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Warning: Adult language ahead. Proceed at your own discretion ; ) ~ ed.
In May of this year, I found myself in beautiful San Diego, locked into what I can only describe as one of the most expansive and holy weekends of my life.
Something profound and life-altering happened to me during this advanced energetics breathwork training.
Maybe it was the incredible community of women.
Maybe it was the breathwork.
Maybe it was telling the truth out loud instead of polishing it into something more socially acceptable or simply being surrounded by people who weren’t remotely interested in small talk and were perfectly willing to crawl directly into the basement of each other’s souls together.
Whatever it was, I cracked open. I cried. I breathed. I laughed until I hurt. I said things I hadn’t said before and I heard things I didn’t know I needed to hear. I excavated pieces of myself I had buried beneath years of survival, responsibility, relationships, grief, motherhood, business, and being a functioning adult who most definitely had her shit together.
The bottom line is that I came home feeling more alive than I had in years. And for the next few weeks, I was insufferably well. I meditated every morning and I journaled. I noticed sunsets and even felt profound gratitude while making coffee. I was finding spiritual significance in basically everything short of unloading the dishwasher.
I was present, open, soft, grateful, and even the mundane felt sacred.
I genuinely remember thinking, “Holy shit. I figured it out!”
After four and a half decades of being a human being, I had apparently cracked the code to existence during one expansive weekend in Southern California. I literally felt untouchable.
And then, about a month later, the universe said, “That’s adorable, Rachel.” And what was so frustrating to me at the time was that there wasn’t some prolific unraveling or singular event I could point to and blame. It just…happened.
I started dimming; slowly and quietly like waves retracting from the shore in the middle of the night. Meditation stopped taking me anywhere. I would sit there waiting for transcendence and mostly just think about what I needed from Costco. Journaling started feeling like I was interviewing myself for a job I didn’t even want. My energy levels dropped dramatically and the gratitude that had been pouring out of me started requiring actual effort. And that electric zest for life I had been so convinced permanently belonged to me? It began slipping off my skin in sheets.
Then came the low-level depression. It was the type of depression that quietly lets itself in, takes off its shoes, finds the remote, and apparently plans on staying awhile. And to be completely transparent, that scared the hell out of me. Because once we have felt that expanded, contraction feels deeply personal and incredibly lonely. Like a thorn in your side you can’t quite reach. To put it blatantly, it feels like we fucked something up.
There was a part of me that immediately wanted to get this version of myself back and capture the spiritually evolved woman from San Diego who was alive, wide-open, and could practically taste gratitude in the air.
So naturally, my first instinct was to try harder. More meditation, longer journaling sessions, going back to therapy. I was desperately attempting to become the woman who was supposedly no longer desperate to become anyone.
The irony was not lost on me.
But eventually, I stopped trying to crawl my way back to the high.
Instead of fighting the contraction, I got insanely curious about it.
I stopped asking, “How do I get rid of this dreadful, unwanted feeling?” And started asking, “What is this contradiction trying to show me?”
I sat in it. I meditated with the heaviness instead of trying to transcend it and I let myself feel uninspired and depleted without immediately turning it into a personal-development emergency I had to fix as quickly as possible. And somewhere in the quiet of that, I realized something that completely changed the way I understand expansion and contraction.
Here is what I found.
Contraction is actually extremely common after a deeply expansive experience, especially breathwork, retreats, intense connection, spiritual work, travel, or any experience where you feel unusually open and fully alive.
Expansion asks our nervous system to hold more: more sensation, more emotion, more vulnerability, more pleasure, more possibility, more connection.
Even beautiful intensity is still intensity and afterward the body often moves toward contraction because nervous systems naturally seek equilibrium. It can look like fatigue, numbness, irritability, sadness, wanting to isolate, or that strange “why do I suddenly feel worse?” feeling.
There’s also the contrast. When we have just felt wildly connected, clear, loved, purposeful, or free, ordinary life can temporarily feel flatter by comparison. Nothing necessarily went wrong, the baseline just feels different after touching something so much bigger than us.
And sometimes expansion loosens the lid on our emotions. We don’t only become more available to joy; we become more available to everything. Grief, loneliness, fear, old attachment wounds, exhaustion, or truths we have been able to keep compartmentalized can rise once we finally feel safe enough to experience them. The contraction can actually be part of integration rather than evidence that we have “lost” the expansion.
I think of it almost like breathing itself: inhale, expansion; exhale, release.
No body can remain in an inhale forever and we are not meant to live permanently in the peaks of life. That would, in fact, completely negate the purpose of being in these human bodies.
The problem we run into is that expansion can feel unusually intoxicating. We touch something bigger and feel clear, connected, alive, and cracked open while getting a steady glimpse of a version of ourselves that feels freer, softer, more courageous, and more awake. And naturally, we want to stay there. Who wouldn’t?
But the body knows something the mind often forgets: an inhale has to become an exhale.
At some point, we have to come back down into ourselves and into our body. We have to settle into ordinary life, the places that still ache, the parts that still need tending, and the truths that became impossible to ignore once we cracked wide open and the light got in.
But here is what is important to recognize. Contraction is not regression. Sometimes contraction is simply a sacred integration and the nervous system saying, “Whew, that was a lot. Let me absorb all of this.”
Sometimes sadness arrives after joy because we finally created enough space to feel what had been waiting underneath it. And there are times exhaustion follows expansion because becoming more fully ourselves requires more energy than we once realized. And the darkness feels darker only because we recently stood somewhere incredibly bright while feeling temporarily untouchable.
The mistake we make is believing the exhale means we lost the inhale. We didn’t.
The breath still moved through us and changed us and rearranged us on a cellular level. And even when the lungs empty again, the body remembers what it felt like to be full.
Healing isn’t learning how to stay expanded forever but rather learning to trust the rhythm, respect the opening, and honor the closing. We must trust and accept that neither will last forever and give ourselves enough grace to stop panicking every time we contract. But more importantly, we must refrain from clinging to the feeling every time we expand.
Because life itself is movement. It is opening and closing, reaching and returning, becoming and resting. All in one fluid motion.
The seasons where we feel less inspired, less open, less magnetic, or even less certain are not detours from our becoming. They are often where the becoming settles into our bones. Because expansion can show us what is possible but contraction asks us whether we can love ourselves when we are no longer standing in the light of possibility.
Contraction and expansion are the inhale and exhale within this extraordinarily sacred life experience. And the deepest form of surrender is allowing ourselves to belong to all of it. Our holy work is to trust the breath enough to let it leave us, knowing another inhale will always come.
~
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