The Practice of Inner Work
It was past midnight. The house was quiet, and I was sitting with a journal I had not opened in years.
This was 2025. Three rounds of chemo behind me. Covid on top of it. I could not eat much. I could not go out. On paper, I had no strength left.
And yet every night, I wrote four lines. Gratitude. Surrender. Who I still was beneath all of it. Nobody saw those pages. They were for me to read, and re read.
But those four lines every night were doing something no medicine could do. They were tending to the part of me that everything else depends on.
That is inner work. Simply put, it means noticing your own thoughts, triggers, and reactions, before they run the show for you. Not journaling for the sake of journaling. Not another wellness trend. It is the quiet, often uncomfortable practice of checking in with yourself before the world asks something of you.
For years I focused on the career, the responsibilities, the next milestone. Nobody ever asked me who I was becoming while I achieved all of it. I had to ask myself that question eventually, at midnight, with a journal I had almost given up on.
It did not start there, though. If I am honest, the journal itself had been sitting on my shelf long before that season found me. What changed was not the notebook. It was my willingness to actually open it.
Quick Read – Mirror Mirror on the Wall, What Do You See
I did not start journaling to write beautifully. I started because I had nobody else to say certain things to.
For years I thought journaling meant elegant sentences, the kind you see in other people’s photos of their notebooks. So I never started. It felt like one more thing I would do wrong, one more standard I would fail to meet, on top of everything else I was already trying to hold together.
Then came a season where I had no choice. I was too tired to talk, too full to stay quiet, and the only page that would not judge me was blank and in front of me.
I began with four lines. Gratitude. Surrender. A fear I was not ready to say out loud. A version of myself I was trying to remember. Nothing about it was structured. I did not follow a method or a template. I simply wrote what was true that day, however small or unfinished it felt.
Some nights it was messy. Some nights it was one sentence, repeated because I could not think of anything else. It did not matter. The page was not grading me, and slowly, I stopped grading myself too.
Without noticing, it became something else. A conversation with myself, the kind I could not have with my husband, or my sons, or even the people closest to me, because some things need to be written before they can be spoken. And it became a way to understand what I was actually afraid of, instead of carrying the fear around unnamed, letting it shape my mood and my reactions without ever calling it by its name.
Some of what filled those pages was not heavy at all. A silly argument over what to cook for dinner. A funny thing one of my sons said before he left for university. The ordinary noise of a full house, the kind I did not yet know I would one day miss. Inner work was never only about the hard chapters. It was also about paying attention to the small, unremarkable ones, before they quietly became memories I wished I had noticed sooner.
Suggested Read – The Tea Pan That Taught Me What Inner Strength Really Is
I did not know it then, but I was doing inner work. I thought I was just writing.
If you have never journaled because you think you need to write well, you do not. You need to write honestly. Start with one line if that is all you have. Ask yourself one real question and let yourself answer it badly. The pages never judged me. They simply reflected me, and that reflection, imperfect as it was, taught me more about myself than years of simply moving through my days ever had.
Journaling taught me how to notice myself on the page. What I still had to learn was how to notice myself in the moment, before I reacted, not after, when there was no page in front of me, only the people I loved and whatever had just been said.
The biggest arguments in my home had very little to do with what we were arguing about.
For years, I thought I was simply a passionate person. I spoke quickly, and it took me years to understand where that came from. I was the youngest in a joint family, and somewhere along the way, I learned that being heard meant responding first. The quickest reaction often got the attention. Being the youngest also meant being indulged, and without realising it, I carried that way of responding into adulthood, long after the room full of cousins and elders had become a distant memory.
For most of my life, I never questioned it. It was simply who I was, and I had even come to think of it as a strength, the fast thinker, the quick decider, the one who did not hesitate.
Until last year, when I noticed I was bringing the same habit home, snapping first and expecting the people I loved most to understand me immediately, the way a whole joint family once seemed to. It led to more arguments than I care to admit.
One evening, after one of those arguments, I sat with my journal and asked myself a question I had never asked before. What if this is not really about today.
As I wrote, I realised I was not reacting to the moment in front of me. I was reacting from a pattern that had been with me for decades, one that had nothing to do with the door left open or the tone in someone’s voice, and everything to do with a much older need to be heard immediately, without delay. That was the beginning of real self reflection, not the idea of it, but the actual, uncomfortable practice of it.
Learning to pause did not come naturally. It came from one honest night of writing, and then from asking myself better questions, again and again, until I could recognise the pattern before it took over rather than after the damage was already done.
Now, before I react, I ask myself what just happened, what I am actually feeling, and what this is really about, underneath it. Those questions rarely change the situation. They almost always change me.
Reflection did not slow me down. It gave me back the ten seconds I used to skip, the space between something happening and me choosing who I wanted to be. That ten second pause has changed many conversations, many decisions, and most importantly, many relationships, in ways a fast reaction never could have.
Journaling opened the door. Reflection is what taught me to walk through it before I reacted, not after. Together, they are the practice, not something I mastered once and set aside, but something I keep choosing, one page and one pause at a time, on the ordinary days as much as the difficult ones.
What is the ten second pause you keep skipping, and what might you discover if you finally took it?
Usha Nagrani – Executive Leadership Coach
#UshaRunsHerOwnRace
Usha Nagrani, an HR Leader turned ICF Executive Coach, empowers senior management professionals and business leaders to achieve breakthroughs as expats, build cross-cultural teams, and navigate the exciting journey of career acceleration.
