Contracting

Updated: Sep 14, 2019

Transitions, Growth, and Being Okay with not being okay

Reader’s note: This piece is deeply personal, deeply cathartic, and deeply brave. I have written it to give words to my experience, it is a communicative thing, these words to follow. Now, don’t let that scare you – I talk about hard hitting and real things here, but not in such a way as to overshare. What I am doing here is expressing the lessons I have learned and giving the context necessary to understand.

The biggest expansion of my life and of myself was the alchemy I experienced while living in the embrace of the Himalayas. If you’ve read pieces of my other writing, I am sure you can see the beauty in how my world opened, and how I stepped into the experience wholeheartedly, eagerly, and oh so ready to be all of the human I possibly could. Now I write having been “home” for a year and some to the day of having left for India. Coupled with this great eye lifting, shoulder opening, arm outstretching expansion was a sharp fetal curling, deep shattering, and pointed contraction into myself upon my return in January. Coming back from such a grand adventure was a collapse. The question that punctuated my days this spring was: how does an expanded self return?

If we examine nature, it is clear that everything is in a constant state of dynamic change. Trees are a great example: in cycles they alternate from experiences of growth to experiences of releasing, all the while alive, all the while growing. -Yung Pueblo

I knew I was a different person coming back from India, almost as though I had “leveled up.” I also knew that the same spaces from before my trip existed in my apartment, in my relationship, in my obligations. I was aware that reintegration was going to challenge me – but I wasn’t prepared to feel as though the rug had been pulled from under me. What caught me by surprise was the exceptional disconnection I know felt to my world. I did not feel held by my environment – my classes were asking me to perform and judging me based on my execution of institutionalized goals while caring less about my humanity. My job was a means to an end (rent money), my network of fellow journeyers scattered around the globe, and my family was across the country. It took me months to understand that I wasn’t in the midst of reintegration so much as just integration.

January was a blur of just getting used to another routine, of taking classes and unpacking suitcases. February was a brick wall. When I think about it now I the image I feel is a visceral gasp for air. I think of the noise made at the edge of a sob where you are desperate for air and the release of emotion. Inside of my lungs was a vacuum, a space of deep grief, a need for air, and a continuous longing for the life I was able to build on the other side of the world. At the time, the only language I had to identify my experience was depression. I went to student health, I asked for help, and I tried anti-depressants. And when they didn’t work for me, I blamed myself. What I didn’t understand was that I wasn’t in the midst of what my culture knows as a disease, I wasn't just a pathology. I was experiencing the spiritual & psychological counterpart to great expansion; I just wasn’t ready for the intensity of the contraction.

"It needs to break down so something else can break through." -Deepak Chopra

In his book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions Johann Hari talks about the “grief exception” which is an idea in western clinical settings that states that the only place where depression is an acceptable option for the human to undertake is when grieving the death of someone important to you. He asks, “Why is death the only event that can happen in life where depression is a reasonable response?” It is in this book that I came to recognize that what I was experiencing wasn’t “depression” the disease, the big awful illness; but rather that I was a human being depressed by a profound disconnection and that this response was completely normal, rational, and acceptable. I wasn’t sick or less than or useless, I was isolated, grieving, and becoming more. In my experience, my society has failed in providing me with an adequate framework to engage with the complexity and nuances of mental health – and this failure was detrimental in my coping and growing. Hari follows up this thought by saying, “Being well adjusted to a sick society is no measure of health.”

I found that along with being disconnected from my environment I disconnected from myself. At the time my disillusion, dissociation, and discovery made me feel like Atlas and an imposter. My body went into a freeze state, a deep sleep in order to get through this transition. My world shrunk to getting through the day, the week. I became very small & scared. I remember one of the disconnection phenomena I kept coming back to was how I couldn’t focus my eyes. I would sit in my classrooms, my apartment, and pick an object and try to discern its edges. My ciliary muscles unable to contract to focus the lens’ of my eyes while the rest of my psychi continued to fold inward. I think now about how my literal vision, with my inability to find the boundaries between object is a metaphor for what was happening inside. I was dissolving. In her book When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions Sue Monk Kidd talks of the Dark Night of the Soul. She talks about this idea of waiting – a mystical time where the soul contracts to bring something new into the world. She refers to the waiting in her book as the cocoon, a metaphor that did not fall on more ready ears. Sue says,

Trust the wait.

Embrace the uncertainty. Enjoy the beauty of becoming.

When nothing is certain anything is possible.

In the midst of my waiting, embracing the uncertainty was terror. I was in the midst of finding new depths of being, but in the dark. I have been conditioned to fear places where the light doesn’t touch, but that was before I realized the force created by the existence of the relationship of the two. For me, it keeps coming back to the interplay, the dialectic, the relationship between two things which allows for the movement and greater depth. I was learning about the “Two Wings” through deep experience.

I was in the midst of contracting to bring something new into the world. I was in the depths of my perseverance place, choosing to become more, and to be present through the small, exhale-so-you-can-squeeze-through-the-rocks contraction of my inward spelunking. I once read that the spiritual journey is one of becoming more real, and the experiences of the last year have forged me into the most authentic women I have yet uncovered. I am working every day on what Brené Brown calls braving the wilderness. She says, “The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.” Not only has my pendulation and cycle of contraction and expansion created a bravely authentic human, but it is teaching me how to be the wilderness, how to become more, and how to settle into the cycle. The wilderness is a place of courage, authenticity, uncertainty, vulnerability, and criticism. It is a place about showing up and being real.

"There is a special kind of resilience that comes from the level of scrutiny that happens in the wilderness." -Brené Brown

What I am continually dedicating myself to is allowing myself to be open to the cycling. For me, the flow comes with the grace of accepting the movement. It takes grit & courage to move between my biggest, alive, and wildly capable self into my chrysalis, to the self that is gathering, small, and intensely vulnerable. It takes a certain type of bravery to sit in the small, dark, collapsing spaces of yourself and to do the work that needs to be done. It is when we collapse and proceed to armor ourselves that we become stuck, that we stifle the growth process, and live in profound pain because of it. One of the lessons that has become integral in keeping my mind open to the process came from a SuperSoul podcast with Steven Pressfield. In this episode, Steven talked about how he measures his days. He does this by asking himself, “Have I overcome resistance today?” Have I looked inside and discovered where I am resisting life, where I am not surrendering to the flow, and have I done anything to acknowledge and overcome that friction? This question has planted a seed in my life and I have loved integrating it into my writing process, my meditation practice, my daily (hourly, by the minute) check ins with my internal anxiety and fatigue. Debbie Ford has a great quote about overcoming resistance saying:

"We are all created with this phenomenal force inside of us. And everything that comes our way is coming so that we can grow and evolve. And if we look at it like that, if we’re willing to open our hearts and see where we’ve shut down, where we are trying to resist life, then we have the great opportunity to step into who we always wanted to be."

I write as though I am on the other side of this collapse, though that is not entirely true. I am not on the other side in a two-dimensional manor, I am directly through the experience in such a way that employs the z axis – that adds another dimension to the whole piece. There is more to this story to follow, and my hope is that you read it when I share it.

And beyond that, here is my wish for you:

when you grow rapidly

and experience

such deep insights

that you can no longer

look at yourself

or the world

in the same way

be kind

allow yourself

the time and space

to settle into the