I started by watching birds outside the window. They were coming and going, hopping, pecking at seed, flying off and returning. It reminded me of watching fish in a fish tank. Not because birds are like fish, but because I wasn’t involved. I wasn’t judging, planning, or comparing. I was just watching movement in a contained space.
That’s what made it a “tank.”
A fish tank isn’t about the fish—it’s about the way I watch them. I don’t expect anything from them. I don’t take what they do personally. I just observe.
Once I noticed that, the same way of looking showed up everywhere. Traffic became a traffic tank—cars flowing past, stopping, starting. People in a restaurant became a people tank—conversations, gestures, servers moving between tables. Nothing special was happening, but it was interesting because I wasn’t inside it. I was watching.
Then I turned that same way of seeing inward.
Sitting on a cushion, I noticed sensations in my body the way I’d watched the birds. Pressure, warmth, the feeling of being slightly lifted off the ground by the cushion. Instead of being those sensations, I was noticing them. My body became another “tank.”
Then something shifted. If my body was being watched, where was the watching coming from? It didn’t feel located in my head or chest. There was a light, floating feeling—as if the usual sense of being “inside” my body had loosened.
I wasn’t disconnected. I knew I was supported by the cushion, the floor, the earth. But the tight feeling of being contained inside myself relaxed.
What stayed with me was simple: when I stop narrating and just watch—outside or inside—things feel lighter. Not because anything changes, but because I’m no longer trapped inside what I’m watching; freedom is not being pulled into it.
Spiritual Gravity 