It’s Safe to expand
I’m settling back in after spending a week in Ireland with my family. The Irish landscape is wonderfully lush at the moment. The verdant green is punctuated with an abundance of flowers in bloom and the air is filled with the sweet scent of hawthorn blossoms. Nature never fails to feed my senses and nourish my soul.
I arrived back in Italy to find my orto (kitchen garden) also bursting with life and my seedlings having outgrown their seed trays and ready to be potted on.
This time of year is such a wonderful reminder that it’s in our nature to expand and yet we often have an inverse relationship to expansion.
I was a child when I learned that physical expansion was not a good thing and that you’d be judged for being ‘too big’. This manifested in years of ‘yo yo’ dieting, where I’d gain weight (expand), then loose weight (contract). A constant battle between those feelings of being in and out of control.
What I’ve learned as I’ve aged is that it was never about the physicality of my body.
Energetically and spiritually some part of me had wanted to expand to ‘be more’, but I didn’t know what that meant or how to hold space for that. So instead I’d push against the physical boundary of my flesh and gain weight.
As women we gain weight when we are pregnant because we are quite literally creating new life. So now when I gain a few pounds I ask myself; “What wants to be birthed here, what part of me wants to expand?”
Expansion looks different for everyone. Expansion can be:
Going to a different coffee shop.
Visiting a new place.
Doing something out of your normal routine.
Opening to a new possibility or a new relationship.
Starting a new creative project or a new business.
Following through when you hear the whisperings of your soul.
And sometimes expansion involves letting go of something that no longer serves you. The phrase that has been stalking me recently is “Don’t get too big for your boots.”
When I took that phrase into my meditation this morning I saw that those old boots had holes in the soles and were hobbling me. I made a conscious decision to throw them out and get myself a more fabulous sparklier pair!
Some of my seedlings that need to be transplanted are sunflowers that by the end of the summer will be 3 metres tall. Their beauty will give me so much pleasure and they will provide much needed shade for some of the more tender plants.
Their pollen will be food for bees and insects and their seeds at the end of the season will feed us and the birds and some of those seeds will become next years flowers. If I leave those seedlings in their little seed trays they will perish because they never got the opportunity to expand. Expansion is our birthright, it’s what we were put here to do, to expand into the fullest expression of ourselves. Don’t stay in your seed tray, it’s safe to expand!
Catherine x
Need help expanding? My Soul Readings and Shamanic Healing Sessions are potent ways to help you to expand into the fullest version of yourself in your personal, professional, creative or spiritual life.