Hold onto nothingness

“Hold onto nothingness”. Deep into our yoga class, we melted deeply into a variation of the One-legged King Pigeon pose. As we came out of the pose after minutes of being still, Donovan, our yoga teacher asked us to notice that for a moment we had been in a place of nothingness. He exhorted us to “hold onto this nothingness” not just in our yoga postures, but throughout our day and indeed our lives, for nothingness is ultimately where we want to be.

Yet it occurred to me that when we try to hold onto nothingness, we are actually holding onto something. Whatever we hold onto in turn takes hold of us and becomes something, something that defines, binds and limits us. Nothingness is just that – “no thing”: once we hold onto it, then “no thing” becomes “some thing”. The essence of nothingness has to be nonattachment, even to a moment when we experienced the nothingness. It is to not be attached to ever experiencing or holding on to that moment again. True nothingness is not something to hold onto – it is to just be.

The reason we had experienced that state of nothingness in our asana was because we had gone beyond our physical body limitations. Looking at us, you would have labelled us “contorted”. To get there, we had to let go of all thoughts and ideas of what the body could and could not do. We exhaled deeply, and the nothingness appeared in that hovering moment between exhalation and inhalation. In that moment, our bodies ceased to exist. For a moment, we had no breath: we were dead, surrendered to the nothingness. Yet, in that moment of surrender we were actually vibrantly alive for we were no-thing. The moment of nothingness, in hindsight, we could label “ecstasy”. Hindsight because when we are in that moment of nothingness then there are no labels, names, feelings, hurts or sensations – nothing. We just are. It is when we return to the human condition that we glimpse the memory of the moment and label it “nothingness”, “ecstasy” – or whatever we choose. Yet it matters not what we choose to call it, for it is only a label for a memory.

To experience the beautiful nothingness we have to release – let go, allow, surrender. Then there is nothing to hold onto, just no-thing to be.