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Can I Stop Trying to Fix What I Feel? A Somatic Look at Healing & Emotional Regulation
- Juel McNeilly
- Jul 3
- 4 min read
The moment something uncomfortable appears inside you, what do you do? Before you answer, notice how quickly your mind starts looking for a way out.
Do you immediately think of a breathing exercise you've learned? A practice that calms you down? Something your therapist once said? A way to cope and feel better? When something uncomfortable shows up, we've been taught that the next step is to do something about it.
So ask yourself, can I meet what's here without immediately trying to get rid of it or change it?
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about healing is that we've confused listening with changing. Most people never actually meet what is happening inside them. They meet the urge to change it. Like a shortcut through a park, you've walked that urge so many times it has become the obvious route. So familiar that it no longer feels like avoidance. It feels responsible, like you're working on emotional regulation. You're taking care of yourself and doing the work.
"I should regulate."
"I should calm down."
"I should process this."
"I should let this go."
"I should shift my mindset."
"I should...."
None of those shoulds are inherently wrong. I teach many of those practices myself. But I've always been interested in something else: the moment before you reach for them. That's the moment that tells me whether you're responding to yourself... or trying to get away from yourself.
It's a strange invitation when you really let it in. To stay with your overwhelm or fear. To stay with the grief that has just started moving within, without immediately trying to regulate it into something more manageable or desirable. I'm not inviting you to suffer for the sake of it. But to teach that the moment you automatically move to change your experience, you've already stopped listening to it.
Imagine someone starts telling you something deeply important and, before they've even finished their first sentence, you interrupt them with advice. We all know that... and that's how many of us relate to our own bodies. A sensation appears. An emotion starts to rise. The chest tightens. The stomach drops. Tears begin to gather... and before the body has even finished speaking, we're already breathing through it, analysing it, fixing it, releasing it, reframing it. Or what I probably see most often...talking over it.
That's why I keep coming back to one question: Can you meet what is here without immediately trying to get rid of it?
We've become incredibly skilled at changing our internal state. And when we can't, we've become incredibly skilled at masking it. What we've become much less practiced at is staying in relationship with it.
And this is one of the quieter addictions I see in wellness spaces. It isn't necessarily an addiction to yoga, meditation, therapy or breathwork, but to relief itself... the next workshop, retreat, breakthrough or release. An addiction to making it stop immediately. A shift to the next version of ourselves that won't have to feel this anymore... without stopping to understand why it's there in the first place.
Eventually the practice becomes less about listening and more about not having to feel what you're feeling. And somewhere along the way, we start calling that healing.
But your body isn't asking you to become someone who no longer feels discomfort. It's asking a much more honest question: Can you stay with yourself while discomfort is here?
To me, that's where healing begins. Life doesn't stop bringing you experiences that hurt, overwhelm, confuse or shake you. Those moments are part of being human.
What changes is your relationship to them. You stop treating every uncomfortable feeling as something that needs to be solved before you can be okay. You stay a little longer. You listen a little deeper.
From there, your body finally has the chance to finish the conversation it has been trying to have with you all along.
One love,
Juel
If this way of seeing resonates with you, we can explore it together.
Most of my work begins with the same question I ask throughout these blogs: what’s happening in your body right now?
In one-to-one sessions, I support people in recognising the patterns that pull them away from themselves, and in building the capacity to stay... with their bodies, their relationships, and the parts of themselves that have been waiting to be met.
FAQ
What does it mean to return to yourself?
Returning to yourself is the process of reconnecting with parts of your experience that may have been pushed aside through adaptation, survival, conditioning, or the demands of everyday life. It is not about becoming someone new, but about deepening your relationship with who you already are beneath habitual patterns and protective strategies.
How does the nervous system affect personal growth?
The nervous system shapes how we perceive safety, connection, stress, and possibility. Many of the patterns that influence our behaviour are not conscious decisions but embodied adaptations developed over time. Personal growth often involves becoming aware of these patterns and creating new experiences that support greater flexibility and choice.
What is embodiment?
Embodiment is the practice of being in relationship with your lived experience through the body. Rather than relating to life only through thoughts and analysis, embodiment includes sensation, emotion, breath, movement, and presence as sources of information and wisdom.
Why is awareness not always enough to create change?
Awareness can help us understand a pattern, but understanding alone does not necessarily transform it. Many habits, fears, and protective responses live within the nervous system. Sustainable change often requires practice, repetition, relationship, and embodied experience so that the body can learn something new.
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