Think Big ... But Act Small

Louise Thayer bucks conventional wisdom and says, yes, sweat the small stuff.

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The universe is wider than our views of it … It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

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It’s the little things that we decide to give our attention to which become the practice for sustaining a decent quality of life. First though, we have to become aware of what it is that we’re lacking, and that’s not always an easy task, especially when we have no idea where to look for the answers.

Finding faith in small and then not so small things can lead to huge leaps of personal progression, you just have to keep opening up to the possibility that everything you need is already waiting for you.

I’ve written previously about keeping one body part moving in the face of stultifying overwhelm.

I’ve been in that sea of depression and anxiety where the tide is made of fresh, churning cement, with you in the middle, not knowing which way is up because everything in your system is so low that you can’t sense that direction exists at all.

When I was in that place of concrete it was as though the positivity I saw in others was just an illusion. I knew, beyond question, that they would soon realize what it was that I’d already discovered; that everything was too hard and too heavy and too much.

You choose not to kill yourself because that would cause so much pain for your family and friends who are often still grieving the same tragedies as you. Childhood feels like an intangible past paradise with only fear, pain and purgatory on the road ahead. So yeah, I know.

We are not only rock. We are water and also the boat that floats on it. We invented machines to take us into the sky. We are air, we are ether and whistling and laughing too loud in the restaurant with old friends. We are windmilling our arms as we take off running down the hill with our dogs, so fast we nearly fall. We are most alive when we don’t care if people look. We only hope that they see that life can be this way too.

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Watching people suffer is what most of us least like to do. I was so hardened and simultaneously numb at one point in my life that I turned away from people and their problems and (towards the horses and dogs I worked with).

It took a lot of encounters with death and other tragedies for me to realize that it’s essential to have people in our lives who we care deeply about.

It took a lot of encounters with death and other tragedies for me to realize that it’s essential to have people in our lives who we care deeply about. I’d already built such effective perimeter fences against most human beings that I couldn’t seem to find a way to disassemble what felt like a permanent state. Loneliness threatened to overwhelm me as I refused to acknowledge that I was solely responsible for isolating myself, even within my romantic relationships.

The one becomes the two, the two become the three and the three become the ten thousand things. My friend Ryan Hallford recently paraphrased that quote from the Tao Te Ching to make a point in the class he was teaching. I interpreted it to mean that we unfold into this life in exactly the manner that we allow, if we can just get out of our own way.

Ryan is a Biodynamic Craniosacral therapist par excellence (try saying that three times fast when you’re drunk). He was initially described to me by a friend I trust deeply as being “very kind” and that’s what tipped the scale in favor of me taking my own big leap of faith. I decided to seek him out. I was desperate to find some answers as to why it was that my body and mind felt so disconnected, from each other and from the whole of life. It turned out to be the best move I’ve ever made.

I had already seen (but compartmentalized) the impressive results that horses underwent as they experienced Craniosacral work; lamenesses instantly gone, never to return, extreme anxiety made a thing of the past. It made a radical and undeniable difference in the life of a mustang who had come to me in a state of learned helplessness (very similar to PTSD in humans).

When I first came to know this horse, I still didn’t care to get interested in my own healing process, but I was very aware that I was a source of negativity to him and every animal and human around me because I’d stayed too long in a toxic combination of despair and stagnation.

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We are clouds more vast than we can ever touch and even so we keep trying to reduce ourselves to the tools in our hands and the thoughts in our ever-quickening minds.

It’s going to take a new vocabulary, one I haven’t formulated yet, to put into words how much of a difference this unique modality of bodywork has made to my existence. If I tried to write about it here, I would fail to do it justice and this is not a sales pitch. What I’m trying to say is that we all start from scratch as we begin to work out what it is, the intangible “something” that we can’t seem to break through, the invisible ties that bind.

I’d been doing my best to collect a jigsaw puzzle of life answers, but I’d been trying to keep the jumbled up pieces in a bag with too many holes.

I’d been doing my best to collect a jigsaw puzzle of life answers, but I’d been trying to keep the jumbled up pieces in a bag with too many holes. Craniosacral therapy became a board to lay my puzzle out on and the ability to recover the seemingly lost parts of my self. I stuck with it. I knew that I had to or else I would have been entombed like a statue forever. This is my path. There are countless others like it.

Prior to my discovery of Craniosacral work I had already figured out how to pull through the hard days by breathing deeply (especially when I didn’t want to), or by holding onto a my own perfectly spherical little rock, (this one from a beach near where I grew up) or the belief that I could sleep through the night without nightmares, or a white feather so perfect that the more I looked at it, the less I believed that it could exist.

The little things. At first they seemed like pitiful tools against the ramparts around me, but determined enough people have dug out of jail cells with spoons and there never was a barrier, except in my mind.

One day, just a few weeks ago, I spontaneously cantered like a horse out of sheer, delicious joy. I live in the country and nobody but the horses themselves were watching (I hope!!!) but I was so interested in the immediate flood of memories this movement generated. Like my body hadn’t remembered that it was built for play too. It was the same as teenage freedom, bouncing in front of the speaker at a ridiculously loud gig with thousands of equally buoyant people; just an undulating wave system releasing so many endorphins that we all walked away different at the end of the night. It wasn’t just the ringing in our ears but the fact that for those few hours of being caught up in the pounding of music, our bodies and souls were united.

It needs to start with your decision to get up every morning and sit in the sun as it rises or to remove white bread from your life or to walk your child to school at their pace, instead of driving them there in a last minute flap of lunch sacks and lost keys.

These days I have enough self-belief to be able to turn it outward. I believe that learning to touch the intangible takes hard work and a deep, constantly developing conviction in what the brilliant theoretical physicist David Bohm calls the “implicate order” of the universe. Undivided wholeness.

If you want some good, practical ways to start to make your own inroads (and a guaranteed laugh) you should take a look at Ged Gilmore’s article for The Good Men Project, “Eleven Proven Ways to Free Yourself from Stress.”

Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy. – David Bohm

Photo—Wonderlane/Flickr