Hello

Space creation is more than just a starting point to a project it is a requirement for any new creation to happen.  Often the first thing one does is create a space in which to work – cleaning off your desk, starting a new page on word, or cleaning out the space for drawing and construction.

Sometimes clearing out the space physically performs the function of creating an internal space for change.

Other actions that can help create that internal space are mindful meditation, yoga, focused breathing, prayer, writing about the issue, and listening both to others and yourself.  The latter is a modality you can use all the time in relationship and interaction.

Listening to the non-verbal components in conversation, the tone, and the language or word-choice all offer ways for you to increase your understanding in communication.  Through these techniques you can see or hear where you are out of sync with reality or how you are acting or thinking based on an inaccurate belief system.  It opens your internal system of thinking and being.

The most difficult space to create is the space within to change thinking and behavior patterns.  Changing habits requires identification of the problem as a first step.  The space creation to change is like a stretching out so that you can observe from a different perspective.  Often influence from outside is the first glimmer of understanding that shifts your focus to the inaccuracy of your habit.

This can be an aha experience or it can be insidious, a slow developing awareness over time.

Creating that inner space starts with the questions What is at the center of this thinking or this behavior ?- What is the underlying belief or value that drives it?  And then once discerning the answers, defining if that value or belief is consistent with what you actually believe.

It requires a slowing of actions and a reworking of thinkings.  Breathing, applying mindfulness, looking for and creating balance, applying compassion and understanding – all these allow for an increase in awareness and delay action to allow for re-working thinkings with a renewed perspective.

Recently I was struck by an internal belief that I had been using to organize my behavior and thinking.  I discovered that it was not actually an accurate description of reality, but rather a picture of a misunderstanding from my early childhood that had been frozen in time, not allowed to incorporate new information or ongoing analysis; it was a stuck, rigid, fear-based belief.  I had been acting from a position that I must prove my worth and my intelligence.  That I had to bring something extra to a relationship because just being myself was insufficient for friendship.  This was the opposite of what I taught my children and patients, and yet here I was acting from this inaccurate perspective.

Astonishing!

It was a powerful and profound experience to discover both the internal belief and  that I no longer had to act from this inaccurate space.  Seeing it, recognizing it, and understanding its etiology allowed me to create the internal space to let it go and to shift my perspective to incorporate the full or whole of my life experiences, not just that one event.  It was so freeing, and so opening; it created the internal space to make a change in my thinking and my behavior with respect to this issue.

Mindful reflection and paradigm shifting create internal space so that change can happen.  Utilize the methods that best suit you to open a space for you to view and review your internal systems and create a space for internal change.

You may find you are freed from a restrictive belief system that is not an actual representation of reality.  In doing so you may create a space to live more freely and more happily.

See you tomorrow.

Beth