How to Expand Your Capacity to Do and Receive More

What’s the secret to expanding your capacity to do more and receive more?

Here’s a secret: it’s not about working harder or pushing more.

One of the core metaphors of Katonah Yoga, the method developed by Nevine Michaan, is that of the body as a house. The first time I heard this, resonated deeply with my journey of yoga as a way to find home within myself, as well as with my role as a real estate broker.

This metaphor helps us understand the fundamentals of how to manifest our visions and expand our capacity. Let’s set up the framework by starting with a house tour.

Your Body as a House

Your “body house” has three floors.

First Floor: The Basement

The First Floor is your basement. In your body, your first floor is everything from the hips to the feet.

The first floor is your foundation — it’s the floor of being. It’s your stability, structure, strength, and mobility.

To get anywhere in the world, you must use your feet and legs, to step out into the world from your house.

In your car, you accelerate or stop using the gas or brake, which you control with your feet. If you ride a bike, you use your legs.

The basement contains your boiler room, laundry room, and garage. The boiler room is responsible for heating your whole house. The laundry room represents the things we must do repeatedly over time. No matter how well you do the laundry, it’s not a once-and-done. It’s a regularly repeated activity. Your garage is where you have your car that you drive out into the world.

The boiler room is the first fire of your house; it’s the primal fire; the fire of survival. In the body, it is the fire of the groin that ignites sexual desire.

The first floor represents the basics you need to survive: food, water, money, and sex — for reproduction.

If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you might see the commonality between the first floor and the bottom of the pyramid. The first floor is your security and basic needs.

Second Floor: Main Level

The second floor is the main level of our house. In the body, the second floor is your torso: everything from your shoulders to hips, including your arms and hands.

This is the floor of doing; it represents your ability and capacity. Your hands represent how you handle things, how you manipulate your circumstances, and what you can receive.

How much you can hold — your capacity — depends on how free your arms and hands are to hold them. If you’re carrying a heavy load, your hands aren’t free to accept more.

The second floor contains the kitchen, which is the fire of your heart. As I often point out to my yoga students, and real estate clients, the kitchen is always the heart of a home. When you have a party, everyone ends up in the kitchen.

This floor also contains your home office — where you write checks and sign contracts and type away on your computer — all things you do with your hands, obviously.

And it contains your “inner sanctuary” — the proverbial “room of your own”— where you can tuck away to meditate and listen to your intuition, the place of your “gut feelings.”

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this is the middle of the pyramid: connection and relationships. The second floor is how you reach out to others, how you hug and embrace, how you give and receive. It’s your capacity for receiving, doing, connecting, and loving.

Third Floor: Attic and Bedroom

The top floor of your house is everything above the shoulders.

This is the floor of seeing. It is your vision, your imagination, and your perspective. The third floor contains your bedroom, your attic, and your “personal observatory.”

Consider how elevating yourself above the level of the ground can help you see the landscape better.

The elevated level allows you to look out the window and get perspective, to see what’s “out there” for you that you might want to pursue.

The third floor contains the fire of your imagination.

This is which is where you set your goals, where you store your memories of your past that inform your future. It’s where you dream up big ideas for what you want to create.

In Maslow’s hierarchy, this floor corresponds to your higher purpose and individuation.

Every person on the planet has the same rooms in their houses insides, but it’s our capacity for seeing and imagining what could be that most differentiates us.

How to Manifest Your Visions

The dreams and visions of your third floor are only as good as your ability to implement them; otherwise you will end up living in your fantasies and delusions.

This is where you might hear many spiritual gurus talk about manifesting your vision.

Consider what that word means.

The root mani means hands. In order to manifest your visions you must actually do the doing. You have to bring the vision down to the main floor.

If you have vision of eating something nourishing, you must go to the kitchen and turn on the stove and cook it. If you have visions of creating a writing a book, you must go to your home office and sit at your computer and write.

How to Expand Your Capacity

As I often remind my students: nobody builds a house from the top down.

When building a house, a body, or anything else, we must start from the foundation. The way to expand your capacity is by developing your stability and structure.

Think about an outdoor deck: it’s capacity for how many people it can hold safely depends on how it’s built, how deep into the ground it is anchored, the strength of its foundation.

The same is true in the body: the capacity of your upper body is limited by the strength of your lower body.

This also applies to your work.

Your capacity for doing more of whatever you do — creating more content, taking on more clients, running a household — depends on the strength of your systems and the support you have.

To manifest your vision it’s not enough to try to do more; without a foundation of structure and support, your capacity will be limited.

In life, like a house, we must build from the foundation.

Consider what might that mean for you in whatever context you want to expand.