The discipline that built your life may not be the discipline that heals your body.

(my latest Substack Article)

I had a poster on my wall growing up.

It was a skater gracefully doing a layback spin. Underneath it were the words: “Make Things Happen.”

Thanks for reading Wholly Grounded: Rebuilding in Real Time! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I don’t remember the exact slogan, but the message was clear: keep going, don’t quit, never let anything get you down. As a kid, that kind of message is powerful. It teaches tenacity and resilience. It teaches you to get back up when you fall which is the motto of any skater, and in many ways it shaped me.

I became the kind of person who pushed forward no matter what. I truly believed that effort could solve almost anything, and as a kid and young adult, it was exactly how I was rewarded.

Ambition. Drive. More school. More movement.

That kind of discipline built a lot of good things in my life, and I’m proud of all of it. But, I heard a line today and stopped immediately to write it down because it captured a lesson my body had already been teaching me for years:

The discipline that got you here is not the discipline that will get you out.

Healing requires a different kind of discipline. My dad used to tell me that I could accomplish anything I put my mind to, and I believed him. But putting my mind to healing my body required something I had never practiced before.

Doing a lot less.

In fact, it required almost a complete stop to many of the things that had always brought me satisfaction! Things that were healthy, joyful, and “good for you,” but personally, my body could no longer keep up with.

The joy of going to the gym
The joy of eating “perfectly health”
The joy of volunteering and ministry
The joy of traveling with my family
The joy of pursuing a new hobby or class
The joy of homeschooling my daughter
The joy of a long walk outside

All of these are good things, and for most people they are signs of a full and healthy life. They are the very habits our culture encourages, so why wouldn’t someone pursue them…..and even do more of them?

But my body was asking for something different.

The discipline of stillness. Rest. Doing less today.

That idea felt like nails on a chalkboard. Healing required me to do the opposite of what had always worked for me. It was completely counterintuitive. For example, I had to remove my Apple Watch and put it somewhere I couldn’t see it. I had to stop measuring my step count, and I had to stop checking boxes and counting tasks completed.

This all felt very irresponsible. Also, slowing down feels like you’re undoing years of hard work.

But sometimes slowing down is exactly what preserves the life you worked so hard to build.

My Gut Issues Were the First Red Light

The slow shutdown of my digestion was that still, small voice saying, Please pay attention to your lifestyle.

But instead of looking at my whole self and the pace I had lived at for years, I tried to fix my gut. I treated the symptom. Now, to be fair, that is exactly what a good doctor would do. If a patient presents with gut issues, of course the gut needs attention. I absolutely needed to heal my gut, and addressing it was an important part of the process.

But what I didn’t realize at the time was that my gut wasn’t the entire story.

It was like trying to fix a leak in the ceiling when the real problem is the roof. That leak was a warning sign. The lifestyle behind it was years of pushing and ignoring the signals my body had been sending all along. For me, that looked like not nourishing my body properly when it needed it most, exercising and overexerting myself when rest would have been restorative, and saying yes to every opportunity that came my way.

God was trying to get my attention.

But I didn’t see it that way at first. Instead, I did what I had always done when faced with a problem.

I tried to solve it. Obsessively.

When Type A’s Try to Heal

When Type A personalities encounter a problem, we don’t sit still. We research, learn, and act. In many ways, it’s a great era to be wired this way because the information isn’t just available, it’s yelling to us everywhere. Podcasts, articles, research papers, experts on every platform. With all of that information comes the promise of new supplements and various protocols claiming to be the next fix. Before long, the search itself becomes an obsession.

We begin to identify with the illness because we refuse to stop until we find the solution.

I tried to find the perfect doctor. That mostly led to another doctor… or another problem to solve. Of course, each doctor had a protocol. There were endless promises:

HBOT and red-light therapy

Detox protocols

Gut healing protocols

Microbiome protocols

Mitochondria protocols

Nervous system resets

The list kept growing, the costs kept piling up, and somehow, I kept getting worse. The cycle repeated itself: new doctor, new tests, new supplements.

Eventually you end up with a graveyard of supplement bottles, each one representing the next magical thing that was supposed to fix everything.

One day I realized something humbling. My gut had never been the whole problem. It was simply the warning light on the dashboard. Instead of fixing the car, I kept trying to silence the warning light. Each protocol was another attempt to turn off the signal. But warning lights are designed to come back, and mine did; each time a deeper shade of red, each time louder, until eventually it seemed to take over the entire dashboard.

The Discipline of Doing Less

Eventually the day came when I said out loud, “I surrender!”

Before that moment, I had been resting only because my body was too sick to keep going. Now I was resting with intention. Before, I forced myself to eat out of fear. Now I was nourishing my body with real food. Before, I walked with the goal of hitting a step count. Now I walked simply to move my legs because they hurt so much from my nervous system being on overdrive. Before, my planner was so full that I couldn’t imagine adding one more thing. Now I plan my days loosely, grateful simply to wake up and experience another day of a new paradigm of health.

You rarely hear someone say,

“Today your discipline is to sit on the couch and rest.”

Or,

“Instead of taking 10,000 steps, your discipline today is to take 3,000.”

Or even,

“Your discipline today is to eat more food than you’re comfortable eating.”

But sometimes healing requires exactly that. Reprogramming a nervous system that has been running on pressure for years takes time. And time moves slowly. That doesn’t mean you sit back passively and hope things improve.

Returning to the Basics

Healing didn’t come from adding more, which comes naturally for me. Instead, it came from creating the kind of environment the body knows how to respond to: sleep, nourishment, gentle movement, a nervous system that feels safe, and consistency in the small things that seem almost too simple to matter.

One thing I learned along the way is that a good practitioner doesn’t keep adding and making things more complicated. In fact, they should be prescribing these basics first before piling on any medications or supplements. Sometimes the most healing thing you can do is return to the foundations.

For someone wired like I am, it feels too simple, and it doesn’t move the needle very fast. There’s no grade or prize or raise for slowing down. Type A personalities like solutions, plans, and progress we can measure. We like to do something.

But that something may mean a lot of nothing at first.

Healing still requires discipline. The discipline of patience. The discipline of consistency. The discipline of missing out for a season.

And slowly but surely, you start to get your life back. But not just back. Renewed. Rested. Ready for the next chapter. I do want to give a caveat: Hard work isn’t wrong. I have a very strong work ethic and believe in the power of hard work and discipline to accomplish one’s goals. But healing taught me something I had never considered before: discipline must also know when to adapt. Sometimes discipline means pushing forward or working harder. And sometimes discipline means pulling back and giving space for recovery.

Both require strength.
Both require humility.

The discipline that built your life may not be the discipline that heals your body.

The poster on my wall told me to make things happen. Healing taught me something different: Sometimes the most disciplined thing you can do is finally stop pushing.