Hello Reader,

Before we go any further, take a breath with me.

Heart Notes carried us through so many seasons. They offered light when it was needed most.

But this moment is different. The world feels louder, faster, more intense, and more uncertain than it used to, and our bodies are asking for something deeper.

Just this morning, I read about a kindergarten teacher who recently quit after 40 years because for the first 3/4 of her career, it was about parents bringing warm cookies to parent teacher conferences, kids giving handmade cards with love, and witnessing the magic of a child sound out their first sentence.

But these days, not only have the parents changed, but the kids have too. Parents yell, threaten, or disappear. Kids arrive tired, anxious, and overstimulated. Instead of construction paper and glitter and laughter, there’s learning metric charts, and mountains of curriculum, and documentation to prevent lawsuits.

20 years ago, a child might have written a card that said, “I feel safe here.” But now teachers can be fired, disciplined, and sued if they even talk about things that might make a child feel safe to exist.

While you may not be a teacher or a kindergartener (you’re not a kindergartener, are you?), I’m certain you feel these changes in your own way too. In your family, at work, in the job market, online, in your community - and likely even within yourself.

So while the end of Heart Notes may look like the end of one chapter, it’s really a return from quick inspiration to true nourishment, from sips to hydration, from regulation to attunement.

This is where The Attunement Letter begins.

It’s built from the same love, the same heart, the same more love, not less - all-ways.💜™

But this time, we’re going slower. Listening closer. Learning to be in conversation with our nervous systems in a new way… one that honors the body’s wisdom instead of trying to control or manage it.

So let’s start here:

What if the problem isn’t your nervous system at all - but the model you’ve been taught to follow?

Because if the old models are exhausting us, maybe it’s not us that needs fixing.

Maybe it’s the model itself.

Here’s what I know: if we’re going to survive the times we're living through, we need to learn how to attune with our nervous systems.

Not regulate them. Not control them. Not force them into compliance.

Attune. Partner with them. Understand their wisdom.

And I want to be really clear about something: my nervous system work is not the standard nervous system material you may have already found out there.

(If you know me… you know I don’t do standard. I’m not here to repeat the same old tired - and often unhelpful - stuff.)

Most nervous system work treats your system like a machine to be controlled, a problem to be fixed, a thing that needs to behave better. It pathologizes normal human responses. It creates more shame, which… surprise!… makes everything worse.

And the obsession with “regulation” and "being regulated"? It’s performance culture dressed up in therapy language. It’s the same old “just calm down” crap repackaged as wellness advice.

I want to invite you to...

Think of your nervous system as a relationship, not a project.

That’s the foundation of everything I teach.

And if you’re neurodivergent? This matters even more.

Because what standard nervous system work doesn’t tell you is that the “regulation” model was built for neurotypical nervous systems (and it's not even very effective - or healthy - for those systems). It assumes a baseline that many of us have never experienced. It pathologizes responses that are actually adaptive for how our systems work.

When you’re autistic, ADHD, highly sensitive or otherwise neurodivergent, your nervous system isn’t broken - it’s different. It processes more. It feels more. It connects differently. And when we try to force it into neurotypical patterns of “calm” and “regulated,” we’re asking it to betray its own intelligence.

And when you use techniques and tools developed for neurotypical nervous systems, the practices can actually make things worse, not better.

Attunement, as I teach it, doesn’t ask you to be different than you are. It invites you to understand how YOUR system actually works, to partner with its unique wisdom, to stop performing neurotypical “okay” and start living from your actual experience.

This is why I do this work the way I do it. Because I’m autistic. Because I have complex-PTSD. Because my nervous system taught me that the standard model was never going to work.

Because we all need something built from understanding, not compliance.

Here’s what becomes possible when you start to live from attunement:

• You wake up and your body feels like home - not a problem to solve before you can start your day.
• You encounter the news, feel what you feel, and stay present with your experience without collapsing into it or numbing out from it. You can hold what matters without it holding you hostage.
• You honor your needs without the guilt story - because you’ve learned that your body’s wisdom isn’t laziness or weakness, it’s intelligence.
• Your capacity to feel safe expands. Not because you’re working harder or forcing yourself through, but because you’re no longer hemorrhaging energy fighting yourself.
• You can care deeply about what’s happening in the world AND maintain your groundedness. The paralysis between caring and collapsing dissolves because you’ve built the actual capacity to hold both.

You start living from attunement instead of survival.

And from that place? You stop performing wellness and start actually experiencing it.

You stop managing your nervous system and start partnering with it.

You stop trying to be “okay” and discover that - at your core - you already are.

So here’s my invitation:

If you are feeling the anxiety, chaos, and pressure in your world (or business) and have any interest at all in understanding your nervous system in a way that actually creates more freedom, more capacity, more love… please stick around.

You don’t need to take any action. If you received this, the Attunement Letters will arrive in your inbox.

Through the rest of 2025, I’ll be providing an overview of what we’ll be exploring together. Now is the time to tune in. This is the foundation for everything that’s coming.

And if you know anyone… anyone at all… who’s feeling scared right now, uneasy, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, or who simply wants to understand why they’re experiencing life the way they are, and sincerely wants support… please forward this to them. Invite them to come along for the ride.

If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe to The Attunement Letter at https://actualinfinity.com/connect

Thank you for being here. Thank you for trusting me with your attention, your heart, your willingness to grow.

Being here matters, because our hearts can’t open if our nervous systems don’t feel safe.

With kindness, Steve Mattus

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P.S.: Who needs to receive this message? Please forward this to at least one person that you care about today. I’d be so grateful. https://actualinfinity.com/connect. Stay tuned... more to come soon!

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