Near the end of a full day of retreat, the questions tend to arrive quietly. People have spent hours sitting with themselves, and what comes up is rarely the polished insight they expected. In a 2017 recording, meditation teacher Stephanie Nash opened the floor at the close of a daylong session. A woman described feeling nauseous during a sit. A man asked about working with kriyas, the involuntary spasms and twitching that can take over the body in stillness. Nash also offered a few parting words to participants who had to leave early. Her answers share a single premise: the sensations that alarm students are often signs that a long-held sense of orientation is beginning to loosen, and the useful response is to change how you relate to them rather than to fight them. What follows is a close reading of that exchange, with her practical suggestions laid out in full.
The woman's account was familiar territory for Nash. Her first move was to ask questions that narrowed the picture: did the feeling resemble sleepiness, was it a queasiness down in the body, was there any sense of movement around her, or was the motion happening inside. These are the questions a teacher asks before deciding what kind of help a student needs, and they show that Nash treats a physical symptom as information rather than as an emergency.
Her explanation rested on proprioception, the body's built-in sense of where it is in space. Nash tied that to something more than the mechanics of balance. She described a sense of identity we carry as we move through the world, and she pointed to voice work, where teachers sometimes have people hang upside down because the sense of self while inverted differs from the sense of self when upright. In that shift, people often find they can do things with their voice they could not do before. The implication is that our felt sense of who we are is partly built on a fixed up-and-down frame, and that frame can be unsettled.
That is the reframing at the heart of her answer. Nash called the nausea and spinning "a sign of when we start to let go of an ordering principle." She added that letting go of that principle can be disorienting for some people, and that the discomfort itself can be a sign that you are "starting to kind of break through constructed ways of holding things." It is a striking claim, and she did not present it as a guarantee. But it changes the question a student asks. Instead of "what has gone wrong with my practice?" the question becomes "what structure in my experience is giving way?"
Nash was also clear that the sensation is not trivial. She recalled working with people in hospice who were at peace with their cancer and with dying, yet found the nausea nearly unbearable. Her point was not to minimize the feeling. It was that a sensation can be a meaningful passage and still be very hard to go through, which is why she gave concrete tools.
"There's a version of working with that: go to the space outside of the body. That's just space." (Stephanie Nash, in her 2017 Q&A video, around 3:15)
Her main instruction was to shift attention from the body's internal motion to the space that surrounds it. She compared this to being underwater, where the water supports you without your having to hold yourself up. The image she offered was of a cushion of space that holds you, but without tension. "There's a freedom there," she said in effect, "more like you're floating in it." The space is open and airy, not a thing to be gripped.
The technique is about where you place attention, not about closing off the sensation. Nash suggested that when things become intense, widening awareness outward can help. Her reasoning was that the nervous system is in the middle of rewiring, and that the sensation will keep returning. In her description, a student may repeatedly approach the threshold, pull back, then approach again. Her aim was to build a way through that does not feel like being overwhelmed and retreating home.
She also kept one anchor in place. For this kind of work, she said she would stay with the extremities, the hands and feet, to maintain grounding, while working with the surrounding space. That combination matters: the body's outer edges give a stable reference point while attention expands into the room.
When the man asked about kriyas, Nash described two complementary strategies she has used with students whose bodies spasm or move during meditation. One student's body would spasm, and another, she said, went into deep states before his body began twitching in a way that disturbed him. Her approach was to work with the surrounding space, and separately to find an actual center.
"The eye of the hurricane is still space. We've got the life is the hurricane, and we want to be the center and let it all kind of go around us." (Stephanie Nash, in her 2017 Q&A video, around 4:54)
The metaphor does practical work. The body may be a moving hurricane, but there is still a center within it. Nash suggested that for some people, simply closing the eyes and noticing what is there, without trying to fix it, reveals that resting place for the mind. The point is not to make the movement stop. It is to recognize that the movement is happening within a larger stillness that has not been disturbed.
Nash used the word kriyas without much elaboration in this segment, so it is worth being careful about what she did and did not claim. What she clearly described is a teaching stance: involuntary movement is not treated as something to be forced into submission, but as something to be held inside a wider awareness.
One of the most useful points in the exchange is Nash's observation about resistance. The more a student tightens against nausea, the more unpleasant it tends to become. "Who wants to feel nausea? Nobody," she said in effect, and that very reaction, the wish not to feel it, makes the feeling worse.
Her advice was to relax around the sensation. She described using the surrounding space to create a sense of safety and equanimity, so that when you breathe in, the breath can move through an open field. In her image, the breath is not discerning. Air moves through pockets and bubbles, through a flowing openness. The body becomes porous rather than clenched. She was also clear that you do not have to go to the center every time. Approach it as you can, and recognize that the nausea, in her experience, is temporary.
Nash treated the temporary nature of the discomfort as encouraging. Students often respond with relief when told it may pass, and she pointed out that this relief itself is a sign of the same loosening she described earlier.
Nash was practical about the body's position. She said that in her Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction work, participants often lie down from the beginning, because people working with pain frequently need to. At retreats, she said, there is a section with reclining lounge chairs designed for pain. Her broader point was that posture is adjustable, and that small changes can ease discomfort. She described a simple setup with a minimal support under the head, and explained how a slight change in how the pelvis sits affects the lower back.
She also noted that lying down can help some people but can lead others to drift into sleep. Her advice was to experiment, to notice what the body is doing, and to adjust the position rather than assume one posture is right for everyone.
The title of the video refers to emotional "burping," and Nash returned to it in her parting words to people leaving early. Some material, she suggested, comes up and out the way a burp does: sudden, a little awkward, and then over. Her reassurance was blunt and warm. It is just a burp. It is nothing to panic about, and the way to work with it is the same way you work with the rest of the practice, with kindness toward yourself.
She closed with a reminder to be gentle with yourself for the rest of the day, especially when something intense surfaces. Her parting words to those leaving early were a compact summary of the whole Q&A: the body and mind will do unexpected things when they loosen their grip, and the teacher's job, and the student's, is to meet those moments without turning them into a crisis.
Nash's answers are best treated as a set of tools rather than rules. If nausea, spinning, or involuntary movement arises in your practice, start by widening attention to the space around the body, keep a grounding anchor in the hands and feet, and notice whether tightening against the sensation is making it worse. Then experiment: try the center of the hurricane when the body feels steady enough, adjust your posture, and treat sudden emotional surges as something that will pass.
For more of her teaching, Nash lists several places in her video description: her course and information site at strategic-mindfulness.com, the nonprofit mindfulnessarts.org, her Insight Timer profile, and a Facebook group called Strategic Mindfulness Group. If you are experiencing persistent or distressing physical symptoms, it is worth speaking with a qualified medical professional alongside any contemplative practice.
