Soft, Squishy, Sensitive Thing

Note: This episode touches on themes of fire, loss, and trauma.

In this episode of Rainbow After Dark, we explore the beautiful, complicated truth of what it means to be human: we’re soft, squishy, sensitive things.

We’re made of water and nerve endings, after all—fluid-filled bodies with spongey brains and tender hearts trying to make sense of a world that often demands we toughen up and disconnect. But what if our sensitivity isn’t a flaw?

Let’s go on a journey through the nervous system—our body’s operating system—and the ways it silently shapes every part of our experience, from our emotions and relationships to our sense of safety and belonging. 

I’ll do my best to name something many of us feel: that beneath our overwhelm, anxiety, and disconnection is a nervous system doing its best in a world that rarely feels safe.

This episode is a love letter to the sensitive ones, the tender-hearted, the emotionally attuned, and anyone who’s ever been told they were “too much.” It’s also an invitation—to soften, to listen, and to reconnect not just with yourself, but with the systems we live in and the culture we create together.

This episode closes with a short grounding practice to help you come home to your body.

Because regulation isn’t about fixing yourself. 

It’s about remembering your softness, reclaiming your sensitivity, and building a world where it’s safe to belong.

(The longer practice mentioned in the episode is available as the “Soft Landing” Practice!)

Thanks for listening to Rainbow After Dark! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future ones. If something resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts—feel free to leave a comment on YouTube or connect with me on IG @RainbowAfterDark (I don’t use it much, but I exist!).

This podcast is a space for reflection and exploration—it is not a substitute for professional advice. Please take care of yourself and seek support as needed.

More ways to connect coming soon—stay tuned, and thanks for being here.

Transcript

Humans are pretty dang soft.

The average adult human is about 55 to 60% water. We’re more liquid than solid. We’re basically some animated, sentient jello—you’ve got some solid bits to help you move around but let’s be real here… you’re soft. Squishy, even. And that’s okay. 

And it’s not just our bodies that are soft and squishy—we’re emotionally sensitive. Our hearts and minds are tender, whether we like it or not.

We are soft, squishy, sensitive things.

Despite what society would have us think about being soft, squishy, and sensitive; I’m here to affirm that even the most rough, rigid, and resilient of us (even if secretly) are soft, squishy, and sensitive at our core. It doesn’t mean we can’t be those other things (you can be more than one thing!), however, I wholeheartedly believe that you will not find a single person on this planet that is completely distanced from being soft, squishy, and sensitive, both literally and figuratively. 

This squishy softness is exactly what makes our nervous system such an integral part of our experience. It’s super sensitive, and it’s in charge of more than our egos often want to admit. It picks up on energy, it controls how we feel, how we react, and how we connect with our reality. 

Before we get into this; I’m not a doctor or a therapist or a certified anything—I’m a Fellow Human™ who has spent a long time navigating the human experience and realizing my life is some sort of chaotic science experiment. I have lived through enough plot twists to qualify as a case study. Although I can’t offer medical advice, I can offer my story—and maybe some language and frameworks that might help someone else make sense of things. I hope you appreciate my metaphors.

If you’re a human (if you’re listening to this, I am assuming you’re a human) who has ever been told “you’re too sensitive!” that “you need to toughen up!” or to “grow some thicker skin!”, this is for you. 

So, humans… we’re these jiggly, fluid-filled meat suits walking around with our tender little feelings and spongey brains, and we needed a system to keep all of it coordinated. Enter (insert boss music): the nervous system. AKA: the body’s communication superhighway. It’s not just about reflexes or those weird twitches when you’re falling asleep—hypnagogic jerks or whatever they’re called—it’s literally your operating system. It’s the reason you can move your hands, feel your feelings, freak out about that email you forgot to send or that other thing you forgot to do (you know the one). The reason you cry when a dog or cat looks at you with their cute little face, or get totally overwhelmed in the grocery store. It is all the nervous system. 

It’s like a squishy sponge of sorts—it absorbs all the signals in our environment and filters them through our internal lens of safety—or lack thereof. 

Even though this thing is running the show, most of us never really learned how it works—or how to take care of it. I mean, it’s called the ‘nervous’ system, and yet no one thought to mention that it might be connected to, I don’t know, feeling nervous? Anxious? Burned out? Wild.

As I mentioned, the nervous system is basically like your operating system or your body’s internal Wi-Fi network. Except it’s much faster than any Wi-Fi, much older than any software we’ve ever built (or anything we’ve ever built, period), and it never turns off—even when you sleep. It lets you feel things, move, breathe, digest food, doom-scroll, cry during an ASPCA commercial, or every time you watch a Pixar movie. It’s electric, it’s chemical, and it is deeply relational.

It’s also incredibly sensitive—kind of like that one friend who picks up on every subtle shift in a room’s energy (me, I’m that friend). Except that friend is also in charge of regulating your breathing, your blood pressure, your ability to focus, your muscle tension, your sense of time, and your reaction to someone asking you, ‘Hey, can we talk?’

And here’s The Thing: if that system gets overwhelmed or disrupted—and for a lot of us, it has, over and over and over and over and over again—sometimes on a daily basis—it doesn’t only impact your body. It changes your thoughts. Your emotions. Your sense of self. Your capacity for connection. It even shapes what kind of world you believe is possible.

And when we’re all navigating our own dysregulation, it’s no surprise we live in a world that reflects this kind of disconnection. Our culture encourages disconnection; it pushes us to preform, to shut down, to keep moving even when our bodies—and nervous systems—are screaming for rest.

When your body is constantly in survival mode—when it doesn’t feel safe to rest, to feel, to connect—it doesn’t just change you. It changes what kind of culture we create. A society full of dysregulated people will build systems that reflect that dysregulation. 

Control. Dominance. Scarcity. Disconnection. 

And the longer we ignore that, the more we normalize it.

So, let’s talk about this beautifully complex, often overlooked, and deeply sensitive system that shapes our entire human experience: the nervous system.

If you’ve ever found yourself crying at a stoplight for no apparent reason, forgetting how to breathe because someone used that tone, or staring at the ceiling at 3AM contemplating the collapse of civilization and why that one person hasn’t texted you back—it’s not just you “being dramatic.” It’s your nervous system doing its best to interpret a confusing world with limited information and ancient wiring. 

Bless its little electrochemical heart.

Your nervous system is not just this biological thing that controls your heartbeat and digestion and makes your eyelid twitch when you’re stressed. It’s also the system that helps you decide if it’s safe to love, to rest, to speak up, to be seen. 

It’s the part of you that’s scanning your environment constantly, asking: Am I okay? Is this safe? Can I soften here?

And for a lot of us—the answer has been “no” for a really long time.

When we talk about disconnection, we’re not just talking about the kind where you forget to respond to a text or ghost someone (although, yes, that too). We’re talking about a physiological disconnection: from the body, from self, from safety, from other people, and from the moment we’re in. It’s not a personality flaw—it’s an adaptation. A brilliant one, actually. If your body had to shut down certain signals, numb out feelings, or go on high alert to survive something that didn’t feel survivable… that wasn’t a failure. That was intelligence. That was your body protecting you.

But those same protective strategies—when they stay switched on for years or even decades—sometimes generations—they start to become the thing that keeps us stuck. Personally, relationally, and collectively.

On a personal level, disconnection can feel like being trapped in your own mind. Like no matter how much you journal, talk it through, try to “figure it out,” something still doesn’t shift. Like there’s a delay between what you know and what you feel. It can look like burnout, anxiety, hyper-independence, chronic illness, self-sabotage, numbing, or just feeling like you’re not fully here. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever disassociated during a conversation and came back to earth just in time to nod like you knew what the heck was going on.)

In relationships, dysregulation can sound like: 

“Why do I feel so anxious around this person?” 

“Why do I shut down when they get too close?” 

“Why do I keep choosing the same kind of people over and over even though I know better?” 

It’s not because you’re broken. It’s because your nervous system has been mapping connection through a distorted lens—and it’s still running outdated scripts that were written in the middle of some very real chaos.

But this isn’t just about us as individuals—our collective nervous system shapes our world.

We live in a world that rewards disconnection. It normalizes burnout. It treats rest like laziness and overwork like virtue. It tells us to “suck it up”, “push through”, “keep going”, to “hustle harder, just do more”, swoosh included…—even when every fiber of our being is screaming “NO”. 

A dysregulated society creates systems that are armored, extractive, reactive, and afraid of softness—because softness requires slowness, and slowness makes space for feeling, and feeling makes space for change. 

And real change is terrifying to systems that rely on our numbness.

But here’s the hope: if disconnection is something we’ve been conditioned into, reconnection is something we can choose—over and over, in small, tender ways. We can relearn how to listen to the body. How to move toward safety instead of away from it. How to be with ourselves, and with each other, in a way that doesn’t require us to armor up all the time.

Regulation isn’t about “fixing” yourself. It’s about remembering your softness. Reclaiming your sensitivity. Giving your nervous system a chance to feel safe enough to show up fully. And when we do that—not just as individuals, but as communities—we start to build a world that isn’t just about surviving… but about actually belonging.

Our nervous systems shape our entire experience as humans. They control how we think, how we feel, how we interact, how we function… it isn’t just a biological concept; it is mental, it is emotional, it is everything. 

People often talk about, like I said, “just do the thing”, encouraging us to override our systems with action—or to “just change our mindset” or “control our thoughts” which overrides the way we feel—ignoring the bridge between the two; the nervous system. 

And your body isn’t in charge. 

And neither is your mind. 

It’s your goddamn nervous system. 

Now, I live in the US so I know my view is US-centric, but based on my observations, most people are walking around with some degree of dysregulation. That’s not a personal failing—it’s a symptom of our culture. In our current cultural climate, a mature, fully regulated nervous system is extremely rare, if it exists at all. It could just be a myth. 

And historically, was it more common? I don’t know, I haven’t figured out time travel yet, but my hypothesis suggests that as humans we’ve been functioning with dysregulated nervous systems for millennia, perhaps since the dawn of humanity, and this disconnection has compounded and been compacted over time throughout generations.

Dysregulation isn’t just a personal issue—it’s at the root of systemic problems like violence, oppression, and destruction.

And here’s something we don’t talk about nearly enough: you cannot regulate a nervous system that is still under threat. You can try. You can have moments of relief. You can build tools. But no amount of deep breathing or somatic practice will fully ‘rewire’ a system that doesn’t have food, safety, housing, or support. 

That’s not a failure of the individual—that’s the failure of the system.

Those of us who are more resourced have more capacity to regulate, and thus more responsibility to help shape safer systems—not from a place of saviorism, but from a place of relational integrity.

Sometimes these regulation practices are even weaponized or used to spiritually bypass the very real, material conditions people are living in. True nervous system healing can’t be divorced from justice, safety, and care.

I feel like it’s really important to talk about all of this because I believe disconnection and nervous system dysfunction is at the root of all systemic issues. It’s what allows us to harm others, to exploit others or treat them as subhuman, to harm our home—our planet. 

We couldn’t do this if we weren’t disconnected from ourselves, from others, from life itself.

Regulation isn’t about fixing yourself; it’s about remembering our softness and reclaiming our sensitivity.

Years ago, throughout most of my 20s, I was mostly housebound, relying on a caregiver, and I was visiting doctors, physical therapists, and therapists like it was a full time job. I was in severe chronic pain, completely exhausted, and I felt hopeless. Even after many years of therapy and medical treatment, something was missing. It wasn’t until I began exploring body-based approaches that I realized the key was connection and nervous system regulation.

Now: I live independently, my pain levels are the lowest they’ve been since I was a teenager, and while I do still deal with constant pain and various symptoms, I’ve made more progress in the last few years—mostly through somatic practices and nervous system regulation—than I did in the entire decade before that. And I had no idea this was possible—when I started doing this kind of work, it was solely to help me process trauma, I had no idea it would affect every aspect of my life.

I had a few therapists over the years recommend the book “The Body Keeps The Score” by Bessel van der Kolk and while I am aware of some controversy around the book and the author since reading it, when I read the book and he specified top-down versus bottom-up processing, I had a lightbulb moment. 

I was overwhelmed with how I felt realizing this because while it brought me hope and relief, it also brought up a lot of frustration and grief. Kind of a grief-gratitude smoothie, if you will. 

I realized that almost all of my trauma processing had been top-down and despite being in therapy for over 15, I still really struggled with a lot of what I’d been through. 

They say trauma is stored in the body, and that’s true—but more specifically, it’s stored in the nervous system. It’s not just a memory—it’s a physiological imprint. A loop of signals that tell us we’re ‘not safe’—even if we are. And if the trauma is ongoing, that loop doesn’t stop. It doesn’t get archived. It stays open. Raw, and alert.

I started looking into somatic practices and nervous system dysfunction and how to heal my nervous system. 

I started becoming increasingly aware of my body signals and stopped utilizing many of the methods I had been using to avoid my feelings. I also was able to stop using most of the prescription medications that I had been on—some of which I’d been taking for years, including any of my psychiatric medications.

I had a history of binge drinking and I’d been using cannabis medicinally for over a decade—I stopped drinking, I eventually stopped consuming cannabis. I was able to completely change my diet. I increased my mobility and started being able to move and exercise more. I stopped self soothing through casual relationships. I stopped watching porn. I drastically reduced my social media use. 

I had almost completely disconnected from my body due to my history of pain and trauma—I often didn’t want to have to have a body, I felt frustrated and hopeless—I learned to reconnect to my body, to begin loving and caring for it, and I learned to speak to myself with kindness, to reconnect to my feelings and my genuine experience of existence. 

Not to be dramatic, but it completely changed my life.

I feel like the essential role of the nervous system in healing and nervous system regulation is being talked about more than it ever has been, and I still feel like this is not something widely discussed or implemented and there is a massive, humongous, gigantic gap in what we know and what we teach people.

Because you also have to remember—the healing I’ve done over the past 5 years or so has been facilitated almost entirely on my own. Despite my best attempts at finding a somatic therapist or similar practitioner, I wasn’t able to access anyone who took my insurance. I wonder what kind of progress I could have made with someone who was trained for this kind of work. And that’s something I find extremely frustrating, too—there are people trained in this kind of treatment but accessing them if you aren’t properly resourced is nearly impossible and the people who would benefit the most from this kind of intervention are the people who often don’t have the resources to actually access it.

I also want to acknowledge that when we talk about nervous system regulation, we’re not just talking about healing trauma from the past. We’re talking about surviving trauma that’s still happening. Because for a lot of people, trauma isn’t a singular event—it’s a condition. A context. A lack of safety that continues. And if someone doesn’t have access to food, shelter, or support, asking them to regulate their nervous system is kinda like asking someone to meditate their way out of a house fire.

I encourage you to think about how this disconnection shows up for you and people you know in your life—how are you numbing yourself or avoiding what you feel or feel you need to do? Do you feel anxious? Depressed? Exhausted? Are you prone to overthinking? Prone to illness or have chronic illness or chronic pain? Do you struggle to just be present with what’s in front of you? 

All of these are symptoms of nervous system dysregulation—of disconnection.

When we reconnect with ourselves, with our bodies, with our feelings… we can access more awareness, we increase our capacity to tolerate discomfort, our capacity to focus, our capacity for connection, our capacity for life. 

This is how we foster genuine resilience that isn’t born of avoidance and numbness—resilience that comes from consciousness and connection instead of survival.

The world often teaches us to disconnect from ourselves. From each other. From our lived experiences. From reality. And I don’t blame people for being dissconnected or even for choosing disconnection because choosing connection is not an easy path—not with the way things currently are. 

Embracing your sensitivity can be uncomfortable or even painful. 

But connection is essential to life and softness isn’t weakness—it allows for more fluid experiences of intelligence, increased adaptability, and genuine empowerment. 

If you have started cultivating regulation and awareness—if you have also identified the need for softness and connection—thank you.

And if you want to start and don’t know where to begin—begin by noticing. Noticing your breath, how your body feels, what emotions you’re carrying. Not to try to fix or change anything, but to be present with it. And slow down. Take a deep breath, and slow down. Your nervous system will thank you—the world will thank you, even if it’s in the whispers of the energy rippling through the cosmos.

And if you can’t begin, that’s okay. You’re where you need to be. 

Okay, we’ve just covered a lot—softness, science, society, sentient jello—and if your brain is doing that thing where it’s spiraling with excitement or maybe it’s floating somewhere near the ceiling like a balloon, that’s okay. Let’s give your nervous system a chance to catch up. 

This isn’t a big dramatic ritual or a fancy breathwork session. 

It’s just a moment. A breath. A little connection to now.

So, wherever you are, unless you’re driving or doing something that requires your full attention—please do not meditate while operating heavy machinery—see if you can just pause for a minute or two.

Begin by noticing the places where your body is being held right now. That might be the feeling of your feet on the floor, your back against a chair, your hands resting in your lap. 

Don’t worry about doing it “right”, you can’t do this wrong. Just… notice. 

Your body is already here. You don’t have to force it.

Just breathe naturally, softly. No need to deepen it unless your body wants you to. 

Notice the inhale… and the exhale. 

Maybe even say, in your mind, “Inhale… Exhale…” like you’re narrating a nature documentary. 

You can do it in David Attenborough’s voice if that helps.

See if there’s a small part of you—your shoulders, your jaw, your hands—that could let go just a little. 

Not totally. Not completely. Just 5% more softness. That’s it.

Then, if it feels okay, place a hand on your chest, or over your heart, maybe on your belly—somewhere that feels grounding or soothing. 

You can even whisper to yourself: I’m here. I’m safe enough. I don’t have to figure it all out right now. 

Or anything else your inner softie might need to hear.

Finally, take a moment to thank your body—not because it’s perfect or pain-free or doing everything you want it to, but because it’s still here. Still trying. Still communicating. 

That’s kind of a miracle.

And when you’re ready, slowly bring yourself back to the space around you. 

Wiggle your fingers and toes. Look around. Drink some water. 

Your nervous system will thank you. And I thank you for listening.

I’ll also have a longer practice as a separate offering, so please check that out if you feel called to it.

Until next time; remember, you are a soft, squishy, sensitive thing. And I love you.