I was sitting with a piece of code recently.
Not code exactly, more like the architecture of a response and I noticed something strange.
I was in the process of building a healing companion.
Something that would hold space for women between their health consultation sessions. Something that wouldn’t push, wouldn’t prescribe, wouldn’t add to the noise.
And I realised I kept designing it to apologise for itself.
These were small things. Like softening a prompt so much it became meaningless. Or adding three disclaimers before a single reflection question.
Or hesitating to let it say the exact thing a woman actually needs to hear when she’s feeling lost at 2am and her body won’t stop flaring.
And I realised something.
This isn’t a design problem. This is me.
This is my pattern.
The one that says: don’t take up too much space. Don’t be too confident. Don’t let them see you think you know what you’re doing.
I’ve been doing inner work for years, right?
Meditation, journaling, breathwork, all of it. But this was different. This was the work underneath the work and there were layers of it that needed to be excavated.
The stuff I hadn’t looked at — the beliefs I’d been carrying since childhood about visibility, about belonging, about what happens to women who claim too much.
So I did something I hadn’t done before. I sat with it. Quietly, taking the time to reflect through journaling and sometimes with the help of Oracle cards too.
Fifteen minutes each morning. Quiet questions. The kind that don’t have right answers , rather, honest ones. Questions about safety. About belonging.
About what I’m actually afraid of when I hold myself back.
One of the questions that stopped me was this:
What belonging do I fear losing if I become visible?
And I sat with that for days. Because the answer wasn’t simple, it was layered.
There was the belonging of being the woman who doesn’t ruffle feathers, keeps the peace. The one who gets along with everyone. The one who dims her own light so that others don’t feel diminished.
I’ve been her my whole life.
And I realised that belonging was contingent on me staying small.
I think about this with my clients, too. I had a woman once who pushed herself through Diwali. She didn’t have the energy to make the sweets and her body was telling her to rest. But she kept pushing through.
Then her gut gave up in the next two or three days. She couldn’t digest and she was bloated, inflamed, irritable. Because she wasn’t listening to her body. She was operating out of guilt.
This is the pattern that many of us are familiar with.
We all know it. The guilt of not making the extra dish. The guilt of resting when there’s still a to-do list to tick off. The guilt of choosing yourself for just one afternoon. And then the body pays for it. The flare comes and the exhaustion sets in.
We are forced to take the break out of sheer necessity.
We talk about root cause in functional medicine. We go upstream, that is, past the symptom, past the trigger, past the obvious.
The thing is, sometimes the root isn’t a food or a toxin or a deficiency.
Sometimes it’s a belief. A story you inherited. A version of yourself you built to belong, and now it’s running your biology.
Your nervous system keeps score. The flare that comes after you say yes when you meant no. The fatigue that settles in when you’ve been pushing yourself for weeks even when your body has been screaming for rest. The inflammation that shows up when you’ve been operating from guilt instead of genuine desire.
And I say this as someone who has a background in hard sciences.
Here’s what you need to understand:
your body doesn’t lie about these patterns. It can’t. It just reflects what hasn’t been witnessed yet.
What surprised me most about doing this inner work was that it wasn’t really about the business. Or the companion. Or any of the other things I thought it was about.
It was about coming home.
Coming home to the parts of myself I’d deliberately left out in order to survive. Or to fit in. Or both.
The parts I’d decided were too much or not enough. The parts my body had been holding on my behalf while I was busy trying to earn my place in rooms I already belonged in.
I think this is the piece we miss in chronic illness.
We optimise the supplements. We focus on the diet and we do the tests. And all of that matters — I’m not dismissing any of it.
But underneath all the doing, there’s a woman who hasn’t felt safe in her own body for years. And no protocol in the world addresses that.
What if healing isn’t always about adding more?
What if sometimes it’s about witnessing what’s already there, whether it’s the guilt, the stories, the old versions of yourself that are still running the show —
and gently, slowly, letting them go?
Not fixing. Not forcing. Just... coming home.
I’ve been sitting with this for weeks now. And I think there’s something here that goes beyond my own journey. Something I want to explore more deeply, with you, in this space.
More on that soon.
If you want to be the first to know when the Companion is ready, there’s a waitlist. Link below.
P.S. Your energy is sacred. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stop earning your right to rest and instead, just rest.
With warmth, Anindita
P.S If this stirred something in you, share it with someone who might need it today.
