{"id":41127,"date":"2012-02-29T10:35:57","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T18:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=41127"},"modified":"2012-02-29T10:35:57","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T18:35:57","slug":"fear-makes-you-contract-love-makes-you-expand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=41127","title":{"rendered":"Fear Makes You Contract, Love Makes You Expand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When you&#8217;re afraid, you tighten up. The contraction will start in your neck and then spread to the rest of you. You compress, make yourself smaller, less of a target, and go into some version of the fight-or-flight reflex. <\/p>\n<p>When you&#8217;re afraid, it will be hard to reach out to others. Your touch will be less pleasant. Your verbal and emotional expression will be curtailed.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, when you love, you expand. You swell up and take your full space in the world. The neck frees up, the head releases forward and up to take a poised relationship to your spine.<\/p>\n<p>Conversely, when you pull down and in on yourself, you&#8217;re going to have more access to the emotions of fear, hatred, sadness and depression. By contrast, when you expand into activity, you&#8217;ll have more access to the emotions of joy, love and tranquility. <\/p>\n<p>Every emotion requires a particular alignment of the body. When you use your muscles in a certain way, certain emotions are readily at hand while others are out of touch. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not that emotions, thoughts and muscles are connected but that they are all part of the same thing &#8212; you. Your brain is part of your body. What you think affects the degree of muscle tension. Your emotions, thoughts and muscles are constantly affecting each other. <\/p>\n<p>You can take the path of love to expansion or you can expand into love. Or you can lose consciousness of yourself and slip into pulling down and into depression. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you&#8217;re afraid, you tighten up. The contraction will start in your neck and then spread to the rest of you. You compress, make yourself smaller, less of a target, and go into some version of the fight-or-flight reflex. When &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=41127\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10268],"tags":[29137,29135,22132,29136,5946,29138],"class_list":["post-41127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexander-technique","tag-contraction","tag-emotional-expression","tag-muscle-tension","tag-sadness-and-depression","tag-target","tag-tranquility"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41128,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41127\/revisions\/41128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}