Hi Friends, I'm freshly home from leading retreats in Portugal and Italy and feeling equal parts inspired, grateful, and a bit disoriented by time zones :-) Reflecting back, this month-long adventure feels like a tapestry of heartfelt conversations, intuitive wanderings down cobblestone streets, dancing and howling with painty hands, and becoming more and more free... together. One theme that kept surfacing throughout the retreats (and in my FREE FLO community lately) is the relationship between expansion and contraction and how this relates to freedom. We see the rhythm of expansion and contraction in our breath, our heartbeat, the ocean tides, the changing seasons, and often in birth itself. Intuitive creativity moves this way, too. We add paint. We cover it with a layer. We get stuck. We break through. We simplify. We complicate. We become certain. We become confused. We zoom in. We zoom out... Needless to say, the creative process is far from linear. Yet so often we think of freedom as staying expanded all the time... more growth, more possibility, more energy, more openness. But that's not how life works, and that's not how creativity works. Contraction is a crucial part of the birthing process. It's what keeps things moving along! Sometimes we need to contract, other times we're ready to expand. Paintings (and lives) come alive not because they stay in one place, but because we keep responding to WHAT IS TRUE NOW. It's resisting the change that needs to happen that keeps us stuck. | 
