When you feel good, are in the moment and are creating your life as you want it, you’re in sacred space. Joseph Campbell defines sacred space as any place where you’re hermetically sealed off from the world. This can be a room, or an activity, or just a state of mind. But the idea is that when you’re in sacred space, whatever you’re doing becomes a meditation. Your actions are coming from your soul, your mind is neutral and open and so it projects perfectly the light within you and you feel good. Time seems to fall away and you feel charged. This is sacred space and it’s a metaphor for the soul. The soul is sacred space. Campbell says that whenever he would have to travel, he preferred a standard, no-frills room. As soon as he took his books out and put them on the table, the place became his– a metaphor for his sacred space.
Yoga is such a way to create sacred space. You stop the mind with yoga and when you sit in meditation, the soul’s influx creates a feeling of wellbeing. In this way you’ve sealed yourself off from the world for however long– 5 minutes, 90 minutes or half a day. Anything done with focused attention is a meditation. If fishing is what you do to get in the middle and make the world out there fall away, then that’s your meditation. Anything that you do that puts you into flow is a meditation. So you don’t have to do yoga. I always tell people, yoga works for me but there are many rivers that flow into the ocean. If you’ve got a way of creating sacred space for yourself and your life works, God Bless, that’s the whole point as far as I’m concerned.
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If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, you should examine that. Many people, myself included, have been at a period in life when everything seems a struggle and a chore. If you’re not careful, you can adopt a philosophy that, it’s just the way life is. That’s simply not so. It all starts with finding a sacred space where you can seal yourself off from the world for a period of time so that you can use your imagination to create a new picture. If you make this a regular practice, the ability to focus your imagination on the experiences you want to have will become very strong and you will create the habit of conscious creation. The big catch is you actually have to do it!
If you can’t find any way to get into your center, then yoga is one great way to go. Many if not all of us are in our heads a lot these days. It’s a sign of the times– computers have allowed everything to move so fast that people rarely slow down until they’re completely exhausted or worse, they’ve gotten sick and then they just absolutely have to rest. Sacred space and creating a meditative flow is more important now than ever before. People need a way to plug in and recharge quickly so they can keep going.
As a writer it’s very important for me to create sacred space in order to write. As soon as I think about who’s going to see this and who’s going to buy it or what the outside world will do with it, I’m finished. You really have to set yourself up in life with some apparatus for creating sacred space. It’s only from that anchor, that core center still point, that you can begin to see exactly what you want to be– what you want to create. It all comes from that still point within.
It’s only from up on the bridge, at the helm, where all the controls are that you can truly gain the perspective to steer the ship.