The Nervous System

About This Gathering

The Apartment Café is a women-centric community space designed to feel warm, familiar, and welcoming — just like being invited into someone’s living room. For this gathering, we set up a shared table with baked goods and drinks contributed by the women attending. Everyone brought something small — whether homemade or picked up along the way — and together we created a relaxed, café-style atmosphere. We poured something warm, made a plate, settled in, and talked.

Theme

The Nervous System

This April, we gathered around something that touches all of us — how we regulate, how we respond, and how we return to ourselves under pressure.

Our Speaker

This month we welcomed Patricia Reed, a leadership and executive coach at The Next Best Step with over two decades of experience across Cisco, Microsoft, and startups throughout Europe and Asia. She has sat in Board, VP, and First Key Commercial Hire roles and has seen firsthand what pressure does to people at every level. She knows why we freeze, avoid, overdo it, and spiral — and more importantly, she knows how we come back to ourselves.

Patricia brought that wisdom to our table. Real science, zero fluff, and live tools we could walk out the door using that same day.

There were surprises too.

Details

As always, everyone brought something for the table — homemade or picked up along the way. We poured something warm, made a plate, and settled in. We came exactly as we were.

Debrief

A small gathering, but a deep one. 🤍

The conversation was exactly the kind we love: intimate, honest, and full.

Our precious Patricia held the room so beautifully — sharing practical tools for the nervous system, breathing exercises we can reach for the next time we feel ourselves flare up, and stories from her own life as someone who holds so much at once: investor, coach, healer, woman of magnitude.

We also wandered into the science of emotions — the debate between Lisa Feldman Barrett and Ekman on how emotions are actually made, and what neuroscience tells us about the nervous system beneath it all.

And honestly? Patricia’s home was doing its own quiet work on our nervous systems the whole time. The green everywhere, the birds, the Brazilian jazz in the background, the rose water she served us. The space itself was part of the medicine.

Resources from today, recommended by Patricia:

• 📺 Plastic Detox — on Netflix
• 📖 Finding Radical Wholeness — Ken Wilber
• 📖 When the Body Says No — Gabor Maté

Grateful for this little room and everyone in it. 🧡

Photos