1FROM CONSTRICTION TO EXPANSION

WHEN I WAS NINE, my mother died, so during a chunk of my chaotic childhood, I lived with my paternal grandparents—immigrants from Poland, observant Jews. Most of the practices of the household, like not turning on the lights on Saturday, the Sabbath, I simply followed with little interest or curiosity about any possible deeper meaning. Following along suited my general sense of numbness anyway. The Passover Seder, however, was a big exception.

I didn’t have a tremendous understanding of the layers of the Seder’s symbolism or values—but I felt a lot. I felt a stirring of joy at the coming together of family (even if my family didn’t look like the conventional picture I had in my head from TV), the tribal recognition of collective suffering (which painted a picture of a life I could actually feel I belonged within), the idea that life could be different, could be better, and that no matter how hard things were, you could imagine you were on your way to that better life.

I’d like to consider the Seder apart from religious identity, apart from leaning into the geopolitical realities of Israel, the Palestinian people, or Egyptians. I didn’t know any of that as a frightened child, and even as an adult, if I am marking the Passover Seder in some way, it’s my own way, with a consideration of all beings everywhere who are suffering, who seek a better life. The liturgical text, the Haggadah, that I’ve used for years is a Jewish Buddhist Haggadah, where quotations from Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet, and from the Buddha himself are laced throughout the depictions of the essential journey from bondage to liberation.

In Hebrew, the word conventionally translated as Egypt in the Haggadah is called mitzrayim. The name is derived from m’tzarim, meaning “narrow straits” (mi, “from”; tzar, “narrow” or “tight”): a place of constriction, tightness, limitation, or narrow-mindedness. Each of us lives, at least at times, in our own mitzrayim, the narrow straits of seeing few options, or being defined by someone else who has more power than we do in a situation, or feeling so unseen that we absorb someone’s projection so thoroughly we come perilously close to forgetting who we are.

Perhaps we’ve been engulfed by a personal tragedy or health crisis, so that taking that first tentative step out of overwhelm toward an uncertain but beckoning future seems untenable. Or our actions are so determined by what we have been taught to believe in contrast to what we can newly discover that our ability to know wonder or awe seems completely beside the point.

Our personal Exodus is journeying out from an opaque world—where it’s difficult to breathe, where change, the ever-present rhythm of life, is all too muffled, where the tight bindings around our hearts keep them from generously nourishing our bodies, our feelings, our entire existence—to a wholly different kind of world.

We journey from fixity to freedom.

CONTRACTION

CONTRACTION OR constriction isn’t the same as focusing, being one-pointed, being centered, or being contained. We can be specific, determined, intentional, without being constricted.

Think of the last time you were lost in fear. The last time you were harshly unforgiving of yourself. The last time you felt trapped. The last time a craving was so strong that all reason and common sense fled (remember, for example, those old infatuations). The last time any sense of potential change collapsed and you fell into hopelessness. Those are times we experience limited options, the blunting of our creativity, a feeling of disconnection, the dimming of our vision of what is possible.

Judson Brewer, author of Unwinding Anxiety, once said to me, “My personal practice comes together with my lab’s research in exploring the experience of contraction versus expansion and how that manifests in the world in so many ways.”

Jud—who is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University—began by telling me about a dynamic web of interconnection in the brain called the default mode network. The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)—the hub of self-referential habits—is a key part of this network. In his research, he found that “when people were feeling guilty, they activated the PCC. When they were craving a bunch of different substances, they activated it. When they were ruminating, they activated it. When they were anxious, they activated it.”

What Jud and his team found was that the PCC correlated with a feeling of contraction: “The experience of anxiety, of guilt, of craving, of rumination—all of these—share literally an experiential component of contraction. We contract, and we close down.”

None of this is to say that contraction is bad or wrong to feel. But if it becomes chronic, we begin living more and more in a world of tunnel vision, of auditory exclusion, of distorted perception, of narrowed interests, of joy that is right here in front of us that we miss simply because we don’t see it. Our perception of options, of possibility, of aliveness, fades.

We suffer.

Learning to be aware of these narrow straits and changing how we respond to them is crucial. “If we read the news and read something that pisses us off, it is that reaction of contraction that feels bad,” Jud explained. “So we may have this urge to make ourselves feel better by firing off a tweet, writing an email, eating a cupcake. This perpetuates the entire process. If we’re not aware of our habitual responses, we not only may make things worse for ourselves, but also for society.”

What we are working to evolve is an inner environment where we can surround that state of constriction, of holding back from the flow of life, with spaciousness, ease of heart, and kindness. Cultivating that radically changed relationship is the essence of the journey to being free.

ASSUMPTIONS

THE QUALITY of our lives can be limited by the thought patterns that produce much of our constriction, such as unexamined assumptions. Sometimes—perhaps most of the time—we don’t even notice the ideas we hold about ourselves, our experiences, our friends, family, and so on. We tend to accept our preconceptions, judgments, hasty conclusions, and anxieties about the world as truth: ultimate, unyielding, inflexible. Our world shrinks, becoming ever smaller and smaller.

* * *

My friend Friedrike Merck is a sculptor. One year, she told me that she had a piece in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., so on a visit to the capital, I went to see it. I walked up and down and up and down the vast corridors of the museum. I checked every room, looked at each display case and pedestal—and I just couldn’t find it! My mind went everywhere, all the way to, Just my luck. I have to be the one to break the news to her that they decided not to put it up after all. It must be in a basement somewhere. Having given up in disappointment, as I headed for the exit, I casually glanced up at a wall—and there was her beautiful piece. It was a bas-relief, not the freestanding piece I’d expected: my assumptions had contoured my vision, and determined what I was expecting to see, and what I was simply not seeing.

Several of the traditions found in India use a well-known parable: Someone walks along a path. They casually look ahead and see a poisonous snake barring their way and turn and run in the opposite direction. As they return along the same path in the morning, they see that same shape but look more carefully and find a coiled rope on the ground. There never was a snake. Or as Star Wars Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi said, “Your eyes can deceive you…”

Because of many factors, including previous traumatic experience, we might be easily activated by the ropes littered throughout our lives, mistaking each for a source of the highest danger. When that’s the case, we rarely feel safe. It’s exhausting, so the times when we really do see a snake and mistake it for a harmless piece of rope (which actually happened to me once in Burma, only for me to be saved by a group of Burmese women who shooed me away from an outdoor staircase where a highly poisonous green snake was taking a nap, masquerading as a piece of yarn), we might not be able to summon the acuity we need to protect ourselves.

One day not long ago, I was on a Zoom call with friends and (perhaps inelegantly) drinking seltzer straight from a can. At one point, one of my friends said, “Why are you drinking beer at 10:00 a.m.?” I held up the can next to the camera and protested, “It’s not beer; it’s seltzer.” Afterward, I reflected how glad I was that she’d asked. In another context, not with friends, I might have started sensing innuendoes in snatches of conversations, fielding offers of help, and been puzzled about why people started acting strangely around me.

Questioning our assumptions doesn’t leave us full of doubt and uncertainty, floundering, unable to take a step in any direction. It leaves us in a more spacious place, released from the grip of perhaps having once, long ago, felt a certain way, or from projecting our fears into a seemingly unchanging future, or from making choices based on something like a long-ago determination that we don’t deserve to be happy. Questioning leaves us free to examine, explore, and experiment.

What do you think the messages you’ve received are—about who you are, how you’re designated, about where you belong, who you’re capable of becoming?

Zainab Salbi—an Iraqi American women’s rights activist, humanitarian, author, founder of Women for Women International, and co-founder of Daughters for Earth—articulates beautifully the limitations of relying on the external assumptions we so easily grasp at, and what it meant for her to break free of that. Zainab had been building Women for Women International since her early twenties. By the time she reached her forties, it had grown from a small operation (with her husband and a handful of volunteers working out of her in-laws’ basement) into an award-winning humanitarian organization with seven hundred staff and offices in ten countries, helping hundreds of thousands of women survivors of wars and distributing millions of dollars in aid.

However, even with all she had achieved, she writes in her book Freedom Is an Inside Job: Owning Our Darkness and Our Light to Heal Ourselves and the World, “Inside I felt like a failure.” In particular, she was deeply dismayed by the fact that would-be donors “seemed to prefer seeing their destitution, torn clothes, devastated faces, blood and dirt. Pity raised money … but it did not get women’s voices heard, dignity seen, or strength witnessed.”

She became ashamed of her feelings of frustration and failure and did not want to admit them to anyone, even her therapist. Her mind raced. She was restless, and “perhaps to avoid a deeper encounter with my own heart,” she booked herself with more and more work and social activity, until she reached the point where “even distracting myself became irritating. It was time to explore my feelings further. To do that, I needed the safety of silence.”


REAL LIFE. Copyright © 2023 by Sharon Salzberg. All rights reserved.

Music by Jonathan Larson. Copyright © 1990 UNIVERSAL