Creating Mental Space
by meditative - July 21st, 2016.Filed under: Insights For Mindfulness Training.
Our minds are constantly engaged… thinking, planning, analyzing, ruminating, anticipating, reminiscing, etc. As the mind relentlessly runs our internal streams of thoughts, images & memories, our perspective reflexively seems to narrow and constrict. We feel ‘boxed’ in by the walls of an internal ‘dialogue’ that leaves little or no space for the unexpected or unanticipated events of life. Without the mental space to ‘hold’ these events in awareness, we mitigate our capacity to respond skillfully and appropriately.
Creating mental space helps us to disconnect from our mind’s cognitive vortex. It quiets & relaxes us as we become still within ourselves. Here & now, we gently open up into our awareness… breathing & visualizing its emptiness & expansiveness all around us. Like the clear, blue sky… our awareness is full of empty space… vast & open to accept & receive whatever may arise. In this field of open awareness, the mind appears to meld and melt away as free attention seems to become space itself.
As best you can, see if you can simply breathe & be with this mental spaciousness. How does this ‘openness’ and ‘vastness’ feel in your body as a whole? Does your mind appear to open up… and your body to relax? How might creating this mental space affect your ability to respond to the unexpected and unanticipated?
Creating mental space can give us the freedom to make more appropriate choices. Take pause in awareness and experience it for yourself.