Will You Choose to Expand or to Contract?
A few months back, I pulled a small book off my shelf that I hadn’t opened in thirty years. The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas — published in 1971, barely more than a hundred pages. I remembered enjoying it the first time. Reading it again, I found myself underlining the same passages.
That’s either a sign that the book holds up, or that I haven’t changed much. Probably both.
What Golas outlines is a nondualistic model of the universe built around a single axis: expansion and contraction. In any given moment, at any point in a life, we are moving in one direction or the other. The whole map, distilled to two directions. And while that sounds almost too simple, sitting with it — in a breathwork session, in the middle of an argument, in the quiet of a difficult night — it opens something.
Expansion
When we expand — choosing to lean in, choosing love over fear, opening to what is here — we become more permeable. Golas writes that a completely expanded being is space itself. In that expanded state, we can share space with others. That, he says, is another word for love.
Love isn’t just a feeling in this frame. It’s an action — the willingness to occupy the same space as another being, another experience, another feeling. It always includes what is not yet love. It always moves toward.
Contraction
When we contract — leaning away, closing, choosing fear — we become dense. Impermeable. Contraction is what we feel as fear, pain, isolation, the particular loneliness of being shut in with yourself. It’s part of the full range of experience available to any being.
No judgment. The contracted place is one of the infinite experiences available to us.
Breathing Into the Hard Place
In a breath session, contracted moments tend to arrive uninvited — a sensation that overwhelms, an emotion we’d rather not meet, a memory that edges in at the wrong time. The familiar move is to brace, tighten, wait for it to pass.
Golas suggests a different direction: expand into it. Give it full, permissive, loving attention — especially when the pull is to contract. He offers a phrase I’ve kept close since re-reading this:
This, too, can be experienced with a fully expanded awareness.
That’s a shift in the direction of movement — from away-from to toward. And consciousness tends to follow. When we stop fighting the contracted place, something softens. The compulsive feeling of dismay doesn’t disappear, but our relationship to it shifts.
This is what we’re practicing in breathwork, beneath whatever technique is being used: the expansion move.
Where to Start
You start where you are. Whatever you’re feeling, thinking, resisting — there’s nothing wrong with being exactly here. The work isn’t to free yourself from what’s hard. The work is to expand your awareness and go deeper into it.
Whatever you’re thinking, love yourself for thinking it. Whatever you’re doing, love yourself for doing it. Golas’s instruction is that simple — and, in practice, that demanding.
A little love goes a long way. That’s his line. I’ve found nothing to argue with in thirty years of sitting with people in expanded states of awareness.
What would it mean, in this moment, to lean toward rather than away?