Gina Gardiner & Friends - Marta Czajkowska - Going within - Rewiring the nervous system

Meet Marta Czajkowska

I left Poland after seeing a climbing movie about Yosemite. I was eighteen, had two hundred dollars and the conviction that freedom was somewhere on the other side of a hard enough climb.

For thirty years I chased summits across the remote reaches of the planet, from El Cap to Fitz Roy to Tasmania to the big walls of Yosemite. I taught technical rockcraft to Navy special warfare teams, in places where a dysregulated nervous system is the difference between coming home and not.

For a long time the climbing was the answer. And underneath all of it, a nagging question kept running: what does freedom actually mean, if I've built a whole life to escape into it?

I was very good at one thing in particular, and it had nothing to do with rock. World-class at overriding myself. Minimize, manage, keep going, don't be the problem. When I broke my back, the first thing I said was, let's not tell anyone. That instinct kept me alive across three decades in environments that punish hesitation. It was brilliant. And then it kept going, right past the signals my body was sending, well past the point where it was serving me, because the override doesn't turn itself off when the environment changes. It performs as discipline. As drive. As the thing everyone admires. And you cannot see it from inside it.

So I know the difference between a woman who is strong and a woman who has learned to override herself. I was the latter for most of my life.

I came back from the other side of that collapse with both a story and the science to explain it. Most people have one or the other. The story without the framework, or the framework without the lived cost. Mine came out of the full collision: thirty years where regulation determined whether I lived, and the specific experience of watching the same pattern that kept me alive nearly take me down a different way entirely.

That collision is the work I do now. Eight years of coaching senior women and leaders, running a continuous coaching group. I nurture and protect my clients the way I was never protected. I train the capacity underneath the performing, in real mountains, so the women I work with can lead and decide and meet what's in front of them without abandoning themselves to get through it. I hold the parts most coaches sidestep. The grief. The fear. The version of you that is ending so a truer one can form.

The entire hard-things industry is built by men for the performance of more, and I do the opposite work: healing over achievement, which is the correction that industry has never made. I learned why the hard way, and I will not run you the way I was once run.

Website: https://mastersofbadassery.com