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The ∞actualinfinity Podcast
Finding Home in Your Nervous System: A New Approach to Attunement and Wellbeing
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You know how sometimes you work really hard at something to build something that you love? Maybe it's a business, maybe it's a mission of some kind that you have. Maybe it's a dream that you've held and you're living, working your business, you are fulfilling your mission, you are living the dream, as they say, right? And yet something in your body makes it feel like it's not that it's wrong or that it's not good, or that it's not whole or that it's not complete or anything like that. It's just not quite home. That's what I'm experiencing. I've been experiencing that for a number of years now. So I'm making a change and I'm going to share this transition that I'm in the middle of right now with you in hopes that if you've built something, but it doesn't quite feel home to you, maybe something here will help you to move through that process, either to find your home or to find your way towards what is home for you. Hello and welcome to the actual Infinity Podcast. I'm your host, Steve Mattis. And today I want to share a story about where I'm coming from and where I'm, what I'm moving towards. And I'm doing so from a place of wholeness, of completeness, of a healthy relationship with my nervous system. In the past, when I've gone through big changes like this, it was full of drama for a wide variety of reasons. This time, while there is some healthy unknown, there is some healthy fear, there is some healthy uncertainty. There's also a lot of stability and there's a lot of love. Even though parts of my circumstances are less stable, less certain, less structured and more fragile than ever, I feel safer than ever in making this change. So let me start from where I've been for the past 15 or so years. I have been running my own business as a coach for business owners, working primarily with financial advisors at the start and then I morphed into helping heart centered entrepreneurs. I do finger quotes when I say heart centered entrepreneurs, which are generally ethical, sensitive, thoughtful, caring, sincere people, sometimes with this spiritual connection, trying to do business in a way that doesn't hurt themselves or the world. At the beginning, when I first started my coaching, I was very much in the conditioned, capitalistic, traditional mindset of productivity and high performance and all those kinds of things. And as I moved into the more heart centered place, I began to see through the conditioning and into more of the humanity of these gentle, beautiful Sincere hearts that were trying to do good work in the world and trying to survive, trying to make their way financially in the world without manipulating or coercing or taking advantage of others and actually bringing healing to the world in their own unique, special way. And I was helping people to do that. And I had experience to do that. I've run my own businesses in the past and I had lots of training and it was really an autistic special interest of mine has been business over the years. And I got to witness so many people build meaningful things, run businesses that were gifts to the world, that were gifts to the clients that they served, whether it be in the financial realm or in the healing arts. So many beautiful souls helping so many other beautiful souls. Often said business is not that complicated. And I think it's true. Business is not that complicated. But so many people struggle with it. But it's not because business is hard or complicated. It's because we, the human is hard and complicated. It doesn't matter. You could have the best business strategy, you could have the most robust marketing. But if your heart isn't cared for, if your human isn't cared for, if your beingness isn't attended to, none of it matters. It's not going to work or you're going to end up burnt out and collapsed. And so I started the business in the conditioning of capitalism, the productivity, the bro culture, all that kind of stuff. And I moved into this more spiritually oriented, heart centered, attuning to your heart, attending to sensitivity. And that felt really, really good. But there was still more that I was longing for. There was still more. What I realized is that I began to not care about business at all. In fact, all the clients that I have now, we work on the business, yes, but what we're really working on is the human running the business and the human getting right with how they run the business getting right with themselves is really the key to the work. And in my own developmental process I came upon what is becoming very popular out in the world, which is nervous system regulation. And I began to make that a hyper focus of my own. And I took training on polyvagal theory and read everything there is to read and watched everything there is to watch about the nervous system and how it works and how to regulate and all the kinds of things. And very quickly I began to see the flaws and the same unhealthy capitalistic perspectives showing up in nervous system work that I saw in business work. But underneath that, if I stripped away that unhealthy stuff And I'll just use the word regulation as the core identifier of dysfunction. The idea of regulation itself, by definition, regulation is talking about control. Regulation is about ruling, order, directing law, command requirement, policing, management. And while, yes, there are instances and circumstances where your nervous system gets dysregulated, meaning it gets artificially stuck due to trauma, ptsd, whatever it might be, the way it's talked about in the world. Everybody is trying to control their nervous system and make their nervous system be something, do something, act in a way that it was not designed to do. I began to notice that almost across the board, that nervous system regulation was just another performance metric. It was another productivity practice. And so I built a new model, a new model that was inclusive of our experience with our nervous system, respectful of this wisdom, this innate wisdom that our nervous system carries to try to keep us safe. The realization that our main goal of our human animal is to be safe, to survive. That's all our nervous system is trying to help us to do. We don't have to control simply needs attunement. It doesn't need regulation. It needs attunement. Even the idea of regulating your nervous system is actually what would be considered by most a dysregulated nervous system response. It's a sympathetic response to a sympathetic experience, which doesn't help anything. And so I designed this new model called the ansem. That's the acronym A N S E M. The actual Infinity Nervous System Experiencing Model that holds your entire experience and it goes very deep. There are some spiritual elements to it. I say spiritual, not from a religious perspective, because of the depth that they have. One of the other misnomers of most nervous system work is that we're either in parasympathetic or sympathetic. And the truth is that we are in blended states almost always. In fact, I would say always. But nobody talks about that. The model that I've created demonstrates that. And what I want to do. What feels so important for me now, what feels like home for me, what feels like the thing I've been talking about my entire life, it's been a long process. To finally get here is to plant the flag. To encourage people to stop treating your nervous system like an enemy. It's an ally. And to think of your nervous system as a relationship, not a project to complete or a problem to fix, to be in relationship with it, not to change it, not to control it. That regulation isn't earned. It's not earned. Through practices and effort, regulation is remembered. It lives in your system. In fact, it lives in your nervous system. You don't have to control parts of your nervous system so that you can access the other parts. You simply attune with it and remember the peace and the ease and, and the spaciousness and the stability that you long for is already within you. It doesn't come to you from outside. It exists within you. It's already there, waiting to be remembered. And this is the work that I want to do. Imagine what you could do in your business or on your mission, or with your dreams if you were coming from and coming with a nervous system where you have the capacity to allow all of it to exist without being swept away. Where you understood how to navigate in your nervous system without trying to control it. Where you could be in healthy relationship with yourself as you are, and you could still function, you could still move forward, you could still accomplish, you could still pursue, you could still have ambition, but doing so from a place that was grounded, centered. And I'm really longing to do that work with neurodivergent folks. People who are highly sensitive, maybe they're autistic, maybe they have adhd. Much of the work out there has been founded upon neurotypical standards. One example is what we often hear in nervous system training about the window of tolerance. Hate that, because as an autistic person myself, I have been conditioned my entire life. I have been abused and I've gone through therapy as a child. And much of it was targeted to try to help me tolerate more. This world is not designed for neurodivergent people, obviously, and we're asked to tolerate a lot. I'm not in favor of encouraging us to have to tolerate even more. Now that doesn't mean that we won't end up tolerating more. But the way I talk about it is about increasing our capacity for safety. Because what matters is not how big your window is, it's whether your system believes safety is possible inside whatever window you have. The end result might be the same for us, but the way we approach it matters. When you're neurodivergent and one of the most beautiful things. Depth of the model comes from what I call the three characteristics of autonomic tone. This is the deepest, richest, most practical exploration of your nervous system experience. It's really the key characteristics that allow you to move in your nervous system to guide and direct you back towards love. Those three characteristics are self containment, surrender and sovereignty. And these all move within you, through your life, through a rhythm, and when you can be in relationship with it, when you stop chasing regulation as a goal and start recognizing safety as a relationship, everything changes. And so starting here, I'm shifting my business and shifting my website and shifting my communication, and there's all kinds of shifting going on to talk about these things. I think there's a lot of harmful information, information that will actually keep us stuck in cycles of dysregulation, using the known term in the nervous system regulation world out there, I'm going to bring something new, I'm going to bring something more whole, more complete that encapsulates the nuance necessary to actually heal in relationship with your nervous system and that attends to those who are neurodivergent. Now, my approach also works for neurotypical folks, and so they're included as well. I'm not creating a false bifurcation here between the two, but it's actually a much more compassionate, gentle, holistic process for both neurodivergent and neurotypical people. And the result, when you do this nervous system work the way I'm going to be teaching it, you wake up and maybe for the first time ever, your body feels like home. Your nervous system feels like it's okay, it's not a problem to solve. Before you can start your day, you actually feel like you're home. In today's world, where things are so intense and so chaotic, when you encounter the news and you feel what you feel and you stay present with your experience, you learn how to do that without collapsing into it, without numbing out from it, without being swept away by it. You can hold what matters without it holding you hostage. When you do this work, you can attune to your needs without guilt for having them. When your nervous system gets activated, you can realize that there's wisdom there, not weakness. And you know how to be with that. And in the being with shifts, and in so doing this work, your capacity begins to expand, your capacity for safety. You're able to feel a sense of safety in more situations. You don't have to tolerate more situations. You actually feel safe in situations not because you're working harder or you're forcing yourself through them, but because you're no longer hemorrhaging while fighting yourself. You're not hemorrhaging energy and effort and attention while you fight yourself to become quote, unquote regulated. You can care deeply about what's happening in the world. You can feel empathy with all the suffering, and you can maintain your groundedness. The paralysis that often we have felt between the amount of care that we have for what's happening in our neighbors and our own lives and our neighbors lives and around the world. And that amount of care that's needed in the world leading us into collapse. That dynamic dissolves because we have finally developed the capacity to hold both. This is living from a place of attunement instead of survival. You don't have to perform wellness anymore. You don't have to perform being okay, because you can actually experience it. My invitation, if you're willing, is to follow along. I'm going to be going through all the different aspects that you might be familiar with out in the world. If you're familiar with nervous system regulation type teachings and trainings, what you will hear less of here are the little rescue things that you can do. Tips and tricks and tools and practices and breathe this way. Like those things are band aids. Those things are great, but they don't help you shift long term. In fact, just doing those things can deepen the cycles that you get into. And you're constantly having to perform the practices and the tools and the techniques in order to stay quote unquote regulated instead of being attuned with what's going on in your nervous system. And your nervous system went into fight or flight for a damn good reason. And you should pay attention to that because your nervous system senses a threat. Maybe your mind knows that there's not a real threat, but what your nervous system is detecting is something that needs to be faced more fully, more thoughtfully, more mercifully. And if we attune to your nervous system, we'll be able to actually resolve what's causing the sympathetic response in the first place. That fight or flight, so that it's no longer a threat in your nervous system anymore the next time it comes along. You don't have to do the breathing practice because you never went into sympathetic in the first place. So if you're feeling the anxiety of your life or the world, the chaos, the pressure, and you have any interest at all in understanding your nervous system in a way that actually creates more freedom, more capacity, more love. Please stick around. Please listen and subscribe. You don't have to do anything else if you don't want. You're welcome to follow along. I write attunement letters. I'm also on substack and on YouTube. You can find me there through the rest of 2025. I'm recording this in October of 2025. I'm going to be providing an overview of what I'm going to be exploring from here on out. And if you're listening to this, now is the time to tune in. This is the foundation for everything that's coming. And here's my request. If you know anyone, anyone at all who's feeling scared right now, uneasy, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, or who simply wants to understand why they're experiencing life the way they are and they sincerely want support, please recommend this podcast to them or Send them to actualinfinity.com connect invite them to come along. Thank you for trusting me with your attention and your heart and your willingness to grow. I believe what's coming is desperately needed in the world. It is different than 99% of what's already out there about the nervous system. And it matters because our hearts can't open if our nervous systems don't feel safe. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world where everyone's hearts are closed. I think we need our hearts to open and we need to understand how to walk with our nervous system. And that is home for me. So I welcome you into my home as we start this amazing journey forward. Thanks so much for being here. I wish you more love, not less always. Bye for now.