Today I am sitting at an 8.
Not a spiritual 8. Not a metaphorical 8. A nervous system 8.
The kind of 8 where the light feels too bright. Where every decision feels heavier than it should. Where your body no longer feels entirely like home. Where the world starts asking more of you than you have available to give.
This morning I had a blood test. Thirty minutes later my arm still feels sharp where the needle went in. A small thing. The kind of thing you’re not supposed to mention. The kind of thing that should have faded by now.
It hasn’t faded.
And I am learning — slowly, imperfectly, with a great deal of resistance — not to run past that.
Because here is what I have discovered.
Every vulnerability is mine. Every pain, every discomfort, every frustration, every yellow day and red day and day where the beautiful evening is right outside the window and I cannot get there. All of it is mine. And I am learning to love all of it — the way you love your favourite character in a story. With full knowledge of their struggles and their contradictions and their limitations. Leaning in rather than away. Feeling more tenderness, not less, precisely because of the difficulty.
This is me. And this is mine. All of it.
This week my son’s placement broke down. My car was involved in a hit and run. I am waiting to have a cyst checked. The project that has been helping me make sense of my life hit a wall. The weather has changed. My son has needed more of me.
None of these things are small. And yet the world has a way of asking you to treat them as manageable. To keep moving. To note them and continue.
A friend told me this evening that it was a beautiful evening. That I should go for a walk around the block. She was right. It was a beautiful evening. I couldn’t get there.
And instead of judging that gap — instead of filling it with apology or explanation or the familiar voice that says this isn’t good enough from you, other people manage, why can’t you — I turned toward it. I went inside.
I start with what is most immediate. My arm. The sharpness still there thirty minutes later.
Is this pain mine? Yes. It’s mine. And I love it.
Why does it hurt so much? Because it does. Because you are sensitive today. Because the needle went in and your body registered it fully and hasn’t finished processing it yet. You are extra sensitive today — the weather has changed, it’s windier than usual, and that is already costing you something your system is working hard to absorb.
And then more comes. It always does when you go toward it rather than away. Information arriving forward — protective parts doing what they were built to do. Trying to help. Trying to make sense of the load. Each one carrying its meaning. Each one wanting to be heard.
And I hear them. I thank them. I love them too — these parts of me that have been working so hard for so long to keep me safe. They are not the enemy. They are the most loyal companions I have. They showed up when nothing else did.
And then I get to a place — not quickly, not always, but sometimes — where I can look down at everything that is happening. The sore arm. The placement breakdown. The car. The cyst. The weather. The beautiful evening I cannot reach. The voices. The parts working hard on my behalf. All of it.
And I smile.
Not because it isn’t real. Not because it doesn’t hurt. But because from here — from this place that is not a part, not a voice, not a protector or a manager but simply the Self that was there before any of them arrived — I can see it all with tenderness. A nervous system doing its job. Parts trying to protect a soul they love. Meaning trying to attach itself to sensation the way it always does.
And then I let it become noise. Just noise.
What meaning do you need to give all this anyway? What meaning is the world trying to put onto all this? Put it down. Enough is enough.
This is the seat of self. The place the zawiya was built to help you find. Not through formal practice. Not through a retreat or a course or a professional intervention. Through a sore arm and a Tuesday afternoon and the willingness to turn toward your own experience with love rather than judgement.
And here is what I have found at the centre of that practice.
I don’t need anyone to tell me I am doing well. I don’t need the validation, the well done, the external recognition. Because something inside — a stream, a resource, a spring that replenishes itself — fills my being with its own satisfaction. The cheering comes from inside. The witness is inside. The one who sees clearly what this soul has been doing and loves it completely for every moment of it — that one is inside too.
And from that fullness — not from emptiness, not from need, but from genuine inner abundance — everything else flows. The writing. The zawiya. The mothering. The faith. Not because it needs to be seen. Because it cannot help but overflow.
I notice the pull away from this place constantly. In the messages that arrive — this happened, and that happened, and I need to do this and that. The world generating noise that wants meaning given to it. Wants me back in the parts. Back in the managing and responding and performing of regulation.
There is something worth naming plainly here — something that rarely gets said outside of neurodivergent spaces.
A neurotypical nervous system runs on mains power. It processes most of daily life automatically — conversations, transitions, driving, social cues — without significant energy cost. The battery recharges overnight and begins the next day largely full.
My nervous system works differently. Before I have done a single thing — before I have spoken to anyone, made a decision, or left the house — approximately 75% of my available energy is already spent. Spent on processing my own internal signals. The sensory environment. The body’s messages. The manual sequencing of tasks that others do automatically. The management of a nervous system that does not run quietly in the background but demands constant conscious attention.
That leaves roughly 25% for the world.
This is not a metaphor for laziness. It is not an excuse. It is biology. It is why a blood test at 10am can still be felt at 10.30. It is why a week of ordinary events — a placement breakdown, a courtesy car, a change in weather — can bring a nervous system to its knees. The events are not dramatic. The accumulation is.
Knowing this changes everything. Not because it removes the difficulty. Because it stops you blaming yourself for it.
In our home we are trying to do something different. We are finding words for states before they become crises. I’m in yellow today. I’m reaching red. We need a low demand day. A pyjama day. An afternoon nap as part of ordinary life and not a sign that something has gone wrong.
And underneath all of that language — underneath the colour chart and the named states and the low demand days — is something simpler.
The practice of loving yourself in the moment you most want to leave yourself behind.
Not the performance of self-care. Not the strategy of nervous system management. The actual, unglamorous, ordinary act of turning toward your own experience and saying — this is mine. All of it. The sore arm and the yellow day and the beautiful evening I couldn’t reach. Mine to feel. Mine to sit with. Mine to love.
The way you love your favourite character in a story. With everything they are. In every season they live through. Even — especially — the winter ones.
My arm still hurts from this morning’s blood test. It is a beautiful evening and I cannot get there. My nervous system is in winter while the calendar says June.
And I am here with all of it.
And sometimes you can’t get to love. And that’s okay.
Some days I cheer myself on and I get here in seconds. Some days it takes everything I have. Some days I’ve completely forgotten this place exists. Some days I’ve lost my way entirely and only know I’m back because of another crack.
Turn to look at the world. This one is for everyone whose body said stop and the world said keep going.
Zawiya Discussion
The Wide Lens — Somatic, Intersectional & Systemic
There is a colour chart most of us have seen. Green. Yellow. Orange. Red. The zones of regulation — a simple, elegant tool for helping children name their nervous system states before those states become crises. It is taught in schools and therapy rooms and support groups across the country. Children learn to say — I am in yellow today. I am reaching red. I need something to help me get back to green.
And then the adults in those same rooms walk out and perform perfect regulation for the rest of the day.
This is not a minor irony. It is a profound systemic failure. The message travelling silently from every regulated-presenting adult to every child in the room is this — yellow and red are states to be managed privately, not named publicly. The only acceptable presentation is green. Everything else is weakness. Everything else is inconvenient. Everything else is yours to carry alone.
The performance of constant regulation is one of the least examined cultural norms in professional and educational settings. It is so pervasive it has become invisible — the water every professional swims in without noticing it is water. And it causes direct harm. Not dramatically. Quietly. In every child who learns that their winter must be hidden. In every parent who cannot name their 8 because nobody around them has ever named theirs. In every nervous system performing summer while living winter because the culture around it has never once modelled anything else.
Caregiver burnout in the neurodivergent world is one of the most under-researched and under-supported experiences there is. The parent of a high-needs child — navigating the SEND system, managing trauma, holding everything together without adequate support — is operating under conditions of chronic stress the human nervous system was never designed to sustain indefinitely. And the particular cruelty of this situation is that the knowledge and skills developed through years of supporting a neurodivergent child do not automatically transfer to the self. A parent can hold sophisticated understanding of nervous system science while simultaneously being unable to apply it to their own body.
This is not hypocrisy. It is the lived reality of a system running on empty.
The body’s signals — the yawning, the light sensitivity, the arm that still hurts thirty minutes after the blood test, the emotional heaviness — are not weakness. They are intelligent biological communication. The body is doing exactly what it is designed to do: telling the truth about its current state. A culture that has learned to override, dismiss, and perform around those signals has much to answer for.
The most radical act available in that culture is a simple one. To say — I am in yellow today. I am at an 8. My arm hurts and I cannot get to the beautiful evening. And to mean it. And to let it be enough.
The Devotional Lens
Every contemplative tradition has understood this ground — the place beneath the noise where something is already whole. They name it differently. They arrive there by different paths. But the territory is the same.
The Sufi tradition understands the Qalb — the heart — not as a metaphor for emotion but as the actual seat of the Self. The place where the Divine meets the human. The organ of spiritual perception. And in the Sufi understanding the heart has a fundamental orientation — it is always, beneath all its turbulence and noise and pain, already turned toward God. Already moving toward the source of its own light.
This is what Hazrat Inayat Khan understood when he taught that the soul which is music itself is affected by music. The soul is not separate from its own depths. It is made of the same substance as what it seeks. The inner sufficiency — the stream that fills from inside, the cheering that needs no external audience — is not self-sufficiency in the brittle defended sense. It is the soul recognising its own nature. The Qalb turned inward and finding, at its centre, the same light it has been seeking outside.
The parts that arrive in the internal conversation — the protectors, the managers, the firefighters — are not obstacles to this recognition. They are the soul’s most loyal companions. They showed up when nothing else did. To love them — as you would love a favourite character in a story, with full knowledge of their struggles and their contradictions — is to extend to your own inner world the same fierce, attentive care you have spent years extending to others.
And beneath all of them — beneath the parts and the noise and the meaning the world is trying to attach to sensation — is the Self that was there before any of them arrived. The one who can look down at everything and smile. The one who melts into the nothingness that is not emptiness but fullness. What the Sufi tradition calls Fana — not the annihilation of the soul but the dissolving of the small self into the vast loving reality of God. The place where the crack is not the wound but the doorway.
The Christian contemplative Julian of Norwich understood the same ground from a different tradition. Writing from inside her own darkness, her own winter, her own place of complete depletion — she did not arrive at certainty or resolution. She arrived at something quieter and more enduring. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Not as denial of the difficulty. As the view from the seat of Self. The place that can hold the crack and the winter and the beautiful evening and the arm that still hurts — and know, underneath all of it, that something is already whole.
Some days you get there in seconds. Some days it takes everything you have. Some days you’ve completely forgotten this place exists. Some days you’ve lost your way entirely and only know you’re back because of another crack.
That returning — however long it takes, however many times it is necessary — is the practice. Not the arrival. The returning.
Whatever tradition you carry, whatever your own lineage knows about this place — it is welcome here. This zawiya was built from specific roots but it has no walls.
Questions
What would it mean to name your nervous system state out loud — not privately, not apologetically, but simply and honestly — the way you would name the weather?
What are the parts of you that have been working hardest to keep you safe — and have you ever thanked them for what they were trying to do?
Where is your seat of Self — the place beneath all the noise where something is already whole — and what helps you find your way back to it when you have lost it completely?