Your Nervous System Isn't Broken — But It Might Be Stuck
An Introduction to The Functional Living Method™ and the Science of State Flexibility™
You've tried the stretches. The deep breathing apps. The meditation challenges. Maybe even therapy, physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture — some of it helped, some of it didn't, and none of it quite reached the thing underneath.
That persistent tension in your shoulders that no amount of massage resolves. The fatigue that doesn't match how much sleep you're getting. The low-grade anxiety that lives more in your chest than in your thoughts. The feeling that your body is working against you rather than with you.
What if the issue isn't that something is wrong with you — but that your nervous system is stuck?
What Does "Stuck" Actually Mean?
Your autonomic nervous system — the part of you that operates beneath conscious awareness — is constantly making decisions about safety. It regulates your heart rate, your breathing, your muscle tension, your digestion, and your capacity for connection, focus, and rest. It does all of this without asking your permission.
This isn't a design flaw. It's an ancient, elegant system that evolved to keep you alive. Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges, PhD, describes how this system organizes itself into a hierarchy of states: a ventral vagal state that supports social engagement and calm; a sympathetic state that mobilizes you for action (fight or flight); and a dorsal vagal state that conserves energy through shutdown or freeze. In a well-regulated system, you move fluidly between these states as the situation demands — activating when you need to, recovering when it's over.
But for many people, that fluidity has been lost. The system gets locked into a narrow loop — cycling between the same two or three stress responses — because somewhere along the way, it stopped registering enough safety to do anything else. The original reason may be long gone. The pattern remains.
This is what it means to be stuck. Not broken. Stuck.
State Flexibility™: The Capacity That Changes Everything
At the core of The Functional Living Method™ — developed by Nicole Tavernier at Tantien Integrative Medicine in Branford, Connecticut — is a concept called State Flexibility™.
State Flexibility™ is the capacity to move fluidly between activation and rest. To meet a challenge — physical, emotional, cognitive — and return to baseline without it taking hours or days. To access the full range of states your nervous system was designed for, rather than defaulting to the same protective responses under stress.
It is the ability to stay grounded in connection with others without bracing. To sustain effort without running on adrenaline. To rest without collapsing into shutdown. It is range, resilience, and — perhaps most importantly — choice in how you respond.
State Flexibility™ is not the same as being calm. It's not relaxation. It's not the absence of stress. It is the capacity to handle stress and come back — fully. It is what allows your body to hold safety, not just seek it.
This is the through-line of Nicole's work. Every tool she uses, every session she guides, is building this one capacity.
Three Doorways In
The Functional Living Method™ works through three integrated pillars, weighted to what a person's system needs on any given day — not a fixed protocol.
Breathe — Functional Breath work Rooted in the Oxygen Advantage® Method
Most people don't realize their breathing is dysfunctional. Chronic mouth breathing, upper-chest breathing, over-breathing — these patterns are remarkably common and have measurable physiological consequences. They reduce carbon dioxide tolerance, impair oxygen delivery to tissues (a principle known as the Bohr Effect), dysregulate the nervous system, and keep the body locked in a low-grade state of stress.
The Oxygen Advantage method, developed by Patrick McKeown and grounded in the clinical breathing science pioneered by Dr. Konstantin Buteyko, retrains these patterns at the source. Through nasal breathing, light and slow breathing exercises, and breath-hold techniques that improve CO₂ tolerance, this approach restores the one autonomic function you can consciously override — and uses it as a lever for regulating the entire system.
Research has demonstrated that athletes with higher CO₂ tolerance experience significantly less breathlessness at equivalent workloads, and that the difference between endurance athletes and non-athletes often comes down to ventilatory chemosensitivity — how strongly the body reacts to shifts in blood gases. This isn't just about athletic performance. It's about how efficiently your body uses oxygen at rest, during stress, and during recovery.
Move — Somatic Movement Informed by Feldenkrais and Hanna Somatics
The Feldenkrais Method, developed by physicist and engineer Moshé Feldenkrais, is a system of somatic education that uses gentle, guided movement explorations to help the nervous system recognize its own habitual patterns — and discover alternatives. Peer-reviewed research, including a systematic review published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, has documented its effects on improved posture, reduced muscle tone, and enhanced body awareness. Neuroscience research has shown that Feldenkrais practice modulates sensorimotor network activity, measurable via EEG changes in the mu band — the neural signature of motor learning and body-mapping.
These are not exercises in the conventional sense. They are invitations for your nervous system to notice what it's doing and to choose something different. When safety registers in the body, habitual bracing and guarding begin to soften. Movement becomes more fluid — not because you forced it, but because the neurological conditions for change were met.
Hanna Somatics, building on the work of Thomas Hanna (a student of Feldenkrais), focuses specifically on what Hanna called "sensory-motor amnesia" — the phenomenon where muscles become chronically contracted outside of conscious awareness, often in response to stress, injury, or repetitive patterns. By slowly and deliberately re-engaging the brain's control of these muscles, Hanna Somatics helps restore voluntary movement where the body had been operating on autopilot.
Regulate — Nervous System Reconditioning Through Energy Work and Sound Immersion
The third pillar works at a level many people have never thought to address. Through energy-healing modalities and sound immersion — woven together in real time based on what the system needs — this work supports the nervous system in releasing what it's been holding and restoring coherent flow.
This isn't abstract. The body is an electrical system. Injury, illness, scar tissue, and prolonged stress can disrupt its natural signaling. Sound and energy-based approaches work with these disruptions directly, supporting the conditions for deeper regulation and expanded capacity.
Who This Work Is For
The people who get the most from The Functional Living Method™ tend to share a few things in common. They've been dealing with something that hasn't fully resolved — chronic tension, unexplained fatigue, anxiety that lives in the body, pain that persists after the injury has healed. They've been through conventional and sometimes alternative routes. Things helped for a while, then plateaued.
They're not looking for someone to fix them. They're looking to understand how their own system works and to build the skill of working with it.
This is not therapy. It is not fitness. It is the missing foundation underneath both — a way of learning to breathe functionally, move functionally, and live from a body that is no longer locked in protection.
What Becomes Possible
There are no universal promises. What there is — consistently — is a nervous system with more range. Tension that releases not because it was forced, but because the system recognized it no longer needed to brace. Faster recovery from stress. Breathing that actually regulates rather than merely maintains. And a baseline of body awareness that gives you more information, more choice, and more capacity — not just on a good day, but as the norm.
The Functional Living Method™ is offered by Nicole Tavernier at Tantien Integrative Medicine in Branford, CT.
Nicole Tavernier is a somatic movement educator, Oxygen Advantage® certified breathwork instructor, and developer of the Functional Living Method™ at Tantien Integrative Medicine in Branford, CT. She works with adults across the Connecticut Shoreline and Greater New Haven area.
To learn more, visit The Functional Living Method™ or schedule a free 15-minute consultation to find out if this work is right for you.
You can also reach Nicole directly at nicole@tantienim.com.
Sources & References
Polyvagal Theory and Nervous System Regulation
Porges, S.W. (2022). "Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety." Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227. Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/integrative-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227/full
Porges, S.W. (2025). "Polyvagal theory: a journey from physiological observation to neural innervation and clinical insight." Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2025.1659083. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12479538/
Polyvagal Institute. "What is Polyvagal Theory?" https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org/whatispolyvagaltheory
Feldenkrais Method
Hillier, S. & Worley, A. (2015). "The Effectiveness of the Feldenkrais Method: A Systematic Review of the Evidence." Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4408630/
Taccolini, A. et al. (2021). "The Empowering Effect of Embodied Awareness Practice on Body Structural Map and Sensorimotor Activity: The Case of Feldenkrais Method." Frontiers in Psychology. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8699347/
Phuphanich, M.E. et al. (2020). Feldenkrais Method overview. Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America. Referenced via ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/feldenkrais-method
Functional Breathing and CO₂ Tolerance
Oxygen Advantage. "The Method — Foundations of Functional Breathing." https://oxygenadvantage.com/pages/the-method
The claim that athletes demonstrate significantly greater CO₂ tolerance at rest than untrained individuals is cited by Oxygen Advantage (https://oxygenadvantage.com/science/holding-your-breath-benefits/) and attributed to a study conducted at Nagoya University. Note: I was unable to independently verify the original Nagoya University paper at its primary source. Nicole may wish to verify this citation through Patrick McKeown's published references before including it.
The Bohr Effect — The principle that hemoglobin releases oxygen more effectively in the presence of carbon dioxide — is established respiratory physiology found in standard medical and biochemistry textbooks. It is not attributed to a single modern paper.
Hanna Somatics — The concept of "sensory-motor amnesia" was developed by Thomas Hanna, PhD, a student of Moshé Feldenkrais, and is described in his book Somatics: Reawakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health (1988, Da Capo Press). This is a widely referenced text in the somatic education field.
All other content — including the concept of State Flexibility™, the three-pillar framework, the description of who this work serves, and the overall methodology — is the original intellectual property of Nicole Tavernier and Tantien Integrative Medicine.
