The Nourishment Cycle: How to Create a Deeply Fulfilled Life (and Relationships)
TLDR: The Nourishment Cycle
Your relationships can only thrive to the degree that you are nourished.
This post explores the Nourishment Cycle—a powerful four-step map (from Hakomi therapy) that reveals where fulfillment breaks down:
Insight – Can you feel what you want?
Action – Do you move toward it?
Nourishment – Can you let it in when it arrives?
Celebration + Rest – Do you pause and integrate before moving on?
Each stage shows where trauma, conditioning, and nervous system strategies may be interrupting your aliveness.
And each one has a doorway back to joy, clarity, and genuine intimacy.
This is self-love work. Nervous system work. Relationship work.
And it all starts with your capacity to receive your own life.
Step One: Insight
Can you feel what you want?
This is the place where desire begins.
But for many of us, it’s the place where nourishment stops before it starts.
When you pause and ask yourself, “What do I want?”… can you feel anything real?
Or do you get fog? Self-doubt? The need to check with someone else first?
When this part of the cycle is blocked, life feels grey and disorienting. You may look successful on the outside, but inside, you’re hovering just above your body—watching a life unfold that doesn’t feel like your own.
What causes this?
Often, it’s early conditioning. If your caregivers ignored, dismissed, or mocked your instincts growing up, you learned to cut them off. You stopped trusting your inner compass because it didn’t feel safe to follow it.
Over time, desire goes quiet. You lose access to the hunger that fuels your aliveness.
When this is in flow:
You don’t second-guess every decision. You feel rooted in your preferences, guided by sparks of inspiration. You start to trust that the voice inside you isn’t dangerous—it’s actually sacred.
To begin healing:
☑ Start to notice what pulls your attention
☑ Track what feels a little nourishing—and ask what sparked it
☑ Let your system warm up to the idea that your desires matter
You don’t need a 180-degree overhaul.
A 1% shift—repeated—can completely change the course of your life.
Step Two: Action
Do you feel your grounded power to move toward what you want?
Okay—you know what you want. But do you act on it?
Or do you wait, wilt, overthink, delay, and suddenly forget why it mattered?
This part of the cycle is where so many beautiful lives go unlived—not because of laziness, but because of fear.
Why?
Because acting on desire has a cost: visibility, risk, potential failure.
If your early attempts at initiative were criticized, controlled, or shut down… you likely carry unconscious shame around doing things your way. Especially if you were met with judgment or punishment when you made mistakes.
You may also carry a deep fear of failure—so much so that your nervous system would rather shut you down than risk trying.
Google X (the moonshot factory behind things like self-driving cars) actually rewards failure. They celebrate it because failure is proof that you’re innovating.
You don’t need to run a robot lab to use this principle.
When this is in flow:
You feel energized. Motivated. Alive. Your own joy becomes your fuel source. You take risks, and the world starts to respond. You become magnetic—not because everything works, but because you’re moving.
To begin healing:
☑ Write a letter from your fear—what is it afraid will happen if you fail?
☑ Try one small action you can safely “fail” at today (and celebrate it)
☑ Watch Jia Jiang’s TED Talk on 100 Days of Rejection
This isn’t about pushing yourself into burnout.
It’s about reclaiming the dignity of striving and creating.
Step Three: Nourishment
Do you actually let the good things in?
This is the one that almost everyone skips.
You ask for something. You receive it.
And then… your body leans away.
Instead of soaking it in, you distract yourself. You plan the next thing. You minimize it. You get suspicious.
Why?
Because most of us live with a ceiling on joy.
We learned to exist in a narrow window—not too happy, not too sad.
We became skilled at surviving, not thriving.
When joy rises above that invisible set point, we get nervous.
Why?
Because early on, joy wasn’t safe. The people we loved the most may have mixed it with volatility, abandonment, or shame. So now our bodies keep joy at a manageable level—just enough to stay upright, not enough to overflow.
Somatic healing helps retrain this.
When this is in flow:
You can let yourself have what you’ve created. You can feel joy without reflexively scanning for danger. You start to feel like life is happening with you, not something you have to chase or claw toward.
To begin healing:
☑ Notice where you turn away from joy—especially when things are going well
☑ Practice letting small pleasures land (sunlight, tea, a compliment)
☑ Know that your discomfort with joy is a nervous system adaptation, not a moral failure
You are allowed to feel good. You are allowed to arrive.
And if you don’t feel safe there yet… it doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It just means your system needs time to learn that joy is safe.
Step Four: Celebration + Rest
Do you integrate?
This is the step that restores the cycle and builds long-term resilience.
Without it, we live in the myth of constant forward motion—perpetually chasing the next “enough.”
But when we pause to celebrate and integrate, something profound happens: we become the version of ourselves that created the thing. We let it land. We build capacity.
When this is blocked:
Life feels like a treadmill.
There’s always more to do. Success never feels like “success.” Rest feels unsafe, or indulgent.
Often, this comes from being praised only when we performed. Or growing up with caregivers who couldn’t celebrate our wins without raising the bar.
When this is in flow:
You feel satisfaction. You can rest without guilt. You move from a place of fullness rather than depletion. You don’t confuse urgency with importance.
To begin healing:
☑ Track where you deny yourself rest
☑ Practice pausing after action (not just before)
☑ Let yourself feel satisfied—even if it’s just for one breath
Rest isn’t the absence of value.
It’s what allows your value to live.
This is Relationship Work
Why does all this matter?
Because your capacity for love is limited by your capacity to receive life.
If you’re stuck in self-doubt, overwork, numbness, or chronic dissatisfaction—no relationship can fix that for you.
But when you learn to let yourself be nourished…
You stop trying to extract nourishment from others.
You stop handing out love from an empty cup.
You stop seeking proof that you’re allowed to rest, want, feel, or try.
You start becoming the kind of person who can co-create extraordinary love—because you’ve built a life that’s already full of it.
Not perfect. Not constant.
But real.
Yours.
And from that place?
Everything changes.
If This Is You (Or Someone You Love)
If this resonates—if you've felt yourself stuck in over-efforting, over-giving, always reaching for something just out of reach—I want you to know:
You’re not broken. And you’re not behind.
So many of us were never taught how to receive. How to feel joy without bracing. How to trust our own longing.
We learned to survive. Not to arrive.
But that can change.
This cycle—Insight, Action, Nourishment, Rest—isn’t a productivity hack.
It’s a map for returning to yourself.
It’s how you begin to create a life that feels like yours.
A life where your relationships, your work, your spiritual practice, your joy... can root and grow from fullness.
This is the kind of work I do with clients every day—coaching rooted in nervous system repair, somatic depth, and fierce love.
And it often starts here: with reclaiming your right to want, to rest, and to be nourished.
If you're ready to explore what that might look like:
– Download the Sacred Agreements template to start naming what deeply nourishes your relationships.
– Reach out and connect with me to explore where your nourishment cycle might be stuck.
You don’t need to figure it all out alone.
You just need to begin.
With devotion,
Nick