One Step at a Time

“One step at a time” has been my mantra for some time. When walking the trails on our property had become increasingly difficult, a friend of mine shared a mantra that had worked for her in similar circumstances: “this is what I can do right now.” That was helpful as well. My feeling then was that my ability to walk was only going to decline. That proved to be the case, but now I have less certainty that we ever really know what’s going to happen next. And, in actuality my ability does fluctuate from hour to hour. Recently I get these wild episodes of strength and energy in the middle of the night where I can do physio exercises otherwise not possible. (So I do them!)

If, when I set out to walk one of the trails I felt weak, instead of turning around and giving up, I would take the next step. Without fail this got me around the loop. More proof that I never know what will happen next! These days I use the mantra to get from one end of the house to the other. Or to do a few hours of gardening. This is a practical application of the mantra and has served me very well. When things are very challenging and discouraging, “this is what I can do right now” is still helpful, too.

“Taking the next step” proved to be beneficial in other circumstances as well — where it helps to take the next metaphorical step. For example, sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed. But if the bladder is full, the legs are spasming, and the dog is making noise, the next step is to rise and start the day. When I was physically helpless and in the hospital, and when I was finally left to my own devices, the next step was to figure out how to use my environment. I raised the head of the bed so I could reach my knees with my hands and thereby lift one leg at a time. I would pull it toward my chest so I could get some movement in my hips that had been pretty well stationary for over a day. The next step might be making breakfast or lunch. Feeding the animals. Getting a shower. Calling a friend. Doing a pressing task. Sitting on the meditation cushion or lying down on the yoga mat. Or just sitting down at the computer to let the Reminder App task list do its work.

The instructions as to what the next step is come from different sources. Often it’s the body letting us know its needs. The mind, of course, is very fond of telling us what to do next. I found that the mind functions as a good reminder app when it’s not caught up in restless nonsense. It has a great sense of time and will remind me of things when they need to happen. Also, repetitive thoughts (remember the song lyrics?) are often pointing to the next step. If the next step is really unclear, I usually sit down and meditate. At the very least, paying attention to just a few breaths is enough to calm the mind. Though sometimes it will take a full 40 minutes. When the mind is calm, the next step usually reveals itself. This brings me to a third meaning of “take the next step.”

Life is doing the stepping. I touched on this in the last blog about listening to Life. Life’s messages come in all forms, but we can’t hear them when identified with the activity of a busy mind, feeling like we have to constantly steer our experience, or manipulate circumstances to come out our way or the way we think they should be. Mindfulness meditation, Buddhist and other spiritual practices, and self-inquiry are all techniques to calm the thinking mind so that we are more likely to hear Life. This is often where the next step is coming from and you can tell because it feels like a deep wisdom that seemingly has no source.

And then we might see that the steps happen without any doer behind them. Or we feel it’s the universe stepping. The less you believe the mind or even listen to it, the more obvious this becomes. And the more willing you are to relax into this natural flow of life, you begin to trust the movement of Life more than you trust the mind’s constant need to interfere with it. In my experience, my mind has made a mess of things more often than it has seen things clearly.

I was talking about this with a dharma buddy once and we stumbled on a fun double meaning for the word deconditioning. Conditioning can mean getting into peak physical shape for a specific sport where one uses groups of muscles over and over to build strength in a certain area. Similarly, from the moment we are born, the mind begins a process of conditioning. It draws information from environmental factors, biological factors, social factors, familial, and genetic factors and strengthens those information pathways so that our sense of identity and what we know and believe become ingrained. Until something comes along to shake it up, each of us operates with the blind conviction that this set of conditions is how life really is. Deconditioning through practises such as meditation shows us that, actually, life is not wholly the way we experience it.

Sometimes the next step is elevating my feet.
Tuma wastes no time in climbing onto my chest!

I also often hear the term deconditioning from my neurologist. She’s referring to the atrophy of my muscles that don’t get worked because the brain-body connection is damaged. I experienced a lot of deconditioning through the pandemic and in my recent cancer journey. Sometimes I hear this as blame for my circumstances. And that would be my given set of conditions chiming in with its opinion. It's a deeply ingrained habit to feel slighted by the most innocuous statement — hearing the specialist’s words as, “if I had worked harder, I could have maintained more muscle tone” instead of the plain fact that muscles get weaker when they're not firing. What my friend and I stumbled upon is that for me physical deconditioning was the impetus for the mental deconditioning. It was the increasing challenges of MS that led me to meditation. And it’s meditation that is allowing me to live with the physical deconditioning and not freak out about it. It's also how I could face cancer diagnosis and treatment and not freak out about that either.

A caveat: listening to Life doesn’t necessarily mean lounging around waiting for inspiration. Or lounging around and letting your muscles atrophy. It doesn’t mean crumbling in the face of difficult circumstances. It doesn’t mean putting up with abuse. Years ago I said, “I’ve given up chasing cures and decided to accept the life I have.” There is no end to chasing cures. It still seems wise to let go of that, but it took becoming completely helpless to realize that a little pushback is natural too. Listening to Life isn’t passive. It’s “taking” the next step. Life, I learned, wants to take care of itself. In my case, physio exercise is an example of that. This is an important thing to know because we’re very good at neglecting our mental and physical health — that’s the conditioned mind at work.

Listening to Life is opening to a deeper wisdom that may come through the mind, but is much greater, wiser, and more compassionate. This wisdom feels authentic where mind activity is relatively petty, manipulative, or contrived. It feels open where the mind feels self-reflective and closed. There are lots of elaborate practises to discover this — because there's lots of sticky conditioning that we need help to get through. Self-inquiry is one practice that’s pretty simple. It can also be earthshaking. Here are some contemporary and respected teachers from a variety of traditions offering self-inquiry as anything from traditional instructions to spontaneous experiences of non-self (sudden deconditioning).

Rupert Spira — Introduction to self-inquiry, How do I practice it?
Tara Brach — Guided practice
Ram Dass — Description of practice
Mooji — The Power of Self-Inquiry
Eckhart Tolle — Dark night of the Soul, His Waking Up Story

No Gilded Cage

Freeing the Heart-Mind