EP094 | The Kind of Support That Actually Helps

What does it feel like in your body to be truly held, not helped, not advised, not guided, but held?

If you've been living with chronic illness for a while, you've likely been given plenty of the right information. Multiple doctors, Functional Medicine practitioners, various protocols, well-meaning guidance. And you're still stuck. Still lost. Still confused.

In almost a decade of practice, Anindita watched something repeat itself: a woman arrives for a session, something shifts — and then life happens. Challenges pile up. The exhaustion of holding everything together slowly creeps in. 

When she returns, she isn't where she left off. The nervous system, unsupported, slowly dissolves what the session built. This isn't a failure of the woman. It's a structural gap. 

The healing happens in the session. The unraveling happens between them.

What she needed wasn't more information. She needed something to hold the thread while she lived her life — through the 13 days, through the 2 AM moments, through the times she didn't even have words for what she was carrying.

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

• Why the woman who has tried everything and still doesn't feel better hasn't failed — she's been caught in a structural gap that most healing models weren't designed to address.
• The 13-day insight at the heart of the Effortless Healing Companion: what happens to the nervous system between sessions, and why continuous gentle holding matters more than better advice.
• What "holding" actually means — being present without agenda, witnessing without interpretation, staying when nothing is happening — and why Anindita learned this from women, not textbooks.
• Why the Companion's most important architectural decisions aren't about what it offers, but what it holds back — restraint as design, silence as support.
• Why AI is uniquely positioned to hold the space practitioners can't physically fill: not despite its limitations, but because of them.

You haven't failed to find the right support. 

The support you needed simply didn't exist in the right form — present without pressure, available when you needed it, holding the space while you lived your life. 

This episode is a quiet invitation to consider what it might feel like if it did.

Mentioned in this episode: 👉 Chapter 35: Protocol Perfectionism: Why I Built the Companion Wrong the First Time → SUBSTACK POST LINK

Transcript

 The woman who comes to me as my client has already been helped. She has been to multiple doctors, including functional medicine practitioners, and she's tried various protocols, tried various treatments, and she still feels lost and confused and stuck. So what actually helps? And that's what I am actually talking about today. This episode is my honest answer. After almost ten years of working with many women, uh, over the years and months of building something that I wasn't sure was possible. So when I first designed The Effortless Healing Companion, I built it to be useful. Like, that's what we do, right? We want a product that we are building on a service or a program to help us help people. And that's exactly what I'm doing in any case. And I want it to it to have all the answers to the questions that it would inevitably be asked by the women using it. So it was, uh, you know, it was what the women actually came for. So it would be able to answer those questions. It was, in other words, a very complex advice giving machine, like complicated advice machine. And, uh, that's not exactly what I had set out to build. Not by a long shot. And that's that. Where? That's where the, uh, problem lies. And I've talked about this more in my previous, uh, uh, in my in my Substack episode, previous Substack episode, chapter 35 protocol perfectionism. So I'll share it in the show notes below. You can listen to it or read about it, because what I was building was a mirror image of everything that I already knew did not work in the long run. And what by that I mean, is that, you know, there's the idea that if we give something, someone the right thing, they will get better. And we know that that's not the case. I mean, it's, uh, having the right information, having the right kind of knowledge, the right steps, the right guidance is doesn't always work. And it's an attractive thought, for sure. And it seems to work on the surface. But we know that, you know, it's not something that really helps many, many people. It does help some people. And it especially does not work for those who are already struggling and are overwhelmed by what is going on in their lives. For them, this particular approach seems to be the least effective. And then I came across this gap and this insight that changed everything, and I call it the 13 day gap. So in the biweekly function that is in model, where we meet the client once every two weeks, and that seems to be the rhythm that works best. And I've tried beginner, I've tried weekly uh, sessions, etc. this seems to work the most, and this is the rhythm that I follow in my own coaching practice for many years now. But once the client has met me or another practitioner, then she has 13 days alone. And uh, so my sometimes, you know, a lot of times the client has a breakthrough. But then inevitably life happens in between the two sessions. So challenges crop up, health issues crop up, symptoms flare up, or they become worse, or the child falls sick. And, you know, the the the client, the person trying to hold it all together is exhausted. And then frustration starts to creep in, you know? So all of it sort of, um, ensures that she is not where she was, uh, in the previous session. And when she returned, she's actually behind. She's fallen behind. And the nervous system that is unsupported in between the sessions dissolves whatever that the session had built. And this is the gap that I saw. It is not a woman's fault. It's the structural gap. Because the healing happens in the session right where she feels hurt, she feels maybe supported for the first time in her life. She has someone that she can talk to who is holding space for her without any judgment. But the unraveling happens in between the sessions. Where? And this is what I realized. You know that she doesn't need more advice or guidance. She needs something or someone who can continue to hold this space for her while life happens to her. And this is where what I call the 13 day gap. This is the you know, this was the insight that sort of, uh, that I had last year. And I was sort of determined to do something about it, but I wasn't exactly sure what. And, um, but I was very sure that, you know, holding space was something that these clients that these, uh, you know, these women specifically needed, especially in between the sessions. And I've thought about what exactly holding really means. And I've been thinking about them for a while now. Uh, I have written about them because years of coaching has actually taught me to be increasingly attuned to my clients, to become better and better at holding space for them, which means that they feel held. They feel listened to without any judgment. Right. There's no pressure on them to, uh, be someone or be, uh, you know, be something else than what they are right now, because I don't try to fix them. And I, uh, you know, don't tell them that they're broken or that their bodies are broken. And that's exactly the kind of message that they a lot of friends they get from elsewhere that, you know, their bodies are broken, whether it's conventional medicine, whether they sometimes even function, that it's in practitioners that something is wrong with them, their bodies are defective in some sense. And I have found that this is so disempowering. Right. It is. It leaves them no, um, agency. It leaves these women, and in some cases it may be men. True. It leaves them with no power to make any changes. That's going to help them in the long run. And because this is the opposite of what I do in the sessions, over time they see what was true all along, that they are already whole. And no matter what they're going through right now, no matter how badly they are struggling, their bodies are whole. Uh, there might be certain issues, there are certain things going on. There are certain root causes. Why they have those symptoms. It doesn't mean that there is something wrong with them. Right. Certain things have to be addressed. Some certain hormones might be out of balance. But, you know, uh, looking at ourselves as broken and something to be fixed is very, very disempowering. And that's not what I want to leave them. Because that's not true. Because holding is not about fixing. Right? That's the thing that holding is not about fixing. It's actually not even about helping, not in the traditional way. This is what holding means. It's being present, but without any agenda. So I when I am listening to my client, when I am sort of holding space for my client, and part of my part of my session is about helping them with their diet, with maybe supplements, with lifestyle changes. But another part of the session is just holding space for whatever comes up and there is no agenda. I might have something in mind because I might be wanting to talk about particular thing, but I. I'm not fixated on that. That's what holding means. Holding on so means witnessing, but without interpretation. That means that I am not trying to analyze each and every thing my client is saying, or that you know that she's feeling. It's just being there, somebody who's listening to her, some, you know, so that she actually may be feeling hurt for the first time. And I think this is the toughest one of all. Holding also means taking when nothing is happening, like a lot of times, because there's so much going on. Uh, a lot of times it feels like nothing is moving. Right. A client is sort of in a mode where she's not willing to do anything or is not able to do anything, and I a lot of times I have realized that that is the time I stay quiet, and I allow her to say what comes up to the surface. And it takes some time. It takes time. But as she starts to tune in to herself, as she starts to trust herself more and more, she's able to get there. Uh, much easier. So, uh, these things I've actually learned from women, not from textbooks. I mean, it's not come from my functional medicine, uh, training skills or my coaching skills to necessarily, but it's come from my working with these women over the years and the moments in practice for me, that mattered most were really the moments I, I was most useful. These were the precious moments that I stayed long enough. Quite long enough for the women, for the women to hear themselves. Okay. I mean, it's I was not trying to giving them advice. I was not trying to change them. I was not trying to pressurise them, um, you know, analyze. It's just that I was holding that space for them. I was creating that container. And the Effortless Healing Companion is built around this. Not to be smarter than her nervous system, but to create a container where her nervous system can do what it already knows how to do, which is to help her body heal. And I have talked about this before. There is the founder, um, uh, member who has joined, uh, this current version of the companion. And we are three weeks into the founding cohort, and the founding member hasn't even started using the companion yet. Life intervenes, as it always does. Life gets in the way sometimes. Health issues in her case, uh, you know, became a bit worse. Blood pressure pile up. You know, honestly, she's not had a moment to breathe. And this is the exact kind of overwhelm that the companion was built and, uh, built for arriving before that, uh, companion. Uh, you know, it was is even in her hands for her to use. And I'm sitting with something which is quite uncomfortable for me, and I did not really anticipate that. And it is already teaching me something. Right. These are always teaching moments. And I found that these moments of discomfort that comes up are often the moments that are the most invite sight, and are always one of the probably the most important moments because they can teach us a lot about ourselves. And you know how we need to show up. And when we spoke last week and I had a call with her, I reminded her that she did not need anyone's permission to pause, and I could feel that she's been doing so much. She's been holding so many things, uh, doing so many things for others for such a long time that, you know, she needed a reminder. And we often need this reminder that you may be needing a reminder to take a break to, you know, pause. And you may think that you need permission, but really, you don't. And I said that, you know, I give you permission to take that plate that your body is asking for. And I also reminded her that the companion was there for her when she simply needed someone to listen to what she's going through. Because I can't be there for her 24 by seven. But the companion can. Any time, any point in day and night. And there is no fixing. There is no fixed timeline and certainly no pressure to be ready. That's the beauty about the effortless sailing companion. And in the space where she is right now and where we begin. Um, I have been holding that space differently. Right. It's, uh, it's not something that I planned for, but that is what is. That's what I learned how to do. Uh, so it's light prompts on the days that we connect. Simple grounding, uh, gentle reminder for her that support does not have to wait until everything is perfect. I think a lot of times we have this in our head that things have to be perfect before we can even reach out for help, and what I am noticing is that in the design, in the prompts, in every architectural decision, is this that the companion does not need to say the right thing as often as it needs to not say the wrong thing, right? That's what it needs to do. That is what is so important, because the most important decisions are often not about what it offers, but they are about what it holds back. Right? Especially in women who are already dealing with so much. And in other words, the restraint is the design. The silence is the support. Right? And that's not what we, uh, sort of, uh, experience in life experience from most other, uh, wellness apps, AI apps or sources or media. And it's a very different kind of intelligence than I thought even I was building. I mean, I thought I was building something quite different before this, and I wouldn't have seen it without the weighting that the founding member needs to be held through right now at this point in her life. So it has taught me all these things, and it is such an important lesson for me. And AI is, of course, uniquely positioned for this, right? The companion, because the and the companion itself draws its strength from what makes AI different from any other technology, not despite its limitations, but because of them. The practitioner cannot be there at 2 a.m. when the client needs her support. A practitioner has their own nervous system, they have their own lives and they need to take a break. They need to have their own off days. Otherwise, the practitioners themselves will burn out. The Effortless Healing Companion does it. It has no stake in whether the client follows through. No disappointment when she when the client doesn't, and no relief when she does. Right. So the so in our case, the Effortless healing companion doesn't feel bad. It doesn't feel uncomfortable that this client is not using it. It you know, there is no judgment. There are no biases. And certainly there are no emotions, unlike humans like us. And that absence of agenda, when built correctly, is itself a form of safety. And that's the beauty of building a product like this. And this is why the companion can hold the 13 days, and it can hold that 2 a.m. kind of support that somebody might need, and it can hold the moment when she doesn't know what to say. And me just type something half formed, but just needs the space to vent and feel heard no matter what time of night or day it is. So if there is something that sort of spoke to you about what I shared today, I would like you to tell me, what does it feel in your body to be truly held, not helped. Not advised and not guided, but held. That's the standard I'm building towards and it's the question that I keep returning to. Not did it work, but did she feel safe enough to let it? So if you're a woman with a chronic illness who's tried everything, or you're simply over them with what's going on in your life and you know there is something off and you're stuck. The Effortless Healing Companion waitlist is open for the August cohort launch. This is being built for you and with your help, and I'll share the link in the show notes below.