Notes for My Nervous System

I AWAKE
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Welcome, love. This isn’t a podcast to help you get your shit together. It’s a space to remind you: you were never broken to begin with. What you’re listening to now is Notes for My Nervous System. short transmissions for when you forget how to feel, or when feeling too much makes you want to disappear. I’m not here to motivate you. I’m here to slow you down. These episodes are not meant for background noise. They’re for coming back to your body. You might hear poetry. You might hear silence. You might hear something your cells remember. All I ask is that you meet yourself as you are. Not how you think you should be. You don’t need to change to be welcome here. You just need to breathe. So take a moment. Let the sound land. Let your body soften. Let this be the beginning of a new kind of listening. Welcome home. sensualinstitute.substack.com

  1. JAN 12

    Come closer. This story is for adults...

    Today I want to share something different. A story. A story for adults. In many traditions around the world, wisdom wasn’t passed down through concepts or instructions. It was passed through stories. People sat close to each other. By firelight. Bodies warm. Listening together. Stories were how we learned what couldn’t be taught directly. How we remembered things the nervous system understands long before the mind does. This is one of those stories. It’s a creation myth I wrote, drawing on the ancient names Eros and Ananke. They appear in old mythologies, but this is my telling. Not a reconstruction of the past, but a story shaped for the modern body. Because we need new stories that can speak to the way we actually live now. To our pace. Our hunger. Our exhaustion. Our longing to feel whole without burning out or going numb. I wrote this story because myth makes us larger. It connects our everyday drives, our bodies, our relationships, to something older, deeper, and more spacious than personal psychology alone. Not to escape reality, but to inhabit it more fully. This story doesn’t try to teach you anything. It doesn’t tell you what to do. It simply remembers. I invite you to listen the way people used to listen. Not to understand. But to let your body recognize something it already knows. You don’t need to concentrate. You don’t need to analyze. Just listen. Some stories aren’t meant to be consumed. They’re meant to sit beside you for a while. This is one of those. If something in you stirred while listening, if you felt the pull between wanting and holding, beginning and staying, then you’ve already touched what I call the Sensual Hero’s Journey. It’s the larger map this story belongs to. A way of understanding how we leave ourselves, and how we return, through the body, the nervous system, and lived experience. You can find it HERE, if you want to enter your myth With love, Camilla This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sensualinstitute.substack.com

    20 min
  2. When was the last time you let yourself stay with a feeling without adjusting it?

    JAN 3

    When was the last time you let yourself stay with a feeling without adjusting it?

    Not improving it. Not explaining it. Not calming it down so it fits better. Just staying. Most of the time, you move on. You do what works. You keep things okay. And that’s not wrong. But sometimes something doesn’t move with you. A sensation. A hesitation. A quiet “wait”. That’s usually the moment you step over yourself. Not deliberately. Not dramatically. Just fast enough not to feel it. The Soft Return exists for that exact moment. Not to make you braver. Not to give you insight. But to let you notice what happens when you don’t step in so quickly to adjust yourself. The Soft Return is a short, body-led journey. Something you move through slowly, over a few days. Reading. Writing. Listening. Feeling. No fixing. No performing. No pushing. If this stayed with you a second longer than you expected, i’ve prepared a guided audio journey for you. You’ll find the audio at the end of the page when you click on the link below. 👉 CLICK HERE DARLING With devotion Camilla This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sensualinstitute.substack.com

    11 min

  3. 12/11/2025

    When your body learns to live love-starved

    …and still feel something in you shrinking from the inside. A quiet emptiness. A slow dimming. A subtle tightening around the places where warmth should land. People assume love-starved means lacking romance, or intimacy, or closeness. But your body defines love differently. To your nervous system, love is presence. Consistency. Attunement. A rhythm you can trust. And when that rhythm is missing, or unreliable, or only available in small unpredictable doses, the body recalibrates. It stops reaching. It stops asking. It stops expecting to be met. Not because you don’t want love. But because somewhere inside, you learned that wanting meant waiting, and waiting meant pain. So your system found a workaround. It made numbness efficient. It made low-grade longing livable. It taught you how to function on emotional crumbs, calling it independence. But here is something most people never tell you: Being love-starved doesn’t make you unworthy. It makes you adaptive. Your body protected you with withdrawal. Your heart protected you with silence. Your chemistry protected you with minimal production of hope. You survived a drought by lowering your desire for water. And yet the truth quietly remains: you were built for deeper nourishment. Not intensity. Not chaos. Not grand gestures. Just steady warmth. Just consistent presence. Just enough softness that your body remembers what it feels like to be received instead of tolerated. If you feel the tug of this that faint ache that says “I want more, but I don’t know how to want it safely” you’re not regressing. You’re thawing. You’re coming back to the part of you that still believes in being held without having to earn it. Slowly. Gently. At the pace your body trusts. And if you want a small doorway into that return, a way to begin meeting the places inside you that stopped expecting nourishment… I created something for you. A 7 day journal called Love starved. And i’m giving you first chapter, its 4 prompts, and an audio guided body practice that help the words land in your nervous system . Free, so you can feel what you’re stepping into before you say yes to anything else. The link is below: Love starved 7 day journal With tenderness, Camilla This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sensualinstitute.substack.com

    9 min

  4. 06/23/2025

    How long have you been putting off feeling good?

    We get really good at postponing pleasure. We tell ourselves: “When the work is done. When things calm down. When I’m finally on top of everything.” But the list keeps growing. And your nervous system keeps waiting. The truth is, you don’t build capacity for pleasure by waiting until life gets easier. You build it by allowing tiny moments of softness, even in the middle of the mess. This week’s new audio is a short practice called The 90-Second Yes. A micro-dose of pleasure for your nervous system. No prep. No perfect conditions. Just one small place to start. ✨ Press play and give your body something it doesn’t have to earn. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sensualinstitute.substack.com

    7 min

  5. 05/22/2025

    But maybe you were taught to ignore it

    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sensualinstitute.substack.com

    3 min

  6. 05/19/2025

    Your mind was never the enemy.

    There’s a place in you that thinks it has to figure everything out. That clenches around problems like fists around air. That scans, predicts, solves, performs, explains. It’s tired. And it’s sacred. Your mind was never the enemy. It learned to overfunction because safety felt optional. Because the body was overwhelmed, and someone had to steer the ship. But darling, the mind is not a machine. It’s not a courtroom. It’s not a punishment. The mind is a sky. And thoughts? Clouds that pass. Winds that stir. Storms that build and break. You are not your weather. You are the space it moves through. You are awareness, not agenda. So today — Let the thoughts come, and let them go. Do not grip them. Do not chase them. Do not try to solve yourself. Instead, breathe. Feel the sky inside you. And when a thought arises, meet it with kindness. Not correction. Not control. Just presence. You don’t need to fix your mind. You need to listen to it. With softness. With pause. With reverence. Because underneath the noise… is silence. And underneath the silence… is you. You, unhooked from the spell of thought. You, rooted in the breath. You, finally home in your own sky. Come back here, anytime. This space is yours. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sensualinstitute.substack.com

    3 min
  7. When You Feel Far from Yourself

    05/13/2025

    When You Feel Far from Yourself

    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sensualinstitute.substack.com

    2 min
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About

Welcome, love. This isn’t a podcast to help you get your shit together. It’s a space to remind you: you were never broken to begin with. What you’re listening to now is Notes for My Nervous System. short transmissions for when you forget how to feel, or when feeling too much makes you want to disappear. I’m not here to motivate you. I’m here to slow you down. These episodes are not meant for background noise. They’re for coming back to your body. You might hear poetry. You might hear silence. You might hear something your cells remember. All I ask is that you meet yourself as you are. Not how you think you should be. You don’t need to change to be welcome here. You just need to breathe. So take a moment. Let the sound land. Let your body soften. Let this be the beginning of a new kind of listening. Welcome home. sensualinstitute.substack.com

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