My last Friday Letter about ma - or the energetic open space between things - has acted as a bell, brining my attention towards vast fields of space found amidst, well…amidst everything. I am observing how people sit together but separate at cafes, immersed in their phones with voluminous blankets of air and white noise between them. I see space invisibly hugging trees, bending around buildings, shifting clouds. I see the space between shadows of leaves casting a luminous pattern on the wall in my bedroom at night.
More challenging for me has been to see space between the emotional reactions in my own mind. Many responses come like lightning, so fast it is almost impossible to consider that between this stimulus and response, there is also vast space. The recognition and my heightened focus on increasing my listening and response time has in fact changed my life. It feels like finally unlocking the code to achieving an everyday sense of equanimity and peace on a pretty regular basis.
This tending to spaciousness is in sharp contrast to a world that feels relentlessly on and traumatized. Of course slowing down to pay attention to my own mind has also revealed the traumas and relentlessly on state of my own mind. Through the library, I ran across the audiobook No Bad Parts, Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard Shwartz. At first, I felt a bit like I was opening a pandora’s box of characters held within my own mind, yet the more I listened to the book and the meditations, the more I was amazed at how Shwartz’s approach is helping me unlock healing and self-acceptance of all of the parts of myself in a way that is often immediate and also very natural. His approach feels restorative. For me, it has been an incredible tool to create spaciousness within myself.
Until next Friday!
Be well, breathe, read, and make some art!
Jen