Ancestral Vigilance: What All Our Nervous Systems Inherited
Even in 2026, there is still so much we don’t know about the body.
We still don’t quite understand the quiet, constant conversation happening between the body and the mind.
Many of us are walking around holding a level of anxiety that never fully rests. A not so gentle hum underneath everything.
And sometimes, if I’m being honest, I often feel like I’m carrying something that doesn’t even belong to me.
Something heavier than the moment I’m actually in.
But it feels real, because it is real.
Lately, I’ve been learning a lot about the soma (the body)…and about just how sensitive the body actually is. To sound, to energy. To the people in a room before a single word gets spoken.
And the more I learn, the more grateful I become.
Because what I used to call “too sensitive” has begun to look like something else entirely.
Something ancestral.
I now know that my grandmother lives in me. My great grandmother lives in me.
Not as memory. Not as metaphor.
But somewhere in the body itself. In my wiring. In the way I brace for something before I even know what I’m bracing for.
So today…when I’m in the presence of another being. And I feel something that goes beyond my own lived experience. Something that isn’t mine to explain. I’ve come to understand that sometimes what I’m feeling is actually something that already lives in me.
That sensitivity. That vigilance.
It was here before I was.
And knowing that has changed something for me. And in me.
I get to hold being a highly sensitive person (HSP) alongside knowing that my body has a long, long relationship with living.
With surviving.
With staying close enough to others to notice everything.
And whether I like it or not, I am a relational being.
My body was built for connection. And it has never stopped listening for that connection.
But what that also means is that life is asking something of me. Requiring something of me.
If I don’t take care of myself. If I don’t let myself rest. If I don’t treat this body with the tenderness it’s actually demands, I only add to what it’s already struggling to release.
In learning about the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system….in learning about fight, flight…and the slower, steadier work of rest and digest, I’ve been learning that in my own life what actually moves me from one to the other is needed daily.
For me, it’s art. It’s music. It’s unhurried conversation with people I love. It’s making time for the people I know love me back.
And that’s not indulgence.
That’s medicine.
The kind our grandmothers knew long before anyone gave it a clinical name.
Comments