Spaciousness: The Foundation of Practice

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

If you are romantically involved with Dharma, then you have developed no space in your mind and you will be constantly up and down, skating on your own dramatics with no stability in the mind.  And you are completely at the mercy of suffering.  Where there is no space, there is nowhere to go.  There’s no quiet place where you can rest.  You are either going to be suffering or feeling exhilarated — an intensity of a different kind.  Ultimately it’s all suffering.  You’re going to be into the intensity with no spaciousness in your mind.  You’ll be stuck there with nowhere to go.  You just ride on your emotions.  If you have not developed spaciousness in your mind, you are the victim of the highs and lows and the mind’s conceptual proliferations.  For example, you’re completely at the mercy of pain.  Have you ever had really intense pain?  It can make you lose all awareness.  It’s unbelievable.  You just lose consciousness, and it’s because there’s no space in your mind.  Pain is a concept; it’s something in your mind.

You are completely at the mercy of emotionalism of all kind, and you know that of yourself.  You follow your emotions constantly.  They’ve been high, and they’ve been low.  They’ve been big, and they’ve been small.  They’ve been in, and they’ve been out.  Have your emotions ever made you happy for a long time?  Have your emotions ever been dependable companions?  They never have if you really think about it.

So if you develop spaciousness, you have at least a fighting chance, if you will excuse the phrase, to begin to practice in such a way that your mind has some potential for liberation.  In other words, there’s a little spaciousness in which you can practice.  It’s very, very important for you to try to do that.  If you develop a little bit of space, you can start building up these bricks of the Buddha’s teaching.  You can evaluate the teachings for yourself.  From that calm place, from that place behind all of the concepts, you can see that following the mind leads to no happiness.  You can see that desire is the cause of suffering.  You can sense the potential for enlightenment or at least for disengaging from that phenomenon that you are so involved in.  You can sense that there is something behind all of your concepts that’s very profound.  You can begin to build the solid blocks that are necessary in order to follow the Buddha’s path until you achieve supreme enlightenment.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved