Spacious Mind

A happy mind is a spacious mind, intoned the voice that I have come to associate with calm. It's the voice of the Headspace application (its founder, as a matter of fact), and it has been my guide on this several-month journey I've been taking recently, dipping my toe into the shallowest end of the deep waters of meditation.

Any progress I've made has been courtesy of my place of employ, which has sponsored Headspace meditation sessions every workday since mid-March, most of which I've attended.

Some days I'm a hopeless case and can barely follow the instructions. But other days I can feel myself in another place, one where thoughts flit into my mind and just as easily float out again; one where following the breath, flowing with the breath, is becoming a little more second nature.

Today, when I heard this line that a happy mind is a spacious mind, a mind that has room for other people, other ideas, I'll admit I broke the first rule of meditation. I didn't let that thought move through and out. I savored it a bit, I pondered the implications.

Equating happiness with spaciousness, yes, it works — though you could just as easily equate it with coziness and smallness and manageability. But in this case I imagined the clear sky that you reach when you soar above the clouds. The spaciousness of the heavens, of the mind unencumbered.