expand your capacity
Sara Vatore
When I first started my business 5.5 years ago I said yes to every project, collaboration, invitation, workshop, board membership, conversation, you name it.
People saw my value and I was seduced by people wanting me.
I totally burnt myself out again. My system and body rebelled. Here I was, repeating the same pattern as before when I was working as a High School Guidance Counselor.
I was flying regularly across the country to support my mentor who was starting up a life coach training program, helping my friend bring generative somatic curriculum into schools, said yes to being on the board of two organizations (😬🤦🏻♀️), seeing 20-25 clients a week, navigating all of everything on my own in my business, including the creation and backend of 2 websites, teaching Nia twice a week, participating in multiple trainings constantly, seeing my own practitioners and healers, and… this list could keep going. (Oh, and I am also a mom of 2)
I spent the first 2 years of my business saying yes to everything, the second 2 years releasing and untangling myself from all the things, and this last year in a reintegration, recalibration, and synthesis mode.
I had to get really nuanced and clear about what my system could legitimately handle. Over the years, especially since deciding to homeschool my 8 year old in 2020, I have been working to expand my capacity, so that I can navigate the unfolding, hold all the pieces I desire, and be in my expansion in the most generative way possible.
This is something I have had to learn about ( what my system needs), so I don’t blow myself out, shut down and hibernate, commit to too much, go into overwhelm, forget to care for body and my needs, get sick, be reactive with my family etc.
This attention to my capacity bandwidth involved years of recalibrating my nervous system. Thawing a deep freeze of my life force energy. Particularly wrapped up in lack of access to anger and pleasure (stories for another day).
However, it went beyond nervous system regulation for me. That was simply the first step. It has been required for sure, but my journey has also been about expanding my nervous system’s capacity to be in full expression of sensation, emotion (particularly anger), pleasure, rest, nourishment, without it feeling dangerous or too much for my body. It includes working through ancestral trauma living in my tissues that doesn’t belong to me.
Expanding my capacity involves:
Creating space in my physical body and in my tissues.
Releasing stuck stress, shifting old embodiment patterning, rewiring past response triggers.
Helping my system feel safe in expansion energy, in an emotional expression, in pleasure, in an energetic connection to my bigness, gifts and magick.
Allowing my body to drop the “everything is fine” smile-vibe and actually feel into what is true for me.
Giving permission for my system to dive deep into grief, anger and terror, cycling though to the other side without it wiping me out for days.