Spaciousness

One of the values of practicing hatha yoga, for me, is a deeper and richer understanding of the truism that the body and the mind are one. Since encountering this view a few years ago, I have held it to be intuitively true, but it has been through conscious practice of this particular form of body work that I have been able to flesh out my understanding.

One aspect that I pay much attention to is the experience of spaciousness. I was talking with a friend the other night about a theme that I return to constantly--the recognition of an external apprehension, especially one that evokes strong emotions within me, as an internal reality. I often think of this in terms of architecture, prompted by readings such as Alain de Botton's Architecture of Happiness, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, and St. Teresa's Interior Castle. The example I used with my friend was the emotions I feel in a spacious, cavernous room, especially with very high ceilings. There is a distinct sense of freedom; a feeling that suddenly more time has been bestowed upon me; my mind feels more calm, capable, and secure. When I notice this connection between the space I am in and how mind and my soul feels, I try to contact, even momentarily, the "space" within me that corresponds, like Teresa journeying through the mansions of her soul. 

This process is not easy, and I believe it requires patience, focus, and commitment to find the internal equivalents of what is more easily apprehended outside of oneself. But what I am finding with working with my body is that this process can be conducted both through the mind and the body, for they are, I am assuming, two sides of the same coin, the total organism (though I am not ignoring the significant and necessary differences between these two sides--e.g. the ability of the mind, rather than the body, to take the perspective of someone else but myself). Of course, there are many body practices, each with their different aims, but something that I really connect with in hatha yoga is a focus on the very spaciousness I have described. I don't know very much about the technical intricacies of yoga, but it seems to me that one of the purposes of the poses is specifically stretching different areas of the body in order to create more space, slowly extending the walls, as it were, of the bodymind. And the more I practice, the more I appreciate the openness I experience in both my body and mind after a session.

I value this openness for several reasons, but one in particular is connected with another theme I have been pondering lately--tension, conflict, ambiguity, and ambivalence. In trying to get more in touch with how much of these sensations I constantly live with, I have realized that in order to learn from my ambivalences and internal conflicts, they need space to exist within me. If my bodymind feels cramped or constricted, it is more difficult for me to give the two sides of the conflict their proper due, or to accept their interdependence. For example, in my speech therapy I challenge myself to approach situations where I am afraid to speak, like on the telephone. There are two strong forces at play--the fear of embarrassment and the drive to conquer this fear, to challenge myself, to expand my capabilities. I notice that if I am feeling cramped or constricted, it is much more difficult to honor these two forces, and I feel the tension, which is in some ways necessary, much more acutely. But if I breathe deeper, open my body more, and introduce more spaciousness to mind via my body, I find that I am more capable of being aware of the tension, acknowledging and honoring its value, while also feeling stronger and more confident in my decisions. Another way to look at it is that the more closed and constricted my bodymind feels, the more easily I contract around the tension, especially the fear--my awareness becomes myopic, I cannot feel that I am anything else but this uncomfortable and disturbing fear. 

It is one my fundamental convictions that everything can be a teacher. In the example I am discussing, a more subtle element of the tension is my deep desire to treat fear as a teacher--in other words, to not be afraid of fear. Both David Deida and Alan Watts (especially in his Meaning of Happiness) talk about this a lot, and it has really helped me: in order to effect this attitude towards fear, one of respect and honor, even humility, rather than more fear, fleeing from this deep and fundamental emotion, space is useful. It is as if, in the presence of fear, there needs to be room for both teacher (the fear) and student (the part of me that wants to honor the fear). If there is not enough room, only one will be able to stay--and that is almost always the fear itself.