One of my teachers likes to remind his students to “empty before you begin”. Whenyou arrive into your first śavāsana, a reminder to set aside all the ‘stuff’ that follows you throughout the ordinary day. Because our yoga practice doesn’t take place in ordinary time. It abides by the timeless; spaciousness.

When we empty, we become full of emptiness. There is a softening of resistance. We become more receptive.

But how to empty? How to connect with the spaciousness?

We can slip into the slivers of space between the inhalation and the exhalation and the next inhalation. We can slide into the micro-moment between the passing of one thought and the arising of the next. We can harness all our awareness toward that moment, that spacious moment, in which we have noticed an emotion, a feeling, but we have not yet decided how we feel about the feeling.

 We can notice the breath flowing through the left nostril and the right nostril, and then we can simultaneously imagine a third nostril, right in the middle, connecting us to our central seam. A gateway to pure spaciousness and presence.

 As yogis we harvest these spaces, we are nourished by the liminal realm. We practice in the knowledge that this space is always there, readily available. We can take rest there, we can take others there, we cannot own it because it is free.

 We can be full of emptiness.