Expanding and Contracting: The Dance of Eating Disorder Recovery
The road of recovery is an ongoing dance of expanding and contracting.
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So let’s start with this:
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” ~ Rumi
If you are walking the road of eating disorder recovery, healing from disordered eating, or questioning the pressures and conditionings from diet culture, perhaps you can relate to this quote.
Sometimes it feels as if you're repeating old lessons, hitting brick walls, or spiraling back to familiar thoughts or behaviours.
Sometimes it feels like you're reaching new places within yourself, experiencing life in a fuller way, or effortlessly able to do things that before felt scary.
This dance of expansion and contraction can occur within a single day, over the course of a month, and over many years.
And throughout it all, we are asked to bring our presence to each to expansion and to each contraction.
We are asked to bring open attentiveness to our hands that give and our hands that receive.
We are asked to bring open attentiveness to the pulling in and releasing of the breath, the shifts in hormones, the pumps of the heart, the rise and flow of hunger and fullness levels, the rhythm of waking and sleeping, the ebbs of the ocean tides, the movement from winter to summer.
Connecting to the larger forces of expansion and contraction that we can observe in nature, we are reminded that we too go through similar cycles.
Each time we dance this dance, we gain more skills, tools, insight, and wisdom, with more discernment, resiliency, capacity, and presence to open and close the hand.
Recovery is a dance of being with the inevitable movements of expansion and contraction that life brings (again and again).
Rather than numbing out from life, we are asked to sit in the places of discomfort that makes us want to contract, and to be courageous to allow ourselves to expand beyond what we believed was possible.
Eating disorder recovery is a dance of uncovering the aspects of self that have been hidden.
Disordered eating recovery is the dance of recovering your authentic expression, wants, needs, impulses, and desires.
Eating disorder recovery is the dance of discovering your unique rhythm of moving through life, honoring the need to rest and harnessing the spark of creativity.
It is the dance of dancing within a wide, robust window of tolerance (aka developing greater nervous system regulation).
The ability to consciously slow down so that we can become aware of these natural movements of expansion and contraction is where the work lies.
Awakening to, and accepting these organic rhythms result in a deepening of trust.
a trust in your ability to fly
a trust in your experience
a trust in pausing and resting
a trust in your voice and creativity
a trust in your intuitive, gut responses
a trust in your body's biological impulses
a trust in your capacity to hold challenging stuff
a trust in your ability to release what is ready to be let go
a trust in your core self and your worthy place on this Earth
We ride the ebbs and flows that recovery asks us to be with, through practicing and developing tools that aid the process (such as somatic healing modalities, nervous system regulation tools, and embodied awareness) and most importantly, supported with others who we can trust.
Indeed, as much as an eating disorder separates us from ourselves, our hearts, and the world, the homecoming process of healing happens when there is support, witnessing, and holding alongside other kindred spirits.
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash