What happens when your nervous system isn't ready for your dreams? In this episode we sit down with Spanish singer-songwriter and poet Gala Gomez to dismantle the toxic hustle culture surrounding the arts.If you have ever felt like pure sabotage took over right as your creative dreams were within reach, you aren't lazy, undisciplined, or lacking grit—your nervous system might just be trying to keep you safe.

Gala opens up about the painful, confusing reality of freezing at the height of her musical career—choosing to walk away from two promising EPs, a major indie label connection, and eventually, a highly successful Substack. Together, Anne and Gala explore why our bodies sometimes hit the emergency brakes on our ambitions, and how true healing requires moving out of our heads and back into our bodies.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Creative Freeze: Gala’s raw story of walking away from a major music breakthrough and a thriving poetry platform, and why society's diagnosis of "lack of discipline" is dead wrong.

• The "Middle-Class Artist" & Reimagining Success: Why we don't all want to be Taylor Swift—and normalizing the desire to simply make a decent living through art without the pressure of fame.

• When Talk Therapy Isn't Enough: Why intellectualizing our trauma doesn't heal a dysregulated nervous system, and the power of somatic, body-focused therapy.

• The Survival Modes of the Past: How fight, flight, freeze, and fawn served as childhood coping mechanisms, and why those same survival instincts eventually drain us as adults.

• Learning to "Notice" and Receive: Anne shares her beautiful breakthrough of finally playing guitar in her garden after a decade of hyper-vigilance, and the micro-practice of telling yourself, "I see you."

Whether you are an artist, a recovering perfectionist, or someone who feels perpetually stuck in survival mode, this episode is a gentle invitation to stop fighting your body and finally allow yourself to simply be.

Find Gala Gomez
on Substack: https://substack.com/@poemsat23
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Find out more about our host Anne van Damme (⁠@annevandammesongwriter⁠)
Listen to her music on ⁠Spotify⁠or ⁠anywhere else⁠
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Learn everything about Amie McNee (⁠@inspiredtowrite⁠)
And ⁠The Inspired Collective⁠