The Practice of Letting Go: Why Holding On Keeps You Stuck PART 2

The harder we try to fix something, the more we actually hold on to it.

Take impatience (not speaking from experience, of course!):

You can’t really practice being patient by forcing yourself to be patient. You can, however, become aware of your impatience.

What triggers it? What are you expecting? What happens when things don’t happen as quickly as you want? What pattern have you developed around needing things to happen now?

Letting go isn’t about forcing yourself to stop being impatient. It’s about understanding what is underneath the impatience. The same can be true physically. “No pain, no gain” has no place in chronic pain. Forcing a nervous system that already feels threatened isn’t necessarily going to make it feel safer.

We don’t learn safety by forcing ourselves into the deepest end, hoping we’ll adapt. We learn through experiences that our nervous system can actually process.

Small steps, manageable movement, attention, breathing, repetition and evidence.

Letting go doesn’t mean giving up. It doesn’t mean surrendering nor accepting that you’ll always be in pain. It means accepting where you are today. It means letting go of what you used to be able to do, of the fear of what might happen. Letting go of the need to control every sensation, of some of the tension you’ve been holding.

Sometimes it means allowing yourself to feel the pain without immediately fighting it, taking a breath. Relaxing around it. Observing it and noticing what happens.

Does it change? Does it move? Does it soften? Does it dissipate? You are not giving the pain permission to stay. You’re giving yourself permission to stop fighting it for a moment. And that can be a surprisingly different experience.

I worked with someone experiencing very acute shoulder pain.

The pain was affecting their ability to make a living. They were frightened for the future and were full of tension. They had spent a lot of time and money looking for answers and had been told that there was nothing structurally wrong with their shoulder and to keep stretching and resting. They came to me desperate.

We started by looking at the evidence. Together, we looked at the scans and the facts. We looked at the information from their medical team.

Their body was structurally sound, that didn’t mean nothing was happening. The stress, tension and worry were very real, and this was acknowledged and understood. The pain was also real!

So we started gently, we explored movement, paid attention to the pain rather than immediately fighting it. We used breathing, worked with small movements and gave their body opportunities to experience something different. We observed without fearing the pain by gently providing signals of safety.

Slowly, they began to realize something. Their body could move, the pain could change. They could move without the pain they had been expecting.

Something else happened. They started to believe there was hope and with that hope came results. The tension began to release. They could breathe more easily, move better and sleep better. Their confidence began to return slowly.

This is what letting go can look like. Sometimes you can actually see it. There’s a smile… a deeper breath. More freedom in the movement. A little less fear.

And it’s simply the moment when someone realizes: “Maybe I don’t have to hold on so tightly anymore.”

Sometimes, letting go is emotional.

It can be powerful to tell yourself: “I’m safe. I’m okay. I don’t have to hold everything so tightly.”

You can fully fill up your lungs, relax a little. You can take a slightly bigger step. You can test something you’ve been afraid to test. Not because you’re forcing yourself to get better. But because you’re giving yourself the opportunity to discover what happens when you stop protecting yourself in quite the same way.

Letting go isn’t about doing less. It’s about fighting less, understanding what you’re holding, why you’re holding it, and whether you still need to hold it in the same way.

Because the things that once protected you may not be the things you need to protect you now.

Letting go is one great first step to take!

And for me it’s beautiful to witness.

The Practice of Letting Go: Why Holding On Keeps You Stuck …Part 1

Sometimes we try so hard to fix ourselves that we don’t realize how much effort we’re putting into holding on.

We hold our breath. We brace. We clench our jaw. We hesitate before moving. Cross our arms or legs. We fidget. We change our posture. Our body is constantly making small adjustments to protect us, and often, we don’t even notice we’re doing it.

Holding on can look different for everyone, it could be physical tension, the way you move carefully around pain. It can be the hesitation before taking a bigger step because the smaller step feels safer. And sometimes it’s emotional.

We can hold on to fear, grief, stress, trauma, the memory of what happened, or the fear that it could happen again. Holding on isn’t necessarily a conscious decision. It’s often something we learned because, at some point, it helped us feel safer.

For example, if your lower back hurts, maybe taking a smaller step feels safer than taking a bigger one. So you take the smaller step. Then another. And eventually, the smaller step becomes how you walk.

This new habit can feel safe, even when it isn’t necessarily helping you anymore. And when one part of your body is continually protecting itself, the whole way you move will change. You could start limping. You might shift your weight. You avoid using one side of your body. And over time, those changes can affect how other parts of your body move and feel.

Your hip could be affected’ your knee of your upper back, and in turn your posture. Now you have another layer to manage.

The pain creates protection. The protection changes how you move. The changed in movement creates more tension and pain. And the cycle continues.

Holding tension takes energy. It takes energy to brace. It takes energy to constantly monitor your body, your thoughts.

In short, it’s exhausting. When the pain doesn’t seem to improve, these thought appear: Why am I not getting better? What if this never goes away? What if something is still wrong?

There is fear around the pain and fear can create even more protection.

This is something that is important to acknowledge.

Looked at closely, tension isn’t only physical. There may be grief that hasn’t been processed, a period of prolonged stress, trauma, fear, or a difficult life event that someone has been carrying alongside their physical pain.

This doesn’t mean the pain is “all in your head.” It doesn’t mean that everyone living with chronic pain has unresolved trauma. It means that sometimes the body is carrying more than the physical problem we started with. And letting go could require us to look at what else we’re holding.

That may be part of the work that needs attention. And that work is beyond what I do. When I recognize that a client needs support with something outside my scope, I encourage them to work with an appropriate mental-health professional.

Because sometimes the physical work and the emotional work need to happen at a deeper level alongside each other.

So why do we hold on?…

(To be continued)

What Are You Teaching Your Body?

Your body is always learning. But what are you really teaching it?

Some of us think of learning as something that happens in the brain. We learn a language. We learn an instrument. We learn how to cook or drive a car.

Your body is also learning all the time. It learns through repetition and experience. Through what you do every day without even realizing it.

If you hold your breath when you’re stressed, your body learns that stress and breath-holding belong together.

When you push through fatigue every single day, your body learns that the fatigue signals are meant to be ignored.

As you tense your shoulders before every difficult conversation or performance, it learns that anticipation and tension are part of the same story.

The body isn’t trying to sabotage you. It’s trying to become efficient. It notices patterns and says, “Ah, I know this one.”

The more often something happens, the more familiar it becomes. You may not be choosing these patterns consciously. In fact, many of them began as intelligent adaptations. At one point, they helped you cope, perform, protect yourself, or simply get through a difficult moment.

The issue is that our bodies, nervous system and brain don’t automatically update when our circumstances change. Sometimes we just keep practicing habits that no longer serve us.

We practice rushing, bracing.

We practice ignoring pain.

We practice sitting for hours without moving.

We practice worrying about symptoms.

We practice believing that fatigue is normal.

Eventually, what was once a response becomes a habit, and what is familiar begins to feel normal, even when it isn’t helping us.

The good news is that learning works both ways. Your body can learn safety. It can learn strength and recovery. It can learn that movement is safe again. That taking a break is actually helpful. That listening to its own signals isn’t weakness, it’s wisdom.

Recovery is not about finding the one thing that will fix you. It’s about noticing what you’ve been doing and deciding what you’d like to practice instead.

Your body is paying attention. What will you be teaching your body today?

The things people say when they first realize their nervous system is in overdrive

People are incredible adapters.

They’ll ignore the first warning sign, then the second, then the tenth. By the time they reach me, they’ve built an entire architecture of “I’m fine” around something that is definitely not fine.

It usually starts the same way:

“I’m fine, I’m just really tired.”

“It’s been non-stop lately.”

“It will pass.”

“I have an Alexander Technique lesson this week.”

I could go on…I’ve heard it all.

And then we actually talk. We unpack what’s really been going on underneath those sentences. As I mentioned in my previous post, we are adaptable, especially when we have no choice. Life has to go on, right?

But at some point, it stops being just adaptation. The cost becomes too high.

I sometimes compare the nervous system to a long-distance runner. There always seems to be “more in the tank”…until suddenly there isn’t. You hit the wall. And it can feel like it comes out of nowhere.

I know that feeling personally. I used to be a triathlete. What starts as mild discomfort can, under enough load, become a full system shutdown. It’s not dramatic in the moment. It’s gradual… until it isn’t.

In our sessions, I often notice it first in their body. Some people become anxious without quite knowing why. Some start fidgeting as if they want to crawl out of their skin. Others can’t sleep, their mind won’t stop, their legs won’t stop, nothing really settles.

And that’s usually the moment something important happens. Because they look at me and say:

“Wait… I didn’t realize I was this affected. How do we fix this?”

And I usually think: Good. Now they’ve connected.

That’s where the real work begins. Not fixing. Not pushing. Not overriding.

But gently starting to unpack what their system has been carrying and how it learned to carry it. Especially when we have no choice. Life does have to go on. But at some point— and there is always a point — the cost becomes too high.

And that’s usually the moment the nervous system finally gets heard, and change can begin.

Your Body Is Your Instrument… Treat It Like One

Across very different professions; musicians, construction workers, surgeons, hair stylists, nurses, I keep noticing the same underlying pattern:

A body that is relied on, but is rarely treated as something that needs care. You start your work day doing what you do best. Your skills are what you are there for but these skills are performed by your instrument: your body. The demands look different on the surface, but the relationship to the body is often similar: constant use, repetition, precision, endurance, and performance under pressure. Before a musician plays they tune their instrument, it’s the necessary preparation; but what about your body? It will be performing for hours…

And over time, something becomes normalized. Discomfort gets managed. Fatigue gets pushed through. Tension becomes constant background noise.

This mindset is simple and understandable: “It’s part of the job.” But the cost of that mindset is substantial but rarely immediate. The body adapts. It compensates. It tightens. It reorganizes itself around demand.

Until what once felt like strain begins to feel normal.

What’s interesting is the contrast.

A musician will spend years maintaining their instrument, adjusting, tuning, repairing, preserving its sensitivity and responsiveness. But their own body, the very system producing the sound, is often treated with far less attention.

The same is true across many fields. We maintain the external tool. We push the body.

If a construction worker or hair stylist were to begin treating their body with the same level of care, maintenance, and precision as their professional tools, something fundamental would shift.

Not because the work would change. But because the relationship to themselves would.

Your body is not separate from the performance. It is the instrument through which everything is done. And when that becomes clear, not just intellectually, but practically, the question is no longer “how much can I push through?”

It becomes: “What does my body need in order to keep performing well over time?”

What Chronic Pain Does to Identity and Daily Life

Over time, chronic pain does not only affect the body. It begins to influence how you move through daily life and how decisions are made moment to moment.

At first, these changes can feel subtle. How you plan your day, how you pace your energy, and how you interpret sensations in your body all begin to shift in response to your pain.

Gradually, life can become more cautious, more calculated, and more centred around managing what might happen next. Confidence can begin to change as trust in your body, and in yourself, slowly erodes over time through this constant adaptation.

For many of the people I work with, this process is already well established by the time they seek support. There is often a background experience of ongoing tension, fluctuating fatigue, heightened awareness of symptoms, and a reduced sense of ease or spontaneity in movement and in daily life. Frustration and fear often become part of the experience as well.

Because these changes happen gradually, they are not always recognized as symptoms in themselves, but rather as a general change in how life feels to live.

It becomes the new baseline.

From a nervous system perspective, this process makes sense. Your system learns from experience. When your body has been exposed to prolonged pain, stress, or overload, it begins to organize itself around protection and predictability.

As time passes, even the anticipation of movement or symptoms can begin to trigger protective responses, reinforcing cycles of tension, vigilance, and avoidance.

This is where chronic pain becomes more than a physical experience. It becomes a lived pattern of perception, behaviour, and internal expectation.

These adaptations, with time, can begin to feel less like responses to a situation, and more like part of an identity.

This is where my work begins to support change. We begin to redirect the process. Not by forcing change in your system -recovery is not about intensity- but by gently rebuilding capacity for movement, resetting your baseline of calm and trust.  Through small, consistent shifts which your system can gradually integrate.

This is where change often becomes sustainable.

Small shifts in regulation.

Small returns of ease.

Small experiences of expansion that begin to accumulate.

Trust, confidence, and a calmer relationship with your body can begin to return.

Many of my clients arrive feeling worn down by pain, nervous system overload, fatigue, anxiety, or a long-standing sense of disconnection from their body.

This work meets you exactly where you are.

Often, all that is needed is an openness to take the first small step.

When Pain Persists Beyond Healing

For many years, my work focused primarily on movement, strength, and physical conditioning.

But my understanding of pain began to change through both professional observation and personal experience.

After a significant lower back injury and a prolonged period of nerve pain and sciatica, I experienced firsthand how symptoms can persist long after the initial acute phase has passed. Time and again, I have seen scans and tests indicate the structural injury had eventually improved or healed, yet many symptoms continued for years.

What surprised me most was how deeply stress, fear, sleep disruption, emotional strain, and nervous system overload can. influence both the intensity of symptoms and the body’s ability to recover.

That experience has fundamentally changed how I understand chronic pain. It became clear to me that movement and physical treatment alone are often not enough to address the full picture.

Through exploring the role of the nervous system, protective patterns, stress physiology, and chronic pain processes more deeply, I now integrate these alongside movement, body awareness, strength and recovery work  to support more complete and sustainable outcomes.

Today, this continues to shape the work I develop through KromaSphere.