Staying open in the contraction

Yet when we see the word contraction, it doesn’t necessarily conjure up an image of something you’d prefer. It suggests tightness, clenching, gripping. Shrinking in pain even.

Yet what if we have severely misunderstood the genius of the contraction? What if it wasn’t designed to hurt us but rather soften us. And what would it look like to stay open in the heart of the contraction?

When I teach the EARTHED framework, we discuss the way the masculine and feminine energetics move through nature and us in cycles.

The feminine represents the downward-moving part of the cycle.

The masculine rises and the feminine descends.

So if one of the key markers of living beings is the movement of breath, the never-ending cycle of expanding and contracting (even NASA scientists have documented the Earth ‘breathing’ through satellite imagery), perhaps then we may see the essential nature of the contraction for birthing life into being.

I recently watched a video about a study on redwood trees where they injected them with a similar chemical to adrenalin to halt the process of hibernation. In doing so, the trees never went through their natural winter phase and stayed in a perpetual state of growth. As a result, these majestic trees that would normally live over 100 years, died within one year.

So what does this tell us?

It tells us that the downward part of the cycle is actually the regenerative part.

Rather than the contraction being something we need white-knuckle our way through, it’s an invitation to release and surrender. To open fully, so when Spring eventually returns, your glass isn’t overwhelmed but instead ripe for filling.

In this way, your capacity to let go actually dictates your level of reception.

It’s only through lack of surrender that more universal force is required and thus more gripping may take place as you resist the tides of Truth that are shaping your life, one way or another.

To hold our breath, no matter how large the inhale we believe will sustain us, always leads to the ungraceful kind of death. The collapse where life is taken from you rather than gifted as the seed of newness.

Because you see, regeneration occurs through composting, pruning, slowing down and being. The decent is the mother’s love, nurturing your innate gifts by removing the weeds and feeding the soil.

So my love, there is no need to close your heart in the contraction. In fact, the whole purpose of the descent is to learn how to open it wider. To alchemise and digest everything that blocks the natural flow of life that is trying to reach you.

In writing this, I’m reminded of a line in my favourite David Whyte poem that I read to the women at my immersion before they head off into the wild on their overnight solos....

“Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognise its own. There you can be sure....you are not beyond love”.