On breaking the loop, the war that ended, and the terrifying practice of staying open

I want to talk about something that nobody prepares you for.

Not the hard parts of the journey. Everyone talks about those. The dark nights, the resistance, the sitting with what you'd rather not feel. We have language for that. We have community for that. We have practices for that.

I want to talk about what happens after.

When the work lands, when the pattern finally loosens, when life slowly, then all at once, starts to answer.

Because here's what I'm living right now, in real time. I'm writing this on a full moon, and that feels right, because full moons have a way of illuminating exactly what you've been trying not to see.

The loop

For a long time, I, like many of you, was running a loop.

Not consciously. That's the thing about these patterns, they don't announce themselves. They operate just beneath the surface, shaping what we allow ourselves to want, what we believe we deserve, how much goodness we let ourselves receive before we find a way to make it smaller, safer, more manageable.

The loop looked different on the outside depending on the day. Sometimes it was overworking or accepting pain and challenges as a martyr; sometimes it was staying invisible just long enough to feel safe; sometimes it was getting right to the edge of something real - something expansive, something true - and finding a perfectly reasonable excuse to step back.

The body knows the loop. It runs it automatically, like breathing. You don't decide to contract. You just notice, later, that you did.

We did the work of naming this, of feeling it in the body rather than just thinking about it. Of tracing it back - not to blame, but to understand. To see the intelligence in it, because the loop was never stupidity. It was protection. It was your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe in an environment that, at some point, wasn't. If you want to go deeper on this, this post on root causes and patterns is a good place to start.

That's important. The loop protected you then.

But there's something else worth naming. Something that goes even deeper than protection.

For some of us, the loop didn't just protect us, it became us.

The fighting, the striving, the holding it together, the pushing through - it became the identity. The thing that felt like you.

The mode that made sense of the world, that gave you a role, a direction, a reason to keep going.

We became the warrior.

The one who has learned to navigate by threat. Who knows exactly what to do when everything is hard. Who is so good at surviving. Who wakes up every morning already scanning for what needs to be fought, fixed, held together.

What happens to that warrior when the war ends?

Not defeat - victory. The thing they fought for, finally arrived. The peace they were protecting, finally here.

And suddenly there is... nothing to fight. No enemy to outsmart. No crisis to manage. No reason to keep the armour on.

Who are you, if not this?

What do you do with hands that only know how to grip?

The peace doesn't feel like peace, it feels like danger. Like something must be wrong, because if everything were truly okay, you'd feel okay - and you don't. You feel lost, restless. Vaguely guilty for not being in motion. Suspicious of the stillness.

So you find the next battle. You create the next problem. You manufacture just enough friction to feel like yourself again.

Not because you want to suffer. Because you don't yet know who you are without the fight.

This is what the loop really is, at its deepest. Not just a pattern - an identity - a story about what you have to do in order to be.

And breaking it, really breaking it, means more than releasing the behaviour. It means grieving the self that was built around surviving. And slowly, tenderly, beginning to find out who lives underneath.

Because the opposite of the warrior is not the victim, it's not weakness or passivity or giving up.

The opposite of the warrior, the one who only knows how to fight... is the flower.

And the flower asks something completely different of you.

A flower doesn't bloom in private. The moment it opens, it's exposed to everything. The light that feeds it, the wind that bends it, the storm that will eventually come and test whether the roots went deep enough. Every single petal - out there. Visible, tender, in full contact with whatever arrives.

The warrior controls. The flower trusts.

The warrior knows how to grip. The flower knows how to open.

And blooming - real blooming - is not a single dramatic moment of courage. It's not the breakthrough, the revelation, the one big release. It's something much quieter and much harder than that.

It's the sustained practice of remaining open... again and again... when the wind comes, when you feel exposed, when something in you screams to close back up and become small and safe again.

It asks you to trust what you cannot fully see or control, that the roots are deep enough. That the light is actually there. That being seen, really seen, will not destroy you the way part of you still believes it will.

This is the work the warrior never learned. Not because they were weak, but because openness, in the environment they came from, was dangerous. Softness cost you something. Being too visible brought consequences. You can read more about how triggers and discomfort hold this pattern in place here.

So you armoured up. You learned to fight before you could be hurt.

And now the armour is coming off. And underneath it, tender, uncertain, blinking in the light, is the part of you that still wants to bloom.

That part is not naive. That part is not the part that gets hurt again.

That part is the most alive thing in you.

The coming home

And then came the slower work.

Not fixing, not performing healing, not adding more tools and techniques to a collection that already felt overwhelming, just arriving.

Coming home to the body you'd been living at a slight distance from. Feeling what was actually there, underneath the doing and the managing and the careful construction of a self that was acceptable enough to be loved.

This is the work I do with people in 1:1 containers and on the longer containers, with the ones who are ready to go beyond understanding their patterns and actually inhabit a different way of being. Slower, more intimate. Less about breakthrough moments and more about the quiet, steady process of learning to trust yourself again, from the inside out.

This is quieter work. Less dramatic, less obviously progress-shaped.

But something was shifting, I could feel it in myself, as well as in the people I work with. In the quality of presence in the room (even the virtual ones) when we were together.

The body was starting to trust, slowly and unevenly, with setbacks and spirals and days where the old patterns came back so loud it was hard to believe anything had changed.

But something had.

The part nobody warns you about

This last month, life has been genuinely, almost overwhelmingly generous.

New clients committing to deep work together. Reviews that feel almost too good to be true. Collaboration requests arriving. Friends showing up with so much love it almost feels like too much. The best birthday. Being in the process of getting a new car - and the fulfilment of a long-held dream to build a microvan with it. Life itself - the material, the relational, the creative - all moving, all saying yes at once.

And this week, my nervous system, instead of celebrating, quietly started to freak out.

The old low hum returning. The subtle pull to make myself a little smaller, a little more manageable, a little less visible, the "what if" fears - in the exact moment I've been praying for this. The anxiety that doesn't arrive when things are hard. The anxiety that arrives when things are good.

I had to stop. Literally stop. And say to my system: this is safe. Not the old safe - the new one. The updated, upgraded safe. The one I don't have to earn anymore.

And that distinction matters enormously.

Two kinds of safe

The old safe was conditional.

It was: stay small enough, quiet enough, undemanding enough, and you will be okay. Don't take up too much space. Don't want too loudly. Don't let yourself be seen too fully, because the last time you were... it cost you something.

That wasn't a story your mind made up, it was information your body collected. Evidence, accumulated over years, about what happens when you're too visible, too present, too much.

Your nervous system filed that evidence and built a set of rules around it. Rules that kept you just below the threshold where exposure becomes dangerous. This is also why emotional overwhelm is not always what it looks like - sometimes it's the system protecting you from the very thing you want.

The rules were intelligent, they were survival.

But survival and aliveness are not the same thing.

The new safe is different. It doesn't ask you to earn it, nor it ask you to be less. It doesn't require smallness as the price of belonging.

The new safe says: you can be fully here. You can receive what's coming. You can let life be this generous without immediately looking for the catch.

But here's the thing: your nervous system doesn't automatically update just because your mind understands something new. Understanding is not the same as integration. You can know you're safe and still feel the old alarm, and that's not failure, that's just how the body works.

The update happens through experience, through being seen - slowly, gently, repeatedly - and surviving it. Through receiving good things and letting them land, rather than deflecting them, through staying open when everything in you wants to contract.

Through practice, through exactly the kind of work we've been doing together.

Why the anxiety arrives with the good things

There's a reason the anxiety doesn't come when things are hard.

When things are hard, the old survival strategies make sense. Contracting, protecting, managing - these are appropriate responses to genuine threat. The system feels coherent. The feelings match the circumstances.

But when things are good - when life is generous, when love is available, when you are being seen and received and met - the system gets confused.

Because somewhere in its history, expansion felt dangerous. Being visible brought consequences. Receiving too much meant it could be taken away. Trusting the good meant being unprepared for when it ended.

So the nervous system does what it always does: it protects you from the threat it learned to fear. Even when the threat is no longer present. Even when what's arriving is grace, not danger... even when the thing you've been praying for is finally, actually here.

The body cannot tell the difference yet. Not until you show it, slowly, that this time is different. Shadow work is often where this layer lives - the wound beneath the wound.

That's not a flaw in you, that's the work.

The real initiation

I think the real initiation isn't the breakdown, it's the moment after the breakthrough.

It's when the war is over... and you have to figure out what to do with the quiet.

It's standing in the middle of your own answered prayers and choosing to stay open instead of finding something to fight. To not make it smaller, nor to manufacture the next crisis just to feel like yourself again.

To say to your body - again, and again, and as many times as it needs - this is the new safe. We don't have to earn this. We are allowed to be here, fully, in all of it.

The practice right now isn't more healing. It isn't another layer of inner work.

The practice is staying open when life finally meets you with what you asked for.

Staying open when the clients come.

Staying open when the love arrives.

Staying open when the material stuff shifts and the world starts rearranging itself around the version of you that you've been becoming.

Staying open - not because it's easy, but because you know now that open is where you actually live and flourish.

For you, reading this

I don't know where you are in your journey.

Maybe you're deep in the inner work, in the middle of the loop, not yet sure there's a way through.

Maybe you're somewhere in between, glimpsing the other side but not quite trusting it yet.

Maybe you're right where I am this week, surprised to find that expansion has its own kind of discomfort, and that receiving requires just as much practice as releasing.

Wherever you are: this is not a journey you have to make alone.

And the body, given the right environment, the right practices, the right container, the right community of people doing the same work alongside you, can learn to update its definition of safe. Can learn to stay open and to trust the good.

That's what I'm here for. That's what all of this is for - the 1:1 work, the in-person retreats, and the Soma Groove Village - a community of brave souls doing exactly this work, together.

What this full moon is actually asking

I'm writing this as the Scorpio full moon rises, and I want to say something about it that goes against almost everything we're conditioned to do with these moments.

This full moon is not asking you to do more work.

It's not asking for a release ritual, a new intention, a list of what you're letting go or what you're calling in. It's not asking you to process anything, heal anything, figure anything out.

It's asking something much harder than all of that.

It's asking you to receive. To allow and stabilise in the open, in that tender, exposed, vulnerable state of actually blooming, without immediately reaching for something to do, fix, or earn.

Most of us are so practised at the doing. At the working through, the releasing, the setting of intentions. We've made a whole identity out of the journey itself. Another ritual, another moon, another layer of the work.

But what if the work right now is to stop working?

What if this particular threshold - the one where life is finally saying yes, where the loop has broken, where the warrior has laid down their sword - what if this one asks you to simply be in it? Not transcend it. Not immediately optimise it. Not turn your own blooming into the next project.

Just stay. In the opening. In the receiving. In the strange, unfamiliar, quietly terrifying experience of being met.

The flower doesn't do anything extra to bloom. It just stops contracting. It lets the conditions that are already there - the light, the warmth, the soil that was being tended all along - finally do what they were always going to do.

You've tended the soil, you've done the work.

Now comes the part that requires a different kind of courage: letting yourself actually open. Staying in that open. Letting life find you there, and not flinching.

Sit with this

Whenever you read this - full moon or not - this question is worth sitting with:

Where are you shrinking in the exact places you prayed to expand?

Can you stay open when life finally delivers what you asked for?

Not do something about it, process it, turn it into the next intention.

Just... can you stay open? Can you let it land?

You don't have to earn it again.

You already did.

Vanda is the founder of Soma Groove Sessions - a somatic embodiment and movement practice based in Algarve, Portugal. She works with people who are done surviving and ready to actually live - in 1:1 sessions, in-person retreats, and online programs. If this resonated, find your way to the Soma Groove Village - a community of brave souls doing exactly this work, together.