Yesterday I was supposed to be writing. Instead, I spent about five hours purging my office of paper. I wasn’t exactly sure at the time what that was about, but this morning I woke up, looked around my office, which still has quite a lot more unnecessary “stuff” that can be tossed, and knew exactly why I felt the need to throw all of that away.
I needed to make space for something new to exist—actually several new things.
New Things Need Space to Appear and Thrive
Creation cannot happen without space for something new to come into the world.
Meditation provides a great example of this. How can you allow a new thought into your mind, focus on what you want to create, or even allow in a new idea, when your mind is cluttered with 12,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day? Meditation helps you create because it quiets the mind. While you can’t totally rid your mind of thoughts, you can focus on one thing, such as the breath, and slow the flow of thoughts. You can unclutter your mind with meditation and create the closest thing to an empty place for a new thought—an idea or inspiration—to enter and begin to grow and thrive.
No matter what you want to create, the same principle holds true. If you want more clients, more money, more relationships, you need to rid your life of the clutter—possibly of similar clutter, such as old clients that don’t serve you (or old client files), negative thoughts about money and old debts, or old relationships that aren’t working for you. It’s possible you just need to clear out some old stuff, like your junk drawer, some old magazines, those clothes in your closet you never wear, or the papers in the file cabinet that you’ll never need. (I discuss this in a lesson provided in The Living Fully Challenge.)
Create a Void and Focus Energy in It
The Jewish mystical tradition has an interesting way of telling the creation story that speaks to this concept as well. That’s what I remembered this morning as I looked at some empty space I created yesterday in one of the many boxes in my office. Here is a very condensed version of that story: The Kabbalists’ say that before the beginning, there was only the Creator, and the Creator was everywhere and everything. When the Creator developed the urge, the desire, to create something else, He/She had to contract and create a void into which something else could exist. The Creator then focused energy (a beam of light) into the void. After a process, which involved going from being to though to feeling and then to physical action and form, the world and everything in it manifested.
When you create a void in your space, in your life or in your mind, for something else to exist, you give it room to come into existence. If you then focus your being, though, feeling, and physical actions on the creation of that thing, the likelihood of actually seeing the creation manifest increases. That’s why so many wisdom teachers repeat the same lesson: Make room for the new. And, again, that’s why meditation is so important. It makes room in your mind for you to allow in ideas and to focus on those you want to bring into the world.
I still need to make more room. My office, and my home are definitely cluttered. But I have more space than just yesterday. That’s a start.
Now…meditation.
