Day 20 - A New Workshop

Day 20 brought me face to face with an interesting disconnect between mind and body. I was creating a new workshop, and in my mind, this shouldn't feel like much of a stretch—I've been teaching since the mid-1990s, after all. Teaching is familiar territory, comfortable ground.

But my body wouldn't agree.

There's something about the newness of a topic that elevates my stress levels in ways my conscious mind doesn't register. Thankfully, I'm learning to breathe deeper when I know I'm teaching something new, because my body doesn't actually send me obvious stress signals. It feels normal to me—which is exactly why I can miss it.

If this had been any other week, I probably would have pushed myself to find something more dramatically challenging for my "new" item. But I've been strict about what counts as growth, and honestly, I've been doing some pretty stretching things lately. Leading our leadership program solo Monday morning, attending hot yoga classes alone with unfamiliar teachers—my system has been consistently activated.

By the end of my work day, I found myself feeling depleted. So I grabbed the "new" that was true but might not have been the "ideal" stretch by my previous standards. Sometimes we have to honor where our capacity actually is rather than where we think it should be.

The intention of this challenge is to get out of my comfort zone, and by that definition, I've definitely been hitting it out of the park. My Oura ring has been registering more daily stress than usual—objective evidence that my nervous system is indeed expanding, even when my conscious experience feels manageable.

This taught me something important about the subtlety of growth. Sometimes our bodies are working harder than we realize. Sometimes the challenge isn't about finding the most dramatic stretch possible, but about honoring the authentic stretch we're already experiencing.

Creating a new workshop after decades of teaching might seem like a small thing, but my elevated stress levels told a different story. The newness of the topic activated my system in ways that familiar content never does. There's always something to learn, always an edge to navigate, even in our areas of greatest competence.

The wisdom here is learning to trust what my body registers over what my mind assumes. Experience isn't always the same as ease. Competence doesn't eliminate activation. And sometimes the most honest thing we can do is acknowledge that we're already stretching, already growing, already doing the work—even when it doesn't look as dramatic as we think it should.

Twenty days in, my Oura ring is my reminder that growth is happening whether I feel it consciously or not. My nervous system is expanding, one workshop, one yoga class, one uncomfortable moment at a time.