More on spaciousness

I want to share with you a bit more of what John Welwood has to say about the role of space in letting go of old ego-clinging. This is from his book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening:

Whenever we allow ourselves to experience some difficult feeling, or whenever an old identity starts to loosen up, the larger space of being that this feeling or identity had been obscuring starts to be revealed. This is a challenging moment, because it can often feel as though we are falling through space. If we resist space at this point, the falling becomes terrifying, and we may try to abort the experience, "pulling ourselves together" by contracting and tensing. This prevents us from freeing ourselves from the old fixation that was starting to dissolve.

Yet if we can learn to relax into the expansiveness that is opening up, then we may begin to discover space as support: The ground of our being actually hold us up. We may feel extremely light at the same time, as though we are floating on a bed of clouds. Once we have made this discovery, the shedding of old identities becomes far less frightening.

This is where the role of "right effort" comes into play. Courage is actually an aspect of right effort. What I want to emphasize here is that it's normal for courage to be required for deep inner work. Take heart and don't give up, no matter how strange it may feel to start becoming aware on an interior level.