Louise Thayer works with animals, but she takes us on the ultimate human journey.
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When I started to write for The Good Men Project about a year ago, I first became aware of the topics that would dominate the themes of my stories. It surprised but didn’t shock me that these themes arose, and initially I questioned the validity of writing about them at all. I’ve spoken about grief and anxiety, depression and loss of all kinds, and for a while I wondered if I was a one-trick pony, bound to my past and re-living it through my words.
What I realized instead was that every conclusion I was drawing out of myself, through the act of writing, pointed towards the goodness inherent in the universe; an infinite number of checks and balances that made the ‘bad’ things appear essential and ultimately beneficial if only I could find ways out of my habitual behaviors.
I’ve since heard from so many people who have reached out to say they’ve shared the same conclusions. All of us are coming from different vectors and experiences, all of us are seeking a way to feel better and to be able to give more of ourselves to our loved ones and eventually to contribute to the world at large.
When we first begin the seemingly impossible search for a way out of our self-inflicted cerebral prisons, we must throw our hat into whatever ring that makes the most sense to us. We have to do this repeatedly and courageously and sometimes this takes a long while and feels extremely daunting. As we stumble towards what feels better we have to go outside of our spheres of knowledge and take greater and greater leaps of faith, knowing increasingly that when we stumble the ground will still be there to meet us.
We can be prone to beating ourselves up for the decisions we make during this process and that can initially keep us thinking that we’re incapable of making the right choices – in relationships, friendships, jobs and passions. If we continuously interrupt our vital spiritual growth by doing this and other detrimental things to our psyches, we lose our lust for life, and recovering it can take some really persistent work. This is especially true if we are peering out from the darkest corners of our souls. We fall, and when we fall it’s hard to believe that we will ever rise again, but rise we must unless we plan to keep living a small and fearful existence.
Fundamental to our growth is learning who we can trust, deeply and without question, and at first that might be one solitary soul that we throw our badly-needing selves at.
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Fundamental to our growth is learning who we can trust, deeply and without question, and at first that might be one solitary soul that we throw our badly-needing selves at. The probability is that at this intensity level, most people will be unable to handle us. I think that this was the root of all of my dysfunctional past connections. The need to keep reaching out in combination with the fear that when I found something that made sense, I would surely drive it away with my apparent inadequacy and inability to act “normally.”
Two major branches of options remain within a field of absolute possibility. Stay open or become more closed off. Closed-mindedness and isolation can lead to fear and even hatred (not only of the self but also of those people and things around us). This shutting down comes, I believe, as a result of allowing our minds to become polluted by self-doubt and lack of faith in the universe, in something intangible and so much bigger than we can ever comprehend.
I cannot go along thinking that someone or some magical thing is out there and will have “the cure” for me.
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I’ve come to be fascinated by the study of embryology and the beginning of life itself. That we can even materialize in the first place is beyond our ability to fathom it. We come to the paths of hope and trust through many different avenues of exploration. I’ve decided to open to the infinite even when my body and mind react in long established ways, shutting out pain and turning away from the root of discomfort. I cannot go along thinking that someone or some magical thing is out there and will have “the cure” for me. No doctor in the world can enter the depths of your soul and extract what it is in there that’s keeping you bound to your suffering.
I can think all these thoughts but some days if I don’t do so with the hottest shower water possible pounding on my aching back then I simply float off into space with no tether to hold me to my body. The same can be said for when we attempt to negotiate our lives alone. I don’t mean that we necessarily have to be partnered up, but we must find better and better ways to be around other people, some of whom are also suffering greatly.
It’s best though if we can also enjoy those who are a quantum step ahead of us on the road through life. They have an innate and instantly recognizable goodness to them, the healers, the ones who already know how to love unconditionally. Those people either came into this world with clean souls and a bright light that never dims or, more often than not, they have been sculpting themselves through tragedy and grief into a fusion of all that they can be. They give back because they know what it is to have and to feel nothing.
Speaking about feeling, I’m coming to believe that the answers we seek to the most convoluted questions in our highly developed minds are actually to be found in sensation. We need to find ways to get inside our bodies, past the cerebral rationalizations and castigations, past the worry of what might be lurking beneath the surface of our lives.
We need to place our faith in the fact that our real strength does not resemble brute force with its allies of ‘powering through,’ ‘sucking it up,’ and ‘handling it,’ but in those moments of collapse of all reason, in knowing that our vulnerability is our superpower.
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When we choose to unplug from life and turn away from people, we lose them and we leave behind pieces of our selves. We need to place our faith in the fact that our real strength does not resemble brute force with its allies of ‘powering through,’ ‘sucking it up,’ and ‘handling it,’ but in those moments of collapse of all reason, in knowing that our vulnerability is our superpower. That if we keep reaching out with our truth as we discover it, then we will certainly find that those people who reflect it back to us. We are not alone. We have to go through the whole process while inhabiting our own bodies. There’s no shortcut that’s worth taking because we simply can’t substitute someone else’s answers or experiences for our own.
I was shown a tangible example of this just last week as I went about my job. With horses and dogs the learning is more meaningful if we let them figure new things out for themselves. It goes right through to the core of their understanding when we simply set them up for success and get out of the way. Part of my daily routine involves socializing puppies who are bred for hunting birds (tough gig!). In order for these dogs to become capable of finding birds, they must first be able to explore their visceral world without impediment or worry. We want to help to shape their growth but we cannot become too involved in their progress or else we run the risk of them always needing us to show them what they should already instinctively know.
I was watching 3 young puppies explore the area outside the pen where their mother raised them. Two of the pups were boldly charging headlong into the loud kennel house area and wrestling with all the dogs they could get their teeth on. One, a slightly smaller female, hadn’t been raised in the same place, but had been bought in from somewhere else. This fact had evaded me when I’d turned them loose that morning and I watched as she initially hurtled around the grass and launched herself at every moving thing in her path. A few minutes later though I saw her tuck her tail and scoot back over towards her pen, all fun and games forgotten. She put herself back in the open gate and proceeded to howl in a small and piteous way. Her fellow playmates ignored her (being thoroughly engaged in wrestling with a rope they’d dragged out from somewhere) and so she withdrew further and voiced her upset most noticeably.
I had allowed her to find a way to feel better but without reaching out to ‘comfort’ her in a fashion that would have kept her in a fearful state of mind.
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I could have gone to her and picked her up but every fiber of my being knew that it would have been the wrong thing to do. I’ve seen similar things happen, when people believe they’re doing the right thing for the dog but when actually they’re just trying to make themselves feel better by making her stop crying. What I did instead was went about my business but I made it my business to cause the other puppies to become interested in what I was doing, walking briskly off at a right angle to where the little pup had now sat down looking confused. She saw my movement and that of her two friends and instantly she switched from being intimidated to once more running like a maniac to join in the flow of our forward momentum. In approximately ten seconds her world was put to rights. I had allowed her to find a way to feel better but without reaching out to ‘comfort’ her in a fashion that would have kept her in a fearful state of mind.
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It’s so important to unravel our experiences so that we can live the lives we’ve always imagined. When we have encounters that we interpret as negative, they leave their mental imprints on our psyches just as surely as they leave a physical imprint on our bodies. We do ourselves no favors by allowing others to sacrifice themselves in order to help us when we are not willing to help ourselves.
The way I see it now is that we have to want to let go of the convoluted tales we’ve told ourselves about how we “are.” It’s more like picking apart a ball of tangled string. The more you yank and try to force things, the tighter the knots become and the more intensely your frustration level increases. Instead of that Sisyphean tactic we should be seeking to follow in the wake of people and things which attract our attention but don’t demand that we shape ourselves in any particular fashion or form.
We have to believe that there’s a softer and more patient way to allow for the the universe to unfold within us. If we can do this, if we can just believe enough that it’s possible to be exactly how we always wanted to be, then we can get there. We don’t have to know the destination or the particular route and there’s a huge freedom in that fact. We just have to start to pick apart what no longer serves us in order for a new kind of life, one that better suits us, to come into fruition.
Photo—Eddy Van 3000/Flickr