Unlearning Happens in the Body

Reclaiming our nervous systems and our lives with embodiment.

I've been in active recovery from workaholism for around 15 years, I have more than enough money for the things I need and want, and I still sometimes get anxious during "normal working hours" that there is *something important* I'm supposed to be doing. It drives me nuts.

I fully believe that this is because the school system grooms children's *still-developing* nervous systems for a lifetime of servitude. (The human brain is not fully formed until age 25 - everything prior to that shapes *how* the nervous system develops.)

It is very hard to undo that, and I don't even know if it can be completed in a single lifetime.

When I say "active recovery" I mean I have been almost aggressively pursuing self-regulation on a daily basis, attuning my nervous system to my own needs rather than to the demands of a predatory economy that runs on self-abandonment.

The main thing children learn at school is self-abandonment. So that's the primary task of deschooling, unworking, etc - learning how to claim responsibility for ourselves and care for our needs and wants as if our lives, and the future of humanity, depend on it. They do.

For me it's a hand on the heart, a reassuring word or two, allowing tension to release and grief to flow in the form of tears that have held back like they were waiting for a hall pass.

The most important unlearning doesn't happen in a library - it happens in our bodies, and both the process and the reward is being able to just sit with ourselves and do nothing.

The more 'nothing' we do, the less our children will have to struggle with it. And if we do 'nothing' enough, maybe *their* children will never know stillness as anything other than joy.