Dynamic Movement: Expansion, Contraction and Collapse

This article is part of the SoleHealing Fundamentals series.

Movement exists beyond what we can see.

Dr. Janice Brown

In SoleHealing, we are always thinking about movement as an understanding of the natural rhythm of expansion and contraction. Rhythmic expansion and contraction is a key indicator of fundamental health. Contraction is a normal rhythm of expansion. Expansion is innate. Inability to move due to collapse is in indicator of disruption of health. 

Movement that you Can See

First let’s simplify this by thinking about expansion and contraction in terms of what you can see. Let’s look at the body.

There are many ways you experience expansion and contraction in the body. The body naturally contracts through all the systems: breathing lungs, beating heart, dilating and contracting blood vessels and eyes, dilating and contracting uterus and cervix, your skeletal muscles that enable you to reposition your physical structure. Physically, the body in health is always in a state of transition with this natural rhythm of expansion and contraction. 

A simple illustration in the body that most people can understand is the example of your lungs. In health, your lungs experience a rhythmic expansion and contraction due to various aspects of muscle expansion and contraction coupled with pressurization differences. We call this breathing. However, when the system is disrupted due to an injury or illness that interferes with rhythmic expansion and contraction, a collapse can occur. A collapsed lung is a medical emergency that requires a medical intervention. It does not allow a rhythm that maintains health.

What about Movement that you Can’t See?

In terms of movement that you can’t see the same principle applies. Resonant health flows without constraint. It is the difference between contraction and collapse. Collapse is a forced energetic. Contraction is a natural rhythmic undulation. Collapse occurs under force.

Now let’s look at an understanding of this non-visible movement that occurs through mind and body, the energetic aspect of feeling and emotion.

Expanded energy is experienced when you are feeling positive emotions.

Negative emotion, feeling bad, is how you know that your energy is collapsed.

Dr. Debra Ford Msc D., The Tao and SoleHealing

You train your body to understand expansion in terms of energetics. The way you can be most familiar with this expansion and contraction of your energetic nature is through the experience of emotion. 

Why does this matter? It matters because you can’t know what you can’t feel. And emotion and feeling are intimately tied together.

All energetics have a natural movement pattern, and in fundamental health you are allowing the natural rhythm of movement and not denying it through the application of force (mental, physical or emotional). You have to allow feeling to be able to powerfully use this awareness.

So, how does this idea of movement come into play in terms of a person’s mental aspect? 

Personalities constrain themselves against their natural energetic response because they wish to appear in a different manner. While this is understandable at times, it is not an issue with the nature of who you are; it is an issue with the perception of who you are that is really at the root of the forced contraction.

This becomes the first place you begin to hold yourself apart from the essence of who you are. Contraction expresses itself in the form of resistance when it is in a forceful state of friction. When you feel negative emotion you are experiencing mental contraction related to a feeling. The best thing you can do is allow it to be seen for what it is, an energetic disruption that doesn’t require control but release. 

How to Create Expansion

The trick is to choose a better feeling which allows you to mentally, emotionally or physically release from the contraction. Allow the follow through of a natural release of contraction into expansion and the feeling will naturally subside. Remember a contraction requires force to sustain itself, it means you are holding a feeling and a thought that is keeping the contraction sustained.

The sustained contraction can not change until the feeling stimulus changes. You need to choose the change of feeling. Choosing is an action.

Dr. Janice Brown

Physically: think of a ‘yawn contraction’ (naturally subsides) as opposed to a workout at the gym (forced contraction). Sustained, forced contraction results in a physical imbalance in bodily structures. In fact, if something feels wonky in your body, try yawning to release it out.

Mentally: You have the power to choose the thought you are going to THINK about. Yes, you are bombarded with thoughts and it may seem like you are thinking a million things at once. However, you are only thinking the thought you are choosing to hold, meaning you can actually only THINK one thought at a time. Choose a thought that helps you feel better. No matter what that is.

Emotionally: Choose a better feeling (relief is a great one) as opposed to negative emotions or feelings of aversion or worry (forced contraction). Sustained, forced emotional contraction results in an energetic imbalance.

The compounding result of a forced contraction is the need for a more powerful expression of the necessary energetic to ignite a motive force. This is a key understanding for achieving, sustaining and maintaining “resonant health”. 

Find the natural flow of expansion and contraction without collapse.

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ACTION: Pay attention to see if you are aware of where your feeling is actually being stimulated from. Are your choices to feel better being applied in a way that can have positive resonant effect?

Are you making changes from the correct aspect?

Have you ever had a dream like this when you were surfing that limbo between sleep and wakefulness?

The other day, my alarm was ringing and the sound was intruding on me, in my dream I was dreaming of trying to adjust the sound of the alarm on my phone. I could not turn it off or turn it down or make it play a different tune. And no matter what I did it kept playing.  A little too loud and it was disrupting everyone around me in my dream as I kept trying to adjust it. I was showing people that I was trying to adjust it but the music played on and on. It was frustrating me. And I was attempting everything I knew to make it stop. It just wouldn’t. I had to change the stimulus where it was originating. Not in my dream. But at my bedside. Where I was hearing the stimulus from another level of awareness. 

This is a great illustration about how and why you may have been attempting many different forms of treatment for health resolution to create change in your life without result. You have to get to the initiation point, the feeling, before you can create lasting resonant change in your experience of health.

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This article is part of the SoleHealing Fundamentals series.