Practicing grace in pace: what happens when we surrender to the process?

{my rhythm}

 she’s alive in depth

nuance and complexity;

she lives the slow burn

What happens when we surrender to the process?

This question sits alive in me.

As practitioners, we often speak of supporting our clients to view their bodies and experiences as ecosystems: complex, dynamic, responsive.

And yet, I wonder: how are we contributing to an ecosystem that allows their system to unfold? To show us what it needs?

As I sit with these questions, I notice an impulse to name that in the act of reading these words, you ~ hullo reader ~ are already participating in this ecosystem of writing.

Together we are inhabiting a living dialogue that shifts and breathes. And it is in this shared space that we begin to dance, inviting both attention and surrender and everything in between.

We learn to dance so differently.

We really do.

We each carry our own rhythm, but so often, before we even know what that rhythm is, we’ve been shaped by someone else’s.

Moulded by education systems, training frameworks, productivity cultures. Timed to bells, deadlines, outcomes, and unspoken rules about what ‘progress’ should look like.

We learn to attune outward before inward. To read the room before we read our own bodies. We’re taught that doing is preferable to being, that speed is evidence of competence, that stillness is suspect.

And yet... when we begin to retreat into our own practice - our practice, not the one we inherited - something softens. Something rewires. We begin to feel for the beat that was there all along. The one that doesn’t need to rush, doesn’t need to impress, doesn’t need to land anywhere fast.

We begin to unlearn the tempo of urgency.

We begin to remember the pace of presence.

In clinical and therapeutic settings, there is often a natural and understandable urgency. We feel pressure to plan carefully, to have answers, and to meet specific goals within limited time frames. This urgency can be driven by external demands: session times, clinical outcomes, funding, or by the practitioner’s and client’s own hopes and anxieties for resolution.

Yet introducing the principle of organicity invites us into a different rhythm.

Rooted in the Hakomi approach and informed by complex systems theory, organicity acknowledges that living systems ~ including the bodymind ~ are inherently self-organising.

When we create the right conditions, primarily a felt sense of safety and presence, the system is capable of unfolding toward wholeness and healing on its own terms.

We now understand that the nervous, immune, endocrine, and other bodily systems are not isolated silos but are in constant communication. While anatomy and physiology help us map these systems individually, we are increasingly embracing the inherent messiness of how they interact.

This shift allows us ~ both practitioner and client ~ to become more comfortable with uncertainty and complexity.

It challenges the model of clear, linear understanding, and invites us to accept our internal landscapes as dynamic, messy, and not fully knowable in neat, siloed ways.

From this place of embracing complexity and messiness, the practitioner’s role shifts. Rather than directing the outcome or rushing toward a predefined goal, we hold a container of felt-sense safety and attunement.

We trust the client’s system to find its own pathways to reorganise, in a way that flows with ease, emergence, and intrinsic wisdom.

It’s natural to want quick answers or clear endpoints, especially when we’re used to working within tight timelines and structures. Yet this organic process doesn’t follow a fixed schedule. Sometimes shifts happen quickly, sometimes more gradually, and often they continue to unfold over a lifetime.

Holding onto the expectation of a neat finish line can pull us back into old patterns of urgency and linearity. Instead, the invitation is to stay curious about the ongoing dance of change ~ the subtle, sometimes slow reshaping of the system that reveals itself over time. This asks us to soften into patience and presence.

To me, this is the practice: the noticing of being pulled back, and the invitation to stay curious.

Yes, and yet what happens when we surrender to the process?

So much happens.

It’s so deeply vulnerable.

It’s like, in that micro-moment, we are leaping worlds.

It can feel like we’re departing from all that we’ve learned ~ the years of training, the hours of study, the frameworks that helped us feel secure.

But perhaps we’re not really leaving it behind.

We’re learning to widen.

To take those learnings and hold them more lightly, alongside the aliveness that’s here now.

It’s a kind of internal reconciliation ~ between what we’ve been taught and what we’re discovering through presence.

Between the part of us that longs for certainty and the part that’s willing to follow what’s emerging. We’re turning toward a different kind of knowing, one that surprises, one that lives in the moment.

That is the work. That is the practice.

This has been true in my own process, too.

For me, it looked like resisting the old patterns in a way where I felt like I could experiment, and have space for grace in my pace.

It looked like squirrelling away for a while, practising how to follow in moments where I would normally lead, practising how to soften and surrender in micro-moments, practising rest and metabolising afterwards, and practising deeply honest reflection ~ knowing that I’d done something quite big on the inside that might have looked somewhat negligible on the outside.

There are moments in session when I feel the client’s system shift, often just slightly, almost imperceptibly, from holding to a little less holding ~ a micro-relief.

These moments are gold.

They often don’t come with fanfare. No big insight.

Just the tiniest softening in the face, a different quality to the breath, a pause that feels like exhale. My own system orients toward that; toward their moment of relief, and in doing so, something in me lets go too.

I surrender whatever I thought might come next. Whatever structure or plan or idea or wondering I might have held ~ even gently ~ I release it for now.

I don’t meet their relief with more doing.

I meet it with spaciousness.

With slowness.

With trust.

And sometimes I might return to what I had held before ~ the plan or intention ~ but often, it changes.

That micro-moment of surrender is where something new begins to organise. Not because I’ve made it happen, but because I’ve allowed for it to take shape.

What needs to be disrupted in us to allow for that surrender?

So much of our training, our culture, and even our own nervous systems are primed to grasp, to intervene, to push forward. We have internalised models of certainty and control that make it feel risky to pause, to wait, to allow. And often, we’ve learned to equate competence with answers ~ and quick ones at that.

And yet in these moments of emergence, competence looks different. It looks like presence; it looks like being willing to not know; to stay with the discomfort of ambiguity without rushing to resolve it.

I wonder if these words may feel familiar ~ as we know more now about needing to welcome uncertainty, about demonstrating not knowing.

Yet I’m curious how we are doing that. What does it feel like?

How do we discern when we are performing not knowing and when we are truly surrendering?

Tracing our own internal ecology, we begin to notice the felt sense of this ~ and where urgency lives in us: in our habits, in our posture, in our thoughts.

And we begin to make space around those patterns.

And we begin to breathe.

I’m sitting here right now, writing this piece.

Thoughts that keep coming up are:

Where is this going?

What are you trying to articulate?

What do you want the reader to understand?

How long will this be?

What if it doesn’t make sense?

And as I name those thoughts, I can see that pattern again ~ of needing to know, needing to perform and produce.

And not just to produce, but to produce something clean and coherent, something that lands well and meets the other more where they are than where I am.

So even in this moment, noticing those thoughts and giving them space has just let me …

... my attention’s gone to watching the fire,

and how its flames are burning,

whippet quick,

wild and furious,

darting,

yet also generously giving of its warmth.

And I notice how I'm warm,

I don’t have to rush.

And I can let that warmth reach me,

and soften something ...

... something in between my intercostals.

There’s something in my ribs that is softening. I’m just letting the softening happen.

And I sense my mind’s kind of settled. I was about to say I've lost track and then I notice that's another thought that comes from urgency and production.

I haven’t lost track as that would mean I’ve lost something; and that the track I was on was the only track available, or valuable, or ...

What I’ve actually gained is space.

Spaciousness, a slowness.

I’ve stopped racing with time.

I'm a kind of disrupted time.

This disrupted time ~ this spaciousness ~ feels like a soft exhale.

A widening of the inner landscape.

The urgency loosens its grip just enough for something new to be felt, just enough to notice what’s really here beneath the surface.

And so, I wonder: what’s happening with you in this moment?

Are there some sensations, thoughts, or emotions showing up as you read these words?

Is there a part of you that’s holding tightly?

Or perhaps a small opening ~ a quiet willingness to pause?

What might it mean, or look like, or feel like, to surrender a little right now, even just for this moment?

To let go of the need to have it all figured out, to step back from the rushing, and simply be with what is?

My intercostal softening wants to add that there’s no right or wrong way to experience this; surrender is not about giving up or losing control ~ it’s about staying the course with ourselves, with curiosity and kindness, even when things feel uncertain or messy.

Maybe notice what arises. Maybe notice what shifts.

Maybe see what happens when you follow what feels most alive inside.