When someone is meeting difficult conditions, the often-given, well-meaning advice is to take space.
Some of you may know that my father passed away two weeks ago--today--after a decade-long, insanely rigorous fight with cancer. The loss has been deep and profound--simultaneously full of sadness and love--and I know I'm just at the beginning of a new relationship to my life without him in form.
As such, I have had many people reach out to me in the past couple of weeks, knowing that I've been experiencing loss, grief, sadness, and any/all of the wildly-vast range of emotions that comes from losing someone so close. And all have encouraged me, in some way, to take space for myself to heal, to grieve, to be, to feel, to breathe.
At times, I am able to do that; to find moments of space within my very full life to sit, to rest, to reflect. But this kind of space is a rarity, perhaps even a luxury. This kind of space requires something outside of you to allow for it—someone else to make the meals, drive the kids, do the work, write the newsletter, meet with the clients, buy the groceries, go to the doctor’s appointments--so that you have the time to carve out space to allow for the (emotional, physiological) experience you are having. For many of us, this isn’t always >>or ever<< possible.
So what to do?
Well…as I have been wrestling with this the past few weeks, I’ve discovered that there's a difference between "external space" and "internal space." Though external space requires something outside of you to be different, internal space does not. Internal space is within our capacity to access always. Internal space comes from an undoing of the contraction, the resistance, the efforting to push away from things as they are. Internal space is experienced as we soften the inner edges of our bodies, when we allow our eyes and jaws and bellies to soften, when we unclench around our hearts. This space exists alongside the knowing that we have capacity to meet the moments of our lives, no matter what they contain.
To be clear, neither external nor internal space can change the actual conditions we face in our lives. However, both can change our relationship to ourselves and to those conditions. And that changes everything.
Upcoming opportunities for practice, guidance and growth:
Saturday Sit - THIS Saturday - 9/7, 9-10am at The Yellow House
Guided Meditation - Fridays, 12-12:30pm (9/11-10/25) at The Well Collective
1:1 Coaching - now accepting new clients for WINTER
Small Group Coaching - now enrolling for Fall/Winter Session
Fall Meditation Retreat - Oct 18-20 - waitlist only!
With Love,
