I am one of millions of people worldwide who have been avidly following Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle’s class on A New Earth. This week the topic was getting in touch with our “inner space,” as Tolle calls it. I am paraphrasing here, but as I understood it, it is that expansive, wise, place of aliveness within. It is another term for Buddha Nature, perhaps. This week’s class comes at an especially pivotal time for me, as I am realizing on new and deeper levels just how much suffering is generated in my mind.

When I can, I watch the mind: its tendency to criticize myself and others. Its tendency to panic. It has been panicking a lot lately, in response to various life causes and conditions. I am in some dire financial straits, according to any measure. My debt-to-income ratio is 145%. My mortgage has risen substantially as a result of the refi. I got turned down for all the credit and loans I have applied for because I’ve been a self-employed mom for the past two years with a debt-to-income ratio of 145%. One very kind woman at Suntrust thought that I had recorded my income in error and just wanted to check up on that. When I confirmed my paltry income, she sweetly informed me that they would not be able to assist me today, and they even were kind enough to mail me a letter to emphasize that.

My mind reacts to all this with an enormous amount of fear and panic. But when I drop down into the body and touch into the space within, I see that all and everything is OK. Or whatever. It just is. Right now, in this very moment, I am blessed with a healthy body that is alive and pulsates and breathes, a beautiful son, plenty of food to eat, people who love me, a safe home. There is so much abundance it takes my breath away. But my mind makes me homeless, miserable, crazy, sick. Perhaps I have blogged about this a million times, but I need to write it into the folds of my consciousnessness. Everything is available to me when I drop out of the mind-tripping. I am the stuff of stars and sea. Whole universes can fit inside my cells. I feel that I will burst with all the love in and around me. This is not some New Age trip: it’s just sensing into our intrinsic connectedness with All-that-Is. There is nothing mystical about it. It’s accessible to all of us, all of the time. It lives in our bodies.

When I remember Buddha nature, even for a trillisecond, I see how this matter of being broke is SO no big deal: it’s such a small ripple in a big-ass pond. Truly I see how it is small stuff and there’s no need to sweat it. It might take another trillisecond and then I click back into small, contracted self, “little me” (as Tolle calls it), into panic, into a very compelling and seductive story about how impoverished and doomed and tragic I am.

So inside me, there are two “dharmas” co-existing: the part of me that would like to evolve a bit and the part of me that kicking and screaming resists it because it is so afraid to let go of the old ways of being. One dharma wants a cigarette; the other wants to practice mindful breathing. It is always interesting to sit with these two and see what unfolds.

I see it too, in my mothering. One part of me wants to discipline by punishment. When Sami doesn’t want to lay in his bed and go to sleep at night, I want to close the door for two minutes while he screams to show him who is boss. That is inherited societal “wisdom:” we must punish ourselves and others to motivate “right behavior.” The truth is, when I do that, I show him that Mommy withdraws her love when he does not cooperate. I love him conditionally when I do that, and it feels just plain wrong, even when it “works” in the short term. I see how this equates to me accepting myself only conditionally. I am also slamming the door on my own unpleasantness, my own unwanted feelings. I don’t want to do this to either of us.

The other part of me wants to go beyond Neanderthal standards of punishment and reward as he goes through his sleep transition (and all the other changes that his little 28 month old self is moving through at what feels like light speed). I want to model unconditional presence and patience and love for us both. While I may never be Kwan Yin Mama incarnate, I feel hopeful that the more I stay in touch with my own inner spaciousness, the closer I can move to my ideal of being a model of loving presence for Sami, and for the one inside me that resists awakening with all her might. (By the way, she often feels like she is between 5 and 7 years old.)

So here it is, my little “room of my own.” It is the breathing room inside. I’ll take it over a physical room any day. It is the room I make when I practice, whether through meditation, one breath at a time, or muddling through this little blog of mine, my Mama Dharma, one post at a time.