What holds us back is often exactly what catapults us forward.
The Growing Edge
I don’t think expansion always feels expansive. More often than not, it feels uncomfortable.
It feels like standing at the edge of the known, where the familiar ways we’ve learned to move, express, protect and contain ourselves begin to loosen. The places where we’ve become conditioned to stay small suddenly start to knock at our door, asking to be met differently.
Perhaps this is why so much of growth feels like resistance. Because something is trying to move through the very places that have forgotten their wildness.
And perhaps that is why what holds us back – individually, collectively, generationally – so often turns into the greatest catapulting force, moving us in the opposite direction at greater speeds than we could have gone without the tension of opposition.
The Conditioning
To let your body wiggle, scribble, flutter, express shapes and noises in no particular structured format – how terrifying and uncomfortable this can be.
And how uncomfortable it can be to see another in full expression. Why is this so?
Because we are conditioned, learned, molded in ways that tell us that certain ways to move and express are NOT okay, while others are acceptable.
This is like telling the forest that certain trees and blossoms and fruits and creatures are simply inappropriate, while others are acceptable. And the insanity is that humans do treat the forests and wild nature as such – trying to control the wild, domesticate the genius, and by doing so squishing this vast library of pure intelligence to extinction.
Our nature and Mother Nature are always reflecting one another. As we watch the wild spectrum of nature get flattened and controlled, we can feel the same happening inside us: our own connection to wild, creative, unpredictable sources – also in danger of extinction.
What’s The Medicine?
I think the medicine is to move in unpredictable ways – spontaneous, so that you can only know movement as you discover it coming through you, the moment you are doing it.
This therapy will move out the conditionings that constrain our ability to connect to the forces of Mother Nature. As we open, our heart teaches our mind to remember how much we love the universe. We then re-develop our powers of will and choice.
The process of re-opening our hearts up as big as they actually are, is a painful one. That is why it’s avoided. It hurts so much to begin to feel the global heartache. But I believe we must do so in order to wake up and start hugging the ground we walk on with every step.
Just little by little. Not all at once. Wiggle by wiggle. Moan by moan. Let the pure intelligence of your body express and release and heal.
Raw Expression
I think the hardest part of letting pure wild natural creativity flood through and work us over is the let-go of taking our inner judgments personally.
The incremental release of the nit-picking committee that pulls apart and inspects every degree of expression streaming through. And a setting free of the unending potentials of how the expression will be observed and judged by others.
To let raw expression flow so purely that what is coming out can only be known as it is occurring. Standing naked on stage. This is so beautiful and so uncomfortable and so transformational in the layers of every witness on some level of their existence.
Some days the guts come out and something so raw is exposed – and that is beautiful. Some days what comes is more simple or refined – and that is also beautiful and profoundly important.
I can see by now that the process of growing more naked, vulnerable and humble is one that never will stop. There will never be an end to the creative potentials that can play through our instruments.
And even though the content of what comes through may appear more modest at times as we grow, the inner effects of this raw creative juicing become more potent and bone quiveringly shifting.
This is what expansion means to me. It happens in the layers – subtly, uncomfortably, bone quiveringly, every time we let something real come through.
I’m humbled and stripped at the moment by this process working me.
In love and nonsense,
Meghan