I Became Calmer When I Stopped Fighting Myself

Inside Nat's Notebook - Real Reflections for Real Change

For a very long time, I believed something that many of the women I work with still believe today.  I believed that if I ever really slowed down and allowed myself to feel everything that was going on underneath the surface, I would somehow fall apart.

At the time, that felt like a perfectly reasonable concern. Life had required me to be strong. There were responsibilities to carry, problems to solve and people who depended on me. Like so many women, I became exceptionally good at coping. I kept moving, kept functioning and kept doing what needed to be done.

From the outside, it probably looked as though I was handling life rather well.

Inside, however, I was exhausted.

Not simply because life was demanding, but because I was spending so much energy fighting myself. I was fighting my tiredness when I needed rest. I was fighting difficult emotions when they appeared. I was fighting the reality of where I was because I desperately wanted to be somewhere else. Without realising it, I had become locked in a constant battle with my own experience.

The strange thing about fighting yourself is that it can become so normal you barely notice you're doing it.

You convince yourself that once this project is finished, once the children need you less, once work calms down, once life becomes easier, then you'll finally relax. The problem, of course, is that life rarely presents us with a neatly wrapped moment called "now you may rest". There is always something else waiting for our attention.

And so we keep carrying. We carry responsibilities, expectations, worries and pressures for so long that eventually the weight of them begins to feel normal. Then one day we find ourselves wondering why we feel so heavy, without recognising how much we have been carrying in the first place.

One of the biggest surprises on my own journey was discovering that feeling something does not automatically mean being overwhelmed by it.

For years, I had treated those two things as though they were identical. I assumed that if I allowed myself to feel sadness, fear, frustration or grief, I would somehow be swallowed whole by them. What I eventually discovered was that there is a vast difference between being consumed by an emotion and simply acknowledging its presence.

One creates suffering.

The other creates understanding.

I see this realisation happen over and over again in the women I work with. The strongest people are often the most frightened of stopping. They worry that if they stop holding everything together, everything will come apart.

Yet what I witness repeatedly is the opposite. When people stop fighting their exhaustion, they finally allow themselves to rest. When they stop fighting sadness, they begin to understand what it has been trying to tell them. When they stop fighting fear, it often loses some of its grip. And when they stop fighting themselves, they discover that far more energy becomes available for actually living.

That was certainly true for me. The calm I had spent years searching for did not arrive because I finally got better at controlling my thoughts. It did not arrive because life suddenly became easier, or because I somehow reached a magical state where I never felt challenged by anything.

It arrived because I stopped treating parts of myself like enemies. That, for me, changed everything.

It is also one of the reasons I care so deeply about the work we do inside Soul Sessions. Week after week, I watch people arrive carrying far more than they realise. They arrive tired, overwhelmed and convinced they need to try harder.

Then, slowly and gently, something begins to shift.

The pressure eases. The breath deepens. Sleep improves. Laughter returns. Life starts to feel a little less like something to survive and a little more like something to participate in. Not because anybody has been fixed, or because their circumstances have suddenly changed.

They simply stop fighting themselves. And that is the real healing so many people are searching for underneath all the self-help, optimisation and overthinking. Not perfection. Not becoming endlessly calm. Not floating through life in linen trousers radiating spiritual enlightenment, although that is cool if that's your thing! 😂

You see, it is really about learning that it is safe to be human, safe to feel, safe to soften, safe to stop carrying everything alone.

The strongest people are not the ones who never feel. They are the ones who slowly learn they no longer need to fear their feelings quite so much.

#RebelMoment

What might change in your life if you stopped treating your feelings like problems to solve?

Sit with that gently tonight. Not to answer immediately. Simply to notice what arises.

Stay blessed.

LoveLove

Nat x

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Exhausted but still brilliant? You bet you are.

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You don't have to carry it all on your own.