Spacious Calm

I’m engaging with the work of Richard Rudd and my current read is The Art of Contemplation. I’m still very much in the beginning of his content, conceptualizing it, and living it. But I came across a phrase of his that greatly resonated with me: Spacious Calm.

It’s a phrase I would not have been able to relate to for much of my life. But when I read that, I felt the peace that comes when an experience I’m going through feels seen and understood.

From the outside, my life likely looks no less hectic than it has in the past. The contents of the hecticness have changed, but the potential to look at it and see hecticness is still there. I also don’t believe there are necessarily more opportunities to experience calm than I’ve had in the past. But what has vastly changed is my internal experience of my life.

Perhaps the biggest shift I’ve gone through to allow me to experience spacious calm is I no longer fight the inevitable chaos. My emotional fluctuation, the emotions of those around me, my narrative intertwining with others’ narratives, and events all across my local town to around the globe. I no longer fight what is right in front of me.

I have found that whether I choose to fight it or not, it will be there. And when I instead embrace, see, and breathe into what is right in front of me, it allows it to only be what it is. Versus when I fight it and try to ignore it or avoid it, then it has to take on extra energy to catch my attention.

So now I choose to see it. I see the anger, hurt, sadness, rejection, pain, misattunement, jealousy. I see it, I name it, and then it often calms down immensely.

But it doesn’t go away necessarily, and that has also been a shift. Calm isn’t the absence of everything else. It isn’t a space of nothingness. It’s a space of acceptance for what is. It’s a space of seeing, unobstructedly, what is in front of us and embracing it for what it is. My calm these days often has a touch of chaos, fatigue, hurt, curiosity, disappointment, confusion, awe, and deep love. And by allowing these, and more, to enter into my calm, it allows it to become much more spacious than when I only viewed calm as the absence of everything else.

This has also been fitting of my walk with God. The more I have allowed things to not be black and white, the more I’ve allowed for complexities, uncertainties, and wrestlings, the closer I have felt to God. I feel as though stepping into the messiness that is present in any relationship, even our relationship with God, has brought an intimacy and closeness that wasn’t present when I grasped onto a black and white God. And by embracing the complexities and messiness, I have found a spacious calm in my relationship with God, too. A soul-deep calm, that knows I not only have a God, but a close companion and confidant.

I know it sounds counterintuitive. I know leaning into our emotions, our narratives, and the messiness of it all makes us feel like everything is going to amplify and consume us. But it is only by embracing and seeing what is there that we can start to consume and process it. It’s going to be there no matter what. So it is up to us whether we choose to embrace it from the beginning, or whether we need it to get louder and stronger and more amplified before we address it. Because all our emotions and narratives really want to be seen and heard. The sooner we do that, the less consuming they need to be.

So if calm is something you have been desiring to feel more, then I first encourage you to think through what you currently view as calm. There’s a good chance that, like me, you need to allow more emotions, narratives, and experiences to be present in your calm. And by embracing those emotions, narratives, and experiences to be in your calm, you may just find that you not only experience calmness more often, but that it’s a spacious calm.

Warmly,

Kylie Larson, MA, LPC

www.illuminate-counseling.com