The Moment You Stop Pushing Is When the Real Work Begins
- Samantha Leonard
- Jun 7
- 5 min read
In a culture obsessed with control and achievement, this series explores the power of surrender—not as giving up, but as a courageous opening to inner transformation.
There’s a moment in every true transformation when the ground gives way.
You stop.
Not because you’ve mastered it.
Not because you’re at peace.
But because the effort-the effort to fix it, to optimize it, to “finally get it right”—becomes too heavy to carry.
A Familiar Scene
You’re sitting in the car, parked outside the grocery store. You’ve crossed off the appointments. Managed the meals. Showed up for work, family, and friends.
But something inside you is fraying.
You’ve meditated. Journaled. Tried the diet. Read the books. Said the affirmations.
And still… your chest is tight. Your jaw won’t unclench. The fatigue is bone-deep. You don’t want to do anything. But you can’t not do everything.
This moment-this—tension, this ache, this quiet collapse, it’s not a failure. It’s a threshold.
You find yourself not enlightened, but emptied.
It’s a strange kind of relief. Not the relief of answers, but the quiet of no longer pretending to have them. The silence that arrives after the last “should” has fallen flat.
The stillness that comes when trying doesn’t work anymore.
The Liminal Space
A word from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold.”It is the space between stories. The
place between the life you’ve outgrown and the one not yet born.
No longer who you were.
Not yet who you're becoming.
Here, Jung would say, we are caught in the tension of the opposites—between the part of us that clings to the known and the part that longs to evolve.
It is raw. Tender. Disorienting.
The nervous system, shaped by years of chaos and striving, finds the stillness unbearable at first.
Doing has always been your lifeline.
Solving. Fixing. Hustling for a sense of control.
To stop… feels like falling. Especially in a culture that equates doing with value. Where productivity is praised, and stillness is mistaken for laziness.
You may have grown up in a family that, directly or indirectly, echoed this belief:
Stay busy. Be useful. Keep going.
So part of the work here is unpacking those messages. Tracing the inherited story that says you must earn your worth. And then gently, through reflection, through breath, through conversation—begin writing a new one.
Because being is not a failure of effort. It’s the soil of becoming.
Stretching Your Tolerance for Stillness
This is where somatic practices become more than tools. They become companions.
Breathing consciously reminds your body that it’s safe to soften. Gentle movement helps discharge the tension of uncertainty. Not to escape the moment, but to anchor in it.
Each time you choose presence over panic, stillness over scrambling, you build a memory in the body—a thread of trust that says: “I can be with this.”
The drama may be familiar. The striving - addictive.
But the breath…the breath is faithful.
It helps you stay when everything inside wants to leave.
And when you’ve stayed long enough—quiet enough—still enough—you may notice something else arise.
A Longing.
Not for a solution. Not for a finish line. But longing itself.
Longing not as lack, but as a thread to something deeper. Something vast. Something holy.
Call it the Mystery.
God.
The Ground of Being.
Or simply, what Patanjali referred to as "the God-Feeling," that very personal sense of awe that lives just beyond the veil.
Joseph Campbell once wrote:
“The experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes.”
Longing is not always meant to be resolved. Sometimes it is the teacher.
It points toward a wholeness we remember, but cannot yet name.
It is its own kind of prayer.
In the Christian contemplative tradition, this space of disorientation has long been honored as sacred. It’s known as the Cloud of Unknowing—a place where the intellect fails, the ego releases, and the soul reaches not for answers, but for God.
As Father Thomas Keating, a modern teacher of centering prayer, wrote:
“Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation.”
To sit in the cloud is to relinquish control and allow yourself to be drawn by longing, by breath, or by grace into the presence of the Great Mystery. It is not an absence of meaning but the quiet presence of something too vast, too holy, too intimate to name.
In this silence, surrender becomes communion.
If you’re here, in this space—this pause, this ache, this unknown—let me tell you:
You haven’t failed.
You’ve entered the initiation.
Not the one you asked for. But one your deeper life has been quietly preparing you for all along.
In the next blog, we’ll explore what it means to be guided not by effort, but by the body’s quiet wisdom: How to let the breath lead. How to trust sensation over strategy.
Until then, may you rest in the not-knowing… and find it kinder than you expected.
More Resources
William Johnston--an authority on fourteenth-century spirituality and specifically on the writings of this unknown author--provides a substantive and accessible introduction detailing what is known about the history of this text and its relevance throughout the ages. Also included here is the author's other principal work, The Book of Privy Counseling--a short and moving text on the way to enlightenment through a total loss of self and consciousness only of the divine.
In the darkest hour of the darkest age, Christian monks developed a meditation
tradition unique in the Western world. A 14th-century author described their profound mystical experience as entering the cloud of unknowing. Yet during the 500 years after this great monastic flowering, this precious tradition and the direct path to union with God it described was virtually lost.
For decades, Father Thomas Keating, together with other monks, examined this great question: Could anyone enter the cloud of unknowing through a prayer practice specifically created to attain it? Keating reached back in time for clues about the prayer forms of the Christian mystics. He synthesized his work into a Centering Prayer method that has helped thousands of seekers travel the contemplative path to divine union.
From infancy, Father Keating teaches, we accumulate emotional layers, or programs, as a result of traumatic experiences. The practice of Centering Prayer engages directly with the unconscious and loosens old traumas that hinder your spiritual development. This form of divine therapy draws from a contemplative method that has brought profound inner transformation into the lives of thousands of practitioners.
The Contemplative Journey is Father Thomas Keating's great masterwork: a complete curriculum devoted to a Christian path for achieving the still point of resting in God.
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!
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