In our hectic, often crowded lives, both physically and mentally, space can feel like a luxury. However, in meditation, space becomes a powerful 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 embrace emptiness not as a lack, but as potential and an opportunity for calm. It becomes a source of creative energy and peace.
- You reduce mental clutter. Thoughts become passing clouds in a vast sky rather than storms to endure.
- You tap into the space within the body. This can calm the nervous system, shift brainwaves, and reconnect you with your energy and breath.
- You enhance presence. Silence, stillness, and gaps between moments become alive and rich.
- You rise above the noise. A “witnessing” perspective offers a more balanced, compassionate, and emotionally free approach.
- You notice the gaps—the pauses between thoughts or sensations—creating a sense of detachment. You are no longer in the thought but observing it.
- You feel more connected. As the boundaries of the self soften, there is often a deepening sense of unity with others, with nature, and with the universe itself. Spaciousness becomes relationship, not separation.
What’s happening 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 isn’t about escaping life; it’s about meeting it with more room to breathe, feel, and respond.
Try this meditation:
Expanding in the space
Your body…
- Find a comfortable sitting position and let your body and weight meet the ground.
- Be aware of your body as it is, right here, right now, as if you have never seen it.
- Come to a feeling of the entirety of the body and being.
- Be aware of the body meeting the earth and the field of energy coming from it, offering you stability and balance.
- Be aware of the sensations in your body: temperature, solidity, and 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 covers the wall in front of you.
- Keep this feeling of openness in front of you.
- Truly immerse yourself in the space.
- How does it make you feel?
- Proceed by repeating the same process with the space on your left, on your right, and behind you.
- Now, don’t emphasise any one direction; feel your globality – you’re not localised anywhere.
- Within this sense of spaciousness, free from dwelling in the mind, there is a connection with our true nature, a sense of liberation from all boundaries and constraints.
- Finally, don’t hold on to the feeling of expansion — it’s still just another experience, even if it feels subtle.
- Simply rest in silent presence and in spaceless, timeless awareness!
