Finding Space in the Tightness: A Meditation on Self-Compassion
inviting spaciousness
by rosemerry wahtola trommer
Today when the heart is a small, tight knot,
I do not try to untangle it. I don’t tug on the strings
in a desperate attempt to unravel it.
I don’t even wonder at how it got so snarled.
Instead, I imagine cradling it, cupping it
with my hands like something precious,
something wounded, a bird with a broken wing.
I cradle my heart like the frightened thing it is.
I imagine all the other frightened hearts
and imagine them all being held in love.
And I breathe. I breathe and feel
how the breathing invites a spaciousness.
I breathe and let myself be moved by the breathing
as I open and soften. Open and soften.
And nothing changes. And everything changes.
The heart, still a knot, remembers
it knows how to love. It knows it is not alone.
We've all experienced those moments when our hearts feel impossibly tight – constricted by anxiety, wound up in stress, or tangled in grief. In her luminous poem "inviting spaciousness," Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer offers us a different way to approach these difficult moments, one that transforms our relationship with emotional pain through radical tenderness.
How often, when we're struggling, do we immediately try to fix ourselves? We pull at the knots of our distress, analyzing what went wrong, desperately seeking solutions. We treat our pain like a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be held.
But Trommer suggests another path: what if, instead of trying to untangle our knotted hearts, we simply cradled them?
There's profound wisdom in this approach. When we cradle something, we create a safe container for it. We acknowledge its fragility, its need for protection. Just as we wouldn't roughly handle a wounded bird, perhaps we shouldn't roughly handle our wounded hearts.
This gentle approach opens up something remarkable – a spaciousness that comes not from forcing change, but from allowing ourselves to be exactly as we are. It's counter-intuitive, isn't it? That accepting the tightness might be what allows us to breathe more freely?
The power of the poem lies partly in its recognition that we're not alone in our suffering. When we imagine "all the other frightened hearts," we step out of isolation into connection. There's something deeply comforting in knowing that across the world, countless others are also learning to hold their knotted hearts with tenderness.
The practice is deceptively simple: breathe, open, soften. Repeat. No dramatic transformations required. No knots need to be untangled. Yet in this simple act of self-compassion, everything shifts. Not because our circumstances have changed, but because our relationship to them has.
Perhaps this is what healing really looks like – not the absence of pain or the perfect resolution of all our tangles, but the remembrance that even in our most constricted moments, we retain the capacity to love, to connect, to hold ourselves gently.
Today, if you find your heart becoming a tight knot, try setting aside the impulse to fix or understand. Instead, cradle whatever arises with the same tenderness you'd offer a wounded bird. Breathe into the spaciousness that surrounds the tightness. Remember that across the world, countless others are breathing with you, learning this same gentle art of holding their hearts in love.
After all, as Trommer so beautifully reminds us, sometimes the most profound change comes not from forcing our way through difficulty, but from remembering that even in our knottedness, we know how to love. We know we are not alone.
