She started to shudder from the inside. The air went still as we sat there. Something big was shifting. She shuddered some more. Tiny, involuntary tremors rising from somewhere deep. And as we sat together in that stillness, I realised something wasn’t shifting. Something was emerging.

Good question, right? It’s a question that surfaced for me recently through a series of real-life conversations that landed not just in my mind but in my body.

Almost all self-improvement, self-regulation, self-development courses are actually the puppet masters of systemic shame. (Especially for those socialised as women.)

We cannot dismantle the patriarchy until we dismantle how it lives within our body and nervous system. Our nervous systems were born into environments that teach us directly and indirectly, to control, suppress, and mistrust our bodies.