Finding The Space In Life

This talk focuses on learning how to be in the space to let things simply unfold. To learn to be with silence and "not doing". This was first recorded as a video on Facebook Live.

Transcript

Hello,

I'm Charlotte Watts.

Welcome to these podcasts that were first broadcast live in my Facebook group Charlotte Watts Calm.

Hope you enjoy them and if you want more,

Please look at my website charlottewattshealth.

Com.

Hello,

Welcome to this Wednesday's Facebook Live with me Charlotte Watts and I want to discuss and explore a subject that is very close to me in terms of my own exploration in life,

How I live life and something I work with very much in consultations with people.

As I mentioned,

I tend to specialize in stress,

Burnout,

Overwhelm and also I tend to teach yoga in a way that I really need to experience myself the antidote to busyness that I have always needed and what brought me to practice in the first place,

Which is to find space and to have an ability to be with myself,

To be with silence and to be often with not doing and to be able to be in the space of letting things simply unfold.

We have such a tendency in modern life to keep doing and to fill space,

To fill silence with noise.

I like to have the radio on for instance when I'm home,

Even sometimes working,

But really actively look to switch off and be with space and silence and we are very much used to information just coming in,

Coming in,

Coming in all the time and it's not surprising then when we often feel these effects of so much stuff coming in,

So little space in our lives and also in our heads,

It can be very overwhelming.

Now I'm very sensitive to that.

I tend to be quite introvert by nature and feel a sense of overwhelm and too much very quickly sometimes depending on my stress levels,

But often classically for an introvert I just do need those spaces between interactions with people,

Between information coming in,

Sometimes even between speaking my thoughts,

Time for reflection and it's very much a characteristic and effect of the stress response for things to be constricted,

Making them to become rigid rather than open.

Part of the whole body stress response is for muscle to tense,

For us to draw everything in towards the centre ready for action and ready for forward motion.

So whereas being in a state of rest,

Being in a state of openness and reflection allows us to naturally create space and actually drop into space,

The stress response,

The protective survival response actively,

Physically makes things rigid,

Tenses muscle ready for action,

But also in terms of our head space closes things down,

There's actual feeling of few options and we can really notice that for instance if we are under pressure,

We do feel the effects of stress,

Often it feels like there's only one way to do things,

That it's imperative that we do that now,

It doesn't feel like there is reflective time,

That there are options to play with,

So space gets closed down.

And since this is so often part of our lives and so we have this conditioning to achieve so much,

It is very much part of our culture,

Our schooling,

For many people that is their work situation,

How much can you get done in a ridiculously long day for many people and many people are kind of doing the jobs of more than one person,

That space is something that needs to be really honoured and respected as something that we find,

Something that we create for ourselves and that we drop back into.

And one of the most obvious places for space that we would work with say in yoga,

In mindfulness,

In any conscious pursuit is that place where the body and mind are always wanting to find space anyway and that is the exhalation,

The out breath is space,

It is by nature releasing,

The inhalation is there to gather energy in,

To gather in resources and the exhalation balances us over to let go,

So on every exhalation potentially we are letting go,

We are releasing.

The choice that we always have is whether we are conscious of that and the breath is like many autonomic processes,

Many involuntary processes that when it is watched,

When it is observed,

It changes.

It used to be believed that we had no control over these involuntary processes at all but loads of research,

Particularly to yogis and breath,

Have shown that we do have the capacity to change,

To manipulate these autonomic processes.

We can slow our heart rate down by paying attention and yes some simple tools but as much as anything consciousness.

So we can watch the state of our breath to notice how much space we have in any given moment,

How much potential for opening up expanse and freedom we have in every single exhalation which also means we can notice the reverse where we are holding on to breath or we are dominating on the inhalation,

We are breathing in over the end of the exhalation,

It is such a common stress pattern to really dominate the excitatory inhalation,

That kind of almost gets a hyperventilation state.

We can notice that we can make space,

It is available to us,

It is not something we need to make,

It is there.

And just noticing the end of the out-breath,

The potential for us to go right to the end conclusion for the out-breath,

Not to force it,

Not to make longer exhalations but we can just notice where it is we can let go and often that is letting go around here,

This area can be the heart,

That can be metaphorical,

It can be actual in terms of letting go of muscles around here,

Even massaging this area,

Letting go of the diaphragm and letting go so that we can drop down space into the belly,

We can start to let everything drop down from the shoulders so that rigidity,

Lack of space we have up into the shoulders and the ears which is physically part of the stress response to keep us energised,

We can start to release down.

And it is then that we can start to find space between thoughts,

One of the things that is really characteristic of going into any kind of heightened state,

Hypervigilance,

That is scanning our environment to check that we are okay,

Is that it has that,

It has continual input,

We are looking for information to be coming in all the time and we can get stuck in that mode and even when it seems that our mind is most racing,

That the monkeys are most chattery,

There are still spaces between thoughts and looking for the spaces and noticing where they are,

I mean we have the opportunity to open them up and this can start to really make us feel that there is that potential to come down if we are looking for space in quite a heightened state of anxiety.

And then there is the actual consciousness of making space through life,

A more mindful way of living if you like and that is to recognise that actually to fill our waking hours with as much to do as possible to fill our mind with more stuff coming in,

Is it actually exhausting,

It is not what we were designed for and a statistic I kind of like to roll out because I think it is pretty,

It kind of says it all really if you like,

Is that in the 14th century your average person would have got the same amount coming into their brains in a lifetime as is in one day's edition of the New York Times and our expectation for the amount of stuff we should have coming in,

Be it social media,

Be it knowing about the state of affairs across the whole world,

Our expectation of that is phenomenal.

As part of,

For me personally as part of when I needed to recover from burnout,

From adrenal fatigue,

From that sense of overload was to really walk away from current affairs and I have a very kind of strict boundaries around things like notifications coming in for social media,

For having really good guidelines in place and when I engage and when I don't engage there is definitely definitely space and not having more information coming in a certain time at night,

We don't need any more.

What we need at night is the space to allow our nervous system to come down,

To start to move into a place of rest and recovery and to bring more stuff in at that point simply means that we are taking,

We are stealing away from quality of sleep,

That place where we most need that R&R to be able to then move through life with least stress in the day.

So space can also be the places that the kind of buffer points we make between these things of doing and this is something I'm continually working on because I tend to leave the house or wherever I'm going just on the minute to get there.

It's something I'm really trying to work at the moment that leave early so there's no sense of kind of a stress to get there and some point in time before you get there you're not just rushing into the next thing and it's a bit of a false economy to not make space between things or to not actually create breaks between things because our ability to concentrate,

To focus,

To get things done without mistakes and to make decisions that we actually believe in and feel true to ourselves really rely on our brain having periods of rest and periods of recovery and rejuvenation to really be able to come from a more creative,

Inspirational,

Imaginative,

Reflective place and even if we're doing analytical work we need that level of space in our landscape for it to be able to see the bigger view not just a kind of constricted viewpoint that comes from having stress involved.

So space is absolutely necessary and one of the ways that you often see our body try to make that is when we might kind of zone out we might just sit and be doing something and you find yourself kind of daydreaming.

This often happens kind of four or five o'clock when we're going into a bit of kind of lull in terms of brain waves that's a very natural point to be doing that.

When your brain goes into a lull let it we're very,

Very used to kind of finding ways to keep it going and we might because we often have so much to do there might be a little panic when we notice brain waves dipping into a place where they just want to go into deeper,

Less obviously connected to get into the stuff we want to get done.

When they want to go into that place if we let them then actually you find very naturally they come back up again that your brain kind of there's a lovely sense of reset and we might get a sense of new perspective at that time.

But often when we do have so much to do and we do feel oversubscribed or overwhelmed making space feels like it's something that we can't make a priority for.

Even taking a little time to have a bit more space when we get up in the morning means that we don't feel that we're shooting ourselves out of a cannonball first thing in the morning and then we can always try and play catch up with that feeling of being even like close to agitation and like I said at the beginning space when we're eating space between mouthfuls space as we're chewing space to actually allow our digestive processes to fully engage to fully nourish us is a really crucial part of our whole energy regulation our whole appetite regulation and ultimately has us living life in a way that feels more enjoyable has more space for joy and space for feeling easeful when we do come to times of fun we can feel more present particularly if we're not latching onto things that we should be doing.

The other thing I just want to mention about space and is in the way that we communicate and I tend to talk fast it's why I'm quite deliberately actually slowing myself down right now I get excited about the ideas I have to get out and there's a little bit of stress in doing these kind of public things so there's a speed up that's quite natural when it comes to that and one of the ways that we can notice if we tend to have gone into the stress response if we're in our speech tends to speed up and deliberately slowing ourselves down allowing our breath to come back into our belly as we speak gives us that space between words that means we can be heard and that's reciprocal so when we're listening to someone else making the space for them to speak to be heard and for us to not simply be waiting to have our turn to put our opinion forward so there's when there's space in the communication that we have giving and receiving actually we can feel that we're heard we're listened to and we're not everyone's not just trying to solve each other's problems offer opinions but really there's the space of feel that we are fully communicating and that really gives us a sense of safety that allows a massive amount of calm in our lives so I love to hear from you about the ways that you do create space in your life if it's kind of like walking in nature if it's just taking yourself away and sitting you know it can be formal practices like meditation but also informal ones where you might just sit and look out of window or read or whatever it is that really you know gives you a sense of release and space in your whole body so hopefully this is something that we can continue it's a massive theme here within this group for me particularly in this this calming I will add up the link to my calm package just in case you haven't signed up to that because there's a somatic yoga practice a 40-minute moving meditation practice that is incredibly spacious so it's slow and it takes its time and if you're a yogi and are used to doing a fast practice and getting lots of stuff done in that it's also incredibly valuable to move to a practice a complimentary practice where you are it's very much about being with ourselves and the space that's opening up so that even if that kind of pushes your buttons a bit that's good meet your samskaras for yogis who will know what that is and if you don't and would like to know post a question I will explain to you but enjoy finding space in your life and I'd love to hear any questions and comments from you take care

Reviews

A lovely insight into space.

This is such an important topic. I definitely have a need for more space in my life, more mindfulness. Thank you! 🦋

Insightful! Thank you!

Enormously helpful. Thank you very much

Excellent points and very clearly explained. It is so difficult to get off the treadmill. Even if I try to give myself some space in my day (eg by stroking my cats), heart and mind are still in work. Allowing yourself to be in a different space for a while is very difficult.

Great talk thank you.

Very nice. Thank you. You accompanied me whilst doing yoga :)

I thought this was a meditation but enjoyed it very informative 😀