Evan Renaerts

A Spacious Place

November 6, 2007

It is mid-autumn, one and a half months until the winter solstice, and the magnolia trees in our yard are beginning to put forth buds again. They do this every autumn and I am wonderfully surprised each time. The power of life to continue under all kinds of conditions is both hopeful and inspiring.

A friend was telling me the other day that their eldest son had called from Thailand where he had completed his first ever twelve day meditation retreat. My friend was just off the phone with his son and still feeling all the joy and gratitude and sense of accomplishment that his son had expressed.

Hearing my friend connected me to the energy of the final day of a silent retreat when the meditators begin to speak again but the stillness lingers, when all eyes are filled with light, and every face smiles. One of the greatest learnings of all may be to learn how to sit and to be quiet with all the inner voices and all of the urges and desires; to simply watch them as you would watch a play.

Friends and colleagues who know about my own meditation practice ask me how I manage to sit every day or why I sit. The answer is tied to my first significant experience of awareness meditation when I discovered that I didn’t need to react to thoughts or feelings or to sensations in the body – I discovered a place of spaciousness within myself.

Most of us take the events of daily life quite personally, feeling hurt or offended by people’s actions and comments, being angry at the weather, or at other drivers; it can seem that life is” being done to us.” In meditation it is possible to see that the endless flow of events and occurrences is just happening and that it has almost nothing to do with us.

Even when people seem to have singled us out for their words or actions we can, when we look more deeply, see that they are really focussed on themselves and that all their words and actions are really about them, what they want, what they feel they need, and that we the recipients are merely coincidental.

This discovery on its own is enough to create a huge place of inner freedom! By realizing that the fear, anger, jealousy and resentment expressed by others emerges from concern for themselves we no longer need to waste any time or energy trying to defend ourselves or prove the other wrong and ourselves right, all of those behaviours become meaningless.

Evan Renaerts
604 314 0835
evan@evanrenaerts.com