Wishing You Good Space
Our practice – on the mat, on the cushion, and in the world – provides abundant opportunity to explore spaciousness. Where we find space depends on where we are looking. In the physical body, we seek to “create space” by means of our asana and movement practices. The word and its associated phrases are used casually and frequently by yoga teachers, myself included: open the hips, free the shoulders, lengthen the hamstrings, create space in the upper chest, etc.
The physical aspect of yoga practice ideally (sometimes, but not always) opens doorways to cultivating spaciousness in heart and mind. The Dalai Lama says that practicing with the opening of heart and mind are like “two wings of a bird.” Both are needed to progress along the path. Cultivating openness in the heart allows us to expand our offerings of karuna (compassion) and metta or maitri (loving-kindness) toward ourselves and others.
It’s a bit inaccurate to speak of creating spaciousness in the mind. This is because we don’t need to create a spacious mind; each of us already has inherently within us a vast, open awareness, ready and waiting for us to lay down our weary, worry-ridden, long-suffering baggage and let. it. go.
Wisdom teachers often use the sky as a means to explain the inherent openness of mind. Many things travel through the sky. None are permanent. And yet the sky itself, vast and open, remains. Many things travel through the mind. None are permanent. And yet the mind itself, vast and open, remains. As the beloved Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön reminds us: “You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.”
What an amazing realization this is: that feelings arise as inevitably as clouds, but also pass just as inevitably.
Of course, understanding this to be true is just one step in the right direction. The work…the practice of opening to the mind’s spaciousness…comes in not clinging to the pretty fluffy clouds we wish would never leave and in not pushing against, or closing our eyes to, the dark heavy clouds we don’t like. Either way, they’re clouds…they’ll move on in their own good time.
And yet it is so difficult to accept that things arise and pass and that we just really don’t have control over any of it. (I know from whence I speak here, as a Grade-A control freak.) It is SO difficult. It’s much easier to just stretch your hamstrings or stand on your head or whatever you consider an “advanced” asana practice to be. There are plenty of people who practice yoga for years, who have exquisitely beautiful physical practices, who have undoubtedly created abundant spaciousness in their bodies. But the harder work of creating real openness in heart and mind just never seems to be given as much bandwidth.
And yet the big sky mind is still there, should we choose to investigate. When we do, we find that there’s room for it all, room to sit with things that don’t go the way we’d planned, for example – the things that cause us to experience dukkha. The word often gets translated as “suffering,” but it doesn’t have to be as dramatic as all that. Dukkha is also translated as “unsatisfactoriness,” and more literally, it simply means “bad space.” All sorts of things can land us in a bad space: a body that isn’t performing as we want it to, weather that isn’t doing what we expected it to…and that’s just the small potatoes stuff.
But the big sky mind doesn’t judge; it doesn’t say, “Oh, you really shouldn’t be suffering over this silly thing.” It just says, “I see that this has caused you to be in a bad space. Let’s wait awhile together and keep an eye on it so it doesn’t need to snowball further. It will pass.”
In this way, we eventually return to a state of sukha, or easefulness. In our physical yoga practice, we sit in sukhasana, the cross-legged “pose of ease.” In our mindfulness practice, through the lens of big sky mind, we see that we can rest in a more literal translation of the word; we can be in “good space.”