Who I was, and when I stopped

My name is Gabriela, but to people I’m Gabi. For years I’ve worked in marketing — an environment built on performance, deadlines and the pressure to keep doing more. I have a doctorate behind me, several jobs and years of practice. And that is exactly why I also know the other side of this world.

I’m someone who can chase performance a little too hard. Who struggles to stop. Who always has the feeling that there is still something to finish, something to solve, something to achieve.

I’m not writing this to sound dramatic. I’m writing it because when I say in a class today “you don’t have to achieve anything”, I know exactly how hard that is to believe.

Understanding isn’t enough

Years ago I could already name my patterns. I knew why I did things the way I did. I knew where they came from. I knew why I reacted in certain ways in certain situations.

And I thought that once I understood it, I would be able to change it.

Then came real situations. And I found that although my mind knew exactly what was happening, in that moment my body reacted the old way.

Because our patterns aren’t only thoughts. They’re automated.

Understanding is a very important beginning. But understanding alone often isn’t enough. It has to be rewritten. A different experience has to be lived. The body has to be given the chance to find out that it can respond differently.

From the mind to the body

That is why I started looking for other ways. I began to work more intensively with the body, with emotions and with the nervous system.

We can know that we should slow down. We can know that our relationship with work isn’t healthy. We can know that we’re overreacting. We can know that we have trouble setting boundaries.

And still, in the actual situation, we do exactly what we didn’t want to do. Because our body doesn’t yet know that it can respond differently.

And this is where regulating the nervous system became the key thing for me.

Why I ended up building my own process

Gradually it dawned on me that the individual methods I had been trying are wonderful in themselves — but that I was missing a more complete picture.

It isn’t enough to just calm down in meditation. Sometimes the body first needs to release the tension it has stored up. It needs movement. It needs breath. It needs to shake out the accumulated activation. It needs to move through an emotion.

And only then can real slowing down, grounding and calm arrive.

Out of that experience and out of years of working on myself, the idea of creating my own process slowly took shape. NESYRE. Not as another product. As a joining together of the tools that made sense to me and that I had lived through myself.

We can spend an hour explaining to someone how sweet honey is. If they have never tasted it, they still won’t know what it tastes like. They have to taste it. And it is much the same with the feeling of safety. We can know that we are safe. We can explain it to ourselves. But our body needs to experience safety.

What I do today and what I don’t

I don’t want to fix people. I want to help them understand themselves, their bodies and their reactions better — and to show them that not everything has to be solved with the head alone.

I’m not a psychologist or a therapist and I don’t want to present myself as one. I’m a certified instructor of women’s and pregnancy yoga and I work with tuning forks. The rest is my own experience, tested over years — and a method I assembled from it.

Today I can stand through things that would once have broken me. Not because difficult things stopped happening. But because I am changing.

And when I stand more firmly, I look differently at what is happening around me too.