Making Space For Life
I think we all feel that we have enough on our minds. Maybe too much. I remember the cartoon of the school child raising their hand, “ma’am can I be excused, my brain is full.”
In truth our minds are capable of accessing astronomical amounts of information. It’s simply that the part of the mind we believe is ourselves sits in a narrowly defined space without much processing space. I imagine a cluttered desk in the corner of a dark room. With the curtained windows revealing the beautiful grounds if we only had time to look up fro our work.
Borrowing an analogy from computers, when our RAM becomes overloaded we might move files to an external drive or into the cloud to free up space. We’re not really losing anything; we’re creating room for the system to operate more efficiently. The result is greater fluidity of mind and better access to the life outside our windows.
Our brains can stand in on an episode of hoarders. Meditation is a step in clearing the space just enough for us to access our own heart. Just enough space to recognize ourselves in the crowded room.
One of the oldest spiritual principles, found in many traditions, is the practice of offering. We might think of offering as a kind of information offloading. Whether we imagine it as uploading, downloading, or simply making space we’re creating room for the mind to function more freely.
In recovery traditions we speak of turning what we cannot change, but need to accept, over to our higher power. Whatever we believe about god or not god, the operative point is that we are offered a means to free up space. We just need to offer it.
From a materialist perspective, offering can feel like loss because we’re conditioned to believe that having more means being more. In traditions shaped by guilt, we may even feel that an offering must hurt—that only by surrendering something precious can we earn the favor of a deity or satisfy a reward-and-punishment version of karma.
This isn’t the Buddhist view.
To punish ourselves by giving things away simply because we want them is just another form of ego. We create a story of sacrifice that proves how good, pure, or virtuous we are. The Buddhist understanding of offering is much simpler. It is the gradual relinquishing of whatever we’ve mistaken for ourselves. It is opening. It is letting go. Our aim is to strip me down to our essential being without the entrapments of the world.
In this regard, offering need not be punitive because punishment is a form of aggression. Reward and punishment belong to the larger samsaric cycle that keeps us trapped in habitual patterns. Buddhist practice points instead toward freedom from those cycles, which is why the Middle Way avoids both indulgence and self-denial.
So I don’t think it’s cheating to begin by offering the very pain we don’t want. If we’re honest, we may discover that beneath our pain lie the attachments keeping us bound to suffering. What are the things weighing us down? What continually pulls our ship off course? What in my life am I still carrying that no longer needs to be carried?
Why? Because suffering begins when we mistake impermanent things for permanent ones. We believe our identities, possessions, opinions, relationships, and even our thoughts possess an enduring solidity that reality simply doesn’t support.
Emptiness, on the other hand, allows for the spontaneous creation of new realities. The Buddhist path can be understood as progressive stages of letting go, progressive stages of opening, or, as Khenpo Tsultrim Gyatso Rinpoche beautifully described it, “progressive stages of emptiness.”
Perhaps offering is best understood as relaxing our grip.
If our grip is too tight on the things we love, we’re likely to strangle them. Love cannot flow where control dominates. Letting go becomes our love language. We release our fear. We loosen our grip on our children so they can become who they were meant to become. Above all, letting go means allowing ourselves to see what is actually here rather than clinging to our fantasies about what should be.
Ultimately, every act of offering is practice for the greatest letting go of all.
Death is the one appointment we are certain to keep. Of the many appointments we scurry to make throughout our lives, this is the only one guaranteed.
If our purpose were simply to live life as fully as possible until that moment, we might relax into the unfolding of the process. Instead, we apply the brakes. We turn the wheel. We try to swim upstream. We cling to memories. We cling to grievances. Yet none of those things is happening now. Even when we imagine ourselves stepping backward, time continues carrying us forward.
According to Buddhist tradition, when death arrives the body returns to the elements from which it arose. Our ordinary, RAM-like mind falls away, while the deeper continuity of mind proceeds according to the momentum it has cultivated.
That isn’t heaven. It isn’t salvation. It is simply another opening.
If we stop holding on, we release ourselves from the weight of imprisonment and become available to whatever comes next. And if we resist the temptation to name it, define it, or expect it to conform to our wishes—if we remain genuinely open—we may discover that the journey itself is far more extraordinary than any destination we could have imagined.