I wake at 5:15 with a feeling rather than a sentence.
Then the sentence arrives:
Why did I become a teacher?
It doesn’t land as philosophy. It lands as sensation: dryness in the throat, a vague pressure at my temples, a heaviness behind the eyes that wants coffee and disappearance. As I imagine walking into school, I can already feel the institution taking shape inside my body: the timetable, the bell changes, the expectation to “manage” X for a block.
X arrives in my mind before I do: the relief that his support is finally shared, the echo of another Education Assistant proudly describing how she tells him, “I’m the boss,” the exasperation of yet another adult yesterday afternoon. No one calls it bullying, but the bullying paradigm is right there: you submit, I stay in control.
The system decides what counts as a “good day.” Our nervous systems adapt around it.
Beneath that, my mother’s death sits like a low-frequency hum. Ninety years, a long decline, an expected ending. But none of that makes grief tidy. Old stories surface: Am I worthy of love? Did I give enough? Was I enough? They don’t come as clear sentences at first, just as that dorsal pull to stay in bed, to skip the day, to go get a Starbucks at six and vanish into the fog.
Breath, Grief, and “Enough”
At 6:01, with the bedroom light soft around me, I choose breath over coffee – for now. I put on Taylor Somerville’s guided breathing and follow his instructions: hand on belly, hand on chest, breath moving slowly in and out.
He talks about love, light, peace, about being stronger than you think you are. Under other circumstances, I might roll my eyes. Today, my cells are grateful for the script.
The long breath-holds are where I feel the edge: lungs full, time suspended, the body wanting to gasp. My old story about being loveable flares briefly and then dissolves into pure sensation: the tension in my chest, the quiet tremor in my diaphragm, the way I can actually stay ten seconds longer than I thought I could.
Right there, grief and nervous system practice meet.
I don’t transcend anything.
I just hold a little more than I thought I could.
When the practice ends, I feel a small but real difference: I’m not “fixed,” but I’m more here. Enough to notice that one exercise is enough. Any more would come from striving and self-critique. Today, “enough” will have to be enough.
The Accident, Interoception, and a Missing Language
On the walk in, my mind circles back to yesterday’s woodshop accident: the boy who lost three fingertips.
I see again the moment in the shop when he opened the doors to the yard and the woodshop teacher asked for them to be closed because it was getting cold.
“I’m hot,” the boy said. Really hot.
It was November. I was in a sweater and not hot at all. I suggested he stand in the doorway to cool down. At the time it felt like a tiny, practical suggestion. Today, it looks more like a clue.
His body was talking.
Our system had no shared language to answer.
Later, when the corridors were blocked, when the vice principal and teacher stood in an empty shop with gloves on, when a counsellor told me he’d severed three fingertips, I could feel the throughline:
“I’m hot.”
The open doors.
The distraction.
The machine.
Not as blame.
Not as certainty.
Just as a pattern we keep refusing to see: interoception as warning signal, ignored.
He hadn’t been taught what to do with “I feel off.”
We haven’t been taught what to do when a student says it.
Today, woodshop is temporarily in the library. A retired woodshop teacher from England is covering—seventies, hearing aid, voice that carries that familiar English mixture of warmth and sharpness. He begins by talking about safety and accidents:
You can’t be everywhere. Accidents happen in moments. You don’t plan them. That’s why they’re called accidents.
He tells stories of kids who forget safety glasses, of distractions, of phones, of friends talking too close to machines. He speaks about teacher responsibility, guilt, the need for self-care. He encourages students to talk to counsellors if they’re upset.
All true. All important.
And still, I can feel the missing piece: no one is yet saying,
“If your body feels wrong – too hot, too tired, too floaty – that is safety information.”
No one is teaching what to do when your nervous system is already frayed before you touch the blade.
This is the turning point hiding inside the “terrible accident.”
Not just more rules.
More interoceptive literacy.
Winhall’s Map in Real Time
Jan Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model gives me colours and shapes for what I’m seeing everywhere:
- Yellow: FLOCK—ventral safety, connection, ease.
- Red: FIGHT/FLIGHT—mobilised, edgy, on alert.
- Gray: FOLD—dorsal, collapse, numb.
And then the blends:
- Yellow + Red: that fun, fired-up energy in a class that’s presenting or playing.
- Red + Gray: fixation, freeze, fawn—swinging between panic and collapse.
- Yellow + Red + Gray: the “I’m fine” mask while cycling through overwhelm.
- Gray + Yellow: quiet, restful flow—true restoration.
Today, the whole building feels like a living diagram of those states.
The foyer first thing: students arriving, some chatty (FLOCK), some wired (FIGHT/FLIGHT), some glazed over (FOLD).
Me in bed, thinking about X and my mother: Gray + Yellow—dorsal heaviness with a thread of ventral awareness.
The woodshop accident: Red + Gray—overheated body, distracted mind, one moment of inattention, then collapse.
The retired teacher’s safety talk: Yellow and Red, with his own unresolved Gray just under the surface. He mentions knowing what it’s like as a teacher to carry a serious accident, how it affects you, how you question yourself. You can hear both care and old shock in his voice.
What strikes me is how none of this is in the curriculum.
And yet, it is the curriculum.
A Morning with X: Tracking Energy, Not Performance
By 8:29, I’m in the foyer. The vice principal tells me the boy has lost three fingertips. The woodshop teacher is off for the week. Everyone involved is now doing their own version of Winhall’s FOLD and FLOCK—trauma and support, fear and care, all interwoven.
X arrives. In math, he manages about twenty minutes. The “Mad Minute” mental arithmetic holds him in that Yellow + Red zone: regulated but alert, focused but playful. I advocate for two minutes of work instead of one. The teacher agrees. He smiles. It’s a small moment, but one that deposits safety into his nervous system.
When he’s done, he’s done. We leave before his state tips fully into Red.
We end up in the weight room. He’s on the bench, doing chest presses. I spot him, then ask him to stand up, arms wide, and say, “I am strong. I am beautiful. I am loved.”
“Not beautiful,” he says. Flat. Immediate.
I tell him I disagree. But I also recognise the truth of his refusal. Underneath it is a long history of Gray and Red: collapse and agitation, shame and defiance. His story—I’m not beautiful—is sitting on top of a nervous system that’s been in survival mode for years.
After weights, we move outside with three baseballs, a bat, a cone. He hits balls. Flips the cone. Uses it to splash water. Scans the street for bikes and dogs. His whole system is one long act of neuroception: safe? unsafe? boring? exciting? better regulation somewhere else?
From the outside, it looks like aimless wandering.
From the inside, it’s continuous state management.
My own state shifts alongside his: Yellow voice, Red vigilance, Gray fatigue. I can feel the old conditioning creeping in: Shouldn’t there be more structure? Shouldn’t we be doing something more “educational”?
It feels, at moments, like he’s a child playing with sand on a beach while the institution stands at the promenade muttering, “This is not the curriculum.”
But this is his curriculum: movement, co-regulation, micro-moments of FLOCK.
Shame in Woodshop, and Macbeth as Nervous System Event
Later, I’m back in the makeshift woodshop in the library, working on a small box with a student who’s helping me. I mention this to the cover teacher—this retired English woodshop teacher—and say I’m supporting the student. Then I notice the student is actually in the room, listening.
Instant heat. Old shame. The familiar sense of having “talked about” someone instead of “with” them. I correct myself quickly, turn to the student, and say, “You’re helping me make the box. It’s a gift to me that you’re helping.” He smiles and agrees. In that moment, he regulates me.
This is The Bullied Brain inside out: not just how systems bully students, but how old bullying templates inside me get activated by moments like this. The instinct to criticise myself harshly, to withdraw, to replay the mistake. The nervous system trying to collapse into Gray.
Staying present here—apologising, repairing, softening—is a micro-act of resistance against the bullying paradigm in my own head.
Later still, I find myself attached to an English class watching Macbeth onscreen. Joel Coen’s version. I’ve watched it at home and felt my whole body revolt: the visual brilliance, the expressionist imagery, the stark sets—and then a Macbeth who feels too settled, too old, not combustible enough. A production that, for me, misses the physiological terror of the play.
In class, watching students sit through this film, I feel a familiar tightening: not just as a viewer, but as someone who taught Macbeth for eighteen years. There’s a flash of judgment: this is a lazy choice, a way to “get through” the text rather than inhabit it. I had planned on not saying anything to the teacher. The old fawn reflex whispers: Don’t be difficult. Don’t be that person.
But inside, something else is happening: my own Yellow + Red + Gray blend. Ventral love for the play and for students’ nervous systems. Sympathetic agitation at how the film flattens the psychological horror into mood. Dorsal ache saying, You don’t belong here anymore. You’re surplus to requirements.
It hits me that Macbeth is, at heart, a nervous system story: witches as triggers, imagination as accelerant, murder as sympathetic overload, hallucinations as a brain under siege. Coen shows the murder; Shakespeare makes us sit in the pre-murder autonomic storm. One version is behaviour. The other is biology.
Watching this with a room full of adolescents whose phones are never far from hand, I can’t help but think:
If we taught them what FIGHT, FLIGHT, FLOCK, and FOLD feel like in their bodies,
Macbeth would make more sense than any worksheet ever could.
The Bullying Paradigm as Nervous System Pattern
Underneath the accident, the woodshop shame, the Macbeth frustration, the EA’s “I’m the boss,” the vice principal’s decisions, the students on phones, my grief—you can see the bullying paradigm at work in subtle ways.
Not as moustache-twirling villains.
As patterns:
- Containment over curiosity.
- Compliance over co-regulation.
- Efficiency over interoception.
- “Get through the content” over “What is this doing to bodies?”
Robert Sapolsky talks about how behaviour is the last link in a long chain of biology, environment, history, and context. By the time we see “defiance,” “laziness,” “inattention,” so much has happened beneath the surface.
In this sense, the bullying paradigm isn’t just what adults do to children. It’s what institutions do to nervous systems when they refuse to acknowledge state. X becomes a “problem” instead of a nervous system doing its best. A boy who says, “I’m hot” becomes “unlucky” instead of a flashing warning light.
And me? I am not outside this. I absorb it. My body wakes at 5:15 asking why I’m a teacher. I fantasise about coffee and avoidance. I feel shame flush my cheeks in a library. I feel grief pull me toward collapse. I watch Macbeth and feel my own old teacher-self trying to fight for meaning in a room that just wants to get to the end of the period.
Teaching from Within: Energy as the Real Curriculum
All of this brings me back to the framework I keep circling:
Sense – State – Story – Steady – Start Again.
Sense: notice the tingling, the heat, the numbness, the speeding heart, the droop.
State: name it—FLOCK, FIGHT, FLIGHT, FOLD, or a blend.
Story: recognise that the narrative (“I’m a bad teacher,” “He’s impossible,” “This is hopeless”) is only the top 20%.
Steady: use whatever brings you a little more ventral—breath, walking, a friendly face, a kind word, a moment outside.
Start Again: not as a heroic reboot, but as a quiet willingness to stay in the experiment.
Today, that experiment involved:
- breathing through grief,
- witnessing an accident through the lens of interoception,
- walking alongside X as he tracked his world like a radar dish,
- catching myself in old shame patterns,
- resisting the urge to disappear,
- and watching Macbeth as both a film and a diagnostic of how little we talk about state.
The science teacher’s line about energy won’t leave me:
Lifting something up or pulling it down doesn’t change the amount of energy.
It just changes how the energy is distributed.
That is schools.
That is trauma.
That is grief.
That is X.
That is me, waking at 5:15.
The question, then, is not whether we will carry the energy of this work.
We will. Our bodies already are.
The question is:
Can we redistribute it toward awareness, interoception, and shared regulation—
instead of letting it pool in accidents, shutdown, and quiet despair?
That is why I am still a teacher.
Not to deliver content into heads,
but to notice, with as much honesty as I can bear,
how bodies are bearing what the system refuses to feel.
And to keep asking, gently and persistently:
What if nervous system literacy is the missing curriculum?
What if teaching from within is not a luxury, but the only way out of the bullying paradigm?
For today, that question is enough.