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.”
Even though she knew nothing about Zen meditation, she booked herself into a four-day retreat. She felt that a stately house in the woods would provide a safe place for her to ruminate. On the first day, she writes:
I experienced a torrent of painful feelings, all of which I wanted to avoid. I had meditated at home before, following tips from friends or yoga classes or videos I had seen online, but just for ten minutes at a time. As I sat for hours on the small, round cushions on the floor that first day, every part of my body ached. My mind rebelled. I fixated on other participants’ every movement to try to distract myself from going inward. When someone sighed or sneezed or shifted their body, I noticed. It was easier to pay attention to the details of the pattern in the carpet or the sound of the copper bell that marked the time than to ask myself the questions I came to ask.
Over the course of the four days, though, the silence began to take over, and she began to see her shame in a clearer light:
It was the shame of missing my mark, of doing more talking than accomplishing; the shame of not being as successful as my successful friends; the worry that people might feel bad for me or look down on me or that I might have to give up on my big dreams and just be content with what I had accomplished so far.
By day two, seeing all the thoughts from every angle was illuminating but also “like going through a storage room full of clutter.” She investigated the arising thoughts in a fresh way in the silent space: “If worry came, I checked out why I was worried. What was the story behind the worry? Where did it come from? Was it real or not real? I stayed with the feeling until I had processed and digested it, and then I let it go.”
Gradually, she worked through her restlessness and “desire to accomplish more than I was currently able to do.” What emerged from the retreat was insight about what really held her in its grip:
Our attachments to whom we think we’re supposed to be are like chains around our necks. Our identities get wrapped up in the external roles, titles, and accomplishments that we put value on … A wealthy businessman values how much he’s worth financially. A research scientist values the cure she is working on. A writer values the books he writes and publishes. In my case, I valued how much social change I could create through my advocacy for women’s rights and my humanitarian work.
At first, it might seem that one pursuit or identity is more valuable than another. Surely, the cure for a disease is more important than how many books an author sells. Surely, creating social change that improves thousands—if not millions—of lives is more important than increasing the wealth of one individual. At a fundamental level, though, no matter what our vocation is, our accomplishments are where we find our core self-value and feel affirmed.
Attachments are attachments, I realized, no matter who we are or what we identify with. When we value ourselves because of what we accomplish and how much we accomplish, our souls are forever held hostage to these attachments. No matter how much we do, how many dollars we accumulate, cures we discover, books we sell, or people we help, it is never going to be enough to permanently fulfill us.…
I was completely identified with my work, and in my own mind, I could never be successful enough at it. That was a very big chain around my soul, a huge weight on my being. Realizing this was like cutting the umbilical cord to my shame.…
One short silent retreat couldn’t instantly change the shape of my life—or my mind. It had just given me a taste of what freedom from attachments could be like. It was like tasting chocolate for the first time: we can’t describe how good it tastes until we’ve actually tasted it, and then we can’t ever forget that taste. Now that I had seen the source of my pain and the route to my freedom, I had a clear path to follow.
As Zainab’s story so powerfully illustrates, we can learn to recognize assumptions for the thoughts that they are, rather than cleaving to them as an ultimate defining reality we’re bound to. We get to choose, “Do I want to take this to heart or let it go?”
EXPANSION
ONE TIME when my colleague Joseph Goldstein and I were visiting a friend in Houston, we all went out to a restaurant to order takeout. As we were waiting for the food to be prepared, Joseph struck up a conversation with the young man working behind the counter. After a few minutes, he told Joseph that he’d never left Houston and went on to describe, somewhat passionately, how his dream was to one day go to Wyoming. When Joseph asked him what he thought he would find there, he responded, “Open, expansive space, a feeling of being unconfined, with peacefulness and freedom and room to move.”
Joseph responded, “There’s an inner Wyoming, too, you know.”
At that point, the young man fixed a stare at Joseph and said, “That’s freaky,” as he sidled away.
But there is an inner Wyoming, a potential for openness, spaciousness, clarity, and freedom that exists within each of us. We just need confidence in it, to make the journey to that place, to discover it, nurture it, and hold the memory that it’s there, waiting for us to visit anytime.
In moving from contraction to spaciousness, it’s as if we’re sitting in a narrow, low-ceilinged, dark room—so accustomed to it that we don’t even realize we’re confined—and then the door swings open, revealing light, room to move, and possibilities that suddenly await. We don’t know just what is out there, but it’s certainly more vast and spacious than that tiny room.
My favorite way of imagining that expansive state—as someone with asthma—is “being able to breathe again.” More than just pleasure, different from indulgence, it is mostly a sensation of huge relief. It is peace.
Theologian Howard Thurman recommended that we “look at the world with quiet eyes.” It’s an intriguing phrase. It seems like with the way we so often look at the world, we resemble cartoon characters whose eyes are popping out on springs: “I see something I want! Give it to me!” Our heads rapidly turn to the object of our desire in a fixed gaze, so as not to lose sight of it. Our bodies lean forward in anticipation. Our arms extend, reaching out to acquire it. Our fingers flex, ready to grab on to what we want, to try to keep it from changing, from eluding our grasp. Our shoulders strain to hold on even tighter.
That’s grasping, contraction.
It happens in a moment, or an hour, or a day, a month, a lifetime—and it brings a lot of pain.
So, look at the world with quiet eyes whenever you can, and let go of grasping. The world will come to fill you without your straining for it. In that relaxation, you will find peace. Peace isn’t a fabricated state, repressing all woes and challenges. It is tuning into our fundamental nature.
Willa Maile Qimeng Cuthrell-Tuttleman, when she was seven years old and a student at Friends Academy in Manhattan, wrote a poem that beautifully expresses what I understand as peace.
Peace Is Friendship
Peace looks like nature
Peace smells like fresh air
Peace sounds like wind blowing through the trees
Peace tastes like bubble gum
Peace feels like a soft pillow
I have a friend who describes himself as pretty obsessive when nursing a grudge, another contracted state. He can go over and over and over the words of the misunderstanding, or his resentment at not being included, or someone’s reckless behavior. Over and over and over. After one such interlude, he reflected on the obsessive quality, declaring:
“I let him live rent-free in my brain for too long.”
Now imagine yourself going home to that blessedly quiet apartment of your mind. What a relief. You can play music. You can cuddle with your dog. You can reach out to a struggling friend. You can cook a meal, or write a poem, or maybe finally get some sleep.
Expansiveness doesn’t lead us to a vacuous place—cavernous, muted, disconnected. Expansiveness isn’t being spaced out, floating above it all. In the sense that I’m using the word, expansiveness is energized, confident, creative, brimming with love. The subtle balances in life—of rest and action, of passion and letting go, of the power of intention and of patience—all can take place in this expansive space.
Expansiveness helps broaden our perspective, so we can think more flexibly and with a more open mind. We become better able to focus on the big picture and not feel so discouraged by the constant array of ups and downs we experience every day. When faced with adversity, we can generate more solutions. Expansiveness invites experimentation and imagination. We’re more willing to pour ourselves fully into life’s pursuits. It is the freedom of letting down the burden we have been carrying. It leaves room for our fundamentally loving hearts to uncoil, and lead us onward.
Copyright © 2023 by Sharon Salzberg
