Practical Magic | Use Everything
Can you imagine how magical you'd feel if you had the power to use even your darkest moods and moments as a source of energy and as your compass?
Magical living isn't about aspiring to a life that's 100% sunshine and rainbows. It IS about harnessing the full spectrum of the human experience, like sadness, low energy, PMS...so you can use everything you have.
Expansion and Contraction
The cycles of expansion and contraction are laws that govern everything in our world.
You see this cycle in the seasons. There is a beautiful expanded state – spring and summer – where everything grows and energy goes out, and then you have the contraction – autumn and winter – where the energy goes inwards, everything retreats, but under the ground, many important processes are happening.
The energy created in the contraction provides the fuel for the next expansion.
The cycle goes on and on. Expansion followed by contraction, followed by expansion, followed by contraction. It’s an energy cycle that’s self-sustaining. A contraction always follows an expansion, and an expansion always follows a contraction. You can't have one without the other.
Where else can you see expansion and contraction? You can feel it in your body as you breathe, in a menstrual cycle, in a circadian rhythm of the day.
Nothing about life on earth is stable. This is an ever-changing universe, and we are the strangest change of all. These cycles are alive in us in many different ways, and they’re also alive in every system that humans have ever created. Yet, we are blind to seeing them.
Move Through the Cycle
When we enter a contraction, whether it's a mid-afternoon energy contraction or an economic contraction, we attack ourselves and each other. We don’t see the contraction as a logical next step after an expansion, we see it as a sign of weakness and failure.
We all hide our contracted states from each other, and only show each other the expanded states. “I'm go go go all the time. It’s all good here. I don't deal with that sort of stuff. That's not me.”
But it's so fake. The contraction always follows the expansion. Negative emotions, low energy states, illness, fatigue, rest, and retreat are part of what it means to be human. It’s the other side of an expanded state. And although we may hate spending time in a contracted state, it can be immensely powerful if we know how to harness it.
We are energy beings. Energy wants to move. It wants to transform. It's going somewhere.
When you deny the existence of a contraction and attack yourself for arriving there, you're blocking the energy from moving and stagnation sets in.
Instead, you may arrive in a place of contraction and get curious. “Oh, how interesting. I'm feeling a feeling low. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling drained. I wonder whether this is just a contraction that's coming on? How can I honor this? How can I ride this and let the energy go where it needs to go? I need to get refueled. My body needs something. How can I tend to it?”
If we allow our bodies to take us where they want to go – to recover, replenish, or connect – we will ride that wave because we got what we needed.
Expansion always follows contraction and contraction always follows expansion. You can't skip through it. It's impossible. Denying its existence and battling all the way through is not going to give you that sense of agency, power, and connection that you're looking for.
But I can tell you exactly what will give you that.
Use Everything
Retrain yourself to see these low energy, low mood, challenging, uncertain, melancholic places that we come to in contraction, and use them to serve ourselves ingeniously.
When you can start to radically approve of, welcome, embrace and use the energy you have in every single expanded and contracted part of the full experience of life, that’s when you're harnessing the full spectrum of the human experience. Versus trying to eke out a half-life by cramming everything into the expanded states, and dreading and hiding in the contracted ones.
Magical living isn't about aspiring to a life that's 100% sunshine and rainbows. It IS about harnessing the full spectrum of the human experience, like sadness, low energy, PMS...so you can use everything you have.
There are so many facets of ourselves and they're all there for a reason.
Emotional Alchemy
There's a section from chapter 6 of Kasia Urbaniak's new book, Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power, on Emotional Alchemy that speaks so powerfully to this concept of using everything. Kasia is a collaborator, colleague, and mentor of mine.
“Anxiety is unalchemized enthusiasm; worry is unalchemized care; sadness can signal a return to yourself, and expose a desire for more of the tender things in life.
Rage is unalchemized passion—absolutely a force for good, if it wakes people up to the truth in the world.
There is no such thing as a vice or a virtue, only the role that you give it. You can work with anything that comes up, as long as it’s not buried. Get in contact with an emotion, and you can steer it—use it. Suppress it, and it will run amok.”
You can apply this concept of using negative emotions by turning them into something positive.
The mission of my coaching business is to be a partner for my clients and students in creating what I call unstoppable success without burnout or compromise. An unstoppable person is not someone who never stops. They are someone who cannot be stopped. They are someone who does not break down when they enter a natural contraction. An unstoppable person is someone who embraces and harnesses the full power of their cyclical energy, expanded and contracted. They can play powerfully and feel truly alive from both states.
Commit to using everything you have.
Welcome the Contraction
All life on Earth goes through cycles of expansion and contraction, and the moment you stop denying this is the moment that you break free.
The next time you are in a state of contraction, I invite you to welcome it with curiosity and approval. I invite you to not attack yourself. Don't try to slow it down. Don't cling on. Don't try to speed through it either. Commit to riding it out fully, and see where that energy wants to take you. See what it wants to show you.
Can you imagine how magical you would feel if you had the power to use even your darkest moods and moments as a source of energy and as your compass? Truly, that is a magical power worth having.
I hope this has given you some food for thought. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with more specific details on how to harness every source of energy that you have in your life.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Episode Resources:
UNBOUND – A Woman's Guide to Power by Kasia Urbaniak
1:1 Coaching Intensive Programme, The Unstoppable Method
Did this episode resonate with you? Send me a DM on Instagram!
Pin This Episode for Later:
