THE ORDER OF BECOMING IS A SPIRAL, NOT A LADDER: Why You'll Return to the Same Lessons at Deeper Levels

For a long time, I believed that growth moved in one direction.

Forward. Upward. Each stage completed and left behind. Each lesson learned once and then no longer needed. Each version of yourself a step above the previous one on a staircase that only went one way.

I believed this about the body. I believed it about my career. I believed it about who I was becoming as a teacher, as a builder, as a person.

I was wrong about almost all of it.

And the correction — which came slowly, through more repetition than I would have chosen — turned out to be one of the most useful things I have ever understood.

The Moment That Did Not Make Sense

The first time it confused me, I thought I had simply regressed.

I had done the work. I had rebuilt from a significant loss, found my footing again, moved into a new stage of building with more clarity and more care than before. And then — without warning, without an obvious reason — something that I thought I had already resolved came back.

Not identically. But recognisably.

The same pattern, slightly different clothes. A version of the old doubt. A question about identity that I was sure I had answered. A moment of exhaustion that felt, uncomfortably, like the one I had already learned from.

My first instinct was disappointment.

I thought: I have been here. I have done this. Why am I here again?

It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand that being here again was not failure. It was depth.

The Ladder and the Spiral

We are taught to think of growth as a ladder.

You climb. Each rung is a skill acquired, a lesson absorbed, a stage of development completed. Once you have climbed past a rung, you do not return to it. You are beyond it. And if you find yourself back near it, something has gone wrong.

This model is clean. It is reassuring. It makes progress legible and measurable. It also does not describe how any living thing actually grows.

A tree does not grow in a straight line upward. It grows in rings — each year adding a new layer around everything that came before, each layer shaped by the specific conditions of that particular season. The earliest rings do not disappear. They remain at the core, held inside every ring that follows. The tree does not transcend its first year. It carries it.

The body works the same way. You do not finish learning to breathe and move on. You return to breath at every stage of development, each time with a different capacity to understand what it is asking of you. You do not resolve your relationship with effort once and leave the question behind. You meet it again — at a different age, in a different body, with a different understanding — and discover that there was always more to learn from it.

This is not regression. This is the spiral.

What the Seasons Actually Are

Nothing in this work unfolds in a straight line.

Not the body. Not the self. Not the business. Not a life.

We move in seasons. We expand and contract. We accelerate and rest. We build and dissolve and build again — not because we failed the first time, but because each version of what we create can only be as strong as the version of ourselves that created it.

And we are always becoming someone slightly different.

Someone slightly more coherent. Slightly more capable of carrying what they are building.

There is the season of pure beginning — fragile and determined, where everything is being planted and nothing has yet taken root, where faith carries you further than evidence. There is the season of acceleration — when things come together, when the vision feels close and alive, when the energy of building feels almost effortless. There is the season of harvest and recalibration — where what you have built begins to mature and deepen, where better matters more than bigger.

And there is the season of necessary stillness. Slower. Quieter. Asking you to reflect and restore. To return to what may have been lost. To prepare the ground for what comes next.

None of these seasons is better than another.

Each one carries you forward in its own way.

Each one asks something specific of you.

The Season That Looks Like Going Backwards

The hardest season to trust is the quiet one.

Because from the outside — and sometimes from the inside too — it looks like nothing is happening. Like you have stopped. Like everyone around you is moving and you are standing still, losing ground, falling behind some invisible measure of where you should be by now.

I have been in that season more than once.

The years after I walked away from a lineage that had shaped me. The period after a significant business loss. The stretches of time when the next thing was not yet visible and the last thing was no longer where I belonged.

In each of those seasons, my instinct was to act. To do something. To produce visible evidence that I was still moving, still building, still becoming — because stillness felt, in a profession that rewards output, like a kind of failure.

What I eventually understood was that growth often happens in stillness.

After a period of intensive training, it is not during the effort that strength consolidates — it is in the recovery. It is in the rest that tissue repairs, integrates, and emerges stronger. If you train without recovery, you do not get stronger. You get injured.

The effort is necessary. But the stillness is where the adaptation happens.

The self works the same way. The quiet seasons — the ones that feel like nothing, like loss, like standing still while everything else moves forward — are often where the deepest roots form. Where beliefs are examined. Where borrowed identities are shed. Where something truer and more durable takes shape beneath the surface.

Everything I have built that has genuinely lasted grew from roots that formed in apparent stillness.

Returning Is Not the Same as Going Back

Here is the distinction that matters.

When you return to a question you thought you had answered, you are not back where you started. You are deeper into the same terrain.

The question about your identity as a teacher — who you are when you are not representing someone else, what you actually believe about the body, what only you can bring into the room — that question does not get answered once. It gets answered at the level you are currently capable of, and then you live that answer for a while, and then at some point you realise there is more to it than you understood the first time.

Not because you got it wrong.

Because you have grown into a capacity to understand it more fully.

The same is true of the business questions. The question of what you charge, and what belief is underneath that number. The question of how much is resting on your own physical presence, and what it would mean to build something more durable. The question of who you are building with, and whether the people around you are helping you rise or holding you at a level you have already outgrown.

You will return to all of these. You are supposed to.

Each return is not a sign that you have gone backwards. It is a sign that you are going deeper.

What I See When I Look Back

I have had businesses that did not survive. I have rebuilt from zero more than once. I have dissolved partnerships that cost me significantly — financially, professionally, personally. I have made expensive mistakes and, in some cases, repeated them before I understood what they were teaching me.

For years, I looked at that history and saw the difficulty of it.

Now I look at it and see the seasons.

Each contraction made the next expansion possible. Each dissolution cleared space for something more aligned. Each mistake refined my understanding in ways that success never could have. The business that exists today — the one that finally feels coherent, sustainable, and genuinely mine — could only have been built by someone who had lived through all of those previous seasons.

Not despite them.

Because of them.

This is the thing about the spiral. You cannot skip the rings. The work you did in the earlier seasons is not wasted because the later seasons asked something different of you. It is there, at the core, holding everything that came after.

The Invitation

You will move through seasons too.

You will have periods of rapid growth that test your structure. Periods of quiet that test your faith. Moments of clarity so sharp they feel like revelation, and moments of confusion so dense they feel like failure.

You will outgrow beliefs you once defended fiercely. You will dissolve structures you once thought were permanent. You will begin again more than once, and each beginning will carry more wisdom than the last.

This is not regression. This is part of becoming.

The invitation is not to rush the season you are in — but to participate in it fully. If you are in a body season, listen to what your body is telling you before it has to shout. If you are in a self season, sit with the questions that are arising instead of filling the silence with more action. If you are in a business season, face the structure honestly — the numbers, the systems, the support you need — and strengthen what needs strengthening without shame.

And if you are in a quiet season — one that feels like nothing, like waiting, like being left behind — trust it.

Something is forming.

Something that cannot be forced.

Something that will emerge when it is ready, stronger and more coherent than anything you could have pushed into existence.

The order of becoming is not a ladder. It is a spiral. You will return to the body, to the self, to the business — again and again, at different depths, with different understanding each time.

Be patient with the season you are in.

Be honest about what it is asking of you.

And trust — as I have had to trust, more times than I can count — that what is happening now is preparing the ground for what comes next.

Season after season. Layer after layer.

This is the order of becoming.

Wherever you are in your own spiral right now — whether you are in a season of building, of questioning, of quiet, or of beginning again — I would love to hear from you.

Inside the IVA Inner Circle, this is the kind of conversation we make space for: not just the strategy of what to build next, but the deeper work of understanding which season you are actually in — and what it is asking of you. With people who are in their own spiral, at their own depth, doing the same honest work.

Send me a message at hello@ivapilates.com and tell me where you are right now. I read every single one.

‍