12/07/2025
Timeless Truth:
Some of our deepest patterns weren’t mistakes … they were survival codes. And once we honor them, they can finally evolve.
Lately I’ve been watching an old pattern in myself … and in many of the people I support … the belief that something only “works” if it’s intense.
If there’s no big sensation, no stretch, no emotional surge, a part of us quietly panics:
“Is this real? Am I doing enough?”
For many of us, that instinct didn’t come from nowhere.
It formed in childhood environments where the energy was loud, sharp, critical, or unpredictable. Where intensity wasn’t a disruption … it was the atmosphere.
In homes like that, the nervous system learns early:
intensity = attention
intensity = connection
intensity = safety
So of course the subtle can feel empty.
Of course ease feels suspicious.
Of course we chase sensation as proof that we’re alive.
I see this in Yin all the time.
A client will meet resistance, and instead of softening, they instinctively push harder … not because they’re trying to self-harm, but because pain feels familiar, and familiar feels safe.
And for some, especially those who lived inside freeze, numbness, or emotional shutdown, intensity becomes a lifeline … a way to feel something in places that went offline long ago.
There is nothing wrong with that strategy.
It kept us here.
But once we become conscious of it, something new becomes possible.
The night I skipped all my routines, practices, and protocols, I slept better.
Not because I found a better method … but because my body finally stopped being chased.
It makes me wonder how many of us are still efforting our healing, efforting our worth, efforting our way into feeling “real,” because subtlety was never shown to us as a place we could rest.
This is the transition I’m in now:
Honoring the part of me that needed intensity to survive…
while learning to trust the part of me that heals through softness.
If you feel this too, maybe the question for today is:
Where am I pushing when my system is actually asking me to soften?
✨ To read the full long-form piece, the Substack link is in my bio.
