Spanda & Why It Matters

One of the beautiful things about yoga teacher training is the connections you create with your cohort. And some of those connections strengthen beyond the cohort and become lifelong-- and necessary-- relationships. Humans you turn to when the shadows overrun your existence and block all light and possibility of hope.

The nurturers who hand you a jar of home-cooked healing nutrients when your pantry is empty and your paycheck is a week away. The person you can rip off all filters and get real AF on the fly and say what needs to be said to lift the weighted blanket of paralysis off your soul. Your people.

In times of accelerated change, we need our people and we need them consistently. It takes a village and we must remember that in times of turmoil, filled with situations that call into question our very ability to exist on this planet with our humanity intact. And the answer is beyond our control.

Over coffee today, my YTT soul sister and I went through updates on the chaos we’re both navigating in our personal lives. Long, deep conversations with tears and goosebumps, unraveling the threads of emotions wound around our hearts during this transition period. Our worlds are wildly different, polar opposites almost, except for one thing. Yoga.

Our hearts were cracked open during our training and the chord of connection strengthened in the containers our teachers held for us. I watched her enter our shared learning space a different woman. Beautiful. Confident. Reserved. Holding just enough uncertainty to have a hint of “”fish out of water” vibe. Within six months, she entered the classroom and a beautiful unwinding in real time could be seen. And shared. We were all unwinding the lessons and the traumas we’d accumulated up to that point. And a collective unraveling is beyond beautiful to witness.

We learned to unleash our wild— unapologetically and without reservation.

Naropa University isn’t a place you enter lightly. It may be easy to be admitted to the school, but the price to stay is high. And has nothing to do with money. Deep spiritual training will crack your heart and soul wide ass open-- whether you want it to or not. And never in the way you envisioned or dreamed of.

In spaces of deep spiritual training, there’s an unspoken culture of holding space to explore the deepest aspects of our existence on this planet. Not bypassing. Not deflecting. Not worshipping. Just a deep excavation of the life you’ve lived up to that point— an uncovering done in community. Powerful composting of all of our truths, our lies, our fears, our pain and our hopes-- the power of composting on such a level enables transformation in ways you can never imagine before that type of education begins.

This has nothing to do with exams and essays. This is the learning of our elders, passed down and improved upon for seven generations past, and seven generations forward. We studied Non Dual Śaiva Tantra together and from a lineage brought to our school by Ram Dass. We ripped open all the wounds and all the scars and poured our blood on the sacred grounds of our ancestors.

We drew a line in the sand with our blood. A line that declares, “this generational trauma stops with me”.

Knowing that you are opening up the festering wounds from decades of compounding trauma and willingly reliving the pain in order to prevent the next generation from the same degree of suffering is an intensity that’s hard to quantify. And when you travel that canyon of darkness together, you create the bonds of friendship from a strength that does not tear easily, if at all.

While we were speedrunning our “this is what happened the last month” stories, we landed in a conversation of expansion and contraction. Spanda. I have forgotten so many powerful concepts from my YTT days since I entered tech full time. I’m beginning to reconnect with them through my own composting period as I exit tech and a collapsing labor market right now.

Spanda means “the divine pulsation of interlaced movements of expansion and contraction, the beat of the drum sets the tone for all that follows.” Illuminated Tantra by C. Wallis

When we crack open our hearts and lay bare all that we are in a situation or to another human, we thrive for a while in a place where anything is possible. A liminal space. A place where time and location are suspended and we seem to exist in this dreamland that rests close to the Divine. We can feel it, maybe even smell it, but we know it’s not our place to dwell for long, yet.

Inevitably, gravity pulls us back to Earth and our consciousness hits the material plane again. We have bills to pay, people to help, meetings to attend and the chaos of our now causes us to contract. Our consciousness shifts from wide and endless to narrow and real. We touch a sadness when we realize the suffering still exists and is jabbing us in the ribs just to remind us that we’re human.

• Will we touch the Divine again soon?
• Will we have done enough work to move past our egos to not block that Divine goodness in the future?
• How long will we stay in this corner of contraction, fearing things that may or may not exist beyond our own mental story loops?

If we look at the definition of spanda, the divine exists in both the expansion and the contraction, a duality that needs both elements to function properly. If we work with our nervous systems enough to guide and support it through this divine duality, our own spanda drums will lay a rhythm that empowers us to move fluidly between both states and not attach ourselves to the outcomes or promises of either.

And when we contract, are we able to acknowledge the wounded child hiding in the corner, frozen in fear from the specters of the past and just needing a minute to breath? Are we able to give that child the space it needs to feel secure again? Do we know our nervous systems well enough to give it the space to hold that scared child and also the regulation necessary to be the adult that child needed years ago?

None of these questions are easy. None of this work is easy. None of this practice is predictable. But holding the space for these emotions to exist, to expand with the beauty of our love and contract with the fear of our existence are non-negotiables for our today.

We are living through a time in history where the spiritual practice you embrace-- ANY denomination or belief system grounded in ancient wisdom-- will be the most necessary element for our collective survival. We were not meant to live in isolation, separation and perpetual contraction.

We are meant to co-exist, to travel through this world in community and with our cohorts so we can embrace our spanda together. And so we can watch in absolute amazement at the beauty of our ability to expand and contract as one.