08/05/2025
In teaching meditation, I often advise students to develop a "soft and spacious mind." But once when I used that phrase while teaching in a financial group setting, I found that "soft mind" meant something quite different to people there from what I had intended, because we were surrounded by three giant wall-sized black screens. I felt cold and tight in their environment. So it seems important to elucidate what I mean.
I mean by "soft and spacious mind" the quality of acceptance. For example, suppose you are watching your breath in meditation and you feel a sense of struggle or tension. This feeling of struggle may be a sign that something else is happening in your experience that you are not recognizing or allowing. Perhaps you are not opening to some other sensation in the body, some discomfort, or some underlying emotion. Or perhaps you have become caught up in expectation, with too much effort or striving, wanting the experience of the moment to be different from what it actually is.
Softness means opening to what is there, relaxing into it (a deep stretching for the mind). At such a time, try this self-allowing: "It's okay. Whatever it is, it's okay. Let me feel it." That is softening of the mind. You can open to your experience with a sense of allowing, and simply be with whatever predominates: sensation, emotion, thoughts, image, even pain, anything.
Softening the mind involves two steps: First, become mindfully aware of whatever is most predominant. That is the core guideline for all meditation in any way, because meditation is shapeless, formless. So the first step is just to feel, sense, be aware, and be open. You can see it as your first few steps into the water before you are going to swim.
For the second step, notice how you are relating to whatever arises. Often we can be with an arising appearance but in a reactive way. If we like it, we tend to hold on to it; we become attached. If we do not like it because it is painful in some way, we tend to contract, to push away out of fear, irritation, or annoyance. Each of these responses is the opposite of acceptance.
The easiest way to relax is to stop trying to make things different. Rather than try to create another state, simply allow space for whatever is going on. Allow yourself to fully merge into the water, and be part of everything.
