The Woman Who Stopped

On inconsistency, intuition, and finally understanding the difference.

Three weeks into a 15,000 steps a day streak, I found myself standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at my trainers by the door, and thinking: I genuinely cannot be bothered.

Not tired, injured, or busy, but simply done.

The way you’re done with a song you loved so much you played it to death. It wasn’t failure; it was something quieter and more honest than that. A kind of cellular ‘no’ that arrived without drama and without apology.

So I stopped.

I rolled my yoga mat out in the living room the next morning at 7 am. Lit a candle. Sat with the particular hush of early morning still in the air. And it felt, immediately and unmistakably, like ‘yes’. Like something my body had been patiently waiting to be offered.

A few weeks later, I went vegan, not as a proclamation, and definitely not forever, but just a quiet experiment: “I wonder what this feels like.” It felt interesting for a while: clean and curious. Then one day it felt like enough, and I made myself a bowl of fish curry and didn’t look back.

I’m telling you this because I used to feel enormous guilt about exactly this kind of behaviour: the stopping, the pivoting, the trying and the moving on.

I’d built a story about myself: that I was inconsistent, undisciplined, unable to commit, because I couldn’t sustain the habits I’d decided I should have forever. And for years, that story sat quietly in the background, colouring everything.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand, at 48, finally: What I was calling inconsistency was actually just being alive.

We’ve been sold a very particular idea of what growth looks like: pick a habit, make it permanent, do it every single day without deviation, or you’ve failed. But that’s not discipline, that’s a kind of quiet violence against your own natural rhythm, a stubborn insistence that the woman you were in January should still be running the show in October.

She shouldn’t. You’ve changed. You’re supposed to change.

The 15,000 steps served me beautifully for three weeks, and then they didn’t. The vegan experiment stretched something in me and then completed itself. The yoga is here now, soft and steady, and one day something else will arrive, and I’ll follow that instead.

The thread connecting all of it isn’t a habit, it’s a woman paying honest, curious, loving attention to herself. I’ve decided that is more than enough.

And speaking of paying attention, I have some news.

I passed my Pilates Diploma with 92% Distinction!

I’m sitting with that for a moment, because it didn’t arrive easily or quickly. It arrived in the cracks of a very full life; studied on tired evenings, during quiet Fridays, in the margins of building two organisations and showing up for everything and everyone else. The final assignment was submitted last Sunday, in the three precious hours I had carved out entirely for myself.

And now it’s done.

What I didn’t expect from this diploma was how much it would deepen my relationship with Pilates itself. I thought I was studying movement. What I was actually doing was studying the body; how it holds tension, how it compensates, how it speaks when we’re willing to listen. How the breath is never just the breath. How core strength is never just about the abs.

Did you know that Joseph Pilates introduced 34 Contrology exercises that form the original matwork sequence? Every movement intentional. Every exercise is connected. A whole philosophy built on the idea that the mind, body, and spirit are inseparable.

That’s the practice I’m returning to now. With new eyes and a Distinction.

Not more intense, but more present. More attuned to what my body is asking for in this season. The Pilates that regulates my nervous system on a hard day. The strength work reminds me of what this body is capable of. The slow, deliberate movements that bring me back into myself when the world has pulled me too far outward.

This feels like the beginning of something, not just the end of a course.

If you’d like to build your own Pilates practice, I’ve written two pieces you might love:

→ Your Daily Pilates Sanctuary: A Midlife Woman’s Guide

→ Strong & Soft: Pilates and Weight Lifting for the Midlife Heart

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Some mornings, I sit at my desk before anyone else is awake, tea going cold beside me, and I think about all the women quietly doing the same thing.

Not the version they post about, but the real version. The one where you’ve been building something for months and you genuinely can’t tell if it’s working. Where you’ve had a week where nothing seemed to land, nothing seemed to move, and you sat with that familiar, awful question: “Am I fooling myself?”

The fear isn’t loud or dramatic; it’s just a low hum underneath everything. Present on a weekday morning when you open your laptop. Present when you check your numbers and feel the sting. Present when someone else seems to be moving faster, arriving somewhere you can’t quite reach yet.

I know that feeling; I have lived in that feeling too many times. I remember sitting in this same chair, not that long ago, certain I was building something that mattered, and terrified, in equal measure, that I was the only one who could see it. That invisible thing you believe in before there’s any real evidence to believe in. Before the community gathers. Before the words land in the right place. Before someone messages you at 11 pm to say, “I needed this today”, and your whole chest opens with relief.

That season, the one before the breakthrough, the one that feels like silence, is the hardest part of building anything real. And it is, I’ve come to understand, also the most important part.

Because what you’re doing in that silence is becoming someone who can hold what’s coming. You’re building the faith, the resilience, the quiet, stubborn, unglamorous conviction that what you’re creating deserves to exist, even on the days it doesn’t feel like enough.

So if you’re in that season right now. If you’re building something nobody has fully seen yet. If the failures have been more frequent than the wins. If the fear shows up every single morning, and you show up anyway.

I see you. I root for you. Genuinely, completely, from one woman doing the quiet, invisible, necessary work to another.

Don’t give up. You are so much closer than it feels from the inside.

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This week, you might like:

→ This week’s Midlife Circle: Wanting More But Not Knowing What More Is, because sometimes the wanting arrives before the knowing, and that deserves its own conversation.

→ Still time to catch up with the End of Spring Season Reflect & Review, seven days of honest reflection on the season just passed. A beautiful thing to sit with before June begins.

→ And on Monday, 1st June, the Summer Edit of the Midlife by Design Magazine goes live, including a wonderful conversation with the remarkable Sif Orellana, I cannot wait for you to read it.

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One question to carry into your week:

Where have you been calling yourself inconsistent, when really, you’ve just been listening?

One more thing before you go.

Starting next Sunday, The Midlife Edit is getting a quiet refresh. A new format, a new feel, and a new day. From 7th of June, you’ll find it landing in your inbox every Sunday morning, just in time to set the tone for the week ahead.

I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you.

Kiran x

Kiransinghuk.com | The Sattva Collective