At my week of teacher training, I felt so expansive. I was expanding to allow in the people around me, expanding to new knowledge, expanding out of my own fears in order to practice teaching the new things I’d learned. I expanded out so much that my immediate reaction when I arrived home was to contract. To sink down into myself and retreat. I’ve wanted to stay home, stay quiet, and burrow down into myself, absorb myself in fiction. To some extent, I think that I needed this, I needed to contract after a week of wild expansion. And now, I’m working on making space for both contraction and expansion. “As much as you contract in,” I hear my yoga teachers say, “expand out.” So I am working at making space to allow this full spectrum of experience.
The creative process pulses with this contraction and expansion too. Some days creativity is quiet, reflective, contractive, like it wants to draw itself into little tiny whispers of circles. Some days its loud and bold and screaming, “I AM HERE!” We need both of those kind of days. One helps us tune into our selves, helps us to draw in to the quiet part of our nature and the other helps us to expand our hearts outward and into the world. Today’s creativity meditation is about taking stock of where you are today, of whether your creativity feels contractive or expansive and then finding the space to embrace both. Enjoy the ride!
