… by holding differently
Badri watched me squat.
“Again,” he said.
I went through the motion, focusing on form.
He nodded slowly. “Still too much quad. Your glutes and hamstrings haven’t woken up.”
I was lighter than I’d been in a decade. Stronger, fitter, more focused. But underneath it all, I was still compensating by asking the wrong parts of my body to carry what they weren’t built to hold.
“Strong doesn’t mean functional,” he said.
And didn’t I know it. I could feel it landing in places far from the gym.
Repatterning hasn’t been a single moment but more a languid undoing. Over the past few years, I’ve been retraining my body to move differently, engage differently, and stop pushing from all the wrong places.
My Pilates practice has been central to this in how it taught me to stop muscling through and start paying attention and to stop chasing intensity and start trusting structure. It’s humbling. Sometimes humiliating. Always illuminating.
Bit by bit, I’ve had to retrain old habits. I learned to stop overusing the front of my neck and access the deep flexors instead. I shifted from shoulder bracing to engaging my shoulder blades. I reawakened dormant muscles and re-sequenced my core so that tension doesn’t stand in for actual stability. I worked to quiet overactive hip flexors and fire glutes and hamstrings that had gone offline. I stopped asking my adductors to do more than they’re meant to. Even my feet had to learn new patterns to learn to grip and ground better.
Each adjustment took time, precision, and trust. And a slower understanding that change doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real because slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
Then the physical re-patterning brought up emotional patterns I hadn’t quite named.
I’ve always been good at resilience. Capable under pressure, quick with clarity, reliable in a storm. What I hadn’t seen was how much of that capability was built on a bypass of solving as a way of not feeling and pushing through as a way of staying safe.
Through therapy and coaching, I began to see how much I relied on doing instead of being, especially when things felt emotionally charged. I used to assume that if a sensation felt intense, it meant something specific to that moment, that person, that context.
It took me a while to realize that what I was feeling was often real, but not always specific. A sensation is human. It doesn’t have to mean what I first attach to it. The heat of desire, the ache of recognition, the feeling of awe aren’t always about someone or something in particular. They’re just part of being alive and I don’t have to act on them, but sometimes I can stay a while and notice.
This shift from reflex to reflection was its own kind of re-patterning.
I began to see how often I reached for control in the name of clarity. How frequently I tried to resolve what was meant to be lived with. How predictably I rushed to name what was still unfurling.
What I thought was strength was often just overuse. Not unlike the quads.
I used to think leadership meant keeping things together, holding the pieces, anticipating what others needed and projecting steadiness whether I felt it or not.
Now I’m more interested in coherence. Not clarity or control. Just coherence.
Does what I say match how I show up? Do I leave space, or do I fill it by habit? Can I let others be where they are, or am I managing their discomfort through mine?
That’s the work now. Not to hold more but to hold differently. It’s unheroic, not because it lacks strength, but because it doesn’t need a spotlight and works from the inside out.
I notice the changes in small ways. I’m less drawn to performance in people, in music, in aesthetics. The songs I loop aren’t the loudest or most complex. More and more, they’re the ones that feel clean. The athletes I watch aren’t the most dominant but the ones who smile mid-match, who play with ease without losing their edge.
I’m less interested in being polished and more interested in being real. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m listening to my body less as something to be managed and more as a site of conversation, perhaps even consecration. No longer a regime but a system of care. Not optimisation but relationship.
There’s a triple helix to this: physical re-patterning, emotional re-patterning, and a shift in how I lead. They’re not separate tracks because they move through each other, spiraling, reinforcing change within and across.
Each time I find new footing in my body, something shifts in how I lead. When I slow down emotionally, I feel my posture soften. When I stop gripping for certainty, I find I can listen with less urgency and more presence.
The old patterns haven’t disappeared. I still brace, still over-function, still reach too fast. But I catch it sooner now. I pause more often. I don’t act immediately. That pause is the beginning of the new pattern.
If the pattern is the point, then this is the work: noticing what once felt natural but no longer feels necessary. Choosing differently, again and again. Trusting that slower isn’t weaker but just more honest. And staying with what’s human, even when it’s uncertain.
Re-patterning isn’t a project. It’s a practice.
I came across ‘s piece just before I hit publish.
She writes about how we all bend reality to stay the hero of our own story—that being good, reasonable, and right is a psychological anchor most of us won’t give up, even when the facts shift beneath us. It helped me see how much of this re-patterning, for me, has been about loosening that grip. Trusting sensation more than story. Accepting that maybe coherence isn’t a permanent state but something we glimpse between patterns. And maybe the point isn’t to get it right, but to stay in practice.
Originally published on Substack on 19 July 2025. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
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