The Rhythm of Contraction and Expansion: A Path Through Trauma and Grief
Trauma recovery, grief, and living a life well all include grounding into the basic premise for how the body lives and breathes in life. Looking at our breath, and at all life itself, there is the flow of contraction and expansion. We contract, breathe out, close down, and go in. We expand, breathe in, open up, and take the outside world into our body. And then we do this over and over, billions of times, billions of moments, thousands upon thousands of times every day.
In the inner work, and especially when we are focused on recovering from trauma or loss, we must learn to allow our body to be able to do this. To explore these edges of experience in different varying degrees. With grief and loss, we must learn how to contract ourselves. We learn how to allow ourselves to stop giving outward and stop taking in, to pause and let the gravity and impact of what we have lost affect us and change our internal landscape.
And the same goes with trauma. We must learn when to self protect, when to go in, and when to expand out and seek comfort and safety from others, our environment, and ourselves.
Recovery and health are all art forms when looked at from this narrative. Every breath, glance, and direction of attention becomes the brushstroke of how we dance with life itself. And looking at the delicate impermanence of life that arises when we see how fleeting each state really can be, can become the next layer we must face.
The biology of being alive
Think of it this way: first we are born. The creative spark of biology writes us into existence. From nothing, molecules of stardust in our mothers' wombs combine with molecules of stardust in our fathers' bodies, and form a cosmic reaction from which new life results. Our life. And then through the process of expansion and cellular growth, comes our body. As our body moves in a fluctuating state of contraction and rapid expansion, we are both contracted and forming in our mother's body while also expanding with growth—our nervous system and organism reaching out for nourishment and seeking connection and safety from inside her.
Then, through an explosion of energy and chemical processes, we expand out into the world. Forced from safety and the contracted space we knew for months, into a new cold, noisy, and gravity-filled world. And in this, we have been forced out of contraction into something new. And we gasp for air, contracting for the first time in contact with our breath. We expand and contract. We cry. We are alive.
And this cycle perpetually unfolds as long as we live. We have new experiences which overwhelm us, we seek out comfort and support, and then we withdraw. And this is our cycle of life and death in every breath, every day, and every moment.
Relearning the fundamental rhythms of life
For truly effective growth, healing, and effective emotional inner work, we have to relearn these fundamental rites of being alive. Grief thrusts us into contraction, and then we must learn how to allow it and welcome its wings if we are to recover and grow around it. We must learn when to shut the world out and when to let it back in. The same goes with trauma recovery; our body needs us to help it relearn—or in some cases learn for the first time—how to know when to do each and how to trust the natural impulse of the body's requests, telling us what it needs.
I have been learning and relearning these skills this past five years. I had a major series of life-changing events, which followed other life-changing events. The stack of so many dominoes continually falling sent me to a place where I lost my breath. I lost my rhythm entirely.
In a short period of time, I lost both parents to suicide before I hit 30. In the same window, I lost family members, a baby, my career, and my sense of sanity. I crawled my way back to a semblance of life that made sense, but the trauma and grief were so impactful that I was like a wandering ghost—half okay but half lost all the time.
I thought that first wave of losses was hard, but I had no idea what was coming. Eight years after the first set of losses, I hit the mega wave. It completely annihilated any familiar sense of self or reality I knew. I experienced sexual assault from someone I trusted and developed PTSD. I began gaining weight and becoming increasingly fatigued. Then the pandemic hit and altered my social routines and structure. Not long after, I experienced a massive life-changing health crisis combined with a brain injury that left me reeling with a nervous system disorder and such fragile health that I could no longer work or walk well. The brain injury robbed me of my sense of self, reality, and my memory of what I liked or what I was supposed to do with my time. And I was alone, with almost no one.
The work of coming home to ourselves
In those years of suffering, sickness, and recovery, I had to learn. I had to learn how to contract when I wanted to expand. I had to learn how to let myself go inside and feel the things I didn't want to feel and didn't know how to feel. I had to allow myself contraction when all I had known as safety was expansion.
Living in an expansion-hungry culture, full of noise and creation and more, more, more, my being had no idea how to go inside and let that be okay. With poor models from my caregivers growing up—who also didn't have healthy models for this—I was lost.
Over the years that followed the major crashes, I learned what I needed to do. I learned how I needed to be, and how to respond to my inner signals and outer signals. And now I am learning who I need to become to dance with these rhythms. How to allow the contraction, and how to allow the expansion. How to let this go, and allow that, and let that go.
Illness forced me to contract more than I had ever had to in my entire life. It robbed me of the coping mechanisms and skills I'd spent a lifetime perfecting. But in doing so, it gave me back a version of myself that is emotionally healthy, in tune, and grounded—no matter how I might be feeling in any given moment.
An invitation
This is what I wish for everyone: grounded, safe, and embodied connection to our aliveness. To master that capacity to meet yourself with compassion in both the contraction and the expansion throughout life’s moments. Because in and throughout our lives, we will all experience great loss and strife at some point; and in many cases, we will experience the waves over and over again.
It is my belief that the best thing we can do for ourselves is to cultivate the resilience to be with every wave and be washed by them. To learn to allow and let in the reality of life as it actually is, and not just as we wish it to be. To learn the skill and grace to allow the breath of life to move us, change us, and expand or contract us organically with the flow of life's rhythms is where we can find ourselves again and again.
That is where we come alive.
