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Rituals for times of contraction and expansion
It’s all a cycle. Here’s how to support yourself through it.
Happy Sunday, Soothers. Perhaps you, like me, know and love the quote from Anais Nin: “And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
To me, no quote better illustrates the cycle of expansion and contraction that marks nature. Shedding and inwards; tightness and fear; then bursting and blooming. Only to do it all over again, for infinity past and infinity forward.
These cycles of contraction and expansion apply to you, too. Much like nature, you (since you are of nature, you are not separate from nature, you are nature and she is you) grow in a dance of expansions and then contractions, one after the other.
Expansion is not better than contraction; contraction is not worse than expansion, though our patriarchal society, so focused on linearity and growth at all costs, would have you believe so.
Because, however, we’re so conditioned to believe that contraction is a negative event, we don’t create healthy rituals or processes to work through it. Instead, if we’re in a season of contraction, we ignore signals from our body like exhaustion or lack of motivation and tell ourselves that we must push through. This then can result in…
