Tuesday, August 5, 9890

Spaciousness

When we sense who we are, without ideas about our body, nationality, wealth, social status, gender, etc, we feel very light. The burden of maintaining an image has been lifted. We feel spacious.

This sense of spaciousness is often misinterpreted as emptiness. We are conditioned to be full: our minds are full of ideas, our bellies are full of food, and our homes are full of possessions. When we let go of them we feel the opposite of full. Since we have believed for so long that fullness is a good thing, we might believe that not being full is bad. So we view our sense of lightness as negative and seek to fill ourselves once again. We do this by sustaining our old ideas, or by grabbing gratification in the form of food, alcohol, television, sex, possessions, compliments, or whatever we feel we need to “fill” us.

We are not empty. We are spacious. There’s a huge difference. Emptiness implies a lack of something. Spaciousness is a wonderful lightness of being that does not need anything to fill it. It is the pure, unburdened, unconstrained self.