Mountains are powerful icons of spaciousness, ever-present reminders for those of us who live in western NC. Everywhere we look we see mountains, and they rarely look the same two days in a row or sometimes even two hours in a row. Sometimes fog drifts around their shoulders, other times you can actually watch billowing clouds form on the peaks. In cold weather just a few thousand feet above where most of us live it can be snowing. Five months out of the year we can watch the high ridges turning white while down here on the mountains’ feet it may not even be raining.
We human beings have our own weather patterns too, our own ecologies. Happy can turn to sad or mad in an instant. Sometimes anxieties linger in the gut even while the brain is processing some new information that makes us optimistic.
Carl Jung said that inner work can be like taking a long hike in the Alps. In the village where we start it may be raining. Lightening may be flashing and thunder echoing across the valleys, but after we’ve walked for awhile, we often come out of the storm. You might still see the lightening and hear the thunder behind and below, but we’ve moved on to another space. The storm hasn’t ended, only we’re not in it anymore.
The practice of spaciousness is regularly taking these kinds of hikes through the regions of our own hearts and minds. We learn not to ignore either the lighting within or the sun above the clouds. Both exist at the same time and in the same space—the same space when our perspective grows a little bigger. The practice of spaciousness is the growing of this very perspective, and it can be very exhilarating exercise.
