Increasing Your Capacity to Experience Joy and Ease

With both exercise and working with the nervous system, we are working on increasing capacity — capacity to do more, to get stronger, or to increase flexibility.

More capacity can be achieved by teaching your body to learn a different range of motion or movement pattern. Over time, it can be lifting heavier weights so your body is stronger and has a greater capacity for load. It can feel like having different sensations that change your relationship with pain and discomfort. It can be learning to sit with the discomfort of big emotions and staying present with the sensations that go along with those feelings.

We build capacity to get stronger, to be able to better navigate hard experiences, and to learn to enjoy and be present with joyful and pleasurable experiences. 

If you’ve experienced a lot of pain, emotional stress, hard times or trauma, our brains and nervous systems learn to overly focus on scanning for danger. In this process, we become focused on what isn’t working. This comes from your nervous system trying to keep you safe (thank you, nervous system!). As we work on shifting this pattern, we want to build the capacity to notice where there is ease and safety. This can be as simple as bringing your awareness to areas of the body where there is less discomfort or a more neutral experience or sensation. This allows your body to sense how it feels when things feel good. 

Spring is the perfect season to experience this. The days are longer, the birds are singing, flowers are bursting, and the seasons are moving from a place of darkness, cold and constriction to a place of expansion.

One way to play with this is to notice how you feel in your body. For example, you could look at a flower (or a tree or some other thing that brings you simple joy) and notice what you like about the flower. Is it the colors, the shape, the way the sun shines on the petals? As you notice what you like about the flower, notice what you feel in your body. Is there a feeling of softening? Does your breath change? Does your body feel heavier?

As you become aware of these changes, see if you can stay with them and allow your cells, your muscles and your nervous system to take in the feeling. This experience and experiences like this, over time, build capacity to enjoy the good stuff in life.

Why We Need to Talk About Endometriosis

This is my sister Holly’s story. Her personal experience with endometriosis has impacted her in many ways, and she’s been offering a wealth of information for other women.

March is Endometriosis Awareness Month, a time to bring attention to a condition that affects an estimated 1 in 10 women and people assigned female at birth worldwide. Despite being so common, endometriosis remains widely misunderstood, under-researched and under-funded. For many people living with it, including myself, the road to diagnosis can take years or even decades.

I was diagnosed with endometriosis in my early 30s, but my symptoms began when I was just 13 years old. Like many teenagers, I was told that painful periods were normal. Severe cramps, fatigue and other symptoms were often minimized or explained away. Over the years, I saw doctors and tried to manage the pain as best as I could, but not once was endometriosis mentioned as a possible cause. We so often misinterpret common for normal. It wasn’t until the day of my diagnosis that I even heard the word from a medical professional.

Endometriosis occurs when tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, causing inflammation, scarring and chronic pain. While often discussed as a reproductive condition, it is increasingly recognized as a systemic inflammatory disease that can affect the bowels, bladder, nerves and other systems. Because symptoms vary and diagnostic methods are limited, the average time to diagnosis is seven to ten years. During that time, many are dismissed or told their pain is simply “part of being a woman.” This delay has serious consequences for physical health, mental well-being and overall quality of life.

My story is not unique, and that’s exactly the problem. Endometriosis Awareness Month is about breaking the silence, supporting those living with chronic pain, and pushing for the research and medical training needed to improve care. No one should have to wait nearly two decades to hear the name of the condition shaping their health. By sharing our stories, we can help ensure that the next generation is heard sooner, diagnosed earlier and supported better than those who came before them.

Knowledge is power. For more information and resources on endometriosis, visit enodfound.org and learn more from Holly on her Substack.

Humanizing Risk Management and the Nervous System

Guest post by Amy Leo, creator of the Mindful Money

Risk management. Cold, mechanical, academic. The kind of phrase that makes most people's eyes glaze over.

But you have been doing risk management your whole life!

Every time you buckled a car seat, kept a spare key with a neighbor or packed an extra layer, that was risk management. Quiet, instinctive, entirely yours. No spreadsheet required.

Let me show you what I mean with a quick story.

A grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter share a garden. Same soil, same row of dahlias, same trip to the Cape. Before leaving, the grandmother stakes each stem with a soft cloth and a little slack. Just enough support. She has been gardening for years. Her daughter has been checking the forecast for days. She adds extra stakes, wraps each tie firm and close. She is almost late to the car. The granddaughter glances out the window. The dahlias look fine. Honestly, they look great. She heads out the door.

When they return, the granddaughter's dahlias are face-down in the dirt. The daughter's are mostly upright, but two stems snapped at the tie. No give. The grandmother's are swaying, open, a little wild-looking and entirely alive. The goal of a stake isn't to stop the weather. It's to make sure the plant is still standing when the wind passes. The following summer, the daughter loosens her ties. The granddaughter stakes hers.

In human terms: risk management is putting a few supports in place before change arrives.

So, is it about planning or predicting?

Planning says: wind will probably come. Here's what I'll put in place.

Predicting says: I must know exactly when and how hard, and I must control the outcome.

Predicting is tempting because it can feel safer, but it narrows attention, creates urgency, and can push us toward rushed moves, overcorrections or avoidance.

One is a relationship with uncertainty. The other is a war with it.

When I sit with the women I work with, I eventually ask: What are you actually afraid of losing?

It's almost never the number. It lives somewhere quieter than that.

I don't want to become a burden to the people I love. I want to leave something that matters. I want to stay in charge of my own life for as long as I possibly can.

If uncertainty has been on your mind, try one of the exercises below.

A. The Inner Garden (for the reflective, 15 minutes, pen and paper)

Sit somewhere quiet. Write whatever comes.

1. What changes (no matter how unlikely) could I experience in the next few years?

2. Choose one. Is this a planning problem or a predicting spiral?

3. What's one action I can take this week to feel more ease?

B. Quick Stake (for the doers, 60 seconds)

Three quick questions, no journal required.

1. What's one thing that could go sideways in the next 90 days?

2. Do I have anything in place for it or am I assuming it'll be fine?

3. What's one small support I could add this week?

C. The Body Stake (30 seconds, anywhere for right now)

When you feel the winds of change picking up — a headline, a number on a receipt, a conversation that lands wrong — pause before you respond. Feet on the floor. One longer exhale. Soften your jaw.

You don’t have to solve anything in that moment. You're just choosing not to snap.

About the Author 

Amy Leo is the creator of the Mindful Money approach. She blends finance, yoga and personal development to help women build a steady, empowered relationship with money, especially in a world changing fast. 

As a Registered Yoga Teacher and Financial Therapist, she integrates mindfulness, somatic tools and practical financial education to support both inner steadiness and outer strategy. 

Through group programs, one-on-one guidance and retreats, Amy helps women prepare softly and intentionally for what's next. Her next retreat is June 2026 in the Redwoods. Learn more here.

Nervous System Touch Work to Help Your Body Settle

There is so much going on in the country, the world and in our personal lives that it can be hard to be present, grounded and settled in our nervous systems. While the experience and feeling of stress and activation isn’t bad, and is actually what you should feel in reasonably stressful or traumatic situations, it isn’t good for you to be in this state all the time.

Healing comes from learning to orient more toward the things that feel better, or the things that don’t feel quite as bad. Often this can feel unfamiliar and challenging, and it's a slow process of offering your nervous system a new experience and different options. Over time, we can strengthen our awareness of how to orient to allow our nervous system to soak into the feeling (and hence the healing potential of the parasympathetic nervous system).

One way that we can support this process is with gentle touch work that supports the body in releasing stored nervous system energy, helps the body settle and relax, and brings deep rest. This work is done with you lying on a massage table fully clothed with a blanket, bolster on your knees and pillow to support your body in feeling comfortable. We set an intention for your session and then follow what your body needs. Different parts of the body are gently touched, which supports your nervous system allowing you to relax, settle, rest and feel more present.

After sessions, clients report feeling more like themselves and more grounded. I am offering these sessions as a standalone experience as well as part of a more complete nervous system coaching offering. Please reach out if you would like to learn more or schedule a session.

In these sessions, I use a combination of touch training I’ve received through my Somatic Experiencing Practitioner program and Vagus System, Organ System and Craniosacral Training done locally with Janet Evergreen.

The experience of feeling good is crucial for nervous system health and allows us to show up more fully in our lives.

Investing in Our Past

We’re serving up something different on Rooted Reading today: a guest post from Kwento founder Aidȳn Mancenido. When I learned of Aidȳn’s new business, it reminded me of how much value there is in our stories. Learn about her offering below:

As the holidays have passed and having spent precious time with those I love, including family and friends I don’t see often, I realized just how fortunate I am to be surrounded by such gorgeous humans; many of whom I consider resilient, wise, soulful, and abundantly generous in spirit. I caught up on stories of navigating the challenges of a new marriage; on the heartaches of supporting an older sibling contending with a heroine addiction since the age of 15; and the victory of overcoming stage IV cancer at the tender age of 79. These and many other stories make up the beautiful breadth and depth of our humanity. We are ever-evolving creatures immersed in a strikingly beautiful and kaleidoscopic array of life.

I started Kwento so that I can offer individuals the opportunity to capture some of these unique and impressive life experiences of those we love, including our aging parents and grandparents. I help folks preserve their family history as a legacy for future generations. I interview individuals through a series of 1-hour interviews to identify the threads and poignant elements, then I craft the story, which is shared as a printed book. With over 20 years of experience as a cultural anthropologist and writer, I am invested in documenting histories that lead to greater knowledge and appreciation of our pasts, and therefore, of ourselves.

You can learn more about Kwento at www.kwentome.com, or email me at kwentome@gmail.com.