Don't Shrink

My teacher says that when you meditate, you should imagine your breath moving in and out through your whole body at once. Then, he says, notice the tendency of this full-body awareness to contract. Because untrained awareness tends to contract around points of tension in our experience.

This is true beyond meditation. People say, “Take up space,” “Put yourself out there,” “Own the room.” But those are just words. We don’t shrink from our power because we lack the right affirmations. We shrink because we lack the right mindfulness to keep awareness open in the midst of tension. This is something we have to see, not judge.

I’ve been a professional musician for three decades and have played some big venues. I rarely get stage fright. Yet if someone hands me a guitar at an intimate party and asks me to play, I can freeze up. My awareness can contract in the area of my head, my sense of self can become very small there, and I can feel overwhelmed.

Now, I can analyze this tendency back to childhood, or to the fourteenth century, but analysis doesn’t change what’s happening. What helps is changing my relationship to my body. So, for example, I might imagine my body is the size of the whole room, or that my voice is coming through the windows, or that my fingers on the guitar are making the walls reverberate. I need to inhabit my body differently to have a different experience.

Bertrand Russell once said that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” That’s probably true, and it’s certainly unfair that people don’t naturally take up space in proportion to their talents. But you can’t spend your life blaming the world while abandoning your own gifts, which the world so desperately needs.

You have something no one can take from you: an imagination and a changeable awareness. I don’t know if you’ll ever own land, but you can cultivate a consciousness as wide as the universe. Now that you've read my words, forget them, and find their resonance in your own expanding body. As Leonard Cohen said, “If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”

Tish Scott, "Teleological Destination Heart Brain Coherence Expanding Consciousness" (2026)