Holy crap, it was a contraction!
There a few sure fire signs when my attitude to life takes a turn: I stop updating my facebook status, I stop exercising and I start reminiscing about working full-time. Yep, I know, tragic. But as tragic as it sounds, it just occurred.
It was prompted after the Great Easter Campout at The Forest, with 13 of my darling friends and 9 of their kids pitching tents around my yard. The weekend was chaotic, messy, fun and heartwarming. My kitchen turned into a brothel within minutes of it being cleaned, the boys couldn’t wait to burn everything in sight on the campfire, and kids were having major sugar meltdowns by Sunday evening. But all in all, we functioned rather harmoniously, sharing food and watching whoever’s kid was right in front of us…the whole weekend kind of echoed of the commune-style living that you imagine the original hippies of this area would have lived like.
Then as quickly as this impromtu community sprung up, it packed up and headed home. Headed home with their family members in tow, to their jobs and mortgages, to the weekly social gatherings with one another in Brisbane, to the cycle of life that revolves around the whole Monday-Friday gig.
I am known as the crusader of the group, who has embarked on the mission to carve out a different reality in life (either that or I’m just the crazy friend who went to live a forest for some ‘spiritual’ reason). Either way, that week after they left, I was left a little grief stricken. Further provoked by the plummeting movement of my bank balance, the distinct lack of tangible business plans or employment, and no-one to share the burden (opps, I meant joy…really, I did), I found myself sucked into a victim vortex – lamenting the lack of funds, the lack of family, and generally feeling a bit crap that my passionate “life purpose” wasn’t in full swing yet.
Now I wouldn’t be the spiritual warrior that I am if I didn’t have a way to pull myself out of this despair. With all this time on my hands freed up by not working, I love to indulge in the free interviews done by a multitude of players in the personal development field. My favourite is Jennifer Mclean’s “Healing with the Masters”. I love her interview style as I never feel like she is trying to sell me anything as a consequence of listening to her program. Sure, the people being interviewed have products/programs – all promising to be that elusive missing link in making your life amazing. But she just has a way about her that makes me trust her (okay, okay, so my closest affection for this women is out in the open!).
Anyway, I digress. The point I wanted to bring up with all of this, is that in an interview Jennifer did with Gary Zukav, he mentioned that he never refers to feelings as good/bad, or experiences in life as positive/negative…he simply refers to us as either being in a state of expansion or contraction. I really liked that. Okay Gary, so you helped me work out that I am just in a “contracting” phase right now. And you know what, just putting that label on it, as opposed to “feeling like shit” phase, made me feel so much better. Because following on from that thought, I could see that whatever contracts, can expand again and in actual fact, it’s just the natural ebb and flow of life to travel through these periods of expansion and contraction. Phew, I wasn’t going to feel like this forever!
And that thought really helped me. Just knowing that I am not going to be in this position forever. Things always change. That’s life. We can always bank on things changing. So armed with this knowing, I breathed a sigh of relief. One day I will be sharing my gifts with the world, and earning money, and have a beautiful relationship, and a family to share this whole journey with. I managed to pick myself up enough to continue on with my studies.
Then lo and behold, I found myself bouncing out of bed yesterday and springing off to a morning cycle class at the gym. Yes, it was a Saturday, but for someone who isn’t working, every day is Saturday so it hardly counts for extra bonus points on the “commitment to fitness” scale. But it was only when I was buzzing on the way home, after my workout and after-workout catch up with new friend in the Shire, Em, that I was merrily dreaming about all the possibilities for my future, that I realised I had somehow made the switch to an expansive phase, or my “woohoo-life is great!” phase. Ha ha ha, see – proof that what goes down must come up 
