My Organs Worked the Night Shift
On panic, slow medicine, and what I’m bringing into circle today.
I want to tell you about last night.
Somewhere around midnight, anxiety arrived uninvited. By 2 a.m., it had brought panic with it, and the two of them spent the rest of the night rearranging the furniture of my life while I lay there trying to negotiate with my own nervous system. You know how this goes if you’ve been there. The thinking gets sharper and more useless at the same time. The body gets louder. The mind gets quieter, or it gets meaner, depending on the night.
Mine got meaner.
But here’s the part I want you to sit with for a minute, because it’s the part I’m still sitting with this morning:
My body did not stop working.
While my mind was making its case for catastrophe, my liver was doing the deeper work the day didn’t leave time for. My adrenals were carrying what my conscious self couldn’t put down. My nervous system — even in its panicked state — was trying. It was running every protocol it knew. It was keeping me alive through something I couldn’t think my way out of.
That’s the thing about the body. It works the night shift whether you sleep or not. It doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It doesn’t require your understanding. It just moves.
This is the work, and last night was the work
The reason I can sit across from a chronically ill client and say your body is not broken — it is overwhelmed, and we are going to slow it down enough for it to find itself again is because I have been that body. Not metaphorically. Literally. I’ve moved through three full rounds of healing my own chronic illness, and the rounds I tried to push through, the rounds I refused to listen — those were the ones that took the longest. The round that moved fastest was the round I learned to listen.
Slow medicine is not a marketing concept around here. It’s the actual lived practice. It’s why I delay labs until after foundational work is in place. It’s why I won’t hand you a protocol before your nervous system is regulated enough to receive it. It’s why I tell clients, often, that the answer is to do less for a little while.
The body cannot heal in panic. It heals in safety. And safety isn’t something you affirm your way into — it’s something you give the body, slowly, until it remembers what it feels like.
This is what I mean when I say the person healing IS the healer. I’m not above the work. I’m in it. My organs are in it. Last night was a reminder that even when the mind is losing the plot, the body is faithfully on duty. The medicine was already in the room. I just had to wake up and recognize it.
What I’m bringing into circle today
This afternoon at 1 pm ET, I’m co-facilitating our Collective Healing Circle. It runs every other Tuesday and it’s anchored in the energetic medicine my mother, Marilyn, has been practicing for decades — reiki, intuitive transmission, the kind of work that happens in the field whether or not you can explain it on paper.
But today I’m doing something a little different. I’m weaving in more of what I usually hold in our Wellspring of Wholeness gatherings — our somatic, body-led circle that alternates with the Collective on the other Tuesdays. Today is going to be more breath. More nervous system. More attention to the actual organs in the actual bodies in the actual room.
We’ll start with a white light roots visualization for every organ that has been working overtime. Not just mine. Yours, too. The liver of the woman walking with cancer. The skin of the one whose eczema won’t relent. The adrenals of the person whose body has been bracing for so long they don’t remember what unbraced feels like. The thyroid that’s been quietly carrying. The gut that’s been processing more than digestion.
All of it. Held.
Then I’ll adapt the rest of the circle intuitively. I don’t entirely know what happens next — and that’s the point. The medicine isn’t in the script. The medicine is in the listening.
How we gather
If you’re new here, this is the rhythm:
Both circles run on love offering — $1 minimum to enter, pay what feels right for your body and your bank account on any given week. We alternate every other Tuesday at 1 pm ET: Collective Healing Circle one week, Wellspring of Wholeness the next.
This is on purpose. Healing is not a one-time event. It’s a rhythm. It asks you to show up, leave, integrate, and come back. The body wants repetition, not heroics. So we built something you can return to — without a price tag that requires you to be sure first.
There are no protocols you have to follow before you arrive. You don’t have to be doing the work. You don’t have to be ready. You just have to show up with the body you have today.
If your body has been working overtime too — if you’ve been the one not sleeping, the one carrying, the one whose nervous system has been on duty for longer than you can remember — come let it down for an hour.
I’ll be there with mine.
🌱
Today’s Collective Healing Circle is at 1pm ET. Love offering, $1 minimum. The link is below…