Episode 63: Stretching Through Closure
Oct 13, 2021
Stretching Through Closure
Episode 63 of Soul Saturations, The Podcast is called Stretching Through Closure… and in these past couple of months, I have felt a lot of closure. I know, I am not alone.
in today's episode, I want to start off by giving you a personal update. As you know, the last two months that I've been through, feel like they have kicked my from Lily, getting sick and having to put her down. And then that night both getting COVID. We had to cancel two trips and just a whole plethora of things it's been challenging. There have been lots of moments of closure. As we are just getting back into town from a family trip, that was beautiful and also filled with lots of shining. Examples of our family is karma and the wounds that we are healing and our partnership together, there has been so much beauty, so much joy, so much love amongst so much closure. And as I sat down today to do my work and show up and record this podcast, I was meeting so much resistance, so much closure, and I have had to spend so much time in practice utilizing my own tools to just show up.
Today I am living in integrity by stretching past the closure and the resistance in me that doesn't want to record this episode today. But this is my accountability that I will release an episode every week, whether or not I feel like recording it and this past week was an example of, I had an episode recorded uploaded in the draft folder. All I had to do was hit upload on the day that it was ready to go with a couple extra of my show notes and I completely spaced and I didn't upload it. So you're getting kind of two back-to-back episodes this week, but they're released they're out. And I'm standing, sitting here in front of you today in pure human integrity and honoring just all of the elements of my humanness of where I'm at right now. And I also want to share with you a little bit about stretching past closure, what that means, how you can start to recognize it within your own life and partnerships and what are some of the tools that you can use to stretch past closure
When we look at closure, how do we recognize what closure is? Closure is often where we contract or collapse, and this tends to happen because it is our programming. It's our patterns that we have grown up with and spent our entire life with. This is our karma. These are our biggest lessons that we have to learn. And in life we get to make a choice. Natalie [inaudible] said today in her Monday, musings, we have a choice to choose love. And I believe that every moment in our life is a choice to show up, especially in moments of closure. One of the things that I have written on a sticky note on my computer is how can I serve love today? We have this river of love that flows through us. We are unconditional radiant beings of love and light. And when we can choose to serve, love to be devotional to love, we can heal.
It can grow. We can expand. Even in moments of closure, we get to make a choice when we're feeling contracted, how do we choose expansion? Expansion is moving through. Now. There's a lot that exists in this space about spiritual bypassing and ignoring tough feelings or saying, you know, one of my hot buttons is, oh, I'm so embodied in processing my emotions, but we don't actually go deep enough into the feelings to truly feel, feel, feel, and express, to become embodied. It takes honoring the process of embracing our humanity, integrating our lessons to fully become embodied. And so when we look at expansion versus contraction, we have experiences where we feel fully expanded. We feel inflow, we feel light, we feel inspired. And we also meet moments of contraction. Often they come just like waves, just like our breath. Our breath is an expansion and a contraction just like waves are up and down. They continually go and move with the tides. The same goes for our growth and our healing moments of expansion are met with moments of contraction, right before we massively expand. We meet moments of contraction. And so when we can choose to serve love, it gives us the purpose of why we need to continue to stretch past closure.
Just like our breath, just like the expansion and contraction our life, our healing, our growth is going to come with it with those same breaths, with those same waves. When we can choose love, we get to expand and stretch through closure. And this is where we have to move through it. It's not about ignoring it, skating over air, going around it, but we have to truly choose to feel and embody those moments of closure and contraction. That's what gives us the opportunity to witness the beautiful gift of contrast and expansion. When we think about different ways that expansion and contraction can show up in our life, it can be in our daily life when we're doing things that feel big and scary. When we're pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone. When we are trying to heal and grow and shift our habitual and karmic patterns, we can tend to experience closure.
We may do something that feels massively, expansive or excited. We get this beautiful download. We have a gorgeous idea of something that we want to bring into the world, or we show up and shine so much light. And then it is met with contraction, fear, uncertainty, doubt, worry. This is something that I feel like happens on a global scale too. So with my personal program of priority partnership, the couple's container that I'm watching, what a beautiful container it's gorgeous. It's it has so much value. I know that it is going to impact so many lives. And as soon as I brought it down, I'm in this space of flow and open expansion and momentum. And then the contraction happened, then Lily got sick. Then we got COVID. Then we had all these things and it was the contraction, the contraction, the contraction that felt paralyzing that made it really hard to show up and hold the vision of this container that I know I am meant to bring onto the planet, even when it feels like so much is pushing against it.
We choose love. We choose expansion even through the contraction. I had to honor my humanness honor. The reality that the timeline that I proposed back in August, isn't the timeline that it happened in September, October, and I have to be okay with that, but it is through my practices that I can continue to hold the expansion. I can hold the vision of why I'm showing up, why I'm choosing to continue to do this work. For you in your personal application and integration, what are the things that you can hold on to? What is your purpose that you can hold on to when you need to stretch through the closure to find expansion? Now, when we think about our partners and our relationships, Matt and I were having a conversation about the container coaching container priority partnership. And we were discussing what are the things that have been so transformational for us?
A lot of the things we were discussing is when it comes to moments of closure, especially when it comes to communication, how do we bring that desire to move through closure, to find expansion? We're talking about communication. When we feel like we're having a breakdown in communication, we're having an argument. We're frustrated one, person's upset. Somebody is pushing back and we're bringing up all of our habitual programming, our karma, those past patterns that we've relied on in so many different times in our life. We have the awareness to recognize when it's happening, especially in partnership, we tend to kind of get in this spiral where you feel like you're almost too far gone to come out of it. I know that I can get incredibly moody and defensive and shut down and run away. And all of my karmic patterns show up yet.
I can still have this awareness of Kendall, drop it, choose love, just go wrap your arms around him and love him. And I know that choosing love would actually shift me out of the contraction and into expansion. Sometimes it takes longer for that choice to actually be made. When you're in the moment of contraction now honor your humanness and know that that's just part of growing and learning. Matt was talking about when we were communicating, he says, he knows that he needs to drop into vulnerability. He knows that he needs to reveal his emotions and connect with me. But oftentimes the contraction is that it's easier to stay shut off. It's easier to stay shut down. And that's where you have to move past the closure to choose expansion, to choose love and stretch past it. But it is through those moments of closure.
It's through walking through those flames, that fire of doing healing work in partnership that we experience such profound moments of expansion and love. How do we honor this in partnership? I love implementing a tool by doing a nervous system. Check in, checking in with your nervous system on a scale of one to 10, one being somewhat apathetic, disconnected, 10, being out panic and stress and worry and anxiety. Being able to recognize for yourself where your nervous system feels. If you are in a space of being alone, taking time to shift that closure and create more space or communicating it to your partner to say, I'm feeling like my nervous system feels shot. I feel like I'm at a nine. Can you hold space for me, being able to have that opportunity to communicate and be seen and held by your partner is a really beautiful space, but that takes some, some setup and some communication with your partner.
Let's talk about some practices for when you are alone and you are feeling closure and you're feeling that contraction. How do you stretch past it with out avoiding it? One of the things that you can do that my teacher, John Wineland is, has been really instrumental in teaching and in a program that I'm doing is called the sacred tantrum. I love this practice because you get to throw the biggest, most obnoxious, powerful, emotional tantrum that you can possibly do. Flail on the floor, scream, yell, stomp, hit something, throw something whatever's going to make you feel like you can move that energy and embody the closure that you're feeling is so powerful. It only needs to be 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, and you will feel so much space. So the sacred tantrum is one of my favorites. There is also so much research about shaking when we shake.
I want you to imagine a dog when they are stressed out or worried, they tend to shake. That is their nervous system. Coming back into re alignment, after moments of stress or fear, the same thing goes for us as human beings. Shaking. Imagine you are shaking from your central column, from your spinal cord, from your gut, and you're shaking everything out and you can shake in a pure moment of chaos. Again, it only needs to be 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds. It can be a really short amount of time. And what it does is it literally shakes it off. It clears the pipes, it realigns our nervous system. So the tantrum and the shake are two things that I am incredibly big fans of for stretching past closure. But here's the funny thing is that when you're in a moment of closure, you're probably not going to want to do either one of those things.
That's where you get to come back to that purpose, that purpose of opening to the flow of love that you are, and that exists within you. The other tool that my teacher, John wine Lynn has recommended, which I am so excited to do I have in all honesty have not yet done it, but I am so ready to do it is to do a sacred bat practice. That's right. Get yourself a bat, a plastic bat, maybe not your full-on metal bat, but get a bat and hit your bed pillows, whatever that may be the sofa, and really just get all your frustration, your anger, your stress, your worry, your closure, whatever that is, channel it, all of your energy. Use your body, move your weight into this bat and, and move through closure. These are a couple of my favorite practices to, to be able to really shift the energy in a big way. Other ways that I think are so useful is breathing something that it just taking slow, deep breaths can be so nourishing to your nervous system, breathing in where you inhale through a kind of pursed lips, like you're sucking air through a straw and then exhaling and imagining your heart flowering open your mouth can be really wide. Like you're fogging up a mirror. So it's an inhale and then exhale, like you're fogging up in here and you can imagine your heart starting to flower open. That can be so nourishing, or if you need something a little bit more energetic, the breath of fire is a great way to start to shift these moments of closure and then of dancing. Moving in previous episodes, I've talked how pleasure is a lubricant for all the emotions that we are feeling. When you can start to layer pleasure with your closure and move that through your body, it becomes so expressive and so nourishing to be able to move it. Once you've implemented one or multiple of these tools, whether it's the sacred tantrum or that practice or shaking or breathing or dancing or whatever those things are that feel so in alignment for you, what do you notice? You'll notice more space. When you can stretch past closure, you have more space, you become more available to serve love.
You become more radiant. The light within you is free to shine and you become available and open to the flow of love within you. When we are looking to stretch past closure, remember it is a choice. It is up to you to choose love, to choose, to take the action that will allow you to stretch past closure so that you can become more available to love. Remember, we have so much patterning and conditioning and programming that our neural pathways store so much in our physical body, in our mind that it's easy to get back into moments of closure. For instance, today, I had mum, I had so many beautiful moments of expansion, of love, of joy. And I had so many moments of closure. I had to throw no less than five tantrums today. I had to scream. I had to yell. I had to move it.
That's part of why my voice is so raspy is because I let it all out. So I'm going to link my Instagram post from today, where you can witness and hold an honor, me in this space of closure and honor me in stretching past it and stretching through it. To give you an idea of what it could look like, sound like, feel like to fully embody this. I'm not doing it for, I'm not doing it to show off. I'm just here to show you an example of a tool that helps me to stretch past closure. Should you feel like you have a lot of closure that you're coming up against and you want support in a sacred, safe, confidential container. I am here to hold that space for you. So reach out to me for either a deep dive, energetic coaching session, a longer container, and stay tuned for more information on priority partnership, which we'll be releasing so soon. And you can get more [email protected]. I love you. I see you. I feel you. I know you're so, so honor your journey because everything is happening for you. Thanks so much for joining me today.
In this episode we talk:
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Why do we experience closure?
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Why does closure happen in partnership?
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What practices can you use to stretch through closure and find expansion?
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Why is it important to honor your closure?
In so much love and gratitude,
K
LINKS:
Woo More Play - The most delicious lube aka love oil and freshies great for after play
Onna Lifestyles - The art of slow pleasure, crystal wands and luxury pleasure toys CODE: SOULSATURATIONS
Deeper Blue Ceramics - Handmade ceramic dildos CODE: SOULSATURATIONS
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