Growing toward the light

Learning to read your own early signals, and adjusting one small step at a time.

We have walked through some heavy places together in these pieces. The loop, the loss of self, the long climb back. I wanted to end here, in the Light, because this is where the story actually lives now, and because I think it is the most useful thing I can leave you with.

There are two parts to it. The first is learning to catch the early tells. The second is learning to grow towards what gives you life.

When I fell apart, I fell apart dramatically. By the time I could no longer ignore what was happening, my whole life had to be taken down to the studs and rebuilt. I do not regret a moment of it now, but I have thought a great deal about why it had to get so extreme before I listened. Perhaps I had never really learned to read the warning signs or signals my body and mind must have been giving me. I was so young and at the time very few people were even talking about yoga, quieting the mind, breathwork or stress reduction. The body always speaks, we just need to learn how to pay attention. Long before the crisis, there were tells. A variety of migraines and heart arrhythmias that landed me in the ER were first. I chalked them up to stress. Eventually things got worse. I could hardly sleep, I was forgetting to eat and was often irritable. All the while the rumination loop became more consistent, louder and especially intrusive. The joy quietly drained out of things I used to love. These were not the emergency. They were the smoke before the fire, and I had trained myself to push through them instead of listening to them.

This is where the nomadic ethos matters, the same one from [Practicing change, on purpose](https://www.wakingnomad.org/blog/practicing-change-on-purpose). A nomad reads the terrain. You wake up in a new place and you learn to notice the small signs, the shift in the weather, the change in the ground under your feet, and you adjust your course early, while the adjustment is still small. You can learn to do this with your own inner terrain too. You can learn your own early tells, the specific two or three signals that always show up first for you, and you can honor them as information rather than pushing through them. When you do, the corrections are gentle. A little more sleep. A little more space. One honest conversation. A return to the practice. A return to eating at regular intervals and checking in on your supplement routine. You course correct while the shift is still small, instead of waiting until the only option left is a dramatic and unstable overhaul. That is the whole ethos. Small and early beats large and late, every single time.

Now the second part, the rebuild, because sometimes we are already past the early tells and the "disassembly" has already happened. When you are rebuilding a life, the temptation is to fix everything at once. To overhaul your whole existence by Monday. I understand the urge, but I have to tell you it is a trap, and it is usually just another overwhelming loop or old worn out narrative wearing a productive disguise. Trying to change everything at once is how we end up changing very little, all while adding one more chapter to the story of "I tried it all and nothing works." It's a chase game.

What actually rebuilt me was practice, time, a supportive environment and patience for my own evolution. I started eating regularly, prioritizing sleep and noticing the moments when something brought me joy. When people asked how my day was I eventually started to share the truth, both the good and bad, rather than focusing only on the parts that brought me pain. This awareness started to shift my mindset around my healing. I was making progress. There were in fact good moments. There were moments when I was present. There were moments when someone made me laugh.

All my energy poured into the next single step instead of the entire staircase. And here is the magic of it. Each small step you actually complete builds a little pattern of success, and those patterns build momentum. This momentum is the thing that carries you when willpower runs out. You are not trying to arrive somewhere by a specified time. You are building a direction.

And how do you know which direction to take? This is my favorite part, and it is where the light comes in. You follow the small joys. Not the big fireworks, the tiny sparkles. The thing that made you feel a flicker more alive today. The thing that made you laugh. The activity you lost an hour inside of. The person you felt lighter around. These little flickers are not trivial. They are information. They are your own experience telling you where the life is. Like a trail of breadcrumbs, they are leading the way, you just need to slow down enough to pay attention. This can happen daily, if you let it.

At first they can be hard to find, and that is normal. When you have been in the dark for a long time, the part of you that senses joy has become a little rusty. You might not even know what you like or are interested in. But the soul knows, the authentic self knows. So start smaller than you think you should have to. Look for any flicker at all, the faintest one, and when you find it, stop and actually notice it. Let it be recorded as evidence. Get familiar with its particular signature, the way it feels in your body, so that you can find it again. The more you notice it, the more of it you will see, until you can feel which direction it is coming from. And then you simply keep moving toward that light.

There is a tree outside our home that grew up half in shade. It did not decide, all at once, where the sun was and lunge toward it. It could not. It simply grew, a little each season, toward wherever it kept finding the light, until its whole shape had bent gently in that direction. It did not plan the path. It followed the light it could actually feel, one small increment at a time, and the path revealed itself as it grew.

That is what I want for you. Not a grand plan you execute perfectly. Just this. Learn your own early tells and honor them. When you feel the need to shift, take one small step, and then the next. And let the small joys, the little places where you feel a bit more alive, quietly lead the way. Grow toward the light you can actually feel. The whole direction of a life can change that way, without a single dramatic leap.

I began the first of these pieces by telling you I was once a shell of who I am now. I want to end by telling you the rest. I am not a shell anymore, far from it. I grew back, slowly, toward the light, and so can you. It is not always the same version but it was never meant to be. We are continuously becoming, evolving, and that in itself can be beautiful. It gives us permission to be curious and to lean into the mystery of life. There is no rush.

If any part of this series resonates with your experience, I hope you take it as encouragement. You do not need my permission, or anyone else's, to keep growing toward your own light. You only need the next small step, and then the one after that.

Big Love,

Thomasina

---

Thomasina's five-part personal series

1. The year I disappeared

2. Fuel for the fire

3. Nobody is coming to save you

4. We don't do it alone

5. Growing toward the light (you are here)