Psycho-Emotional Expansion and Contraction

Your entire existence is composed of only two distinct polarities that we can refer to as contraction and expansion (or limitation and freedom).

As an emotional being, you are always experiencing either one or the other and, if you’re experiencing one, rest assured, the other is awaiting its turn to impact you in waves of varying intensities that you will define as good or bad (note: it is your mental definition that determines the emotional response).

This experience is called “duality” and it is an absolute fact of your life and there is no escape from it as long as you live.

You could be living in abject poverty, which most would certainly agree is a contracted and limited way to live, but even with such a contracted experience, waves of expansion and freedom can also be experienced (which may explain why some of the happiest people in the world live in the slums of Calcutta, while some of the unhappiest people are right here in the good ‘ole U. S. of A.).

You could be diagnosed with cancer, which would be a very contracted experience. Nevertheless, waves of emotional expansion can also attend you in varying intensities and at various times in response to significant others who are their to support you.

Sometimes it seems as if things are just rolling along wonderfully (expansion) and then, baddabing! a contracting experience comes out of nowhere to diminish your positive mood. Yet, soon enough, that contracting wave itself diminishes and expansion flows back in with waves of pleasure in varying intensities and degrees.

The idea that you should be consistently happy all the time may indirectly result in more misery, because the moment you experience a negative thought-emotion you immediately criticize yourself for not being happy, even though the situation you're in may be realistically negative. 

Your problem is that you wish to live in a monality, rather than a duality, and you demand expansion and freedom be your only experience. Hence, there are millions of people out there scurrying to and fro in futile attempts to avoid emotional contraction, which only results in more contraction associated with the chronic stress of seeking desperately to escape any and all contracting experiences. Even the rich and famous must find ways to negotiate contracting experiences, upon realizing that their wealth and fame are useless against the chronic onslaught of negative emotion.

To demand that a contracting experience ‘should not' be happening is to reject the reality of the moment and increase the intensity of the contracting emotion. This is similar to compounded depression in which you become anxious about being depressed which intensifies the depressed mood. 

The polarities of contraction and expansion, limitation and freedom, are a part of your life no different than the inhalation and exhalation of your breathing. However, you do not consider exhalation to be a negative aspect of breathing while inhalation is positive. You simply accept both as necessary for the life sustaining process of breathing.

It may be time to accept the emotional contractions of your life to be as necessary as the emotional expansions and to perceive the limitations you experience to be as necessary to you as the opportunities for freedom. Acceptance does not mean giving up on change, it merely asserts that facilitating change is more likely when the mind-numbing hopelessness of chronic rejection no longer impedes your mood and functioning.

Accept that the experience of life is a duality and, as long as you live, you cannot escape that experience, because it is what makes life worth living. Engage the contractions and expansions of your life as you would the inhalation and exhalation of breathing. Both are necessary as a whole, so just let it happen as it must because...

...this too will pass.