of the brain that detects threat. When those hormones drop, the buffering goes with them. And if your nervous system has a set point that's dysregulated, your baseline is already at high alert. Then removing that buffer is like removing the last layer of insulation from a wire that is already overloaded. The fuse gets shorter and shorter because the protection is gone. This is biology. It's not a bad thing that you did. I just want to give you some language for it, an understanding of it. Because I myself didn't understand it. I didn't understand that all of a sudden, why I was so nervous in the car when my husband was driving. Literally, I would just reactivity. I'm slamming on my brakes in the passenger side and he's yelling at me. And I'm like, why are you yelling at me? That's this doesn't feel safe. I don't feel safe. I had felt safe for many, many years riding in the car with him. I didn't understand that this is what was going on in my body when I started going through perimenopause. So, top down versus bottom up, why information alone does not change your set point? That's a lot of information I just gave you. And I want to talk about how to take that information and create transformation. Introduce you to the idea of the heart of what I teach, the heart of what I talk about, the heart of what I do, top-down versus bottom-up. Top-down changes, change works through the mind, through insight. So the top-down is the information. This is the insight and the understanding, the cognitive reframing, the mindset work, the mantras. Yes, you need to understand why you react the way you do. You're you identify the pattern and you develop the new thoughts about it. But this is where personal development work lives, and this is where it usually stops. So I want to go a little bit deeper. Because I'm not saying it's useless. We need the mantras, we need the mindset, we need the information. But I want to give you the next step in the nervous system. The actual survival system in your body does not respond primarily to the mind. It responds in the body. This is the bottom work, bottom-up change that I speak of. The somatic work, the breath work, the movement, the mantra with the movement. This is the physical experience, the practices that speak directly to the nervous system in its own language, in sensation, rhythm, vibration before the mind even gets involved. And here's why that matters. You can have complete insight into your patterns and still react the same way. You can know exactly what you do, understand your childhood origin, understand, okay, yes, I grew up with some trauma. I've done all this therapy work, I've addressed that issue. And in the moment, the activation, the nervous system does what it always does because knowledge lives in the cortex, the set point lives in the body. And I see this over and over. Women who are doing extraordinary work are emotionally aware, have emotional intelligence I can't talk today, have a self-awareness and the emotional intelligence, but so they can articulate their patterns with precision. They understand the things, but they still wake up at 2 a.m. anxious, they still have that short fuse, they still find themselves in a dynamic that they've been in their whole lives. Not because they're not trying, not because they're not doing the work, but because the work resides in the body. And they may do the work, but the work has to be done and practiced over and over and over, repeated so that the body can understand that the set point can be changed. So the work that actually moves that set point is somatic. It is experienced and it is repeated daily in the body. We're not rejecting what the mind needs to know, we need to understand, and we need to do the body work. So one of my clients told me this great metaphor, and I was like, oh my gosh, I have to use this metaphor. I love it. I love it so much. She was describing she had read something about trauma years ago, and she said it was like a bubble or a circle. So imagine the trauma as a circle or a bubble. I imagine this little ball bouncing around in a square box. And as the bubble or the ball, the circle, the trauma bounces around the walls, it's always moving, it's always present, it's always touching the edges of the container. And as healing happens, the circle gets smaller. It still can bounce around, it can touch the walls, but it's smaller and it hurts less. There's more space in there, there's more understanding, there's more, and it and it hits less frequently, right? And then something happens: a trigger, an activation, somebody needles, somebody pokes, pokes the bear, the moment of activation, that hard conversation, you have a bad day, and God forbid it happened around when your hormones drop and that protection goes down, all of a sudden that bubble gets bigger and bigger, and the box is full again, and it hits every wall simultaneously, and it's louder and it's overwhelming. And if it happens when your cycle is coming and your hormones are already, your hormones have dropped, that protective mechanism is lowered, those inhibitions are lowered. She said, I cannot control my thoughts. I cannot control my thoughts. Not I choose to think these things, but I cannot control my thoughts because the activation is not cognitive, it is neurological. The circle is filling the box. The nervous system is at full capacity, and the mind, which under regular conditions has some ability to observe and choose a different way, is responsive rather than being reactive, is now simply along for the ride. You didn't fail. This is a nervous system that learned at a very early age that certain triggers mean certain things, and that these associations are stored in the body, not in the mind. And you cannot think your way out of that full box. You cannot think your way out of being at capacity. So I've referred to the Enneagram a couple of times. Not going to give you a full lesson on the Enneagram. We will do a deep dive in the Enneagram, I promise. But I want to go back to this because both of these clients that I'm speaking of are both head types. So what does that mean? If you're not familiar with Enneagram, there's it's a nine-type system of personality that describes not just your behavior, but your core motivations and your fear that drives those behaviors. And at a deeper level, it describes how each type actually relates to the nervous system. The head types, which are the five, sixes, and sevens, process the world primarily through the thinking center, through the mind. So their core strategy for safety is to think their way to certainty, to analyze, to anticipate, to mentally rehearse and prepare. They have a strategy for this and a strategy for that. And there's a best case scenario, worst case scenario, a backup plan, and a backup plan for the backup plan. That's the head type. And they rehearse it until the danger feels manageable in some way. The problem is that for a dysregulated nervous system, thinking is not a calming strategy. It is an activation strategy. So the head type, the thinking center, who wakes up at 2 a.m. and starts running through every possible scenario is not calming. This is actually activating. It is generating threat after threat in the body. And the body cannot tell the difference between an imagined threat and a real one. Therefore, the cortisol rises, the heart rate increases, the nervous system goes into high alert. And all of a sudden, I'm thinking, oh my God, I got to figure this out. I've got to understand this. I have to understand this so that I can feel, I can feel better. If I can just think my way through it, I will feel better. But understanding does not equal regulation. Understanding is top down. Regulation is bottom up. Not a criticism to the head types. It's an invitation, my friend. There is an invitation here. The mind is extraordinary. The analysis is a gift. I need those people in my life. Met one today at the lunching I was at. She was telling how she was a nervous wreck at this event because it was overwhelming her nervous system. Head type, head type. I need those head type people around me. They're the smart ones. They figure things out. They're the analytical mind. It is a gift that needs to be used from a regulated nervous system, not deployed as a substitute for one. So knowing your Enneagram type is tells you where to go, where you go when you are activated. It tells you the particular flavor of your survival strategy. And that knowledge paired with bottom-up somatic work becomes a map of your nervous system. Full transparency, I'm an eight on the Enneagram. I know that may surprise some of you. Someone said yesterday, I cannot believe you're an eight. I was like, I've done a lot of work to get here. I have done a lot of work to get here. Eights, nines, ones live in our body versus the heads and twos, threes, and fours live in their heart, their heart center. The key is to get all three centers in alignment. When we're all three, when all three centers are in alignment, then we're in a place of healthy, healthy. We're calm. We're that calm and command that I speak of. Anyway, I'm I digress. We're not giving a full any RAM lesson today. I'm just giving you some examples, just trying to keep it experiential. All right. So what can you actually do? I want to give you something very concrete today. I promised that I would give you something concrete in every episode, not just an understanding of why you do what you do or why you don't do what you do, want to do, but I want to give you some practical tools because this is how we actually transform. And this is where the magic happens. The practices that will change your nervous system set point so that you can feel calm. They are bottom up, they speak to the body before the mind. Breath. Breath is one of the autonomic functions that you can consciously control. You can breathe slowly. You can inhale, allow your exhale to be longer than the inhale, and your vagus nerve responds immediately. Your heart rate variability improves, the parasympathetic nervous system engages, and that little bubble, that little circle begins to shrink. Somatic awareness. Simply placing attention on your body. Take your right hand, put it on your heart, your left hand, put it on your belly with that breath work. You interrupt the cognitive loop. You cannot fully be in the mind when you are fully in the body. The body is always present. The mind is always somewhere else. Mantra, sound and vibration. So I talk a lot about meditation, and I'm gonna be fully transparent. There are days that I get up and I can't. Meditate. I did a great meditation this morning. Oh my gosh, I did this amazing meditation. I felt on fire this morning. But there's days that I get up and I have too much on my to-do list and I can't sit still. I can't, I can't focus on the meditation. So on those days, I will turn on chanting and I will chant mindfully. And there is something with the rhythm of the chant, the sound and the vibration that will bypass the analytical mind and speak directly to my nervous system. I stumbled upon chanting, even though I've been practicing yoga all these years. I stumbled upon chanting because I was trying to do a meditation and I was like, I can't do this today. I just can't. So I was like, I'm going to listen to some spiritual music. So I turned on a Krishna Das chanting Spotify playlist and started listening and started washing dishes. And when I finished washing dishes and finished the chanting, I was like, wow, I feel so incredibly calm. The rhythm of the sound and the vibration, that mantra gives the mind something to do that is not generating threat. My first episode, I said, give the monkey a banana. This is the mantra. This is the banana I speak of. The rhythm is regulating movement. Movement. Slow intentional movement. Not some kick-ass hot yoga class with loud music that is activating for some. Yes, it's very can be very good and can you can sweat and get some toxins out, but I'm not talking about that kind of movement. I'm talking about slow intentional movement. Not as exercise, but as medicine. Medicine for the nervous system. This can be yoga, it can be yin yoga, even ashtanga. People throw ashtanga under the bus. I've been practicing ashtanga for about 12 years now. When you have a good teacher and you are in an ashtanga class and you combine that movement with your breath, that is medicine. That is medicine. But it can be as simple as going for a walk, a walk with gratitude. Anything that moves your body with breath and presence, not to burn calories, but to be present. I'm not talking about go out and do a power walk. I'm talking about being present in your body. And over time, with consistency and repetition, these practices do not just create moments of calm. They change your set point. They rebuild that thermostat from the inside out. Because your nervous system is neuroplastic and it can learn a new baseline. It can calibrate to safety without threat, but it learns through experience and repetition in the body, not through understanding alone. So again, this is information, but it is not transformation until you practice it. And I don't mean practicing for five minutes a week. I mean daily. So let me bring this all back to full circle. Wherever you go, there you are. You can change the job, you can change the relationship, you can change your city, you can change the boyfriend or the husband. You can go to the retreat, do the journaling, do the morning routine, you can read all the books in the world. But if your nervous system set point doesn't change, nothing changes. You go from the skillet to the front, Pan sister. So through every door, in every new context, until the body learns something new, something different, it's not going to change. Not saying that from judgment. I'm giving you this for from the most compassionate part of my heart. I don't care what you know, until you do the body work, nothing is going to change. And this is not about discipline. It is not to insult your intelligence because I know how incredibly smart and I'm self-aware, and your emotional intelligence is so incredibly high. Now it's time to do the work, the work in the body, because the mind already knows and the body is still waiting to be convinced. So if this episode landed for you, I want to invite you to do three things. Three things. If you didn't listen to last week's episode about you're in a three-way and you didn't know it, go back and listen to it. It's the foundation of everything I talked about today. I'll put a link in the show notes. You can join my free Facebook community, Calm in Command, where I give these little tips and I'm very honest and transparent about my own fallacies and how I lose my shenanigans on the 17th hole while I'm playing golf with my husband because he likes to push the buttons. And sometimes I get it in my own capacity. Anywho, that's another story for another day. But third, if you're ready to do the actual work, I have a couple of different ways that you can join me. Go to my website, jennifertmore.com. I've got some weekly groups that I meet with that are six-week groups, I've got some three-month groups, and I've got some individual options. So wherever you are in this game, I would love to see you on the journey. And one last thing, if any of this hit home for you, or you think of somebody that you need to forward this to, send it on to them. That's not a coincidence, that's a synchronicity, my friend. Wherever you go, there you are. And your nervous system came along with you. So if you've been playing a whack-a-mole game and you're ready to change that set point, you recognize that bubble in the box and you're ready to change that, take one of those steps, join my free Facebook group, get on a call with me, figure out a way to do the work. And I look forward to seeing you next week. And isn't there more? Before you go, if something landed for you today, don't let that just be information. Let's use it as transformation, integration into your body. Ask yourself, what's one thing I heard today that my body already knows is true? Feel it. Allow your body to experience it. This is where the magic happens. If this episode added value to your life, the best way to support the show is simple. Share it. Forward it to somebody who needs permission to go a little bit deeper. Start showing up. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you're feeling really generous, write me a raving review. It means everything. All the links and resources are in the show notes below. And I'll see you next week. Until then, you remember just how incredibly powerful you are. Namaste.