Space as Love

For the past year I have been building my online studio Body Poetry Space. Aware of the inundation of wellness information and online studios out there, I wanted to craft Body Poetry to be beautiful, intentional, and digestible. It is not designed to replace community practice. It is designed to bolster it. So one of the ways I have been experimenting with this intentionality is to focus our practice on a theme of the month. And January’s theme is Space.

Space or Ether is one of the five elements in Samkhya & Ayurveda; the metaphysical foundation of many Yogic teachings. In Sanskrit Ether is Akasha. The root kāś means “to be”. In Vedanta, Ether is thought of as an ethereal substance that pervades the cosmos and is essential to the structure of the universe.

Richard Freeman says something in his text The Mirror of Yoga that made a strong imprint on me. He says when we give something or someone space, we practice the physiology of kindness. What I believe Freeman is saying here, is that the physiology of kindness is reflected in our capacity to witness the fullness and immensity of our shared experience without attempting to fix, deny, or justify it. This is a practice of offering space as love.

Sometimes when I am teaching more intimately, say in my Sift dance classes or a teacher training, a difficult emotion will come up in a community member. I have learned (through trial and error) that one of the best ways to navigate these moments is to invite the entire circle to close their eyes and share in the difficult emotion. If someone is feeling deep confusion, then we all sit in deep confusion. To be clear, this is not a practice of empathy. I am not feeling someone else’s deep confusion, I am feeling my own deep confusion. Because compassion is the art of feeling our pain as the pain. This fosters and expands community capacity to embody space as love.

Looking at this from the point of view of Trauma healing; for many of us, what we remember from a highly traumatic or painful experience is often not the impact of the event itself, but the isolation we may have experienced because of the event. Where there is severe trauma, their is often also isolation, rejection, or a lack of capacity in our communities to hold loving space for us. When someone in our life is going through something difficult, giving them space is not the same thing as holding space. I wonder, what is our capacity to witness suffering in our loved ones, communities, country, or Self?