Welcome to The Daily Ascent. I'm Molly Carmel, and this is the podcast I always wish existed, a bite-sized on-the-ground spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life, to help make us all a little bit more awake, alive, and ascending. So today I want to talk about what happens when something big and overwhelming is coming, and how our pockets age helped me to stop shutting down and start moving. So I've talked about my puppy on the show before, Danny.
And so Danny is about to have surgery. It's his third surgery, so I don't know. But if you know Danny, he's 75 pounds of pure, labrador, joy, excitement, love for life. He's who I aspire to be in this world.
And he is most definitely not a dog who does bed rest. But that is what it's on its way. Two weeks of keeping this awake, alive, ascending, energetic, large labrador, completely still. So I had to move him downstairs.
I had to rearrange my house. I have to like shut down parts of my life to take care of him. I have to figure out how I'm going to work, how I'm going to manage his recovery, how I'm going to keep him from doing the things that he loves the most, which is jumping on beds and running in forests and just being Danny, and take care of myself on top of it. I mean, I love this dog so much that even talking about this is like kind of stressing me out and making me emotional, but that's the gist of the show.
So here we are. I mean, this dog is my guy. He's my companion, you know? And he's really gotten me through a lot of hard seasons just by, you know, being a good dog.
So, you know, there is this part of it where if I'm honest, when I think about him being in pain, being under anesthesia, waking up from anesthesia, being confused about why he can't move, you know, it just kind of levels me. It's not this big bleeding dog heart. I don't know if you relate. And honestly, this idea of like, can't not being able to explain to him what's happening.
I can't tell it's temporary, you know, it's a lot. And here's what I notice happens. I really, when I really try to take in this whole thing at once, like the surgery, the recovery, the two weeks and the rehab back, the logistics, the emotional weight, like, that's it. I shut down.
That's it. Completely frees shut down mode. I stopped doing anything because it all just feels like too much, you know, overwhelmed doesn't make me frantic. It makes me frozen in the worst way.
Like it makes me not like a peaceful Buddhist still like a paralyzed frozen still, not a good look. And listen, I've been here before, not just with Danny. This is my trauma pattern, right? This is my nervous system pattern when something feels really, really big and really, really consuming.
I don't usually spiral out. Sometimes, sometimes I do, but I'm not really a spiral out girl. I'm a collapsed girl. I go quiet.
I stop. Which honestly might look very attractive and calm on the outside, but on the inside, it's just a nervous system that has decided that the whole thing is impossible. So why even start? And so interestingly, the very recent reading in Melody Beatty, who we know very well from the language of letting go has another daily reader called Journey to the Heart.
And so anyway, this was a very recent daily reader as I was struggling with Danny's surgery and how much I had to get done and how much help I had to ask for. I read this reading called One Step at a Time. I'm going to read the whole thing too because it's so good. One step at a time, that's all you can take.
That's all you have to take. Yes, you have visions you've created of where you want to go, but you don't get there in one leap. You get there one step at a time. That's how you receive your guidance.
That's how you respond to the guidance you've received. Let your faith be strong. Your faith will keep you going through those moments in between steps. When your faith is strong, you don't look in fear at the journey ahead, wondering if you will get all the guidance you need, or if you will get to where you're going.
You know you will, so you take the simple steps one at a time that lie ahead. You take them in joy because you know you are being guided. You have faith that the simple steps you are led to do will take you to your destination. Let me read that again for those of you in the back row.
One step at a time, that's all you can take, that's all you have to take. Yes, you have visions you've created of where you want to go, but you don't have to get there in one leap. You get there one step at a time. That's how you receive your guidance.
That's how you respond to the guidance you've received. Let your faith be strong. Your faith will keep you going through those moments in between steps. When your faith is strong, you don't look in fear at the journey ahead, wondering if you will get all the guidance you need, or if you will get to where you're going.
You know you will, so you take the simple steps one at a time that lie ahead. You take them in joy because you know you're being guided. You have faith that the simple steps you are led to do will take you to your destination. So to say I needed that reading is just an understatement.
I mean, just talk about a God wink. That just came up and I was like, well, good for me, good for daily ascent, right? And I love that part. You take the simple steps one at a time that lie ahead, right?
My version of fear doesn't look like panic. It looks like shutdown. It looks like staring up the ceiling at 10 a.m. Because I can't figure out where to begin.
It looks like not beginning at all, right? But this reading reminds me, I don't have to see the whole path. I don't have to have the whole month mapped out in my head. I just have to take the step that's right in front of me.
Just the one. And so our word of the day is begin, not finish, not figure it all out, not have the plan. Just begin because here's what I've learned about myself, the shutting down, the freezing, the collapse. It's not because I can't handle hard things.
I mean, I can handle really, really hard things. I have handled things that would knock people sideways, right? But the shutdown happens because I'm trying to handle it all at the same time. I'm looking at the whole mountain instead of the next step and beginning is the antidote to shutting down, right?
You don't have to know how the two weeks in the month are going to go. You just have to move Danny's crate downstairs. You got to call your friend Rob and see if they'll help you move the crate downstairs, right? You just have to bring the bedding into the room.
That's it. That's the beginning. And then the next thing will show itself. So listen, if you're like me and you're someone who shuts down when things get big, namaste, namaste, shut down.
I see you, I am you and I want to tell you, it's not laziness. It can feel like laziness, right? It's not apathy and it can really feel like you don't care. It is simply your system being overwhelmed and your system, your nervous system doing what it knows how to do, which is shut the operation down, right?
It's overloaded, but the stopping doesn't actually protect you. You know that. It's just the laziness that needs to happen. It keeps you stuck in the overwhelm instead of moving through it.
The only way through is to begin, right? And not to begin everything, just to begin something, the smallest possible next step. Have you ever heard this one, right? How do you eat a rhinoceros?
One bite at a time and very, very mindfully. So we move the dog bed, we make the phone call, we write the first sentence, we pack the first box, like whatever the thing is that's been sitting on you, making you feel like you can't breathe, like life is impossible, probably feels that way. But you don't have to do all of it. You just have to do the first piece of it and then the next piece will become clear.
And that's what Melody VD is saying, right? One step at a time, not because you're weak and not because you can't handle it far from that. But that's how guidance works. It comes one step at a time.
We don't get the whole map. We don't get the next turn and we have to trust that. So your reflective question of the day, what have you been putting off starting? Because the whole thing feels too big.
And I am right with you, as senators, beginning, just beginning. And listen, if you're in a season right now where something feels really big and really consuming, whether it's food or your health or a life transition that has you frozen, I mean, you don't have to figure it all out to start. And if it is food, my stop starting over program, this is literally what we do. It's all we do.
We break it down, we take the next step, we stop trying to do it all at once and we just begin our healing. And so if that happens to sound like what you need right now, you know, I want to talk to you and you can find a link to meet with me in the show notes or you can learn more about my program at mollycarmel.com. And listen, if this episode moved you, send it to someone who might be frozen right now, right? I'm dying, dying to grow our sender crew, the more the merrier.
And listen, we rise together until next time.