EP096 | The Work Underneath the Work

Have you ever caught yourself holding back, whether its dimming your light, softening your voice, making yourself smaller because it felt safer?

In this episode, Anindita shares what happened when she noticed this pattern showing up not in her life, but in the healing companion she was building. She kept designing it to apologise for itself. Softening its prompts. Adding disclaimers. 

Hesitating to let it say the direct thing a woman needs to hear at 2am when her body won't stop flaring.

And then she realised: this isn't a design problem. This is me. This is the pattern I've been carrying since childhood — about visibility, about belonging, about what happens to women who claim too much.

What followed was weeks of quiet inner work. Fifteen minutes each morning. 

Honest questions about safety, belonging, and what she was actually afraid of. 

One question in particular stopped her: What belonging do I fear losing if I become visible?

The answer changed everything.

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

• Why the beliefs you carry about belonging and visibility can run your biology — and why your nervous system keeps score of every time you say yes when you mean no.
• How guilt operates as a chronic stressor that shows up as flares, fatigue, and inflammation — backed by research from JAMA showing stress-related disorders increase autoimmune risk by 36%.
• Why sometimes the root cause isn't upstream of the symptom — it's underneath all the doing, in a woman who hasn't felt safe in her own body for years.
• What "coming home" actually means: not fixing, not forcing — just witnessing what's already there and gently letting it go.

If you want to be the first to know when the Effortless Healing Companion is ready: WAITLIST LINK

Transcript

I was sitting with a piece of code recently. Well, uh, technically. Technically, not strictly a code, exactly, but more of, uh, the architecture of a response around something that I'm building. And I notice something strange. So I'm in the process of building a healing companion. And, uh, this is something that will hold space for women with chronic health issues, with chronic overwhelm, which will sort of help them, uh, listen to what their body has been saying all along and then guide them in a way that has, uh, that is designed to be non addictive and, uh, something that doesn't push, that doesn't ask them to do anything that doesn't prescribe and that needs them exactly where they are. And I realized that I was actually designing it to constantly apologize for itself. So, you know, and these were very small things, not not major ones. Welcome to Embrace Your Healing Journey, a podcast for women living with autoimmune and chronic conditions who are done being overwhelmed by everything they're supposed to do to get better. This show is built on one belief your body is not the enemy. It is wise, responsive, and on your side even when it doesn't feel that way. I am an independent, functional medicine certified health coach, founder of Body Wise Healing and creator of The Effortless Healing Companion. I've spent a decade working alongside women with chronic illness, and what I know is this healing doesn't require more protocols. It requires coming home to yourself. Each week. This podcast is a place to do exactly that wherever you are in your journey. However hard this week has been. If you're ready to embrace healing with compassion and awareness, not hustle and self-blame, this show is for you. It was like softening a prom so that it became almost meaningless, or asking like 2 or 3 questions even before it could give an answer. And, uh, also maybe. And also I realized that it was hesitating to say the exact thing that a woman needed to hear. I'd say, uh, 2 a.m. in the night when, uh, when she was going through a flare up. And this is not, uh, very helpful for somebody who is looking for that kind of support. And I realized that this was not a design problem. It was me. This is my pattern, right? And it's taken me years of inner work to understand what this pattern is. And this pattern is all about not taking up too much space. That's that's what it means. It's the one that says don't take too. Don't take up too much space. Don't be too confident. Uh, don't let them see you, uh, think that you know what you are doing, right? And, uh, there are many. I'm not going to get into all the reasons why this comes up. I've shared the, uh, my work that I've been doing, the shadow work that I've done, uh, earlier. And, uh, this is something that I've been doing for years. So whether it's meditation, journaling, breathwork, all of it, but this was actually a bit different. This was the work underneath the work. This was seriously like excavating the layers that are there much below the surface, like I was. I thought I was already there, and then I started excavating and I went lower, you know, down much further, maybe 6 or 7 layers, much deeper than I ever thought I would. And it was a stuff that I hadn't looked on for, looked at for many years. It was the beliefs that I had been carrying, uh, since childhood about, uh, visibility. It was about belonging. And it is also about, you know, what happens to women who ask for too much, who demand too much. So I did something that I hadn't done before. I sat with it quietly. I, uh, took the time to reflect, to journaling. That always helps me clear my mind. That always helps me to come up with the answers that are deep from inside me, from this place of inner wisdom. And I did this for 15 minutes each morning. These were quiet questions. These were the questions that don't always have the answers, uh, but, uh, all the right answers, but rather the honest one comes to the front. And it's not an easy thing, believe me. I mean, it's it's quite an uncomfortable thing, but it's questions about safety. It's questions about, uh, belonging. And the reason it's not very comfortable is because it asks you to be honest with yourself. And one of the questions that actually stopped me was this what belonging do I fear if I do become visible? And I sat with that for days because the answer wasn't again, simple. It was a layered answer. And this was the belonging of a woman who, uh, doesn't like ruffling feathers. Like, I've been a peacekeeper for almost 37 years, and this is who I am. I keep the peace, I avoid confrontation. Uh, I get along with everyone. I can actually dim my own lights so that others don't feel uncomfortable around me. And this is who I've been my entire life. And I realized that this belonging was contingent on me still playing small. And I was not ready to do that anymore. And I think about this with my clients, like I was interviewing one of my clients, and she said that she had once pushed herself, uh, through Diwali, when she was actually already quite exhausted and she didn't have the energy to make sweets at home. But she decided that she must make homemade sweets, and she kept pushing through. And then her gut gave away. The next 2 or 3 days. She was exhausted for almost a week and it was, uh, you know, and she her whole body was inflamed and she was operating out of guilt. That is a lot of times that is the place that we end up operating from. And that's a pattern that many of us are familiar with. And we all know it. The guilt of not making that extra one day, the guilt of not picking up our children, the guilt of resting when there's so much of, you know, work to be done on our to do list, even though we are exhausted. The guilt of choosing our self for just one afternoon. Right? These are all real things that women experience, and we are then forced to take the break out of sheer necessity because our body just can't handle it anymore. And we talk about root cause in functional medicine. We go upstream. That is, we go past the symptoms, past the trigger, past the obvious. But the thing is, sometimes the root is not diet, it's not food, it's not a toxin, or it's not even a deficiency. Sometimes it's a belief. It's a story you inherited from your mother and her mother and, uh, the women before her. It's a version of yourself that you build to belong. And now it's running your biology. Your nervous system keeps score and the, you know, the flair that comes after you. Say yes when you actually mean no. The boundaries that you don't set, the fatigue that settles in because you've been pushing yourself for weeks when your body has been screaming for you to stop or take, at least take some rest. And I say this with somebody who comes from a background in hard sciences. I have a physics background, physics honors background, and I then went into marketing, and now I am a health coach and practitioner for almost a decade. And here's what I need you to understand. Your body does not lie about these patterns. It can't. It just can't lie. It just reflects what hasn't been witnessed yet, what you haven't allowed it to share with you, or you haven't really made the space to listen to it. And I have actually shared a link in the notes below, uh, about this. And what surprised me about doing this inner work was that it wasn't really about the business, or the companion or any of the other things that I thought it was actually about. When I started this, it was about coming home, and it was about coming home to parts my of myself that I had deliberately left out in order to survive, to fit in or to do both. A lot of times we edit parts of ourselves. We edit parts of ourselves to make us more agreeable to others. We edit parts of ourselves to get along well, right? To just fit in and the parts of ourselves. These are typically the parts that we think are too much or not enough. And these were parts of my body that I had been holding on my behalf while I was trying to be. I was busy trying to earn my place in rules that I already belonged, whether it was as a function with first function ladies in health coach in India, or as a functional medicine practitioner in the, uh, you know, nascent, uh, and evolving functional medicine industry in India. And I think this is the piece that we often end up missing in chronic illness. We optimize the supplements. We look at the diets, we do the tests, and all of it matters. I am not just dismissing all of that, but underneath all that doing, there is a woman who hasn't fail, felt safe in her body for years, and no protocol in the world can address that, because safety must come before strategy. Because what if healing isn't always about adding more? What is? Sometimes it is about witnessing what is already there, whether it's a guilt, whether it's the stories, whether it's the old versions of yourself that are still running the show. And what if it's about gently allowing them to just go, you know, just letting it go? It's not about fixing. It's not about forcing. It's about coming home. And as I said, I've been sitting with this for weeks now, and I think there is something here that goes beyond my own journey. And I that's why I'm sharing this with you here. And I want to explore that more deeply in this space. And I'm going to talk more about that in the next few weeks to come, because I am looking at hosting something in June and July, and I would like you to be part of that. Uh, but if you want to know, uh, about the companion or if you want to be the first to know when the companion is ready in August, then the, uh, link for the waitlist is also shared below. And if you think it's going to help somebody, please make sure that you share this with a woman who is going to benefit from, uh, being in a part of a community like this. And, uh, yeah, I'll see you soon.