Befriend the Big Empty

“As we grow into adulthood, we often end up searching for someone to give us what we didn’t get as children. The absence of sufficient attention can create a gnawing hunger for outside approval… Though other’s responses to our efforts (to get their approval) feed our hunger, that satisfaction is only fleeting, and in the end we feel empty again.”

Steve Flowers & Bob Stahl, Living with Your Heart Wide Open

The great “gnawing” universal empty. That’s what so many of us experience on a daily basis: The Big Empty. Inside we are empty and we have been running on empty for years. We muster enough adrenaline to keep us searching from person to person, from face to face, to find some sign of love or approval. We look for those who have a “Fill ‘er Up” sign on their faces; whether it be in he form of an approving smile or some gentle kindness in their eyes. It may be enough to get us through the day or it may be only enough to get us to the next subway stop. But either way, it’s more than what we are willing to give ourselves.

The Big Empty carries with it the big misery of believing we are naturally unlovable. You see, if we didn’t believe we are somehow naturally unlovable, we wouldn’t need to perform for others. We wouldn’t need to be cute, or nice or act however others want us to act in order to gain their stamp of approval. We wouldn’t need their pat on the head to calm the Big Hungry inside our Big Empty. But we do. We need outer-approval. Somewhere along the line of life we learned from others that we just weren’t lovable simply being us; that we had to be different and had to jump to others people’s demands about who we should be in order to earn their love. And so we learned to perform, like trained puppies, to get our Milkbone of approval whenever the Big Empty began eating us up alive.

So what’s the solution? Flowers and Stahl believe the solution is within the Big Empty itself. Why is it that we are so uncomfortable with empty spaces? We are uncomfortable with the empty spaces within ourselves and within our environment. What do we do with the empty spaces within our homes? We fill them. We fill the walls with pictures, paintings, clocks, sconces, shelves, etc. We fill the empty spaces within various rooms with furniture—and the more furniture the better. We then cover the empty spaces on the furniture with vases, TVs, stereos, standing picture frames, books, statues, candles, lamps and assorted knick-knacks. We want all of our outer-empty spaces filled-up with everything—but dust!

And the same is true for our inner-empty spaces. We want them filled-up. And we want this without even taking the time to first explore those empty spaces within us to see what we might learn from them. If we took the time to explore them, instead of running from and desperately trying to fill them, we might learn that they have purpose in their emptiness. Think of a woman’s womb. Throughout most of a woman’s life, her womb is an empty inner-space. Yet it has a purpose to it’s emptiness, and that purpose is to provide space for the birth of new life.

The womb needs to be empty of all things that fail to serve its life-giving purpose, and isn’t the same true for our other internal empty spaces? Maybe, instead of being uncomfortable with our inner-emptiness, we need to embrace it. Feel it, love it, learn from it. Maybe we need to quiet ourselves and allow the Spirit to find it’s place to dance within our emptiness; not to fill it, but to move through it, casting light, wisdom and fulfillment into our emptiness. Or maybe we need to sit long enough with the Big Empty until we learn to have compassion for ourselves; until we can accept that we are lovable naturally just as we are; until we can be kind to ourselves and allow our own spirit of self-love to dance within our emptiness, spreading light and warmth into its aching darkness.

We will be continually running on empty if we keep racing and performing to receive the outer-approval of others every time we feel the Big Empty gnawing with its insatiable hunger. Instead we need to learn to be comfortable with the empty spaces inside of us. We need to stop enabling them by refusing to seek approval from others. All of the approval we need comes from within those big empty spaces inside of us. Befriend and learn from them. Enjoy them.