BIRD WINGS
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralysed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and
expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
-- Rumi
~
I got walloped by a headache the other day. I'm not sure where it came from. A sudden exhaustion, intense pain. Old me would have looked for something concrete to blame. Too much caffeine? Not enough? Am I coming down with something?
Old me would have taken a painkiller and tried to push on with the next thing on the long to-do list while rubbing my eyes a lot and hating everything and finding some way to blame myself for my own pain.
Thankfully, I try not to do that anymore — beat myself up when something hurts. And since I mostly work from home, and my to-do list was flexible, instead of fighting the headache the other day, I allowed myself to surrender to it. I lay down to rest for 20 minutes.
And the body -- great source of wisdom that it is -- began to re-organize itself around recognizing the energy of the pain as just that: an energy pattern.
Aha, I realized. This is a contraction.
~
Contraction, as in: a headache is often a symptom of tightness. So as I lay in bed, I dropped into a meditation practice to try to witness and map what I was experiencing, from the inside.
Yup. Tight neck muscles, tight eye muscles, and -- and this is where it gets interesting -- in my mind, some tight, contracted beliefs about unresolved situations in my life. I noticed I was telling myself stories that I was wrong for not having "figured it out" already.
I lay in bed and just felt into the texture and shape of the sensations that I was calling a "headache," and started to invite the tight muscles to soften.
Almost immediately, the tight stories I was telling myself began to soften also.
And then, in what felt like a small miracle, I could suddenly feel very clearly that the headache was not actually a problem at all, but a side effect of something opening.
As in, I could actually feel an expanded version of myself being born on the other side of resting. Some of the visions I've been calling in for my life and my art stopped feeling like far-off fantasies, and started to feel like they're just... within reach.
I got up from the rest feeling more hopeful about life. Better than I had before the headache, honestly.
Which got me thinking about contraction. About what is happening when we tighten -- and how when we can meet contraction with presence, it allows us to find the next opening.
~
In many natural processes, we see this same cycle: contraction and expansion go hand in hand. Our hearts pump blood by contracting, then relaxing. Our lungs breathe through this same process. Inhale. Exhale.
We come into this world through wombs that contract, tighten, clench, over and over again. This is the process of labor and birth. Each time the uterus contracts, the cervix expands just a tiny bit more -- until a portal opens wide enough for a whole new actual LIFE to emerge.
Tension precedes opening.
Here's where we come to the birth of a star. This is the metaphor that, when I really picture it, gives me chills, waters my mouth, widens my lungs, makes me feel connected to the cosmic mystery. As above, so below, the alchemists say.
Stars are born through a process of massive contraction.
Picture a cosmic dust cloud, and a tiny clump of matter swirling within it. That clump begins to gather more stardust and gas. The bigger the clump gets, the stronger its gravitational pull, until it becomes a denser and denser, larger and larger knot. Contraction, contraction.
The baby star nearly collapses in on itself at this point, gathering more and more matter into its spin. Tighter and denser, it gets hotter at the center until the heat is too much and then -- it breaks free, expands. Births a whole fucking solar system.
Can you close your eyes and picture any contracted part of your life as a baby star? What changes when we remember we too are built of the same stuff as the whole cosmos? How does it shift your relationship to your own life if you can feel yourself living this same universal process of contraction and expansion?
~
I think what's feeling so gorgeous and supportive about this metaphor right now is imagining the discomfort you or I might feel, if we were a baby star. Oh God, so much pressing inward. So much spin. Hotter and hotter.
And we've never been anything bigger than this, so what if this dense, tight, churning, hot density is all there is?
Ah.
But what if it isn't.
And often it isn't in our lives, either.
When something is contracting — when you’re tight, tense, stuck — if that contraction can be met with true compassion, wisdom, and love, something will nearly always let go. Something will expand.
Of course, sometimes periods of struggle and tension and density go on a long time, in our lives. Sometimes survival patterns are all we've got. They're valid, they are doing their job. Not every headache will feel like a portal.
But what if contraction is always an invitation to notice what's gotten tight right now, to ask if we're believing a story whose edges could expand, and to ask what, in our lives, might be ready to change form?
In that view, our contracted states stop being a problem -- and become an invitation to meet the place that's calling for attention.
~
Journal prompts:
Is there a situation in your life that you've been contracting around lately? Contraction might show up as feeling anxiety, stress, or a lot of repetitive thinking and trying to "figure it out" without much actual change. The prompt: describe this situation that feels contracted. What are you believing? What story are you telling yourself?
If you scan your body in relation to this situation, I'm curious if you will discover physical contraction anywhere. A sense of tightness or resistance that lives in the body. Often, our bodies know what's happening before our minds catch up. The prompt: can you write about this physical contraction, or draw a picture of it? Does it have a location, a texture, a color, an image?
A practice:
Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down, and place a hand on the location of the most physical contraction. Not to fix, but just to be with.
Can you invite yourself to stay with the tightness, exactly as it is, and welcome it to become more known to you?
Breathe deeply, visualizing sending your breath to that location. Not to force it to change, but simply to ask it what it knows, what it's holding.
Imagine that contracted place as a baby star, and just wonder, without needing to know yet: what expansion might be waiting for you on the other side of it eventually letting go?
~
Sometimes, a pattern of contraction will not let go when we try to meet it alone. That’s where support comes in. Whether you find it in friendships, support groups, therapy, or elsewhere, having someone else to hold it with you is vital.
If you’d like to go deeper with my support, I offer workshops, series, and 1:1 sessions that facilitate the process of embodying transformation.
