Living Space

Paul Holman is a widely read doctor with 40 years' experience in psychiatry and psychotherapy. In this erudite book he explores the nature of spatial awareness as a means of experiencing greater openness and freedom and therefore balance. The journey begins with sensing, seeing and paying attention, starting with the body and moving on to the mind. This spaciousness rises within the context of the complementarity of connection/separation, which are very differently experienced by extroverts and introverts. We can all make space to remember, stop, centre, let go and relax but we often forget to do so. The author brings many strands and writings into his narrative, including Marion Milner, Fred Alan Wolf, Jean Klein, Douglas Harding and Iain McGilchrist - of whose book he provides a succinct tabular summary.

He gives many helpful observations for highly sensitive people and quotes Judith Harris with her scheme for a child's developmental process in terms of the relationship system, the socialisation system and the status system. I have observed all these variables in my work with young people, and in the larger social context pecking order and hierarchy are represented by systems of power and control in their competition with love and cooperation. 'Holman's Law' notes that most psychological distress results from or is exacerbated by finding oneself at the bottom of the social hierarchy - he finds no exceptions to this rule in his 40 years of clinical practice.

In meditation, space can also be the void or light, something that is also nothing, the One Substance as Light, experienced by mystics down the ages and manifesting as form in space and process in time. If we are lucky, we can experience flow within cycles of life and number. The penultimate chapter explains how we have a tendency to get ahead of ourselves in constantly moving forward, which means we actually have to remember to come back to ourselves in order to achieve spaciousness, stillness, silence and even wholeness. This process is perceptively evoked in a series of phrases describing the meditative state, which are themselves meditative. This is a rich tapestry of exploration into an important topic.