Finding Our Third Space

by Sam Glannon

A year or two ago, there was a gentleman who used to come into the yoga studio and ask about the ways in which we build community. I can remember this happening more than once, although I only engaged with him once myself. He struck me as intelligent and technically minded, definitely a tech person of the kind which abound in the larger Camberville area. After he had asked this in my presence a few times, I decided I would try to explain to him what we were doing as I understand it. What I told him was in effect that what we are is a shared physical space where people can go to be present with others with whom they have no other direct connection, and share some experience which is fundamentally not work or family related. We are, in other words, what is called a third space, one which is not home or work but which allows casual social contact between people who would not otherwise meet. I specifically alluded to the 80s-90s television sitcom ‘Cheers’ - which in all honesty, I have never seen, but which is I think shorthand in some way for the idea I was exploring. The show is about a bar in Boston where people go to congregate and the social experiences they have there. Also I should probably mention at this point that I don’t drink, smoke, or use any drugs, that I’ve been living that way for almost fifteen years, and that this show was on for the most part before I was born. Perhaps it might seem incongruous to you for me to have gotten caught up on this sitcom or this idea so firmly as I have, but let me explain what it is I see in it.

In the theme song, which I have heard although I have again never seen this show (and that should probably tell you something also - there’s an idea in this song that I think people latched on to even aside from the show itself) there’s a line which says: “sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.” I explained this to the man who was asking about how we build community, and I quoted to him that line. He wasn’t familiar with the show, probably for the same reasons I’ve never seen it. He looked to be only slightly older than I am. I explained further that there was a reality around shared spaces and community that this sentiment encapsulated. He told me that he was trying to conceive of a way to create an app or some other digital medium which would create this kind of experience. I replied that I thought it was precisely because we were analog and not virtual that we were able to do what we’re doing, that in other words, physical space and physical embodied presence was a part of the formula. At that point, he told me that he had encountered all kinds of people who were technophobic, and that he was still intent on what he was doing. And to be fair, I basically am technophobic. But that wasn’t the substance of what I was trying to convey to him. I don’t think he was really hearing me, though, I think he had a goal in mind that structured his intentions in a way that made it hard to appreciate what I was trying to suggest. Being technophobic, although it is related in some ways to what I’m discussing here, is not really the central aspect of what I’m trying to discuss, which is community, shared space, and physical presence.

There is a book entitled ‘Bowling Alone’, which is slightly more than twenty five years old now, the basic thesis of which is that shared community spaces and participation in them has been declining since the 1950s. For instance, participation in bowling leagues has steadily declined even though more people are bowling overall - which is to say that more people are, as the title has it, bowling alone. The book was published in 2000, and is based on an essay which dates back to the middle part of the 1990s. The social science underlying the book goes back over a number of decades. This is coming from a period of time, in other words, where there is no social media, no smartphones, no internet in the form that we’re interacting with it today. I want to mention that now because I’m going to come back to it later. The basic trend of disengagement with shared third spaces is, in other words, not a new one, and is not solely the effect of a technologized society in the form we now have it. 

Something I would observe about the era in which we are now living is that emotional experiences of alienation, shame, isolation, and loneliness, which are often interrelated, are incredibly and increasingly common. The events through which we are living in social terms cannot be understood without bearing this in mind. The trend towards the loss of shared social spaces in one aspect of that pattern, although not the extent of it. Without going deeply into this line of thinking (which would probably be a good subject for another of these pieces), I would simply state that, as regards technology, I think it has greatly exacerbated this pattern regardless of what other advantages or disadvantages it may possess. To take this statement one step further, I think that the idea put forward around the time of the advent of social media that connectedness through virtual spaces would fill the gaps created by the loss of shared physical social space has been conclusively disproven, both by social science and by obvious fact. In reality it seems that these digital spaces make it much easier to become ideologically radical or detached from the world, rather than enhancing connectedness and social integration. But even without these technological aspects of our current societal moment, the social isolation and disconnection that I am observing is still a clear feature, which is why I was at pains to mention before that much of the research which found its eventual form in ‘Bowling Alone’ predated these technological trends. The reasons for these developments are multiple and varied, and cannot be reduced to any one area of social or technical change, but the cumulative effect has been a growing state of separateness and alienation.

Spirituality at its heart is about connectedness, and connectedness on multiple levels. In part it means connectedness to a larger sacred reality, and often an understanding of one’s deep relatedness to that sacred reality. On a human level, spirituality also involves connectedness to the world of humanity and to the world in which we live (parenthetically I would like to mention that sometimes to pursue spiritual experience, one might specifically attempt to remove oneself from social reality, in the manner of the Desert Fathers or the Vanaprasthas - for more on that you could look at Thomas Merton’s amazing book ‘Thoughts In Solitude’ - but let’s leave that aside for the moment). We are fortunate in this regard that we have, in the form of the Mysore room, a shared space and a community which we can inhabit. I am writing to you today, therefore, in what is essentially a spirit of appreciation, and to thank you all for your participation in our community. Putting aside the yoga itself, I want to recognize and specifically take note of the fact that this is a beneficial thing that we’re all a part of. Shared spaces are a hard thing to find these days. We’re lucky to have one another.

As regards the yoga we are doing itself, I have been pleased recently watching the changes that take place in new students over time in terms of the way they practice as they participate in the Mysore room. People come to us with a wide variety of levels of experience. In these past several months, we have added individuals with a wide range of levels of experience, some who are doing yoga for the first time, and others who have long standing ashtanga practices. One of the effects of being in a room full of people who all know how to do a certain thing is that, almost as if by magic or as though there were some magnetic pull exerted upon you, your own style of practicing slowly starts to be affected by theirs. As new students continue to practice with us, somehow wordlessly they sink into the flow of what we’re doing, certainly not through any agency of mine. I was reminded of a passage in the writings of the naturalist E.O. Wilson (unfortunately I couldn’t readily find the section I had in mind for this piece, although I think it’s in ‘The Diversity Of Life’) where he describes the cultural aspects of animal behavior, and the way that different behaviors are passed along within groups. He observed specifically in the behavior of birds that certain ways of doing a given motion or action would be passed along from parent to child, or from one member of a population to another. This is simply to observe that we mimic one another, and that our participation in groups meaningfully, and we hope, positively impacts our behavior. With the new students, what I’ve seen over time is that the experienced members of the group slowly demonstrate, simply by doing it in the same room, how to practice in a controlled, focused and conscious way. It is worthy of observation that we now have within our community a significant constituency of practitioners who have been doing this for five, ten, or even twenty years or more. Simply put, one learns a lot of intangible information over such a period of time, and the group as a whole benefits collectively from the shared knowledge and experience of the individual members. As new people join, this knowledge is passed along, both in obvious ways (i.e. someone simply tells you ‘hey what’s up with your breathing?’) and non-verbally through behavior and through doing alone. In short, this is powerful and irreplaceable. 

One experience I want to share with you in this regard is one which I otherwise think I am almost alone in having in our room, which is as follows. I am the one most days who opens the room and begins practicing first. I begin my own practice between 5 and 5:15AM, depending on how much I have to do to get the room into working order once I arrive. I normally do surya namaskar and some standing poses before others arrive, sometimes more depending on the day. I can tell you that, observing my own mind and state of consciousness as I am practicing, there is a change as other people filter in. In other words, even in the absence of any communication, without any words being exchanged, but simply by the bare fact of other humans being there, the mental and emotional contents of what I’m doing shifts. And the contents of that is different every time, but it always has an effect.

This is all impossible without the aspect of physical presence. In other words, there is something powerful about being in a room in which other people are all doing the same thing that you are doing. To say something even more basic, there is something tangible and powerful about sharing space with others at all. If one ends up isolated from others, there are all kinds of negative ramifications of that, whereas if one has these communal experiences, that conveys all sorts of benefits, even of a physiological nature. Another concrete example of this is that when researchers have looked at so-called Blue Zones, places in the world where people routinely live to be in excess of one hundred years old, they have found that one important commonality is that these are localities with a strong community. And I’m not even saying that you need to have some profound, deep interaction with these other people for this to work. If you do, wonderful. But even if you just go to a place where you can be in the presence of others, that itself is a good thing. The fact that we’re living in a world where I have to make the case for this explicitly is, as I write this to you, bumming me out more than a little. But that’s where we’re at. This is my extensive explanation to our friend who wants to condense the social benefits of attending a yoga studio in person to an app or a social network - come into the Mysore room and observe what’s happening, or even better, participate yourself for a month or two. If you still believe after that that such a thing is even possible in theory, then you will be fully armed with as much information as I could furnish you in concrete terms about what exactly we’re doing in there. But if you still think it’s possible after that amount of time, I think in truth, that you will have missed out on the essence of the social experience, both in our room and in general.