The Inner World as a Mirror: Trauma, Expansion, and the Dance of Awareness

Many wisdom traditions agree: our inner world is not separate from the outer one, but a reflection of it, a mirror. What we resist within, we encounter outside. What we integrate within, we find reflected in life. This mirror becomes most clear in moments of expanded awareness — meditation, psychedelics, or profound spiritual practice. Yet when trauma enters the picture, the mirror distorts.

Life itself moves in pulses: expansion and contraction, like breath in and out, heartbeat opening and closing, day and night cycling endlessly. In Shaiva Tantra, this is called spanda, the pulsation of consciousness itself. When we are well, we ride this rhythm naturally. We expand into joy, connection, creativity; we contract into rest, reflection, containment. Both are necessary.

But trauma interrupts this dance. Instead of flowing, the psyche locks. The waves keep on going as the infinite waves of the ocean. But we can freak out and lose our sync with reality. We cling desperately to expansion — chasing insight, intensity, peak experience — and do everything in our power to avoid and push away fear contractions as if it were failure or collapse. Then we get stuck in contraction — frozen in withdrawal, shutdown, despair — unable to expand back out into life. In Buddhist language, this is grasping and aversion, the two forces that keep us bound.

Healing involves remembering the dance. In psychedelic-assisted integration, meditation, or deep bodywork, people often re-encounter contraction safely, in a safe set and setting, oftne held by others. Instead of running from it, they can lean in, breathe, and discover that contraction too has wisdom. It is the womb of silence, the dark soil where seeds gestate. Expansion will come again, naturally, if we do not resist.

To see our inner world as a mirror is to recognize that the universe itself is pulsating through us. Trauma clouds the surface, but it does not destroy it. With care, practice, and support, we can restore the rhythm — and when we do, we rediscover that expansion and contraction are not enemies but lovers in the dance of life.