The body you stopped trusting

Hi Reader

There's a moment in this week's podcast episode that I keep coming back to.

Jessica lives with ADHD, fibromyalgia, inflammatory arthritis, ulcerative colitis, chronic blood cancer, and chronic migraines — described what it feels like to lose trust in your body.

Not as a metaphor. As a lived reality.

When you've spent years with a body that sends unpredictable signals. When pain is your baseline. When something as serious as sepsis can arrive quietly before it arrives catastrophically. Your relationship to your own body becomes hypervigilant, fearful, defensive.

What struck me about Jess is that she's been carrying all of that — invisibly — whilst holding down a demanding career, maintaining an active lifestyle, and showing up with more body awareness than almost anyone I've trained.

But here's what I've observed in our nine months working together. That same hypervigilance — which she'd always experienced as a burden — has become a profound form of intelligence. She knows precisely where a movement lives in her body. She can judge exactly how much is enough today. She can anticipate how effort will land tomorrow.

That's not damage. That's data.

Most of the women I work with aren't navigating chronic illness. But many of them have, at some point, stopped trusting their bodies. Through years of overriding signals in service of performance. Through treating rest as failure. Through disconnecting from the cyclical, non-linear way their body actually operates.

Recovery isn't something that happens to you when you finally collapse. It's an active, ongoing relationship with your own system. And it can only happen when you start trusting what your body is telling you.

Jess is proof of what becomes possible when that trust is rebuilt — not through gentleness alone, but through intelligent, consistent, body-led training.

That's the work.

​If this landed, the podcast episode with Jessica is worth your full attention. Find it on Spotify — Active Shakti.

And if you've been feeling like your body has become something to manage rather than something to work with, reply to this email. I read every one.

Seema x

PS

If you would like to read my weekly reflections on movement, ADHD and strategies, you can follow my substack. Here is the link for you.​