Unlock the magic of spaciousness. Embrace the undefinable, let go of control, and create room for transformation. Your mind isn't a checklist—it's an open field where wild things grow. Trust in the creative flow of life. You are not a concept; you're an evolving story. Let's explore together.
Editor's Note: We're kicking off a new series with Lama Tasha Schumann, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher trained in the lineages of Dzogchen and Mahamudra and a longtime collaborator of Jeff Warren's. Over five weeks, Tasha guides us through five patterns that tend to run our lives, what she calls knots: Aversion, Grasping, Striving, Self-fixation, and Confusion. This week, we are wrapping up with confusion.
In the Dzogchen tradition, we talk about the spaciousness of mind a lot. Mostly because it’s so fundamental to experience and so misunderstood.
“The spaciousness of mind,” my teacher Lama Lena likes to say, “ain’t a cold, dead nothin’”. It’s awake, alive. It’s the very condition that allows all of your experiences to unfold freely.
This is not a poetic suggestion. It’s functional. Without space, nothing becomes. Not a planet, not a body, not a revolution, not a meditation community on Substack.
Spaciousness is how anything happens. It makes room for transformation, for grief, for new thought, for language, for rest. If we want to grow into something new, we first have to encounter that open, undefinability that is our essential nature.
It’s a radical trust in the creative nature of life itself: we stop pretending we can control the outcomes, and start tending to the conditions instead. Good things will grow, if they have the right kind of soil. And that soil is made of presence. And permission. And pause.
When we lose connection with our inherent spaciousness (which happens all the time), we feel contracted and confused.
We start needing to define everything, name it, map it, bleed it of its mystery and give it a taxonomy. We wanna feel in control. We wanna feel safe. But when we can’t, we sink into the fog of uncertainty. Not sure what to do next.
Losing touch with the natural openness of mind feels like:
Opening to spaciousness is courageous because it invites the undefinable. But we don’t have to do anything heroic to be there. We just have to make a little room. Hit publish on that wonky newsletter. Sit down at the blank page. Send the longshot email. Let the field open. See what grows.
I have no idea what will emerge in the next year at Bodhisavage (seasonal practice containers? Probably. Workshops? Maybe. A drunken karaoke sangha? Honestly, wouldn’t surprise me). And as a recovering Type-A control freak, I’m learning to love not knowing.
So this month (and every month!), let the Wisdom of Spaciousness go to work on you. Let it loosen you in the middle of your plans. Let it remind you: you are not a concept or a role. You are an open field. And wild things are growing here.
If you want to explore more of Tasha's work, visit her website or tune into the Mind Bod Adventure Pod, her podcast with Jeff Warren.
