As we travel further along the path, something begins to open within us.
Space.
The space between a feeling and a reaction. Between what happens and the story we tell ourselves about what happened. Between another person’s behavior and our need to make it mean something about us.
Meditation introduces us to this inner spaciousness. Stillness gives us somewhere to stand.
And from that stillness, patience begins to grow. Humility begins to grow.
We begin to understand ourselves.
Perhaps more importantly, we become less afraid of what we find.
This is where our first real relationship on the path begins. With ourselves.
Before we can love another person freely, we have to learn how to sit kindly with the person who is always here. And that can take some practice.
We are often astonishingly hard on ourselves. We criticize. Judge. Compare. Demand. Replay mistakes. Argue with what we feel. Try to become someone more acceptable than the person sitting here right now.
Meditation begins another kind of relationship. Instead of immediately trying to fix ourselves, we learn to stay with ourselves. Kindly. Patiently. Without abandoning ourselves every time something uncomfortable appears. We give ourselves room.
Inner spaciousness.
And in that space, we begin learning one of the great skills of the path: not immediately reacting to our own minds.
Something happens. Someone disappoints us. Someone doesn’t respond the way we hoped.
We don’t get what we wanted. We become frightened. Jealous. Angry. Frustrated. Anxious. Ashamed. Depressed. Maybe even filled with hatred or violent thoughts.
Ordinarily, the mind immediately gets busy. It explains. Accuses. Defends. Predicts. Rehearses. It creates conversations that haven’t happened and catastrophes that may never happen. It gathers evidence. It remembers every similar injury.
Within minutes, one difficult moment can become an entire universe.
But somewhere underneath that universe was something much simpler.
A feeling. A reaction. A charge of energy.
This is where practice begins.
Attachment carries a charge. Desire, expectation, jealousy, anger, fear all carry a charge.
The charge itself is simply energy.
What happens next matters.
We can take that energy and build a world with it.
We can turn it into blame, justification, fantasy, argument, resentment.
We can construct dialogues in our heads, saying what we wish we had said and imagining what someone else might say back.
Thought generates emotion. Emotion generates more thought.
The energy keeps feeding the story and the story keeps feeding the energy. Soon we’re no longer responding to what actually happened. We’re responding to a world our mind has created around it.
The original moment disappeared a long time ago. And we’re spinning. This is the vortex.
Mindfulness gives us another possibility.
Instead of feeding the energy, we sit down beside it. Quietly.
Anger. Jealousy. Fear. Loneliness. Disappointment.
We can name what is happening without condemning it. Not: I shouldn’t feel this. Not: I’m terrible for feeling this. And not: Someone else made me feel this, and now they must fix it.
Simply: This is what is here.
And then we stay. We feel the actual feeling rather than the story surrounding it.
Where is it? What does it feel like? What happens if I don’t run from it? What happens if I don’t explain it? What happens if I don’t make anyone wrong?
We breathe. We remain present.
And something remarkable begins to happen. The emotion moves. Because emotions move. Energy moves.
Everything moves when we stop continually rebuilding it.
This is kindness toward ourselves.
Not indulging every thought. Not agreeing with every feeling. Not telling ourselves that everything we do is fine.
Kindness means allowing ourselves to experience what is actually happening without turning our own mind against us.
We learn that we can feel jealousy without becoming jealousy. We can experience anger without becoming anger. We can know fear without handing fear the steering wheel. We can be disappointed without constructing an enemy. We can hurt without making our hurt the center of the universe.
We discover that there is room around everything. And gradually, that room becomes freedom.
Humility grows here.
Because humility isn’t thinking poorly of ourselves. It is seeing ourselves clearly enough that we no longer have to defend every reaction.
We can say: I’m jealous, I’m scared, I wanted something, I expected something, I’m hurt.
And because we don’t need to make ourselves wrong for being human, we also don’t need to make someone else wrong in order to justify what we’re feeling.
That’s an enormous shift.
We begin taking responsibility for our own state of mind. Not responsibility for everything that happens to us. Responsibility for what we do with what happens.
And then our relationships begin to change.
We become more patient. There is a little more time before we react. A little more curiosity before we conclude. A little more room before we decide what someone meant.
We stop requiring other people to manage our inner world.
Someone can disappoint us without becoming a bad person. Someone can disagree with us without becoming an enemy. Someone can choose differently than we hoped without having betrayed the story we had written for them.
People become freer around us because we are becoming freer inside ourselves. And that changes love.
So much of what we call love is entangled with expectation.
Love me this way. Respond this way. Need me this much. Understand me. Choose me. Don’t change. Don’t leave.
But when we begin seeing our expectations clearly, something loosens.
Attachment begins losing some of its authority.
We don’t stop caring.
Quite the opposite.
We become capable of caring more deeply because love is no longer carrying quite so many demands.
We begin discovering what it means to love another person without constantly trying to arrange them around our desires.
To allow them their path. Their mistakes. Their discoveries. Their changes. Their freedom.
And to allow ourselves the same.
This is where love begins becoming spacious.
First we learn to give ourselves room. Then we discover that we can give that room to others. And eventually we begin giving that room to life itself.
Because life doesn’t obey our expectations either.
Life changes. People arrive. People leave. Doors open. Doors close. Bodies flourish and bodies fail. Plans succeed. Plans collapse.
There is extraordinary beauty. There is terrible loss.
There are days when everything seems illuminated and days when we cannot see the trail ten feet ahead.
The mind wants to label all of it immediately.
Good. Bad. Success. Failure. What I wanted. What should never have happened.
But awareness can remain for another moment before deciding. And sometimes, in that moment, we discover life itself.
Unlabeled. Unexplained. Alive.
Then our relationship with existence begins changing.
Instead of continually demanding that life conform to us, we begin listening to it. Working with it. Moving with it.
We become more interested in what a moment can teach us than in whether it matches what we wanted.
Every difficulty contains information. Every attachment reveals something. Every reaction shows us where consciousness has become caught.
Every person who touches something unresolved in us illuminates another place where we can become free.
Nothing is wasted.
The beautiful moments awaken us. The difficult moments awaken us. Love awakens us. Loss awakens us. Joy awakens us.
Even our own ridiculous minds, spinning themselves into knots and then wondering who tied them, can awaken us.
Once we begin seeing life this way, the game changes.
We stop asking only: How do I make life give me what I want?
And begin asking: What is life showing me?
Where am I caught? Where can I open? What can become freer here?
Then relationship itself becomes part of the path.
Relationship with ourselves, with another, with the world, with life.
Each one showing us another face of the same possibility: to remain present, to remain open, to become less entangled, to love without grasping, and to meet what comes with increasing awareness.
Life was never standing in the way of awakening. Life was the path all along.