Healing’s Secret Side Effect: Spaciousness

“When we focus on needs, our world can feel abundant with possibility. When we focus on a particular strategy, our world can feel scarce.”

- Marshall Rosenberg

If you’d asked me years ago what could be the result of healing (becoming whole again), I’d probably have answered that I’d hoped to feel more fulfilled, fuller of purpose, more grounded & embodied. I wouldn’t have answered that I might feel more spacious, less limited in time & space, lighter, connected & yet freer, that precious balance between being safely bonded & autonomous at the same time.

I wouldn’t have mentioned it because this Lebensgefühl, sense of life, had been completely foreign to me.

I was pretty much overwhelmed with my life & my relationships all the time, from early on. Not that I necessarily knew that either, one barely knows when life is just like that - pacey, demanding, cluttered. It might have been going on like that if I hadn’t become a mom that needed to take responsibility & care for another totally dependent & loving human being. My sense of urgency to figure myself out got multiplied.

To my inner eye it looked like I was faced with a pile of unsolvable issues in my self-esteem, in my relationships, in my understanding of my own purpose, all crowned by a deep & painful sense of insecurity, both physically & emotionally.

This didn’t provide for a grounded, balanced, and nourishing basis for the relationship with my daughter.

Luckily, around the same time, I became interested in the concept of trauma, its relational roots & impact. It provided a lifeline for me to slowly comb through the challenges I faced, which I realized were based on a deep sense of insecurity in my own early bonding experience. How can one provide safety, Geborgenheit, to another human being, if one’s own “safety batteries” are more or less empty?

This journey is continuing, I cannot emphasize that often enough. Life is a process & so is our individual evolution. And yet, each step along the way is an act of freedom, one of releasing mechanisms that are no longer needed & of re-integrating parts of myself, still stuck with my own childhood experience.

This freedom translates into a spaciousness that is tremendously healing for my relationships. A spaciousness that was hidden behind my immediate reactions to triggers; the inner push of always wanting to be somewhere else; the fear of really diving into what is present; my sense of self-worth being connected to what I did & achieved and especially the validation I sought so badly from the outside world.

With all those strategies fading what I notice is joy & an attention to detail that further generates that vitality. I increasingly feel that past decisions (such as “staying at home” with my kid for 3 years), long questioned, have always been self-empowered & conscious, only that some of my habitual strategies have buried my trust in myself.

Spaciousness to me (and to many spiritual practices I gather) is our natural state of being. It’s who we are meant to be rather than the tight-knit stress balls that we’re often feel like or society asks us to be. And it starts with granting yourself, your inner core, the space it needs to flourish & thrive, free of all the clutter that our upbringing provided us with.