It’s the micro-movements in the smallest places that change everything.
Back in October of 1978 when I awoke from surgery after my near-death car accident-initiation, I found myself wanting to live my life. For the first time I could remember, I thought “there must be some reason for me to be here” and I decided to determine what that was. It was the tiniest of shifts in attitude from “let me out of here” to “well, I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’ve going to be healing from this for a long time, so I’ll study healing.” I had one person’s feedback when I gave them a massage before I had any training at all: “you have good hands” and I decided to build on that.
44 years later with 35 years in practice under my belt as a holistic health provider and Licensed Acupuncturist, I’m still learning new things. One of latest and best is from a brilliant local savant “Manual Medicine” practitioner who calls himself “Suntah”. He showed Bren and me how if you want to release an entire muscle group, all you have to do is release the smallest muscle in the group. A great example is the Psoas minor: if you can persuade this thin, small muscle in the iliopsoas group to let go of it’s locked up contraction it can release the whole muscle bundle. This muscle group, along with the Piriformis and Gluteus are responsible for a majority of chronic low back pain.
Holistic Health is based on the commonly accepted idea that we live in a fractal Hologram. This means that we are inextricably part of a much larger body: Humanity, Earth, the Solar system, the Galaxy and the Universe are all one body. All expressing infinitely diverse aspects of itself through the branching of fractal experimentation. Mathematically, fractals are simple equations. By changing the smallest components of these equations, you can create the immense variety of form, starting with sacred geometry and moving into the infinite complexity of living beings.
If this premise is true, then our culture, our society and the neighborhood we live in are part of our body. What happens to our bodies, our emotions, the animals, air, land and water of our neighborhood happens to us as individuals. Witnessing current events, it seems to me that we are we are in a chaotic cycle of vast cultural and physical change. It’s no wonder that there is resistance to any change, it’s all too much too fast, yet change we must.
The way the economy and the laws of our town and our Island are operating is locking up the energy moving through the people who live here. Essentially we are experiencing what could be seen as the inevitable extreme of colonialism: Every nice location in the world has too many vacation rentals and second/third homes which people live in for a few weeks or months at a time. Air BnB gives more modest income homeowners the opportunity to profit from this tendency, but the growth of the tourist industry without connection to a higher vision of the future is not the path to prosperity for all. Perhaps in places like Sedona Arizona, there is enough surrounding space for differing economic classes to live and this pattern can sustain itself for a while longer. But on a tiny island dependent on serving visitors, there will eventually be nowhere to live for any other class except the super-rich and tourists.
So, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I need some breathing room in the culture we find ourselves in, in this tiny town on this tiny island in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean. I need to feel safe and loved and appreciated, just as we all do. I’m well past the need for the validation of my skills and ability to make a difference in somebody’s life. I can see evidence for that every day, but one of the things that is constricting my sense of safety and approval is the housing situation.
Both Bren and I marvel at how much we have to work everyday to consciously relax the stress that literally contracts the muscles of our bodies and makes breathing feel tight. Fear is collective. There is no way I can just release my own fears and feel better. For me anyway, I have to acknowledge that I am feeling everybody’s fear (and all contractive or expansive emotions) before I can let go of the holding in the precise place in my body, with it’s personal history of trauma, that will allow me to relax more completely for another few hours. Really, that’s all I seem to get these days before the next internal/external contraction requires personal attention to release!
One of the things I help my clients to consider, especially if they are very ill, is that they are contributing the possibility of healing and wellness to the collective body of humanity by pursuing their own wellness. Similarly, when we received our blessings and welcome to Maui from Aloha ambassadors Lei’ohu Ryder and Maydeen Iao, Bren asked Lei’ohu what was “the best way we could make a contribution to everyone here?”. Her answer was “even your breath is a contribution!”
The core question of how to live in prosperity according to the Gene Keys Golden Path is “How do I best serve the Whole?” The simplest principle of creating prosperity is to dedicate one’s personal initiative and growth to the well being of the community of life. Applying the same holistic logic to my own personal healing process I came to a radical realization: it is inevitable that some of my efforts to relax my personal body and create ease in my life MUST have a socially perceptible impact on my neighborhood. In order for a more complete, healthy physical relaxation and easier breathing to be possible in my own body and everyone else’s, some of my efforts must contribute to relaxing the constricted energy in the community I live in.
So here is the radical, tiny change we are proposing that could tip the scales in favor of everyone breathing easier, feeling safer and more appreciated in our communities. We are looking for likeminded people from all economic strata, (starting with our own economic status) to be willing to risk disregarding collective standards of behavior. If Bren and me can succeed in placing a luxuriously appointed yet affordable (to us) tiny home in a willing landowner’s spacious back yard, it might tip the scales toward creative ways of easing a chronic worldwide problem of lack of diversity and sustainability in neighborhoods.
Our proposal is this: we ease up one tiny corner of the lack of housing constriction in our community by placing an entirely self-contained, off-the-grid, beautifully appointed tiny home on wheels in an existing neighborhood. We want to enhance someone’s property. Preferably someone who also wants to live here permanently and contribute to the well being of everyone on the island by showing how diverse living styles can co-exist.
Once we find a place that feels relatively stable we can begin to experiment with the sustainable technologies that can make Island life more self sufficient without sacrificing the level of beauty and comfort that each individual person needs.
If we can inspire a few people in our general economic strata to secure homes by showing them how we did this, we can begin to change the way everyone thinks about diversity in housing. If we can show that the lifestyle we are creating uses less resources and contributes more luxury, more beauty, food, water and goodwill in the community for all economic lifestyles, we will have created a HUGE change out of a tiny one.