A Mason's Work

In the last episode we talked about self-inning your heart and the role of doing that in helping

you grow and be open to essentially what life throws at you.

And today I want to talk in this episode about creating space.

More often than not, we tend to get stuck into our patterns, into our rituals, into our

behaviors, whatever they might be.

And we don't create space for new things.

Now I want to be clear and separate the idea of making space from things like risk tolerance.

So let's start talking first and foremost about making space.

So when we talk about making space and creating sort of opportunity for things to arise or

emerge, we mean putting yourself in position in the right way to allow for new opportunities

to emerge.

Sometimes making space means going to a gathering of people where you might meet new folks

or learn new things without having to control or be any of it.

You can just kind of walk in and participate.

You don't have to be in charge, you don't have to do anything.

There's nothing for it.

So gathering is like even informal gatherings where you go to a park and there's a bunch

of people and you might find opportunity there.

There's some important distinctions though about being open that I want to cover in the

rest of the episode here.

First things first, being open means being present.

So it doesn't mean going somewhere else and looking at your phone or reading your favorite

book.

That's not openness, that's just a field trip, right?

So you exercising your stuff that you would normally do in a different location.

When we talk about being open, we're talking about getting rid of the normal trappings of

your everyday sort of habits, right?

So you're going to let go of your phone or you're going to let go of maybe your favorite

meal and go have a meal with someone else.

Maybe you let go of your favorite sort of daily patterns of doing things to go be open

to new experiences in a different way.

Now the discomfort that comes from this, it's not going to be profound, it shouldn't

be anyway.

It's going to be sort of mild, but the mild discomfort that you go through when you go

out and about and you see the world.

What if you do it in a way that doesn't bring their distractions of your everyday life

with you?

You allow new opportunities to emerge your arise.

You create cognitive space for your brain to do the things that it does when it's not

being perpetually and actively entertained.

So when you start pursuing this openness, and again, you don't necessarily need to go

find groups of people to do it, you can also do it in the consumption of nature.

Go on a walker hike on a nature trail or go find an area where you can sit and be in

the world without having anything weighing on you in terms of the obligations of everyday

life.

Give yourself a carve out of time where you can just go be.

And in that sort of openness, in that creating of opportunity, or space for opportunity,

what you're going to find is that new connections and new thoughts and new concepts emerge in

the vacuum of that space.

Your brain will want to fill it.

Now the notion of caution here, not everything your brain is going to add to that silence

or to that openness is going to be of high value, but it's not going to add anything if

you're perpetually feeding it with your favorite media, your favorite music.

What have you?

So the other note I want to make here on risk tolerance is these activities do not have

to be high risk.

So you don't have to go do things that are super out of your comfort zone.

I'm not suggesting go be open.

And then for the first time in your life, go do a stand up night or an open mic night at

a local pub.

That's not what we're looking for here.

We're looking for just space, just space where you can go be without increasing the anxiety

level without increasing your terror alert level with just allowing your sort of mind to

be in a place.

Now this is going to be a little bit different than just sort of conventional meditation as

well in that you're going to be moving to a place so you can absorb and appreciate

the opportunities that that place creates.

If it's a group of people, you're going to absorb and appreciate the opportunities to

connect with new people.

If it's out in nature, it's going to be that you're absorbing the opportunities to connect

and create in nature.

When you create this openness, when you find this space, you'll find that cultivating

an opportunity for creating space on a regular basis is going to be vital to your practice

moving forward.

It may not be immediately, but every time you kind of go explore the world in this way

with this open heart.

You will find that there is productive value in that activity.