The phrase came into my mind when, for just a moment, I allowed it be soft on waking with a chock full of over-busy, over-anxious, over-pessimistic thoughts. It came in like a healing balm and arrested me for the difference it brought into my previously over-stimulated mind and it was then that I realised I had been tipping my balance from right to left hemisphere again; my yin and yang had got badly off centre in the space of just a few short days.

For a week, I had been geeking out like my life depended on it, “tackling” ever more complicated health issues with every intellectual approach I had. Even while I was writing blogs about honeyed walls, my mind was doing overtime around the “subject” of me. How had my balance got so tipped over that I was waking feeling leaden even before the joy of breathing in the new day came flooding in? Oh yes, I remembered…the masculine is territorial, it is the stuff of empires. Include it, allow it into the mix…yes (as I always say)…but give it too much rope to run with and it will claim whole new territories, thrusting inward and gobbling up what lies well over the middle line; it will even take over and negate all the rest. I had to smile. The push-pull aspect of yin and yang is the stuff of a children’s playground; for what the yang will take the yin will gladly keep giving…even though we may lay depleted in the middle of their play-off (don’t a lot of us know that for sure). And I’d been talking about that “middle” place being a honeyed space yet mine felt like sour milk this morning.

Something had come to me, one of those oh-so simplistic lightbulb revelations, late the night before when I was watching a short video on Bhakti Yoga; the yoga of devotion (the video is Women of Bhakti and I recommend it). As these women talked so affectingly of their love for God, I realised something I had been missing thus far. I had been regarding “void” as just that…voidness; as in, empty. Blank. Nothingness. I had been missing, entirely, that void is really “love“. Really, it is. I mean, I felt I knew it with my mind before then…I gave it plenty of lip-service…but I wasn’t feeling it. Hearing them speak of love for God was the first time it really settled inside of me like the butterfly that would never quite land; and now it had. This most elusive love, it was everywhere since it is in all the spaces. Once you get that, the feeling is this most tremendous thing; like the light you see switched on in the faces of holy people. It’s when you realise the infrastructure for this to happen universally is already there, like the wiring in a house before the wires get connected to the electricity grid. We all have these spaces installed ready; in fact they make up more of us than do our physical cells and they are all, already, full of love just waiting to be noticed or “switched on”.

Once I allowed that all my spaces were actually filled with love, not voidness, emptiness or nothingness, it was as if a seismic shift happened in a quantum moment. For in allowing that my voidness was overflowing with this deep unconditional love…for me…I could finally get the point. No, I could feel the point; of everything. The pointlessness and effort that “empty void” seemed to suggest (always requiring that I strive so much, that I work so hard, to fill all the spaces with my choices…which is as much of an oximoron as the idea of “working at art”)  was replaced by the absolute point of everything, most of all me. And its all there already there, no need to do anything.

In a micro video-show of my life flitting through my mind, I saw at once how I had internalized the belief that I had no point, was taking up space without purpose or meaning, that I was surplus to requirements, that I was not really wanted or made-room for, that I offered nothing new or useful to the world, even that I “took up valuable space” that could be used by another being (its a long story how I internalised this; a particular family dynamic, one many people would probably recognise). As a child too young to understand, I had made this into the concrete belief system that suggested I could not be sustained by this life, that I was not loved enough “to feed” with all that makes life a thriving thing. That this defunct belief has now reached the point where I find multiple food intollerances have reduced my diet down to next to nothing, so few food choices that I am finding it incredibly hard to sustain myself, is hardly (in this light) a surprise. This “not thriving” business had been the subject of my endless intellectual seeking for the past week; my left-brain had taken over the desperate matter of why this was happening and what to do next but was really spiralling into too much contradictory information and a state of overwhelm. It was missing the point since it can’t reach that point without the help of its opposite aspect to correct its aim. Because, all the time, the answer lay inside me, between the yin and the yang; in a voidness or neutrality that I was getting all wrong, believing it to be cold and uncaring, impasssive and heartless. For that neutrality is really the unconditional love that loves every inch of me and which supports me absolutely in so far as I believe that I am worth sustaining (that part is really down to me). The love is always there, overflowing.

All my spaces are love…the phrase feels so key that I find I want to write it on the air with my finger. Small adjustment but what a difference than this idea I nurtured that all my spaces were void, like one of those blank canvases I no longer seem able to paint upon…yet, when I perceive what is already there, wanting to be expressed, even before dipping my brush; those are always the best canvases of all. When we change the feeling around a circumstances, especially one as pivotal as this, it alters absolutely everything. I find I can allow things to be softer now; as I must, to hold the balance that allows the love-light to shine through. And those words “my spaces are all love”…those have become my mantra of healing; they help me to perceive its truth everywhere I look. I intend to devote myself to this practice.