Expand or Contract?

Have you had any fun lately?  Have you laughed? Romanced? Played?

Life doesn’t need to be, nor should it be, all serious business.

Have you noticed, though, how many people are so serious all the time? It’s as though the stresses in their lives are pressing in on them from all sides, compacting them, making them denser, smaller, and harder to get “light” through.

Life in the physical world can do that to you.

Have you ever felt like you had to compact yourself, make yourself smaller, so that you could fit into a particular scenario? Like a job or a relationship?

Life in the physical world can do that to you, too.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. 

See the “Fast Moving Fog” story below, an excerpt from Your Spiritual Home Field Advantage:  A Book About Intimate Relationships.

Download free ebook at http://www.lightofchange.com/storeBook_new.htm

FAST MOVING FOG, Part 1

They had been dating for months, but things were only getting worse.

Arnold seemed like such a nice guy when Roxie met him. He was full of energy and fun at the summer softball games, so she found herself gravitating to him.

Then one day the whole team witnessed a bad car accident in front of the softball park. It traumatized her - so much so that even after getting home safe and sound, she called Arnold to talk. It was the first of many long talks that eventually led to dating.

“He’s so different now, though,” Roxie considered. “Once we started dating, he changed. He wanted me to be his ideal of a girlfriend - feminine, sexy, emotional, quiet. I’m none of these things, at least not to the extent that he wants. Though certainly I have tried, with heavier make-up, brighter lipstick, tighter clothes. But still, he’s continually getting angry with me for not having the right look and feel.”

Roxie felt like a failure.

Then a visit from her friend Molly turned her around. Mind you, Molly had been passed-on for some eight years at that point.

Roxie:

I was jogging on the beach. It was a bright, clear morning. My friend Molly was talking with me as I jogged and it seemed as natural as any conversation I’ve ever had.  She was telling me to not crunch myself down - that I needed to be as expansive as the

universe.  I needed to stop making myself smaller so that I could fit what Arnold or any one else wanted.

She said that kind of crunching would essentially be death to me.

At that moment massive amounts of fog came rolling in from the ocean, faster than I’d ever seen before.

It took me quite by surprise.

Molly told me to look around, then asked what I could see. The fog was so thick I could barely see anything except a few feet around me.

Then, just as suddenly and quickly, the fog rolled back out, and it was a bright, clear morning again. She then asked again what I could see. I could see everything, of course.

She told me to look all around at the sky and water and land. She then said that’s the difference between leading a life in which I make myself smaller than I am, and leading a full, expansive life, where I let myself be all I am.

She emphasized again that I should as expansive as the universe, and then she was gone. It took me a few minutes to realize what had occurred.

I couldn’t stop replaying the whole thing in my head. Had it even happened? It had. Other beach dwellers commented on the fast moving fog, though I’m quite sure no one was as astounded as me.

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Don’t be smaller than you are. Don’t let life’s pressures compress you. Expand into the pressures. Expand into change.

Change makes room for new things. If a painting in your living room falls off its hook and breaks, then you’ve got a space for something new. If it hadn’t fallen, you wouldn’t have the space.

Change is opportunity. Expand into the opportunity.

Expand or contract? Expand or contract? That is the question you face on a moment by moment basis.

Expansion requires flow, movement, the letting loose of things you’ve clutched onto.

Sometimes it feels like you’re stepping out into thin air, but instead of falling to your death as you feared, you find a foundation that’s firmer still.  See Part 2 of the story below.

FAST MOVING FOG, Part 2

Roxie quit seeing Arnold. And it being winter, she didn’t see the softball crowd either. Then the next summer her job made it virtually impossible for her to play softball, so again, no Arnold and no softball gang. And she realized later, no temptation for her to be smaller than she is.

Roxie watched as other people, too, seemed to be taken out of her life, until it reached a point when she felt she didn’t have any friends at all. It looked on the outside like her life was getting smaller, like she was shrinking somehow, because there was so little “outside” activity.

Just the opposite was happening on the inside, though. With the freed-up time and space, the lack of outside distraction, the lack of outside temptation to be and do as others wanted or did, Roxie became more than what she was. She expanded on the inside, becoming more her true self.

“I’ve learned more about myself, and have let myself be more my self,” Roxie wrote in her journal. “If my whole, true self were like an entire house, with many rooms, it’s as though I had only been living in one of the rooms. Now, I occupy more of the house, more of myself. I am more my whole self.”

“I’ve learned so much in my expansion into more of who I am,” Roxie continued. “I’ve learned that I love to paint, watercolors mostly - it’s so fulfilling! And I’ve learned that certain geographies are calming, unifying to me, like the plains of Wyoming. And even just the image of trees in their splendor opens me, inspires me to be more!”

Becoming comfortable in her expanded and expanding insides, Roxie noticed her outside world began expanding as well. People came back in - some new and some not-so-new - but she engaged them differently than she had before. To her delight, Roxie felt like a new person living in an exciting new world.

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