Make Doing The "Impossible" Your Habit
How we expand our somatic comfort zone one edgy step at a time.
Thank you for being here, offering your time to the reading of this piece.
I am committed to the exercise of writing this without AI (even if I occasionally use AI images).
Captain, Luna and our Bus home :D
My daughter is currently singing “Boop, it’s the butt power!”, to our big puppy while ramming her backside into him. This is how I arrive to writing today. I’ve sat down to begin several times now with a myriad of distractions and demands pulling me away. We have made it to Denver, CO in the bus and my pack is slowly finding our rhythm together as we travel. And here I am, showing up another month to say “Hello!”, and share the story and lesson that’s been burning on my heart to be immortalized here this time around.
“We are what we repeatedly do…
Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~ Aristotle. My dear mother had this on a poster in the piano room growing up. (You might guess what kind of teacher she was.)
I loved it. The quote from the ancient philosopher made it seem as though perfectionism was totally attainable if I could just figure out the most excellent actions and then repeat them…forever.
This level of externally and self-imposed demand eventually led to full-scale burnout and rampant teenage rebellion…ya know, the type that leads you a full 180 from your conservative upbringing all the way to sex work and surprise single parenthood as a young adult, (but that’ll take a whole memoir one day to tell all. For the moment I just find it necessary to highlight that this deeply engrained self-motivation first self-imploded before I came out the other side to tell you this next thing!).
As my lil brother said once in processing his own life choices, “Blaize, have you realized every single one of us grew up to be ‘try hards’?” He was right. Instilled in us was a fervor to effort. And yet that also came with a maybe-only-sometimes-healthy dose of realism. Handed down to my siblings and I was a message along the lines of, “you can do anything through hard work, but keep it safe.” Confusing? Yeah.
There’s a whole lot of layers of socio-economic, religious, and ancestral impacts at play here and I won’t digress any further except to say that despite the conflicting messaging, and some of the temporarily harmful side effects of early perfectionism and it’s accompanying self-destruction, I AM SO GRATEFUL FOR ARISTOTLE AND MY MOM TEACHING ME THAT GOING BIG CAN BE HABITUAL.
Somatic Expansion of our Comfort Zone takes REPS, bruh!
Good ol’ Ari’s quote circled back to me in the last few years with the epiphany, whoa, I don’t have to go full-scale perfectionism to find a super empowering, integrated, adult application of this concept! :D
As I pondered what to write about the last couple of weeks, this phrase kept popping into my mind. “Make doing the impossible your habit.” Idk if it’s my consistent prayerful connection to my unknown ancestors at their alter, a deepening of my Reiki practice, my supplications for mediumship or purely a benevolent gifting from Source, but these kinds of clear messages are becoming increasingly commonplace for me. I knew this was the topic at hand. So there’s the thesis statement, let’s make it somatic.
If you’ve worked with me in any capacity you’ve likely heard me talk about the Window of Tolerance. More if you click the link, but the gist is that we all have these nervous system windows of what is handle-able for us before we “F response” (fight, flight, freeze, fawn). We could also call it your comfort zone. Now, as we learn more about regulating our own unique nervous system and apply somatic tools to our own triggers and responses, we can EXPAND our window of tolerance, or our comfort zone.
In other words, ditch the old “get outside your comfort zone” and replace it with “heal your nervous system to GROW your comfort zone so that increasingly edgier tasks are now within your window of tolerance!” Make sense? How exciting and liberating is this?! Basically if we consistently repeat actions that are slightly uncomfortable, while supporting our nervous system regulation somatically, we can grow what will be within our comfort zone. WOHOOO!! That’s celebration worthy in my book.
Back to using my life story as example, as I do haha. I was at a dinner party with ENM friends a few months back and we were answering question prompts to get to know each other. The question was something along the lines of “what is a great strength or quality you possess that you find helpful?” My response?
I jump right before I feel ready.
Not way before I am prepared. Not in a reckless, unsafe, injury prone way (though there have been moments of that, hello cliff diving dares from younger brothers!)
But mostly, I’m talking about that feeling, maybe you know, where your heart is pumping, and your body feels magnetically pulled, and you’re grinning and tingling just thinking about what might happen if you just say yes and go for it! I’m talking about that breath right before your analytical mind can turn on and talk you out of it.
Jump then.
That’s how I’ve made going big my normal.
My gut says, “go for full time pursuit of an acting career straight out of college, pack up everything you own in a car and drive to California, have this baby you’re nowhere near ready to parent, keep pursuing art while healing your trauma responses and parenting her, co-write-direct-produce-star in a feature film with a new love partner during a pandemic, go work at that festival last minute, invest in the business coaching that can heal your money trauma, go to the play party, ask out the hot girl, release a song, then another, step into a circle of hundreds of strangers and vocal improv, get the chickens you’ve wanted since you were ten, homeschool your child while running a business and single parenting, buy a bus with most of your savings and see the world!” —— and I say YES and jump, right before I lose my nerve.
Because, as I tell my mother who often asks me “why are you doing ____ right now?”
There is always a reason not to.
Over the years, I have painstakingly taught my body and my nervous system not to collapse, freeze, or go into panic when I’m presented with a big choice.
THIS DID NOT USED TO BE THE CASE.
I used to take upwards of an hour over the tiniest decisions, prompting another favorite childhood quote from my mother “to not decide is to decide.” Lols.
The sad truth is there were a lot of factors disempowering my connection to my own inner compass, but gut truth, my own self-consent, my yes and my no.
But over time, with lots of reckless hiccups and some whoopsie’s, I began to reconstruct trust in my Self.
And now, I’m quite comfortable with my knowing when something is a yes, no, or not right now. And now that I know that through years of self-repair and healing, my comfort zone is getting larger every day, so that truly nothing seems impossible.
Start with one impossible thing right now.
Like the Lewis Carroll quote from Through The Looking Glass when Alice says, "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Just start. What’s one thing you have convinced yourself is impossible, but deep down you keep wanting so badly that you know it really is meant to be for you? And what’s the next step towards that thing? Just keep taking those next steps!
I think maybe what Aristotle meant is not that excellence is our habit, meaning every little thing has to be superb, but rather, that our habits beget excellence. It’s easy to look at the people who have/have done what we want and just see the shiny things. But zoom out and see the day-to-day grunt mundanity of all the tiny habits it takes to get there.
Where does your nervous system need the healing? Is even thinking about the things you want causing collapse? Are you freezing during step 5? Are you fighting the hard work, or flying away from the communication it takes to make step 8 happen? We all have our survival “F” responses coded into our habitual patterns. But the great news is that patterns and habits can change, often way faster than we think. All it takes is somatic tending, mindset shifts, new skills, and repeatedly DO-ing excellent and mundane things that previously felt impossible, until they no longer are. :D
Caveat: Pick impossible things that are still safe. If you pick things that cause a bunch of harm those protector parts and F responses will get oh so much stronger. Choose healthy, rewarding, safe impossible things that give your system dopamine, oxytocin, satisfaction, without harm to negate the win or this process can backfire big time. Trust me, I tried it that way for a while. You’re better off skipping the self destruct phase if you can help it. And if you already did that, no worries! YOU CAN STILL HEAL. We are neuro-plastic beings ; )
I’m with you. Let’s do impossible things by breakfast. <333
Me on top of an arch in Utah I was terrified to climb but knew it was my impossible thing of the day….right before handling a tire blowout became the second one.
Creator Corner Collective
Here’s the part where I tell you about somebody else! I’m super stoked to introduce you to my friend and colleague COCO! Coco teaches authentic relating for dancers, conscious kink, kinky parts work, and many other incredible workshops to help us stay embodied, curious, and playful with one another in this life. She’s teaching play fighting at a yummy looking movement and connection festival called SoulPlay in Ahwahnee, CA June 4-7. I highly recommend you check out her instagram and accompanying bio links for all the details and sign up for all her teachings. Her work is impactful, relate-able, fun and caring towards your journey.
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