Making EXPANSION and contraction your best friend…

Life is full of cycles where things increase in one way or another and then decrease in one way or another. This is the universal law of expansion and contraction – something that you simply can’t escape. However, if you don’t understand how it all works, you may well fight one side or the other of this ongoing equation. Which is a bit like trying to swim against the river – futile, always painful, and ends up with you drowning. This universal law affects people and their pets – dogs, cats, and others.

So let’s look at each side of these continual cycles that affect us all in small ways and larger ways. Breathing in, breathing out, The heart relaxing to fill with blood, and then squeezing the blood through the veins. Day and night. Pregnancy and birth. Tides. Life itself- from the puppy or kitten to maturity, and then waning into old age and death.

You can learn a lot about how to move through the cycles of expansion and contraction in an easy, safe, graceful way from your beautiful pets. Animals are so much better than most humans at simply allowing themselves to be with what is. You might take your dog out for a walk and a play. Then they come home, switch off, and have a deep rest. Humans often go to work, get stressed, can’t let go of it at all, and bring it home, can’t sleep, and then rinse and repeat until they collapse.

If you fight the contraction phases in life, this can be a problem for your pets!

Expansion can be addictive. And our society conditions us all to seek more, more, more. I know that for many years, I was totally focused on looking for and creating more and more expansion. I took a lot of stimulants- poured coffee down my throat. I never stopped. I fought the contractive phases tooth and nail.

The thing is, you can’t expand forever. If you try to just keep blowing a balloon up, at some point it’ll pop! If you never allow time for rest, for going within, for recovery, at some point you’ll crash and burn, and your pets will pay a secondary price – because you won’t have anything left in your cup to give to them.

Most recovery and regeneration, most healing, happens in the contraction stages of life. If you are always trying to expand more and escape any kind of contracting experiences, you degrade your vitality. And you need to understand that your pets will always entrain with you, with your nervous system. This means that if you are continually wired and stimulated, then your pets will sympathetically be wired and stimulated too.

Everyone loses! They lose rest. They lose vitality. They lose presence. They lose opportunities to connect and experience love, calm, and peace. So what does it look like to really embrace contraction phases?

I’m just coming off a massively expansive, intensively beautiful night on the weekend, where I hosted and performed with my band at the launch concert/event for the album we recorded earlier in the year. It was SO MUCH FUN. And then on Sunday, I was so knackered.

So I took it easy, went slowly, had a huge afternoon sleep, and got to bed early that night. And today, while I’m a bit tired, I’m functional. If you have animals who have an arousal (expansion) bias – who are easily excitable, who love high-impact, high-intensity activities and play, you may have to help them into contraction, downtime, and relaxing phases. You might have to teach them how to relax, so they get all of the benefits of increased vitality, calmness, better able to learn, and so on.

The more you understand and work intelligently with the universal law of expansion and contraction, the happier your life will be. The better your vitality and energy levels will be. the better you’ll be able to be present with and support your pets. So – I invite you to embrace all of the beautiful, natural contraction phases that your life brings you.; Stop pushing through. back off, go easy, and you’ll reap incredible rewards.

After all – it’s the contractions that birth the baby – and the same is true in all of your creative work in this life!

If you’d like to read more blog articles like this, you can click through to our  #1 + #2 + #3 + #4 + #5 + #6 editions of How To Help Your Pets with Dr. Ed, The Healing Vet

And here’s where you can click through to watch this week’s video where I talk live about these themes from a bit of a different angle.