Heaviness.

The Wisdom of Contraction: Making time to let things unfold.

We celebrate expansion.

Opening our hearts. Awakening our consciousness. Embracing the unknown. Becoming more.

But what about our contractions?

Those moments when our bodies feel heavy, our eyes resist opening, our minds wander, and even our will seems inaccessible.

When we feel displaced, delayed, interrupted. Unable to move, despite everything within us wanting to flow.

We search for explanations. Something to change. Something to overcome.

Yet everything alive contracts.

Our hearts. Our lungs. The seasons. The tides.

Contraction is not the opposite of Life. It is one of its movements.

Perhaps the invitation is not always to overcome our heaviness, but to learn to inhabit it with grace.

To make time for things to unfold.

To allow ourselves to be uncomfortable without insisting that we ought to feel otherwise.

Not everything needs to be understood. Not everything needs to be fixed.

Sometimes, we simply need to be.

This week, Life seemed determined to interrupt my movement.

Communication interrupted. Movement delayed. Presence seemingly inaccessible.

The Trickster was smiling.

Not everything inaccessible is lost.

Sometimes, patience is the medicine.

Two stories encountered along the way offered different mirrors.

Digger held up a disturbing one: a world turned upside down, digging itself ever deeper towards the abyss, unable to imagine another way.

Disclosure Day offered another: the possibility of communicating with other intelligences, crossing the mirror into a world of awe and wonder.

One mirror reflects the abyss we risk creating; the other opens onto possibilities we have yet to imagine.

Between the two, a familiar question returned.

What are we choosing to make real?

And yet, perhaps I did not need another answer.

I needed to return to my senses.

It happened while practising yoga.

Breathing. Moving. Feeling.

Allowing myself to be embraced and supported by Mother Earth. Feeling the Air flowing through my lungs, the Water flowing within and without, and the Fire burning inside.

I had not thought my way back into myself.

I moved my way back, with my breath as the gateway.

And something began to lift.

I just noticed it.

I am not really sure when it happened.

Nothing had been resolved. Yet something had changed.

I was present.

And perhaps that is enough.

Along the way, Love had also been quietly doing its work.

A brother shared bread. One sister understood. Another listened. A beloved companion whose presence reaches across distance.

The grace of sharing our heaviness without the need to explain it, much less repair it.

The grace of being accompanied in something that cannot be fixed, because nothing is necessarily broken.

Sometimes, Love is simply the space in which we are allowed to be.

At the New Moon in Libra, we remembered that the One lives through the Many.

Now another dimension of that teaching was revealing itself.

We belong not only through what we give, but also through what we allow ourselves to receive.

Receiving is an act of reciprocity.

And perhaps that is where the Medicine Wheel is guiding us.

Towards the North, where Love invites us to allow ourselves to be held.

To surrender without resigning. To rest without withdrawing from Life. To trust without needing to know.

Around us, Life continues moving.

Generations returning home. Loved ones finding their way to one another. New unions preparing to be celebrated.

And somewhere between the homecomings and the beginnings, we discover that we, too, have been moving.

Even when we thought we were standing still.

In Suspension, we wondered what becomes possible when we stop insisting on what must happen next.

In Pramā, we remembered that balance is a living practice.

Now, perhaps, we are learning to stop insisting on how we must feel while Life unfolds.

We need not remain forever expanded to be fully alive.

There is wisdom in contraction. Medicine in discomfort. Grace in allowing ourselves to receive.

And freedom in remembering that we do not have to understand everything to trust the movement of Life.

Despite everything.

Or perhaps, because of everything.

This, too, shall pass.

But while it is here, this, too, belongs.

May we find the patience to let things unfold.

May we return to our senses before asking Life to make sense.

May we allow ourselves to be held when we have nothing to offer but our presence.

And may we remember that Love does not wait for us to become lighter before reaching for us.

For each and all our relations.

Yo lo Creo / I believe, and so it is.