The nighttime temperatures are dipping into the 40s in my neck of the woods, and most of my summer vegetable garden is toast. At this point, I have to admit that we’re in the gap between summer and winter.

Practicing yoga has taught me a thing or two about appreciating such transitions. I’ve made my peace with fall and the winter to come. Thich Nhat Hanh talks about things manifesting when the conditions are correct and subsiding then those conditions cease. That’s how he grapples with tough subjects like mortality, but I think we can find value in this idea when we’re in any liminal space.

The process of changing conditions is not usually instantaneous. We can use our practice to become keen observers and appreciators of transitional spaces.

The Gap in Asana

Like many students, my earliest exposure to yoga was through asana. I went to class, and I learned to make shapes with my body. I liked making the shapes so much that I decided that I wanted to teach other people how to also make those shapes.

After my training, I taught a bunch of community classes to continue to build my shape-making skills with real live humans. On one of those occasions, I got some wonderful, practice-improving feedback. My colleague said to me, “Your class was well-sequenced, but you need to work on your transitions.”

It’s like being told that you’ve been reading the words well, but you forgot to notice that the words were parts of sentences on pages housed in a book.

My achievement-oriented Western brain immediately sought to learn everything I could about transitions. After some reflection, I realized that when I took class, I perched on my mat waiting for the teacher to call the next asana. When I taught, I created a list of postures that targeted specific planes of motion.

I hadn’t really given much thought to what happened between the poses at this point. I was just blasting through them thinking I was accomplishing something.

We don’t just flicker from having our hands overhead in urdhva hastasana to having our hands at heart-center in samasthiti. Some conditions cease while others arise to create these shapes. We can move between them like they're items to knock off our checklist, or we can travel like we're slow-dancing through honey.

Yoga became way more interesting to me after I had that realization. Before long, I was spotting the spaces between everyday actions. When a practice consists of asana alone, it stays stuck on your mat. It’s confined to class or the awkward moments you spend doing tidbits of standing sequences in the grocery store line. (Ask me how I know!) Now everything could be a ground for observation.

Turn to your breath

When you mind the gaps, you can really start to engage with the other limbs of yoga. The practice can connect with the rest of your life in new ways. It’s no longer a thing you do. It’s a thing you are.

The next most accessible in-between space for practitioners to observe happens in pranayama (control of life force/ breathwork).

Take a class with me, and there’s about a 30% chance we’ll engage with sama vritti (square breath/ equal-parts breathing). For this pranayam, we focus on making all four parts of our breath equal in length. While the inhale and the exhale get lots of airtime (yep, I said it), there’s also the transition point between each of those parts. Yoga as a tradition is so keyed into this that there are special names for each part:

1. Inhalation (Puraka)

2. Retention of the full breath (Antara Kumbhaka)

3. Exhalation (Rechaka)

4. Maintaining the state of emptiness (Bahir Kumbhaka)

Take a few square breaths with me

I like to draw attention to each part of the breath with a count. You can try this at home and adjust the count to fit what’s appropriate for you. If you would prefer not to retain the breath for any number of reasons: pregnancy, health concerns, anxiety, etc., you can still lengthen the inhalations and the exhalations and watch the spaces between them without suspending your breath.

Inhale. 1….2...3...4…

Suspend the breath full. 1….2…3….4…

Exhale. 1….2...3...4…

Hold empty. 1….2...3...4…

Do a few rounds of this, note the transitions between your inhales and exhales, and then see if anything changes in your mind and body. You can do this just about anywhere without making a scene. It’s way less conspicuous than Tree Pose in the checkout line. Nobody is going to want to go grocery shopping with me after this email...

With yoga, we can use our awareness of transitional spaces to shift the relationship between our breath and our mental state. Normally, your breath follows your mind. We've all felt the shallow, rapid breathing that comes when we're anxious, for example. By noticing all parts of the breath, you can get your mind to follow your breath instead.

I know that might not sound like a siddhi (the yogic equivalent of a superpower) to everyone, but it could turn your whole day around. Sometimes that extra moment minding the gap can be the difference between a reasonable response and a knee-jerk reaction.

That sense of slowing down invites even more opportunities to observe in-between states as you continue to practice. In meditation, you'll begin to notice and extend the spaces between thoughts. In pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), you can find a sense of being present but unmoved by the clamoring of the senses.

Sign me up for the perspective-shifting, awareness-building thing.

The Collective In-Between

I wanted to talk about appreciating these in-between spaces in yoga because I think we’re all in the middle right now. We’re not totally out of this pandemic, but we’re seeing some promising signs that the fog is lifting.

We’ve experienced a lot of stress, fear, and loss, and that changes us. Things matter differently than they used to. Relationships and spaces hold new meanings. Things won’t be like they were before… not exactly. They aren’t where they’re going to be yet, either. We’re in the middle, and it's an opportunity to practice being here now. While we’re here, we may as well see what we can see.

The peaks and valleys of our lived experience are straightforward enough to watch. This week, see if you can observe what happens between them.