Do you live in a tight, confined prison-like container of continuous thought-stream?
Are you held captive – mesmerized/consumed/distracted – by the stories and chatter that cyclically run through your head?
Is there space to breath in this mind-prison you filter and experience life through?
Do you find yourself gripping “good feeling” thoughts and sensations, and attempting to distract or escape “bad feeling” ones?
Living in the toying-play, the push/pull, gripping/avoidance, non-stop chatter game of the mind-thought-stream is an awfully painful place to reside.
Where’s the oxygen to breath here?
Where’s the connectivity here?
Is it possible to really feel “at home” with yourself when lost in the loops of spinning thoughts?
Can you really feel connected, and deeply relate to others when consumed by the circling mind-chatter?
Entertaining thoughts are the very smoke screens that keep you from feeling connected to yourself, and deeply in touch and connected to others.
It’s quite the oxygen-depleting desert.
Thoughts are actually never the problem.
Identifying AS (with) thought is where suffering is born and breeds.
Identifying AS (with) thought is the essence of feeling the grip of being in a prison you can’t seem to escape.
Ever feel like you want to peel away from the body and escape your own head?
We suffer in direct proportion to the belief that we ARE the thoughts in our head.
The more tightly bound we are to the thoughts, stories, images, and beliefs that pass through, the smaller, tighter, and more uncomfortable the mental prison cell is that we experience.
Feel the confinement? ..the discomfort, the dis-ease?
Crave some spacious freedom from the mental chatter, internal war, and constant dialogue of should/shouldn’t, do/don’t, right/wrong, good/bad, fear, etc?
It’s never a person, place, or thing we need to escape from to experience the freedom and space we seek.
It’s the mental prison cell we yearn to leave, we yearn to dis-identify from.
It takes no “time” to leave this prison.
There’s no lock and key, you can leave at any point.
In fact, we come and go from being in this prison to experiencing freedom throughout every day.
Step back.
Notice the space, the silence, between words that arise.
What would it be like to live from here more often?
Living between the words – the spaciousness that you are – is where your freedom from the mental prison walls resides.
What might life be like if you saw yourself from a much greater vantage than the small prison cell of the mind?
What might it be like to live from a spaciousness where there are no assumptions, story telling, making meaning out of nothing, heavy mind chatter of opinion, judgment, criticism, constant evaluation, division, separation, wall-building, internal mental wars, blablabla?
How big is this spacious container, between and holding, all letters, words, and sentences?
The more you see yourself beyond the confines of the limited body-mind, the larger your capacity/your container to hold/allow anything that shows up to arise and fall.
Here there’s no need to avoid anything, to block out aspects of life, nor suppress that which is “heavy” and “unbearable.”
All thoughts can come and go, without you being captivated and dragged down and around like a dog on a leash.
Fear, devastation, despair, terror, deep pain …all of this has the space to arise when the container is experienced as large enough for anything and everything to come and go.
In this spaciousness, nothing is repressed, denied, unaccepted …everything is allowed to show up, to be fully felt, and to pass through as it naturally does.
There’s insurmountable space for everything!
Thoughts, feelings, sensations can come and go and be felt, as it has plenty of room to show up, be seen and experienced, and move through with unsnagged ease and space.
These “heavy” thoughts and feelings are not who you are.
When you see yourself as you truly are – spacious, open, infinite, limitless – fearlessness arises as there is capacity to see/allow any “heavy” thoughts and feelings to be present, linger as they may, and dissolve when they do.
When you see yourself as limitless space, the capacity to simply be present – to anything that shows up – is infinite.
The clearer you are about the vast, infinite container that you are, the greater the capacity to “hold” anything in the presence of “another’s” deepest, darkest, debilitating pain and fear.
In the breadth of this container, nothing sticks, nothing is shocking, nothing is “too much,” nothing is shamed or denied.
There is room for it all.
It’s all fully welcomed. All, already fully “allowed” exactly as it is.
What’s it like to be around someone whose container to “hold it all” is huge, vast, infinite?
What might it be like to be with someone who sees their big container, and experiences life beyond the mind’s prison cell?
What’s it like to feel someone’s capacity to be fearless, calm, and still, amidst any appearing human storm arising – be it circumstance, people, place?
Have you ever been around someone that you feel you can say anything to and it won’t startle him/her? …as if nothing you say or do really ruffles their feathers.
What’s it like to feel this freedom – to have the infinite space – to show up however you show up – with all your crazy colors – and feel it all accepted, all okay, and all non-jarring to this person?
What is it about this person that allows this depth and breadth of capacity to exist?
“Deep sea” calm – touching Vast Stillness – Presence that you are, is that which is unafraid to experience anything that arises.
Is it possible to experience this “deep sea” calm amidst the surface of the human storm(s)?
Your freedom is right here …in the depth and breath of your container.
How aware are you of your infinite, vastness?
Is there room to breath, to be with it all, and to hold/allow anything that shows up?
What if we saw ourselves as beyond the limitations of this body-mind space?
Your freedom depends on this discovery.
How big is the container you live in?
Carole Griggs, Ph.D. 2014 ©
