Expansion and Contraction

I have a new yoga teacher who I'm really starting to like. She does a more traditional Hatha practice and at the beginning of each practice she draws an observation from the yoga sutra's and attempts to connect it to daily life. Today she discussed expansion and contraction, in the context of breath, our muscles, and even our economy.

As I sat in my beginning meditation I allowed my mind to open to expansion and contraction. The universe itself was birthed into being as it rapidly expanded from a singularity, slowly expanding still, perhaps only to contract again in some far distant future. Pondering the steady expansion of our universe I was reminded of the Hermetic saying "as above so below, as below so above." A concept seemingly linking all things however small to that which exists on a grander cosmological, even spiritual scale. But what is "below" that is "above"? What thing, what characteristic, is so transcendent? Perhaps it's as simple as expansion and contraction.

As above so below.  Expansion and contraction is the quality that defines life itself. We breath in, we breath out. To breath in and to breath out is to be alive. To contract and to expand, it is a beating heart, it is the engagement of our muscles to allow our movement in the world. To project and open to receive. to copulate and create new life. To extrovert, or introvert. To open to others, or draw into ourselves. Expansion and contraction, breathing in and breathing out, taking things in and letting things go. These are the yin and the yang, the fire and water, and the sun and the moon. The poetic dichotomy of elements themselves bound in yoga, bound in union. These are the masculine and feminine aspects, projecting outward, and opening to receive. Expansion and contraction, a duality, represented on many different levels, symbolic, physical, sexual, and cosmological. Yoga is union, and to manifest union yoga is the cultivation, the balancing, of expansion and contraction. We see this duality in Pranayama, in the form of the physical practice, and in the form of harnessing the masculine and feminine energies of Kundalini. Yoga is union, both within the physical self and within the divine. The divinity within us with the source, with the primordial energy of the universe. Our existence itself, on every level, an expansion or contraction, and yoga, a tool to bring balance to their union.