Making Space

Lessons in surrender and the wisdom of the body

Image: Jason Gardner on Unsplash

New Year is often seen as a time of stripping away - when we purge and let go of what's no longer needed to create space to invite in the new.

This year the stripping away took an unexpected turn.

After writing off my car the previous week, in the days following Christmas, I found myself stripped of my ability to hear. An ear infection left me 90% deaf, unable to hold a conversation or perform a lot of everyday tasks - making a phone call, listening to a podcast, catching up with a friend, to name a few. Even conversations with my partner were a challenge.

The irony was not lost on me that I listen to people for a living. My ears are, quite literally, the tools of my trade. At the end of a long year, they were decisively shutting up shop. The body sometimes practices a tough love style of parenting, demanding that you face what's needed, resolutely refusing to take no for an answer.

I cycled through a range of responses, from panic and claustrophobia (I'm drowning!) to frustration (how can ALL the clinics be shut in the holidays?!) and self-pity (this is the worst holiday ever!) before eventually digging a little deeper into my toolbox and recognising it was time to practice what I preach in the therapy room - radical acceptance.

I'm reminded often of the futility of fighting against that which we cannot change, though it doesn't stop us from trying. But when we resist reality, fight with what's in front of us, and say no to the life that’s unfolding, we deplete ourselves very rapidly. The nervous system switches into threat mode, narrowing our vision and draining our battery. We expend energy in a fight we can’t win, and the thing we can’t control does not change.

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson teaches us to make a practice of saying yes to life. Improv comedians practice the same. Whatever is placed before you, try on saying yes to it, embracing the unexpected, and seeing what's possible from there. Saying yes helps the nervous system call off the fight/flight response, which in turn allows more expansive thinking and new possibilities or ways forward to emerge. This doesn't mean, of course, that we become passive in our lives and accept the unacceptable. It means we recognise where our sphere of influence ends, and discern what we can change or influence from what we can't. We stop wasting energy fighting the immovable objects.

When I had exhausted all the ways to seek help for my hearing and recognised that I would have to wait a week and a half for an appointment with the ear clinic, I was left with no choice but to turn towards acceptance.

Acceptance meant embracing a silent world, cancelling plans and redirecting my energy towards activities that didn't rely on my ears.

There’s a Rumi quote I love:

The moment you accept what troubles you have been given, the door will open

As the noise of the world was screened out, a space opened up. A space in which I could do very little. A space where I chose to stay very close to home (the outside world is scary and disorientating without a sense of hearing), and a space where I could turn more deeply towards some of the solitary activities that sustain me - reading, writing, yoga.

In the inner sanctum of this space, I found myself reflecting, daydreaming and tuning into my body’s rhythms. An invitation opened up to listen more deeply to the inner voice, instead of the many clamouring voices of the external world.

As I surrendered into that space, my initial panic and claustrophobia eventually started to subside and I found an inner well of calm, pause and rest that is rare to be able to carve out at other points during the year.

I was reminded that life exists as a dance of opposites. Light co-exists with shadow, day oscillates with night, summer with winter, joy with grief.  And the energy of expansion lives in tandem with the energy of contraction. It had been a particularly expansive year, a year of travel, connection and pushing my boundaries, so perhaps I should not have been surprised by the velocity of the contraction that followed.

There’s wisdom in the body, even in its most annoying and inconvenient communications. Our symptoms are often expressing for us what’s out of balance and demanding we sit up and take notice. We ignore them at our peril.

It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this. An autoimmune condition that showed up in my 30s taught me many lessons about how I was living – how I was running my engine on the fuel of adrenaline, borrowing from tomorrow’s resources to get through today, and how that debt would need to be paid back when my whole body would crash in exhaustion and depletion.

This New Year, I was forced to set aside plans for socialising, renovations and day trips. I was even forced to drop the podcasts and the Netflix for a while, to listen to the much deeper and more primal need for silence.

I’m emerging out of the other end of that literal and metaphorical tunnel now. But I notice my emergence is cautious. I don’t want to refill that space with all the noise of the outside world that’s rushing to get in. I want to savour some of the preciousness of this pause, to honour my need for slowing down and solitude, my need for mental and physical space. I want to be intentional about what I allow back in.

And I have a renewed appreciation for the sacred gift of hearing. As over-taxed as it is in the cacophony of our Western culture, it is such a precious tool for connection, intimacy and engagement with the world.

My holidays were not what I had hoped for, but I returned to work with a feeling of having been emptied out, a feeling of spaciousness and clarity and readiness to begin again.

Sometimes we make space, and sometimes life makes it for us.

With thanks to

Beth Kempton

’s Winter Writing Sanctuary which was the perfect companion to my enforced solitude, and which also gave me the title for this piece of writing.

Tell me, how do you create space in your life? How does your body talk to you? And what does it take to get you to listen? Join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, click through to the website to join the conversation).

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