Lately, I’ve been returning to a simple idea in my meditation practice: containment.
Not containment as restriction.
Not as tightening or bracing.
But containment as capacity.
A good bowl can hold water.
A cracked one can’t.
In practice, containment is what allows us to meet life without spilling everywhere.
In this meditation, I worked with the metaphor of the body as a house. Not a perfect house. A lived-in one. A place with rooms we love, rooms we avoid, and rooms we forget are even there.
We began by building the foundation. Feeling the edges of the body. The weight in the pelvis. The steadiness of the legs. The quiet of the hands. It’s remarkable how rarely we notice how busy our hands are until we let them rest.
This is where containment starts.
Not with insight.
Not with clarity.
But with safety.
Before direction, we need a container.
I see this play out everywhere. At work, when pressure builds and we reach for solutions instead of steadiness. In traffic, when irritation rises not because of the delay, but because the body doesn’t feel held. In relationships, when difficult conversations derail because there isn’t enough internal space to stay present.
Containment lets us stay.
From there, we moved through the house. Nine rooms. Three floors.
The pelvis as the boiler room.
The legs as exits to the world.
The arms as places of work and care.
The chest as the living room everyone passes through.
The head as attic and observatory, where memories and dreams collect.
As we scanned each space, the instruction was simple: notice what’s present, and notice what’s absent.
Both matter.
Sometimes we discover sensation.
Sometimes numbness.
Sometimes tension we’ve been carrying quietly for years.
Sometimes nothing at all.
And that’s okay.
Just like in a real home, there are rooms we close because we’re not ready to deal with what’s behind the door. The practice isn’t about forcing them open. It’s about knowing the house can hold whatever we find.
Eventually, the metaphor falls away. The scanning ends. And what remains is what meditation always points toward: open awareness.
This is the space where everything can be here without needing to be fixed.
Thoughts come and go.
Sensations rise and pass.
Emotions knock.
And we don’t have to follow them.
This is the skill we take into the world.
When we build internal containment, we don’t have to rush to improve ourselves. We don’t have to chase calm. We don’t have to harden against discomfort.
We learn how to stay.
And when we stay, something subtle happens. We interact differently. We listen more fully. We pass along whatever steadiness we’ve cultivated, not by effort, but by presence.
That’s the quiet work of practice.
With metta,
Dominic
💬 Let’s Reflect Together
Where in your life do you feel like things “spill” most easily?
Which room in your inner house do you tend to avoid?
How does your body signal when it feels safe?
What changes when you focus on capacity instead of control?
How might containment shift the way you show up in conflict?
What would it mean to let awareness do the work?
Use as journal prompts or share your reflections in the comments—I’d love to hear how impermance is alive in your practice.
