You're Shaking Because You're Being Born

What your nervous system is actually doing when everything feels wrong

Divine Elegance Tarot

Something is hatching inside you and it doesn’t give a fuck about your calendar. Your Google Calendar says “Tuesday: meetings, groceries, exist.” Your body says “Tuesday: complete identity dissolution, sorry about your plans.”

You’re sweating. Possibly just from one armpit. Your heart is auditioning for a role it didn’t tell you about. You woke up heavy from a dream you can’t remember, like your soul did a whole therapy session while you were unconscious and now expects you to integrate the homework without giving you the notes. And somewhere in the background of your ordinary Wednesday, reality has a lag. A glitch. A slight wobble, like the simulation got a software patch at 3am and now everything is two degrees to the left of where you left it.

And suddenly you’re... porous. Crying at a commercial for car insurance because the father looked proud of his daughter and that felt like being stabbed in a place you didn’t know was wounded. You’re picking up everyone’s mood in every room like your nervous system is running an emotional Airbnb and forgot to screen the guests. Someone sighs three rooms away and your body responds like it’s YOUR sigh, YOUR problem, YOUR job to fix whatever made them exhale like that. You watched a video of a dog being reunited with its owner and sobbed so hard you scared yourself. The dog was fine. YOU’RE the one who’s not fine, and you don’t know why that either.

You don’t know where you end and other people begin. That’s not weakness. That’s your edges dissolving because they were drawn in chalk and it’s raining.

Your boundaries aren’t gone. They’re just... under renovation. The fence is down. The workers say it’ll be “a few weeks” which, as anyone who’s ever had contractors knows, means somewhere between tomorrow and the heat death of the universe. In the meantime, every emotion in a five-mile radius is wandering into your yard, eating your food, asking if you have WiFi. You do. Unfortunately.

You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing a self. There’s a difference. One is a breakdown. The other is a birth.

Here’s what’s actually happening: the version of you that knew how to shrink, perform, abandon yourself for approval, hold it together, keep the peace, be the “easy” one, need nothing, give everything, and call that “fine”... that version is being evicted. Not gently. Not with 30 days notice and a security deposit return. She’s being escorted out by a universe that finally lost patience with watching you betray yourself and call it love.

(Spoiler: She’s not going quietly. She’s in the hallway right now, screaming about how she KEPT YOU SAFE and you’re UNGRATEFUL and who’s going to manage everyone’s feelings NOW, have you thought about THAT? She’ll tire eventually. Offer her water but don’t negotiate.)

The shaking isn’t anxiety. The shaking is her grip loosening. You’re not falling apart. She is. And she should.

That weird thing where you feel like you’re watching your life from slightly outside it? Like you’re in a movie but it’s the wrong movie and you definitely didn’t audition for this role and the script makes no sense and you keep waiting for someone to yell “cut” but nobody does?

That’s not dissociation. That’s accurate perception. You ARE in a different reality than you were last week. Literally. The nervous system you’re operating through has been recalibrated without your conscious participation. The field you’re walking through has a different texture. You’re not crazy for feeling like everything is weird. Everything IS weird. Your body is telling you the truth. Your mind is just three software updates behind.

Your blood already knows what’s happening. Your bones got the memo. The rest of you is still checking spam.

And the exhaustion. Oh, the exhaustion. Not the kind you can sleep off. The kind where your skeleton feels like it’s been holding a staff meeting about whether to continue supporting this operation, and the vote is split, and HR got involved, and now there’s a mandatory review of all load-bearing beliefs you’ve been standing on since 1987.

You’re not tired because you’re weak. You’re tired because you’re running two operating systems simultaneously. The old one that knows how to be small. The new one that doesn’t remember how to shrink and isn’t interested in learning. They’re fighting for resources. Your CPU is maxed. Your RAM is weeping. Your inner IT department has quit and left a note that just says “good luck lol.”

This isn’t burnout. This is becoming. They feel identical. One is an ending. One is a beginning. You’re standing in the hallway between them, and the hallway doesn’t have snacks.

The heart pounding? That’s not panic. That’s your heart recognizing something your brain hasn’t caught up to yet. Hearts do that. They’re the first organ to form in utero. They know about beginnings before anything else does. Your heart is pounding because it knows something is coming. Something that requires more circulation. More oxygen. More blood flowing to parts of you that have been dormant so long they forgot they existed.

Your heart is not warning you of danger. Your heart is warming up for what you’re about to become.

Your pulse isn’t panic. Your pulse is preparation. Your blood is rehearsing for a body that finally fits.

The fog you’re walking through... the one where everything feels muted and unreal and you’re not sure if you’re dreaming or awake or trapped in some in-between realm where nothing quite lands... that’s not a malfunction. That’s mercy. Your system is blurring the edges on purpose. Full HD clarity on a complete identity dissolution would fry your circuits. The fog is protection. You’re being given the soft-focus version because the high-resolution version would send you to the ER asking doctors to explain why you can feel your ancestors arguing in your spine.

The blur isn’t confusion. The blur is grace. Your nervous system loves you enough to dim the lights while the surgery happens.

And that thing where you’re suddenly questioning everything... your relationships, your work, your entire life structure, whether you even LIKE the things you built, whether any of it was ever really yours or just an elaborate coping mechanism you decorated with throw pillows and called a personality?

That’s not a crisis. That’s clarity. Inconvenient, destabilizing, “why couldn’t this wait until after the deadline” clarity. The fog that protected you from seeing how much you’ve been settling is lifting. And the view is not cute. The view is: oh god, I built my whole life on a foundation of being acceptable instead of being ALIVE.

(Your inner architect is looking at the blueprints right now like “who approved this?” Ma’am, YOU approved this. In 1994. When you were seven. And someone made you feel like being yourself was a problem to solve rather than a gift to live. You signed a contract you couldn’t read and now you’re 40 and the building is finally being condemned. Thank god.)

You’re not falling apart. You’re being renovated. By a contractor who showed up at 3am, didn’t knock, and isn’t taking questions.

Your jaw, if you check right now, is probably clenched. That’s where you’ve been storing every word you didn’t say. Your shoulders are probably up near your ears. That’s where you’ve been carrying everyone else’s expectations like luggage you forgot to put down at some point in 2009. Your chest might feel tight. That’s where hope went to hide when you decided it was safer to expect nothing than to be disappointed again.

All of it is softening now. Not because you’re doing it right. Because your body is done waiting for permission.

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How To Survive Your Own Becoming

(The Part Where We Actually Help)

Your nervous system just got a renovation notice it didn’t consent to. The least we can do is give it some tools that don’t require an app, a guru, or functioning executive function.

This is body technology your cells already know. We’re just reminding them.

Tongue on the roof of your mouth.

Not because it’s mystical. Because it completes an electrical circuit that’s been running your mammalian ancestors for millions of years. It connects the two main energy channels in your body and tells your nervous system “we’re doing regulation now, not reaction.” (Yes, really. Your tongue is a switch. Your mouth is a control panel. You’ve been walking around with admin access this whole time and nobody told you. Rude.)

Breathe into your lower belly.

Not your chest. Not your “I’m trying to look calm in a meeting” breath. LOW. Three fingers below your navel. That’s where your anchor lives. That’s the part of you that doesn’t give a fuck about your inbox or your ex or the state of the world. It just exists. Heavily. Like a stone at the bottom of a river that doesn’t need to explain itself to the current. Inhale there. Let your belly actually expand like you’re not trying to look skinny for an audience that doesn’t exist. Revolutionary, I know.

Your pelvic floor is the basement of your being. When the upstairs is on fire, you go downstairs. This is how you stop floating in everyone else’s emotional soup.

Exhale with a soft “fff” sound toward your sacrum.

That’s the triangular bone at the base of your spine. The one that’s been holding your secrets since before you could talk. Imagine sending your breath there like you’re mailing a love letter to the most ancient part of yourself. The part that existed before your personality. Before your wounds. Before your coping mechanisms got so elaborate they needed a project manager.

Spiral your breath.

Once you’re anchored: inhale up your spine. Exhale down the front of your body. Like a wheel. Like a loop. Like you’re cycling yourself back into yourself. This isn’t woo. This is the Microcosmic Orbit and it’s been regulating human nervous systems since before humans had a word for “anxiety.” Your great-great-great-grandmothers knew this. It got lost somewhere between industrialization and Instagram. You’re just remembering what your blood never forgot.

Energy rises when you open. It needs somewhere to go. If it doesn’t descend, you become a porous mess absorbing everyone’s everything. Grounding is not optional. Grounding is how you stay YOU while becoming new.

Hum.

Put your hand on your chest. Hum “mmm” for thirty seconds. Not a song. Just the hum. Feel it vibrate against your palm. In your sternum. In your teeth. In the bones of your skull. This is sound technology. Your voice vibrating your own tissue. Telling every cell: coherence, coherence, coherence. (Your neighbors might think you’re weird. Your nervous system will think you’re a genius. Choose your audience.)

When it gets to be too much, whisper: “Return to bone.”

That’s the whole instruction. When the shaking won’t stop and the fog won’t lift and you’re floating in the soup of everyone else’s feelings: return to bone.

Bone is the deepest tissue. Bone holds the oldest memory. Bone doesn’t panic. Bone doesn’t scroll. Bone just holds. The architecture of you. The structure that remains when everything else is in flux.

You are not your thoughts. You are not your feelings. You are not your nervous system’s current opinion about reality. You are the bones underneath all of it. Return there. Nine breaths. Or ninety. Or until the shaking becomes a hum becomes a settling becomes something that feels like ground beneath feet you forgot you had.

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She’s coming. The one you’re becoming.

She’s not asking permission. She’s not waiting for you to feel ready. She’s not interested in your timeline, your objections, or your very reasonable request to maybe do this after Q2 when things calm down. (Things won’t calm down. Things are composting. That’s the point.) She’s emerging through every crack in your composure. Every breakdown you can’t explain. Every moment the old strategies just... stop working and you’re left standing there with nothing but the raw fact of your own existence asking to be lived instead of managed.

She doesn’t need you to understand her. She needs you to stop resisting.

The shaking is her arriving. The sweating is her clearing the path. The tears are her watering the ground she’s about to stand on. You’re not broken. You’re hatching. And hatching looks like destruction from inside the shell. It looks like everything falling apart. It looks like death. Because something IS dying. The shell was never supposed to be permanent. The shell was just protection until you were ready.

You’re ready. You don’t feel ready. That’s fine. Caterpillars don’t feel ready either. They just feel like goo. Sacred, necessary, disgusting, transformative goo. You’re in your goo era. The goo is working. Stop poking the goo. Let yourself tremble. Let yourself dissolve. Let yourself become.

You will not die from this. You’ll just stop living the version of life that was killing you slowly and politely. And in its place: something with actual breath in it. Something with space. Something that looks at the world through eyes that aren’t exhausted from performing and thinks, for the first time in maybe forever:

Oh. So THIS is what being alive feels like. Welcome back. We’ve been waiting.

🔥✨💎

P.S.

This week isn’t random. There’s a reason your system chose NOW to fall apart and rebuild.

What you’re feeling in your body... the shaking, the sweating, the fog, the sense that reality shifted while you were sleeping... it has a pattern. A map. A timeline.

Between February 17th and 22nd, something is happening that hasn’t occurred at this exact cosmic address in approximately 6,000 years. Your personal earthquake is part of a much larger restructuring. Your bones got the memo. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. It would just really, really like a manual.

I wrote one.

👉 [Your Bones Have Been Waiting: The Complete Guide to Navigating Saturn in Aries]

It’s not an astrology book. It’s a body book. A nervous system book. A “here’s why you feel insane and here’s what to do about it” book. Twelve phases mapped. Somatic practices for each one. Emergency resets when Amygdala is screaming and Vagus is begging you to feel your feet.

Your bones have been waiting for this map. Now it exists.

And if you want personal guidance through your specific passage... [Soul Sessions are here]