Psychic Space

When our yoga teacher first taught us to visualize the space between two joints in our body and then to breathe into that space to open it up, we followed her instructions avidly and were pleased with the results. It wasn't until much later that we realized she was assuming that the mind could act on the body and that the body could act on the mind — that is, that the mind/body separation did not exist in Eastern practice in the same way that it does in Western medicine.

It was easy enough to imagine the mind affecting the body under certain circumstances: how our mouth waters when we are hungry and think of a great meal or how our body stiffens when we remember a traumatic situation. But how do we imagine a space between two joints and then fill it with air? Nobody had taught us how to do that, and yet, it seemed to work in a satisfactory way and to get better with practice when we tried it.

So it seemed as if the teacher's external suggestions to focus could influence our experience of internal bodily space and when we learned how to meditate, it could also influence our experience of internal psychic space as well. But psychic space seemed to be more of a problem. Everybody knows it without being quite sure what it means.

None of the standard psychological reference works contain an entry for psychic space, and although PEP gives over two thousand references, a cursory glance shows little agreement. By “psychic space,” we mean simply the experience that people have of a space in their minds that usually includes their body, like the space of the room

that they're sitting in. This space can become infinitely large, like in an oceanic experience, or closing in to crush them, as in a claustrophobic experience. In both the oceanic experience of merging with a world of increasing infinite space and the claustrophobic experience of increasing loss of space, there is also an accompanying loss of the sense of agency. Indeed, the feeling of control or