Contraction and Expansion
- finding resilience in contraction and expansion through pleasure
It’s been a month since I’ve been in your inbox but you’ve never been far from my mind. I am slowly finding my way out of the wave of a deep contraction.
As it is the law of the universe, what goes down must come up.
I’m an emotional creature and as such not unfamiliar with the back and forth of contraction and expansion. However, this has been difficult to be with.
I put all my focus elsewhere, and I had no capacity for writing.
They were dark weeks and hard to write about pleasure. Next to all the atrocities in the world there was death and loss and grief and pain in my small corner of life.
And the question that arose for me was: how do I connect and stay in my pleasure when all around me is destruction, death, loss, grief, pain?
And to what purpose?
Witnessing that which is difficult to witness is a threat to our nervous system. We become hyper vigilant, and our sense of well-being is disrupted.
We think that if we pause and feel, we fall apart, that we can’t come back, that we can’t get things done.
There is no escaping pain, death, and suffering.
In general, we are taught to avoid pain, tragedy, death, as if this avoidance would keep us healthy in some way. While we talk in broad terms about what ails us, we don’t talk about how that makes us feel and what fears that might bring up.
I believe we have to find holistic ways to confront, interact and move the unbearable through our bodies before it gets locked in, and we are paralyzed. Before we become numb, powerless, and frozen and have no agency for action.
Over the years I learned that we have to go down into the murky mud of all the things that are hard to be with.
We have to sit in the swamp, bringing acceptance and love to all that is uncomfortable.
From that depth of the unbearable we source our transformation and alchemize it into the fabric of who we are.
Sitting still and trying to figure things out in my mind, makes it worse. The lure to escape, push it all away and to become numb is great.
But we have this incredible instrument, our body with its infinite, innate wisdom that can show us the path to liberation. By connecting to our felt sense, we can move with what we are feeling, and restore sovereignty to our body.
In moving we remember.
Remember to connect to the inner reliable rhythms of our life: our breath, a sound, our heartbeat, the salt of our tears, our cycles that are connected to the earth.
Those are the things that anchor us to ourselves.
In honoring our natural rhythms ‘waiting’ for expansion becomes the next action to take.
Slowly buoyancy lets us float up to a place where we are being reminded:
Expansion happens when we tap into the natural abundance that lives within us. Pleasure, aliveness, well-being are what our bodies are made for.
Sensuous and sensual pleasure that makes us feel alive, deeply nourished, and hydrated.
It’s our oxygen mask.
It’s always available if we so choose.
It’s part of our quality of life.
Feeling alive and well, coming back to ourselves well pleasured, is a moment of rest and restoration for our nervous system.
The more we flood our body with all the delicious hormones produced by pleasure, the easier it is to create a space where we can have the strength to be of service to others.
Sometimes we get pulled into the underworld where we are being asked to fully submit, where we are taken fully.
Only when we ride the full wave of contraction and expansion, expansion and contraction, can we become so resilient that the fullness of life can claim us over and over again.
With love and pleasure,
Theres