The Art of the Tiny Sacred Action Step
Chipping through the Glass Wall of Separation
The past few months have been an invitation into the underworld—to know the dark side of the human experience. I have known this place before but perhaps naively, I didn’t think I would visit again. At this point in my life, I’ve had years of therapy and ayahuasca ceremonies and yoga and meditation. I have oracle cards and spirituality books and my mantra of what is this here to teach me? But it didn’t matter. I was still hit with a fog of grief and hopelessness, and there were many days when I felt like I was trapped in an empty aquarium tank looking through a glass wall at the rest of the world.
When I am in this place, I tend to think that the glass wall needs to come shattering down in order for me to feel better. I need a miraculous intervention from the outside world—“Wow, your newsletter is amazing and you do not deserve to be so sad! Here is a million dollars.” Or I need to make a big and dramatic shift that will pull me out of my swamp of suffering and keep me out of dry land forever. Get rid of all of my belongings and move to the forest? Cut out every person who has ever hurt me? Bangs? This kind of thinking usually keeps me stuck. Or worse, I end up alone in the middle of the woods with no clothes and a choppy haircut, still ruminating over all the same things.
Shattering the glass never really works. These big dramatic shifts are often a way of trying to gain control over the situation, an attempt to feel like we can find stable ground when everything is falling apart around us. There is usually no simple solution to resolve my big and messy feelings. There is no place I can run to where I will feel better. But the divinity hides in unexpected places. The comfort I have not been able to access through mantras or mushrooms or deep-pocketed Substack benefactors, I’ve found through doing things I didn’t want to do. By mastering the art of the tiny, sacred action step.
The tiny sacred action step is not a solution. It’s an invitation. Thinking we need all of our circumstances to change in order to feel okay is a way of keeping ourselves comfortable in familiar stories and thought loops. I’ve come to believe in the power of picking up the ice pick, rather than the explosive device. Because we don’t need the glass wall to shatter to make our way back to the world. We just need to create a tiny chip in the surface.
What Makes it Tiny?
You are not cleaning your whole house or doing a 20 minute meditation or moving to an ashram. Maybe those things can come later. When we find ourselves swimming in darkness, we need to give ourselves a life raft and credit for every little step we take to move ourselves out of that place. Tiny steps add up and even if they don’t add up right way—they add up over time. One day, I wanted to clean my apartment which did not happen, but I did stuff my duvet filling back into its cover, which I had been avoiding for like 29 days. I went to bed feeling a little more accomplished and put together. When I woke up, it was easier to make my bed and get dressed and feel like a person.
The key is tiny—don’t overwhelm yourself! I am a huge fan of the polar plunge for changing my mood but I do not always have the courage to take a cold shower. How can I make this tiny? I asked the universe. And then I saw a someone on Instagram put her face in a bowl of ice water for 30 seconds. Just like a cold shower, this trick stimulates the vagus nerve and increases the production of a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, which enhances your focus, attention, vigilance, and mood. More importantly, it’s small and cute and always makes me laugh!
What Makes it Sacred?
The outcome of tiny sacred action steps is not the point. Eventually, a series of tiny sacred action steps can lead to a major life change but we do not get to choose or control how this happens.
Maybe today’s tiny sacred action step is making a doctor’s appointment or sending one networking email to a potential client or employer. I can do either of these things with dread and resistance or with love and intention. May this appointment bring me closer towards my healing! I say. May this email help me find the career opportunities that are meant for me. I find myself less attached to the outcome of each effort if I see it all as sacred energetic movement helping me flow in the direction of where I am meant to be going.
When you are in the darkness, it’s very easy to spiral into nihilistic thinking of what is the point of anything? This continues to thicken the glass wall between you and the rest of the world. Trust that when you decide something is sacred, it becomes sacred. Even when the action step doesn’t lead to the results you want, you’ve stirred something in your energetic field. You cannot always measure or see what is happening.
I’ve also noticed that my inner monsters tend to quiet down when I move into the space of sacred ritual. The monsters tag-team really well when my ego is spiraling into stories about how I am not enough. But when I enter the divine realm, they get confused. They know a lot about productivity and success but they don’t understand why we would put flowers on an altar or stare at a tree for 15 minutes. Sacred practices invite us to abandon the rational part of our brain that wants to control and fear so we can invite in more expansive forces of love and trust.
What Makes it an Action?
Every emotion we feel is a little droplet of water. There are times when the droplets are overwhelming and the body cannot hold it all. We become rivers flooded by rainfall.* There are other times when have more agency—when we make a choice to let these emotions move through us or we stew in them and allow them to stagnate. Any time we act in a tiny and sacred way, we are stirring up these molecules and keeping ourselves from getting frozen in one state.
We can get very comfortable living behind the glass wall or swimming in puddles of emotionally stagnant water because it’s easier! It’s more efficient for our brains to keep firing on the same synaptic loops as we tell ourselves the familiar stories. I will never belong. Nothing will ever change. Everyone will always abandon me. The action step energizes us to step away from our rumination for a moment and remember that we are more than these thoughts and feelings.
One night when I was living in Puerto Escondido, I was feeling lonely and preparing a fresh fish for dinner. I heard laughter coming from the casita next to mine, and I felt the familiar sensation of separation, of feeling like the world was happening on the other side of the glass wall. It would have been easier to hoard my leftovers and simmer in my stories, but instead, I walked across the garden barefoot to offer some fish to the new guests.
They were a group of hungry surfers from Hawaii, and they offered me a beer as we sat down to enjoy the fish together. The gesture was like throwing darts of beautiful energy into the universe. I shattered the glass wall I was hiding behind without even realizing it. Sometimes the most powerful tiny, sacred action step is reaching towards connection without asking for anything in return. It’s overcoming the stories that want to keep us separate and believing that there is room for us. The world wants us to belong. In that moment, eating fish and drinking Corona under the muggy night sky, I had a sense that the aquarium tank was never real. I could step out of it anytime I wanted.
*Of course, there are definitely times when the tiny, sacred action step is not sufficient, and it is so important to reach out for professional support!
P.S. I made an epic playlist called Ripal St. Fir. If you can guess the anagram, I will send send you the Spotify link.