Focus:
Understanding that your nervous system is listening, and giving it signals of safety.
Repetition:
My nervous system is safe.
My body knows how to heal.
I am held. I am whole.
Manna in the Wilderness: On Suffering, the Nervous System, and Learning to Trust
The Weight of What We Carry
You are not weak because you are struggling. You are human, and more than that, you are someone whose nervous system has been shaped by real experiences of real pain. Fear and anger are not character flaws. They are the body’s learned responses to a world that was not always safe.
But here is what is also true: those responses, once adaptive, can become a prison. The very systems that kept you alive can keep you from living, fully, freely, and in the present moment.
There are two patterns that commonly emerge from a nervous system that has been living in survival mode for a long time. You may recognise yourself in one, or in both.
The Fear Loop
“What if this gets worse? What if I can’t handle it? What if God doesn’t come through? What if things never change?”
Fear keeps you locked in the future, in every possible catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet. It is hypervigilance in the mind: scanning, predicting, preparing for the worst. It feels like caution. It feels like wisdom. But it is the nervous system running a loop it cannot stop, and it is exhausting you. It also keeps you from receiving what God is offering you right now, because you are never in the present long enough to receive it.
The Anger and Bitterness Loop
“This is not fair. I have suffered enough. Why is this happening to me? You don’t understand what I have been through. God should have prevented this.”
Anger and bitterness keep you locked in the past, in every wound that has not been resolved, every injustice that has not been answered. Bitterness is grief that has curdled. It began as legitimate pain, but over time it hardens into a posture, a way of relating to God, to others, and to suffering itself. It says: I will not trust. I will not receive. I will not let go. And so the loop continues.
Both loops are reactive. Both keep you stuck. And both have roots in the nervous system, in a body that has been living in sympathetic dominance for so long that it no longer knows how to rest.
This week is an invitation. Not to push through. Not to perform peace you do not feel. But to begin to understand what is happening inside you, and why there is another way forward.
What Happens in Your Body
The Amygdala: Your Internal Alarm System
Deep inside your brain sits a small structure called the amygdala. Think of it as your internal alarm, scanning constantly for threat. When it fires, your body responds: heart rate rises, muscles tense, breath shortens. This is your sympathetic nervous system, fight, flight, or freeze. In moments of genuine danger, this is a gift.
But when a person has experienced prolonged trauma, chronic stress, abuse, loss, instability, the amygdala becomes enlarged and hypervigilant. It begins to see threat everywhere, even where none exists. The alarm fires not just in true emergencies, but in ordinary moments: a conversation, a silence, an unexpected change, a memory.
This is called sympathetic dominance: a nervous system that has been living in survival mode for so long that it no longer knows how to rest. For some, it expresses as fear: anxiety, hypervigilance, obsessive “what-if” thinking, the desperate need to control outcomes. For others, it becomes anger: chronic irritability, bitterness, a hair-trigger reactivity. Often, it is both, cycling between the two.
Neither is who you are. Both are what happened to you.
We See What We Look For: The Reticular Activating System
There is a structure in the brain called the reticular activating system (RAS). It acts as a filter, sorting through the thousands of pieces of information your environment presents each moment and highlighting what it has been trained to notice.
When your nervous system has been shaped by trauma, your RAS is calibrated for threat. You will notice, out of everything happening around you, the thing that confirms your fear, the thing that confirms your grievance, the thing that proves the world is dangerous or unfair. You are not making this up. Your brain is genuinely finding what it has been trained to find.
This is why two people can walk through the same day and have entirely different experiences of it. The person whose RAS is tuned to fear will find evidence of danger everywhere. The person whose RAS is tuned to gratitude will find evidence of grace. Both are seeing real things. But only one is seeing the full picture.
We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are, through the lens of our nervous system, our history, our fears, and our bitternesses. The work of healing is, in part, the work of recalibrating that lens: choosing, throughout the day, to look for what is actually present rather than what our trauma tells us must be there.
This is not positive thinking. This is neurological truth. And it is also deeply scriptural: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, think about such things.” (Philippians 4:8). Paul was not giving lifestyle advice. He was describing a practice of intentional attention that rewires the mind.
Why We Cannot Just Think Our Way Out
Because trauma lives in the body, not just in thoughts and memories, healing must also happen in the body. You cannot reason your way out of an amygdala response. The thinking brain goes partially offline during activation. What is needed is work at the level of the nervous system itself: limbic and somatic practices that teach the body, through direct experience, that it is safe.
This is why we will talk about movement. About breath. About physical release. Not as coping tricks, but as the means by which the nervous system is actually retrained.
The Israelites in the Wilderness
There is an ancient story that maps onto this experience with striking precision. The people of Israel had been enslaved in Egypt for generations, hundreds of years of bondage, brutality, and survival. When God finally delivered them, He did not lead them into immediate peace and plenty. He led them into the wilderness. And in the wilderness, their nervous systems were revealed.
What They Had Witnessed
- Ten devastating plagues that broke the power of Egypt (Exodus 7-12)
- The Red Sea parted, they walked through on dry ground (Exodus 14)
- A pillar of cloud by day, fire by night, God’s visible presence leading them (Exodus 13:21-22)
- Bitter water made drinkable at Marah (Exodus 15:23-25)
- Manna, bread from heaven, fresh on the ground every morning (Exodus 16)
- Water brought from solid rock (Exodus 17:1-7)
- Victory over enemies when Moses lifted his hands in prayer (Exodus 17:8-13)
- The voice of God from Sinai (Exodus 19-20)
By any measure, this was a people surrounded by evidence of God’s faithfulness. And still, still, they could not hold onto trust.
The Fear Loop in the Wilderness
“What if we die out here? What if this is a trap? What if God has forgotten us?”
When Moses was on the mountain for forty days, the people panicked. They could not tolerate uncertainty. They demanded a god they could see and control, and built the golden calf. (Exodus 32)
When twelve spies returned from Canaan, ten gave a fear report. The people wept, convinced they would be destroyed. They begged to return to Egypt, to slavery, rather than face the unknown. (Numbers 13-14)
They hoarded the manna, despite God’s clear instruction to take only what was needed for each day. They could not trust that tomorrow’s provision would come. (Exodus 16:20)
This is the what-if loop made visible. A people who had witnessed miracle after miracle, still unable to stay present to today’s grace because they were consumed by tomorrow’s fear.
The Anger and Bitterness Loop in the Wilderness
“This is not fair. We had better food as slaves. You brought us out here to die.”
Though God provided manna daily, described as “the bread of angels” (Psalm 78:25), the people complained bitterly. They longed for the cucumbers, leeks, and garlic of Egypt. They called manna worthless. (Numbers 11:4-6)
When water ran short at Meribah, they turned on Moses with fury: “Did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us?” They had seen God provide water before. The bitterness rose anyway. (Exodus 17:3; Numbers 20)
Korah and his followers led a bitter rebellion against Moses and Aaron’s leadership, resentment that had been building against God’s chosen order. (Numbers 16)
Notice: they did not long for their freedom. They longed for the food. The familiar. The known misery. This is the bitterness loop, the nervous system preferring a known suffering over an unknown grace.
These are not simply stories of faithlessness. They are portraits of what extended sympathetic dominance looks like in a people. A body that has been wired for slavery cannot easily receive the wilderness. An amygdala trained in captivity cannot quickly trust an open road. They saw miracles and still returned to fear and bitterness, not because they were uniquely bad, but because they were human, and their nervous systems had been formed in suffering. So have yours.
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart… He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna… to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)
God Uses Suffering: It Is Not Your Enemy
This is perhaps the hardest truth to receive, and it must be said with gentleness and without minimising what you have been through: your suffering is not wasted. It is not random. And in the hands of God, it is not pointless.
The theological tradition makes an important distinction between God’s directive will, what He actively causes, and His permissive will, what He allows. God does not cause evil. But He permits suffering, and He permits it with purpose. He is not absent from your pain. He is working within it, around it, and through it, toward something you may not yet be able to see.
Permissive will means God allows suffering He has not directly caused because He can bring good from it, forming us, refining us, drawing us deeper into dependence on Him, and using our wounds to minister to others. This does not mean the suffering is good in itself. It means God is good enough to redeem even what is not.
Consider what Scripture says about this directly:
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 5:3-5)
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)
Notice the movement in each of these passages: suffering is not denied, avoided, or explained away. It is received, and then transformed. The fire does not destroy; it refines. The wilderness does not kill; it forms.
Fear says: this suffering will destroy me. Bitterness says: this suffering proves God cannot be trusted. Faith says: I do not understand this suffering, but I trust the One who holds it, and me.
The Horror of Suffering and the Virtues That Oppose It
The theological tradition has a name for the disordered aversion to suffering: horror poenae, the horror of suffering. It is the deep instinctual recoil from pain that causes us to avoid, resist, or flee any cross that comes our way. In its mild form, it is understandable. In its entrenched form, it becomes a spiritual and psychological trap, and it looks different in each of us.
For the fearful person
Horror of suffering shows up as what-if thinking, catastrophizing, hypervigilance, and the constant attempt to prevent or control any possible future pain. It exhausts the person while never actually preventing what is feared. The antidote is patience and trust, learning to stay in the present moment, receiving today’s manna without hoarding tomorrow’s.
For the angry and bitter person
Horror of suffering shows up as resentment, bitterness, resistance to God’s will, and the refusal to release past wounds. It often carries a deep sense of injustice: I did not deserve this. The antidote is longanimity and constancy, the slow, patient work of releasing bitterness and choosing, again and again, to trust God’s purposes even when they are opaque.
The virtues that together overcome the horror of suffering are:
- Patience: bearing present pain without disordered resistance or despair
- Longanimity (long-suffering), enduring prolonged difficulty without losing interior peace
- Perseverance, continuing faithfully in the good despite the weight of suffering’s duration
- Constancy, remaining stable and grounded under pressure, neither fleeing nor collapsing
These are hard-won, active virtues. They are not resignation. They are the capacity to remain open to God even when, especially when, we cannot see what He is doing.
Feeling It, Moving It, Releasing It
Here is something critically important: you cannot release what you have not felt. Many of us have spent years bypassing our emotions, pushing them down, managing them, explaining them away. But unfelt emotions do not disappear. They live in the body. They drive behaviour from underground. They keep the nervous system in activation.
The path through is not around. We must feel the feelings, fully, consciously, with compassion for ourselves, and then we must move them through the body. This is what somatic work is: giving the body a way to complete the stress response, to discharge the energy that has been held, and to return to a state of rest.
Below are specific practices for each loop. You do not have to believe they will work. You only have to do them.
For Anger and Bitterness: Moving the Fire Through
Anger is energy. It was designed to mobilise us to respond to a real threat. When that energy has nowhere to go, when the threat is internal, unresolvable, or from the distant past, it turns inward and becomes bitterness, or it fires outward reactively. The body needs to complete the cycle.
These practices are not about performing anger or working yourself up. They are about giving the body physical permission to discharge what it has been holding. They may feel strange or even silly at first. Do them anyway.
Practice 1: Shaking It Out
Animals in the wild shake their entire bodies after a threatening encounter to discharge adrenaline and cortisol. We are designed to do the same.
How to do it: Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent. Begin to gently bounce or shake your legs, then let the shaking travel up through your hips, belly, and shoulders. Allow your hands and arms to shake loosely, like you are flicking water from your fingertips. Continue for 2-5 minutes. Let the breath be easy and audible. When you stop, stand still and notice what has shifted in your body.
Practice 2: Punching the Air
This practice allows the fight response, which is mobilised energy looking for a way out, to complete itself physically without harming anyone.
How to do it: Stand in a stable position. Take a breath and drop into your body, feel your feet on the floor. Make loose fists and begin to punch slowly into the air in front of you, alternating arms, like a slow-motion boxing motion. Let your breath lead. You may exhale forcefully with each punch, a short, hard breath out through the mouth. If emotion rises, tears, sound, grief, let it. Do not stop it. This is the discharge working. Continue for 2-3 minutes, then slow, breathe, and notice.
Practice 3: The Silent Scream
Sometimes the body needs to scream, to release what has been held in the throat, the chest, the gut. This practice allows that release without requiring privacy or volume.
How to do it: Sit or stand. Take a full breath in through the nose, filling your belly and chest. Open your mouth as wide as it will go, jaw dropped, throat open. Allow your face to make the shape of a scream, eyes wide or squeezed shut, face fully engaged, while releasing all the air silently, with complete physical intensity. Notice what emotion surfaces. Let it be there without commentary. Breathe slowly. Repeat 2-3 times if needed.
After any of these practices: place one hand on your heart and one on your belly. Breathe slowly. Say, aloud or inwardly, “I am safe right now. The anger does not have to run me. Lord, I offer this to You.”
For Fear and Anxiety: Returning to Safety in the Body
Fear activates the body upward, into the chest, the throat, the racing mind. The practices for fear work by bringing attention back down: into the body, into the breath, into the present moment. Movement that is rhythmic, bilateral (alternating sides), and gentle is particularly effective at calming a hyperactivated nervous system.
Practice 1: Joyful Movement and Dancing
Joy is the antidote to fear. The body cannot sustain two opposing states simultaneously. When you choose movement that is light, expressive, and joyful, even if you do not feel joyful, you begin to shift the nervous system out of threat mode.
How to do it: Put on a song that has made you feel light, hopeful, or simply human at some point in your life, even a distant memory of that. Begin to move, no performance required. Let your body do what it wants. Sway. Step. Raise your arms. Spin slowly. If you feel resistance or self-consciousness, notice it without judgment, and keep moving anyway. The resistance is part of the work. Even 3-5 minutes of this can measurably shift your nervous system state.
Practice 2: Side-to-Side Swaying
Bilateral (left-right) rhythmic movement is deeply calming to the nervous system. It is one of the reasons we instinctively rock a frightened child. It is the same reason EMDR therapy uses bilateral stimulation to process trauma. You can access this any time, anywhere.
How to do it: Stand or sit. Feet flat on the floor, body relaxed. Begin to sway gently from side to side, weight shifting from one foot to the other, or simply rocking at the hips if seated. Let your breath slow and deepen naturally. You may close your eyes if that feels safe. As you sway, you may quietly speak a truth to yourself: “I am here. I am safe. God is with me right now.” Continue for 3-5 minutes, or as long as you need.
Practice 3: Butterfly Tapping
Butterfly tapping is a self-administered bilateral stimulation technique used in trauma therapy. It sends calming signals to both hemispheres of the brain and activates the parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”). It can be done in any moment of heightened anxiety, in a waiting room, before a difficult conversation, in the middle of the night.
How to do it: Cross your arms over your chest so that each hand rests on the opposite shoulder or upper arm, like giving yourself a hug. Alternately tap each hand against your shoulder or arm in a slow, gentle, rhythmic pattern, right, left, right, left, like the slow beat of butterfly wings. Breathe slowly and deeply as you tap. Let your eyes close or soften their focus. As you tap, bring to mind a safe image, a scripture, or a simple true statement: “He holds me. I am not alone. This moment is enough.” Continue for 2-5 minutes. Notice your heart rate, your breath, the tension in your body, and how they shift.
After any of these practices: breathe slowly. Say, aloud or inwardly, “I am here. This is today. God is present with me now. I do not have to solve tomorrow.”
Choosing the Lens Throughout Your Day
Healing is not something that happens in a weekly appointment. It happens in the accumulated small choices made throughout each ordinary day. Every time you choose to notice a grace instead of rehearse a fear, you are training your RAS. Every time you pause to breathe instead of spiral, you are training your amygdala. Every time you offer your suffering to God instead of nursing your bitterness, you are practising the virtues that will, over time, reshape your interior life.
Throughout your day, you can:
- Pause and name three things that are actually true and good in this moment, not the what-ifs, but the what-is
- Notice when you are seeing through the lens of your trauma (fear, bitterness, threat) and gently ask: “Is this the present moment, or is this my history?”
- Use your body: breathe, tap, sway, shake, for even 60 seconds, before reacting
- Pray briefly: “Lord, let me see this moment as it is, not as my fear tells me it must be”
- Choose to look for the manna, the small provision, the unexpected kindness, the grace that is already present
What you look for, you will find. This is not wishful thinking. It is how the brain works, and it is why gratitude is not just a spiritual discipline but a neurological one.
The Invitation: Manna, Not Cucumbers
Here is what is being asked of you, not by a distant God who does not understand, but by One who became flesh, who wept at a graveside, who sweat blood in a garden, who cried out from the cross. He knows the wilderness. He walked it too. And He walked it trusting His Father even when He could not see the other side.
The invitation is not to pretend the suffering is not real. Lament is honest. The Psalms are full of it, and God received every word. You are allowed to say: this is hard. This is not what I wanted. I do not understand this.
And then the invitation comes: take all of it, the what-ifs and the why-mes, the “but You don’t understands” and the “this isn’t fairs”, and lay them at the foot of the cross. Not to be dismissed. Not to be explained. But to be transformed.
Ask God not to remove the suffering, but to use it. To give you the grace, the patience, the longanimity, the constancy, to receive today’s manna and not long for yesterday’s cucumbers.
The cucumbers represent:
- The familiar pain we return to because at least it is known
- The bitterness we nurse because it gives us the illusion of control
- The fears we indulge because they feel like preparation
- The old stories we rehearse because they explain why we cannot move forward
The manna represents:
- The grace available to you today, not yesterday’s, not tomorrow’s
- The small mercies you may be overlooking because they aren’t what you expected
- The suffering God has permitted, with purpose, through His permissive will
- The boundaries, limits, and “not yets”, which are also forms of His provision
God wanted Israel’s trust. Not their perfection. Not their understanding. Their trust. He wants the same from you.
“Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23)
A Final Word
The Israelites wandered for forty years. Not because God had abandoned them, but because they were not yet ready to receive what He had prepared. The wilderness was not punishment. It was formation.
You are in a wilderness. And there is manna on the ground this morning, grace for this day, for this hour, for this moment, even if it looks nothing like what you expected. You do not have to feel the trust before you begin to practise it. You do not have to have it all figured out. You only have to take one step: feel the feeling, move it through your body, release it to God, and look, really look, for the provision that is already here.
He who led them with a pillar of fire has not changed. He is leading you still.
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:19)
This article is meant as a companion to therapeutic and spiritual work, not a replacement for professional care.