Learning to Live in the Pause

If you live with an autoimmune disease, you probably know what it feels like to live in constant motion, not because you are active, but because your mind and body never seem to stop reacting. One moment your energy is steady, and the next, you crash. Your symptoms flare. Your nervous system hums on overdrive.

For years, I thought the only way to manage this was to push harder, to fix, control, or outsmart my body. But the real shift came when I learned to pause.

Our nervous system is designed to protect us. When it senses threat, even something as simple as pain, fatigue, or stress, it flips into survival mode. Heart rate increases. Muscles tense. The body prepares to act. For people living with chronic illness, this response can become stuck in the “on” position.

The more I tried to force myself to get back to normal, the more my body resisted. It was not being lazy or uncooperative. It was protecting me.

What I did not realize back then was that rest, slowness, and gentle movement could rewire that pattern. They could teach my body and brain that safety was possible again.

Restorative yoga was my first teacher in this. At first, I hated it. Being still felt like failure, like giving up, like I was stuck in bed from my chronic illnesses. But over time, as I learned to settle into props and soften into breath, I began to feel something I had not felt in years, if ever: ease.

Somatic movement deepened that experience. Instead of stretching or forcing, I learned to move from the inside out, to notice subtle sensations, tiny releases, quiet shifts in tension. These movements are small, but they are profound. They remind the body that it can let go of old holding patterns and find a new sense of balance.

Both practices became ways of communicating with my nervous system, a language of softness, curiosity, and compassion.

The pause is not passive. It is where healing begins. It is where the body can shift from fight or flight into rest and digest, the place where repair happens.

For those of us living with autoimmune disease, healing is not about pushing through every flare or pretending to be fine. It is about learning to live in the pause, to meet ourselves gently, to listen when the body whispers (before it has to shout), and to remember that doing less is sometimes the most powerful medicine of all.

Because when we stop fighting our bodies and start listening, we find something deeper than control. We find connection.

And that connection is where healing, real and sustainable healing, begins.