Spacious Opening
The light of day has broken on 2022. Horizons are still hazy, even murky, but with some inspirational expressions of beauty and hope — from visual images of countries greeting midnight with exquisite bursts of fireworks, to the traditional Vienna concert uplifting souls with the magnificent waltzes of Strauss, to stories in pictures from around the world of lives of courage and resilience.
Now the new year awaits our first step that can open inner spaciousness for new possibilities.
Friends, on the last day of 2021 many of us reflected on the victories and challenges of the year we left behind, on faces, moment, and encounters perhaps not fully appreciated, not fully granted their significance as we often keep rushing ahead. Perhaps we found a bit more quiet contentment yesterday, a bit more depth.
Today we can lay the foundation of how we respond to the year ahead, to the world calling to us to find new and more humane solutions. We cannot respond meaningfully to this call unless and until we first listen inwardly, with quiet minds, and softer heart space, and hear the suppressed and deeply hidden vulnerability of being human that we each feel.
From the moment we are born into our fragile and amazing bodies, we struggle with vulnerability — hopefully, first, in protected and loving environments; but that’s not a guarantee. As we enter school age, social environments can become increasingly unforgiving, and we learn to brace ourselves for the way life often gets defined as a race ahead. Into adulthood, we stop noticing how tired we are of bracing up, of holding tension in our bodies. We often turn to numbing ourselves to the pain within, to the sense of radical aloneness.
But as we find the courage to acknowledge this experience, paradoxically, we become less brittle, less scared of our conflicted passions. Inner traction takes hold from our core and enables us to read our own reality and the reality of others with greater compassion. From that compassionate understanding, we can see and know that our longing to express beauty, kindness, and justice is greater than our fears of failing to “succeed” among our peers. We find the stamina to embrace our fears of not being enough, and to own our neglected spiritual nature which calls for lives of dignity, integrity, and thoughtful engagement and action.
We realize that much of our lives we have been stricken with amnesia amidst the accelerating velocity of life in our uncertain contexts — the amnesia of reductionist physicalism that only values what we can measure and hold in our hands, that permeates many of our professional and even religious practices, and ultimately creates more division and suffering. We realize that we can listen beyond our physicality, even though murkily at first, and as we do, we reach out to each other in a new way — spaciously.
May 2022 be a year of spaciousness and deeper horizons of truth and justice among us.
In the days and weeks ahead, we will explore the path of faith in the spiritual possibility that life opens at each step, for a moment-by-moment alignment of body, mind, and spirit in an awakened, engaged relationship with oneself and with the advancement of human society toward an enlightened civilization for all.
This essay draws on the deeper examination of these questions in my recent book, Global Unitive Healing: Integral Skills for Personal and Collective Transformation, available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Global-Unitive-Healing-Collective-Transformation/dp/1945026766/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Z19I0JOZ5GEF&keywords=global+unitive+healing+mustakova&qid=1642863077&sprefix=global+unitive%2Caps%2C86&sr=8-1
