Welcome
Happy Easter, my friend. ☀️
Whether today sees you surrounded by chaos and chocolate-smeared children, sharing a quiet meal with people you love, or stealing a rare peaceful hour to yourself – I hope it’s filled with warmth. And I hope you find a moment to sit quietly and reflect on the beautiful gift of life and love.
This week, I’m doing something a little different.
There’s no Rise Report. No Smarty Pants. And no standard format.
Instead, I want to share a special story that touched me deeply. A story about two tiny girls, one quiet act of courage, and what it tells us about the power of love and the most powerful medicine we have – each other.
Today we’re exploring the biology of co-regulation, why regulation beats intervention every single time, and what we have allowed modern life to quietly steal from us: our capacity for human synchronisation.
Whilst I love every edition of The Rise, this one is a little extra special. It’s personal, it’s science and spiritual. And on this Easter Sunday, the day we celebrate the greatest act of love ever given, it feels exactly right.
Much love and sunshine, ☀️
Sandy xx
Issue #114 • 5 April, 2026
Brielle & Kyrie
The story that changed medicine. For those who missed it earlier this week, this is far too important for me not to share with you all . Here it is in full, because this story has messages for us all.
This photo was taken in 1995. It changed medicine.
Kyrie and Brielle were born 12 weeks premature, weighing two pounds each.
Standard practice placed them in separate incubators to reduce infection risk.
Kyrie thrived. But at 3 weeks old, Brielle began to fade. Her oxygen dropped. Her heart rate spiked. Her tiny arms and legs turned bluish-grey as she gasped for air and struggled to breathe.
Her parents watched on, terrified. And were told the news no parent should ever have to hear.
Nurse Gayle Kasparian had exhausted every conventional remedy. Then, with the parents’ permission, she made a quiet, courageous decision – she placed both twins in the same incubator. Something that was never done before in the US at the time.
The moment the door closed, Brielle snuggled into her sister.
And Kyrie, all two pounds of her, wrapped her tiny arm around her sister Brielle.
Instantly, Brielle’s vital signs stabilised. Brielle’s oxygen rose. Her heart rate steadied. Her temperature returned to normal.
The image spread around the world and became known as “The Rescuing Hug.”
Hospitals across multiple countries began co-bedding premature twins, a practice that had been resisted for decades.
Both girls went home healthy. They are 30 years old now.
As a mama of premmie twins, who had to fight the medical system to give her babies kangaroo care, this story wasn’t just heart-warming, it was personal.
Because what saved Brielle wasn’t a new drug, a new machine, or a breakthrough protocol.
It was her sister.
Her touch and her closeness.
Heartbeat to heartbeat.
Breath to breath.
Skin to skin.
It was regulation. It was connection and love, doing what love has always done. Heal. Not as a metaphor – but as a measurable, biological force you can feel in your soul.
And that is what I want to talk to you about today.
Part One: The Biology of Co-Regulation
Your body was designed to heal through connection
There’s a word I want you to hold onto as you read today and head into your week: co-regulation.
It sounds clinical, but what it describes is one of the most profoundly human things there is.
Co-regulation is the process by which one nervous system directly influences and stabilises another. It isn’t a soft concept. It’s a biological mechanism, and the reason “a dysregulated system can borrow stability from a regulated one through proximity, rhythm, and touch”.
It’s what happened in that incubator. It’s what happens when a mother holds a frightened child and the crying slowly stops. It’s what happens when you sit close to someone you love, and something in you, something below language, begins to settle.
This is not poetic licence. This is biology.
When Brielle was placed beside her twin, what happened next was a cascade of very real physiological events.
Kyrie’s steady heartbeat, two pounds of calm, rhythmic life, began to entrain Brielle’s. This is called cardiac synchronisation, and it’s been observed between mothers and infants, between partners, even between strangers engaged in deep, attentive conversation. Our hearts don’t just beat, they listen. They respond. They pull each other into rhythm.
Skin-to-skin contact triggered a release of oxytocin, the neuropeptide of bonding, trust, and safety, which in turn began to downregulate Brielle’s stress response, reducing the cortisol flooding her tiny system and allowing her autonomic nervous system to shift out of the life-threatening spiral she’d been caught in.
Her breathing began to synchronise with Kyrie’s. Her temperature regulation stabilised, not because of a warming device, but because of body heat and a bond shared between two new souls who had co-shared a womb. Her vagal tone, the measure of how well her parasympathetic nervous system could put the brakes on stress, began to recover.
Every single one of these mechanisms is documented, measurable, and real.
The conversations and care not being given
For decades, hospitals across the world kept premature twins apart. And today, in spite of everything we know, and in spite of what the WHO now calls the “standard of care for every baby born”, skin-to-skin contact still isn’t happening in every birth suite around the world.
But here’s the point I really want to make.
This isn’t just a birth suite conversation. Once a precious baby comes home, most parents are never told that daily skin-to-skin contact continues to regulate, to calm, to connect, long after the hospital doors close behind them. And the research tells us just how important this is, and how much of a difference it can make.
Benefits of kangaroo care have been shown to extend to age 15, with improved cognitive and motor development in babies who received it during hospitalisation. And more recently, a 20-year randomised controlled trial found that adults who had received kangaroo care as infants had higher IQ and sustained attention scores, and brain scans showed larger volumes in the structures associated with intelligence, memory, and coordination.
The body is rhythmic. It is electrical. It is adaptive. And it is, at its most fundamental level, designed to be regulated by the presence of another.
Heartbeat to heartbeat.
Breath to breath.
Skin to skin.
This is what Kyrie instinctively knew and this is a deep, innate wisdom that Nurse Gayle understood, when the protocols ran out and her instinct quietly spoke.
Where the story stops being about twins
And this is where the story stops being about twins and babies, and starts being about all of us.
Co-regulation doesn’t switch off when we leave the nursery. It doesn’t become less biological when we grow up, get busy, and learn to cope alone (or pretend to).
Our nervous systems never stop speaking this language. They never stop listening for a heartbeat to borrow rhythm from, a breath to synchronise with, a presence that signals, below conscious thought, below language, you are safe here.
Think about the people in your life who leave you feeling calmer just from being near them. That’s not a personality quirk.
That’s your autonomic nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: reading the environment, finding the most regulated presence in the room, and quietly, biologically, beginning to settle.
And the reverse is equally true. You are that presence for someone else.
Your steady heartbeat.
Your unhurried breath.
Your calm, even on the days it costs you something, becomes medicine for the people closest to you.
This is what it means to be a regulated nervous system in a room full of dysregulated ones.
You become the Kyrie.
You become the signal that says it’s safe to come back.
Research confirms that a genuine 20-second hug can trigger measurable reductions in cortisol alongside increases in oxytocin, in both people. Not just the one being held, but the one doing the holding. Co-regulation, it turns out, is a two-way street.
We were never meant to self-regulate our way through everything.
We were meant to do this together.
Part Two: Why Regulation Beats Intervention
And the quiet courage it takes to go first
We’ve spent a lot of time with Brielle and Kyrie. But there’s someone else in this story who deserves her moment.
Nurse Gayle.
Our hero Nurse Gayle didn’t have a clinical trial to cite or a protocol to follow, in fact, these at the time were failing. What she had was a dying baby, exhausted parents, and something, some deep, accumulated wisdom, telling her that what Brielle needed wasn’t another intervention. It was her sister.
And she had the courage to act on that.
Going first is not a small thing. In certain positions, it can mean your job. In certain circumstances, it can mean the risk of being laughed at. But Nurse Gayle went there anyway because she listened to something older and wiser than the protocol. Her instinct.
There’s a version of Nurse Gayle in each of us. The part that senses that what’s needed isn’t more doing, but more being.
And there may be a version of Brielle in each of us too. The part of us that modern medicine can’t heal, because the machines are treating the wrong problem. Brielle wasn’t just oxygen-deficient, she was unregulated. And no intervention in the world could fix that. Only connection could.
And today in our world, what difference could co-regulation make to yours?
The Prescription Your Doctor Should Give You
Imagine for a moment that you walked into your doctor’s office feeling stressed, suffering from anxiety, and that low-level hum of a heightened nervous system that never shuts off. And on the prescription pad you saw: Hug more. Connect daily. Don’t do this alone.
You’d probably laugh. And that’s exactly the problem.
Connection doesn’t have a patent. You can’t bottle a twin’s heartbeat or prescribe the warm touch of someone who cares. And so we keep funding machines, drugs, and interventions, when sometimes, what the body is asking for is simply to be held. Physically, energetically.
The decentralised health perspective we talk about in this newsletter every week has always argued that the body’s first medicine isn’t pharmaceutical. It’s environmental. It’s relational. The quality of your sleep, your light, your food, your movement, and yes, your community, your touch, your sense of being truly safe with another human being. These are not soft variables. They are the variables that determine whether your nervous system is in a state that allows healing, or a state of perpetual defence.
We have built a world of extraordinary interventions. What we haven’t built, and what we keep dismantling, actually, is each other.
Part Three: The Missing Input of Human Synchronisation
What modern life has quietly taken from us
When did we stop doing this for each other?
Somewhere in the last century, as medicine and our lives became more industrial and culture became more individualistic, we have gradually been directed to stop doing the things that kept our nervous systems safe.
We began birthing in sterile rooms, often without the people who love us most. We began sleeping alone, and told to separate from our babies and children before they were ready for it. Told co-sleeping is dangerous. We created “sleep schools” that normalised separating Mums from their babies, and allowed babies to cry themselves to sleep from exhaustion. We made mothers feel guilty if they didn’t have some high paying corporate job. We designed workplaces that keep us physically apart, childcare centres that accept babies from six months of age, large houses with enough rooms for everyone to be separate on their own device and yet, no garden for everyone to come together and play. We prioritised apps over conversation. Social media over connection. We began ageing alone in rooms and facilities, separated from family and community, our nervous systems slowly starving for the one input they need most. All in cities where you access all the shops and conveniences you want 24 / 7 and never know your neighbour’s name.
The research on loneliness has become, in recent years, almost impossible to ignore. We know that chronic loneliness is associated with a 26% increase in premature mortality. We know that stress is a killer, anxiety crippling, and depression off the charts.
But this isn’t just about loneliness in the emotional sense. It’s about something more specific. Most of us are running on stress, be it physical, mental, emotional or spiritual, that never switches off. Maybe not crisis for most of us. But just… never fully okay or fully settled. And we’ve come to think of that as normal.
Our ancestors didn’t need to schedule a massage or book a therapy session to access co-regulation. It was woven into the fabric of their daily life. They slept in proximity. They touched more. They moved together, cooked and ate together. Raised children and grieved together. Their nervous systems were constantly, gently calibrated by the presence of others.
We have called this progress. But somewhere along the way, what we optimised for efficiency, we paid for in human connection and regulation.
And this is something we can change. Not with a supplement stack or a program or wearable. But with each other, with presence, touch and with the oldest medicine there is.
Just as Brielle needed her sister’s touch, we need to know, in that wordless, cellular way, that we too, are not alone.
A Parting Thought
This Easter, whether it means resurrection, renewal, chocolate, family, or simply a quieter Sunday to you, my wish is for something simple…
May you find or have someone to hug today.
Not a quick, awkward, obligatory hug. A real heart felt one where you hang on for perhaps a bit longer than you probably should. The kind where you both slow down and breathe. The kind where your nervous systems actually get a chance to find each other.
That hug you give today, tomorrow, next week or month — may just change someone’s life.
Because sometimes, the most powerful medicine we have… is each other.
Much love and sunshine, ☀️
Sandy xx
P.S. Know someone who needs a hug or needed to read this today? Don’t keep The Rise or the power of love, co-regulation and human connection a secret – pass it on.
“We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship.”
— Harville Hendrix
The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional for personal health decisions. This post may contain affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
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