ABSTRACT
This paper offers some thoughts on the enhancers and constrainers of mental space. The author suggests the possibility of relating to the body as a kind of a True Other (Becker, 2022, see Chapter 1, this volume): not as “self,” but as an intimately felt other, which, given the right point of view, manifests the deepest truths regarding the world and ourselves. She discusses the Buddha's instructions for developing a state of mind as receptive and unshakable; as non-rejecting and non-desiring as the earth, water, fire and wind; and as unfixed and unfixated as space. Openness to engage with the full range that stretches between the far edges of the human condition enables us to become providers of space, time and nourishment.
The author then reflects on how the Corona pandemic air travel constrictions prevented some of her psyche's spontaneous gestures from being “joined up with the world's events” (Winnicott, 1960, p. 146), and thus affected her mental space and its capacity to expand. Finally, she demonstrates how “the four limitless states,” according to Buddhist thought – selfless love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity – bring together boundless vastness and nourishment, thus exemplifying how the mental space intersects with the mental contents or substances that saturate it.
