Do it scared
Your body is going to freak out. Your brain is going to lie. And you do it anyway.
It’s expansion season, baby!! Meaning: life’s moving fast, opportunities are coming (or already here), and it’s time to take action on what you say you want – whether that means saying no to the things you’ve been hanging on to even though you know they aren’t quite right, or moving boldly to commit and claim the future you desire, even before you have a plan. Probably both.
Expansion is one of those things that sounds glamorous and exciting but often feels and looks like a shitshow in the process.
As someone who’s committed to a full-send life and has a big ick for playing small, I know this well. I honestly love it.
I love feeling my mind and body recalibrate to a new level. I watch with fervor and fascination as it unfolds. I love trying to understand the magic.
This post is the first in what will likely become a regular series on lessons in expansion.
Let’s dive in.
The first thing I want you to know is this:
Expansion usually involves contraction, too.
It’s important to know that contraction is a normal part of the process of expansion.
Because as much as you think you want it, doing something new is usually scary. The bigger and more exciting it is, the greater the risk your mind and body might register it.
Right after making a big and bold choice, you might think you regret it. You might have a moment where it feels like you absolutely definitely made the wrong move. And if/when that happens, I want you to remember that THIS IS NORMAL.
It is not a sign that you made a mistake. It is a sign that you are doing something that is in some way new, unknown, uncomfortable.
It’s one thing to be considering an idea — playing with it, giving it room to have potential. That alone might involve some fear. But it also might not! In the contemplation stage, you might be totally chill or mostly feeling the excitement of it all.
It’s another thing entirely to decide. Something shifts when you make a decision, even before you take action on it. The word ‘decide’ comes from the latin word decidere, meaning “to cut off.” When you make a decision, the other options are cut off, and you are now on the path of what you have chosen. The second this happens, the Universe starts orienting around the decision. Your body does too. It’s an energetic shift, and you feel it.
This is why after making a decision, whether it is within mere seconds or a few hours later, you might have a lil menty b about it.
So when that happens… it helps for some part of you to be able to say, “this is a normal part of the process.” Because as much as I talk about and so deeply believe in listening to your body, this is one of those cases where it’s nuanced. You need to have a certain level of understanding to be able to accurately interpret your body’s experience and messaging. It can be so easy to say “omg my body is freaking out bc this is the wrong choice”. But in this case, that is usually incorrect. Your body is freaking out because you just took off some training wheels and gave it a push. That’s scary, but also exactly what you want to do.
The body registers change, new, unknown, etc, as unsafe. And the mind follows the body.
When your nervous system kicks into gear, your mind starts trying to figure out why. And by “figure out why” I mean that it goes full cannon ball into the downward spiral. The story your mind starts telling you usually doesn’t sound like a guess, it sounds like full confidence and clarity that you are in danger and need to get yourself out of there.
Some real life examples:
After putting in an offer on the Kaua’i house, my mind tried to tell me that maybe I don’t actually love Kaua’i that much and I was just riding an old attachment to a dream that used to be true (when I had literally just spent 10 days there feeling as strong as ever that it is my soul’s homeland and I needed to find a way to commune more deeply and regularly with the island).
After saying yes to the trip of a lifetime – that she’d directly asked the Universe for $10,000 to make it possible and then the very next day got handed $10k unexpectedly!! – my friend woke up feeling like she was making a bad decision and needed to back out and do something smaller/safer.
After hiring her first employee for her business, that was the *exact* kind of person she had written down for who she wanted to hire (every bullet point checked off!!)… a few hours later, a friend of mine went through a wave of feeling like she’d made the wrong choice.
Another friend recently told me, and I directly quote, “I have never felt my body say yes so much” about a man romantically before, and decided (obviously) that she wanted to date him — and in doing so, be her full self!!! YES GURL amiright?! But not half an hour later, her mind was telling her all sorts of stories – everything from telling her to play small and hold back parts of herself, to questioning whether she was really into the guy.
Oy.
And remember, it’s one thing to read about another person’s experience told retrospectively. Here, it’s easy to say - of course I love Kaua’i, of course she should go on the trip, of course she should hire the assistant, of course she should date the guy…
It seems obvious now. But in the moment, the fear story is REAL. Real as real can feel.
So to an extent, you have to just override it. Sorry to not have a better solution haha but that’s the honest one. You have to put on your metaphorical noise-cancelling headphones and keep moving forward. Do it scared. Do it dysregulated.
Sometimes you’ve just gotta let your brain and body be a toddler having a full meltdown about the banana being cut up for them rather than handed to them in the peel. You can give validation for the emotional experience but you’re not gonna go deep and process it, ya know? There’s no point. Anyone who’s been there knows, you can’t reason with a toddler meltdown.
*Side note: An unfortunate nuance is that sometimes there is a point in reasoning. Only you can discern that. But in some cases it is genuinely helpful to play out a worst-case scenario or ask questions and give yourself the wiring of assurance from consulted logic. And sometimes it is just a waste of time and energy, and you’d be much better served by taking a yin yoga class, getting out of your brain, and helping your body to restore a state of regulation.
This is part of why I’m such a big believer in mentally/emotionally/viscerally rehearsing what you want to experience. As I’ve said many times now, what’s unfamiliar is registered as unsafe, *but* you can prepare and practice something that hasn’t landed in ‘real life’ yet – and when you do, you make it familiar! If you pre-load the coding for wealth, for career opportunities, for visibility, for pregnancy or a healthy birth experience… it won’t be a shock to your system when you get there in the 3D. The body will receive it much more smoothly.
Okay, so all of this brings me to a huge teaching point. One I believe in wholeheartedly and that I believe is a cheat code of sorts for the expansion process. (It’s not actually cheating obviously, just a mic-drop kind of nugget that if you use this SINGLE technique as the guidance for all your decisions, you will end up on top, aka in your highest timeline!!)
Ready?? Here it is:
