Making Space for the Unknown

This year I have been deeply studying the work of several people whose ideas and findings are extremely important to the world of healing and personal growth, although they are not in the world of psychotherapy. Three of these people — all of whom are scientists, researchers, and speakers — are Dr. Joe Dispenza, Gregg Braden, and Lynne McTaggart, all of whom have written multiple books. I couldn’t possibly do them justice in a single blog post, but I wanted to express my gratitude for their work as it shapes my understanding of both my own experience and my work with clients. I find their work to be immensely important, and plan to eventually incorporate it into psychoanalytic work.

Before I get on to my topic, I invite you, right in this moment, to take a slow breath and notice your body in your seat. Then, place your hand on your heart and check in with yourself. Just doing this one small action, which should take you no more than 30 seconds, you have now given your body some attention and a little reset. Perhaps you were even able to hear from your body something it needs in this moment — a sip of water, a shift of your muscles, an unfolding of your shoulders. You have just made a bit of space for the unknown and likely just interrupted a pattern of unawareness. That has given your body an experience of moving into the present moment, and your brain has registered a data point of a different way of being. As you read the rest of my blog, you will begin to see why this is so important and so much more impactful than it seems.

In this blog post, I want to focus on and expand a point that Dr. Joe Dispenza emphatically makes in his workshops and books — and that is, making space for the unknown. He makes the point that more often than not, we function on a kind of auto-pilot, mostly based on our past experience. We have the same routines and the same thoughts and feelings day in and day out. Most people can map out their entire day, down to the minute details of the order of their routine (cell phone, bathroom, coffee, shower, breakfast, etc.) And if one does the same things day in and day out, it follows that they are also likely thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings day after day. This makes life predictable and familiar, but also leaves little or no room for anything new to happen.

We want to be able to predict our day and to avoid pain or difficulty, if at all possible, or to at least minimize them. There are many reasons we automatically avoid and guard against the unknown. The unknown is potentially scary, evolutionarily speaking, so we seek out the known and predictable, since it’s helped us survive until this point. Also, when we start out as children, the unknown is adventure and fun! — but more often than not it gets taught (or “whooped” for some) out of us by frightened adults who want to prepare us for the knocks of the “real world”. Before we know it, we form a belief system where we associate the unknown with pain, and come to expect — and are even unconsciously looking for — things to go wrong. So, we learn the safe, familiar routines and hold on to the safe, familiar thoughts (even when they are painful!) On an unconscious level, we live in fear of those “knocks”, rarely embracing joy even when it does show up. Most people I’ve talked to about this say that as soon as things are good, they are cautiously looking around, waiting for “the other shoe to drop”. The joy, spontaneity, and sense of adventure are all but snuffed out by the time we enter adulthood.

So, when in the course of our everyday lives we are struggling and hoping (or even praying) for something to change, if there is no room in our lives for anything new to show up, change has no place to enter our lives, except through a crisis of some kind. So another thing we tend to associate the unknown with is crisis or something challenging happening to us, something being out of our comfortable control.

What Dr. Dispenza points out, however, is that making space for the unknown on a regular basis is the only way for our lives to actually change for the better — both on a personal and on a collective level (which are, of course, inextricably connected). More often than not, when the unknown shows up in our lives, it is our own Self coming to us with information, some aspect of ourselves we’ve neglected even though it is desperate for attention. Or, it might be some important ideas we don’t make time for, or some signal from our body, or it might be even a psychic or spiritual message. In fact, the more I listen to Dr. Dispenza’s material, the more I see how exciting and magical the unknown can potentially be. We often perceive it to be “negative” because it’s not something we expected, and perhaps it even interrupts the flow of our lives. But how often do cancer patients say that cancer was the best thing that could have happened to them, because it finally woke them up to how they were mistreating or neglecting themselves?

Dr. Dispenza passionately urges his students to make space for the unknown in their daily lives through meditation — through sitting down, and focusing on Space in your body and outside it (and a number of other techniques). Focusing on the space your body occupies, and the space around your body, takes you out of the realm of thinking about your life and into the realm of direct experience. He also cites scores of meticulous scientific research (some of which he’s done himself), pointing toward the tremendous impact of “teaching your body emotionally”, bringing up one’s own powerful feelings of gratitude and love, and using your powerful imagination to envision and feel the kind of You that you want to be. This acts as an antidote to the cyclic ruminations of your everyday thoughts, and your body begins to learn and neurologically wire those emotions into your neural circuitry with repetition.

When I’ve sat down this way — even with Dispenza’s guided meditation audios — I suddenly found facing myself in a way I didn’t expect. Hey, that’s the unknown in action, from the first moment! I’ve initially found myself restless, anxious, and sometimes frustrated. As any meditation teacher will tell you, making room for yourself every day is what creates change — it’s not having that perfect meditation posture in white cotton robes, with the perfectly balanced breath and an impossibly straight spine. Often it’s a sweaty, uphill battle. But, as I’ve discovered, that’s not as masochistic as it might sound. It’s a path toward befriending your body and getting to know your energy. I’ve had meditations where I cried in frustration, and others where I experienced exhilaration at feeling my energy field reaching out to fill the entire room.

I do not believe that meditation is the only way to make space for the unknown, although I’ve found that it’s one of the most potent. Journaling/writing is another powerful way, if you are able to stay open to the present moment and allow your conscious awareness to unfold (rather than only writing down thoughts you’ve already had). Making art of any kind — with the same premise of spontaneous expression — is a very rich ground in which the unknown can emerge. And another powerful way, is, psychoanalytic sessions. On both sides of the couch, a therapy session is like a mutual meditation, where both people are attending to the present and are (hopefully) open to something new arising at any moment.

Any practice(s) you create where you consciously make regular time for something to unfold that’s different from your daily tasks and habitual thoughts can create that space and opportunity for positive change. And that’s not just something that sounds good to say — doing this allows you to regularly break up the habitual, cyclic patterns of thinking and feeling, which overtime literally causes those old circuits to prune apart in your brain. Every time you drift in meditation and think about the next thing on your To Do list (or about lunch), and then bring yourself back to the focus on space, you interrupt an ingrained pattern and encourage/strengthen a different one. Or, if you’re writing, when you bring yourself back from checking your texts or looking up a product on the internet — same thing. In an analytic session, bringing yourself back from a tangent, speaking up when something isn’t going in the direction you need, or allowing yourself to explore an uncomfortable topic (and so many other examples!!) allows you to have that same effect in your body, brain, and entire energy field.

It is difficult to convey how powerful this truly is in just a few paragraphs. I think it’s clear that I’m not talking about any kind of magic, “think yourself happy” thing — but a pathway toward deep change on so many levels, facilitated by consciously stepping out of the familiar. I highly recommend the books of the authors I listed — the links at the beginning of the post take you to their respective books for you to explore. All three authors also have multiple fascinating talks on YouTube.

How can you make more space for the unknown in your life?