How difficult it is to take up the space in
between. I feel that many flee from this place. It is a very scary process to
enter into the space where you begin to take leave of what you knew and yet
where you are going is still unformed. You enter into an emotional no-man’s
land.
Our beliefs create our reality and the
space in between is the point where we experience the process of changing old
beliefs for new ones.
By changing beliefs we change our lives. So
the discomfort and unknowing we experience is in the space between two lives,
it is at the threshold of the new potential life.
The other day I bumped into a friend who
now has five children. She said that she wanted more and that she was sad that
her husband did not concur. She said that she missed the time of motherhood.
She did not want it to end.
I understood her. I understood how one
could feel lost. When you live a period of time where you fill a certain role,
where you relate to and define yourself in a certain way, it is saddening and
confusing when that begins to change.
What is going to substitute your version of
yourself? Who are you, for example, when you are no longer a mother who
nurtures the baby inside them and then cares for them in a particular way? To
give another example, who are you when the career you have no longer
successfully defines you or your work is no longer satisfactory?
I have three children and I made a very
final decision not to have more and it was very difficult. It was not that I
necessarily wanted more, which I didn’t, but it was a change in identity.
I was stepping out of a phase of my life in
which I related to myself in a certain way and marking a definite turning
point. I even felt for a while to be in a period of mourning. I was no longer the
person I had been and I did not know what this signified for the future.
In my case a great part of it had to do
with my relating to creativity. In a way, by stopping the physical creating
part, I stepped into another relationship with my own creativity. It was a step
further along in claiming responsibility for my creativity, physically
independent of others, of claiming my own power.
When we step into the space in between,
what happens? The first thing that springs to mind is discomfort, anxiety,
sadness even. We feel the need to define ourselves and in the transition we
find ourselves between definitions.
I suffered a lot as a child because I could
not easily define myself nationally. I was
an Iraqi living in London who had never lived in Iraq. I could not pass
as British and I was not really Iraqi. I was a person in between.
For a long time I regretted and mourned not
being able to belong. But I see now how important it was and why I chose to
come into this experience. Every time I got close to belonging, to adopting a
replete cultural model, I broke it down in order to break out again.
Who I was, was not served up to me easily
and this naturally loosened the external cords enough for me to start seeking
who I was from within myself.
A few years back, when I started awakening
everything speeded up. Nothing was familiar any more. I was getting pieces here
and there but had no idea how or if they would ever fit together. I remember
asking: ‘how long is this going to go on for?’ The answer was, as can be
imagined, very unsatisfying. ‘It varies.’
It was simultaneously exciting and
terrifying. There was great discomfort involved. I did not know who I was,
where I was headed or what was coming. These are not easy sensations to live
with.
But it did all begin to loosely come
together. It all settled down. It was beautiful to see how seemingly disparate
things were now making a part of a whole. I started to see a greater picture.
Ideas that had shocked me and seemed so far
out of my way of being and seeing the world, with no effort, became familiar. A
framework was created to start building upon. I settled down into it.
It was a process and there is much to learn
through the process itself. Though I became comfortable with the bulk ideas I
continued to shift with my beliefs and each shift seems to open up a void and
its corresponding sense of discomfort.
When I speak of “void” I mean an empty
space, without the negative emotional connotations the word “void” may conjure
up. In a way it is a highly positive space purely because it is space.
It is only when there is space that
something else can come in. If I fill it up constantly I leave no room for
anything new. If I talk constantly, I cannot listen.
But what I am discovering mirrors that which the
physicists are discovering: that there is no empty space. Recently I was
approached with a project. I had no idea how I would flesh it out or whether I
was even interested. But as I worked at it ideas began to flow and they came
from the space around me.
I had the clear sensation of how I could
place my consciousness outside of myself or rather let my consciousness go and
draw from the space. I had no expectations of what was in the space, but it
flowed and the result was fascinating for me. It was combining my interests and learning in ways I could never have foreseen.
This has been the coming together of many
thoughts I have been having. It has been becoming clearer to me that I need to
let go more. I have been very driven, especially on my spiritual path, but in
part I have been driven by fear.
I feared that if I stopped driving things,
seeking the next point of learning in books for example or experiences from
within mediation, then it would stop. In many ways it had much to do with
control. I was not comfortable to take up my space within the space.
I am coming to realise that just by being
it will come to me. The more I step into the space, the more I actually become.
