Are You Expanding or Contracting?
How to Find Balance
I believe you could have an amazing life, if in any and all situations in life, you’d asked yourself the following question.
Am I expanding or contracting in this?
Here’s an example:
You look around your office and see that it’s cluttered. You know you “should” declutter your office. You look at it and it doesn’t feel good to you. You might notice you feel a bit overwhelmed yet when you tell yourself you “should” get organized and you “should” go through all of these papers. Now you ask yourself, “Am I in a place of expansion or contraction with this?”
What do you think?
I think this is contraction. Think of how you feel energetically. If you push yourself to do this while you’re telling yourself you should, how will you feel? I suspect you’ll feel constricted and if you’re feeling constricted, you’re not in a place of expansion.
Now if you let yourself off the hook, and decide you want to wait until you’re in a place of expansion, how do you think that might feel?
You might be afraid that you’ll NEVER get organized but what if you utilize the internal feeling information about feeling constricted and tap through this. Tap on your constricted feeling.
Even though, I do not want to get organized right now. It feel too overwhelming. I chose to love and accept myself anyway.
Even though, I can’t seem to get motivated to do this. I deeply and completely accept myself anyway.
Even though, no matter how often I tell myself I should get this done, I just can’t seem to do it. I chose to acknowledge my feelings anyway.
Then keep tapping from here and see what surfaces for you and as always, if something that’s emotionally charged for you comes up, please assistance from a professional to help you navigate through any emotions that might feel too much for you.
Anytime you’re not doing something that you know would serve you well to do, there’s a deeper reason that is based in protecting yourself. Once you have uncovered this and loosened its hold on you, you should find that you’re in a place a expansion and then the “getting organized” will turn into feeling inspired to either do it yourself or hire someone to help you. Either way, the goal is to feel expansion.
I’ve found a lot of times, I don’t even need to tap through resistance now. I just notice that I’m feeling constricted I ask myself, one of these next questions:
If I was an expansive state of mind, What would I do? or How would I behave?
When I really get in touch with how a person would behave who was in expansion, I get a pretty quick and clear answer and I can’t “act as if” if needed to in the moment and practice being a person whose expanded.
In other words, if I get the idea to reach out to someone who might help me expand my business, and I find I’m resisting this, I ask myself how I might behave if I was expanding and the answer quickly comes to me and I act on that.
It’s a practice, like most anything but the beauty is, you can “act as if” until this new behavior takes root and you have this amazing tool of tapping literally at your finger tips to assist you when you’re feeling stuck.
The other day, I was driving, and I tend to think I’m Mario Andretti when I drive. Translation: I’m an impatient driver, in general. (I have tapped on this, but truth be told, I think I haven’t really been that inspired to change my driving.) Well, as I heard myself sigh out loud at the driver in front of me driving 30 mph in a 50 mph zone it occurred to me to ask myself if I was in contraction or expansion and guess what. I felt constricted. Wow!!!! So then I asked myself how I would behave in my driving if I was in expansion and I immediately “acted as if” and I just let the driver in front of me be who he was being and calmly pulled around him when the opportunity presented itself. That felt great. I had been sighing at him, or talking to him as I drove. I just got myself to better feeling place and the truth is, I didn’t have to “act as if.” It just felt better to shift.
So just for today, or for an hour today, can you commit to practicing the first question. “Am I expanding or contracting?
Don’t take my word for it. Practice this and see what happens.
Here’s to tapping into expansion as often as you can.
Marti