All This Space

When I was pregnant with my second son, I took my first son to stargaze in our backyard. World affairs had me rattled – the US had begun their anti-terror campaign by bombing Afghanistan. I often thought of the Afghani women who were pregnant like me, having to flee their homes, or giving birth as explosions blew apart their country.

The night was clear. It was late Fall and we were returning home from a dinner out. Above us the Milky Way twisted through the sky. Recently, I'd read that the Milky Way is home to as many stars as the human body is to cells. I recounted this to my son. “Come on,” I told him. “Let's lie down and look at the sky.” He ran inside for blankets and an old yoga mat we could throw on the ground. Had he ever done this? Reclined over the earth and stared at the night sky? It had been so long since I had, I could not remember.

Lately, he'd been asking questions about space. Planet sizes fascinated him, as did the length of time to orbit the sun. What was the Milky Way anyway? And how long would it take to fly to the moon?

It was the perfect night for stargazing.

We snuggled into each other, holding ourselves against the cold. I started to point out the few constellations I could recall. Big Dipper, Orion's Belt, Three Sisters. Then I rambled on about what I thought was Andromeda and how astrological signs were somewhere up there, but I couldn't really tell him where. I told him we could check out astronomy books from the library. Then, I asked if he'd be interested in a star chart.

He gave a little grunt and I realized he hadn't been listening. He didn't care for the names of constellations, they were all there above him, nameless and magnificent. So, I stopped talking and let myself release into the cold embrace of earth. Quietly, I shut down that part of myself that needed to pin names onto each star. Miraculously, the cosmos began to open up. The sky became deeper, it breathed and pulsed like a living thing.

Beneath this immense display, the relevance of human dramas diminished. There is all this space, I thought. The universe is more vast than our minds can comprehend and we tend to close in, become tight and constricted. There is all this space and still, we war over territories.

We are like this in our minds too. Closing in on perceived problems or opinions, fixating on what we lack, what we fear, how to win -- and reacting over and over -- to these obsessions. We want our lives to be solid and predictable. We want to claim the sky for our very own.

One of the precepts of yoga is ahimsa or non-violence. Violence goes beyond blatant warfare and is understood, on subtle levels, as non-aggression. We become aggressive in countless ways: our need to win an argument, to clutch onto an opinion, to deepen a yoga stretch by shear will. We, all of us express aggression in a variety of ways. And each time we do, we contract – physically and mentally. We pull the sky down around our ears, refusing to offer space to ourselves or to others.

So we study ourselves in our asana practice, we begin to notice when we are pushing ourselves in aggressive ways. Are we trying to touch our toes at the expense of straining our backs? Are we clenching our jaws, holding our breath because we just want to do it right? Can we recognize this tendency and create space around it?

Letting go of the need to “win” the pose, we learn to work without strain. And when we learn to work with ahimsa on the mat, we learn to weave it into our daily lives.

Staring at the wide open universe, I knew that, too often, I closed of from its immensity. Wasn't this what I was searching for? This spaciousness in both my body and mind, this living connection to the universe.

I pulled my arm around my son, felt my baby kick within my body. I wanted to offer them a love, a peacefulness as wide as the sky above me.

Even wider.