“Cultivating Spaciousness”

“Those of us in schools or with the bustle of a modern life often have every last nook and cranny of our beings filled up. We have things to remember and things to do, places to go and people and projects to tend to. Our
inner space is filled with doing. This is so very different from the nature of the very young child. The
young child’s inner space is filled with being-ness. This inner space of being-ness is perhaps best described in pictures. Imagine a cathedral or place of worship just before the members come, or a meadow on a still summer morning, or a well-loved and well-tended home when the family has gone out for
the day. Each of these place-images is filled with human-spiritual activity, but they are still and spacious. This is my sense of the nature of very young children. They are cathedral-like. We often feel a holiness and heavenliness around young children. We sense that they have not yet come into their physical bodies. The largeness that they are hovers about them. It is a moment for us as adults to perceive the vastness of who they are, before it enters more deeply into the physical with the first birth of the “I.” They are bringing the divine to earth. How do we cultivate
our own inner gesture of spaciousness so as to receive them? This cultivation of spaciousness is a deeply individual path. I believe the child’s inner space of being-ness is a place that lives inside of each of us. It
is the nature of our own being, as proven to us by the children in our care. Each of us possesses the capacities to cultivate spaciousness again. We only need to go looking for that place within ourselves again, and
once we discover it, we should grow it, cultivate it and protect it. Once we remember what the young child’s
spaciousness feels like, we can access it in our work with them.”

~Cultivating Spaciousness, Working with the Child from Birth to Age Three Magdalena Toran