Sometimes the body demands the stillness the mind refuses.
There is a moment most of us know. The meeting where you had the idea, but let someone else say it. The room where your hand almost went up. The conversation where you smiled and nodded while something inside you quietly closed a door.
We call it imposter syndrome. We dress it up in self-deprecation, in I’m just not ready yet, in who am I to say. But underneath that story, something else is happening entirely. Your body is listening. And it is keeping score.
Not all moments of discomfort lead to joy, not all pain leads to a better understanding of oneself. Recently, I had to take time out and, through a period of physical and hence mental discomfort, it gave me time to reflect, because the busyness stopped (I was unable to do much). Most people experience that as failure. As an inconvenience. As the worst possible timing.
But what if it isn’t? I noticed most things didn’t really matter. At first, I thought I had lost all motivation, but I was really content just doing what I needed to do in that moment. A lot of things that were affecting me were over there, distant from what or who I really am.
When the body breaks down, it is a sign for us to stop and rest. Not to grin and bear it. So when we ignore the subtle signs the body gives us, it speaks in the only language it knows how, disruption of the physical. It swings, and there is no longer a choice but to lie down on that damn mat.
And during that time, I discovered that not all joy and happiness happen in those moments; they can come in discomfort.
We know that over time, anxiety can create inflammation. It disrupts sleep, suppresses the immune system, tightens the chest, coils itself into the shoulders and the gut. The body was never designed to carry what the mind refuses to process. This is not a metaphor. This is biology.
As we rest, the mind has time for reflection. For some, it may be about what is meaningful or what really matters, or the quiet pleasure of simply existing.
By not maintaining busyness, we get a sneak preview of our unspokenness: our wriggling desires, or lack thereof. We can ask ‘what’s the point of things’, not in a negative way, but in an honest examination of what we want and need.
That opens up space, not to put something into it, but to open up. Those moments of discomfort, when watched, can then be waved on — releasing tension we never even knew we held. In that discomfort, we can find joy and insight into ourselves not by adding, but by releasing. That releases the pain and anger that have manifested in our bodies. That is joy. The pain, in a way, was a distraction from being me. I could go into that pain, experience it over and over, or I could see it as separate from me, an aside, and I could wave it on. At the time, there were too many areas of physical pain for me, so I chose the latter. I discovered the pain was over there. It was not me. Almost like a big, delicious cake, I could indulge, but if I turned away from it, the cake was no longer there. Upon that realisation, joy erupted and flushed away all insignificances. I will never taste that joy in any delectable dessert.
But knowing this, re-entering the busyness of life can see us holding onto the flotsam.
Our behaviours develop neural pathways in our brains. We have done this for many years and understand we react, but cannot remember the first time this happened and what caused it, because it has become a habit. It frustrates us and leads us to look for reassurance from others, which sometimes never comes, or, when it does, boosts us for a moment, and then we reach for more reassurance like an intoxicated Pringle: “Once you pop, you can’t stop.”
That’s how behaviours land. We continue doing the same thing over and over, and it is embedded in our neural pathways. To change this, we either must recognise it subconsciously or we can forge new pathways entirely. We need to build new highways in the brain, not dead-end streets. This is neurology we can change.
When clients try to install new behaviours and triggers or breathing techniques to help in difficult situations, they try them for a while and then say “that didn’t work”. Yet we have only started to build the infrastructure for the new road, for the new behaviour, whereas the old behaviour or old established habits are like the hellish Northern Circular route we drive most days. So we need to give the new routes time to develop, to take hold, to refine for what we want, not what we don’t want.
Like with anything, if we are going to build a new path, it takes thought and planning. We develop a certain countenance for change. The wrong turn isn’t wasted. When we take the old road by mistake, or try the new one and stumble, that isn’t failure. That is information. We gather information down those side roads that we may not have seen about ourselves if we had taken the straight route. They refine our direction rather than derailing it. Because of those unexpected detours, when we find our true North, we know who we are and act instinctively rather than having an educated guess at life based on what we know. The truth of who we are does not need a voice. We exude it.
You’ve probably heard it all before — ‘you’ve got this’, ‘you just need to breathe’. Part of you wants to throttle the deliverer of these words, because consciously you know it’s true. You’re smart, you know exactly what’s happening and what to say…the next day. And you beat yourself for knowing it but not executing. Sometimes at the cost of others and sometimes at the cost of your own self-esteem. But no breathing techniques or positive thinking touch the plane where this pattern was first burned into your mind and body. Imprinted on you, and over the years, it’s just spewed out like a stuttering fax machine whenever you’re required to speak up. Not speaking out, just speaking up, for you, for your ideas and thoughts to be voiced. Your presence to be felt. That advice, these words that are thought to be kind, never touch that subconscious branding.
RTT works with the subconscious; it finds the first time your mind and body decided to protect you against speaking up. It speaks to the hurt child inside and allows it to explore why it is hiding. Then you can see that as a young child, you rightly made a decision to protect yourself, but your life and circumstances have changed, and you can now speak for yourself. No affirmation will uncover that.
The relief is palpable. The body relaxes. The mind collapses — kindly. The thoughts fall away, and the memories crumble into insignificance. Sometimes the client grapples to remember what they have come for. It is never about what happened to us. It is the meaning we put on it. And when we are children, we don’t understand that it is often more about the adult in charge, but we don’t know that, so we start loving ourselves less.
There is now space, not to fill up, but to sashay into, and now breathe. The truth of who we are does not need a voice. We exude it.
If you’re experiencing imposter syndrome or anxiety and want to explore what RTT could do for you, I’d love to have a conversation.