Wise Love - Sessions with KaSia Soraya

15/12/2025

Safety is not just a feeling.
Safety is the treatment.”
— Stephen Porges, PhD

Safety isn’t something we talk ourselves into.
It isn’t reassurance.
It isn’t insight.

Safety is a physiological state.

As Stephen Porges says:
“The nervous system evaluates risk before the brain evaluates meaning.”

Before insight.
Before choice.
Before change.

If the body doesn’t feel safe, it will protect.
Not because it’s resistant —
but because it’s doing its job.

Another reminder from Porges:
“If we want to change behavior, we have to change the physiological state that supports that behavior.”

This is why understanding isn’t enough.
Why techniques fail under stress.
Why healing can’t be rushed.

The nervous system doesn’t respond to reason.
It responds to cues of safety.

Tone of voice.
Pace.
Presence.
Connection.

Or, as Porges puts it:
“Safety is not the absence of threat.
It is the presence of connection.”

Safety isn’t what comes after the work.
Safety is the work.

14/12/2025

08/12/2025

04/12/2025

When you begin regulating your nervous system, you may feel worse before you feel better.
This isn’t a setback.
It’s sensation returning.
A system that survived by tightening is learning it can soften.

Unraveling can feel messy—not because something is wrong,
but because something real is finally allowed to move.

Go slowly.
Stay in relationship.
Let the body lead.

Nervous system regulation is not about “calming down.”
It’s about increasing capacity for sensation, emotion, and contact.

As safety grows, what was once too much may come back online.
That phase doesn’t mean you should push harder.
It means pacing, support, and attuned presence matter more than ever.

Healing is not heroic.
It’s intelligent.

— Kasia Soraya

01/12/2025

“Assertion and recognition constitute the poles of a delicate balance. This balance is integral to what is called “differentiation”: the individual’s development as a self that is aware of its distinctness from others. Yet this balance, and with it the differentiation of self and other, is difficult to sustain.2 In particular, the need for recognition gives rise to a paradox. Recognition is that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self. It allows the self to realize its agency and authorship in a tangible way. But such recognition can only come from an other whom we, in turn, recognize as a person in his or her own right. This struggle to be recognized by an other, and thus confirm our selves, was shown by Hegel to form the core of relationships of domination.”

― Jessica Benjamin, "The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination"

30/11/2025

This was one of the very first sentences I learned in my Somatic Experiencing training.

At the time, I understood it.
Later, I recognized myself in it.
Much later, I realized it had been quietly mapping my entire life.

Trauma isn’t the event.
It’s what had nowhere to go.

What wasn’t met.
What wasn’t named.
What the nervous system was forced to carry alone, without regulation, without resonance, without a witnessing other nervous system.

The absence of an empathic witness isn’t just emotional.
It’s biological.
It shapes how the body learns safety, connection, timing, trust.

And the good news—often missed in fast, inspirational quotes—is this:
what was shaped in absence can be reshaped in presence.

Slowly. Precisely. In contact.
Through attuned relationships, therapeutic or otherwise, where the body finally learns:
“I am not alone with this anymore.”

This sentence keeps deepening with time.
So does my respect for how intelligent the nervous system truly is.

—
Wise Love ✨

29/11/2025

✨You really have to be devoted to noticing beauty.
Not casually.
Not when it’s convenient.
Devoted.

Because if you don’t train your attention, the world will train it for you.
And the default curriculum today is catastrophe.

The nervous system is a scandalous realist.
It scans for threat, not meaning.
It remembers pain more vividly than it remembers any pleasure.
Left unattended, it will curate a hall of dread and call it reality.

So beauty is not naïveté.
It is discipline.🌱

Beauty is
noticing the way light lands on a table after grief.
How breath returns on its own after panic.
How laughter still sneaks in, illegal and undefeated.
How the body keeps choosing life
long after the mind has filed an objection.

This isn’t spiritual bypassing.
This is survival literacy.

Terror grows in us when our attention narrows.
Beauty expands the field.
It gives the nervous system evidence that danger is not the whole story.

There is horror in the world.
No need to exaggerate it.
But there is also astonishing tenderness- quiet, stubborn, everywhere.

You have to practice seeing it.
Daily. Relentlessly.
Like your sanity depends on it.
Because it does.
WiseLove - KaSia Soraya

With Wise Love -
/KaSia Soraya

27/11/2025

Love and connection heal trauma
— but only the kind that doesn’t demand performance.

Trauma wasn’t created in isolation.
It formed where connection failed:
where attunement was missing, safety was inconsistent,
and being yourself cost too much.

Healing happens in relational fields that are
slow enough, honest enough, and sturdy enough
to let the nervous system stop scanning for danger.

Not intense love.
Not dramatic connection.
Not saving each other.

But regulated presence.
Mutual respect.
And relationships where truth doesn’t threaten belonging.

The body doesn’t heal because someone loves you.
It heals when love is reliable, boundaried, and real.

Wise Love
— Kasia Soraya Leffler

27/11/2025

What if thinking doesn’t begin in the brain, but in the quiet, endless labour of our cells? In today’s essay, a senior researcher working on self-consciousness and embodiment argues that cognition is rooted not in a solitary, cerebral mind but in the collective metabolic and immune processes that keep a body alive.

Long before neurons fire, our cells are already self-organising and distinguishing self from non-self. And before we contemplate anything, we are gestated, regulated and sustained within another body. To rethink cognition, we may need to begin here – with the quiet choreography of life that allows thought to arise at all. https://aeon.co/essays/why-you-need-your-whole-body-from-head-to-toes-to-think