The Spaciousness Within: Breaking Free from Mental Prison

By Fleet Maull, PhD

Picture this: You're standing in your kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday morning, scrolling through an endless list of emails, your mind already racing through the day ahead. Then something shifts. Maybe it's a breeze from the open window carrying the sweet scent of fresh-cut grass, or the sound of your child's laughter echoing from upstairs. Suddenly, you're no longer trapped in a trance, mechanically going through the motions—you're fully present. The anxiety melts away. The mental chatter quiets. For three precious minutes, you feel completely awake.

Then the phone buzzes again, and you're back on autopilot.

But those three minutes? They're a glimpse of what's always available to you—a doorway into expanded awareness that most people don’t even realize exists.

The Trance We Call Normal Life Most of us spend our days in a kind of waking sleep. Wake up, scroll, caffeinate, sit in traffic, work all day, return home, collapse on the couch, repeat. It's like living in a narrow tunnel when there's a vast landscape just beyond the walls.

This isn't your fault. Modern life is designed to keep you in reactive mode—constantly responding to the next notification, deadline, or crisis. Your nervous system stays on high alert, your awareness contracts to a pinpoint, and you miss the richness of actual experience.

However, spiritual traditions have known for millennia that this constricted state isn't who you truly are. It's just where you've learned to live.

When Awareness Expands Expanded states of consciousness aren't mystical experiences reserved for monks in caves. They're natural shifts in perception that reveal the interconnected, spacious nature of reality. You've already experienced them—in moments of deep flow, profound beauty, sudden insight, or unconditional love.

These states share common qualities: time seems to slow or disappear entirely, the sense of separation dissolves, you feel connected to something larger than your personal story, and a deep peace or joy arises naturally. Your usual worries and mental loops quiet down, replaced by a sense of presence and possibility.

What makes these moments transformative isn't their intensity—it's their capacity to remind you that your everyday, contracted awareness isn't the whole picture. There's more spaciousness, connection, and aliveness available than you typically access.

Why This Matters More Than You Think The way you perceive reality shapes the way you live it. When awareness is contracted, caught in anxiety, stress, or old emotional patterns, everything looks like a problem to solve or a threat to avoid. You react from conditioning rather than respond from wisdom.

But when awareness expands, even slightly, everything changes. You have space around your reactions. You see options you couldn't see before. You respond to challenges with clarity rather than reactivity. Relationships deepen because you're actually present with people instead of being lost in your own mental commentary.

Here's the remarkable part: neuroscience shows that repeatedly accessing expanded states literally rewires your brain. What begins as temporary glimpses can become stable traits. The spaciousness, compassion, and clarity you experience in peak moments can become your new baseline.

Simple Doorways Into Expanded Awareness The beauty of expanded states is their accessibility. You don't need special equipment, expensive retreats, or years of training. You need practices that interrupt autopilot and invite presence.

• Conscious Breathing: Your breath is always available as an anchor to the present moment. Spend five minutes breathing deeply and slowly, following each inhale and exhale with complete attention. This simple practice can shift your entire nervous system from stress to ease.
  

• Mindful Transitions: Before moving from one activity to another, pause for thirty seconds. Notice where you are, how you feel, what you're about to do. These micro-moments of awareness create islands of presence throughout your day.
  

• Gratitude as Gateway: Write down three things you're grateful for, but go deeper than surface appreciation. Feel the gratitude in your body. Let it expand your heart. Genuine gratitude is one of the fastest ways to shift from contraction to expansion.
  

• Nature Immersion: Step outside without your phone. Let the natural world recalibrate your nervous system. Trees, sky, birds, and wind have been helping humans remember their true nature for thousands of years.
  

• Sacred Pausing: When you notice stress building, stop whatever you're doing and take three conscious breaths, re-center, look at the sky. This isn't about fixing anything—it's about creating space for a different response to emerge.

  
  

• The Flow State Path One of the most accessible doorways into expanded awareness is flow—those moments when you're completely absorbed in an activity and everything clicks. You might find flow in creative work, physical movement, problem-solving, or any activity that engages your full attention.

The key is choosing activities that naturally draw you into presence. For some, it's dancing, painting, or playing music. For others, it's gardening, cooking, or even organizing. The specific activity matters less than your quality of engagement with it.

When you're in flow, you're not thinking about being present—you simply are present. Time becomes irrelevant, self-consciousness disappears, and you're aligned with the natural intelligence that moves through all life.

Integration: Where Transformation Happens Having profound experiences is beautiful, but transformation happens in integration—how you bring expanded awareness into ordinary moments. After a powerful meditation, how do you listen to your partner? After feeling a deep connection with nature, how do you show up at work?

This is where the real practice begins. Can you maintain some of that spaciousness during a difficult conversation? Can you access that sense of connection when someone's behavior triggers you? Can you remember the peace you felt in stillness when life gets chaotic?

Start small. If you experienced five minutes of deep presence during morning meditation, see if you can bring thirty seconds of that same quality to your first interaction of the day. If you felt expanded awareness during a walk, can you access a trace of that openness during your commute?

Why the World Needs This Now In times of crisis, personal or collective, contracted awareness keeps us stuck in reactive patterns. We fight what we fear, resist what we can't control, and exhaust ourselves trying to manage unmanageable circumstances.

Expanded awareness offers a different response. From spaciousness comes wisdom. From connection comes compassion. From presence comes the ability to respond to challenges skillfully rather than reactively.

Imagine if more people operated from this expanded baseline. How would conversations change? How would conflicts be resolved? How would we approach environmental challenges, social division, or personal difficulties?

This isn't about escaping reality—it's about engaging reality from a deeper, wiser place within yourself.

Your Invitation to Wake Up You don't need to believe anything or adopt any particular worldview to explore expanded states. You just need curiosity about your own experience and a willingness to experiment.

Tonight, try this simple practice: Before sleep, lie quietly for five minutes without any agenda. Don't try to meditate or fix anything. Simply notice what it feels like to be you, right now. Notice your breath, the sounds around you, the sensations in your body. If your mind races, that's perfectly normal. If you feel restless, that's information about your current state. If you fall asleep, your body is telling you what it needs.

The goal isn't to have any particular experience. It's to begin developing a relationship with the deeper awareness that's always present beneath the surface of daily activity.

This awareness, which is spacious, peaceful, and inherently wise, isn't something you need to create or achieve. It's something you need to remember. And once you start remembering, even in small moments, life begins to feel less like something you're trying to survive and more like something you're fully living.

The doorway is always open. The question is: Are you ready to step through?