The Monster Was Never Inside You

A listener's reflection on Episode 2 of the Inspire Breathwork Podcast, with Leyla Firatli ‍

Leyla Firatli was twelve years old when a doctor told her she had advanced scoliosis, that she'd be in pain for the rest of her life, and that the pain would only get worse until she was dependent on painkillers just to function. She was a child, and she was being told her own body was the enemy. For the next decade, she coped the way a lot of us learn to, drinking, smoking, doing whatever it took to not have to feel what was happening underneath her own skin.

What stayed with me most, listening to this episode, was how long it took her to understand that the pain was never really the problem.

She found her way to a version of yoga in college, in Los Angeles, deeply colonized in its packaging but still, somehow, a door cracking open. Real relief didn't come until October 7th, 2023, when the genocide against Palestinian people began being livestreamed, and Leyla, living in the very city where the bombs being used were manufactured, could no longer look away. The pain in her back came roaring back, and this time it came with a name attached. It wasn't random. It was her body registering, in real time, exactly how the world actually works.

Before that, she explains, she'd always sensed something was wrong, living in Venice Beach, the self-described capital of whitewashed wellness, surrounded by people who looked embodied and joyful while something underneath her own skin refused to settle. She felt crazy for it. Once she understood colonialism, once she had language for what her body had been sensing all along, the confusion lifted, even as the grief got heavier. There's no going back from that kind of clarity, she says, but it's better than the fog.

This is where the episode turns, for me, into something genuinely radical. Western medicine, Leyla argues, isn't simply incomplete in how it treats chronic pain. It's doing exactly what it was built to do. Born out of colonialism and capitalism, it treats the body the same way those systems treat people, as separable parts rather than a whole, and it keeps mind-body medicine, the kind rooted in indigenous knowledge going back thousands of years, deliberately out of reach for the people who need it most. Because mind-body medicine tells you something dangerous. That the power to heal was always inside you, and that power isn't measurable, isn't sellable, isn't something science can fully account for. A population that believes that is much harder to control than one that's dependent, medicated, and scared of its own body.

She puts it more plainly than I expected, listening. It's like they make you feel the monster is living in you, when really it was a structure built around you.

What follows from that is a completely different way of relating to pain itself. In Leyla's understanding, chronic pain is almost always protection, either from something physically unsafe, her own back pain flared when she was showing up to protests, keeping her from a body on the front line of police confrontation, or from an emotion the nervous system has decided is too dangerous to feel. Rage, especially, for anyone whose body has learned that expressing rage carries real risk. The nervous system represses what it can't safely release, and when it finally can't hold the pressure anymore, pain steps in and takes up all the available space, because pain is easier to survive than the full weight of what's underneath it.

Her actual practice with clients follows from that logic. Not fixing, not managing symptoms, but understanding what a person's pain is protecting them from, removing the shame from the individual and placing it correctly on the systems that put them there, and slowly, patiently, teaching the nervous system that it's safe enough now to feel what it once had to bury. One tool she keeps coming back to is disarmingly simple. Writing pain a letter. Thanking it for trying to protect you, and then explaining, gently, why it isn't needed in quite the same way anymore. Reading it aloud, to the place in the body where the pain lives, a few times a day. She's watched pain soften in response to being spoken to with something like respect, rather than fought.

There's an honesty in how she talks about the limits of her own industry too, one that's easy to miss if you're not really listening for it. She's built a practice explicitly designed not to keep people coming back forever. Three sessions, sometimes, and someone has the tools to keep doing the work themselves. That's not a profitable model, she points out, and that's exactly why so much of colonial wellness resists this kind of work. A person who no longer needs to pay anyone for their own healing is, in a very real sense, a threat to the entire structure.

What holds all of this together, more than any single technique, is something Leyla returns to again and again across the episode. Hope, deliberately practiced rather than assumed. She talks about building a life in a small village on Turkey's southern coast, growing her own vegetables, trading soap and peanut butter and cherry tomatoes instead of money wherever she can, raising children in community rather than isolation, resting for five to seven days at the end of her cycle, non-negotiably, even when the productivity-trained part of her mind insists she should be doing something instead. She's honest that this is still work in progress. Some days the pain simply exists, and she's learned that allowing space for that, without needing to fix it immediately, is its own form of healing.

The line I keep coming back to arrives near the end. She sees all of this, mindfulness, breath, the long slow work of healing chronic pain, as preparation. Not an escape from a chaotic world, but a way of staying grounded enough to hold each other as things get harder, because under this system, they will. That reframes the whole episode. This was never about achieving some final, permanent state of being fixed. It's about building the capacity to keep showing up, message rather than malfunction, whole rather than waiting to be repaired.

You can hear the complete conversation between Suks and Leyla Firatli, including a closing reading of Audre Lorde's A Litany for Survival, in Reclaiming the Root: The Moment Wellness Failed Me, the second episode of the Inspire Breathwork Podcast. You can also find Leyla's own work at mindbodyhealingwithleyla.com.

If this is a thread you want to keep pulling, Breathing Beyond Empire goes further into it, through breath, embodiment, and collective healing.