Mapping the Terrain: Ruptures That Have Revealed Spaciousness and Light
For my husband, who sees me and stands beside me.
For Carolyn Bluemle, CIYT, who taught me to reconnect my mind and body.
—
Every life has ruptures — moments when the terrain shifts beneath us and what we thought was solid ground gives way. As an educator, I have lived those ruptures in two places at once: in the work itself, and in the personal life I carry into it through my actions, my behaviors, my biases, and my capacity to be present. They matter because they are never contained. What I have not examined in myself has shaped how I see the children in front of me, how I respond to them, how available I am to the nurturing and responsive care that young children depend on— and how I see and work alongside the colleagues who share that work with me. Learning to map and study those ruptures — rather than move past them — is what this essay is about.
For me, that mapping has always begun with svadhyaya — a concept in yoga philosophy translated from Sanskrit as self-study (Iyengar, 1993, Sutra II.32). Svadhyaya is a disciplined kind of noticing — a way of studying one's own terrain over time, across experience, across rupture.
I have always been drawn to maps. As a child, I remember visiting AAA with my parents, selecting road maps, unfolding them across a table or the front hood of the car, tracing highways with a finger, circling destinations, noting coordinates. Before any journey, I studied the terrain ahead — bought the tourist books, marked routes, noted destinations, all with the intent of preparing myself for what was coming. There was something in that preparation that felt like a form of care, a way of taking seriously that the journey would have texture and difficulty and surprise, and that knowing the terrain in advance was not the same as controlling it.
No such map exists for a life in teaching, or for a life more broadly. Teacher education does not offer one. Neither does anyone else, though a strong relational network — people who have traveled similar terrain and are willing to say so honestly — can begin to shape something like one. What I have come to understand is that svadhyaya (Iyengar, 1993), practiced over time and across rupture, is how I have built my own.
One way to read that terrain is through the body, which holds what linear methods cannot reach. For me that instrument has been yogasana — though it may be running, cooking, rock climbing, or any practice that roots you in the present moment of your own experience. I had been studying my own terrain long before I had the language for it — in a preschool classroom and a friendship, before I finished my doctorate, before I had either the contemplative instrument or the cartographic method to name what I was doing. By the time I entered higher education, yogasana had deepened the practice, and the question that had been forming since Milo's classroom had sharpened: how do teachers, as real people, access and work through difficult experiences so that they can teach?
That question sent me back to school, back to the mat, and eventually to the cartographic work that would follow. Padilla-Petry et al. (2021) found that when teachers mapped their own learning through cartographic rather than linear methods, the resulting narratives held multiple directions at once without forcing one to precede another — which is precisely what embodied, contemplative practice makes possible. I have been mapping my own terrain this way across a preschool classroom, a friendship, a body, and a sequence of institutions. This essay is where those lineages meet.
Caquard and Cartwright (2014) describe the central challenge of narrative cartography as capturing time, emotion, ambiguity, and contradiction simultaneously — the mixing of scales, of joy and pain, of what was real and what was still becoming. Semetsky (2006), writing on Deleuze, offers a distinction that has stayed with me: this kind of map does not consist of units but of dimensions and directions, and every new configuration of its connections produces something genuinely new.
What I want to add to that is this: the dimensions and directions do not erase what came before. There is a continuous self moving through them, punctuated by ruptures that make the terrain newly navigable each time. The four coordinates that follow are not steps. They are the places where the ground shifted — and where, in the sitting with what had shifted, something opened.
—
One of the first coordinates I mapped was a preschool classroom. The question that experience left me with — what does a system have to be in order for people in it not to fall through? — is one I have traced in full in When Supporting Families and Supporting Teachers Aren't Separate Problems. What I carry here is not the story but the understanding that I did not yet have what I needed to answer it. That coordinate sent me back to school.
A second coordinate was a friendship that ended when I refused to be less than myself. It happened in the year before I got married, with someone I had hoped would become a sister. What I did not anticipate was how far the rupture would travel — not just that friendship, but the wider circle it anchored, and my own trust in myself. When you stop trusting yourself you look outward, and everyone outside is looking from their own position. None of those accounts were mine. The only closure available was always going to come from examining the self in relation to others — and it took me a long time to find my way back to that instrument. I forgive myself for not knowing sooner that doing your best inside something genuinely hard is not the same as failing. That clarity moved through other close relationships where the same pattern had long been operating. Naming it created room for something different: relationships built on genuine reciprocity, the kind I was finally ready to choose and commit to.
Another coordinate was my body, and the years-long fertility journey I wrote about in Unraveling Resistance in My Journey to Truth. What it taught me — through Iyengar yogasana, through pranayama, through the mat I kept returning to even when I could barely meet myself there — was that you cannot create inner action without first placing yourself accurately in the present moment.
The fourth, and likely not the last, was the institution — five of them, across as many roles — each of which found a way to make the work I was actually trying to build invisible. I know this because I drew it once: the tenure track as a jail, stark black and white, vertical pillars, a literal cage — an image I wrote about in Life Mapping My Faculty Experience. My hands named what I could not yet say. What that rupture asked of me, and what it ultimately clarified, I worked through in The Myna Bird Knows Her Name. What it left behind was the clearest question I have ever carried: not just what does a system have to be, but what do I have to be — to be visible, recognized, and welcomed.
—
Together, these four coordinates became my bardo — the intermediate terrain between what was and what is becoming, where the old reality was no longer available and the new one had not yet taken shape (Pema Khandro Rinpoche, n.d.). Each left a samskara — an impression shaped by experience that becomes the pattern I carry forward, as instruction (Iyengar, 1993). My work has been in sitting with them — seeing what each rupture revealed, understanding what it had been asking, and releasing what no longer served the terrain ahead. Rupture opens into something, if we let it: a presence that is no longer defended against what was, but responsive to what is (Pema Khandro Rinpoche, n.d.).
For me, that sitting has happened on the mat — the first place I abandon when the rupture is too raw, which is how I know it is where I most need to return. Yogasana is my contemplative instrument — the way I access what I feel deeply but cannot yet articulate in words: the impressions the ruptures left, the patterns they formed, the way they live in my body. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali call this the steadfast effort to still these fluctuations: tatra sthitau yatnah abhyasah — (Sutra I.13; Iyengar, 1993). Each time I return to yogasana, I find a way to see myself — and in pranayama, in the still point between inhalation and exhalation where there is no absence, only arrival (kumbhaka; Iyengar, 1981), I find my ground … and then my next step.
The sorrowless, luminous light — viśokā vā jyotiṣmatī (Sutra 1.36; Iyengar, 1993) — has been my guiding light through all of it. It does not promise the absence of sorrow. It points toward something that exists alongside it — a light that is not diminished by what my samskaras carry. Nothing is permanent. Not my ruptures, not my grief, not the self each bardo asked me to release. That impermanence is not a loss. It is the permission to stay open to what is still becoming. What has accumulated across enough of those pauses is spaciousness — a capacity I have spent years cultivating, and am still strengthening, to hold complexity without contracting around it. It is my ground, always present, always shifting.
Each rupture asked me to see the invisible pattern, name what no one else was naming, release what was no longer true, and return to the question underneath. That is the work of contemplative mapping — applied now to the systems I work with rather than only to myself. The samskaras of a system (Iyengar, 1993) are the impressions left by every unexamined rupture that no one has yet named. I know how to find them because I have spent a lifetime finding my own. What I bring to that work is the capacity to sit in the bardo of a system without rushing it toward resolution.
—
Svadhyaya does not promise that self-study will be comfortable. It promises that it will be true (Gupta, 2019; Iyengar, 1993).
I have rolled out the mat again — meeting myself where I am, with love and dedication, setting aside self-doubt, embracing the light that has always been within me, and choosing company that does not want to dim it.
The return is not to what was. It is to who I am.
Viśokā vā jyotiṣmatī. The sorrowless light. Always present. Always steady. Always mine.
—
References
Caquard, S., & Cartwright, W. (2014). Narrative cartography: From mapping stories to the narrative of maps and mapping. The Cartographic Journal, 51(2), 101–106. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/0008704114Z.000000000130
Gupta, S. S. (2019). Unraveling resistance in my journey to truth. Yoga Samachar, 23(1), 47–48. https://issuu.com/iynaus/docs/22_yoga_samachar_ss2019/s/11206351
Gupta, S. S. (2025). The myna bird knows her name. Lion's Roar — Bodhi Leaves. https://www.lionsroar.com/the-myna-bird-knows-her-name/
Iyengar, B. K. S. (1981). Light on pranayama: The yogic art of breathing. Crossroad Publishing Company.
Iyengar, B. K. S. (1993). Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Thorsons.
Padilla-Petry, P., Hernández-Hernández, F., & Sánchez-Valero, J.-A. (2021). Using cartographies to map time and space in teacher learning in and outside school. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 1–12. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1609406921992906
Pema Khandro Rinpoche. (n.d.). The four points of letting go in the bardo. Lion's Roar. https://www.lionsroar.com/four-points-for-letting-go-bardo/
Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze, education, and becoming. Sense Publishers.
Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D., is the founder of Ecological Learning Partners LLC.
