In our hectic, often crowded lives, both physically and mentally, space can feel like a luxury. In meditation, however, space becomes a clear gateway to clarity, calm, and connection.
Meditating on space can mean sensing the physical space around you, the inner spaciousness of your body, or the subtle gaps between breaths and thoughts.
This practice gently expands your awareness, helping you soften your grip on stress and reactivity.
By focusing on spaciousness:
- You gain perspective. Emotions lose their intensity, and problems appear less overwhelming.
- You encounter emptiness not as a lack, but as potential and an invitation to calm. It becomes a source of quiet energy and peace.
- You reduce mental clutter. Thoughts become passing clouds in a vast sky rather than storms to endure.
- You attend to the space within the body. This can calm the nervous system, shift brainwave activity, and reconnect you with your energy and breath.
- You deepen presence. Silence, stillness, and gaps between moments become alive and rich.
- You develop a witnessing perspective: more balanced, more compassionate, and less reactive.
- You notice the pauses between thoughts or sensations, creating a sense of distance from them. You are no longer inside the thought, but observing it.
- You feel more connected. As the boundaries of the self soften, there is often a deepening sense of relationship with others, with nature, and with the world around you. Spaciousness becomes connection, not separation.
What happens in the brain
Meditation on space can reorganise brain activity. It tends to quieten areas linked to self-referential thinking and overactive sensory processing, while enhancing networks involved in attention, interoception, and bodily awareness.
This shift in neural activity underpins the felt experience of spaciousness, reduced emotional reactivity, and a more integrated sense of self and environment.
Meditating on space is not about escaping life; it is about meeting it with more room to breathe, feel, and respond.
A guided meditation: expanding into space
Your body
- Find a comfortable sitting position and let your body and weight settle into the ground.
- Be aware of your body as it is, right here, right now, as if you have never seen it before.
- Come to a feeling of the entirety of the body and your being within it.
- Be aware of the body meeting the earth and the field of energy rising from it, offering you stability and balance.
- Notice the sensations in your body: temperature, solidity, presence.
- You are the body and its physicality.
- Rest in the awareness of your body as energy.
Space
- Bring your awareness to the front of your body and give it space to expand.
- Does it have any borders?
- Can you feel it fully expanded in the space before you?
- Feel the energy radiating from your body as it reaches towards the wall in front of you.
- Hold this feeling of openness before you.
- Truly settle into the space.
- How does it make you feel?
- Repeat the same process with the space on your left, on your right, and behind you.
- Now, without emphasising any one direction, feel your wholeness. You are not located anywhere in particular.
Within this sense of spaciousness, free from dwelling in the mind, there is a connection with our true nature and a sense of release from the usual boundaries and constraints.
Finally, do not hold on to the feeling of expansion. It is still just another experience, even if it feels subtle. Simply rest in silent presence and in awareness that has no edges and no centre.
Laurent guides practices like this in weekly classes, both online and in person. View Classes and Pricing →