Most mornings, I wake up in the dark, before sunrise, before the tasks of my day are expected to begin. I lie down on the musty area rug in my living room, rest on the earth, and make a practice of connecting to the immeasurable spaciousness that is at the heart of life.

I’m not seeking bliss (although I’d welcome it). I’m not trying to transcend or get rid of thoughts or any part of myself. I’m simply making room for the chaos of my life.

I do a lot of things, but I no longer have a chronically busy life. Most people I know do. It’s an agreement of our modern, Western culture. If we are busy, then we are clearly being productive. If we are being productive, then surely we are valuable, and if our value is justified by our busyness then of course we don’t necessarily have to be accountable to others or to our own deeper desires and longings because, well, you know…everyone understands when you say, “I’m just too busy…” It’s our unspoken, and overly spoken, agreement to let ourselves off the hook.

Chronic Busyness is a Story

In his book, From Making a Living to Creating a Life, David Firth, says “we make our reality by the stories we tell each other. So ‘we’re all really busy’ doesn’t describe our reality; it’s not an account of what’s really happening. It is making what’s happening.”

He further points out “the identity of being busy requires certain things to keep turning to sustain the identity of being busy. One way we can easily do this is make sure we never have enough time, because lack of time is a strong proof that busy exists. And so, voila, we make 94 commitments which give birth to 94 action plans and measurements and controls and deliverables and 4035 meetings…”

This is how a chronically busy life is born and perpetuated. We do this to validate ourselves. We do this to prove our worth. We do this because we think we need to in order to survive.

I’ve said it and done it myself, many times, and “I’m just too busy” has been true. My years of working full-time, while also being in a graduate MFA program and mother to two young children comes to mind.

The reality is, there isn’t enough time in my day, my week, my month, my year, my life to do all the things I need to, want to, and say I’ll do. And I’ve spent a lot, I mean a lot, of time feeling bad and inadequate about this. It’s easy to feel like a failure when you don’t do all the things you dream of or set out to do. The underlying presumption is you’re lazy, without purpose, drive, motivation, and certainly not someone who achieves the kind of success that’s desired and expected. I’ve seriously wondered if I have some kind of biological deficiency (23andMe results pending) because I just can’t seem to keep up with the speed of life.

But frankly, I don’t want to.

I’ve never wanted to. As a kid I preferred digging in the dirt for fossil rocks to studying for spelling tests. I preferred watching Love Boat and Fantasy Island or laying in my backyard, staring at the stars, pondering black holes to arithmetic, I still do. I prefer long walks in the woods, napping, writing bird poems, Netflix binging and making good food to clearing my inbox, scrolling through social media feeds, or crafting marketing plans for my business.

I simply can’t move at the pace required to answer every email, respond to every post, complete every project, stay informed and active on every issue, trend, or political crisis, and still have time to make a decent dinner. I don’t want to be available, responsive, or consuming more stuff and information 24/7.

I have information overload. I have decision fatigue. I have daily distressed distraction disorder.

And I don’t think I’m the only one.

The problem is not that there are too many things to do, possibilities to be explored, choices or decisions to be made. That’s the beauty (and reality) of life as we know it — abundance.

The problem is we think there isn’t enough, and we think we have to acquire, achieve, manage and control it all in order to survive and be successful and worthy human beings.

Our inability to acquire, achieve, manage and control everything (because it’s impossible) creates deep, persistent undercurrents of anxiety, stress, tension, and depression. Yet we schedule that 4035th meeting anyway because if we do, we just might get close and become the person we hope or expect to be.

I no longer see my unwillingness and inability to be chronically busy as a problem or a deficiency. It’s a skill. It’s a way of being that people need and want more of. I’ve made a decision to step out of the story and experience of chronic busyness and you can too.

Sure, it starts with not committing to that extra meeting or project, saying no to things you’ve previously said yes to, or no longer immediately responding to every email, post, or notification.

But the art of finding spaciousness in a chronically busy life is about something more fundamental.

It’s about reorienting the way you experience yourself and your life. It’s about experiencing the full depths of being human.

As Firth also articulates, it’s about changing the story and moving from “busy to you just creating what’s important to you.”

Growing up with a single mom who often held two jobs, it’s important to note, not everyone has the luxury of free time or creating only what they want. But everyone does have the ability to experience spaciousness in the midst of their particular life’s circumstance.

The truth is at the utmost depths of life is immeasurable spaciousness. No matter who you are, what or how much you have or are doing, it is available to you.

What is spaciousness exactly?

The dictionary defines spaciousness as:

~having enough
~abundant space or room
~large in area or extent
~a gap
~an empty or uncovered place
~the absence of objects
~ the area available for use

The “absence of objects” in our physical reality is often the first thing that comes to mind when we think of spaciousness, especially with the “KonMari” craze brought about by Marie Kondo and her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and her trending Netflix show.

This kind of physical spaciousness is important. The way we keep our house (and our storage units) says something about what’s really going on inside us. And that’s precisely what I want to address — what’s going on inside us.

The spaciousness I’m talking about is internal. It’s the place that lives beyond stuff, concept, language, agenda, to-do lists. It’s the place you touch when you pause, rest, become quiet and still (and get rid of that shirt that no longer brings you joy and you feel good about it).

It’s the mystery you unearth when you write, create, express, or contribute something that comes from deep within your soul. It’s the immense relief that comes when you feel you’ve finally made contact with who you really are.

It’s not something you can measure, quantify, or commodify.

Spaciousness is the luminous field of aliveness that, when you touch it, makes your whole being suddenly say, “I’m home.”

It’s beyond birth and death, us and them, good and bad, right and wrong. Even when you’re suffering or have little to nothing, this spaciousness seems to offer everything you need and with it comes a deep sense of relief, satisfaction, fulfillment, completion, enoughness.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with what you have or achieve. With it comes the cessation of busy and you finally relax.

How do you find spaciousness?

The art of finding spaciousness is the art of getting into your body, pure and simple.

Spaciousness is not simply a concept.

Spaciousness is a direct experience of reality. It happens when you get out of your head — out of ideas and concepts — and get into your body.

You are 99% empty space. Quantum physics tells us this is a scientific, biological fact. One percent of every atom that makes up the human body is composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. The other 99% is empty space. I once read that if the space in the human body were eliminated and the matter condensed, the entire human race would fit into a sugar cube.

Spaciousness is the fundamental state of who you are — who we are.

Inside our own bodies, as the dictionary defines, is an area available for use. Built in room to breathe. With practice, you can directly experience the spaciousness of your own body — I mean literally feel it from the inside — the same way you can feel pain when you stub your toe.

Humans have a “lesser-known” sense that helps us understand and feel what’s going on inside our bodies; it’s called interoception. It’s what’s happening when you feel hungry and get something to eat, or feel cold and get a blanket, feel an itch and scratch it, or when you feel pain from a stubbed toe and hop around cursing. We feel what’s happening in our bodies directly and not just as a thought. Stubbing your toe and thinking about stubbing your toe are two very different things entirely.

We are usually tuned in to these overt levels of interoception, unless you have alexithymia or sensory processing issues. (I also know plenty of people who are so busy they don’t feel hunger and forget to eat lunch). But what we aren’t tuned into is the more subtle levels that allow us to feel the spaciousness of our own bodies.

This is what I do in the darkness of morning when I wake up and go lie down on my musty living room rug. I practice interoception. I’m training myself to tune in to the more subtle levels of my body so I can experience its spaciousness directly and not just as thought or an idea.

When I first wake up in the morning and my conscious mind hits my body, I often feel bad. There’s an ache in my stomach, my heart beats fast; I can feel adrenaline coursing through my veins stirring things all up. I feel the ice cream or Cheetos I ate before bed wrestling with my liver. I feel resistance to getting up and having to face the day and all the things expected of me, from others, but mostly myself.

The moment I slip back into the envelop of my skin from the realm of dreams, I can feel my body from the inside out, and it’s not great. I am in an unfiltered state of reality. There’s a lot going on. A lot of circuits are firing, and a jumble of information is coming through. It’s chaos. It’s what makes me want to turn off the alarm clock and sleep. Forever.

But these kind of wake-up moments, where you feel life intensely, are an invitation to inhabit the chaos of reality, the chaos of being, for just a little bit.

The dictionary defines chaos as “a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization.” This is what I feel for an instant when I wake up — confusion, disorder, total lack of organization — until I can once again make order of it all by getting out of bed, looking at my Google calendar, and going straight to doing all the things I do. This moment of utter confusion happens in a flash — milliseconds of time — less than the time it takes my hand to slap the snooze button.

This is what chronic busyness does for us — it yanks us out of bed as soon as we might feel any of this chaos and sets us on course to get busy planning and attempting to manage and control it all. Because then, at least, we can hang our morning hat on that — “I’ve got this…no need to feel this way…everything’s in order, under control…I’ve got things to do, meetings to attend…I’m valuable, worthy…I’m a busy person.”

But the root of the word chaos comes from Old French and means “gaping void” or from Latin and Greek, “abyss which gapes wide open, is vast and empty.”

Chaos is space.

The very chaos you want to get away from, manage, control and make order out of, actually houses the spaciousness you seek.

Instead of running away from the chaos, I make my way out to the living room rug to spend some time with it. I lie down on my back with my knees up and my hands resting on the sides of my lower belly. I close my eyes. I breathe. I feel the contact of my body on the floor and I notice the chaos — heart beating, aches and pains pulsing, a mind swirling with thoughts and a need to get busy.

I put my attention on my feet. I try to feel my big toes. I don’t think about my big toes, I feel them from the inside through interoception. It’s not always easy. At first, I can’t feel them at all. It’s like I don’t even have toes. I’m numb. But as I put my awareness into my toes, I start to get a direct, visceral sense of what’s happening. The neural pathway connecting my conscious mind to my toes wakes up.

I sense that my big toes don’t end where I think they do by looking at them. They are actually elegantly long and extend all the way down into the ball of my foot where the metatarsus connects to the first cuneiform (something I looked up because I wanted a name for what I could actually feel).

Then I move from my big toes, to my second toes, and on to my third, fourth, and then pinky toes. Each one has its own sensation, its own “personality.” Until I started doing this practice, I never knew that my third toe is the loudest, most bulbous one of all, the one that leaps out and throbs around as soon as it has my attention, while my fourth toe is shy, quiet and takes its time to be heard.

I continue this process throughout my feet — into the arches, the heels, ankle bones — and make my way up to my shin, calf muscle, to the knees, down the thigh, through the psoas muscle that joins my femur to my hip and lumbar spine, through my abdomen, my chest cavity, shoulder blades, down my arms into my hands, and up my neck and into my face and head. I try to feel, directly, every bit of my body from the tip of my toes to the top of my head.

My method for doing this process is called, “Ten Points Practice,” and it was taught to me by Reggie Ray, an American Buddhist writer, academic and teacher. This practice comes from the somatic (body-based) meditation practices of the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana lineage.

The Vajrayana says that through body-based practices we enter the core — the full depth of our human person. We begin there, rather than on the surface with our stuff, our relationships, and our outer lives.

The core is where we touch the “uncultivated field of awareness”; that’s where we make a connection with the empty, open awareness that is our basic nature.

This is the only place to resolve all the compromised, tormented, unenlightened, and pathologically busy parts of ourselves.

I am not a Buddhist, but this practice is changing my life.

The biggest thing I’ve discovered through this process is that my body is riddled with tension; it’s ever-present and everywhere in my body.

Reggie Ray says in his book, The Awakening Body, “As we become more and more aware of the parts of our body, we notice the tension in each part…We are talking here not about the natural, healthy tension that is part of being human, but instead we are talking about neurotic tension, elective tension, superimposed tension — superimposed by our conscious orientation, our ego. Neurobiology tells us that this kind of pathological tension extends all the way down to the cellular level and is a contributing factor to ill health and disease.”

He goes on to say that the tension that pervades our bodies down to a cellular level is there because, “any naked, unfiltered experience we have is initially felt to be painful and problematic; without thinking, we try to withdraw from it, evade and get away from it. We do so by literally tensing up, and this tension is everywhere.”

It’s everywhere in our individual bodies, and it’s everywhere in our collective, cultural body.

Chronic busyness is tension. Tension is chronic busyness.

Tension is our way of closing down our experience and shutting off our awareness so we can control or evade the intensely infinite experience of being human.

This deeply engrained habit of getting busy shutting down experience and awareness is what I am no longer blinding succumbing to.

The naked, unfiltered experience I have when I wake up, and remember I have a body, feels painful and problematic only because my small sense of self doesn’t know what to do with the vacillating, unexpected, endless sensations I feel. It wants to convert them all into a safe, controllable framework and hold on for dear life.

The second big discovery of this practice is that there is nothing to control or hold on to. When I bring my full attention to the actual sensations of my body, I notice that they are not solid; they have an ephemeral, intangible and insubstantial quality. What I feel is impermanent, fluid, changing. One moment my third toe is loudly throbbing and the next it’s a warm, calm summer-lake hum. The stomach ache becomes a deep hollow, then a blazing sun.

I stop experiencing life’s sensations as a painful threat that I need to solve or get away from. Instead they become a world of wonder, curiosity, and interest because they’re infinite. No one thing defines me. No one thought, idea, task, sensation, ache or pain is who I am.

I am the space within which all of life happens. And it’s boundless.

When I’m present to this, I stop holding on or clamping down on any one part of it and I rest in the space around it. As I do, I’m able to relax, let go, and see what comes next.

What happens when you find and touch spaciousness?

Finding and touching spaciousness is the only way you can truly relax. I don’t just mean kick back on the couch or at the spa, relax. I mean letting go of the insidious, incessant, restless craving, anxious proving, and panicked validation we live with in our bones.

I’m talking about easing the grip of all the things that make us feel like we are not enough, we will never have enough, and that we are of no consequence. Those things that keep us chronically busy in the first place. Those things that contract us with tension, shut us down, and make us flee the thick now of the present.

The relaxed I’m talking about is coming home to rest in reality in all its chaotic fullness.

The relaxed I’m talking about is having a true foundation of security — a security of being.

When you live in busyness you live in your head and disconnect from your body. Disembodiment is what creates and reinforces division, separation, hierarchies, domination, and diminishes our sense of belonging because head-centric thinking creates structures of control that cut us off from the living, breathing essence of the world inside and around us — we disconnect from the aliveness of ourselves, our fellow humans, and our earth.

As teacher, writer, and Embodiment Coach, Philip Shepherd, says in his Embodiment Manifesto, “when you disconnect from your body, you are disconnecting from the richest and most tangible reality of your being. To do that habitually — to cut yourself off from the reality of your being as a reflex — is to eventually alienate yourself from being — an experience of reality in its fullness. It’s what you discover when you come home to the body, and feel the self as a whole, and come to rest within that whole in the timelessness of the present and the world to which it belongs. If you are not grounded in that security of being, an undercurrent of anxiety will run through all that you undertake — gnawing at you even when you just sit still.”

He goes on to say, “the insecurity of being that is our constant state disables us from ever feeling that we have enough. The present will always seem insufficient if we are insufficiently present.”

When I do my “Ten Points Practice,” I directly experience the timelessness of the present and the world to which I belong. The vice grip of tension that permeates my body, my mind, and my soul, relaxes.

It’s not continuous. Some days I’m all over the place, thinking, thinking, thinking, and not in my body at all.

But every single time I get up off the floor, I’ve deepened my security of being.

I’ve touched, if only for an instant, the immeasurable dynamic spaciousness of human beingness.

In doing so, I’m less worried about what I am doing. I experience time differently. Instead speeding up and constantly getting away from me, time actually slows down and opens up. I feel in flow, at ease, and clear about what I need and want to do.

I move from one thing to the next, without urgency or overwhelm. I have relaxed attention and take spacious action, which allows me to find my own sustainable rhythm for creating what’s important to me and doing what I need to do to make ends meet.

I actually have room to enjoy and appreciate what I’m doing.

Some days I get a lot more done, some days I don’t. Instead of feeling like a failure for not having checked more off my to-do list or having achieved monumental world impact, I feel good, relaxed. I appreciate others more and stop comparing myself to them. I appreciate life more.

I am able to say no to things, to not respond to every invitation, post, email, notification, request, and not feel bad, lazy, inadequate, or plagued with FOMO (fear of missing out).

I inhabit the “Land of Enough” — where there is enough of everything — time, stuff, words, inspiration, connection, recognition, validation, money (even when the bank balance is low). There is enough life, there is enough ME.

It’s not that all the things I need or want to do go away. They are still there. There’s just more room around them, more space “available for use.” My sense of worth and value isn’t riding on it all so tightly. I have more space to choose, to say no, let things go, and know that it’s going to be okay. That I’m okay.

I still get lost in my head — lost in fear, craving, doubt, despair, comparison, urgency, controlling, planning, doing, doing, doing. My hip still aches, my back still cramps, my mind still goes berserk. I still (sometimes) eat ice cream or Flamin’ Hot Cheetos before bed. I still don’t have the financial stability I’d like to have.

The difference is, I’m deeply relaxed about it all.

The difference is I’ve found a foundation of security within the chaos, rather than spending so much time and energy trying (unsuccessfully) to find security by keeping the chaos out and under control.

The difference is, I’ve made contact with who I really am.

Every cell knows, I am home.

Some specific steps and resources for finding spaciousness in your life:

I call it the art of finding spaciousness because it is just that, an art. There isn’t one right way to do it, no assembly-line-one-size-fits all, take this one little pill, 3-simple steps solution. It’s a practice. It’s a journey unique to each person.

But it’s a journey that starts and ends with your body.

You must:

1. Get out of your head and into your body.
2. Find a practice (or practices) for embodiment that suits you.
3. Commit to doing it as a regular part of your life.
4. When you get stuck in your head and lost in busyness (because you will), notice and remember spaciousness is who you are, and once again, return to your body.

In addition to (but not in lieu of) embodiment practice, you can:

· Create gaps in your schedule — I call this “spacious wandering time.” It’s time with absolutely NO agenda where you have room to simply be and do nothing.

· Take intentional social media & internet breaks — this is becoming more and more popular and it works. Screen time stimulates mental activity and staying in your head. Stepping away allows you to get in your body and experience life directly, not virtually.

· Pause between tasks — I start every new task, client session, workshop or event with an intentional pause so I can acknowledge I’m moving from one thing into another and not constantly multi-task or frantically run from one thing to the next. Simply take 30 seconds to 1 minute to stop, close your eyes, breathe deeply, and feel your body. Then begin the next thing…

· Create without agenda — I practice “alive writing” which is writing without an agenda; it’s writing what wants to be written and allows you to tap into the unlimited, spacious well of creativity within you. You can try this with my signature “Power of the Word” writing exercise as my free gift to you by clicking HERE, or simply block out time in your schedule to write, paint, dance, sing, and create just for fun, just because.

*For specific embodiment practices, I suggest starting with the teachers and practices I’ve referenced:

· Reggie Ray and Dharma Ocean’s Somatic Meditation Practices. There are great free resources — talks and guided meditation practices — on his website, as well as books, online courses, and in-person retreats where you can learn the “Ten Points Practice” and others that will take you deep into the spacious core of your body and life. You can explore what’s offered here: https://www.dharmaocean.org/

· Philip Shepherd offers a powerful framework about how embodiment is one of the most important political statements you can make and is the revolution that we need to bring us into harmony with each other and our world in his, Embodiment Manifesto. Within it he offers a simple step-by-step technique he uses for getting you out of your head and into your belly. You can read it here: https://philipshepherd.com/manifesto/

Shepherd also offers books, workshops, retreats, and classes that you can find out more about here: https://philipshepherd.com/

*I am not a spokesperson for either of these people or organizations, and I am not receiving any kind of compensation (monetary or otherwise) from them. I simply believe in, support, and find great benefit in the work they do.

There are many other teachers, techniques and resources out there for you to explore and discover. It helps to have support, community, frameworks and structures to do this work. But you don’t need them to get started.

If you simply lie down on your living room rug and put your attention in your feet and stay there for 20–30 minutes a day, you’ll open up a doorway to the spacious, thick now of your life, and truly relax.

The key is to go into, and stay, with the chaos of your body, not the chaos of your mind.

The chaos of the mind is another form of tension; it is the control center that leads to busyness and will pull you right up off the floor into tasks.

The chaos of the body is the gateway to the immeasurable spaciousness that’s always available to you.

Entering it changes the story. Entering it changes everything.