Let me be very clear with you, I did not slow down because I wanted to.
My body made that decision without consulting my plans, my work schedule or my will. It happened quietly at first, through a fatigue I assumed would pass.Then a heaviness that followed me from room to room until one day I realized my life had narrowed without me noticing, and the woman I used to rely on to push through was no longer available to me. What I didn’t know then was that rest would not be what healed me. Healing would come through surrender.
There was no single breaking point, more of a steady unraveling. I began arranging my days around what my body might tolerate rather than what I expected of myself. Time lost its familiar edges and continues to do so. Mornings often blurred into afternoons. Rest was no longer restorative. It was compulsory, and I resented it more than I admitted.
I tried to be compliant with the stillness. I treated rest like a contract. Like if I honored it, surely my body would reward me. I slept; so very much. I canceled and rescheduled a lot. I waited and prayed to feel more alive, more rested and beneath all of it was a quiet urgency, a belief that if I did this correctly, I would earn my way back to the life I knew how to live.
But rest that carries expectation is not rest. It is pressure dressed up as care. I was still hovering over myself, still watching for signs of improvement, still bracing for the moment I could prove I was functional again. My body felt that vigilance and responded by tightening its grip.
What it wanted from me had nothing to do with slowing down. It wanted me to stop trying to steer.
Surrender was not something I recognized at first. I thought it meant giving up or worse, being lazy. I thought it meant losing ground. In truth, it asked something far more intimate. it asked me to stay and to remain present without bargaining. It asked me to let the experience mark me without rushing to make sense of it.
When I stopped resting with a future in mind, my system began to change in ways that felt almost imperceptible. Breathing softened and that constant internal surveillance loosened. In the quiet that followed, something older surfaced. Grief that had been waiting for my life to slow enough to be felt.
This grief was not only about illness. It was about the selves I had inhabited for survival. The versions of me that learned how to stay capable, agreeable, and resilient in order to be safe. It was about the belief that effort could protect me, that endurance was a virtue, that rest was something to be earned rather than received.
There were days I sat with that grief without any desire to heal it. I let it move through my body without language. It showed up in the weight of my chest, in the ache behind my eyes, in the way time seemed to fold in on itself. Surrender gave me permission to stop trying to make it productive.
Somewhere inside that season, the question I had been asking fell away. I stopped wondering how to return to who I had been. Instead, I began noticing the shape of who I was becoming in the absence of old expectations. Healing stopped feeling like repair and began to feel like an initiation into something slower, truer, and less familiar.
My nervous system did not respond to effort or insight. It responded to my willingness to stay. To tell the truth about what I could not do. To stop abandoning myself the moment discomfort lingered longer than I wanted it to. Trust rebuilt quietly, not through mastery, but through consistency.
I did not emerge restored in the way I once imagined healing would look. I emerged altered. Less interested in performance. More loyal to my body. More willing to let life be shaped around what is real rather than what is impressive.
This is the ground EmBodhi rises from. Not as a method or a promise, but as a living container for women who have been brought to their knees by their own bodies and are learning how to listen without trying to rush the answer. A space where surrender is not framed as weakness, but as devotion to truth.
If your body has taken you here too, I want you to hear this softly. You are not failing or doing this wrong. You are not behind. You are being asked to enter a conversation with yourself that cannot be optimized or controlled.
What waits on the other side is not a return. It is an arrival into a self that knows how to stay.
Loving you, Brittany.
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