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A Deeper Understanding of This Moment
- rfbreilly
- Jan 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 16
Many people sense that something is happening right now—internally, collectively, quietly—but struggle to name it.
It’s not just about healing.It’s not just about growth.And it’s not simply about becoming a better version of ourselves.
What’s unfolding is a deeper reckoning with how experience itself is being generated—moment by moment—inside the human system.
To understand this moment, we have to move beneath stories, goals, and identities, and look at what is actually shaping our inner and outer lives in real time.
What Neurobiology Reveals About This Moment
Neurobiology is the study of how the brain, nervous system, and body work together to create your lived experience.
Not just how you think—but how you:
feel
react
perceive
decide
connect
and sense yourself as “you”
This is not abstract science.It is the machinery behind every moment of meaning, confusion, urgency, or ease you experience.
For over 15 years, my work has centered on helping people understand themselves in the moment they are in, rather than trying to fix themselves from the outside in.
When people understand how their nervous system is shaping their experience right now, something profound happens:
self-blame softens
the chase for an idealized “better self” dissolves
compassion replaces correction
Not because they’ve changed—but because they can finally see clearly.
You are not fixed — you are generating and being generated
As neuroscientist Jessica McGuire states:
“What you experience as ‘yourself’ right now isn’t a fixed thing — it’s being generated moment by moment by your nervous system, based on bodily signals.”
In simpler terms: You are not a static identity. You are a living process.
Your nervous system is continuously assembling your sense of self based on what it detects inside and around you.
What’s Happening Beneath Awareness
Long before conscious thought appears, your system is tracking and integrating:
breathing rhythm and heart rate
blood sugar and hormone levels
digestion and gut signals
muscle tone, posture, and tension
sounds, light, movement, and spatial orientation
internal sensations like tightness, warmth, heaviness, or ease
emotional signals and habitual thought patterns
This occurs through preconscious processing—activity that happens before you have language for it, yet powerfully determines how you interpret your life.
By the time you think “this is who I am” or “this is how I feel”, your system has already made thousands of micro-calculations.
The Brain Predicts Before It Responds
Your brain is not simply reacting to the world. It is constantly predicting what should be happening—inside your body and in your environment.
It then compares those predictions with reality.
The difference between what was expected and what actually occurs updates your internal sense of self.
This means your identity is being recalibrated constantly based on whether your system registers:
safety or threat
support or isolation
capacity or overload
signals or noise
This is why the same person can feel grounded one moment and undone the next.
Why the Self Feels So Changeable
Nothing external needs to change for your experience of yourself to shift. Your internal state does. When your nervous system is centered and regulated, challenges feel workable—even meaningful. When your system is dysregulated, the very same challenges can feel unbearable. This doesn’t mean you’re inconsistent. It might actually mean your nervous system is doing what it was designed to do: protect, conserve, mobilize, or withdraw.
State-Based Selves
In sympathetic activation (fight-or-flight), your system generates urgency.You may feel driven to fix, improve, prove, or perfect. Thoughts like *“I’m behind,” “I need to do more,” or “I’m not enough” arise naturally.
This isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a physiological state producing a pressured sense of self.
In dorsal vagal shutdown (immobilization), the system conserves energy. Motivation collapses. Hopelessness or numbness appears.“What’s the point?” arrives before effort can even begin.
This isn’t laziness. It’s protection after overwhelm.
Neither of these states represent the truth of who you are. They are state-based distortions.
When the nervous system has the capacity to regulate, something fundamental shifts.
You feel:
more connected
more spacious internally
more available for choice
Discernment and decisions arise from clarity rather than fear, urgency and 'what if'. Core values and updated belief systems guide aligned action instead of emotionally dysregulated responses. Curiosity replaces self-judgment and unnecessary harsh criticism. A quality of presence mobilizes the flow available within the moment without the need to replace pressure but rather integrate and release it.
Your identity becomes less contracted and more expansive—not just because you are doing the “work on yourself,” but because your system is no longer protecting or defending against automatic predictions of threat as the only lens your system views your experience through.
This is where deeper capacities—often long dormant—begin to rise to surface naturally.
Understanding This Moment
This moment we are living in is not asking us to become someone else. It is inviting us to understand ourselves as we are, in real time.
To recognize:
when the past is intruding on the present
when stored stress is shaping perception
when reactions are driven by protection and defensive rather than choice
While appreciating and respecting your personal need and capacity to defend and protect yourself in real time physiological and psychological threat and danger.
As this understanding grows, something quiet but profound occurs. You don’t construct a new self. You remember yourself—beneath the noise of survival signals, dysregulation, and learned survival strategies. You recognize your changing inner state and rather than react or resist it, you meet yourself where you are at. With self awareness and resources to self-regulate and reclaim the moment.
This is less about fixing and more about creating the conditions for who has always been there to finally emerge.
Not a better version of you—but a truer more authentic, uninhibited, less suppressed more informed you. This moment has a better chance of being this moment in real time rather than lived through a past version of time. The hands of which are often being held captive by stored stress, which become conscious through patterns, triggers, emotional dysregulation, over reactions or even under reactions.
When we include the influence of stored stress and the nervous system’s patterned responses in the Now, the power of presence deepens rather than diminishes. Eckhart Tolle teaches that freedom comes from releasing identification with past and future and meeting life as it is, here and now. Neurobiology shows us how this becomes possible. The mind may no longer be looping in psychological time, yet the body can still be living in the past through conditioned neural pathways, unfinished stress responses, and suppressed sensations. When we are resourced enough to self-regulate or co-regulate, we don’t have to bypass these signals to “stay present.” Instead, presence becomes embodied. We stop pushing away what feels inconvenient, raw, or out of sync, and allow sensations, emotions, and impulses to enter conscious awareness. This is where integration happens—not by breaking through the moment, but by turning toward it. As Dr. Arielle Schwartz describes, healing occurs when we have
“a new experience in relationship to the old wound.”
This returns real time to your hands, offering a truer encounter with this moment as it is—one that restores choice, reveals deeper truth, and gives lived substance to this moment and the Power of Now.
©️Copyright 2026. Roseanne Reilly
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