Are you feeling walls closing in around you? Does this feel like stress? Do you feel the struggle and the tightness inside and out?
Do you recognize what is squeezing you? What is limiting you? What has you held stuck?

It is a response.

And a response that has been incorporated by you and your nervous system as a way to adapt – resist, escape or survive.

This will quash space,
decreasing your living square footage,
and potentially your room to move,
to breathe,
AND
to live.

With the walls closing in, locked in, the furniture begins to crowd one another, the windows get jammed closed, and the ability to move around is harder and harder, even requiring you to find new less efficient ways to move around the closely packed furniture in your house, now little house.

What do you do as the square footage limits your living arrangement? And you get frustrated continuing to navigate around those tightly spaced items in your house that you used to adore and cherish? And, oh yes,
and don’t forget….the windows don’t open anymore.

Most would get rid of the furniture in exchange (a hefty exchange that is) for new furniture, break it up, maybe even throw it away or if your lucky throw it into the fireplace. Anything to find more space as the walls are closing in.

What about fresh air?
If you don’t have space to “add” a air filter, you may resort to limiting your activity and minimize your breathing to “save” the precious air in your reduced house square footage.

What to do??????

How bout we look at those Walls –

By first recognizing, and feeling, what is producing these closing actions you can engage the pause button and potentially change your adaptive ways of moving in this world. In the pause is the window into your being-ness, and how you are relating to a situation. In the pause you have an opportunity to change to automatic default response to a potentially more suitable and less restrictive response. The first step to take is the recognition – awareness is 80% of the answer.

I thought this was a great analogy to our body’s adaptive response and how we may not know it right away, but eventually we feel the struggle and predicament of being stuck, limited, suffacated, weak, depressed, anxious, and/or  hopeless.

In Hatha Yoga, compressing space and lessening the circulation of the vital resources, Prana or Qi, that generates movements, interactions, coordinated communications amongst systems, and fluidity is called Vata. It literally translates as restrictions in life force circulation. This circulation of life force energies, Prana or Qi, happens in the blood, nervous system, around organs and inter-connectiveness of every system through the interstitium of the entire body.  This leads to conditions like inflammation, congestion or stagnation, and degenerative processes over time.

And you have the ability to not feel so stuck, limited, weak, suffocated, depressed, anxious, and/or hopeless. You have the potential to make those walls more porous, permeable, and thinner, to allow your healing potential to come shining through.

We will explore ideas on uncovering greater and greater potential in the next few articles…….stay tuned.