Spacious Presence: Purposefully Expanding Our Perspective

We've been focusing on stress, its impact in the body, and how changing our perspective about stress can change its impact on our health and well being.

But how do we do that? How do we change our view point on our experience?

Mindfulness offers a path...

The particular emphasis of various mindfulness practices creates opportunities for growing in many different ways in our lives. One practice in particular helps us gain a expanded perspective of our experience and is sometimes referred to as Cultivating Spacious Awareness. 

This practice helps us see our sensory, emotional and thought experience as part of a greater whole, like clouds that arise and dissipate. It fosters our awareness to broaden and open to the size of a palatial sky. A sky that contains everything.

The practice is not used to try to brush away or make light of deep emotional experiences, but rather help us keep the catastrophizing mind at bay. To help us put our day to day struggles into perspective of the bigger things in our life and to expand the "container of compassion" in which we meet these struggles.

Traffic in Bangkok, Thailand. Image from www.imyselfforwellbeing.wordpress.com

It also serves as an important tool for working with stressful situations. As mindfulness builds our capacity to pause and take action from a more grounded place of wisdom, we can use this expanded frame of reference to keep things that may send us reeling--like someone cutting us off in traffic--in perspective. Do we really want to expend our precious time and energy getting mad at a stranger for a near miss?

While traveling in Thailand, one of the first things I noticed was the lack of aggressive attitudes as people maneuvered hurriedly in traffic. We were in Bangkok (you can read more about this Here) where traffic is heavy throughout most of the day. But people's attitude seemed more like, "How can we all get to where we're going quickly and safely?" Driver attention had to be keen, but the attitude was different, as if everyone knew that we are all on our way to somewhere important, we're all part of a family and we're all part of the larger community--in other words, we're in this together.

This larger view of the world can bring a spaciousness awareness and perspective to our actions. Mindfulness gives us more choice in our responses, so we can choose an attitude like this: "May you arrive on time and safely to your destination." How much peace would you feel if you knew that everyone on the road was looking out for each other?

How much peace would you feel if you knew that everyone on the road
was looking out for each other?

Peaceful? Alert? Caring? Present?

The good news is that we don't have to wait for others to pick up this attitude, we can adopt it ourselves today. And while this adoption of a purposeful attitude may not change anyone else, I can pretty much guarantee that your experience will be less stressful and more pleasant.

This is just one example of how intentionally expanding our point of view can shift our experience not only of our stress, but of ourselves, others, and the larger community. It's one part in creating an expansive compassionate container that has greater acceptance and kindness toward all that is.

The Cultivating Spacious Awareness practice is one of many loving mindfulness exercises taught in Compassion-based Mindfulness courses. For more information on upcoming courses, visit HERE. and be sure to sign up on the email list HERE.