A Year of Expansion
As 2023 comes to a close and we reflect back on the year, I want to ask you:
Did you expand?
Did you expand your perspective?
Did you expand your inner circle of love for yourself?
Did you expand your circle of friends? Your circle of influence? Your circle of knowledge and wisdom?
Did you expand in love, embracing what is with love and light?
For me, this truly was a year of expansion. I had to square my shoulders in order to face my control issues that were making me miserable and were becoming physically debilitating. My father was very ill for a few months with no medical diagnosis. The doctors seemed to be throwing darts at the issue without giving my father any relief or answers. The whole experience brought us both to a place of facing his death. He had to ask himself, did he want to live or die? And I had to face what responsibilities I wanted to take on regarding his care. We both struggled on issues of how I should pay his bills, what care he was willing to receive and what care he absolutely needed to accept.
I learned a lot. I found that expansion couldn’t be forced or controlled, or handled with kid gloves or ultimatums. Expansion requires ultimate surrender, self-love and forgiveness. Really!?! Huh! What a concept!
Surrendering to the truth that we don’t have control over anything except how we respond to the circumstances of our lives. Responding requires letting go of what we think in order to listen deeply to ourselves. And observing what may need to change and what we are truly responsible for and capable of. Letting go of what was so that what wants to grow or expand within can be felt, seen and heard.
Tough experiences grow and expand us. (And by the way, my father decided to live and has made a full recovery. He will be 90 in March.)
Expanding self-love means being honest with yourself about what you want and need. Loving yourself and building strong boundaries with self-respect and care. Self-love is not rushing to help, fix, or manipulate others. The willingness to expand helps us to unearth hidden expectations of self and others, recognizing that expectations can keep us small and stuck. Expectations that keep us operating from a past belief or experience that no longer serves our growth or our expansion.
Forgiving, yet again and always. Forgiving our reactions to others who don’t see things our way, don’t recognize what you think is needed. Forgiving others for seeing things differently, handling things differently and doing the best they can. Especially when it may look like injustice, inaction or hiding from responsibility.
I expanded by surrendering what I thought was necessary to care for my father. I expanded by really listening to what we were both afraid of and seeing what was truly mine to do. What I realized was I needed to care for myself, my health and happiness, by limiting what I was willing to do and enlisting help with what I was not willing to do.
Expansion was SURRENDERING to what is. To loving myself more than I ever have and forgiving the past, the current circumstances and my inability to control anything but my own feelings and reactions to life. POW! Powerful lesson.
Like the butterfly in the chrysalis, surrendering to the emulsifying process, you must become more - more love, more forgiveness, more compassion as you expand beyond the cocoon of old being and spread your wings into being more.
So 2023… How did you expand? Did you expand in beauty, energy, exploring gratitude, playfulness and abundance? Did you expand your imagination and nurture yourself or society, while feeling your emotions and the vastness of Source Energy and the Universe?
What do you intend for 2024 in order to keep expanding and truly become your own self?
My precious dogs, Buster on the left and Macey on the right, at the Ventura Harbor in Southern California.
The 2024 theme for “Empowering Chats with Susan Burrell” is “BE Potential”. I will be calling not only on myself but anyone who is listening to bravely explore our eternal potential by being observant, tenacious, innovative and adventurous in order to elevate our talents into noble service to all by being our full POTENTIAL.
Stay tuned!
Namaste, Susan