08/10/2025
Our bodies hold reminders of the past. For example, you might close off your chest to protect your heart from events that occurred years ago. Or, you might continue to freeze in response to a triggering event, even though you are indeed safe, now. In somatic psychology, we build somatic awareness of habitual tension or movement patterns. Then, we can offer opportunities for new experiences through small experiments that invite subtle changes with breath, posture, or gesture.
The longer we live inside of them, the more they become integrated into the fibers of our identity.
Sometimes we might over-identify with the small self. Here, we live inside of isolation or a form of contraction that can leave us feeling only despair, heaviness, or depression. We might wonder, “is this all that life has to offer?” Here, we must remember that contraction may have once helped you to survive difficult life events. While we might retreat into our shell like the tortoise who seeks self-preservation, we are not meant to live only in contraction.
I encourage you to recognize you own rhythm of expansion and contraction, knowing that this is one of the most basic patterns in all of life. It is found in the bird who opens her heart by puffing up her chest, and, in complementary form, retracts her wings and tucks her beak.It is the flower who opens at dawn and closes with the setting sun. We experience moments of freedom and constriction, we have the capacity for play and can become trapped by our own rigidity. We might prefer one or the other but, in truth, neither state defines us.
Moreover, as we go deeply into contraction, we discover the paradox…that deep inside the narrowed world lies the seeds of expansion. And at the upper limits of our joy is the natural inclination to come back home. We can discover our primal existence in both forms. We discover a luminous courageous Self that holds compassion for our pain and dances in the ecstasy of life itself.
