The Gift of Cultivating Spaciousness

“Spaciousness.” Let what that word evokes fill your whole being. Perhaps say it out loud in a long, drawn out way.  This is how you feel when you have just fallen in love and your loved one can’t do anything wrong, even if he or she squeezes the toothpaste from the center!  Nothing seems to bother you. Why?  Because your heart is open and you have stepped into the world of spaciousness. Now, six months into the new relationship, it drives you crazy that the toothpaste is not squeezed from the bottom.  This is because your conditioned self takes over again bringing tightness and reaction instead of spaciousness.

When you were very young, you lived in spaciousness. Life danced through you. Then slowly, as you reacted to the challenges in your life, you got tighter and smaller until you ended up in a bubble of struggle.  This is where most people live, cut off from being fully alive!

We all long to be awake to life.  We long for the spaciousness of being, for it is our natural state.  In order to see this, recognize that life loves spaciousness, in fact, it permeates life.  Take a moment to open to the vastness all around you. Right now, as you are reading, there are stars above you, below you, to the left and to the right.  And to crack open any sense of limitation in your mind, let in the fact that there are one hundred billion stars in just our galaxy alone and that the star closest to us is 25 trillion miles away!  So much space! Now go within. You are made up of seventy million intelligent beings called cells and each one is made up of between fifty to one hundred million atoms, and science has shown us that atoms are mostly filled with space. So you are mostly space!

You probably rarely connect to the joy of spaciousness because the storyteller in your head is afraid of it. Instead of connecting with life, it wants to control it.  Is that bad or wrong?  No, that is just where we are in evolution. The Universe is constantly evolving and human beings are a relatively new species. Right now most human beings are caught in their heads, believing everything their storyteller tells them. If it says “I am sad,” they believe they are sad.  As more and more human beings awaken, Life is asking us to bring more space to the storyteller (“Oh, anger is here,” rather than “I am angry.”) so we can connect with life rather than being lost in a chronic bubble of struggle. The joy of unhooking from the bubble of struggle and being present for your life is what I call, ‘coming home’.

Cultivating spaciousness brings forth more groundedness and openness to Life.  One of the ways to know more space is through your breath. You are probably holding your breath much of the time. Don’t try to take deep breaths, for that creates tension. Rather, open to long slow out-breaths, what I call “letting-go breaths.” You may even want to give a long sigh, “Ahhhhh” as you breathe out. Another way to cultivate spaciousness is step outside of yourself when you are feeling scared (or whatever feeling is coming up for you), and rather than saying, “I am afraid,” try saying, “Fear is here” or “I see you, fear.”  This brings space around the fear rather than identifying with it and getting caught up in its perspective. You can also simply ask Life:  Show me how to cultivate spaciousness.

Sometimes you can’t do any of these things because the old system of fear is so strong that everything just tightens down. I have found that the best thing to do in that situation is to turn it over to life through an open-ended question. This is the kind of question where you are not looking for an answer, for when you are not stuck in your head trying to find an answer, life can get a word in edgewise!  You might say, “What am I ready to see here?” or “What do I need to do or be in this situation that is for my highest good?”

And when you are still stuck in struggle, you can physically move it – walk around the block, do jumping jacks, watch a funny movie and laugh.  There are many ways you can release the energy that was bound up inside of you when you were very young.  You can know the joy of your energy flowing freely again, resting in the spaciousness of simply being.