The Small Ask

Have you ever found yourself struggling to ask for help?

That is what this tiny healing meditation is for.

Subscribers get two short guided meditations every week, each one with a single habit you can use that day. Every meditation comes as an audio recording and a written script, so you can listen with your eyes closed or read at your own pace. It takes less than four minutes.

Welcome.

You have the phone in your hand. Her name is up on the screen, your thumb is resting over the call button, and this is the third time today you have gotten this far and set it back down on the table.

What you need is not large. Somebody to drive you on Thursday, or somebody to sit in the room with you for an hour so you are not sitting in it alone.

Take a breath with me before you pick it up again. All the way in, and let it go slower than you took it.

I know what has been stopping you, because it is the same sentence every time. Everybody has enough going on already, and you are not going to be one more thing on somebody’s list.

So let me ask you about the other side of that.

Think about the last time somebody you love asked you for something small. A ride to get the car, or help reaching something down off a high shelf. Go back to that afternoon and remember what it felt like when she asked you. You were not sitting there counting the cost of it. You were glad she called you instead of calling somebody else, and you were useful for twenty minutes, and you thought about it afterward with something close to pride.

That is the thing you are about to hand her. You have spent all afternoon protecting her from it.

Breathe in and let your jaw come loose.

Your Tiny Healing Habit for today is “The Small Ask.” Make one call and ask one person for one thing, and make the thing smaller than what you need. Name the day and name the hour, because “let me know if you are ever free” gives her nothing to say yes to. “Could you drive me Thursday at two.” That is the whole call.

Then let her answer. If it is no, it is a no about Thursday and about nothing else. If it is yes, you have handed somebody who loves you something to do with all that worry she has been carrying around for you.