Shifting in to Spaciousness

Lately I've been enjoying spaciousness which I experience as a vast opening in my mind that ripples into the rest of me. The relief I feel in this experience is like going into the shade on a hot and humid summer day in July.  It is why people use bold words like freedom & liberation to describe the potential fruits of having a meditation practice at all. For me though, it feels like an unexpected gift. It feels like grace.

I remember when reading the cofounder of The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts Sharon Salzberg's book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, she described the image of spaciousness as being like the clear blue sky in this photo above from my backyard by the lilac bush. That image is so very helpful to me, and I've internalized it in a way that I can call up the image when I am struggling.

The difficulty comes for me though, in what Ms. Salzberg describes in her book, with my tendency to lose my focused attention on the spaciousness of the sky, and instead, I zoom in on one single bird or cloud.  Which, in meditation terms, would mean I get distracted by my thoughts, feelings or body sensations (though the latter is a less common distraction for me).  Or in other words, I can't see the proverbial forest for the trees.

In the last few weeks I had noticed more and more of this, both in and out of meditation.  Less spacious sky, more birds and clouds.   In fact, in the midst of a emotional meltdown several weeks ago where I was thoroughly steeped in my dilemma du jour, a good friend kindly asked me: Have you been meditating regularly?

Which of course I hadn't been, not consistently anyway, and I'm someone for whom frequency and consistency matters.  Not because there is any heightened moral value to being a well-disciplined meditator. It does not mean anything good or bad about me or my behavior. What I do notice though, and after 4 years of having a meditation practice apparently those around me notice as well, is that I become more rigid and overwhelmed when I am not meditating regularly.  It's like a tightness begins to take hold.  I easily get fixated or preoccupied with small and large problems, and it is more difficult for me to clearly identify solutions.  In other words, the spaciousness feels lost to me.

Then, to make matters worse, I react to my reaction.  Rather than having a warm compassionate response to my growing suffering and difficulty, I can become quite critical of myself- harsh even.  Which in turn leads to more preoccupation with those birds and clouds and less focused attention on the vast open sky. It can be a quite a vicious cycle.

I heard Sharon Salzberg refer to this critical internal response to ourselves as akin to Lucy in the Peanuts comic.  She said this in a YouTube video of a talk she gave in New York City that I listened to during my commute to work.  The comic strip went like this: Lucy walks up to Charlie Brown and says, "You want to know what your problem is?" "What" Charlie Brown responds (so innocently, as always, waiting for some great insight, but not considering the source). And Lucy replies in her ever so curt manner, "You!"

As Sharon Salzberg tells it, her Lucy voice has never entirely gone away, even after 40 years of a meditation practice.  However, Ms. Salzberg's response to her Lucy voice has changed, dramatically. After years of practice, Ms. Salzberg says she now can calmly, humorously, say, "Chill out Lucy."

It makes total sense of course.  If you are already wound up tight like a spring, why on earth would you go in with a sense of mean-spiritedness? I wouldn't do that to someone else. I wouldn't kick someone when they are already down, but I sometimes do it to myself.  I did a few weeks ago in the midst of that meltdown.  And I notice I definitely do it more when I am not engaged in my regular meditation practice.

In Sylvia Boorstein's book, That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist, she says in her chapter "Silence is a Fence for Wisdom," that having a disciplined meditation practice can cultivate  what she refers to as the natural mind, and she asserts that "the natural mind, unclouded by tension, reacts to pain with compassion. It just does."

I love this assertion.  Because it is saying that by engaging in the practice of  meditation, or what I've heard Sharon Salzberg call "skills training" which is very appealing to the psychotherapist inside of me, I might have increased capacity to locate that "unclouded" or spacious place inside of me on a more regular basis- the fruit of which will be a surge of compassion toward self and other. 

Doesn't that sound like the perfect remedy for the vicious circular cycle I just described above?  Not a way out of the cycle, but a way through.  A way to step off of the merry-go-round. And then do it again, and again, and again. Until I have a new habit of warmly responding to my wandering attention, that has shifted away from the clear blue sky and onto that single (or whole fleet) bird moving across my scope of awareness, with a kind and soft touch. 

I imagine it like the opening scene of the movie City of Angels where the angel, played by actor Nicholas Cage, is seen gently putting his hands on the shoulders of a airport control operator when the worker's mind has wandered away from the important task at hand of safely landing planes to his own  personal problems.  But with the touch of the angel, the controller's attention shifts back to the space in front of him, versus the distraction.

So for me, with the gentle nudge of my friend who asked: have you been meditating regularly?, that very next day, I got back on the saddle again, and I took the photo above to remember it is possible to shift back  in to spaciousness with compassion.

How do you experience spaciousness? How does compassion aid you in this endeavor toward spaciousness?