The Hidden Doorway: Why Giving Up, Not More Effort, Is Healing

We have been taught that if something isn’t working, we just need to try harder. Push

more. Learn more. Do more. Effort becomes the answer to everything: from success to parenting to healing. Cold plunges, step goals, fasting apps, productivity trackers - there’s a whole industry around hacking your way to happiness!

But what if your biggest block to feeling better isn’t a lack of effort—but effort itself?

There’s a kind of hidden fear that sneaks into healing work.

It can look like:

– Rigidly sticking to a protocol, even when your body says otherwise

– Feeling like a failure for needing rest instead of pushing through

– Bouncing from one method to the next, hoping the next one finally works

– Constantly trying to “fix” your nervous system, your pain, your past

At first glance, it can look like dedication. But more often, it’s a nervous system stuck in survival. It’s fear disguised as productivity. Control disguised as healing.

In a culture obsessed with fixing, mastering, and optimizing, it’s easy to think of healing as something to achieve. But what if the deepest healing doesn’t come through conquering, but through surrender?

When we begin to trust our own rhythms, our own timing, our own pain even—

something softens. Something shifts.

In my work, I help people slow down and actually feel—not to push, fix, or conquer the pain, but to listen to what it’s asking. Healing begins not when we master ourselves, but when we begin to trust ourselves.

So many of my clients come to me burnt out on trying to be perfect patients. They’ve done all the right things—seen the specialists, taken the courses, read the books. And they’re still hurting. Still anxious. Still sleepless. Still stuck.

That’s when they’re finally ready to do the hard work. To stop fighting and start listening. To stop chasing and start trusting.

This is the real work. Not self-improvement. Self-return.

Invitation

If you're ready to stop efforting and start healing—this is the work I do.

As a yoga therapist, I’ve seen that healing often begins when we stop trying so hard.

When we pause. When we breathe.

The personalized practices aren't about performing postures. They are about being in conversation with yourself. We move with curiosity and compassion, using methods like PNF and pandiculation—subtle, repetitive movements that help you sense rather than strive. This isn’t about pushing into flexibility. It’s about asking the layers of your body - of your spirit - what they need, and listening for the answer.

This is how we awaken what’s called the ‘felt sense’—a deep interoceptive awareness of breath, heartbeat, hunger, or emotion. It’s how we come home to ourselves.

The same goes for breath. While breath hacks like Box Breathing have their place, many of my clients struggle with these techniques. Their breaths are simply too wound up in survival—short, shallow, unsteady. For them, controlling the breath is just another performance. So we don’t start with control. We start with listening. With trust. With gentle guidance. Breath becomes not just a tool, but a teacher.

Resistance to Surrender

But let’s be real. For many people, the suggestion to “soften” or “love yourself” can feel not only foreign, but impossible. If your body is constantly bracing, your mind is on high alert, or your history is marked by betrayal or neglect, then relaxing feels like a setup. Stillness might not be soothing—it might feel unsafe. Vulnerability might not open the heart—it might activate panic.

This resistance doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means your system is intelligent. It adapted. And it needs time, choice, and trust to unlearn. Surrender, for many of us, is not a starting point. It’s something we grow into, gently, with support.

Further Reading

Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life by Dr. Jeffrey Rediger.

Offers compelling case studies and scientific insight into how deep, spontaneous healing often follows radical shifts in belief, perspective, and nervous system state, echoing the core theme of this blog series.

Practice

Try this: Lie down and let your body become heavy. Let your breath happen without controlling it. Notice the impulse to adjust or perform. Can you soften into the support underneath you? Stay for 3 minutes.

What Next?

And if this message resonates, stay with me for the next three blogs in this series, where we’ll explore:

• What Embodiment Actually Means (and why it matters)

• Fear-Based Personality Traits (like perfectionism and people-pleasing—and what they’re really protecting)

• How Surrender Can Change Your Relationship to Pain (especially for those with chronic symptoms)

Each post will offer insights, gentle reframes, and simple practices to help you step out of survival mode and into deeper, more compassionate presence.

Schedule your free Discovery Call

---

Samantha is a member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, a Noom Certified Health Coach, and founder of Davidson Yoga Therapy and Health Coaching.

She has held complimentary healthcare positions at The Blanchard Institute, Atrium

Hospital, Levine Cancer Institute, Sanger Heart Clinic, and Davidson College. She has presented for Fortune 500 companies and major Universities, both public and professional audiences, on this thing called yoga therapy and what it can do when it is unpeeled, revealed, and adapted to meet the needs and the abilities of the person doing it. 

She leverages her three decades of yoga therapy, and health coaching experience with the following therapeutic models:

• Breathing Technology

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

• Jungian Psychology

• Jungian Dream Interpretation

• Somatic Cognition

• Internal Family Systems

• Interfaith Perspectives

• Spiritual Technologies

• Trauma Healing

• Polyvagal Somatics

• Ayurvedic Lifestyle Coaching

• Compassionate Inquiry

• Pain Reprocessing Therapy

• The Neurosequential Model

All this is to say, there are many doorways to use on the path to healing and self-discovery, and Samantha’s breadth of experience allows for vast creativity on which approach is right for you!