Hope Is a Nervous-System Skill

Part of what makes iLumn8 unique is the caliber of practitioners and partners we work with—people doing thoughtful, ethical work in personal development and wellness. From time to time, I'll be sharing insights from these partners when something lands as particularly valuable.

Today's piece is from Robyn Alley-Hay, an iLumn8 partner who leads our Goddess Living community for women. What she's discovered about hope and the nervous system feels essential right now—not just for women, but for all of us navigating this moment.

Here's what Robyn had to say:

In recent weeks, I have been struggling with maintaining hope. Hope for world peace. Hope for human rights and oppressed people. Hope that love wins over fear. Hope for my relationships, my work, my finances.

With the political turmoil we're witnessing—rollbacks of rights, policies that devalue essential work, the relentless churn of alarming headlines—perhaps you've been struggling too. Feeling flat. Disconnected. Oddly uninterested in things that once felt meaningful.

I did what I usually do when I'm struggling: I went down the rabbit hole of asking questions and searching for answers in research, literature, and self-reflection.

Here is what I found: Hope is not something you either have or don't have. It is not optimism, not denial, and not pretending things are fine when they are not. Hope is a state your nervous system can enter—or leave—based on conditions.

Which means hope is not a personality trait or a moral accomplishment. It is shaped by experience, by environment, and by whether your body senses that there is room to breathe, to move, and to matter.

That also means hope is trainable. And understanding this, it becomes impossible to ignore that hope is a form of resistance.

What Your Nervous System Is Asking

Your nervous system is constantly running a quiet assessment beneath conscious thought, asking questions that determine how much life energy you have access to in any given moment:

Does what I do matter?Is there a way forward?Will my effort change anything?

When the answers begin to feel like no, the system adapts. Energy drops. Imagination narrows. The world becomes smaller and heavier.

This is not a personal failure or lack of resilience. It is biology responding to perceived powerlessness, a body conserving resources when it senses that effort may no longer lead to change.

Understanding this helps explain why hope feels so difficult right now. We are living in a time that overwhelms the nervous system by design. There is relentless information, high-stakes language, and constant urgency paired with very little lived sense of agency.

This is not accidental.

Systems that depend on control rely on one thing above all: that people stop believing their actions make a difference. A nervous system locked in threat is easier to manage. A population that feels helpless is less likely to imagine alternatives. A person who is exhausted is less likely to resist.

So when your body feels tired, numb, or hopeless, it does not mean you are disengaged from reality. It means you are inside it, responding exactly as a nervous system would to prolonged exposure to threat without relief.

The Three Ingredients of Hope

From a nervous-system perspective, hope is not a feeling you wait for. It is a condition you cultivate. Research suggests that hope is made of three simple and radical ingredients:

Meaning — the felt sense that something matters to you personally, not in theory but in your body.

Pathways — the belief that there might be more than one way through, more than one possible future.

Agency — the embodied knowing that your choices, however small, can influence what happens next.

When even one of these is present, the nervous system remains engaged. Hope is not certainty or reassurance. Hope is enough possibility to keep showing up.

The body often knows hope before the mind can name it. You may feel it as a slightly deeper breath, a softening in the shoulders, or a flicker of curiosity where there had been shutdown.

This is why hope cannot be argued into existence or commanded through willpower. It cannot be shamed or reasoned into place. Hope has to be experienced. Often quietly. Often collectively. Often through small moments that remind the body it is not alone and not entirely powerless.

Hope as Resistance

This is where hope becomes a form of resistance. A nervous system capable of hope is harder to dominate. It remains curious instead of collapsing into cynicism. It stays relational instead of turning against itself or others. It continues to imagine futures beyond the one being imposed.

Hope does not mean you are naïve or disconnected from reality. It means you are refusing to let despair do the work of oppression for you. That refusal matters, because despair narrows the field of possibility, while hope keeps it open.

At Goddess Living, we practice reclaiming our worth. We believe that our needs matter, that rest is productive, that caring for ourselves isn't indulgent—it's essential. But this internal work exists within a larger cultural context that constantly undermines it.
 
Every time you struggle to prioritize your own wellbeing without guilt, you're pushing against centuries of conditioning that says care work—whether for ourselves or others—doesn't really count. Every time you hesitate to invest in your own growth, education, or healing because it feels "too much," you're absorbing the same message this policy sends to nurses: your care doesn't matter as much.

I want to ask you something—not as a demand, but as an inquiry worth sitting with:

• What supports your nervous system in staying engaged?
• What helps your body remember that you matter, that your presence makes a difference, that you are not alone in this?

I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts. Leave us a comment and share what's present for you—even if it's uncertainty, even if it's struggle. These conversations matter.

(And if you're looking for specific practices to work with these ideas, our Goddess Living membership offers guided support for tending to your nervous system's capacity for hope.)

With you in this,

Robyn Alley-Hay

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