Lost (& Found) in Space

When meditating on "the world" is an empowering experience

By Jackie Moloney

“Empowering” isn’t a word often associated with meditation, but this is exactly the word U.S. astronaut, Col. Mark T. Vande Hei used when asked about his meditation experiences on the International Space Station.

Usually you hear the words relaxing, peaceful, transcendent, focused (or anxious, fearful, painful etc.)— but empowering?

Vande Hei, who currently holds the record for the most days in space—365 straight days in orbit—was being interviewed via Zoom by Micah Mortali, author of the meditation book Rewilding, for an online program sponsored the Kripalu Center, entitled “Overview Effect, Rewilding and Meditation on the International Space Station.”

He explained that he wasn’t sure how he would deal with the lengthy period he would be in space on his second mission. Meditation helped him “recognize the narratives I was using to fill in the gaps,” he said, and “knowing they were based on my imagination.”

You can imagine the “imagination” one might have up in space, but Vande Hei was talking about something we all do: make up stories in the midst of stressful situations that we think are based on truth, when actually they’re not. “They’re just stories,” Mortali said during their conversation.

“Focusing on being present in the present helped me not to be too worried about how many days I have left,” said Vande Hei. “My job is to experience and soak it all in.”

You might think that soaking in the world would be a commodity up in space. But actually the astronauts have intense schedules. Vande Hei called it, “chasing the redline.” On the ISS, everyone has a computer-generated schedule that shows every activity of the day and the time they have to do it in. Imagine your own to-do list but on a—can we say?— universal scale. The red line is an actual vertical red line that shows the current time. Like Beat the Clock.

Meditation, he said, stopped him from chasing the line—from both the satisfaction you get when beating it, and the dissatisfaction that comes when you can’t. “It wasn’t a cause of stress anymore,” he said.

“When you focus on what’s really going on… instead of being mad at the world I can come out with a feeling of gratitude that I get to be in this situation.”

In fact, instead of being “mad at the world” he was able to meditate with it: the whole of the earth outside of a space station window!

Vande Hei equated it with the nature meditations Mortali wrote about in Rewilding, and was encouraged by the book to find a particular spot on the space station called the cupola, instead of meditating in his windowless crew quarters. In the cupola, he was able to shut down all the computer screens and immerse himself in total darkness, without lights reflecting from the windows or the lights of a helmet. He could see the stars and the whole of the earth and the “texture” of the atmosphere behind it.

Imagine it: His “nature” meditation was the whole of Nature itself.

And yet, this too can be stressful, bringing up a feeling of how small you are in relation to everything else, especially when the highest peaks on the earth can’t even be seen from an astronaut’s position in space. Or, think how it feels to no longer experience the sensory nature of earth: to touch it, smell it, hear it.

“I spent a lot of time in the space station longing to feel wind and rain and sand and dirt between my toes,” said Vande Hei, who has a total of 523 days in orbit, and 4 space walks. “When you don’t have that you really appreciate it.”

Sitting in meditation can even be challenging—more so than many of us experience. Vande Hei had to bungee himself to the floor to do so, and even held on to keep his shoulders from rising because of the lack of gravity. “That’s what they do up there,” he said.

The body itself goes through great transformation and has to be treated most gently when the astronauts land. They are actually carried out of their capsule and go through a period of transition because they are “not used to standing on the ground.” This ground that we allow to support us in krya, in meditation, in savasana. You can imagine the kind of cognitive dissonance that might occur. But meditation, helped him—it empowered Vande Hei.

Back on earth, Vande Hei continues his daily meditation, but on the ground, “with the mosquitos” in Houston. Or, doing a walking meditation to avoid them.

One last outtake: one of the things he noticed during his journey was how thin our atmosphere is in comparison to how large the earth is. “We don’t recognize that we are really in space,” he said.

And of the air we breathe? “We are all sharing the same breath. The air that we’re breathing was on the other side of the world a couple of days ago. Breath connects all of us.”

The atmosphere,” he said, is such a precious and powerful element.”

Note: The above article was part of the daily content I wrote for the students who participated in my series, “Christ in Kundalini: An Advent Awakening.” It’s hard not to think about God when watching a conversation about Space and meditation. Mortali and Vande Hei mostly avoided the G-word but anyone watching could have found room for it, in that space where you can imagine the expansiveness of the universe, and feel its loneliness, and, how, without a container, it could be too overwhelming to behold.

Now, writing this, I think of Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed and the whole of Heaven inside of it. Years ago, I had an experience while camping on a beach in Southampton, NY. It was very early in the morning and I was walking, the Atlantic Ocean a sheet of glass. Suddenly, a powerful feeling came over me and I had to stop. I stood staring at a glint in the water near the horizon and felt I was actually inside of it—there’s no other way to describe it, though you’ll see I’ve tried. The next day, I would have a migraine so unbearable and so strange I could still feel myself inside of that “seed.” The poem below is about this, but it still feels undone. I’ve spent years “chasing” the vision, trying to recreate the experience in meditation or in my nature walks (I’m very curious about Mortali’s Rewilding), and sometimes when I’m not searching, I so feel something like it, an expansiveness that I’m not able to hold. It is that fleeting.

 (originally published in my Substack January 21, 2023)