Making space
Making space inside one’s head is central to finding God. If we are all filled up with what is happening inside us, our feelings, concerns and cares, or alternatively what is happening outside us and to us there can be no space for anything other than our self.
I like this quote from a psychoanalytic paper written in 1991 by Peter Fonagy ‘Thinking about Thinking’.
‘There was a silence but also a sense that our minds had met. Eventually he said that he         could not imagine that coming to analysis could ever make him feel happy but he did feel that he had more space.’
The quote encapsulates that experience where it is possible to have some capacity to observe and so some insight into what one is doing and feeling. In other words a space opens up and through beginning to know oneself and see one self in this way there is also a possibility for something other… or as I like to describe it ‘something more than oneself’. There is a space for God to enter.
I think it was Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471) who wrote, ‘A humble knowledge of yourself is a surer way to God than an extensive search after learning.’ Psychotherapy offers that opportunity.