I was horribly unsuccessful as I first tried to meditate some 30 years ago. Reminded of this during a recent Companion Circle from a question that arose, I reflected back to this time in my early twenties. I lasted all of about five seconds seated on the floor in my bedroom on a bright spring day.

My mind was agitated and running about a hundred miles a minute. "How do I do this? Where should I sit? How should I sit? What do I think about?"

It was so loud and uncomfortable in my mind I basically just bounced right off the cushion as quickly as I landed on it. Feeling a failure, I gave up, thinking I would never be able to meditate.

In those days, I would rarely experience moments of quiet in my mind, yet painfully yearned for it. What was it about ME that was wrong? Why couldn't I get my mind quiet?

It turns out the operative words creating the difficulty in getting my mind quiet were "get" and "my."

I've recently started including the awareness of spaces in between objects as part of the centering exercise I do with clients and students. As we look at objects with a curious attention--seeing them as if for the first time through the eyes of a child--they have a tendency to come alive in a new way. A fresh crispness is experienced when our pure attention is focused.

I'm noticing that clarity to be even more pronounced when I focus on the spaces in between objects. Their three dimensional nature becomes more apparent, but something else quite fascinating happens, too.

There is a visceral connection with the object as I become aware of the spaces in between. A deeper realization that I am a part of a bigger something eventually emerges. There's a direct experience of just being an extension of the object--the object and I are one and there is no space in between.