Written by Jen Liu

“Minding the gap, both during meditation and in applying mindfulness to our everyday lives, opens us up to a world of choice. It gives us access to a more wakeful way of being where our typical habits fall away momentarily and we reclaim agency to make decisions with intention and precision rather than from impulsive, reactive patterns.”

To the untrained mind, a single moment can consist of an incalculable flood of thoughts and feelings, firing off in rapid succession and competing for attention. Some strongly affecting ones, like anger or intense joy, are easier to note than others — but even so, a countless number of them elude our understanding, like grains of sand slipping through the cracks of our fingers.

Mindfulness meditation helps us begin to develop a sense of the space between and around those thoughts and feelings, sometimes affectionately referred to as the "gap." From this felt sense of spaciousness, we cultivate discernment and awareness. Instead of moving through life as one big jumbled mess of thoughts and emotions, we become able to relate differently to that pile of sand, developing the clarity and precision to be able to appreciate a unique mental formation, examine its qualities, distinguish how it's different from the next, choose whether we want to act upon it, and so forth.

Minding the gap, both during meditation and in applying mindfulness to our everyday lives, opens us up to a world of choice. It gives us access to a more wakeful way of being where our typical habits fall away momentarily and we reclaim the agency to make decisions with intention and precision rather than from impulsive, reactive patterns.

When we practice slowing down and examining the nature of each thought cycle, as we do in meditation, we become more habituated to resting in the gap space instead of always zooming past it. Over time, that spaciousness becomes more available to us, both as a baseline state of mind as well as a place we can return to more quickly and easefully in instances of strong emotions that might otherwise sweep us away.

The gap is a glimpse into the boundless, untainted sky; while thought formations, like clouds, will pass through and affect our perception, they don't change the reality that there is still always a clear, magnificent sky behind and all around them. Once the illumination of awareness is applied, we become able to perceive that vast expanse again and are reminded of the liberation it represents, even if just for a moment.