Another habit mindfulness encourages is a growing awareness of spacious, a sense that whatever comes along, whether it’s a thought or a feeling or a person or an unexpected turn of events, there’s more room for it than we know.
You know that uncomfortable feeling that you just can’t take anymore of something? Like your mind and gut are crowded or tight or swollen? A practice of spaciousness encourages us to take these feelings as valuable and in some way true--just not take them as the whole truth. There's more.
One summer I was rafting on a rain-swollen river with some friends and we got swept under two huge pipes that spanned the river. The collision and force of the water dumped us out and the raft got stuck between the pipes. When I tried to come up for air I smacked into the bottom of the raft and freaked out, pushing back down and flailing around for a space where the raft wasn’t blocking my way to air and sky and life. I made it. Whew! Two of my friends were holding onto the pipe and gave me a hand, but another friend was apparently still under water.
In a minute he popped up. Somebody said to him, ‘You sure can hold your breath a long time!’ But he told us he hadn’t been holding his breath. He came up under the raft like me but instead of panicking, he searched around under the raft for trapped air, took a moment to breathe, then pushed back down, and out, and up.
Practicing spaciousness is like that. Not freaking out. Having a certain trust that somewhere there’s air enough for another breath, another try.
Our feelings and the thoughts associated with them are powerful. They’ve helped teach us about where danger and pain and heartache lie. But life is always bigger than what we’ve experienced so far. Even when we're convinced we've run out of air or time or options, when we have powerful feelings that this is so, it's probably not so, and if we create a mental space to explore the possibility of this we often find a corresponding space in our situation. Over time we begin to trust this, to count on it, even to laugh about it.
It feels good to be wrong about our limits. We feel better as we get in the habit of not asking life to only be as big as we can currently tolerate. We do better as we learn to trust that our minds and hearts can grow to encompass more and more of the challenges and richness of life as it comes.
