A Powerful Tool for Recovering from Abuse or Anxiety
When I left an abusive relationship my world was very small. I had never been an anxious person before that relationship but during the years of psychological torture I had become anxious and fearful. My world had become contracted. I was living in a tiny energetic space that was ruled by fear. Most of my thoughts came from a fearful space. I would get very anxious at any change in my life. Filling in forms made me anxious, interacting with any kind of authority made me anxious. My whole world view was seen through a lens of fear.
One day I was fed up with feeling fearful all the time. I thought about how I could change my life, to get back to the carefree and happy person I had been before the abusive relationship.
I realised that the opposite of my fearful world was expansiveness. To counter how small my world had become I needed to get big. I needed to remember how to think big and remember how to BE big.
I began to do expansiveness meditations, to make my energetic self bigger. At first I had limited success with this, as I had dug myself into a deep trench of fear and so I had to first climb out before I was back on even ground and able to move forward.
The first months were the hardest but each day I did my expansiveness meditation at least twice — once when I woke up and just before bed. Every time I felt anxious I did my meditation as well. After a while I began to feel relaxed and happy, I began to feel like I could cope again. I used the expansiveness meditations from youtube as a jumping off point to create my own version, and I am able to talk myself through it whenever I need to now.
Later I worked with other women who had come out of abusive relationships. Like me these women had also become fearful & anxious. I introduced the expansiveness practice to them and those who chose to try it also found it to be useful in helping them to overcome the fear and anxiety. I offer it now as a tool to anyone who feels they may benefit from it — it is not meant as a replacement for any medication, practice or medical advice.
It made sense to me that the antidote to my fearful anxious thinking was it’s opposite — openness, expansiveness, getting big. This practice allows you to looking at your life and the world from a broader perspective. Many lovely people and experiences have come into my life since I have started to get big and think big. I still get anxious at times but when I do I remember to do my meditation and that calms me and gives me a bigger picture perspective and a sense of how connected I am to the rest of humanity, I remember what a gift it is to be alive.
I recommend listening to a few different meditations and creating a combination of them that talks you through connecting to energy above and below, energy meeting in your heart and spreading that energy out from yourself and spreading it further and further until it is bigger than the world. Once your energy is huge invite in a connection with the hearts of all the people who can bring you peace, joy, kindness, opportunities or whatever it is you want more of!
You deserve happiness, peace, self love and to feel safe. This practice has increased all of these things for me & the others I have shared it with — I hope it does the same for you ❤
