Repatterning Experience Part One: The Biology of Habit

When we talk about repatterning how we process experience, we’re talking about loosening the grip of the past in our biology.

The nervous system carries memory, shapes emotion, holds tension, transfers, and absorbs force through our tissues, taking in every signal from inside and out.

This forms reflexes and habits that live in procedural memory. Unless examined we stay locked in survival mode.

This can lead us to fist fights in our own imagination. Stuck in chronic and predictable reactionary states, pissed off all the time, hiding behind sarcasm, avoiding others and ourselves, eroding genuine relating. Little by little, we tighten, pull back, and keep life’s vastness at arm’s length.

These patterns etched into our tissues are alive. They exist because survival once demanded them. But our nervous system is always nudging toward more than survival. It wants integration and connection.

As relational beings, our biology compels us to notice, meet, and relate.

Working with these patterns is not about doing to become better. It’s about showing up, slowing down, and listening and learning how to stay.

In that process, we loosen survival-bound habits and open to the intelligence in us that knows what thriving feels like: full expression, giving and receiving, connection in motion.