Is Your Nervous System Broken, or Is It Upgrading? (Transcript)

Episode transcript, ShelbyRADIO · 53 minutes

Short answer: If you feel dizzy, spacey, exhausted, more emotional or not quite in your body, your nervous system may not be broken. It may be upgrading. During a spiritual shift, your energy can rewire faster than your body catches up, and old trauma stored in the body can release through emotional waves, sweating, shaking, tears or sudden tiredness. Take care of your energy first, then check the physical body and get medical attention when it's needed. You're not going backwards. You're releasing an old program so a better one can run.

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Key takeaways

• Dizziness, spaciness, emotional waves and sudden exhaustion can be signs of an energetic rewiring, not only signs that something is physically wrong.
• Check your energy body first, then look at the physical body and get medical care if something needs attention.
• "Your issues live in your tissues": the body stores past emotion until it's safe to release it, and a trigger event can open that door.
• Trauma doesn't tiptoe out of the body. It can leave on full blast, through shaking, sweating, crying or old memories coming up.
• Support the upgrade practically: go barefoot, breathe, eat grounding foods, hydrate, move gently and drop the self-judgment.
• You're not broken and you're not going backwards. You're releasing old software so a better operating system can run.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for reading.

When your body feels off (00:00)

Have you ever felt a calling, something deep, something you can't quite explain, that's urging you to step into a higher version of yourself? Hello, welcome to ShelbyRADIO. I am Shelby Carino, and this episode is about why your nervous system isn't broken. It is upgrading.

This is the episode that might actually validate everything your body has been trying to tell you about exiting the system, the matrix, the grid, whatever that is for you, especially if you're about to make a really big quantum jump. I'm going to share something personal that happened to me. I'm ready to talk about it now, because it took me a minute to process what happened.

If you're feeling off, if you're more dizzy in your world, spacing out in your thoughts, more emotional, or you don't feel grounded to the earth like you used to, this is your episode. You have permission to stop thinking that something is wrong and start realizing that maybe something is actually working.

Energy first, then the physical body (02:48)

I come across this a lot in my sessions. We're so trained by the health system that if we have an ache, a pain or some vertigo, we immediately believe something is physically wrong with us. We're not trained to look energetically and see whether we're in balance with ourselves first, so we can then work with any physical issue that might be there.

This is where so many people are confused right now, because we're still moving toward a higher, fifth-dimension frequency, regardless of your belief system. The planet is doing what it's going to do, and that affects you in your body and your energy. The race begins when you start chasing symptoms. Why do I feel dizzy?

Why do I feel spacey? Why do I feel emotional? Is something seriously wrong?

I'm not saying none of it is valid. It might be valid. But we have to take care of the energy body first, and then move into the physical body and see if there's something there that requires medical attention. That's a paradigm shift that's subtly coming onto the planet, to help more people check their energy before they panic about everything physical.

I do Pilates, and it's amazing how many people I've talked to there who've had vertigo or are very sensitive to movement. They look for a physical explanation without ever asking what their energy is doing. You're doing this holistic movement, connecting mind, body and spirit, and your energy is moving around. People are having to learn there's a new way to live in your body.

What if nothing is wrong? (07:00)

If you're having any of those symptoms, let's ask the question: what if nothing's wrong? What if you're tired and exhausted, but not because you're burned out on anything specific? What if you're in an energetic rewiring process?

The old belief is, "I'm so tired, I'm so burned out, something must be physically wrong because I can't get enough sleep." But what if you're rewiring parts of your nervous system and your energy, and your body just hasn't caught up to the rewiring yet? That's a perspective.

When an accident isn't random (08:24)

This happens all the time with clients. What if that sudden car accident, or that trip and fall, or that panic episode wasn't random? What if it was an initiation into a world of energy, where trauma is actually leaving your body because the grid that's been holding that trauma is resetting?

And during that reset, you might feel emotional waves. You might feel numbness in your hands or fingers. I've had that happen. You feel spacey, like you don't know where you are.

Or you feel the physical release: shaking, sweating, crying. Over the last several weeks I could not stop sweating, and it wasn't a menopause sweat. It was a totally different sweat. You might be really sleepy, or you might feel hypervigilant about what's going on around you.

Your nervous system isn't necessarily malfunctioning. It's rewiring you to get you ready for a higher frequency.

My fall in the classroom (10:16)

So here's what happened to me. It was at the end of September. I was at school, at work, on a Thursday.

My students had gone to their specials, music, art or PE, and that afternoon we had a lockdown drill. My students were at specials, so I only had to lock down my room. I put the curtain down on my door window and did all the things they tell you to do, and then I walked through the middle of my classroom toward the window to put the blinds down.

And I tripped. My foot hit the floor wrong or something, which was the weirdest thing, because I have really good balance. But for several days leading up to that, I had been very high energetically.

I was very spacey and dizzy, and very aware I wasn't all the way in my body. I'd been careful how I walked and how I went down the stairs, because I knew how I felt.

A few minutes earlier I'd talked to Joe, my husband, and said the energy was really high. He agreed and said he'd go balance the energies. I guess when he balanced the energies, it just took me out.

My right foot caught on the concrete floor, I lost my balance, and it was like a wrestler picking you up to body slam you. Both my legs came out from underneath me and I came down, wham, on the concrete floor and hit my head really hard.

It happened so fast. I had a hair clip in, and I think landing on that clip helped break my fall. I landed on the upper right side of my head, it broke the clip, and then my head hit the back. It was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life.

Flashbacks: fourth grade and a soccer field (14:56)

There are only two other times I remember physical pain like that. The first was a fractured greenstick in fourth grade, which is funny, because I teach fourth grade now. There might be something deeper here, because I'm having flashbacks just telling this.

We were playing four square at recess, and I was really good at that game. A boy said he was going to get me out, I said I was going to get him out, and I did. I was always picked on in school.

I wore glasses, my teeth were crooked, and I got called names. When I got him out, he came over and pushed me, and I landed on the concrete on my right arm. He ran to the teacher and said he'd go inside and sign the pad, which is what you did back then if you did something wrong.

I sat in the nurse's office with my arm throbbing, and then in a doctor's waiting room for so long, while they took people who were just getting casts taken off. Finally my parents stood up and had a voice, and they got me in the back. The x-rays showed it was fractured, and I got a cast up to my shoulder.

The second time was playing soccer in high school. The field was really muddy, my feet collided with another girl's, and my big toe on my right foot bent all the way back and broke. My adrenaline was so high that when my coach wanted to pull me out, I said wrap it, I'm going back in. I paced the sideline saying "Put me back in, coach," and I finished the game.

Then I was on crutches. So I guess I've reached my three painful limits. And of course, every one was on the right side, which I think is the masculine side.

Fear, adrenaline and denial (20:04)

When I landed on my head, an immediate fear came over me. I thought I'd ruined my brain. I thought I was going to die on that floor and never be the same.

It was an influx of fear that ran through me. I rolled over to my right holding my head, and the pain was so intense I couldn't even cry.

Then I think the fight or flight and the adrenaline kicked in. We were about to have a lockdown drill, and I had to finish the day. Somehow I got up, dizzy, went to my phone and called Joe. He said, "Are you okay? Go see the nurse."

And I said, "No, no, I'm fine." That was denial. I'd basically just busted my head open, and I didn't want to make a big deal of it or go to the hospital. I just wanted to move on.

The drill happened, and I stayed in that fight or flight mode, holding my head and not telling anybody. The kids came back and I didn't tell them. I was talking very slowly and didn't have a lot of thoughts running through me. I had one hour left and a meeting at the end of the day, and I acted like everything was normal.

A spiritual hit (22:52)

The day before, I had scheduled a massage for that evening. Divine timing. When I got home, the adrenaline started slowing down and everything started falling apart.

So I went to the massage, told her what happened, and asked her to work the muscles, because I had basically snapped my head like whiplash. When I got home, everything started relaxing.

My thoughts were really slow. I never got a headache or blurry vision. I immediately knew I had to start clearing the energy, because that was a spiritual hit. It wasn't just, oops, I tripped in my room.

Here's how I knew. When I got home, Joe told me the hospice nurse had called. She had asked his mother if she wanted to go outside for some fresh air, and his mother hadn't been out of her room in a while.

Around the time I fell was when she was being moved out of her room. I thought, oh my gosh, this is all-encompassing.

I didn't go to work for several days, because there was so much trauma leaving my body from the fall. A coworker found out and told the administration, and HR called me about workers' comp. Reporting it wasn't even in my programming, so other people made sure it got reported, and if I needed to go to the doctor, I had all my information, and I did.

But I told myself I was going to handle what created the fall. When I found out what happened with his mom, and with me being a medium and sensitive and the energy being so high, everything made sense. My nervous system was resetting.

I went to my chiropractor, who does gentle chiropractic and subtle energy work, to move the energy in my body so I could get to the physical side of my head and make sure I was okay. Emotionally, though, I was spinning, because that trauma was leaving my body.

Your issues live in your tissues (27:04)

Have you ever heard the saying "your issues live in your tissues"? It came to my mind when this happened. In energy terms, it means the body stores past emotion until it's safe to release it.

That's why I tell my clients you have to take care of your energy field first. If you don't do the energy work, it goes into the physical body, into the tissues, and that's when you really start to have issues. Sometimes beginning energy work will even speed up finding out that something is going on in the physical body.

None of us know. We just do the best we can. But the body stores past emotions until it's safe to let them go, and apparently I had something in my head that needed to release.

I felt like I woke up all over again, on my masculine side. As it released, I was moving through things from my dad's death. I saw things of Joe's coming out of my head, things of his mother's, all these things that had been lingering around.

Trigger events and screaming for freedom (29:24)

The fall was a trigger event. A trigger event can be an accident, a job ending, a big argument with someone or a spiritual activation. These events tell your body it's safe to release an emotion.

When your body gets loud, it's not necessarily crying for help. It's screaming for freedom.

Joe is a Gemini. Geminis live in their head. I'm a Pisces. I live in my feelings.

In the balance of my relationship with Joe and his masculine energy, I've had to learn how to live in my head, and maybe that created a block in releasing emotions the way the masculine needs to release them. Because I'm learning the masculine energies, I took the hit on the head. My mind was screaming for freedom.

That day, his mom got moved outside. I'm connected in that mediumship energy with her. Joe balanced the energies, and then I fell and took the hit. It was a threefold thing going on between him, me and his mom.

Trauma doesn't necessarily tiptoe out of your body. It goes out on full blast, and it did. Days later, I even thought, well, that's one way to get it out. That's one way to recalibrate my frequency and clear out old pain my spirit no longer needed, pain I maybe wasn't even aware of.

The trauma release (32:40)

My chiropractor doesn't snap, crackle and pop you. She aligns your body so your muscles, tissues and bones organically find their way back to where they need to be. She did a trauma release on my head.

I was lying down, and she lifted my head and moved it forward and back. She said, "Wow, that was a lot of trauma," because of how many times she had to do it.

Then she had me do exercises keeping my head still, and I started crying. I told her I felt like I woke up all over again. Back in 2011, when my awakening happened, I was totally in my right brain, not my left. Now I'd hit my head and rattled everything, and I was balancing the other side, my masculine.

When I went back to work, I was so emotional. I was teary-eyed when people asked how I was. During our enrichment hour, I asked the kids I had left to help me rearrange my room, because I couldn't be in the room the way it was.

It reminded me of how I fell. So I rearranged my entire classroom.

It took the rest of that week to recalibrate my nervous system and understand that I'd reset something, that trauma was leaving, and that I actually felt better in a way. I didn't feel all that pressure in my head anymore. It felt like a glass ceiling got broken, and my energy could go up instead of straight out.

Reframing the symptoms (36:24)

Now here I am, doing fine. But I had to learn the signs that I was recalibrating, meaning my nervous system, because your nervous system is what picks up everything out here.

People asked if I was dizzy, and thank God I wasn't. I had a mild concussion, but no blurred vision or dizziness. There are times we get dizzy, if we stand up too fast or roll over too fast.

If you haven't had a major trauma and you're just dizzy, you can look at it as your spiritual energy expanding beyond the map of what your body used to be. It's pushing out to test how much frequency you can hold now.

If you get suddenly tired, that sudden exhaustion so many people are having, you can reframe it: my energetic field is upgrading, and I'm in an integration period. If you need to stop and take a nap and it's feasible, let yourself. You're probably integrating something that's coming in.

If you feel like you're not in your body, you're probably relearning how to anchor into a lighter version of yourself. Sometimes our energy hops out of the body so we can look at it, and then we hop back in. You might not even know you're doing that until now. You may also have increased sensitivity, because you're becoming more receptive to the energetic truth that's coming in.

And if you find yourself replaying old memories, like I just did on this episode, flashing back to fourth grade when I teach fourth grade now, that may be trauma coming up to release. Not to retraumatize you, but to release you. That's why my head felt so much lighter after I hit it.

Maybe those memories were up for grabs on top of everything else, and the perfect storm hit. Thank God I was safe, and I'm still good.

How I supported the upgrade (40:36)

If you go through something like that, you're going to upgrade. Something is going to come into your life and take you to the next level. You want to be practical about it, because your body sometimes has to catch up to what your spiritual energy is doing.

After it happened, I found myself wanting to be barefoot more. If I went out to check the mail, I didn't put my flip flops on. I walked barefoot on the ground.

I did more breath work during the day. I wanted grounding foods. I wanted a lot of hamburgers and meat, because I was so high up in the energies that I needed to come down and ground.

Then I couldn't get enough water. I was hydrating like it was my job, because water helps energy move. I took about a week off from Pilates, and when I went back, I did gentle movement, the slower classes instead of the cardio ones, to see if I'd get dizzy. That's how I brought movement back in.

And I had to release judgment. I had to tell myself, "Shelby, you're not a failure because you fell and hit your head on the concrete floor." Part of me said that never should have happened to me.

I should have been able to ground it. But it did happen, I'm healing from it, and a lot got released. So I moved into gratitude: now I have that in my vibration, and I can relate to people who go through something like that.

Then I needed a truth, an affirmation: "No, Shelby, you're not broken. You may have thought you broke your head, but you're upgrading. This is just the way you released the trauma." I'm grateful, too, because it probably could have been way worse than how I landed.

Old software, new operating system (45:16)

When something like this happens and your nervous system resets itself, there's no going back. You're not going backwards. In Joe's IT terms, you're releasing an old software program so you can run a better operating system within you.

My chiropractor told me head traumas really shake up the nervous system and the vagus nerve. I don't know all the terminology, so don't quote me, but she said the vagus nerve plays a huge role in how your nervous system operates, and that's why head trauma shakes it up. It's like a rebirth.

You see things differently. You do things differently. The old software left, and the new operating system is coming online.

You're doing better than you think (46:40)

Here are some final words of encouragement. If this has happened to you, or you're in this space, you really are doing better than you think you are. When this happened to me, I thought, "Are you kidding me? Am I going backwards?"

And then I said, no. I'm doing way better than I think, because I've done enough work to know I'm constantly moving to the next piece.

I had to realize, in real time, through a physical injury, that upgrading your nervous system is no small thing. It's the spiritual muscle work of a lifetime. When I woke up in 2011, my kundalini energy flipped and my energy reset itself, and I did a lot of psychic work that was mostly my feminine side. What just happened to me was my masculine energy, working it from the head, because the masculine side wakes up differently than the feminine.

So I told myself, I'm not broken. I'm finally free to feel again. And that's what happened.

I started getting my feelings back in a whole other way. I don't even know exactly what I let go of, and I didn't care. I was just glad it was leaving, and I feel so different now.

This is the healing you asked for (49:28)

If you need something to remind you that you're not alone and you're okay, say to yourself what I had to say to myself: "This is the healing I asked for. It just didn't come through like I expected it to." I knew I was looking for the release. I just didn't know it would body slam me onto a concrete floor in the middle of my classroom, right before a lockdown drill, at the same moment his mom was being moved in hospice. I never would have thought that.

So let this be what it is for you. If you've experienced something like this, if you're still moving through trauma, you've got this. I had to tell myself, "I've got this."

And if no one has told you lately, I'm going to tell you, because I have to tell it to myself: I'm proud of you. Healing is a lot of work, and it takes a lot to go through a healing process and come out the other side stronger.

Especially now, as so much is about your nervous system, your upgrades and your frequencies, and you're still out here doing life and being human as you go in and out of these phases. I'm proud of you. Keep going.

The veil is lifted, the energies are swooping in, and we're all resetting this nervous system, whatever layer we're on. So we have to keep moving forward.

Remember, the journey doesn't end here. It's only the beginning. I'll see you on the path.

Frequently asked questions

Can a spiritual awakening make you feel dizzy or spacey?

In this episode, Shelby describes dizziness and spaciness as possible signs that your energy is expanding beyond what your body is used to holding. She recommends checking your energy first and then the physical body. Dizziness can have medical causes, so please also talk with your doctor, especially after a fall or head injury.

What does "your issues live in your tissues" mean?

It means the body stores past emotion until it feels safe enough to release it. A trigger event, like an accident, a job ending, a big argument or a spiritual activation, can signal the body that it's time to let that stored emotion go.

Why am I so exhausted during my spiritual awakening?

Shelby reframes sudden exhaustion as an integration period, when your energetic field is upgrading and your body is catching up. If it's feasible, rest or nap when you need to. Ongoing exhaustion or sleep problems are worth discussing with your doctor too.

How can I support my nervous system during an energetic upgrade?

Shelby's own steps were walking barefoot, doing breath work, eating grounding foods, drinking plenty of water, choosing gentle movement and releasing self-judgment. She also leaned on an affirmation: "I'm not broken. I'm upgrading."

Where to go next

• Start here: my free 16-minute audio, When You Don't Feel Like Yourself
• The course: Out of Survival Mode, gentle tools to calm your nervous system and feel safe in your body again
• Listen next: How You Know Your Body Is Finally Out of Survival Mode
• Work with me one-on-one: private sessions