EP098 | What if you didn't have to perform being okay?

The hardest thing about chronic illness isn't always the illness. It's the constant performance of managing it.

Many women navigating chronic illness have become expert translators of their own experience. They arrive at every appointment, every call, every protocol already pre-organized having quietly edited out the parts that don't fit the framework. 

It's not deception. 

It's what the structure of healing has trained them to do. And after years of practice, it becomes difficult to know what's actually true underneath the organized version.

The gap between sessions, those 13 days between calls and appointments, is where the real living happens. And it's where women quietly fall, not dramatically but incrementally, one translation at a time. 

Anindita explores what it means to build something that can hold a woman in that gap, without asking her to show up ready.

In the Effortless Healing Companion, the Allow phase does something unexpected: it asks nothing. 

No reflection prompts, no check-ins, no next steps. Just a space that receives what's true and holds it. Anindita shares what she's been witnessing in the founding cohort  and why the women she works with keep using the same phrase to describe what's shifting: coming home to themselves.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why the gap between sessions is where women quietly fall — and what it means to build something that holds them there
• What the Allow phase does that no protocol can: it receives without requiring anything in return
• Why being skilled at managing your illness and being exhausted by it are not contradictions
• What "coming home to yourself" actually feels like — before anyone puts a framework around it
• Why the most powerful thing a healing space can do might be to ask nothing of you at all

If you've been managing your illness so well you've lost track of what you actually feel — that's not failure. That's what the system trained you to do. This episode is a quiet invitation to put the organized version down, just for a while.

The next cohort of the Effortless Healing Companion opens August 3rd — my 50th birthday. Fifty seats. Not fixed, not optimized. Just seen. 

Join the August waitlist → CLICK HERE

If you've been trying to stay on top of your healing while your body keeps changing the terms — pause. Your body is already speaking. You may just need a space that doesn't ask you to translate first.

Transcript

Before we begin today, a quick note I'm opening 50 seats on August 3rd for the next cohort of The Effortless Healing Companion. August 3rd is also my 50th birthday, and this cohort feels like the most honest thing I could build to mark that if this episode resonates with you. The waitlist link is in the show notes. No pressure. Just if you feel it, follow that. Okay. Let's begin. Welcome to Embrace Your Healing Journey, a podcast for women living with autoimmune and chronic conditions who are done being overwhelmed by everything they are supposed to do to get better. This show is built on one belief your body is not the enemy. It is wise, responsive and on your side even when it doesn't feel that way. I am an enlightened to functional medicine certified health coach, founder of Body Wise Healing and creator of The Effortless Healing Companion. I've spent a decade working alongside women with chronic illness, and what I know is this healing doesn't require more protocols. It requires coming home to yourself. Each week, this podcast is a place to do exactly that wherever you are in your journey. However hard this week has been, if you're ready to embrace healing with compassion and awareness, not hustle and self-blame, this show is for you. Chapter 40. What if you didn't have to perform being okay? The gap between sessions is where women fall. There's something that I keep noticing about the way women describe their weeks to me. When they come for the coaching sessions, they say it was hard, but I got through it or it was a difficult few days, but I pushed through and there is something in the way they said, a kind of a quiet pride of hanging on, the pride of having managed, even at the cost of exhaustion, of having held things together in even when their body was screaming for help. And I understand this from a women's point of view, because I've lived inside this myself in the past, but I've been wandering for a while, for a few years actually. What price women pay in the long run, and what gets left behind in this pushing through at all costs? And then something happened last week that I haven't been able to let go of. I was in a call with a woman that I had been working with recently. She has been dealing with chronic illness for more than 15 years, and has followed more protocols than she can count on her fingers, and she said something almost in passing. She said, I think I've gotten so good at living with many of the symptoms and also reporting my progress that I don't even know what I actually feel anymore. And she wasn't upset, and that's what really struck me. She said it in a way that you'd note something like an external observer, and with the same kind of detached interest you, you bring to reading a lab report. And she'd been rationalizing and adapting to her symptoms for so long that she'd stop noticing that she was doing it. And I know this kind of adaptation because I watched women practice it for years. It's actually much more common than you can think, because you pre organize your experience before you arrive at the doctor's appointment, you sort through what was hard and identify what was reportable, what's reportable. You've learned through years of practice which parts of your pain are useful, and which parts will be quietly hidden in the shadow so that you can leave them out before anyone asks. And this isn't about honesty. It's kindness. Actually. You're making yourself easier to help, but something gets lost in this kind of tidying up, of holding, you know, of hiding this messiness of chronic illness. These are the parts that don't have names yet. Feelings that exist before you can even think of explaining them to someone else, even to yourself. And what's important to understand is because the truth doesn't fit any kind of framework. It never gets mentioned or acknowledged, and it certainly never gets held either. So what you are tired of isn't just the protocols. In fact, you've most likely made your peace with the never ending plans, protocols and treatments. What you are tired of pretending is pretending that they are working. And so you arrive at every call, every appointment, every wellness encounter sessions like mine already in performance mode, not performing for anyone, exactly, but just performing because that's what the session structure asks of you. That's what is actually required. And every healing space has a framework, a benchmark, a next step. And you learn to show up ready to be measured. And in the 13 day gap between our calls, between two weeks, in that gap between the sessions where the real living happens, this kind of performance continues and it's unseen and unreported until she's organized it again for me. And usually this gap between sessions is where women take one or several steps back. It's where the unraveling of the progress you made takes place. And this is what I kept running up against when I was building The Effortless Healing Companion, and I was trying to build something that could hold her and support it in that gap. And what I discovered much later than I expected was that holding space itself was what changed everything for her. Not the guidance, not the next reframe, just the holding. So there's a phase of the companion called allow. It's part of the C, a r e operating system. Connect allow, release and allow is the phase that does the least. It doesn't ask you to reflect. It doesn't offer a prompt. It receives what's true no matter what it is, in whatever form it arrives and holds it without responding. And I know that this sounds like very little. It definitely did to me in the beginning. It is actually very little. And that's the whole point. In fact, the first time I saw it work, I honestly didn't expect it. I expected women to find it strange, this kind of a pause. And sometimes they do. They arrive ready to be prompted to be reported to be useful. And when the companion doesn't ask anything, when it just receives something shifts and there's a bit a kind of a disorientation, actually, because the performing part of her doesn't know what to do when no one is asking for that kind of performance. And then often something else comes through, something that didn't have room before, and it wasn't a game that's given that space before. And the women I've been working with lately keep using the same phrase when they describe what's shifting. They don't say they're healing faster. They don't say they're feeling better. They say they're coming home to themselves. And that phrase keeps arriving from women who don't know each other in different conversations upfront, across different weeks coming home. And I've actually been sitting with that and allow is, I think, part of what makes that possible. Not the fixing, not the guiding, just the space that exists before anything is required of her. The place where she doesn't have to arrive, organized and perfect. And I've spent ten years in this work. And I'll tell you honestly, the most radical thing I've ever built is the phase that does nothing. And if this resonated with you, the next cohort of The Effortless Healing Companion opens August 3rd, my 50th birthday. 50 seats not fixed, not optimized. Just seen. Join the August waitlist. The link is in the show notes below.