Thread: Work
There was a time when I believed fitness was built through force.
Through volume. Through pressure. Through repetition layered on repetition until something either broke or adapted.
And for a long time, that belief served me.
It built endurance. It built toughness. It built a kind of psychological armour that could withstand long miles and longer doubts.
But what it never really taught me was how to listen.
After Toronto, listening became the only language that made sense.
I didn’t want more training plans. I didn’t want more numbers. I didn’t want more noise in my headphones or advice in my ears. I wanted to feel what was actually happening inside my body — without interference, without bravado, without the ego that likes to dress itself up as discipline.
That’s when I shifted toward something different.
Neural work.
At first, it sounded almost too simple. Too light. Too subtle to matter. The kind of thing you might dismiss if you were still living in a world where intensity is the only metric that counts.
But the first time I tried it, I felt it immediately.
The pauses between efforts.
The three deep breaths.
The deliberate reset of the nervous system.
It wasn’t rest.
It was information.
In those few quiet seconds, something extraordinary began to happen. My body started talking to me more clearly than it ever had before.
The message wasn’t “push harder.”
It was, be more precise.
Power was no longer about speed. It was about quality.
How clean the movement felt.
How centred my core felt.
How balanced my breath felt.
How calm my heart felt.
How present my mind felt.
It was like switching from a loud, chaotic room to a quiet space where every sound suddenly mattered.
Instead of chasing heart rate, I noticed it.
Instead of forcing fatigue, I explored it.
Instead of burning through stations, I began moving through them.
The body, it turns out, has its own intelligence. But you only hear it when you stop trying to dominate it.
And as I listened more closely, I noticed something else changing at the same time.
My thoughts were softer.
My reactions were slower, but more considered.
My nights were quieter.
Even my loneliness felt different — less sharp, more spacious, more filled with a low, steady warmth that came from somewhere I didn’t fully understand.
It was as though this new physical awareness had opened a corresponding space inside my chest.
A space where calm could live.
A space where distance didn’t feel like abandonment, but like a held breath before something meaningful.
A space where presence mattered more than performance.
The more I practiced this new form of effort — conscious, measured, aware — the more I realized that it wasn’t just rewiring muscle.
It was rewiring identity.
I wasn’t “the guy who pushes harder than everyone else” anymore.
I was becoming “the man who knows when to soften.”
And paradoxically, I felt stronger than I had in years.
My stride felt lighter.
My posture felt taller.
My heart felt steadier.
And best of all, my mind felt clean.
No chaos.
No self-punishment.
No frantic need to prove anything.
Just the simple truth of being in my body again.
Fully.
Quietly.
This wasn’t about slowing down.
It was about tuning in.
It was about trusting that calm is not weakness.
Calm is intelligence.
Calm is presence.
Calm is power beneath the surface.
I had spent decades training the visible parts of myself — legs, lungs, shoulders, willpower.
Now, for the first time, I was training the invisible.
The nervous system.
The breath.
The inner ear of awareness.
The subtle link between mind and muscle.
And as I trained that, something else began to grow stronger too:
The ability to hold a quiet feeling inside me without needing to name it.
A gentle, steady pull toward connection.
A warmth that didn’t distract or derail me, but grounded me.
It didn’t make me reckless.
It made me careful.
It made me protective.
It made me want to stay healthy.
Stay awake.
Stay present.
Stay here — for the work, for the days, for whatever is waiting on the other side of distance.
The body had a new language now.
And finally, I was fluent enough to understand it.