The Hidden Power of Stillness in Healing

For most of my life, I believed that more effort equaled more success. If I just tried harder, pushed more, optimized every detail, I’d get the results I wanted.

In the fall of 2019, I put that belief to the test. I embarked on a transformational healing journey—one I was determined to execute with precision and discipline. I pulled out all the stops: the best biohacks, the best supplements, the best protocols. I weighed and measured every meal, nailed every supplement routine, followed my breathwork practices to perfection, and cut out every vice—including caffeine.

And for a while, it worked. I told myself, I’m crushing it!

But then, something unexpected happened.

The more I tried to heal—analyzing, planning, and dedicating every waking moment to the process—the more my body began to resist. It was as if all my effort was backfiring. My nervous system wasn’t relaxing; it was tightening. My gut wasn’t healing; it was reacting. Four months in, I had lost 40 pounds, was hemorrhaging energy, and felt like my vision of body and soul transformation was slipping through my fingers. So, I doubled down. More discipline. More effort. More control.

But my body didn’t comply. Instead, it broke.

One Friday morning in March 2020, as my wife and I were about to leave for work, I stopped in the doorway and whispered, I can’t do this anymore.

The words barely escaped my lips before the tears followed. My body and soul relented. Years of striving had emptied me. But instead of stopping, I kept pushing—still convinced that healing required more effort. It took many more moments of I just can’t do this anymore before I finally began to ask a different question:

What if healing wasn’t about trying harder?

The Power of Attention: What We Focus On Grows

Years earlier, when I worked as a senior wellness coach for a large financial institution, I had experimented with meditation. I found it almost unbearable at first—five minutes of breath awareness felt like a lifetime. But I stuck with it and noticed subtle changes. My mind felt calmer, my stress levels dropped, and I began to understand how attention shapes our reality.

At the bank, I launched a meditation pilot program for employees. They only had 15 minutes once a week—just enough time for a short practice with calming music and dimmed lights. But the results were profound. After just a few weeks, managers noticed that employees were happier, more focused, and less reactive.

I introduced them to different types of meditation: body scans, guided imagery, color visualization. And I began to notice something fascinating—people from all walks of life could create a state of peace simply by directing their attention in a new way.

That realization would later reshape my entire healing journey.

The Problem with Fixation: When Healing Becomes a Prison

Fast forward to my healing process, and I began to see how misplaced attention was making things worse.

Think about what happens when you roll your ankle. It throbs, swells up, turns reddish-black and blue. Your attention naturally locks onto it. But the more you fixate on the pain—the swelling, the damage—the more intense it feels. Pain amplifies under the spotlight of attention.

This was exactly what I was doing with my body and soul transformation. I wasn’t healing—I was meditating on my suffering. I had trapped myself in a cycle where my hyper-focus on healing was actually reinforcing the very stress I was trying to release.

I was so obsessed with fixing the problem that I never made space for the solution to arrive.

The Shift: Healing Happens in the Space Between

Years later, I discovered a new way to meditate—one that completely changed my approach to healing.

There’s a classic thought experiment: Don’t think about a big blue elephant.

What happens?

You immediately picture a big blue elephant in your mind. The harder you try to not think about it, the more it sticks.

But now, try this: instead of focusing on the elephant, focus on the space around it. The space between its legs, its trunk, its tail. Notice the empty air surrounding it.

Do you feel the shift?

This is the key to healing. Instead of obsessing over the problem, I started focusing on the space around it. Instead of analyzing why I wasn’t getting better, I began creating space for healing to happen. Instead of tightening my grip, I started loosening it.

And this is where faith enters the equation.

"Be Still and Know That I Am God" (Psalm 46:10)

The moment I realized I couldn’t force healing, another truth began to surface—one I had unknowingly resisted all along.

Healing isn’t something we manufacture. It’s something we allow.

In all my striving, I had ignored one of the most profound spiritual principles: “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)

Stillness had never been part of my plan. I had always believed transformation required action, discipline, control. But true healing—the kind that restores body, mind, and soul—was never mine to force. It was already unfolding, but I had been too busy micromanaging the process to see it.

The same way we trust a cake to bake once it’s in the oven, I had to learn to trust my body to heal once I had given it what it needed. My job wasn’t to watch the clock, poking and prodding to see if it was done. My job was to step back, create space, and trust that God was at work in the unseen places.

I had to let go so healing could take hold.

The Lesson: Less Striving, More Trust

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through my journey, it’s this:

Healing isn’t about effort alone—it’s about trust.

It’s about learning to focus just the right amount, like adding the perfect balance of ingredients to a cake. Too much fixation, and you suffocate the process. Too little, and nothing takes shape. The key is to give it what it needs, then let go.

In that surrender, in that space between striving and forcing, healing happens.

So if you’re in a place where you feel like you’re doing everything right but still not seeing results, maybe the answer isn’t more effort.

Maybe the answer is to be still.

And trust that healing is already unfolding in the spaces in between.